As to manners, they make the man more than doth the tailor, though he be a Stultz or a Poole. Sir Matthew had the manner of a man of mark, which consisted in his looking as if he had an answer ready to any question before it was asked. When he came into the committee-room of the hospital, it was as if he had entered to do all the business of the meeting, and to put everything right, taking it as granted that confusion was in the ascendant.
It was so with Sir David Scott. His quiet, pleasant face was a signal for all to look at him, and to feel that what he had to say would be more refreshing than anything they could utter themselves.
Horace Smith’s face was of that free, smileless expression, which clearly asked, “Do you want to laugh? for, if so, I’ll make you do so without further notice.”
As to Wagner’s face, it was one not easily defined. The expression was pleasing without being quite agreeable. It bore the candid threat of entering on some business transaction, useful in itself, but declining in interest the nearer it approached the amount of subscriptions still necessary to carry out as it deserved his beneficent scheme. Wagner in one thing only was unscrupulous and devoid of mercy—it was in ordering money out of one pocket into another for the general good, as if parting with it was the chief object in life, and to assist another in doing so was benevolence itself, such as few were capable of feeling towards a fellow-man.
How successful he was in taking every one into partnership with him in such matters!
XXXVI.
In those days Brighton was full of charm, more so than now by a long measure. There was no three-shilling railway; you went to and from London with blood horses, driven by those nimble whips, Sir St. Vincent Cotton one-half of the way, and by the Marquis of Worcester the other half, within five hours. A crowd saw your splendid equipage start, whether from Piccadilly or Castle Square. It was called “The Age,” and was a wonder of the age.
Brighton then had a season; November was the choicest month. The weather then was delicious, and the upper stratum of society, by a mild upheaval, was moved bodily from the metropolis to the sea, without even a dress being crumpled or a lace torn.
There were good angels in those days, as there are now; and if one was not privileged, as I was not, to see them under cover in such a conservatory as the mansion of the Duchess of St. Albans, one could meet them in full bloom out of doors on the esplanade.