SCENE III
THE SLAVE OF ALDERMAN DOBBIN
“YES, mother?”
Lady Victoria bowed slightly to Despencer, who had risen at her entrance, and walked across to where the marchioness was seated.
The marchioness gazed at her daughter as if she had been a chimney-sweeper.
“You dreadful child! You know this is my day, and you come in like that! Have you no regard for people’s feelings?”
Victoria smiled disdainfully.
“I suppose you mean Mr. Despencer’s feelings?” she observed.
“I mean the feelings of society,” returned her mother sternly. “You are more like an anarchist than a well-bred girl.”
Lady Victoria indulged in the tiniest of yawns.
“I think the anarchists are very interesting people,” she remarked. “If it weren’t for them, there would be nothing to read about in the papers.”
“There would be China,” returned the marchioness in a shocked voice.
The marchioness considered herself a politician. Her husband had once been Master of the Deerhounds.
“Bother China!” said Lady Victoria, dropping into a chair. “Is that what you sent for me about?”
The marchioness raised her eyes in mute appeal to the ceiling.
“I sent for you because I wanted to speak to you privately before anybody comes.”
Despencer, who had been about to sit down again, stood up, and moved towards the door. The marchioness recalled him.
“Where are you going?”
“I thought you wanted to be alone.”
“Don’t be absurd! I don’t count you.”
“Perhaps Lady Victoria does,” Despencer suggested, with a rather nervous glance in her direction.
Lady Victoria did not condescend to return the look.
“Pray, don’t trouble yourself about me, Mr. Despencer,” she said, negligently. “I assure you I never know that you are in the room.”
“Don’t be rude, Victoria!” said her mother, more crossly than she had spoken yet. “Mr. Despencer is one of your best friends.”
“I suppose that means he has been saying something unpleasant about me?” was the retort.
Despencer ventured to interpose.
“I may be a poet, but my imagination doesn’t carry me so far as that,” he said, in his most insinuating tones.
Lady Victoria gave him one crushing look, and turned to the marchioness.
“My dear mother, I wish you wouldn’t train Mr. Despencer to say these silly things. Surely he is not a suitor for my hand?”
“Be quiet, Victoria!” said her indignant parent. “From the way you treat him he might be your husband. But I’m sure it isn’t a thing for you to joke about. Do you remember that this is your third season, and that you are nearly twenty?”
Her daughter smiled in good-tempered derision.
“I think, as there is only Mr. Despencer here, I may as well remember that it is my fourth season, and that I am over twenty-one.”
The marchioness passed over the correction.
“All the more reason that you should seriously consider your position. The question is whether you really intend to be married or not.”
“Surely it isn’t a question of my intentions. You had better ask the men theirs. I presume they know I am in stock by this time.”
“It is idle to talk like that. I have offered you three men already, and you found fault with each of them.” The marchioness spoke with real feeling. “There was Sir Humphrey Bewley, a most eligible man, who quite raved about you. You complained that he was too old.”
“Old! He was prehistoric. He used to get excited about the Conquest.”
“Then you shouldn’t have encouraged him. You let him spend a fortune in jewelry for you.”
“That was because I mistook his intentions. I thought he wanted to adopt me.”
The marchioness gasped.
“Don’t talk like that! Then there was the Earl of Mullet. You objected to him because he was a Scotchman.”
“And took snuff. Put down the snuff.”
“He wouldn’t have made you take it. And last year you refused Mr. Jacobson, whose father owns three gold mines. You said he was a Jew.”
“No, excuse me, I merely said his father had been one.”
The marchioness shook herself impatiently.
“The Jews are most respectable,” she proclaimed, “when they are rich enough. They go everywhere.”
“Except to the Holy Land, marchioness.”
The interruption came from Despencer. If he threw in the remark with the hope of propitiating Lady Victoria it was a failure. That young lady took not the slightest notice. Her mother glared at the traitor for an instant, and continued as though he had not spoken.
