They were seated together, Mr. and Mrs. Crichton in the bar-parlour of
their little public-house in the Harrow Road, at the more fashionable
end, for which Mr. Crichton had himself invented the sign (in memory of
his past experiences) of “The Case is Altered.” Mr. Crichton, too, was
altered and yet the same. He wore one of the Earl’s old smoking-jackets,
with a coronet still embroidered on the breast pocket—not, he said, out
of anything so vulgar as ostentation, but as a sort of last link with
the Upper House—but his patent leather boots had given place to carpet
slippers, and his trousers, once so impeccable, were now baggy at the
knees. Altogether he was an easier, more relaxed Crichton, freed as he
was from the restraining, if respectful, criticism of the servants’ hall.
Indeed, Miss Fisher, who had always hated him, hinted that he had become
slightly Rabelaisian—a reference which she owed to mademoiselle—though
she would not have dared to repeat the hint to Mrs. Crichton (_née_
Tweeny). For marriage had in no degree abated Tweeny’s reverence for her
Crichton, or rather, as old habit still impelled her to call him, her
Guv.
The Guv. was at this moment comforting himself with a glass of port
(from the wood) and thinking of that bin of ’47 he had helped the Earl
to finish in past days. And now he was inhabiting a road where (at least
at the other, the unfashionable, end) port was invariably “port wine.”
Such are the vicissitudes of human affairs. Tweeny herself was guilty
of the solecism, as was perhaps to be expected from a lady who, for her
own drinking, preferred swipes. Though she had made great strides in her
education under the Guv.’s guidance (she was now nearly into quadratic
equations, and could say the dates of accession of the kings of England
down to James II.), she still made sad havoc of her nominatives and verbs
in the heat of conversation.
“A gent as wants to see the Guv.,” said the potboy, popping his head in
at the bar-parlour door—the potboy, for Tweeny knew better than to have a
barmaid about the place for the Guv. to cast a favourable eye on.