It was hard to bear, no doubt, but Richard Tallant was a very profitable investment to Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs, and he could afford to bottle up his Brummagem resentment; for such a fellow as Shuffleton Gibbs could hardly be said to have any honourable feelings of resentment. He was bankrupt, not only in purse, but in reputation; he might have got over the former in time, but he could never whitewash the latter.
Mr. Christopher Tallant had been proud of his son the first time he had seen him, prancing and capering in the Lady’s Mile, as he pranced and capered soon after Mr. Gibbs left him. Mr. Tallant had gone down to the Park quietly on foot, and, unobserved, had seen his son a leading man of fashion, on the best horse amongst the most magnificent of all the splendid animals there. He had seen him acknowledged by many a dashing rider, and had watched him turn out into the carriage-drive, to ride beside a gorgeous yellow brougham, with beautiful women in it. Somehow the merchant could not help feeling annoyed with himself for harbouring such a pride as this; but he had not forgotten the Oxford epigram, and he liked to see a Tallant riding about amongst the big men, the greatest swell of the lot.
CHAPTER V.
THE DIBBLES AND THEIR NEW LODGER.
Thomas Dibble, the porter, who held himself at the beck and call of the principals and officers of the Meter Iron Works Company at Westminster, lived in one of those numerous little streets which run off from the semi-aristocratic regions of St. George’s Square, South Belgravia, to Whitehall; and his wife let lodgings and wore gorgeous caps.
She was quite a study this Mrs. Dibble, quite a psychological study. She governed Dibble, and yet made him her shield and protection in the most amusing and complete fashion. She was a fat, rubicund woman, with her dress either unfastened behind or before, and her cap hanging on the back of her head, both in summer and winter, as if she were in a perpetual state of perspiration.
She was by no means an ill-looking woman. Dibble in his cups had told his friends that she was a regular beauty when first he knew her, as fair as waxwork, sir. But her tongue; well it was a caution, Mrs. Dibble’s tongue, and she had a sort of intermittent lisp, which instead of being an impediment in any way to the rapidity of her utterances only seemed to facilitate them, enabling her to slip and slide over an argument and abbreviate long words until her hearers might sometimes imagine she was pouring out a series of compound syllables in some unknown tongue. But that was only when she was in a passion, thank goodness, which did not occur more than once a week.
Dibble himself was a mild little fellow as a rule, and a profound admirer of Mrs. D.’s accomplishments. She had learnt to play the piano when she was at school in her youth; and when she sat down to a five-and-a-half octave square of Broadwood’s on Sunday nights in her black satin dress, Dibble would sit by the fire and feast his eyes upon her with unsophisticated delight.
It was not a very symmetrical figure neither, Mrs. Dibble’s, as you viewed it at the piano, and the two hooks-and-eyes which were undone near the middle of her back did not make it any the more elegant.
Mrs. Dibble usually thumped at the Old Hundredth and a wonderful variation of “Vital Spark,” until her cap fell off and her hair came down, when she would close the “box of music” and utter twenty voluble regrets that she had so few opportunities of practising and keeping up her fingering.
But Mr. Dibble did not agree with her on this point; it was the only one he was permitted to dispute; he vowed she played as well as if she had no end of practice.