THE DIBBLES AND THEIR NEW LODGER.
Thomas Dibble, the porter, who held himself at the beck and call of the
principals and officers of the Meter Iron Works Company at Westminster,
lived in one of those numerous little streets which run off from the
semi-aristocratic regions of St. George’s Square, South Belgravia, to
Whitehall; and his wife let lodgings and wore gorgeous caps.
She was quite a study this Mrs. Dibble, quite a psychological study.
She governed Dibble, and yet made him her shield and protection in the
most amusing and complete fashion. She was a fat, rubicund woman, with
her dress either unfastened behind or before, and her cap hanging on
the back of her head, both in summer and winter, as if she were in a
perpetual state of perspiration.
She was by no means an ill-looking woman. Dibble in his cups had told
his friends that she was a regular beauty when first he knew her, as
fair as waxwork, sir. But her tongue; well it was a caution, Mrs.
Dibble’s tongue, and she had a sort of intermittent lisp, which instead
of being an impediment in any way to the rapidity of her utterances
only seemed to facilitate them, enabling her to slip and slide over an
argument and abbreviate long words until her hearers might sometimes
imagine she was pouring out a series of compound syllables in some
unknown tongue. But that was only when she was in a passion, thank
goodness, which did not occur more than once a week.
Dibble himself was a mild little fellow as a rule, and a profound
admirer of Mrs. D.’s accomplishments. She had learnt to play the
piano when she was at school in her youth; and when she sat down to a
five-and-a-half octave square of Broadwood’s on Sunday nights in her
black satin dress, Dibble would sit by the fire and feast his eyes
upon her with unsophisticated delight.
It was not a very symmetrical figure neither, Mrs. Dibble’s, as you
viewed it at the piano, and the two hooks-and-eyes which were undone
near the middle of her back did not make it any the more elegant.
Mrs. Dibble usually thumped at the Old Hundredth and a wonderful
variation of “Vital Spark,” until her cap fell off and her hair came
down, when she would close the “box of music” and utter twenty voluble
regrets that she had so few opportunities of practising and keeping up
her fingering.
But Mr. Dibble did not agree with her on this point; it was the only
one he was permitted to dispute; he vowed she played as well as if she
had no end of practice.
“You be fit for a concert,” he would say, “that you be.”
Not that Thomas Dibble exactly knew what a concert was, never having
been present at anything of the kind, except on the occasion of a
_soirée_ at Gloucester when he went to a Sunday school there.
Dibble was bred and born in Gloucestershire, and had risen from a
kitchen menial to a place in the household at Barton Hall two counties
off, whither he had been recommended by a clergyman of the cathedral
city. He was not in Mr. Tallant’s service more than a year before he
was promoted to the portership at Westminster.
The Barton housekeeper gave him an introduction to a relative of hers,
Miss Wilhelmina Stikes, of Still Street, and after a few visits to that
buxom spinster, Miss Stikes made love to Thomas, proposed to him, and
married him in less than three months.
They had now been united some twenty years, and on the whole Mr.
Dibble did not regret his bondage. He had always been accustomed to
servitude; so the yoke of the fair-fat-and-loquacious Miss Stikes was
not difficult to the patient and forbearing Thomas Dibble.
“So we are to ’ave a new lodger, Mithter Dibble, in the purthon of the
bailifth’s son; well, so be it, though when my pa educated me for a
lady, and being a builder he could do that because his property were
naturally his own and if he had been thpared he would no doubt ’ave
retired on it, educated for that thpere it never occurred to me that
I should ’ave to take the hoffsprigs of bailifths into my house, but
there is no knowing what we may come to, and if you fulfil the duties
of the life which has come upon you, though without your own conthent I
can’t see after all that there’s anything to be ashamed of,” said Mrs.
Dibble to her husband after a tripe supper, on the evening when Mr.
Richard Tallant had promised to meet his friend Gibbs at the club.
“Yes, he be coming to-morrow; and I was thinking he might have the
little back sittin’ room,” said Dibble, deferentially.
“Thank you, Dib, for your thoughts, but I may remark, as I have
remarked before, that _I_ will do the thinking; I did it for my pa
during all his contracts, and made out the thpethifications which were
for two railway bridges, and more than one or two streeth, and ith not
unlikely that I shall be fully competent to think for you, Mithter
Dibble; but, at the thame time, I will own that I had thought of the
back thitting-room mythelf, and there’s a chest of drawers bed which
Captain MacStrawsel, of the Blues, said was a perfect bed of roses; and
it may, therefore, be fairly reckoned that a bailifth’s son may recline
upon that which, if his conscience is at rest, he may repose upon as
well as in a palace.”
Mr. Dibble said “Yes,” and Mrs. Dibble mixed for him, as was her wont,
a mild glass of gin, which he proceeded to sip in company with the
accomplished partner of his bosom, who invariably said, whenever she
took spirits publicly, “that it was not as she liked sperrits or any
other allycholic liquors, but it were a necessity to her, seeing the
great strain that was constant on her nerves, owing to having both
mental and physical labour more than common.”
