University companion! It was this educational position which made Gibbs tolerated in the society which he affected. He was a University man, if he had not taken a degree. Something happened to disgrace him a little at Christ Church, it is true; but there!—“it was only a bit of wickedness.” He made love to a pastrycook’s daughter, and ran away with her, or something of the sort, and had a row with a fellow-student over cards. What was all this? Youthful indiscretion, an exuberance of animal spirits. He was a gentleman by education, at all events; he had worn a gown.
That would have been enough to have made him a man of consideration in any provincial city in the empire, and it was a great passport even in cosmopolitan London; but in the dear old cathedral city where Arthur Phillips lived, what weight it would have given to Mr. Gibbs! “Of what college?” says a simpering inquirer. “Christ Church,” is the reply, and the man’s position is made. You had better be hanged than not have worn a gown in some English cities.
And so the gown assisted to cover the cloven hoofs of Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs, even in London; the gown had been sufficient for Richard Tallant, though it had not been enough for his father, and it had not shielded all the owner’s villanies; it had nevertheless worked favourably with Mr. Hammerton, who had put down Shuffleton’s wild college career to his dashing character, his natural wilfulness, and his animal spirits.
But during that last evening when Signor Pigeon was being plucked, the gown somehow fell aside, and Mr. Hammerton, made hot and suspicious by the loss of more than his present fortune, and something on account of his money in perspective, suddenly bounced out of his seat, picked up a duplicate card, seized Gibbs by the collar, and called him “cheat” and “black-leg.”
There was a terrible row, you may be sure. Gibbs, in the strong grip of Mr. Hammerton, shrunk like a coward, as he was, despite his college reputation as a “fast” man.
Clubmen and waiters thronged round the pair, and Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs’ conviction was complete; for, besides another duplicate turning up, the cards were found to be “doctored” substitutes for those used at the club. Fortunately for Richard Tallant, he had “cut out” of the four who were playing an hour before this contretemps occurred. His conduct was not without some suspicion in the club; but his father’s reputation, his own presumed wealth, and his generally open and apparently honest outspoken sentiments, protected him from anything beyond mere suspicion.
He neither attacked nor defended his friend Gibbs, but looked on whilst several members of the Ashford conducted Mr. Gibbs to the door and thrust him into the street. A confederate assisted in the expulsion, and was loudest, after his colleague’s disappearance, in his condemnation of all such scoundrels.
“A plague on all cowards, I say, and a vengeance, too.... A bad world, I say! I would I were a weaver; I could sing psalms or anything. A plague of all cowards, I say still.” Falstaff was not more demonstrative in praise of virtue, and against cowardice, than this wretched colleague of Gibbs’ in expressions of utter disgust for cheats and black-legs. Mr. Richard Tallant was even bold enough to sneer at the ranter, and advise him to communicate his sentiments to Shuffleton personally.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gibbs, shaking himself for a moment like a dog after a swim, quietly readjusted his crumpled collar, and deliberately pulled on his unimpeachable lavender gloves.
If you could have seen his face, you would have noticed the thin lips closely compressed, and the little eyes fixed and glaring. There were no great signs of rage there; but an expression of disappointment—not of despair by any means. He had been in difficulties before, and was not wont to lose his coolness; but he had never had “cheat” and “black-leg” thrown in his teeth until now, nor ever before trembled in the grip of an adversary. He wondered now at his own cowardice, and clenched his little gloved hand as he walked through St. James’s Park, and nursed his wicked thoughts.