Silently she placed the little glove in his hand.
"Barbara! my Barbara!" and she was folded to his heart.
[CHAPTER X.]
AT THE TIN-TAX OFFICE, No. 120.
The Tin-Tax Office, as I have before had occasion to remark, is situated in a wing of Rutland House; that noble building so well known to most Englishmen, whence are issued those concise documents relating to unpaid arrears of public imposts, and where the mulcting of the nation is carried on. The Tin-Tax is by no means a bad office, as times go; though it is rather looked down upon by the men in the Check and Counter-Check Department, and the Navigation Board, who have offices in the same building. It used to be a great point of humour with the wits of twenty years since to say that the appointments in the Tin-Tax Office were given to sons of the faithful butlers of patriotic peers, and to those eager constituents for whose placing-out in life the Members for Irish boroughs are always petitioning with energy and perseverance worthy of the horse-leech's daughters. And, indeed, the manners and customs of some of the middle-aged clerks bear testimony to the truth of this report. They were good enough fellows in their day--blundered on at their offices from ten till four; dined cheaply at Short's, or Berthollini's, or the Cock; went half-price to the Adelphi; occasionally supped at the Coal-Hole or the Cider Cellars; and went home to their garrets in Islington with the perfect idea that they were roystering dogs, and that the world did not contain many men who had drained pleasure's goblet more thoroughly to the dregs than themselves. Most of them married betimes--occasionally the landlady of their lodgings; more frequently the pallid daughter of some fellow-clerk, after a flirtation begun over a round game or "a little music;" most frequently some buxom lass met at seaside boarding-house, or in the old paternal home, where they spent their leave of absence. But we have changed all that; and junior clerks of the present day are thoroughly and entirely different from their predecessors: the establishment of the Civil-Service Commission, and the ordination of promotion by merit, have sent quite a different class of men into the public service, and the subordinate appointments of the Tin-Tax Office are held by men who have taken their degrees at Oxford; who can turn "Vilikins and his Dinah" into Greek iambics; who can tell you where Montenegro is, and what it wants; who have thoroughly mastered the Schleswig-Holstein question; who are well up in the theory of thermo-dynamics; and who dip into Jean Paul Richter for a little light reading;--all excellent accomplishments, and thoroughly useful in the Tin-Tax Office.
It is half-past twelve on a fine Saturday morning in the beginning of October, and the six occupants of room No. 120 are all assembled, and all at work; that is to say, four of them are writing, one is looking vacantly out of the window, and one is reading the Times. No. 120 is at the top of the building; a pleasant room when you reach it, looking on to the river, but up four flights of steep stone stairs. No. 120 has always its regular number of occupants; for when the chief clerk learns that a young gentleman has an undue number of friends calling upon him during official hours, he causes the popular man to be removed to No. 120, and after two trials of the stairs the visitors prefer meeting their friend in the evening at some less Alpine retreat. So also, when a young gentleman is in the habit of being perpetually waited upon by duns, he makes interest to get moved into No. 120, and finds that his creditors simultaneously urge their demands not in person, but through the medium of the Post-Office. The head of the room is Mr. Kinchenton, that tall man with the rounded shoulders, and grizzled head ever bent over his desk. Hard work has bowed Mr. Kinchenton's back and silvered his hair; for he has been in the Tin-Tax Office since he was sixteen years old, and though promoted under the old system of seniority and length of service, no one could ever say that he had not fairly won every step he got. Before he was sixteen, he was the hope and pride--the prize scholar--of the Heckmondike Grammar-School, his father being head-keeper to Lord Heckmondike, who placed the boy on the foundation of the school, and, finding him apt and studious, obtained for him his appointment from the Government of the day. No Adelphi at half-price, no Cider Cellars or Coal-Hole, for young Kinchenton, who had a little bedroom in a little terrace close by Kennington Common, where he was to be found every night, book in hand, and happy as a prince. A poor little bedroom enough!--a wretched little bedroom, with a white-dimity-covered tester-bed, two rush-bottomed chairs, a painted chest of drawers, a rickety washhand-stand, and a maddening square of looking-glass hanging against the wall. But to that garret came Sancho Panza and the gaunt Don his master; came Gil Blas, and the beggar with his arquebuse, and the Archbishop of Grenada; came cringing Tartuffe, and preposterous Sganarelle; came wandering Rasselas and sage Imlac; came Ferdinand Count Fathom, swearing Tom Pipes, and decorous Mr. Blifil. There the hard-working clerk laughed over Falstaff's lovemaking and Malvolio's disgrace, or wept over Sterne's dead ass and Le Fevre's regained sword; while his comrades Mace and Flukes were ruining each other at billiards, and Potter and Piper were hiccuping noisy applause to indecent songs.
When Mr. Kinchenton was forty years old, his income had reached the bewildering amount of four hundred a year, and he thought he might indulge in the luxury of a wife; so he took to himself a pretty little soft-eyed girl, the daughter of an old gentleman who was a traveller, in the straw-bonnet line, and who, when he was not driving about in a very high four-wheeled trap which did its best to look like a mail-phaeton and signally failed in the attempt, lived in the little terrace next door to Kinchenton's lodgings. After his daughter's marriage, the old gentleman, who was a widower, gave up travelling, retired upon his savings, and went to live with his son-in-law in a little house which Kinchenton had taken in Camden Town, where the birth of a son crowned Kinchenton's happiness. His adoration of this child was his weakest point: he was always narrating its wonderful deeds to every body; and the men in the office, with whom the little fellow was really a favourite, knew they could always get late attendance overlooked or half-holiday granted if they asked after little Percy, and sent him some trifling present.
It is well for the junior clerks of No. 120 that Mr. Kinchenton is the head of the room; for the next in seniority, Mr. Dibb, is by no means a pleasant person. Harsh, stiff, sectarian bigotry lurks in his coarse, close-cropped black hair, and in the plaited folds of his huge white neckcloth; he invariably wears a black dress coat, waistcoat, and trousers, creaking boots, and damp cloth gloves. He is always ailing, and invariably changing his medical system: now vaunting the virtues of blue-pill, now swearing by homoeopathy; he has been rubbed and cracked and shampooed and galvanised; and once he tried hydropathy, but came back in a week from Malvern no better, and apparently no cleaner, than before his visit to Dr. Gully. He was one of the first-fruits of the noble system of promotion by merit, having been transferred to Rutland House from some provincial stronghold of the Tin-Tax Office, and report said that he had originally been a schoolmaster in Bilston. He was hated by nearly all his juniors, but respected by the heads for his conscientiousness and power of work; and he was located in No. 120 to neutralise, to some extent, Mr. Kinchenton's excess of good nature. The rank and file of No. 120 consisted of Mr. Prescott and Mr. Pringle, junior clerks; Mr. Boppy, an old gentleman with a bald head and a double eyeglass, who had arrived, through dint of long service, at a good income, who was utterly useless, and who had no characteristic save his intense dread of his wife; and Mr. Crump, who had been for twenty years an extra clerk, and who, owing to an invincible stutter, had never been able to interest any one sufficiently to procure him an appointment.
"Devilish hot!" said Mr. Pringle, a short, good-humoured-looking young man, laying down his Times and opening his waistcoat; "devilish hot! Crump, there's a good fellow, open the door."
Mr. Crump looked up from his work, and said appealingly, "I've got a st--a st--a st--" he would have said "stiff neck;" but long before he could reach the word, Pringle interrupted him--