IS OF A MISCELLANEOUS AND DISCURSIVE
CHARACTER, BUT ESSENTIAL TO THE NARRATIVE.
“The early bird for the worm,” saith the proverb, which the
healthy-wealthy-and-wise preachers quote with such stirring effect in
the society of young people.
Supposing you are a bird, with an inordinate appetite for worms, it is
good to rise early, no doubt; but if you are a worm it is better that
you should not rise at the time when the early birds are congregated
for breakfast.
Eight or nine o’clock is quite soon enough to begin the day if you have
to begin it in misery; and if you have happiness before you all day
long, you cannot get up too early to enjoy it.
Now Mrs. Dibble had a hard day before her, and not a particularly happy
one, and she rose early at the call of duty; but she might just as well
have had another hour’s peaceful rest, for she was doomed to begin a
day of more than ordinary trial.
Shuffleton Gibbs also rose earlier than usual on this eventful day,
and it was well, for his own comfort, that he did do so, as a certain
bird of very “taking” habits only found out his place of residence at
a later hour of the morning, and would have demolished him had he not
sneaked away from his customary locality an hour or so earlier.
So you see, whether we are birds or worms, we cannot count our chances
of success or safety by our early rising. A certain worm may rise too
early for the particular bird which is waiting for him, or he may
lie abed just long enough to be snapped up by a late and luxurious
cormorant; so, though the early bird may pick up the early worm, yet
the lazy bird may also encounter the worm that is late.
The meaning of this is that proverbs are not necessarily the most
truthful and useful things in the world, though Mrs. Dibble discovered
some truth in the axiom, that “it can’t rain but it pours.”
A series of short, sharp screams were the earliest indications of
something wrong in the Dibbleonian household on this morning of the
“gude man’s” departure.
Mrs. Dibble got up, as we have intimated, rather earlier than usual,
for the purpose of preparing breakfast with her own hands, scorning to
trust certain little delicacies of bacon and kidneys to her diminutive
servant.
The sight of her extempore bed undisturbed and with no Thomas in it
gave her a dreadful turn, as she explained afterwards, and that writing
on the table with his confession in it might have knocked her down with
a feather. So she screamed aloud, and as soon as she heard footsteps on
the stairs she composed her morning gown into becoming folds, and posed
herself for a comfortable faint upon the previously unpressed bed.
Mr. Somerton was the first to put in an appearance, then came Paul,
and in a few minutes his sister Amy, all more or less frightened by
Mrs. Dibble’s screams. Mr. Somerton took the paper from her hands,
read aloud the big open letters, and expressed his satisfaction in
unmistakable language.
Amy threw her arms round Paul’s neck, and at the same moment her father
threw a jug of cold water into Mrs. Dibble’s face, which roused that
lady up in a fit of passion and indignation.
“Mithter Thomerton, thir, I wonder you are not ashamed of yourself, to
treat a lady in that outdacious way, throwing a bucket of water over
her as if she were a doorstep or some other inanimate thing, or one of
your own cattle; but it’s the way of the world,--oh, yes, nothing but
ingratitude and all that’s bad!”
Mrs. Dibble shook her dress, and wiped her face with a towel, and
shook her head, and stormed and stamped her feet, and gave other
indications of perfect convalescence, and finally sank down again
exhausted; but she sprang to her feet in an attitude of defence when
Mr. Somerton seized the water-jug for the second time.
By-and-by the position of affairs was gravely discussed, and Mrs.
Dibble talked of a hundred schemes of restoring Thomas to his home.
She would send the police after him; she would advertise for him in
the _Times_; she would follow him on foot through the wide wide world.
Then in a moment of indignation she insisted upon his never returning
to the roof which he had dishonoured, and the harmonies of which would
never go up to heaven any more on Sunday evenings as tokens of peace
and honour. The old termagant grew quite eloquent in her distress
and passion, and all the time expressed her conviction that Paul was
innocent as the lamb led to the slaughter.
The only thing which at all mollified her was Amy’s suggestion that
perhaps poor Dibble had been tempted to do wrong because he loved
his wife so dearly; though Mrs. Dibble insisted that it was not love
she valued so highly as honour and virtue and prudence, however much
she had certainly been attached to Thomas in the early days of their
courtship.
Things were assuming, it will be seen, rather a ridiculous aspect when
Mr. Williamson arrived, with his grave, amiable face, to put affairs
upon a proper footing. He mastered Dibble’s confession immediately, and
rubbed his hands over it and smiled.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “we must change places to-day, Paul; we must put
you in the witness-box, and Gibbs in the dock: that will be a good
joke, eh? It’s really a capital case--as nice a bit of conspiracy as
could well be imagined. I thought yours was an honest face, young man,”
he continued, addressing Paul, “as soon as you appeared.”