“It is high time you made up your mind. Now, there is Mr. Hammond, who has promised to come here this afternoon. He has been paying you attentions for some time. You can’t say anything against him.”
Victoria had changed color slightly at the mention of this name. But she responded, in the same tone of languid indifference:
“I have nothing to say against him, except that so far his intentions have not been very oppressive. He has danced with me three times, and he once peeled me an orange, but you can hardly found a breach of promise case on that.”
“I’m not sure,” ventured the unabashed Despencer. “I fancy something might be made out of the orange.”
Before the marchioness could proceed with her lecture, the door opened, and the voice of the machine announced, “Mr. Hammond!”
“Bother the man!” muttered the marchioness, impatiently, as she rose to receive him. “He is a quarter of an hour too soon. This is so good of you!” she exclaimed, in an altered voice, as the form of the visitor appeared in the doorway.
Mr. Hammond entered.
About his personal appearance there was nothing remarkable. It is bad form to look remarkable, and much of John Hammond’s life had been devoted to avoiding everything in the way of bad form. His attire was in every respect a perfect replica of that of any other hundred men to be met between Waterloo Place and Hyde Park Corner of an afternoon in the London season. He was clean-shaven, and his clear-cut features were those of an able man, not yet entered upon middle age, who has been accustomed to have the world at his feet, and whose only anxieties have been caused to him by his own ambition.
John Hammond was a favorable representative of the class which is gradually replacing the last remains of our feudal aristocracy. The Hammond fortune had been created by his father, so that he was not a self-made man. In the sense in which the word is used to-day, he was undoubtedly a gentleman. He had been educated at the best public school—that is to say, the most expensive—in England, and in the most fashionable college of the most fashionable university. He had been in the best set, both at school and at college, an advantage which his smartness as a wicket-keeper and his inherited millions perhaps contributed about equally to procure. He had taken a good degree; he now took a cold bath every morning, rode to hounds, and sat in the House of Commons as a Conservative.
But John Hammond lacked one thing, which neither money nor merit could procure. He had not been born and reared in an ancestral mansion, built in the days of the Tudors or the Stuarts, on the site of a Norman keep. He had not wandered as a child through dusty galleries from whose oak-panelled walls looked down the portraits of dead generations of his name. He had not heard from his nurse the story of the loyal ancestor who fought for King Charles, and of the wicked ancestor who killed his rival in a duel, and of the beautiful ancestress in whose praise poems had been written by Waller or by Davenant. He had not roamed as a boy through hereditary woodlands, and bullied the keepers’ sons whose forefathers had served his from time immemorial. He had not grown up with the feeling in his blood that all this was part of him, and he was part and lord of it. He was only lord of a brewery, in which his father had once brewed with his own hands.
If John Hammond had been brought up in that other environment, he might not have set store by it. If his lot had not cast him among those to whom such things were matter of course he might not have felt the deprivation. He knew well enough that he had advantages which, in the world’s estimation, far outweighed those which he was without. He knew that he lived in an age when the homage which birth pays to wealth is open and unashamed. He had seen peers bringing their wives to wait in the halls of African Jews. He had heard of mysterious checks received by men of Norman lineage from millionaires who sprang up in a night like monstrous toadstools, and decayed, leaving the air poisoned all around them. He had seen the noblest blood of England in the dock, and the oldest blood of Scotland warned off the turf.
His reason told him that he was immensely the superior of such men; but no man’s beliefs, any more than his actions, are governed by reason. The acute logician who has failed to prove to himself the existence of a God takes refuge in the infallibility of a man. John Hammond’s instinct told him that the boasts of low-born poets were not altogether truth, that the blood of the Howards did not lose all its virtues even in the veins of sots and slaves, that a gentleman was as much above a king’s might as an honest man was, and that neither kind heart nor simple faith could take the place of one drop of Norman blood.
