I SERVED Edward as his second clerk faithfully, punctually, diligently.
What was given me to do I had the power and the determination to do
well. Mr. Crimsworth watched sharply for defects, but found none; he set
Timothy Steighton, his favourite and head man, to watch also. Tim was
baffled; I was as exact as himself, and quicker. Mr. Crimsworth made
inquiries as to how I lived, whether I got into debt--no, my accounts
with my landlady were always straight. I had hired small lodgings, which
I contrived to pay for out of a slender fund--the accumulated savings of
my Eton pocket-money; for as it had ever been abhorrent to my nature to
ask pecuniary assistance, I had early acquired habits of self-denying
economy; husbanding my monthly allowance with anxious care, in order to
obviate the danger of being forced, in some moment of future exigency,
to beg additional aid. I remember many called me miser at the time,
and I used to couple the reproach with this consolation--better to be
misunderstood now than repulsed hereafter. At this day I had my reward;
I had had it before, when on parting with my irritated uncles one of
them threw down on the table before me a 5l. note, which I was able to
leave there, saying that my travelling expenses were already provided
for. Mr. Crimsworth employed Tim to find out whether my landlady had
any complaint to make on the score of my morals; she answered that she
believed I was a very religious man, and asked Tim, in her turn, if he
thought I had any intention of going into the Church some day; for, she
said, she had had young curates to lodge in her house who were nothing
equal to me for steadiness and quietness. Tim was “a religious man”
himself; indeed, he was “a joined Methodist,” which did not (be it
understood) prevent him from being at the same time an engrained rascal,
and he came away much posed at hearing this account of my piety. Having
imparted it to Mr. Crimsworth, that gentleman, who himself frequented
no place of worship, and owned no God but Mammon, turned the information
into a weapon of attack against the equability of my temper. He
commenced a series of covert sneers, of which I did not at first
perceive the drift, till my landlady happened to relate the conversation
she had had with Mr. Steighton; this enlightened me; afterwards I came
to the counting-house prepared, and managed to receive the millowner’s
blasphemous sarcasms, when next levelled at me, on a buckler of
impenetrable indifference. Ere long he tired of wasting his ammunition
on a statue, but he did not throw away the shafts--he only kept them
quiet in his quiver.
Once during my clerkship I had an invitation to Crimsworth Hall; it
was on the occasion of a large party given in honour of the master’s
birthday; he had always been accustomed to invite his clerks on similar
anniversaries, and could not well pass me over; I was, however, kept
strictly in the background. Mrs. Crimsworth, elegantly dressed in satin
and lace, blooming in youth and health, vouchsafed me no more notice
than was expressed by a distant move; Crimsworth, of course, never
spoke to me; I was introduced to none of the band of young ladies, who,
enveloped in silvery clouds of white gauze and muslin, sat in array
against me on the opposite side of a long and large room; in fact, I was
fairly isolated, and could but contemplate the shining ones from afar,
and when weary of such a dazzling scene, turn for a change to the
consideration of the carpet pattern. Mr. Crimsworth, standing on the
rug, his elbow supported by the marble mantelpiece, and about him
a group of very pretty girls, with whom he conversed gaily--Mr.
Crimsworth, thus placed, glanced at me; I looked weary, solitary, kept
down like some desolate tutor or governess; he was satisfied.
Dancing began; I should have liked well enough to be introduced to some
pleasing and intelligent girl, and to have freedom and opportunity
to show that I could both feel and communicate the pleasure of social
intercourse--that I was not, in short, a block, or a piece of furniture,
but an acting, thinking, sentient man. Many smiling faces and graceful
figures glided past me, but the smiles were lavished on other eyes, the
figures sustained by other hands than mine. I turned away tantalized,
left the dancers, and wandered into the oak-panelled dining-room. No
fibre of sympathy united me to any living thing in this house; I looked
for and found my mother’s picture. I took a wax taper from a stand,
and held it up. I gazed long, earnestly; my heart grew to the image.