Paul blushed, and said, “Thank you, Mr. Williamson.”
The journalist and barrister then made a quiet effort to learn from
Paul his reasons for taking such an interest in the doings of Mr. Gibbs
at the Ashford Club.
Paul hesitated and looked at his sister, who immediately came to his
assistance.
“I induced Paul to make inquiries,” she said.
Her father and the rest looking for some further observation, she said,
“Paul heard some strange things, concerning Mr. Tallant’s son, and--and
Mr. Hammerton, who resided near us. I was anxious, if possible,
to learn the truth of the rumours, which were to their discredit.
In truth, it seemed as though the good name and reputation of Mr.
Hammerton were likely to be lost to him, as if he were being gradually
led into the society of disreputable people and deceived, and----”
Amy was very much at fault in her attempted explanation; she felt that
she hardly knew why she had interfered, now that she endeavoured to
justify it. Curiosity, excited by Paul’s letters, had been her first
impulse, and then her romantic love for Hammerton had shown her the
danger into which he was drifting. Her hero a gambler, the man whom she
held up in her imagination as the best and the truest and purest and
noblest, an associate of gamblers and speculators and drunkards; the
idea had tortured her to an extent quite sufficient to add eloquent
point to her inquiries concerning Hammerton and Tallant, which had
at first puzzled Paul, and then enlisted him in her service as Mr.
Hammerton’s good angel.
Could she explain this, with the eyes of her father and Mr. Williamson
upon her? She succeeded in leaving on the mind of the latter gentlemen
the impression that she had had a mind to pry into the private doings
of these gentlemen from idle girlish curiosity, and that Paul had
been very foolish in giving way to her; but Mr. Somerton saw a little
further than this into the secret of his daughter.
“Well, we must not stay chatting here,” said Mr. Williamson at
length; “I will go and apply for a warrant against this Mr. Gibbs
for conspiracy; and with regard to your husband, Mrs. Dibble, you had
better take no steps at present to discover him.”
Mrs. Dibble, who had been mechanically lighting the fire and boiling
the kettle all this time, turned round and requested Mr. Williamson to
attend to his own business, and promised the whole company that she
would attend to hers.
Upon this Mr. Williamson declined the lady’s invitation to breakfast,
and went away in company with Paul, whom Mr. Somerton and his daughter
promised to meet at Bow Street at twelve o’clock, when Paul’s bail
expired.
A warrant for conspiracy was granted against Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs; but
nearly an hour before a detective from Scotland Yard tapped at Mr.
Gibbs’ door to execute the warrant, his landlady had slipped inside
her lodger’s bedroom the rough-looking note of Dibble’s. It happened
that Mr. Gibbs rose a little earlier that morning, or he would not
have received the warning in time to have taken measures for his own
safety. As it was, he no sooner received the letter than he commenced
to prepare for flight.
In the midst of a volley of “curses not loud but deep,” he deposited
a few articles of linen and other things in a valise, into which he
emptied the contents of a small cash-box. Then from a drawer beneath
the bedstead he brought forth a grey wig, a long strait coat, and a
pair of green spectacles.
“Somehow I thought I should come to this at last,” he said, tossing the
things upon the bed and locking the bedroom door. “The luck’s against
me.”
And then he swore bitterly, and savagely ground his teeth, and coughed,
and vowed the direst vengeance against everybody.
Taking up a pair of scissors, he cut off his whiskers and moustaches,
and wrapped them up in paper.
“I must burn them somehow,” he said to himself. “What an ass I must
be to get myself into this mess to satisfy my revenge on a boy,--a
twopenny-halfpenny clerk whom I ought to have thrashed within an inch
of his life.”
He went on muttering to himself as he shaved his face clean and bare.
He certainly was not improved by the operation. The bad lines about his
mouth came out in painful distinctness, now that the hair was gone.
Fastening a white band about his neck, Mr. Gibbs next adjusted the grey
wig upon the partially bald head, put on the green spectacles, donned
the long strait coat, opened his bedroom door, listened attentively for
a moment, and then quietly disappeared down-stairs and out at the front.
He had an hour’s start of the police, and he maintained his advantage
cleverly.
No prosecutor appeared at Bow Street against Paul, and the purse was
impounded,--“rather a sell for Mr. Gibbs that,” as Williamson said in
his quiet amiable way afterwards. The magistrate said Paul left that
court an injured young man, without a blemish on his character.
