the dishes which he will have served, and is off, and simpering to another
acquaintance at a distant table.
"I thought he would take that table," says Firmin's cynical confr?re.
"In the draught of the door? Don't you see how the candle flickers? It is the
worst place in the room!"
"Yes; but don't you see who is sitting at the next table?"
Now at the next table was a n-blem-n of vast wealth, who was growling at the
quality of the mutton cutlets, and the half-pint of sherry which he had ordered
for his dinner. But as his lordship has nothing to do with the ensuing history,
of course we shall not violate confidence by mentioning his name. We could see
Firmin smiling on his neighbour with his blandest melancholy, and the waiters
presently bearing up the dishes which the doctor had ordered for his own
refection. He was no lover of mutton-chops and coarse sherry, as I knew, who had
partaken of many a feast at his board. I could see the diamond twinkle on his
pretty hand, as it daintily poured out creaming wine from the ice-pail by his
side??the liberal hand that had given me many a sovereign when I was a boy.
"I can't help liking him," I said to my companion, whose scornful eyes were now
and again directed towards his colleague.
"This port is very sweet. Almost all port is sweet now," remarks the doctor.
"He was very kind to me in my school-days; and Philip was a fine little fellow."
"Handsome a boy as ever I saw. Does he keep his beauty? Father was a handsome
man??very. Quite a lady-killer??I mean out of his practice!" adds the grim
doctor. "What is the boy doing?"
"He is at the university. He has his mother's fortune. He is wild and unsettled,
and I fear he is going to the bad a little."
"Is he? Shouldn't wonder!" grumbles Goodenough.
We had talked very frankly and pleasantly until the appearance of the other
doctor, but with Firmin's arrival Goodenough seemed to button up his
conversation. He quickly stumped away from the dining-room to the drawing-room,
and sate over a novel there until time came when he was to retire to his
patients or his home.
That there was no liking between the doctors, that there was a difference
between Philip and his father, was clear enough to me: but the causes of these
differences I had yet to learn. The story came to me piecemeal; from confessions
here, admissions there, deductions of my own. I could not, of course, be present
at many of the scenes which I shall have to relate as though I had witnessed
them; and the posture, language, and inward thoughts of Philip and his friends,
as here related, no doubt are fancies of the narrator in many cases; but the
story is as authentic as many histories, and the reader need only give such an
amount of credence to it as he may judge that its verisimilitude warrants.
Well, then, we must not only revert to that illness which befell when Philip
Firmin was a boy at Grey Friars, but go back yet farther in time to a period
which I cannot precisely ascertain.
The pupils of old Gandish's painting academy may remember a ridiculous little
man, with a great deal of wild talent, about the ultimate success of which his
friends were divided. Whether Andrew was a genius, or whether he was a zany, was
always a moot question among the frequenters of the Greek Street billiard-rooms,
and the noble disciples of the Academy and St. Martin's Lane. He may have been
crazy and absurd; he may have had talent, too: such characters are not unknown
in art or in literature. He broke the Queen's English; he was ignorant to a
wonder; he dressed his little person in the most fantastic raiment and queerest
cheap finery; he wore a beard, bless my soul! twenty years before beards were
known to wag in Britain. He was the most affected little creature, and, if you
looked at him, would pose in attitudes of such ludicrous dirty dignity, that if
you had had a dun waiting for money in the hall of your lodging-house, or your
picture refused at the Academy??if you were suffering under ever so much
calamity??you could not help laughing. He was the butt of all his acquaintances;
the laughing-stock of high and low; and he had as loving, gentle, faithful,
honourable a heart as ever beat in a little bosom. He is gone to his rest now;
his palette and easel are waste timber; his genius, which made some little
flicker of brightness, never shone much, and is extinct. In an old album, that
dates back for more than a score of years, I sometimes look at poor Andrew's
strange wild sketches. He might have done something had he continued to remain
poor; but a rich widow, whom he met at Rome, fell in love with the strange
errant painter, pursued him to England, and married him in spite of himself. His
genius drooped under the servitude: he lived but a few short years, and died of
a consumption, of which the good Goodenough's skill could not cure him.
