“You be fit for a concert,” he would say, “that you be.”
Not that Thomas Dibble exactly knew what a concert was, never having been present at anything of the kind, except on the occasion of a soirée at Gloucester when he went to a Sunday school there.
Dibble was bred and born in Gloucestershire, and had risen from a kitchen menial to a place in the household at Barton Hall two counties off, whither he had been recommended by a clergyman of the cathedral city. He was not in Mr. Tallant’s service more than a year before he was promoted to the portership at Westminster.
The Barton housekeeper gave him an introduction to a relative of hers, Miss Wilhelmina Stikes, of Still Street, and after a few visits to that buxom spinster, Miss Stikes made love to Thomas, proposed to him, and married him in less than three months.
They had now been united some twenty years, and on the whole Mr. Dibble did not regret his bondage. He had always been accustomed to servitude; so the yoke of the fair-fat-and-loquacious Miss Stikes was not difficult to the patient and forbearing Thomas Dibble.
“So we are to ’ave a new lodger, Mithter Dibble, in the purthon of the bailifth’s son; well, so be it, though when my pa educated me for a lady, and being a builder he could do that because his property were naturally his own and if he had been thpared he would no doubt ’ave retired on it, educated for that thpere it never occurred to me that I should ’ave to take the hoffsprigs of bailifths into my house, but there is no knowing what we may come to, and if you fulfil the duties of the life which has come upon you, though without your own conthent I can’t see after all that there’s anything to be ashamed of,” said Mrs. Dibble to her husband after a tripe supper, on the evening when Mr. Richard Tallant had promised to meet his friend Gibbs at the club.
“Yes, he be coming to-morrow; and I was thinking he might have the little back sittin’ room,” said Dibble, deferentially.
“Thank you, Dib, for your thoughts, but I may remark, as I have remarked before, that I will do the thinking; I did it for my pa during all his contracts, and made out the thpethifications which were for two railway bridges, and more than one or two streeth, and ith not unlikely that I shall be fully competent to think for you, Mithter Dibble; but, at the thame time, I will own that I had thought of the back thitting-room mythelf, and there’s a chest of drawers bed which Captain MacStrawsel, of the Blues, said was a perfect bed of roses; and it may, therefore, be fairly reckoned that a bailifth’s son may recline upon that which, if his conscience is at rest, he may repose upon as well as in a palace.”
Mr. Dibble said “Yes,” and Mrs. Dibble mixed for him, as was her wont, a mild glass of gin, which he proceeded to sip in company with the accomplished partner of his bosom, who invariably said, whenever she took spirits publicly, “that it was not as she liked sperrits or any other allycholic liquors, but it were a necessity to her, seeing the great strain that was constant on her nerves, owing to having both mental and physical labour more than common.”
After a short visit to the farm, Paul Somerton went to London, and, after due introduction to Mrs. Dibble, entered upon his duties at the Iron Company’s offices. He saw little of Mr. Richard Tallant, and less of his father; but he heard a great deal about both from old Dibble.