“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?”