One day, as he was driving with his wife in her splendid barouche through the
Haymarket, he suddenly bade the coachman stop, sprang over the side of the
carriage before the steps could be let fall, and his astonished wife saw him
shaking the hands of a shabbily-dressed little woman who was passing??shaking
both her hands, and weeping, and gesticulating. and twisting his beard and
mustachios, as his wont was when agitated. Mrs. Montfitchet (the wealthy Mrs.
Carrickfergus she had been, before she married the painter), the owner of a
young husband, who had sprung from her side, and out of her carriage, in order
to caress a young woman passing in the street, might well be disturbed by this
demonstration; but she was a kind-hearted woman, and when Montfitchet, on
reascending into the family coach, told his wife the history of the person of
whom he had just taken leave, she cried plentifully too. She bade the coachman
drive straightway to her own house: she rushed up to her own apartments, whence
she emerged, bearing an immense bag full of wearing apparel, and followed by a
panting butler, carrying a bottle-basket and a pie: and she drove off, with her
pleased Andrew by her side, to a court in St. Martin's Lane, where dwelt the
poor woman with whom he had just been conversing.
It had pleased heaven, in the midst of dreadful calamity, to send her friends
and succour. She was suffering under misfortune, poverty, and cowardly
desertion. A man, who had called himself Brandon when he took lodgings in her
father's house, had married her, brought her to London, tired of her, and left
her. She had reason to think he had given a false name when he lodged with her
father: he fled, after a few months, and his real name she never knew. When he
deserted her, she went back to her father, a weak man, married to a domineering
woman, who pretended to disbelieve the story of her marriage, and drove her from
the door. Desperate, and almost mad, she came back to London, where she still
had some little relics of property that her fugitive husband left behind him. He
promised, when he left her, to remit her money; but he sent none, or she refused
it??or, in her wildness and despair, lost the dreadful paper which announced his
desertion, and that he was married before, and that to pursue him would ruin
him, and he knew she never would do that??no, however much he might have wronged
her.
She was penniless then??deserted by all??having made away with the last trinket
of her brief days of love, having sold the last little remnant of her poor
little stock of clothing??alone, in the great wilderness of London, when it
pleased God to send her succour in the person of an old friend who had known
her, and even loved her, in happier days. When the Samaritans came to this poor
child, they found her sick and shuddering with fever. They brought their doctor
to her, who is never so eager as when he runs up a poor man's stair. And, as he
watched by the bed where her kind friends came to help her, he heard her sad
little story of trust and desertion.
Her father was a humble person, who had seen better days; and poor little Mrs.
Brandon had a sweetness and simplicity of manner which exceedingly touched the
good doctor. She had little education, except that which silence,
long-suffering, seclusion, will sometimes give. When cured of her illness, there
was the great and constant evil of poverty to meet and overcome. How was she to
live? Goodenough got to be as fond of her as of a child of his own. She was
tidy, thrifty, gay at times, with a little simple cheerfulness. The little
flowers began to bloom as the sunshine touched them. Her whole life hitherto had
been cowering under neglect, and tyranny, and gloom.
Mr. Montfitchet was for coming so often to look after the little outcast whom he
had succoured that I am bound to say Mrs. M. became hysterically jealous, and
waited for him on the stairs as he came down swathed in his Spanish cloak,
pounced on him, and called him a monster. Goodenough was also, I fancy,
suspicious of Montfitchet, and Montfitchet of Goodenough. Howbeit, the doctor
vowed that he never had other than the feeling of a father towards his poor
little prot?g?e, nor could any father be more tender. He did not try to take her
out of her station in life. He found, or she found for herself, a work which she
could do. "Papa used to say no one ever nursed him so nice as I did," she said.
