“You are a good man, Ronald, but you are obstinate and prejudiced.”
“On a les défauts de ses qualités. I am not sure that I can boast any especial qualités, but I do know this, that I would be shot to-morrow rather than shake hands with a low brute who comes from God knows where with probably untold crimes upon his conscience.”
Mrs. Raby shuddered and gave a nervous glance to the far distance where Mr. Massarene was playing whist. She was a delicate aged woman, and the idea of entertaining an undetected criminal was extremely painful to her.
“He does look very like Cruickshank’s burglars in Oliver Twist,” she thought, regarding the round bullet head and Camus nose of her guest as he scowled down on the cards which he held; he was losing, and losing to the Principal of an Oxford College, whilst a Cabinet Minister was his (very inefficient) partner; but Mr. Massarene did not like losing—even at half-crown points and in the best company. He had not had much practice at whist; but he possessed a mathematical brain, and grasped its combinations admirably; and he would have made his inferior hand do the work of a good one if the Cabinet Minister had not been an ass, but had been able to second him.
“They put men in the Government here,” he thought, “who over yonder we should not think had brains enough to drive a sweet stuff barrow on a plank walk.”
For despite the deference which he really felt for the world into which he had entered, he could not help the shrewd good sense in him boiling up sometimes into a savage contempt. To his rough strong temper and his unscrupulous keenness the gentlemen who were now his companions in life did seem very poor creatures.
“If I ever get into the Cabinet I’ll show them the time of day,” he thought very often. There was no reason why he should not get into the Cabinet as he had once got into the House. He was made of the solid metal, and the plebeian respectability, with which patrician conservatism, trembling in its shoes for its own existence, is delighted to ally itself; and knew that he would make a very good minister of the type which works hard, pleases the public, is always mentioned with praise by the Press of the Party, and lends itself to the illustration of admirable public dinner speeches in praise of the Constitution, and of that constitutional bulwark the Middle Class. He was a very shrewd man and he had the golden gift of silence. He knew his shortcomings better than his wife knew hers, and so concealed his ambitions more successfully. Nobody could “draw” him. Men in the smoking-room of his own or other houses often tried after dinner to make him “give himself away,” but they never succeeded. He was never warmed by wine or friendship into indiscreet reminiscences or revelations.
Moreover in business he was facile princeps; no one could beat him in the supreme knowledge of money or how to make it. And indeed the thorough knowledge of and capacity for business does carry its own weight with it in an age in which the Mercurius of mart and change is chief of all the gods.
In society he was a heavy, awkward, common-looking man, who did not know what to do with his hands, and always sat on the edge of his chair, with his legs very wide apart. But in a clubroom, a committee-room, a board-room, a bank parlor, anywhere where there was question of the sowing and reaping of gold, he was a totally different person; he was at his ease, on his ground, master of his subject and of his hearers; his hands rested on his knees with a firm grip, his words were trenchant, convincing, logical; and on his pallid, fleshy, expressionless face there came a look, very hard, very unmerciful, very cunning, but a look of intelligence and power, and of entire command of his object. The mind showed through the envelope of flesh.
It was a money-making mind, a harsh astute grasping mind, a mean ignoble greedy mind, but it was a master mind in its way, and as such impressed itself on all those who encountered it on its field of combat. And the men that came into contact with him knew that he had been a day laborer who had, entirely by his own ability and industry, become the possessor of a colossal fortune, and all men respect this successful self-help, and few inquire if the self-help had been made with clean hands.