some one else
than the purchaser, supposing the descendants became extinct, and the interest
they had sold were at an end. But under what conditions the claim might be valid
or void in any particular case, was all darkness to him. Suppose Bycliffe had
any such claim on the Transome estates: how was Christian to know whether at the
present moment it was worth anything more than a bit of rotten parchment? Old
Tommy Trounsem had said that Johnson knew all about it. But even if Johnson were
still above-ground - and all Johnsons are mortal - he might still be an
understrapper of Jermyn's, in which case his knowledge would be on the wrong
side of the hedge for the purposes of Henry Scaddon. His immediate care must be
to find out all he could about Johnson. He blamed himself for not having
questioned Tommy further while he had him at command; but on this head the
bill-sticker could hardly know more than the less dilapidated denizens of Treby.
    Now it had happened that during the weeks in which Christian had been at
work in trying to solve the enigma of Jermyn's interest about Bycliffe,
Johnson's mind also had been somewhat occupied with suspicion and conjecture as
to new information on the subject of the old Bycliffe claims which Jermyn
intended to conceal from him. The letter which, after his interview with
Christian, Jermyn had written with a sense of perfect safety to his faithful
ally Johnson, was, as we know, written to a Johnson who had found his self-love
incompatible with that faithfulness of which it was supposed to be the
foundation. Anything that the patron felt it inconvenient for his obliged friend
and servant to know, became by that very fact an object of peculiar curiosity.
The obliged friend and servant secretly doted on his patron's inconvenience,
provided that he himself did not share it; and conjecture naturally became
active.
    Johnson's legal imagination, being very differently furnished from
Christian's, was at no loss to conceive conditions under which there might arise
a new claim on the Transome estates. He had before him the whole history of the
settlement of those estates made a hundred years ago by John Justus Transome,
entailing them, whilst in his possession, on his son Thomas and his heirs-male,
with remainder to the Bycliffes in fee. He knew that Thomas, son of John Justus,
proving a prodigal, had, without the knowledge of his father, the tenant in
possession, sold his own and his descendants' rights to a lawyer-cousin named
Durfey; that, therefore, the title of the Durfey