Ay, there is what I was waiting for!' he cried, as
the lights of a second chaise swam in sight. 'It is he beyond a
doubt. The first was the signature and the next the flourish. Two
chaises, the second following with the baggage, which is always
copious and ponderous, and one of his valets: he cannot go a step
without a valet.'
'I hear you repeat the word big,' said I. 'But it cannot be that
he is anything out of the way in stature.'
'No,' said the attorney. 'About your height, as I guessed for the
tailors, and I see nothing wrong with the result. But, somehow, he
commands an atmosphere; he has a spacious manner; and he has kept
up, all through life, such a volume of racket about his
personality, with his chaises and his racers and his dicings, and I
know not what--that somehow he imposes! It seems, when the farce
is done, and he locked in Fleet prison--and nobody left but
Buonaparte and Lord Wellington and the Hetman Platoff to make a
work about--the world will be in a comparison quite tranquil. But
this is beside the mark,' he added, with an effort, turning again
from the window. 'We are now under fire, Mr. Anne, as you soldiers
would say, and it is high time we should prepare to go into action.
He must not see you; that would be fatal. All that he knows at
present is that you resemble him, and that is much more than
enough.
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