A MARTYR TO CONSCIENCE
“I have nothing to do with your scruples,” said the magistrate; “the law is the law, and I am here to administer it.”
Mr. Plumley licked his hand, and stolidly smoothing down his black hair with it, answered, as if at a distance, being a well-fed, unctuous man, “too full for sound and foam,” “I’m a conscientious objector.”
“Passive resister!” corrected a friend, a little eager man, among the audience near him.
“Eh?” said Mr. Plumley immovably, and without a glance in the direction of the voice, “I said passive resister, didn’t I?”
“Whether you said it or not,” answered the magistrate sharply, “you look it. I make an order against you for the amount.”
“As man to man——” began Mr. Plumley.
“Not in the least,” said the magistrate; “as debtor to creditor. Stand down.”
“I shan’t pay it,” said Mr. Plumley, preparing to obey.
“If you say another word, I’ll commit you for contempt,” said the magistrate. “Stand down, sir!”
Mr. Plumley stood down, with an unspeakable expression—it might have been of satisfaction—on his huge, stolid face. Arrived at the floor, he beckoned his little friend to follow him, and heavily left the court.
He steered—the other acting as his rudder, as it were, and keeping his position behind—straight for his own domestic shrine, hight Primrose Villa, semi-detached. It was a beautiful little home for a widower unencumbered, calculated, like an india-rubber collar, to afford the maximum of display at a minimum of cost in washing. The doorsteps were laid with a flaming pattern in tiles; red-aspinalled flower pots, embellished with little dull glazed shrubs, stood on the lowest window-sill; the bell-knob was of handsome porcelain, painted with the gaudiest flowers in miniature. Within, too, it was all furnished on a like hard principle of lustre—red and yellow oilcloth in the hall, with marbled paper to match; earthenware-panned mahogany hat-rack and umbrella-stand combined, as red as rhubarb, and as acrid in suggestion to one’s feelings; more oilcloth in the parlour; more mahogany, also, with a pert disposition in its doors and drawers to resent being shut up; glass bead mats and charity bazaar photograph frames on the whatnots, all so clean and pungent with sharp furniture stain that the rudder—Gardener by name—felt, as usual, the necessity of a humble apology for bringing his five feet four of shabbiness into the midst of so much splendour and selectness.
Mr. Plumley rumbled condescendingly in reply—
“You’d get used to it, Robert, you’d get used to it, if you’d lived familiar with it all your life, as I have.”
“Ah!” said Gardener, “but I wasn’t born like you, sir, to shine.”
If he meant that the other was a light in his way—a little tallowy, perhaps—his own dry, hungry cheeks certainly justified him in the self-depreciation. They justified him, moreover—or he fancied they did, which was all the same as to the moral—in continuing to act jackal to this social lion, who had once been his employer in the cheap furniture-removal line. He lived—hung, it would seem more apposite to say—on his traditions of the great man’s business capacities, capacities whose fruits were here to witness, for evidence of the competence upon which his principal had retired. He got, in fact, little else than his traditions out of his former master at this date; yet it was strange how they served to delude him into a belief in his continued profit at the hands of the old patronage. The moral benefit he acquired from stealing into the local chapel to hear Mr. Plumley take a Sunday-school class, was at least worth as much to him as the occasional pipe of tobacco, or glass of whisky and water, which his idol vouchsafed him. For Mr. Gardener, as a true ‘poor relation’ of the gods, was humbly thankful for their cheapest condescensions.
“You stuck to your principles, sir,” he said, standing on one leg and the toe of the other, in humble deprecation of his right to any but the smallest possible allowance of oilcloth. Perhaps he would have brought his foot down, even he, could he have guessed the true significance of his own remark.
“I did, Robert,” said Mr. Plumley, placidly sleeking his hair. “I always do. Have a pipe, Robert?”
“Thank you kindly, sir,” said the man. “That was a mistake you made, sir.”
“Mistakes,” said Mr. Plumley, “will occur. Have some whisky, Robert?”
“You’re very good, sir.”
“You don’t like it too strong, I think, Robert? And how’s the world treating you, my friend?”
“Much as usual, sir. From hand to mouth’s my motto.”
“Sad, sad to be sure. They’ll distrain upon me, I suppose.”
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
“The inhumanity of the world, Robert! You do pretty reg’lar porter’s work for Bull and Hacker, the auctioneers, don’t you, Robert?”
“That’s so, Mr. Plumley,” said the man, wondering. “But the work’s heavier than the wages.”
“They’ll be commissioned to seize the necessary goods. I wish you’d manage to give ’em a hint, Robert—over the left, you know, without any reference to me—that there’s a picture I prize (and that I’ve reason to believe a dealer is after), what would more than pay the two pun odd of the distraint if put up first. O’ course, I can’t appear to favour the matter myself, being a con——”
“Passive resister, sir.”
