“Thank you, sir, I am sure,” returns the stationer with his cough of deference. “This is wonderfully fine wine, sir!”
“It is a rare wine now,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn. “It is fifty years old.”
“Is it indeed, sir? But I am not surprised to hear it, I am sure. It might be—any age almost.” After rendering this general tribute to the port, Mr. Snagsby in his modesty coughs an apology behind his hand for drinking anything so precious.
“Will you run over, once again, what the boy said?” asks Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting his hands into the pockets of his rusty smallclothes and leaning quietly back in his chair.
“With pleasure, sir.”
Then, with fidelity, though with some prolixity, the law-stationer repeats Jo’s statement made to the assembled guests at his house. On coming to the end of his narrative, he gives a great start and breaks off with, “Dear me, sir, I wasn’t aware there was any other gentleman present!”
Mr. Snagsby is dismayed to see, standing with an attentive face between himself and the lawyer at a little distance from the table, a person with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he himself came in and has not since entered by the door or by either of the windows. There is a press in the room, but its hinges have not creaked, nor has a step been audible upon the floor. Yet this third person stands there with his attentive face, and his hat and stick in his hands, and his hands behind him, a composed and quiet listener. He is a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black, of about the middle-age. Except that he looks at Mr. Snagsby as if he were going to take his portrait, there is nothing remarkable about him at first sight but his ghostly manner of appearing.
“Don’t mind this gentleman,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his quiet way. “This is only Mr. Bucket.”