If he be one of the directors on the board of, say “The Private Dwelling Chimney-Sweeping Association,” he still remains a gentleman.
In the Bankruptcy Court, indeed, where some singular anomalies are still permitted to exist, he might be styled a dealer and chapman; but in West End drawing-rooms his standing is above suspicion. He is a wise individual who, despising trade, is still not above making use of it; who, knowing nothing of business, would nevertheless go and reap of the corn which his hand neither planted nor watered; he can do, as Squire Dudley wished to do, “gather where he has not strawed,” and march in and out of City offices as though the whole of the Lord Mayor’s kingdom from Ludgate to the Tower, and from Moorgate to London Bridge, belonged to him.
It was with this feeling Arthur Dudley, spite of his anxieties, entered the temporary offices in Dowgate Hill, where he was greeted by Mr. Black with an uproarious joviality.
“Well, old fellow, and how are you? Bills brought you up express, I see; thought nothing short of them could get me a speedy sight of you. I did not want you about them at all, you know, really, for I could have sent you the renewals to sign by post as easily as not. Yes, we must renew. I have such a devil of a lot of things on hand at the present time—good things, but still all crying out for money. Well, and how are you? and your charming lady, and my friend Lally, you know? Poor little cricket! I was deucedly sorry to hear of her being so ill; and oh! isn’t that a business about Ormson’s daughter! By Jove! the old man is cut up, and no mistake. Mrs. O. takes it better than he—comes the Roman matron and that sort of thing; think I liked her quite as well before I heard her declaiming against the girl. Mrs. Black believes her sister forced Bessie to accept Harcourt against her will, and led her a nice life at home over it. I always considered Mrs. O. a very superior sort of woman; but I suppose God who made it is the only one who rightly understands female nature. It is an enigma to me. Who’s she off with, Squire? Come, it is all in the family, and you need not keep the matter dark here.”
“I have not the remotest idea,” answered Arthur. “No one seems able to give the slightest clue. She must have been a sly, deep girl to make a flight like that. She bribed one of the servants, went down the back staircase, out across the farm-yard, away along the field avenue, and so into Berrie Down Lane, where her lover, it appears, was waiting for her.”
“She was a very pretty girl, Dudley,” said Mr. Black, meditatively, speaking of her beauty already in the past tense.
“I never saw anything so particularly wonderful about her,” answered Arthur, coolly.
“Well, she might not be your style, you know; but still she was undeniably pretty. Talking about style, by-the-bye, I saw your old flame, Mrs. Croft, yesterday. I suppose you are not touchy about a fellow speaking his mind concerning her? You had a miss there—such as a man might have of losing his life. I’d as lief be married to the devil. Croft asked me up to dinner, and I don’t think that madame liked it; at any rate, she made herself so confoundedly disagreeable that Croft seemed downright ashamed of her. And didn’t she nag him! that is enough. He broke a vase on the drawing-room chimney-piece after dinner, and I never heard a poor beast so pitched into in all my life. And before the servants, too! If she had said the one-half to me she said to him, I should not have minded doing six months for what I would have given her. A man was telling me a good thing about Croft the other day. It appears he had been complaining to some of his wife’s male relations about the way she goes on, and this fellow, some fool of a swell, did not seem able to make out what exact fault Croft laid to her charge. ‘Isn’t she pwoper?’ he drawled out. ‘Proper!’ says Croft, in that sharp off-hand way of his, ‘damnably proper.’ Ah, we may laugh at it,” went on Mr. Black, doubtless speaking figuratively, for he was not laughing, and not a ghost of a smile could have been detected on Arthur’s face; “but it must be the very deuce to be tied to a woman like that. While she was going on at him, blowing him up sky-high, and sweeping about in her grand dress, with a crinoline big enough to have camped out under, I thought of your wife, Squire, and I said to a man this very morning, not half-an-hour ago,—
“Well, Dudley must be a deuced lucky fellow—not merely to have missed that woman, but to have got the wife he has. There is no sham there—no angel one day, and devil the next.”
Arthur cleared his throat. He felt as though he were choking; he wanted to make some withering speech in answer to this officious fool, but he was not quick of wit nor ready with repartee.