My mother, I perceived, had bequeathed to me much of her features and
countenance--her forehead, her eyes, her complexion. No regular beauty
pleases egotistical human beings so much as a softened and refined
likeness of themselves; for this reason, fathers regard with complacency
the lineaments of their daughters’ faces, where frequently their own
similitude is found flatteringly associated with softness of hue and
delicacy of outline. I was just wondering how that picture, to me so
interesting, would strike an impartial spectator, when a voice close
behind me pronounced the words--
“Humph! there’s some sense in that face.”
I turned; at my elbow stood a tall man, young, though probably five or
six years older than I--in other respects of an appearance the opposite
to common place; though just now, as I am not disposed to paint his
portrait in detail, the reader must be content with the silhouette I
have just thrown off; it was all I myself saw of him for the moment: I
did not investigate the colour of his eyebrows, nor of his eyes either;
I saw his stature, and the outline of his shape; I saw, too, his
fastidious-looking RETROUSSE nose; these observations, few in number,
and general in character (the last excepted), sufficed, for they enabled
me to recognize him.
“Good evening, Mr. Hunsden,” muttered I with a bow, and then, like a
shy noodle as I was, I began moving away--and why? Simply because Mr.
Hunsden was a manufacturer and a millowner, and I was only a clerk, and
my instinct propelled me from my superior. I had frequently seen Hunsden
in Bigben Close, where he came almost weekly to transact business with
Mr. Crimsworth, but I had never spoken to him, nor he to me, and I owed
him a sort of involuntary grudge, because he had more than once been the
tacit witness of insults offered by Edward to me. I had the conviction
that he could only regard me as a poor-spirited slave, wherefore I now
went about to shun his presence and eschew his conversation.
“Where are you going?” asked he, as I edged off sideways. I had already
noticed that Mr. Hunsden indulged in abrupt forms of speech, and I
perversely said to myself--
“He thinks he may speak as he likes to a poor clerk; but my mood is not,
perhaps, so supple as he deems it, and his rough freedom pleases me not
at all.”
I made some slight reply, rather indifferent than courteous, and
continued to move away. He coolly planted himself in my path.
“Stay here awhile,” said he: “it is so hot in the dancing-room; besides,
you don’t dance; you have not had a partner to-night.”
He was right, and as he spoke neither his look, tone, nor manner
displeased me; my AMOUR-PROPRE was propitiated; he had not addressed
me out of condescension, but because, having repaired to the cool
dining-room for refreshment, he now wanted some one to talk to, by way
of temporary amusement. I hate to be condescended to, but I like well
enough to oblige; I stayed.
“That is a good picture,” he continued, recurring to the portrait.
“Do you consider the face pretty?” I asked.
“Pretty! no--how can it be pretty, with sunk eyes and hollow cheeks?
but it is peculiar; it seems to think. You could have a talk with that
woman, if she were alive, on other subjects than dress, visiting, and
compliments.”
I agreed with him, but did not say so. He went on.
“Not that I admire a head of that sort; it wants character and force;
there’s too much of the sen-si-tive (so he articulated it, curling
his lip at the same time) in that mouth; besides, there is Aristocrat
written on the brow and defined in the figure; I hate your aristocrats.”
“You think, then, Mr. Hunsden, that patrician descent may be read in a
distinctive cast of form and features?”
“Patrician descent be hanged! Who doubts that your lordlings may have
their ‘distinctive cast of form and features’ as much as we----shire
tradesmen have ours? But which is the best? Not theirs assuredly. As
to their women, it is a little different: they cultivate beauty from
childhood upwards, and may by care and training attain to a certain
degree of excellence in that point, just like the oriental odalisques.
Yet even this superiority is doubtful. Compare the figure in that frame
with Mrs. Edward Crimsworth--which is the finer animal?”
I replied quietly: “Compare yourself and Mr. Edward Crimsworth, Mr
Hunsden.”
“Oh, Crimsworth is better filled up than I am, I know besides he has a
straight nose, arched eyebrows, and all that; but these advantages--if
they are advantages--he did not inherit from his mother, the patrician,
but from his father, old Crimsworth, who, MY father says, was as
veritable a ----shire blue-dyer as ever put indigo in a vat yet withal
the handsomest man in the three Ridings. It is you, William, who are
the aristocrat of your family, and you are not as fine a fellow as your
plebeian brother by long chalk.”
