“May I come to tea again, some time?” he pleaded, as she went with him to the door.
“When you are asked,” said Belle.
SCENE V
A PERSON OF IMPORTANCE
In a substantially-built house in the important suburb of Tooting, in a dining-room full of substantial furniture in that school of design which is the glory of Britain and the stupefaction of surrounding nations, sat Alderman Dobbin, J. P., reading the Church Gazette, and breathing Protestantism at every pore.
The person of Alderman Dobbin was not less substantial than the chair which supported it. It was the hour of three in the afternoon; the alderman had just achieved a dinner of solid and ample materials, and a gentle flush which overspread his broad face was due perhaps equally to the silent struggle going on in the region of his waistcoat and to indignation at the insidious practices of Rome.
It is not till a gigantic public evil begins to affect us personally that we become really in earnest for its redress. Alderman Dobbin had long marked the stealthy encroachment of ritual in the Church from afar with inward misgiving. But when the arising of a new vicar of the most lawless school brought the mischief to the door of the alderman’s own pew, when the audacious cleric presumed to burn frankincense or some such idolatrous drug under the alderman’s own nostrils, then, in his own words, he realized that we were on the verge of a revolution. It was fortunate indeed for the offender that the ordinary justice of the peace has no jurisdiction in ecclesiastical causes. Alderman Dobbin did not brawl in the church—such a man could not brawl; but he wrote a letter to the paper, and he intimated to his vicar in the privacy of the vestry that he should reconsider his attitude towards disestablishment.
To the culprit, standing on the great peaks of Catholic verity, clasping hands with sixty generations of apostles, fathers, saints, and bishops, his rebellious church-warden naturally mattered no more than a gnat buzzing round the altar. His spiritual predecessors had cast down emperors from their thrones, and given away largess of kingdoms. Was he to surrender the Œcumenical splendors of the Church at the bidding of an obscure suburban tradesman? If this impertinent boot-maker represented the feelings of the laity, so much the worse for the laity. The Church could get on without them, but not without its apostolic priesthood.
Such disdain, to the worthy alderman, was at once an outrage and a revelation. It is possible that there are social circles in which even an alderman is not removed beyond the reach of rivalry; but in the meridian of Tooting, where Alderman Dobbin had passed his life, and where his high office, together with his equally high moral character, had hitherto secured him universal deference, he felt himself to be an important personage. After all, importance is a question of standpoint. Every one has some one to look up to him. Though you be but a youth of lowly birth, engaged in mercantile pursuits, with a stipend of no more than thirty weekly shillings, yet to the landlady who tolls you in a moiety of that sum you are a power whose favor is to be conciliated, and whose wrath is to be dreaded. To the drudge in the basement who blacks your boots and watches you through the area railings as you issue forth of a morning you are as a god moving on Olympus; the conductor who takes you to your work in his omnibus holds you for an undoubted member of the aristocracy; and the drunken artisan on the roof, earning his pound a day on every day that he can spare from the public-house, hates you for your pride and luxury.
Novelists, it is said, are thought much of by young reporters on the provincial press. The secret of true happiness is to turn away from beholding those who are better off than ourselves, and keep the gaze steadily fixed on those who are worse off; and this secret Alderman Dobbin had mastered. Free from that itching to grovel to some one above him which torments so many unfortunate people, he was satisfied with being grovelled to by his inferiors. Thus it was that he had been able to live in the enjoyment of his own greatness without envying that of others. There might be such persons as dukes and archbishops in the world—he was Alderman Dobbin.
So much the greater was the shock administered to his mind by the unveiled disrespect of the vicar. The alderman’s evangelical zeal had received a new edge; and, at the same time, by a natural chain of cause and effect, he was in a mood peculiarly susceptible to the blandishments of one of those magnates of the earth before whom even Oxford divines are but as dust. Such a one was even now approaching the aldermanic dwelling.