“No. It is an odd question.”
“I don’t know much about your country, except that you invent machines, keep slaves, blow up steamboats, and beguile off Englishmen with your damned Mormonism. The Mormons have done so much harm in my country,—Lancashire that is,—that I’ve sworn I’d never have anything to do with any Yankee, unless I first knew he was not one of those wolves. But if you’re not, and George Short is not, I’ll do your job. Now tell me precisely what you want made, for I can’t spend time with you.”
“I want six sets of these models at once.”
“I’ll order the castings this evening. I have materials here for the fine parts. Can you handle tools?—I mean useful tools,—files and saws and wrenches, not pens and sand-boxes.”
“I’m a fair workman with your tools.”
“You can help me then. Come over to-morrow morning at seven. No; you’re an idler, and I’ll give you till eight. If you’re not here by that time you’ll find me busy for the day.”
So saying, Padiham turned off to his work. He gave me no further attention; but filed away grimly. I watched him a moment. What intensity and earnestness were in this man! Like other great artists, who see form hidden within a mass of brute matter, he seemed to be urged to give himself, body and soul, to releasing the form from its cell, to setting free the elemental spirit of order and action locked up in the stuff before him.
His brief verdict upon my friend’s invention settled its success in my mind. Not that I doubted before; but the man’s manner was conclusive. He pronounced the fiat of the practical world, as finally as the great engineer had done of the theoretical. I thrilled for old Short, when this Dwarf, lurking away in a by-court of London, accepted him as his peer. The excitement of this interview had for a time quite expelled my anxieties. For a time I had lost sight of the two figures that haunted me, and ever vanished as I pursued. They took their places again as I left the shop and issued from Lamely Court into the crowded thoroughfare at hand.
I took a cab, and drove to my hotel, and so to Biddulph’s. The dinner at the Baronet’s shall not figure in these pages. It was my first appearance as hero. I and my horse were historic characters in this new circle. I was lionized by Lady Biddulph, a stately personage, inheritress of a family rustle,—a rustle as old as the Plantagenets, and grander now by the accumulations of ages. A lovely young lady, with dark hair, who blushed when I took my cue and praised Biddulph, she also lionized me. A thorough-bred American finds English life charming, especially if he is agreeably lionné; a scrubby American considers England a region of cold shoulder, too effete to appreciate impertinence.
Lady Biddulph gave me further facts of the history of the Clitheroes.