There was something in Mr. Hunsden’s point-blank mode of speech which
rather pleased me than otherwise because it set me at my ease. I
continued the conversation with a degree of interest.
“How do you happen to know that I am Mr. Crimsworth’s brother? I thought
you and everybody else looked upon me only in the light of a poor
clerk.”
“Well, and so we do; and what are you but a poor clerk? You do
Crimsworth’s work, and he gives you wages--shabby wages they are, too.”
I was silent. Hunsden’s language now bordered on the impertinent, still
his manner did not offend me in the least--it only piqued my curiosity;
I wanted him to go on, which he did in a little while.
“This world is an absurd one,” said he.
“Why so, Mr. Hunsden?”
“I wonder you should ask: you are yourself a strong proof of the
absurdity I allude to.”
I was determined he should explain himself of his own accord, without my
pressing him so to do--so I resumed my silence.
“Is it your intention to become a tradesman?” he inquired presently.
“It was my serious intention three months ago.”
“Humph! the more fool you--you look like a tradesman! What a practical
business-like face you have!”
“My face is as the Lord made it, Mr. Hunsden.”
“The Lord never made either your face or head for X---- What good can
your bumps of ideality, comparison, self-esteem, conscientiousness,
do you here? But if you like Bigben Close, stay there; it’s your own
affair, not mine.”
“Perhaps I have no choice.”
“Well, I care nought about it--it will make little difference to me what
you do or where you go; but I’m cool now--I want to dance again; and
I see such a fine girl sitting in the corner of the sofa there by
her mamma; see if I don’t get her for a partner in a jiffy! There’s
Waddy--Sam Waddy making up to her; won’t I cut him out?”
And Mr. Hunsden strode away. I watched him through the open
folding-doors; he outstripped Waddy, applied for the hand of the
fine girl, and led her off triumphant. She was a tall, well-made,
full-formed, dashingly-dressed young woman, much in the style of Mrs. E.
Crimsworth; Hunsden whirled her through the waltz with spirit; he kept
at her side during the remainder of the evening, and I read in her
animated and gratified countenance that he succeeded in making himself
perfectly agreeable. The mamma too (a stout person in a turban--Mrs.
Lupton by name) looked well pleased; prophetic visions probably
flattered her inward eye. The Hunsdens were of an old stem; and scornful
as Yorke (such was my late interlocutor’s name) professed to be of
the advantages of birth, in his secret heart he well knew and fully
appreciated the distinction his ancient, if not high lineage conferred
on him in a mushroom-place like X----, concerning whose inhabitants
it was proverbially said, that not one in a thousand knew his own
grandfather. Moreover the Hunsdens, once rich, were still independent;
and report affirmed that Yorke bade fair, by his success in business,
to restore to pristine prosperity the partially decayed fortunes of his
house. These circumstances considered, Mrs. Lupton’s broad face might
well wear a smile of complacency as she contemplated the heir of Hunsden
Wood occupied in paying assiduous court to her darling Sarah Martha. I,
however, whose observations being less anxious, were likely to be more
accurate, soon saw that the grounds for maternal self-congratulation
were slight indeed; the gentleman appeared to me much more desirous of
making, than susceptible of receiving an impression. I know not what it
was in Mr. Hunsden that, as I watched him (I had nothing better to do),
suggested to me, every now and then, the idea of a foreigner. In form
and features he might be pronounced English, though even there one
caught a dash of something Gallic; but he had no English shyness: he had
learnt somewhere, somehow, the art of setting himself quite at his ease,
and of allowing no insular timidity to intervene as a barrier between
him and his convenience or pleasure. Refinement he did not affect, yet
vulgar he could not be called; he was not odd--no quiz--yet he resembled
no one else I had ever seen before; his general bearing intimated
complete, sovereign satisfaction with himself; yet, at times, an
indescribable shade passed like an eclipse over his countenance, and
seemed to me like the sign of a sudden and strong inward doubt of
himself, his words and actions an energetic discontent at his life or
his social position, his future prospects or his mental attainments--I
know not which; perhaps after all it might only be a bilious caprice.