“Thank you, Robert; being the one most concerned in disputin’ the justice of the law. But a hint from you might settle the question at once. We aren’t very good friends, Bull and me; and, if he thought I prized the article, he’d be moral sure to seize it, slap away, to spite me.”
“The picter?”
“The picture, Robert. There it is.”
It hung in an obscure corner, a dingy enough article, in an old damaged frame.
“It don’t look the price,” said Gardener doubtfully.
“It cost me more in a bad debt,” said the ex-remover, busying himself with the whisky in his heavy, observant way.
“Very like, sir,” answered the other, and coughed behind his hand.
“I know what you mean,” said his patron; “that I was took in. Well, I’ve reason to think not, my man. I’ve reason to think that picture’s worth a deal—say, fifty pun. Anyhow, I mean to try.”
“A dealer’s after it, you say?”
“Yes, I do say.”
“Then why—with deference, sir—don’t you sell direct to him?”
“Why don’t I? Am I a man of business, Robert? Look about you. Have I learned, do you think, to take a hexpert’s word as to the precise vally of a article that I see his heye’s on, or to argy by induction that a good private offer means a better public one? When it comes to overreaching—hem!—a connoyser’s a man like myself; so we’ll just, by your leave, put the picture up to auction.”
He carried the decanter back to its place in one of the shiny cupboards.
“Besides, my friend,” said he, talking over his shoulder, “don’t you see as how my conscience demands this seizure?”
“Not quite, sir, with humility, if so be as——”
“You’re dense, Robert. Look here, I’m a conscientious resister, ain’t I? Law ain’t necessarily equity because the devil and Mr. Chamberlain frames it. There’s some lawgivers that are Vicars of Jehovah, and some of——but perhaps you’ve never heard of Abaddon?”
“Haven’t I?” said Mr. Gardener ruefully. “I was near run in once for tendering one as had been passed on me.”
“He was king of the bottomless pit,” said Mr. Plumley patiently. “He framed this here law what’s made a passive objector of me. Well, if, in resigning myself to his unjust processes, I force the picture-dealer’s hand, thereby making a profit elsewise denied me, don’t you see how I round on the law—triumph over it—kill two birds with one stone, as it might be?”
“Yes, sir; I see that,” said Mr. Gardener, though still doubtfully.
“You do, do you?” responded the other. “Well, then, the only thing is to make the law pay as heavy as possible by getting the picture run up to the dealer’s figure.”
“But the law wouldn’t go for more’n its two pun odd,” protested the jackal.
“O, you fool!” snarled the lion. “It’s the moral profit’s the game, don’t you see? I gain by the very hact what starts of itself to ruin me. It’s as plain as two pins.”
Mr. Gardener scratched his head, and broke into a short laugh.
“Bless you sir,” said he, “it’s clear enough; if on’y you’ll tell me who in all this here place is a-going to run up the dealer, since you can’t yourself.”
Mr. Plumley, bending at the cupboard, did not answer for a moment. When at last he did, rising and facing round, there was a curious pallor on his lips, and he had to clear his throat before he could articulate—
“You, Robert.”
“Me, sir! You’re joking.”
“Never less so, Robert.”
“I ain’t worth a sixpence in the world, sir.”
The ex-remover walked shakily across, and put a flabby, insinuative hand on the other’s shoulder.
“I think I may say I’ve been a good friend to you, Robert?”
Gardener muttered an uneasy affirmative.
“To justify a great principle, Robert? It’s a mere matter of form; it's——humph! A moment, if you please. Think of it while I’m gone.”
A rap at the front door had obtruded itself. Mr. Plumley tiptoed elephantinely out, was heard murmuring a few minutes in the hall, and returned shortly in a state of suavely perspiring mystery.
“It’s the dealer himself, Robert,” he whispered, his little eyes twinkling. “He’s come to make another attempt. I’ll humour him—humour him, never fear. Now, you must be quick. Will you do this little thing to oblige me?”
“Supposing I were let in, sir?”
Mr. Plumley coughed.
“I guarantee you, of course. It’s just a confidence between us. Go to fifty pound—not a penny less nor more—and let him take it at any figure he likes, beyond. He won’t fail you. You’ll do it, Robert?”
“I don’t favour the job, sir.”
“But you’ll do it?”
“Well, yes, then.”
Mr. Plumley showed him out, returned to the parlour, finished his whisky and water, and called in the dealer from some hidden corner of the hall where he had lain concealed. He had braced his nerves in the interval. His attitude all at once was scowling and truculent—meet for the reception of the shabby loafer who now presented himself.
“What are you grinning at, sir?” he roared. “This ain’t the face to bring to business.”
“O! isn’t it?” said the man. “Then I’ll change it——” which he did, so suddenly and terrifically that the other cowered. The stranger snorted, and relaxed.
“What now, minion?” said he.
