‘I don’t object to him, as a faithful servant, but let him be kept in a servant’s place. Why bring him home here—a man who eats peas with his knife, and bites his bread, and is always talking of the time when you were in trade. Can’t you see that I am trying to raise the tone of your surroundings——’
‘The tone be blowed,’ muttered Mr. Piper.
‘That I want to get you recognised by the county people; that I want to force you into the best society in the neighbourhood. You must know this, and yet you bring Chumney to spoil everything. He was at our last dinner party.’
‘Well, he did no harm,’ growled Mr. Piper, waxing savage.
‘He was an eyesore. He was a blot upon the whole thing. Do you think I shall ever rise above your Wigzells and your Porkmans, while you weigh me down with Mr. Chumney?’
‘My Wigzells and my Porkmans are a deal pleasanter than the stuck-up lot you’ve contrived to bring about me,’ retorted Mr. Piper, ‘A pack of shabby-genteel lawyers and parsons and half-pay captains, that eat up my substance and stare me out of countenance, as if I was waxwork—and never offer me bite nor sup in return. I despise such half-and-half gentry. I’d as soon put electro-plated goods on my table as set them down to it. And as for the county,’ cried Mr. Piper, snapping his fingers derisively, ‘the county won’t have cut, shuffle, or deal with us, and wouldn’t, no, not if you were to put your eyes out upon sticks.’
This horrible expression, which Mr. Piper sometimes used when he was in a passion, overcame Bella. She began to cry, and murmured meekly that she wouldn’t so much mind Mr. Chumney coming if it was not her ‘day.’
‘Your day!’ cried Mr. Piper, growing bold in his scorn. ‘Your day, be hanged! Nobody comes on your day. You might as well call it Queen Elizabeth’s day, or Nebuchadnezzar’s day. You’ve laid yourself out to know a parcel of arrogant people that don’t want to know you, and you’ve turned up your nose at people that give three hundred guineas for a pair of horses, and live in handsome houses of their own building, and brag about the money they have earned with their own industry, instead of bragging about their great-grandfathers. You want to keep company with the Tudors and the Plantagenets. Nothing less than that will satisfy you. But they won’t have you, and if you want any one to admire your fine clothes and eat your fine dinners you’d better be content with my friends.’
Mr. Chumney’s arrival brought the conversation to an abrupt finish. He was a long lean man, with iron-gray hair and whiskers, thick black eyebrows, and an intelligent expression which atoned in some measure for his gaunt ugliness.
He loved Ebenezer Piper with the affection of a faithful dog that has never known but one master, and with regard to all the rest of the world he was strictly misanthropic. He was not a scandalmonger like Miss Coyle. He generally thought the worst of people, but he always kept his thoughts to himself. He believed every business man, except Mr. Piper, to be an innate rogue, and on the verge of insolvency, but he gave no expression to his doubts. He was not a lively companion, so far as conversation goes, but he was an accomplished listener; he had the art of looking ineffably wise, and of appearing to be able to give an immense deal of information, if he had not preferred to withhold it. He was like the great Lord Thurlow. Nobody ever could have been so wise as Samuel Chumney looked.