Every man’s character has its weak spot, and this was the weak spot in John Hammond’s. There were moments when he despised himself for the halo with which his imagination encircled the heads of the caste into which he had not been born. There were other moments when he felt inclined to marry the Lady Victoria Mauleverer.
Mr. Hammond entered.
“I’m afraid you find me brutally punctual, marchioness,” he said, in a vigorous, masculine voice that seemed to go through the atmosphere of the drawing-room like a breath of fresh air. “That is the worst of business habits. I wanted to wait down in the hall till somebody else came, but they wouldn’t let me.”
The marchioness smiled graciously, with a horrible inward misgiving that Mr. Hammond had overheard her rash protest against his arrival.
“But you needn’t talk to me unless you like,” he added, remorselessly, as he finished shaking hands with the two women. “I will sit still and look at photographs. Is this a new one of Lord Severn?”
“You are not a moment too soon,” the dismayed marchioness hastened to say. “Do you know Mr. Cyril Despencer, Mr. Hammond?” The two men bowed with mutual distrust. “I assure you we were absolutely dying when you came.”
“Really! I must apply for a medal from the Royal Humane Society for saving life.” He turned to Victoria, who had dropped into her chair again with an elaborate assumption of being bored to distraction. “Lady Victoria, you are looking remarkably well for a corpse.”
He laid down the marquis’s photograph, and placed himself in a chair beside the young woman. She barely raised her head.
“Thanks. I will tell my maid what you say. She will be glad of a little encouragement, poor thing!”
The marchioness gave a low moan.
“Victoria! I hope you are accustomed to the modern girl, Mr. Hammond.”
“The modern girl is my particular hobby,” was the grave answer. “I may say that I collect her. I keep an album at home, in which I get young ladies to record their most secret thoughts and yearnings for my especial benefit. It is such interesting reading.” He turned again to the scornful beauty beside him. “Mayn’t I put you in my album?”
“I hardly know. I am afraid I should shock you; I am so perfectly depraved,” drawled Victoria. “You would have to keep me apart, like those very select works of which only a hundred copies are printed on hand-made paper and sold by private subscription to scholars.”
“Victoria!” There was a note of real distress in the marchioness’s voice. “What are you talking about?”
“I dare say Mr. Hammond knows,” was the reply, in the same unmoved tone.
“Perhaps Mr. Hammond collects those works as well. They are generally written by young ladies,” Despencer interposed.
Hammond turned and looked at him as if a dog had barked.
“Yes; but I think I have got a volume of yours on the same shelf, if you are the author of Fig Leaves.”
Despencer became loftily indifferent.
“I remember writing a book with that name when I was a boy. Do people still read it?”
“No; but they still look at the illustrations.”
The marchioness came to the rescue of her satellite.
“Ah! but Mr. Despencer has reformed since then,” she said, with unction. “He is writing a novel in favor of marriage.”
“How daring!” Hammond answered. “Of course it will be refused by the libraries.”
“Come, I sha’n’t allow you to say that marriage is improper,” said the marchioness, with an earnestness that was slightly clumsy. “We still marry in society.”
“You don’t say so!” Hammond pretended to exclaim. “I fancied it had quite gone out. Isn’t it considered a rather middle-class thing to do?”
The marchioness refused to be baffled.
“How horrid and cynical of you to talk like that! You know that you ought to get married yourself. Society expects it of you.”
Hammond shook his head.
“My dear marchioness, the views of society are the last thing I think of considering. My life is ordered by the views of Alderman Dobbin.”
“Alderman Dobbin? That person you asked me to send a card to? Who is he?”
“Really, this ignorance is discreditable to you, marchioness. Alderman Dobbin is the autocrat of the constituency I have the honor to represent, the Chairman of the Tooting Conservative Association. In me you behold Alderman Dobbin’s slave. He is my moral mentor and political taskmaster. Since I sat for Tooting I have ceased to be a free citizen with thoughts or ideas of my own. I am a mere puppet, the strings of which are pulled by him. The lips may be the lips of Hammond, but the voice is the voice of Alderman Dobbin.”