“Bah!” snarled Mr. Plumley: “it comes easy to a barnstormer.”
“Roscius, ye fat old Philistine,” cried the actor, striking his breast with a ragged-gloved hand: “Roscius, thou ‘villainous, obscene, greasy tallow-ketch!’ ”
“Well,” said Mr. Plumley, wiping his brow, “I meant no offence, anyhow. Have a drink?”
The stranger breathed heavily, and assumed a Napoleonic pose.
“I will have a drink,” he said; and, in fact, before he would condescend to utter another word, he had two.
“Ha!” he said then, ejaculating a little spirituous cloud, and his lean, pantomimic face was all at once benign. “Richard’s himself again, and eager for the fray! To the charge, my passive resister, my heavy lead! Ye need Theophilus Bolton! Ye must pay!”
“As to that there,” began Mr. Plumley, stuttering and glowering; but the other took him up coolly——
“As to that, dear boy, there’s no question. You’ve withheld me from a profitable engagement——”
“O, blow profitable!” interposed Mr. Plumley. “And you didn’t jump at the chanst neither!”
“To play a part for you,” went on the actor unruffled “Well, am I to be Agnew, or Christie, or Sotheby, or who? My commission’s five per cent.”
“Well, I don’t object to that,” said Plumley, relieved. “On the vally of the picture to Gardener, that’s to say. Call it done, and call yourself what you like.”
“One man in his time plays many parts,” murmured Mr. Bolton. “Put it on paper, dear boy. I have a weakness for testaments.”
Mr. Plumley protested; the actor whistled. In the end, the latter pocketed a document to the effect that Joshua Plumley agreed to pay Theophilus Bolton a sum to be calculated at the rate of five per cent on the ultimate selling price at auction (on a date hereafter to be filled in) of a picture known as the “The Wood Shop.”
“You’ll be close?” said Mr. Plumley uneasily. “It might—it might injure me, you know, if it got about. Short o’ fifty pound’s the figger—you understand? Let Gardener secure it at that. I’ve my reasons. You come to me quick and quiet after the sale, and you shall have your two pound ten on the nail, and slip off with it as private as you wish.”
Now, what was Plumley’s little game? And wasn’t he anyhow a good man of business?
He was at least such a sure student of human nature as to have made no miscalculation in the matter of Bull and Hacker’s predilections. They seized, on the strength of Mr. Gardener’s artful insinuations, the very picture on which the defaulter was supposed to set a value, and put it up to sale one afternoon on the tail of a general auction. Mr. Gardener bid for it (the practice was common enough amongst the firm’s employés, acting for private clients, and Bull rather admired the man’s astuteness in having suggested a seizure so prospectively profitable to himself), and a strange dealer opposed him. They ran one another up merrily, and the room gaped and sniggered and whispered. It was an afternoon of surprises.
“Forty-six,” cried the auctioneer—“any advance on forty-six?”
A local lawyer, Bittern by name, was observed pushing his way through the crowd.
“Good Lord!” he was muttering; “is the man daft!”
“Forty-seven,” said the dealer.
“Forty-eight,” bawled Gardener.
“Forty-nine,” said the dealer monotonously.
“Fifty!” cried Gardener stoutly; and hung on the bid which was to quit and relieve him.
It did not come.
The auctioneer raised his stereotyped wail: It was giving the lot away; a chance like that might never occur again; let him say fifty-one. “Come, gentlemen! Shall I say fifty-one? No?” He would sell at fifty, then—sell this unique work at the low figure of fifty pounds. “Any advance on fifty pounds?” He raised his hammer.
“Not for me,” said the dealer, turning away. “Let him have it.”
Down came the hammer. “Gardener: fifty pounds,” murmured Mr. Bull, with a very satisfied face. The purchaser stood stupefied.
Two flurried gentlemen at this moment entered the room. They seemed more rivals than friends, and each shouldered the other rather rudely.
“Too late, by gosh!” growled one.
“Not a bit,” said the second, pushing past. “We’ll get the vendee to put it up again. I dare say he’ll do it.”
“Here!” cried the first, grasping at the other’s receding figure.
Jibbing together, they made their way towards Gardener, who was standing in rueful and dumbfounded altercation with the lawyer. A brief but very earnest discussion took place among the four. At the end, the rostrum was invoked, the picture was replaced on the table, the two new-comers took up position. Gardener, mute and dazed, fell back, in custody of the lawyer, who stood with a hard, shrewd glitter in his eyes, and the auctioneer, blandly elated, raised his voice, justifying his own judgment.
The picture, he said—as he had already informed the company, in fact—was a desirable one, a rare example of that peerless master Adrian Ostade; and the recent purchaser—whose property it was now become—had been persuaded generously to put it up to auction again on his own account, in answer to the representations of certain would-be bidders, whom an unforeseen delay on the railway had prevented from attending earlier.
