Dr. Wainwright's Patient: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

"Because she's heard Dr. Wainwright is expected, and has turned sulky, and won't move."

"Oh, dam!" said Captain Derinzy.

[CHAPTER III.]

DURING OFFICE-HOURS.

The "Office of H.M. Stannaries" is in a small back street in the neighbourhood of Whitehall. What H.M. Stannaries were was known to but very few of the initiated, and to no "externs" at all. Old Mr. Bult, who, from time immemorial had been the chief-clerk of the office, would, on being interrogated as to the meaning of the word or the duties of his position, take a large pinch of snuff, blow the scattered grains off his beautifully got-up shirt-frill, stare his querist straight in the face, and tell him that "there were certain matters of a departmental character, concerning which it was not considered advisable to involve oneself in communication with the public at large." The younger men were equally reticent. To those who tried to pump them, they replied that they "wrote things, you know; letters, and those kind of things," and "kept accounts." What of? Why, of the Stannaries, of course. But what were the Stannaries? Ah, that was going into a matter of detail which they did not feel themselves justified in explaining. Their ribald friends used to say that the men in the Stannaries Office could not tell you what they had to do, because they did nothing at all, or that they did so little that they were sworn to secrecy on receiving their appointments, lest any inquisitive Radical member, burning to distinguish himself before his constituents in the cause of Civil Service reform--a bray with which the dullest donkey can make himself heard--should rise in the House, and demand an inquiry, or a Parliamentary Commission, or some of those other dreadful inquisitions so loathsome to the official mind.

However, no matter what work was or was not done there, the Stannaries Office was a fact, and a fact for which the nation paid, and according to the entries in the Civil Service estimates, paid pretty handsomely. For there was a Lord Commissioner of Stannaries, at two thousand a-year, and a secretary at one thousand, and a private secretary at three hundred, and four-and-twenty clerks at salaries ranging from one to eight hundred, besides messengers and office-keepers. It was a well-thought-of office to; the men engaged in it went into good society, and were recognised as brother officials by the lofty bureaucrats of the Treasury and the Foreign Office--great creatures, who looked upon Somerset House and the Post Office as tenanted by the sons of peers' butlers, and who regarded the Custom House as a damp place somewhere on the Thames, where amphibious persons known as "tide-waiters" searched passengers' baggage. But it was by no means infra dig. to know men in the Stannaries; and that department of the public service annually contributed a by no means small share of the best dancers and amateur performers of the day. "Only give us gentlemen," Mr. Branwhite, the secretary, would say in his first official interview with a newly-appointed Lord Commissioner--for the patronage of his office was vested in the Lord Commissioner of the Stannaries, who was a political functionary, and came in and went out with the Government--"only give us gentlemen; that's all I ask. We don't require much brains in this place, and that's the truth; but we do want birth and breeding." And on these points Mr. Branwhite, who was the son of an auctioneer at Penrith, and who combined the grace of Dr. Johnson with the geniality of Dr. Abernethy, was inexorable. The cry was echoed everywhere throughout the office. "Let's have gentlemen, for God's sake!" little Fitzbinkie, the private secretary, would say, adding, with a look of as much horror as he could throw into his eyeglass--you never saw his eyes--"there was a fellow here the other day, came to see my lord. Worthington--you've heard about him--wonderful fellow at the Admiralty, great gun at figures, and organisation, and that kind of thing; reformed the navy almost, and so on; and--give you my honour--he had on a brown shooting-jacket, and a black-silk waistcoat, give you my word! Frightful, eh? Let's have gentlemen, at any price."