"I think I could do that better than anything, except my needle, but I like to
be useful to poor sick people best. I don't think about myself then, sir." And
for this business good Mr. Goodenough had her educated and employed.
The widow died in course of time whom Mrs. Brandon's father had married, and her
daughters refused to keep him, speaking very disrespectfully of this old Mr.
Gann, who was, indeed, a weak old man. And now Caroline came to the rescue of
her old father. She was a shrewd little Caroline. She had saved a little money.
Goodenough gave up a country-house, which he did not care to use, and lent Mrs.
Brandon the furniture. She thought she could keep a lodging-house and find
lodgers. Montfitchet had painted her. There was a sort of beauty about her which
the artists admired. When Ridley the Academician had the small-pox, she attended
him, and caught the malady. She did not mind; not she. "It won't spoil my
beauty," she said. Nor did it. The disease dealt very kindly with her little
modest face. I don't know who gave her the nickname, but she had a good roomy
house in Thornhaugh Street, an artist on the first and second floor; and there
never was a word of scandal against the Little Sister, for was not her father in
permanence sipping gin-and-water in the ground-floor parlour? As we called her
"the Little Sister," her father was called "the Captain"??a bragging, lazy,
good-natured old man??not a reputable captain ??and very cheerful, though the
conduct of his children, he said, had repeatedly broken his heart.
I don't know how many years the Little Sister had been on duty when Philip
Firmin had his scarlet fever. It befell him at the end of the term, just when
all the boys were going home. His tutor and his tutor's wife wanted their
holidays, and sent their own children out of the way. As Phil's father was
absent, Dr. Goodenough came, and sent his nurse in. The case grew worse, so bad
that Dr. Firmin was summoned from the Isle of Wight, and arrived one evening at
Grey Friars ??Grey Friars so silent now, so noisy at other times with the shouts
and crowds of the playground.
Dr. Goodenough's carriage was at the door when Dr. Firmin's carriage drove up.
"How was the boy?"
"He had been very bad. He had been wrong in the head all day, talking and
laughing quite wild-like," the servant said.
The father ran up the stairs.
Phil was in a great room, in which were several empty beds of boys gone home for
the holidays. The windows were opened into Grey Friars Square. Goodenough heard
his colleague's carriage drive up, and rightly divined that Phil's father had
arrived. He came out, and met Firmin in the anteroom.
"Head has wandered a little. Better now, and quiet;" and the one doctor murmured
to the other the treatment which he had pursued.
Firmin step in gently towards the patient, near whose side the Little Sister was
standing.
"Who is it?" asked Phil.
"It is I, dear. Your father," said Dr. Firmin, with real tenderness in his
voice.
The Little Sister turned round once, and fell down like a stone by the bedside.
"You infernal villain!" said Goodenough, with an oath, and a step forward. "You
are the man!"
"Hush! The patient, if you please, Dr. Goodenough," said the other physician.
CHAPTER IV. A GENTEEL FAMILY.
Have you made up your mind on the question of seeming and being in the world? I
mean, suppose you are poor, is it right for you to seem to be well off? Have
people an honest right to keep up appearances? Are you justified in starving
your dinner-table in order to keep a carriage; to have such an expensive house
that you can't by any possibility help a poor relation; to array your daughters
in costly milliners' wares because they live with girls whose parents are twice
as rich? Sometimes it is hard to say where honest pride ends and hypocrisy
begins. To obtrude your poverty is mean and slavish; as it is odious for a
beggar to ask compassion by showing his sores. But to simulate prosperity??to be
wealthy and lavish thrice a year when you ask your friends, and for the rest of
the time to munch a crust and sit by one candle??are the folks who practise this
deceit worthy of applause or a whipping? Sometimes it is noble pride, sometimes
shabby swindling. When I see Eugenia with her dear children exquisitely neat and
cheerful; not showing the slightest semblance of poverty, or uttering the
smallest complaint; persisting that Squanderfield, her husband, treats her well,
and is good at heart; and denying that he leaves her and her young ones in want;
I admire and reverence that noble falsehood??that beautiful constancy and
endurance which disdains to ask compassion. When I sit at poor Jezebella's
table, and am treated to her sham bounties and shabby splendour, I only feel
anger for the hospitality, and that dinner, and guest, and host, are humbug
s
together.
