“Nothing. What can I do? To breathe a word of it aloud would be a libel; and if I did not get sent to jail, they would pack me off to Hanwell as a malicious madman. Shelf’s name is as good as a banknote in the City this day, and, for everybody’s sake, I trust that I have wronged him foully, and that it may always continue so. But, Amy dear, I have a heavy foreboding on me that in less than half a year’s time there will be a mob of wretched people shooting themselves or going to the workhouse because he has ruined them, and they haven’t the pluck or the thews left to commence life afresh.”
CHAPTER XVI.
FOR THE BIRTHDAY LIST.
Mr. Theodore Shelf was a gourmand of the first water. He preached most violently against all people who drank to excess, and seemed scarcely to discriminate between these and other people who were decorously moderate. He included them all in one sweeping anathema, and rammed home his charges with countless texts always once a Sunday, and usually on several weekdays as well. He was a powerful exhorter in his own particular narrow groove, was Mr. Theodore Shelf, and a vast number of people believed in him, and put out their savings to usury under his directions.
But he was, as I say, a gourmand of note. He paid his chef £300 a year, and would have thought himself permanently injured in constitution if his truffles by accident happened to be English, and not from Perigord Forest. He over-ate himself habitually, and made no particular disguise about it. There is no influential society to make a national sin of bestial over-feeding, or otherwise Mr. Theodore Shelf would doubtless have posed as an ascetic in public, and—kept biscuits and a jar of foie gras beside the brandy-bottle in the safe. There wasn’t a man in England who knew better how to get the votes of his clique, and their influence, and the handling of their money. There was not a man in Europe less inclined to mortify the flesh or undergo exertion without adequate return.
He was not a vastly clever man, if one came to add him up. He had climbed from a humble clerkship to a very giddy eminence by the nice exercise of three strong faculties. He had great discrimination, he was a quick thinker, and he was brilliantly unscrupulous.
When he saw a move that would eventually pay him, he had the wit to single it out in an instant from a thousand others, and decide on the road which led to his own personal profit. Then he disregarded the sneers of the well-dressed crowd—rather courted them, in fact, when they enabled him to pose as a martyr—and went in for the project heart, tongue, and soul. He could put such beautiful unction into the performance that even the most bigoted of the enemy never thought of questioning his own personal sanctity; and meanwhile the great earnest mob of his followers were chorusing the man’s praises with fervor and fanatical zeal.
It has been stated that Mr. Theodore Shelf was a man entirely wanting the saving salt of humor. But this I think is wrong. When he was alone he would take George on his knee, and whisper in that small animal’s ear, and call up a sardonic expression amongst the smug, sanctimonious lines of his face that was not carried there in outer life. At times, too, he would even laugh—a new, gleeful laugh; far different from the saintly reproving smile which was the only sign of mirth that ever illuminated his features before a more talkative confidant. But then George was taciturn; he could express whole pages by one quick pucker of the nose and half a tail-wag; and he was never known to gossip. Perhaps it was because he made such a prodigiously safe confidant that Mr. Theodore Shelf was so fond of George.
In social standing George was not a gentleman. Nature had intended him for the professional extinction of rats, and given him a preternatural gutter cleverness. Fate had him surrounded with affluence and regular meals. The pursuit of rats was forbidden him; battles with canine acquaintances were discouraged; and his one dissipation was sneaking away from his residence and making love to the barmaid in an adjacent public-house in return for biscuits and sugar. As a general result he waxed portly, and could look upon most kinds of rascality with a lenient eye, and perfectly understood why Mr. Shelf’s private brandy-bottle lodged in retirement from the public view.
Now, Mr. Theodore Shelf’s dinner parties—as sent up by the inventive and excellent chef aforesaid—were celebrated all over London, which, despite all the charges laid against it by Continental neighbors, is a city which does contain some people who appreciate the exquisite in food. Shelf, who despised no means of furthering his material interests, naturally traded upon his celebrity in this matter, and distributed his dinner invitations with a keen eye to some adequate return. But he was usually content to leave the actual making-up of all parties to his wife. He could quite trust her in this matter. She was not likely to expend a single cover uselessly. She had a wonderfully nice appreciation of the main chance. A clever woman, Mrs. Shelf.