Peacock hesitated. "That's not my secret, sir; 'I am combined by a sacred vow.' You are too much the gentleman to peep through the blanket of the dark, and to ask me, who wear the whips and stripes—I mean the plush small-clothes and shoulder-knots—the secrets of another gent, to whom 'my services are bound.'"
How a man past thirty foils a man scarcely twenty!—what superiority the mere fact of living-on gives to the dullest dog! I bit my lip, and was silent.
"And," pursued Mr Peacock, "if you knew how the Mr Vivian you inquired after loves you"! When I told him incidentally, how a young gentleman had come behind the scenes to inquire after him, he made me describe you, and then said, quite mournfully, 'If ever I am what I hope to become, how happy I shall be to shake that kind hand once more,'—very words, sir!—honour bright!
'I think there's ne'er a man in Christendom
Can lesser hide his hate or love than he.'
And if Mr Vivian has some reason to keep himself concealed still—if his fortune or ruin depend on your not divulging his secret for awhile—I can't think you are the man he need fear. 'Pon my life,
'I wish I was as sure of a good dinner,'
as the Swan touchingly exclaims. I dare swear that was a wish often on the Swan's lips in the privacy of his domestic life!"
My heart was softened, not by the pathos of the much profaned and desecrated Swan, but by Mr Peacock's unadorned repetition of Vivian's words; I turned my face from the sharp eyes of my companion—the cab now stopped at the foot of London Bridge.
I had no more to ask, yet still there was some uneasy curiosity in my mind, which I could hardly define to myself,—was it not jealousy? Vivian, so handsome and so daring—he at least might see the great heiress; Lady Ellinor perhaps thought of no danger there. But—I—I was a lover still, and—nay, such thoughts were folly indeed!
"My man," said I to the ex-comedian, "I neither wish to harm Mr Vivian (if I am so to call him,) nor you who imitate him in the variety of your names. But I tell you, fairly, that I do not like your being in Mr Trevanion's employment, and I advise you to get out of it as soon as possible. I say nothing more as yet, for I shall take time to consider well what you have told me."