“Who was this singular man you were speaking about just now?” Mrs. Evremonde asked.
Lady Jocelyn answered her: “The light of his age. The embodied protest against our social prejudice. Combine—say, Mirabeau and Alcibiades, and the result is the Lymport Tailor:—he measures your husband in the morning: in the evening he makes love to you, through a series of pantomimic transformations. He was a colossal Adonis, and I’m sorry he’s dead!”
“But did the man get into society?” said Mrs. Evremonde. “How did he manage that?”
“Yes, indeed! and what sort of a society!” the dowager Copping interjected. “None but bachelor-tables, I can assure you. Oh! I remember him. They talked of fetching him to Dox Hall. I said, No, thank you, Tom; this isn’t your Vauxhall.”
“A sharp retort,” said Lady Jocelyn, “a most conclusive rhyme; but you’re mistaken. Many families were glad to see him, I hear. And he only consented to be treated like a footman when he dressed like one. The fellow had some capital points. He fought two or three duels, and behaved like a man. Franks wouldn’t have him here, or I would have received him. I hear that, as a conteur, he was inimitable. In short, he was a robust Brummel, and the Regent of low life.”
This should have been Mel’s final epitaph.
Unhappily, Mrs. Melville would remark, in her mincing manner, that the idea of the admission of a tailor into society seemed very unnatural; and Aunt Bel confessed that her experience did not comprehend it.
“As to that,” said Lady Jocelyn, “phenomena are unnatural. The rules of society are lightened by the exceptions. What I like in this Mel is, that though he was a snob, and an impostor, he could still make himself respected by his betters. He was honest, so far; he acknowledged his tastes, which were those of Franks, Melville, Seymour, and George—the tastes of a gentleman. I prefer him infinitely to your cowardly democrat, who barks for what he can’t get, and is generally beastly. In fact, I’m not sure that I haven’t a secret passion for the great tailor.”
“After all, old Mel wasn’t so bad,” Mr. George Uplift chimed in.
“Granted a tailor—you didn’t see a bit of it at table. I’ve known him taken for a lord. And when he once got hold of you, you couldn’t give him up. The squire met him first in the coach, one winter. He took him for a Russian nobleman—didn’t find out what he was for a month or so. Says Mel, ‘Yes, I make clothes. You find the notion unpleasant; guess how disagreeable it is to me.’ The old squire laughed, and was glad to have him at Croftlands as often as he chose to come. Old Mel and I used to spar sometimes; but he’s gone, and I should like to shake his fist again.”