“Going out now to luncheon, Davis?”
“Yes, Dodson, I am.”
As Mr. Davis sauntered out in a manner entirely worthy of Mr. Dodson himself, William Jordan, Junior, with his odd and unaccountable natural courtesy, which had already baffled many who had come in contact with it, opened the door that he might pass through.
“Why did you open the door for that young swine?” said Mr. Dodson, with an extremely rapid reversion to his out-of-doors manner. “If you do it again you and I will quarrel. He is as full of side as he can stick. He would even like me to dip my ensign; he would like me to call him ‘Mr.’—me, if you please, call him. I ought to have had his berth; everybody in the office said I was better qualified. He got it by a trick. I will tell you what he did. He signed his name in the time-book, George Eliot Davis, and he had no more right to do so than I have. Next day I signed myself Matthew Arnold Dodson, but it was too late. Octavius had already seen his name in the book and had promoted him up-stairs.”
With this tragical fragment of autobiography, Mr. Dodson and William Jordan, Junior, ascended their stools in the left-hand corner of the counting-house.
The second week of the boy’s sojourn in the high latitudes to which an inscrutable providence had called him was as chequered as his first. His fate was postponed; the sword, ever ready to descend, hung in mid-air, suspended by a thread. The theory of the previous week that the boy was deficient mentally, had received such ample confirmation that it had come to rank as established fact. Many anecdotes were already in circulation concerning an intellectual weakness that was now common knowledge. Mr. Dodson was the author of the majority of these; and owing to the fact that his superintendence of the boy’s education permitted him to obtain first-hand evidence, he had acquired among the staff a kind of vogue as a raconteur, which formerly it had not been his good fortune to enjoy.
To the well-furnished mind of that philosopher every cloud was lined with silver. Luney’s education cost him infinite pains and expenditure of temper in the course of a day, but the halo cast by the mere recital of his latest vagaries was ample compensation. Their fame had even evoked the august notice of the occupant of the low table, Mr. Walter Pater Walkinshaw. In his capacity of a vigilant student of the human heart, and part author with Robert Brigstock, M.A. (Cantab.), who sat up-stairs, of The Fluctuations of a Discerning Spirit, published anonymously and now in its fourth edition, this august but benign personage inclined a tolerant and sympathetic ear to the anecdotes so racily narrated by Mr. Dodson.
“I don’t think you know the latest, sir, about young Jordan,” said that eminent worldling about half-past three, as he sauntered up to the low table with the simper of a dean at a dinner party. “I took him out to luncheon this morning, sir, and I ask you, sir, what do you think he ate?”
“Tell me, Dodson,” said Mr. W. P. Walkinshaw indulgently, as he dipped thoughtfully, as he invariably did, and began a letter, “Very Reverend and Dear Sir.”
“He ate, sir,” said Mr. Dodson impressively, “one slice of thin bread-and-butter, and he sipped a small glass of milk.”