Can You Forgive Her? (21 page)

And yet the letter was of much moment, and made him think deeply. ‘If I did it at all,’
said he, ’it would be more with the object of cutting him out than with any other.’

The reader will hardly require to be told that the him in question was John Grey, and that Kate’s letter was one instigating her brother to renew his love affair with Alice, And Vavasor was in truth well inclined to renew it, and would have begun the renewing it at once, had he not doubted his power with his cousin.
Indeed it has been seen that he had already attempted some commencement of such renewal at Basle. He had told Kate more than once that Alice’s fortune was not much, and that her beauty was past its prime; and he would no doubt repeat the same objections to his sister with some pretence of disinclination. It was not his custom to show his hand to the players at any game that he played. But he
was, in truth, very anxious to obtain from Alice a second promise of her hand. How soon after that he might marry her, would be another question.

Perhaps it was not Alice’s beauty that he coveted, nor yet her money exclusively. Nevertheless he thought her very beautiful, and was fully aware that her money would be of great service to him. But I believe that he was true in that word that he spoke
to himself, and that his chief attraction was the delight which he would have in robbing Mr Grey of his wife. Alice had once been his love, had clung to his side, had whispered love to him, and he had enough of the weakness of humanity in him to feel the soreness arising from her affection for another. When she broke away from him he had acknowledged that he had been wrong, and when, since her
engagement with Mr Grey, he had congratulated her, he had told her in his quiet’ half-whispered, impressive words how right she was; but not the less, therefore, did he feel himself hurt that John Grey should be her lover. And when he had met this man he had spoken well of him to his sister, saying that he was a gentleman, a scholar, and a man of parts; but not the less had he hated him from the
first moment of his seeing him. Such hatred under such circumstances was almost pardonable. But George Vavasor, when he hated, was apt to follow up his hatred with injury. He could not violently dislike a man and yet not
wish to do him any harm. At present, as he sat lounging in his chair, he thought that he would like to marry his cousin Alice; but he was quite sure that he would like to be the
means of putting a stop to the proposed marriage between Alice and John Grey.

Kate had been very false to her friend, and had sent up to her brother the very letter which Alice had written to her after that meeting in Queen Anne Street which was described in the last chapter, – or rather a portion of it, for with the reserve common to women she had kept back the other half. Alice had declared
to herself that she would be sure of her cousin’s sympathy, and had written out all her heart on the matter, as was her wont when writing to Kate. ‘But you must understand,’ she wrote, ‘that all that I said to him went with him for nothing. I had determined to make him know that everything between us must be over, but I failed. I found that I had no words at command, but that he was able to talk
to me as though I were a child. He told me that I was sick and full of phantasies, and bade me change the air. As he spoke in this way, I could not help feeling how right he was to use me so; but I felt also that he, in his mighty superiority, could never be a fitting husband for a creature so inferior to him as I am. Though I altogether failed to make him understand that it was so, every moment that
we were together made me more fixed in my resolution.’

This letter from Alice to Kate, Vavasor read over and over again, though Kate’s letter to himself, which was the longer one, he had thrown aside after the first glance. There was nothing that he could lean from that. He was as good a judge of the manner in which he would play his own game as Kate could be; but in this matter he was to learn
how he would play his game from a knowledge of the other girl’s mind. ‘She’ll never marry him, at any rate,’ he said to himself, ‘and she is right. He’d make an upper servant of her; very respectable, no doubt, but still only an upper servant. Now with me; – well, I hardly know what I should make of her. I cannot think of myself as a man married.’ Then he threw her letter after Kate’s, and betook
himself to his newspaper and his cigar.

It was two hours after this, and he still wore his dressing-gown, and he was still lounging in his easy-chair, when the waiting-maid at the lodgings brought him up word that a gentleman wished to see him. Vavasor kept no servant of his own except that confidential groom down at Bicester. It was a rule with him that people could be better served and cheaper
served by other people’s servants than by their own. Even in the stables at Bicester the innkeeper had to find what assistance was wanted, and charge for it in the bill. And George Vavasor was no Sybarite. He did not deem it impracticable to put on his own trousers without having a man standing at his foot to hold up the leg of the garment. A valet about a man knows a great deal of a man’s ways,
and therefore George had no valet.