And the prayer of these great creatures was, to a large extent, answered. Most of the men in the Stannaries Office were pleasant, agreeable, sufficiently educated, well-dressed, and gentlemanly-mannered. Within the previous few years there had been a Scotch and an Irish Lord Commissioner, and each of them had left traces of his patronage in the office: the first in the importation of two or three grave men, who, not finding work enough to do, filled up their leisure by reading statistics, or working out mathematical problems; the last, by the appointment of half-a-dozen roistering blades, who did very little of the work there was to do, and required the help of a Maunders' "Treasury of Knowledge," subscribed for amongst them, to enable them to do what they did; but who were such good riders and such first-rate convivialists that they were found in mounts and supper-parties for two-thirds of the year. The Irish element was, however, decidedly unpopular with Mr. Branwhite, the secretary, a cold-blooded, fish-like man, dry and tasteless, like a human captain's biscuit, who had no animal spirits himself, and consequently hated them in others. He was a long, thin, melancholy-looking fiddle-faced sort of a man, who tried to hide his want of manner under an assumed brusquerie and bluntness of speech. He had been originally brought up as a barrister, and owed his present appointment to the fact of his having a very pretty wife, who attracted the senile attentions and won the flagging heart of the Earl of Lechmere, who happened to be Lord Commissioner of the Stannaries when Sir Francis Pongo died, after forty years' tenure of the secretaryship. Lord Lechmere having, when he called at Mrs. Branwhite's pretty villa in the Old Brompton lanes, been frequently embarrassed by the presence of Mr. Branwhite, that gentleman's barristerial practice being not sufficient to take him often to the single chamber which he rented in Quality Court, Chancery Lane, thought this a favourable opportunity to improve the Branwhite finances, in this instance at least without cost to himself, and of assuring himself of Mr. Branwhite's necessitated absence from the Old Brompton villa during certain periods of the day. Hence Mr. Branwhite's appointment as secretary to H.M. Stannaries. There was a row about it, of course. Why did not the promotion "go in the office"? That is what the Stannaries men wanted to know, and what they threatened to get several members of Parliament to inquire of the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who replied on Stannaries matters in the Lower House. The Official Chronicle, that erudite and uncompromising advocate of the Government service, came out with a series of letters signed "Eraser," "Half-margin," and "Nunquam Dormio;" and a leader in which Lord Lechmere was compared to King David, and Mr. Branwhite to Uriah the Hittite, the parallel in the latter case being heightened by the writer's suggestion that each had been selected "for a very warm berth." But the authorities cared neither for official remonstrances nor press sarcasms. They had their answer to the question why the promotion did not go in the office. Who was the next in rotation? Mr. Bult, the chief-clerk. Was Mr. Bult competent in any way for the secretaryship? Would the gentlemen of the Stannaries Office like to see their department represented by Mr. Bult? Certainly not. Very well, then, as it was impossible, after Mr. Bult's lengthened service, during which his character had been stainless, to pass him by, and place any of his juniors over his head, the only course was to seek for Sir Francis's successor in some gentleman unconnected with the place. This was the way in which Mr. Branwhite obtained his appointment. Lord Lechmere's party went out of office soon after, and Lord Lechmere himself has been dead for years; but Mr. Branwhite held on through the régimes of the Duke of M'Tavish and Viscount Ballyscran, and was all-powerful as ever now while Lord Polhill of Pollington was Lord Commissioner. What was thought of him, and, indeed, what was thought and said pretty plainly about most official persons and topics, we shall learn by looking into a large room on the ground-floor of the office known as the Principal Registrar's Room.

The Principal Registrar's Room must by no means be confounded with the Registry, which was a very different, and not a very choice place, where junior clerks got their hands into Stannaries work by stamping papers and covering their fingers with printers'-ink. The Principal Registrar's Room was appropriated to the Principal Registrar, and three of the best-looking assistants he could get hold of. The gentleman seated at the writing-table in the centre of the room, and reading The Morning Post, is the Principal Registrar, Mr. Courtney. He sits habitually with his back to the light, so that you cannot see his features very distinctly--sufficiently, however, to make out that he is an old, in reality, a very old man, made up for a young one. He must have been of fair complexion and good-looking at one time, for his capitally-made wig is red in colour, and though his perfectly-shaven cheeks are mottled and pulpy, his features are well-cut and aristocratic. His throat, exposed to view through his turn-down collar, is old and wrinkled, reminding one of a fowl's neck; and his hands are soft and seemingly boneless. So much as can be seen of his legs under the table reminds one of Punch's legs, exhibited by that "godless old rebel" in front of his show: the knees knock together, and the feet turn inwards towards each other with helpless imbecility. The only time that Mr. Courtney exhibits any great signs of vitality is in the evening at the Portland Club, where he plays an admirable game of whist, and where his hand is always heavily backed. Though he confesses to being "an old fellow," and quotes "Me, nec foemina nec puer," with a deprecating shrug of the shoulders, he likes to hear the adventures of his young companions, and is by no means inconveniently straitlaced in his ideas. He has a comic horror of any "low fellows," or men who do not go into what he calls "sassiety;" he regards the Scotch division of the office as "stoopid," and contemplates the horsiness and loud tone of the Irish with great disfavour. He has, he thinks, a very good set of "boys" under him just now, and is proportionately pleasant and good-tempered. Let us look at his "boys."

That good-looking young man at the desk in the farthest window is Paul Derinzy, only son of our friend the Captain, resident at Beachborough. The likeness to his father is seen in his thin straight-cut features, small lithe figure, and blue-black hair. The beard movement had just been instituted in Government offices, and Paul Derinzy follows it so far as to have grown a thick black moustache and a small pointed beard, both very becoming to his sallow complexion and Velasquez type of face. He is about five-and-twenty years of age, and has an air of birth and breeding which finds him peculiar favour in his Chief's eyes.

In his drooping eyelids, in his pose, in his outstretched arms, and head lying lazily on one side, there was an expression of languor that argued but ill for the amount of work to be gotten out him in any way, and which proclaimed Mr. Paul Derinzy to be one of that popular regiment, "The Queen's Hard Bargains." But what of that? He certainly did his office credit by his appearance; there was very seldom much work to be done, and when there was, Paul was so popular that no one would refuse to undertake his share. That man opposite, for instance, loved Paul as his brother, and would have done anything for him.