Talbot Twysden's dinner-table is large, and the guests most respectable. There
is always a bigwig or two present, and a dining dowager who frequents the
greatest houses. There is a butler who offers you wine; there's a menu du d?ner
before Mrs. Twysden; and to read it you would fancy you were at a good dinner.
It tastes of chopped straw. Oh, the dreary sparkle of that feeble champagne; the
audacity of that public-house sherry; the swindle of that acrid claret; the
fiery twang of that clammy port! I have tried them all, I tell you! It is sham
wine, a sham dinner, a sham welcome, a sham cheerfulness, among the guests
assembled. I feel that that woman eyes and counts the cutlets as they are
carried off the tables; perhaps watches that one which you try to swallow. She
has counted and grudged each candle by which the cook prepares the meal. Does
her big coachman fatten himself on purloined oats and beans, and Thorley's food
for cattle? Of the rinsings of those wretched bottles the butler will have to
give a reckoning in the morning. Unless you are of the very great monde, Twysden
and his wife think themselves better than you are, and seriously patronize you.
They consider it is a privilege to be invited to those horrible meals to which
they gravely ask the greatest folks in the country. I actually met Winton
there??the famous Winton??the best dinner-giver in the world (ah, what a
position for a man!) I watched him, and marked the sort of wonder which came
over him as he tasted and sent away dish after dish, glass after glass. "Try
that Ch?teau Margaux, Winton!" calls out the host. "It is some that Bottleby and
I imported." Imported! I see Winton's face as he tastes the wine, and puts it
down. He does not like to talk about that dinner. He has lost a day. Twysden
will continue to ask him every year; will continue to expect to be asked in
return, with Mrs. Twysden and one of his daughters; and will express his
surprise loudly at the club, saying, "Hang Winton! Deuce take the fellow! He has
sent me no game this year!" When foreign dukes and princes arrive, Twysden
straightway collars them, and invites them to his house. And sometimes they go
once??and then ask, "Qui donc est ce Monsieur Tvisden, qui est si dro?le?" And
he elbows his way up to them at the Minister's assemblies, and frankly gives
them his hand. And calm Mrs. Twysden wriggles, and works, and slides, and
pushes, and tramples if need be, her girls following behind her, until she too
has come up under the eyes of the great man, and bestowed on him a smile and a
curtsey. Twysden grasps prosperity cordially by the hand. He says to success,
"Bravo!" On the contrary, I never saw a man more resolute in not knowing
unfortunate people, or more daringly forgetful of those whom he does not care to
remember. If this Levite met a wayfarer, going down from Jerusalem, who had
fallen among thieves, do you think he would stop to rescue the fallen man? He
would neither give wine, nor oil, nor money. He would pass on perfectly
satisfied with his own virtue, and leave the other to go, as best he might, to
Jericho.
What is this? Am I angry because Twysden has left off asking me to his vinegar
and chopped hay? No. I think not. Am I hurt because Mrs. Twysden sometimes
patronizes my wife, and sometimes cuts her? Perhaps. Only women thoroughly know
the insolence of women towards one another in the world. That is a very stale
remark. They receive and deliver stabs, smiling politely. Tom Sayers could not
take punishment more gaily than they do. If you could but see under the skin,
you would find their little hearts scarred all over with little lancet digs. I
protest I have seen my own wife enduring the impertinence of this woman, with a
face as calm and placid as she wears when old Twysden himself is talking to her,
and pouring out one of his maddening long stories. Oh, no! I am not angry at