“How goes it, Governor?” responded Morty, winking tremendously, and patting his parent on his stout back with a large-sized hand, gloved with the most expensive lemon kid. “Hold on, you!” he hailed, as the ghastly Standish, seeing Distress for Rent written large across the page of the near future, was creeping out. “Come back and help us out of this watchbox, will yer?” Adding, as the clerk assisted him out of a capacious driving-coat of yellow cloth, with biscuit-sized mother-o’-pearl buttons:
“You look uncommon green, Standish, my boy—Standish’s your name, ain’t it?”
“Yes, Mr. Mortimer, sir. And—I am quite well, sir, thank you, sir. There’s nothing the matter with me beyond ordinary.”
He hung up the son’s coat on the peg beneath the low-crowned, curly-brimmed beaver of the parent, and went out. Morty, retaining his own fashionable, shaggy headgear upon a skull of the bullet rather than the pear-shaped order, had forgotten the clerk and his sick face before the door closed behind him.
“Don’t you worry about Standish and his looks, my boy!” said Thompson Jowell. “That’s the way to spoil a good clerk, that is. Cock ’em up with an idea that they’re overworked, next thing is they’re in bed, and their wives—and why the devil they should have wives, when at that fellow’s age I couldn’t afford the luxury, beats me!—their wives are writing letters begging me not to stop the substitute’s pay out of the husband’s salary, because he, and she, and the children—and it’s like their extravagance and presumption to have children when they can’t afford to keep ’em!—will have to go to the Workhouse if you do. And why shouldn’t they go to the Workhouse? What do we ratepayers keep it up for, if it ain’t good enough for you, ma’am, and the likes of you and yours? My name being Tom Candid—that’s what I say to her.”
He had, in fact, said it to a suppliant of the proud, presumptuous class he complained of, only that morning. And now, as he blew out his big, pendulous cheeks and triple chin above their stiff circular frill of iron-gray whisker, his tall son took him by the shoulders and shook him playfully backwards and forwards in the grip of the great hands that were clothed with the extra-sized lemon kids, saying, as he regarded his affectionate parent with a pair of brown round eyes, that, with the narrow brain behind them, were a trifle bemused with liquor even at this early hour, yet wonderfully frank and honest for a son of Thompson Jowell’s:
“You knowin’ old File! You first-class, extra-ground, double-edged Shylock, you! You jolly old Fee-Faw-Fum, smellin’ the blood of Englishmen, and grindin’ their bones to make your bread—or the flour you sell to the British Government, and take precious jolly good care to sell dear!—you’re lookin’ in the prime of health and the pink of condition, and that’s what I like to see!”
“Really, Morty! Truly, now, my dear boy?”
Morty nodded, with a cheerful grin, and Thompson Jowell’s heart glowed with fatherly pride in this big young man with the foolish, good-natured face and the round, somewhat owlish eyes, that resembled his own, though not in their simplicity. But Morty’s invariable and characteristic method of expressing frank admiration of those invaluable business qualities of unscrupulousness, greed, and cunning, which the author of his being, while fattening upon them, preferred to disown—was a venomed dart rankling in the fleshy ribs that were clothed by the gorgeous waistcoat. His narrow slanting forehead, that was like the lid of a Noah’s Ark—furrowed as he heard. He said, with hurry and effort:
“Yes—yes! Well—well! And how did you come, dear boy?”