CHAPTER XXIII.
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.