“Now, mind how you put it, Bucket,” cried the old man anxiously with his hand at his ear. “Speak up; none of your brimstone tricks. Pick me up; I want to hear better. Oh, Lord, I am shaken to bits!”
Mr. Bucket had certainly picked him up at a dart. However, as soon as he could be heard through Mr. Smallweed’s coughing and his vicious ejaculations of “Oh, my bones! Oh, dear! I’ve no breath in my body! I’m worse than the chattering, clattering, brimstone pig at home!” Mr. Bucket proceeded in the same convivial manner as before.
“So, as I happen to be in the habit of coming about your premises, you take me into your confidence, don’t you?”
I think it would be impossible to make an admission with more ill will and a worse grace than Mr. Smallweed displayed when he admitted this, rendering it perfectly evident that Mr. Bucket was the very last person he would have thought of taking into his confidence if he could by any possibility have kept him out of it.
“And I go into the business with you—very pleasant we are over it; and I confirm you in your well-founded fears that you will get yourself into a most precious line if you don’t come out with that there will,” said Mr. Bucket emphatically; “and accordingly you arrange with me that it shall be delivered up to this present Mr. Jarndyce, on no conditions. If it should prove to be valuable, you trusting yourself to him for your reward; that’s about where it is, ain’t it?”
“That’s what was agreed,” Mr. Smallweed assented with the same bad grace.
“In consequence of which,” said Mr. Bucket, dismissing his agreeable manner all at once and becoming strictly businesslike, “you’ve got that will upon your person at the present time, and the only thing that remains for you to do is just to out with it!”