“We will start at fifty pounds, gentlemen, if you please,” said he.
Mr. Bolton, in the background, pulled his hat over his eyes, and settled himself to listen.
That great financial strategist, Mr. Plumley, sat drinking whisky and water by lamplight. His pipe lay at his side. He had tried to smoke it; but tobacco flurried him.
“It should be about settled by now,” he muttered. “Where’s that Bolton?”
“Rap!” came the answer, upon such an acute nervous centre, that he started as if he had been stung.
He rose, made an effort to compose himself, and went to the door.
A spare tall figure detached itself from the dark, and entered.
“What the devil’s been keeping you?” growled the ex-remover.
“Ah! you’re short-sighted, my friend,” said Mr. Bittern, and walked coolly into the parlour.
Mr. Plumley stared, felt suddenly wet, shook himself, and followed. When it came to creeping flesh, he felt the full aggravation of his size. The slow march of apprehensions, taking time from a sluggish but persistent brain, seemed minutes encompassing him.
“So,” said the lawyer, dry and wintry, the moment he was in, “you coveted your neighbour's one ewe lamb?”
Mr. Plumley took up his pipe, blew through it, put it down again, and said nothing.
“You’d heard of Gardener’s aunt’s little bequest to him of fifty pounds, duty free, eh?” asked the lawyer.
“No,” said Mr. Plumley.
“O!” said the lawyer. “He bid fifty pounds for that picture of yours this afternoon, and got it. On whose instructions?”
“Ask him, sir. He acts for many.”
“It wasn’t on yours, then?”
“Is that reasonable, Mr. Bittern, when to my knowledge the man wasn’t worth a brass farden?”
“What do you say about holding him to his bargain?”
“I say, if he’s bought the picture, he must pay for it.”
“And who bid against him? You don’t know that either, I suppose?”
“Nat’rally. Was I there?”
“Well, I’ve settled for him with Bull and Hacker, and brought you their cheque, less commission and distraint. Give me a receipt for it.”
The great creature, elated with his own strategy as he was, could hardly draw it out, his hands shook so. But he managed the business somehow. The lawyer examined the paper, and buttoning it into his pocket, took up his hat.
“O, by the way!” he said, as if on an afterthought, “I was forgetting to mention that Gardener, after securing the picture, put it up to auction again, at the particular request of some late arrivals, and was bid a thousand pounds for it. It turned out to be a very good work.”
Mr. Plumley took up his pipe again quite softly, looked at it a moment, and suddenly dashed it to smithereens on the floor.
“It was a plant!” he cried in a fat, hoarse scream. “I’ll be even with him—I’ll have the money—the picture was mine—I’ll—by God, I say, it was a conspiracy!”
The lawyer at the door lashed round on him like whipcord.
“And that’s what I think,” he shouted. “The meanest, dirtiest trick that was ever played by a canting scoundrel on a poor brother. But I may get to the bottom of it yet, from the opening scheme to enlist Gardener’s sympathies for a poor martyr to conscience, to the last wicked design upon him in the saleroom. I may get to the bottom of it, cunning as it was planned; and, when I do, let some look out!”
As he flung away, he let in a new-comer, Mr. Bolton, by the opened door. Mr. Plumley, choking in the backwater of his own fury, had sunk into a chair, gasping betwixt bitterness and panic. He could not, for the moment, remember how far he had committed himself. He looked up to meet the insolent, ironic smile of his confederate. “Come along, dear boy,” said Mr. Bolton. “Curtain’s down. Cash up!”
He presented a claim for fifty pounds, and stood, his hat cocked on his head, picking his teeth.
“What’s this curst gammon?” sneered Mr. Plumley, rousing himself.
“Commission,” said the actor airily. “Five per cent. on the ultimate selling price of a picture.”
“It went at fifty.”
“Pardon me, sir. Ultimate—ultimate, see agreement” (he smacked his chest). “One thou’ was the figure, and dirt cheap. Fine example. I’ll trouble you for a cheque.”
“Two pound ten. I’ll give it you in cash.”
Mr. Bolton whistled a stave, and turned round, his hands deep in his breeches’ pockets.
“I can sell to the other party. Good day to you, and look out.”
[The End]
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. cash-box/cash box, frockcoat/frock-coat, etc.) have been preserved.
Alterations to the text:
[A gallows-bird]
Change “convolutions of war, the merry, the dance-maccabre” to danse-macabre.
[Our lady of refuge]
“fort of San Fernando. and the cursed French garrison,” change period to comma.
[The five insides]
(“ ‘Eh, says the old man, ’usky-like, and starting) add right single quotation mark after Eh.
“a bit forward—‘No, no, no no, no, no, no—’ ” add comma after third no.
[The jade button]
“The property was recovered—but for the heir…” add period to sentence.
[End of text]