* * * * *
In the evening Amy and her father returned home, and they would fain
have had Paul’s company; but Mr. Williamson begged that they would let
Paul spend the evening with him, as he thought he could introduce the
lad to a better situation than the one at Westminster.
Amy looked the gratitude which she felt for Mr. Williamson’s great
kindness, and Mr. Somerton delicately pressed a ten-pound note upon him
just “to buy something, you know, in remembrance of the affair--not in
the way of payment for a moment, but to buy a ring or something as a
token of a father’s gratitude for protecting his son when no friends
were near.”
Mr. Williamson could not resist the fine fellow, as he said at the Club
afterwards, “there was something so noble in the way in which it was
done. A true son of the soil that Somerton--a fine noble fellow with
his heart in his eyes, and then his splendid daughter standing by and
looking so appealingly, by Jove, I took the note, and the young fellow
and I went together into Regent Street and spent it.”
This Club of which we speak was the Cavendish,--a Club frequented by
artists, actors, writers for magazines, and newspaper critics,--and
in the evening, Mr. Williamson, one of its most lovable members,
introduced his _protégé_ Paul.
It represented quite a new world to the bailiff’s son,--and a world
which was highly attractive. A new drama had been produced on this
evening, and soon after eleven o’clock quite a small crowd of fellows
came in to eat chops, drink grog, and discuss the new play. Some of
them shook hands with Williamson, called him “dear boy,” and asked
what new bit of philanthropy he had in hand. He introduced Paul to one
gentleman as his _amicus curiæ_, his _camarade_, his _fidus Achates_,
and said he wished to recommend Paul to him for a clerkship in his
office.
“I know you have a vacancy, because I inquired yesterday. Read the
papers to-morrow about a case at Bow Street--the one in which I was
engaged,--they were talking about it here, you know, last night,--don’t
ask any questions, but wait until I call upon you to-morrow.”
“All right, old fellow,” said the gentleman; and when he had joined
a companion at the furthest end of the room, Mr. Williamson said,
“That gentleman is the proprietor of _The Pyrotechnic_, a musical,
theatrical, and literary paper of which, _entre nous_, I am the editor.”
Paul during the whole night acted upon the nursery proverb--listened
and said nothing. He heard all sorts of wonderful things about
dramatic art and literary criticism, and Mr. Williamson pointed out
to him the most notable personages present. One of the quietest and
“meekest-minded” fellows there was the leading low comedian of a
famous theatre; and the noisiest and funniest dog of the lot was the
gentleman who played high tragic characters at the same house. The most
“disputatious person” was a musician who talked of German operas and
the unities of the classic drama. A gentleman who was renowned as a wit
spoke of the gorgeous poetic beauty of the Psalms; and a preacher who
contributed leading articles to a popular religious paper got a little
applause and some quiet expressions of irony by designating himself “a
professor of Hebrew mythology.”
Paul did not quite understand this latter bit of smart profanity at
the time; but he learnt eventually to estimate it at its true value,
and understand how much of the practical unbelief of the day arises
from the want of downright earnestness on the part of many professed
religious teachers. Mr. Williamson often talked about questions of this
character with Paul in after days at his quiet chambers in the Temple,
and Paul found at the bottom of Williamson’s philanthropy a fine vein
of religious feeling. And yet Mr. Williamson was a disappointed man.
The world had not gone well with him, he used to say. He commenced life
with grand theories and sentiments, and with convictions too strong,
and a heart too susceptible of honour and truth and honesty, to let
him register vows which he did not feel that he could perform to the
letter. Otherwise he might have been a shining light perchance in the
Church: at all events he would have been true to her, not like that
miserable fellow who talked about Hebrew mythology, and chuckled over
his own infamy. Mr. Williamson had avoided this religious writer ever
afterwards; not, as he said, for being an unbeliever, not because he
was an atheist, but because he belonged to the holiest and best of
all professions and made a boast of his perjury and unfaithfulness.
Mr. Williamson gave the greatest latitude to free-thinking, and never
interfered in religious controversies, and he instilled into Paul’s
mind opinions of liberality and toleration.
It was strange that Williamson should have taken such a fancy to
Paul Somerton; but he was an eccentric, amiable, kindly fellow, and
his ways and mode of life, his likes and dislikes, his selection of
companions, and his general motives of action were not influenced by
common impulses: he had habits of thought and ways of his own, and he
took it into his head that he would help this young fellow whom Fortune
had thrown in his way.