After a short visit to the farm, Paul Somerton went to London, and,
after due introduction to Mrs. Dibble, entered upon his duties at the
Iron Company’s offices. He saw little of Mr. Richard Tallant, and less
of his father; but he heard a great deal about both from old Dibble.
Once a week Mrs. Dibble permitted Thomas to spend an evening out with
Paul. She said she was not one for letting a young man run about London
in an evening without a guide, and she thought her Thomas’s experience
of the place might be of some benefit to Paul, and she would not hear
of any opposition to an arrangement by which she proposed to set apart
“closing time,” on Friday nights until half-past ten, for Thomas Dibble
to show Paul Somerton some of the sights of London.
Mrs. Dibble also at the same time arranged to entertain her own
particular friends at home on these evenings, and so balanced off her
generosity to poor Dibble, her husband. Thomas Dibble soon became a
bore to Paul Somerton.
So soon as the young man began to know his way about town, so soon did
he become tired of Dibble, and ashamed of him, too; for Paul was not
altogether a stranger to the manners and feelings of a gentleman, and
was a good-looking fellow withal; whilst poor Dibble was nothing more
than a respectable porter at any time.
Besides, Dibble was perpetually praising Mrs. Dibble, and would stop to
buy hot potatoes in the street, and “penn’orths” of pudding; so Paul
decided to shake him off, but his determination was changed by a letter
from his sister.
“What should Amy want to know all about Mr. Richard for?” said Paul,
reading a letter in bed, one Sunday morning, some weeks after his
residence in London.
“And who is Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs; and what the deuce business is it of
hers if young Hammerton is often with them?” he continued, staring up
from the letter to the ceiling.
“Please, sir, it’s nine o’clock. Mrs. Dibble said I were to tell you,”
said a voice through the keyhole.
“All right,” said Paul; “and hang Mrs. Dibble.”
“Were I to say so, please?” asked the voice.
“No, confound you,” said Paul; “but tell Dibble I shall go for a walk
with him after chapel.”
It was the custom of Thomas Dibble to take what he called “a little
constitutional” after chapel, and before dinner--just half-an-hour’s
stroll, whilst Mrs. Dibble changed her chapel-going satin, and dished
up the dinner.
It was a rare thing for Mr. Paul Somerton to volunteer to accompany Mr.
Dibble; but he did so on the Sunday in question, and, as they walked
by the Thames, watching the steamers pass and repass with their loads
of noisy pleasure-seekers, Paul asked Dibble a variety of puzzling
questions about Mr. Richard Tallant, and his friend, Shuffleton Gibbs.
“Ise no spy, Mr. Somerton, and Ise not an owl, or a dormouse,” said Mr.
Dibble, looking as knowing as he could at Paul.
“Certainly not, Dib,” said Paul; “certainly not; you know a thing or
two.”
“Well, I dur say, and I knows nothing about the things you speaks of.”
“What, don’t you know who Mr. Gibbs is, and how he lives, and why he is
a friend of the son’s and not of the father’s?” asked Paul.
“It bain’t my business to know,” said Mr. Dibble.
Paul Somerton pumped old Dibble all the way home, but to little or no
purpose; and the porter’s dogged silence aroused Paul’s own curiosity
about his sister’s inquiries.
“Does Mr. Richard attend much at the office? Who and what is Mr. Gibbs?
Are they particular friends of Mr. Hammerton? Do they meet together
often? And where?”
These were the chief questions which Miss Amy Somerton required her
brother Paul to answer.
Paul was fond of his sister, and had always looked up to her as one of
superior knowledge to himself.
“I’ll tell you all you want to know, as soon as I can,” he wrote to Amy
on the Monday. “But why are you so inquisitive?”
There are thousands of brothers and sisters without affection for each
other. We say of So-and-so, “I loved him as if he were my brother;”
or, “Mary So-and-so--if she had been my own sister, I could not have
felt more regard for her.” It is flattering to our humanity that these
illustrations of regard and affection should be in use. Nine families
out of ten quarrel amongst themselves, and brothers and sisters are
the deadliest enemies of brothers and sisters, thwarting each other in
childhood and at maturity, stepping in each other’s way, disgracing
each other, and making the very name they mutually bear hateful to
both. Happy, indeed, are brothers and sisters who really and truly
love each other; for there is not a holier, not a more beautiful
passion.
Paul Somerton would have done anything in the world for Amy. He
remembered so many hours made happy by her love and foresight. They had
nearly broken their hearts over parting when he went to school; and Amy
had quite a box-full of his boyish letters, carefully preserved. She
thought there was the making of a great man in Paul; he was like his
father in temper and disposition--frank and outspoken, a hater of shams.
At first when Amy had written to him about the doings of Mr. Tallant,
and concerning Mr. Hammerton, Paul had scruples about his duty in the
matter; but it was sufficient for Paul that Amy assured him that she
had a proper and sufficient object in learning what she sought; and
Paul determined that Amy should soon know all she desired.