Close to this lobby was a sliding panel, opening on a counter where the great scales hung for weighing the silk; and here weavers and winders gave in or took out their work from the "scale-foreman," whose name was Bashley—one of those bad men who, with a bullying pretence of candour and honesty, contrive to impose even on the victims over whom they tyrannize, and at the same time, as it were, wrest from their superiors the acknowledgment that they are "rough diamonds."
By a horrible fiction it is often thought that such a man is "just fit to deal with workpeople." The same opinion prevailed then, and thus Bashley was able to get a character which obtained for him a place in the warehouse of Anton Dormeur. He had been there for some twelve months, in place of old Pierre Dobree—a faithful fellow who had joined his old master in London after the calamities which drove them both from France. Pierre had been in Paris, and had escaped to bring to his master the awful intelligence that the daughter he had denounced was now beyond his relentless anger; but the old man, having grown old and feeble, had retired with a pension to the French Hospital which then stood in St. Luke's, and was called La Providence: a refuge founded to receive poor Protestant émigrés, mostly aged men and women, who had their little rooms quaintly furnished with their own poor household goods; and who walked daily in the quadrangle, laid out in beds and borders.
Bashley had been only fifteen months in Dormeur's service, and yet he had come between the grandfather and Antoine, suggesting suspicions of the young man's probity, but so artfully that while he only seemed to hint at small blemishes, which he pointed out for the sake of the lad's future welfare, he left so much to be inferred that the old man had already a new trouble added to his load.
Bashley's insinuations, when analysed, came in effect to charging Antoine with small peculations in order to increase the amount of his allowance—to taking beforehand what he, of course, might consider would be his own some day, as the scoundrel would have put it. Not only this, but he hinted at low companions—at a secret love affair with a girl far beneath him in station—of this he would, if necessary, furnish proof.
It was with a troubled heart that Anton Dormeur, having at last escaped from a whispered conference with Bashley, locked up the warehouse, and went slowly out towards Shoreditch on his way to the "Providence." Old Pierre had been the early guide, philosopher, and friend of the little orphan boy; and the keen-faced, pippin-skinned old Frenchman had the courage of his convictions, and roundly swore many innocent French oaths that afternoon, when his old employer, and present patron and friend, paced with him along the path of the old quadrangle and told him his suspicions.
"So, that man of blague, that Bashley, is at the bottom of this also," he said presently. "Why did you send me away, and take that liar, that—that—ventrebleu—that hyena?"
"But what should it be true, Pierre? My heart is very heavy."
"I tell you it is not true."
"But about the girl? He said he could prove it. And yet the boy came and rested his hand upon my shoulder to-day as if he were candour itself."
"Let him prove it."