Lady Victoria raised her head with an appearance of interest during this speech. She now remarked:
“From what you say, I am sure he is a charming person. You have made me quite in love with him. I shall flirt with him when he comes.”
Hammond gazed at her with stern reproach.
“Lady Victoria, you commit yourself most painfully. Alderman Dobbin is married. Alderman Dobbin is the father of a large family. Alderman Dobbin, moreover, is a church-warden, and in the High Street of Tooting the sinner trembles when he passes the shop which bears Alderman Dobbin’s name and superscription.”
“Don’t you see that you are simply making me more determined by all this?” returned Victoria. “I shall feel like the loreley, or whatever they call it, luring the well-conducted fisherman to his destruction.”
“Did you say he kept a shop?” put in the marchioness, who already began to see in the alderman a possible ally. “What does he sell?”
“Boots. Since I was returned for Tooting my unworthy feet have been clothed in Alderman Dobbin’s handiwork. The shoes which I have on are made of a substance which he supposes to be patent leather. They are his choice, not mine. I am as wax in his hands. If he required me to wear Wellingtons, I should obey. At his bidding I have changed my tailor and discharged my groom; and if ever I want to choose a wife I shall first have to ask Alderman Dobbin’s consent.”
“I have no doubt he is a very sensible man, and you could not do better than take his advice,” said the marchioness, who was quite serious. “I am very glad he is coming here. We don’t see nearly enough of the—er—the other classes. When my husband was Master of the Deerhounds, I once gave a thing they called a Primrose Tea down at our place in Worcestershire, but I didn’t speak to any of the creatures that came to it, except one dreadful person, who, they told me, was a justice of the peace. He called me ‘My lady,’ exactly like that delightful character who wants to murder everybody in one of somebody’s novels.”
“I expect the alderman will call you ‘ma’am,’” observed Hammond, reflectively.
“I once knew a solicitor in a Welsh town,” said Despencer, slowly, “where they had just elected a peer of royal descent as mayor, and this solicitor urged that they should return another solicitor, who happened to be a Jubilee knight, to the town council, in order that his lordship might have some one of his own rank to talk to.”
This time it was the marchioness who administered a snub to the unlucky speaker. She observed severely:
“As soon as any gentleman, in whatever position, has received the accolade of his sovereign, he ceases, in my opinion, to be a proper subject for ridicule.”
Just as this rebuke was ended the door opened quickly, and a small, insignificant-looking man in a rather shabby lounge suit strolled into the room. On catching sight of the group round the marchioness he stopped short, and looked as if meditating flight.
The marchioness promptly took him into custody.
“Pray come in, George! This is quite too charmingly domestic and suburban,” she observed, addressing the company generally. “My husband has actually come home to tea.”
The Marquis of Severn, who was generally supposed to haunt a small dark room somewhere near the kitchen stairs, called by courtesy the library, was plainly disconcerted by the position in which he found himself.
“I’m really very sorry, Jane; but I didn’t know you had a party on.” By this time he had succeeded in recognizing the two men. He gave Despencer a careless nod, and walked across the room to shake hands with Hammond. “How d’ye do? I see you know my women,” he remarked.
“My dear father,” Victoria remonstrated, “if you are not careful you will wake up some day and find yourself covered with moss. Mr. Hammond and I are all but engaged.”
“Victoria!” came in tones of stifled anguish from the marchioness.
“Don’t you believe her, Severn,” laughed Hammond. “I haven’t given your daughter the slightest encouragement—as yet.”
“Well, you should have my consent, if it counted for anything,” said the marquis, beginning to make his retreat from the room.
Again his wife’s voice arrested him.
“George, now you have come in, you must stay, you know. I should consider it very marked if you went away.”
“You don’t want me, Jane; I should only be in the way,” he objected, feebly.
