General Well'ngone In Love Read Free Page B

and
curves of its golden form suggested the shape of a certain person
whose acquaintance he had recently made, a young lady with a proud
head and arms placed defiantly upon her hips.
    “ It looks like the
fishmonger’s wife,” said Saulty, another member of the band, who
was also sitting in the room. “A real scold,” he added.
    “ She’s not a scold! And
she’s not ...” The General stopped in mid-sentence. The cynically
raised eyebrows of the Earl struck him as fiercely as a blast of
grapeshot from a Frenchman’s cannon.
    “ She?” inquired the
Earl.
    General Well’ngone stuck his hands into the
pockets of his greatcoat and glared down at the tip of his faded
black boot.
    The Earl of Gravel Lane motioned for Saulty
to leave the room. When he and General Well’ngone were alone, he
said, “You cannot keep a secret from me. Who is she?”
    “ Nobody. Just an ordinary
girl.”
    “ If she were an ordinary
girl, you would not have been thinking about her for the past
quarter of an hour. Who is she?”
    The General shifted uneasily in his seat.
“Miss Sarah Krinkle.”
    “ The Miss Sarah Krinkle
whose father died a few weeks ago?”
    General Well’ngone nodded his head.
    “ Where does she
live?”
    “ Duke’s
Street.”
    “ As of this hour, General
Well’ngone, consider Duke’s Street to be enemy territory. You shall
neither walk through there nor work there, until this folly has
passed.”
    The Earl paused and waited. “Those are
orders, General Well’ngone.”
    “ Yes, sir,” replied the
General, albeit reluctantly.
    “ In our profession, a man
has to keep his wits about him. When a love-sick laborer makes a
slip up, he loses his job. When we get caught, we get a noose
around our necks.”
    The Earl made a gesture of being hanged on
the gallows. In the past, the General would have laughed at his
companion’s gruesome expression, certain that he and the others
would always escape that grisly fate. Today, however, the game of
successfully eluding the hangman seemed much less thrilling.
     
    “You there, don’t you know how to properly
shut a door? You’ve let in all the cold air. I cannot think why Mr.
Barnstock puts up with you.”
    Berel Krinkle cast a wary glance in the
direction of the desk where Arthur Barnstock was sitting, before
returning to the door and giving it a shove. He knew that the
younger Mr. Barnstock did not like him, even though Berel was
certain he had done nothing to offend the young clerk.
    “ Is Mr. Barnstock
available, sir?”
    “ No, he is not. Do you
think he has nothing better to do than talk with messenger boys?
There! See what you have made me do!”
    Berel saw that the contents of a bottle of
ink had spilled onto the pages scattered upon the desk, but he did
not see what his presence had to do with the unfortunate
occurrence. Still, he held his tongue.
    Arthur Barnstock angrily mopped up the ink
with his handkerchief. When his eye again fell upon the boy, he
became even angrier. “What are you grinning at?”
    “ I am not grinning,
sir.”
    “ Do not contradict me.
Give me that package and go away.”
    “ I shall be happy to go
away, sir. But my instructions are to deliver these papers into the
hands of Mr. Horace Barnstock, and no one else.”
    “ Impertinent little
...”
    The clerk’s rant was brought to a halt by
the opening of the door to his father’s private room. The solicitor
and his client, Lord Liverwood, a round-faced gentleman whose face
perpetually had the expression of a happy child, were standing in
the doorway.
    “ I shall attend to it at
once, Lord Liverwood. Are you staying in London for a few
days?”
    Lord Liverwood’s attention was elsewhere.
His stubby, bejeweled fingers were searching through his pockets
for some object. “I cannot think where that fob seal of mine went
to.” His eye fell upon Berel, and there was an uneasy silence for a
moment.
    “ A man cannot walk from
his house to the end of the street without some urchin