“You underrate your social powers, George. Besides, I don’t ask you to talk to any one. I only want you to show yourself.”
“If that’s all, I’m sure I needn’t stay. But I leave you my photograph.”
With these words Lord Severn made a bolt for it, and succeeded in getting out of hearing before his wife could launch a fresh injunction.
The marchioness bit her lip in some embarrassment. Despencer caught her eye and managed to infuse a certain meaning into his look, as he asked aloud:
“Who are you going to have to sing on Thursday night?”
The marchioness took her cue with the dexterity of an old diplomatist. She leaned back in her chair with an air of utter unconcern, as she responded:
“I have almost forgotten. Some people they recommended to me at the music-seller’s.” She raised her hand to her brow, as though studying to recollect. “Let me see. Oh yes, there is one woman who I believe is perfectly charming. They told me that at the music-halls all the young men were dying for her.”
Hammond moved his head rather abruptly to look at the speaker.
“Do you remember her name?” he asked.
“I think she calls herself Belle Yorke. Why, have you seen her?”
The marchioness’s expression was one of innocent surprise at the strong interest plainly depicted on her listener’s countenance.
Before he could reply to her, the conversation was again interrupted. The machine had brought a Dowager Lady Rollox and an Honorable Edith Rollox to see his mistress.
The marchioness seized the occasion with the instinct of a match-maker.
“Come and help me to talk to these stupid people,” she breathed hurriedly in Despencer’s ear, as she rose and went to meet the newcomers. Despencer meekly obeyed.
The little piece of by-play between her mother and Despencer had not been lost on the Lady Victoria Mauleverer. As soon as she and Hammond were left together she inquired, with an air of doubt:
“Do you know anything about this Belle Yorke?”
Hammond roused himself with a start from his reflections.
“I? Belle Yorke? Yes, yes. I know something about her.”
“I hope there’s nothing wrong about her coming here?” pursued Victoria, with superb coolness. “She won’t do anything dreadful, will she?”
Hammond braced himself up.
“I have the honor of being a friend of Miss Yorke’s, and I respect her as much as any other lady of my acquaintance,” he said firmly.
“I beg your pardon,” Victoria said, lightly. “I only asked because my mother is so very indiscreet. She makes me quite giddy sometimes. One meets such very queer people in this house—the Ladies’ Journal, for instance.”
“Oh, don’t you know? It’s what we call Mr. Despencer behind his back. He is so well informed, you know, on certain subjects.”
“I wonder what you call me behind my back.”
“Oh, we think very highly of you, I can tell you. I believe my mother is quite anxious that I should marry you.”
“Let me see, I rather fancy I am engaged just now, but I shall be charmed to break it off.”
“I hope Alderman Dobbin will approve of me.”
Hammond affected to shake his head in doubt.
“You will have to satisfy him as to your moral character.”
“That will be rather difficult,” Victoria admitted. “Perhaps you had better not let him know that I cycle.” She glanced down at her costume as she spoke. “But I must really go and put on decent things before anybody else comes, or the alderman may hear of it. We shall see you at the concert, I suppose?”
“Yes, and the alderman,” said Hammond.
He was slipping away a few minutes later, when he found himself intercepted in the doorway by Despencer.
Despencer addressed him in a confidential tone.
“I say, you heard what the marchioness said just now. Do you think any one ought to give a hint to Lord Severn?”
“Why, what about?” asked Hammond, surprised.
“About Belle Yorke. She oughtn’t to come here, you know.”
“Why not?” demanded Hammond, frowning angrily.
“Didn’t you know?” Despencer’s expression became that of a man who finds he has innocently committed himself. “Perhaps I ought not to have spoken to you about it; but I thought the story was public property.”
“What story? I wish you would speak out.”
Despencer glanced round cautiously, and lowered his voice.
“Of course it may be only idle rumor. But they say that she is living under his protection.”
“That is false!” said Hammond.