‘A gentleman!’ said he to the girl. ‘Does the gentleman look like a public-house keeper?’

‘Well, I think he do,’ said the girl.

‘Then show him up,’ said George.

And the gentleman was a public-house keeper. Vavasor was pretty sure of his visitor before he desired the servant to give him entrance. It was Mr Grimes from the ‘Handsome Man’ public-house and tavern,
in the Brompton Road, and he had come by appointment to have a little conversation with Mr Vavasor on matters political. Mr Grimes was a man who knew that business was business, and as such had some considerable weight in his own neighbourhood. With him politics was business, as well as beer, and omnibus-horses, and foreign wines; – in the fabrication of which latter article Mr Grimes was supposed
to have an extended experience. To such as him, when intent on business, Mr Vavasor was not averse to make known the secrets of his lodging-house; and now, when the idle of London world was either at morning church or still in bed, Mr Grimes had come out by appointment to do a little political business with the lately-rejected member for the Chelsea Districts.

Vavasor had been, as I have said,
lately rejected, and the new member who had beaten him at the hustings had sat now for one session in parliament. Under his present reign he was destined to the honour of one other session, and then the period of his existing
glory, – for which he was said to have paid nearly six thousand pounds, – would be over. But he might be elected again, perhaps for a full period of six sessions; and it
might be hoped that this second election would be conducted on more economical principles. To this, the economical view of the matter, Mr Grimes was very much opposed, and was now waiting upon George Vavasor in Cecil Street, chiefly with the object of opposing the new member’s wishes on this head. No doubt Mr Grimes was personally an advocate for the return of Mr Vavasor, and would do all in his power
to prevent the re-election of the young Lord Kilfenora, whose father, the Marquis of Bunratty, had scattered that six thousand pounds among the electors and non-electors of Chelsea; but his main object was that money should be spent. “Tain’t altogether for myself,’ he said to a confidential friend in the same way of business; ‘I don’t get so much on it. Perhaps sometimes not none. May be I’ve
a bill agin some of those gents not paid this werry moment But it’s the game I looks to. If the game dies away, it’ll never be got up again; – never. Who’ll care about elections then? Anybody’d go and get hisself elected if we was to let the game go by!’ And so, that the game might not go by, Mr Grimes was now present in Mr George Vavasor’s rooms.

‘Well Mr Grimes,’ said George, ‘how are you this
morning? Sit down, Mr Grimes. If every man were as punctual as you are, the world would go like clock-work; wouldn’t it?’

‘Business is business, Mr Vavasor,’ said the publican, after having made his salute, and having taken his chair with some little show of mock modesty. That’s my maxim. If I didn’t stick to that, nothing wouldn’t ever stick to me; and nothing doesn’t much as it is. Times is
very bad, Mr Vavasor.’

‘Of course they are. They’re always bad. What was the Devil made for, except that they should be bad? But I should have thought you publicans were the last men who ought to complain.’

‘Lord love you, Mr Vavasor; why, I suppose of all the men as is put upon, we’re put upon the worst. What’s the good of drawing of beer, if the more you draw the more you don’t make. Yesterday
as ever was was Saturday, and we drawed three pound ten and nine. What’ll that come to, Mr Vavasor, when you reckons it up with the brewer? Why, it’s a next to nothing. You knows that well enough.’

‘Upon my word I don’t. But I know you don’t sell a pint of beer without getting a profit out of it.’

‘Lord love you, Mr Vavasor. If I hadn’t nothink to look to but beer I couldn’t keep a house over
my head; no I couldn’t. That house of mine belongs to Meux’s people; and very good people they are too; – have made a sight of money; haven’t they, Mr Vavasor? I has to get my beer from them in course. Why not, when it’s their house? But if I sells their stuff as I gets it, there ain’t a halfpenny coming to me out of a gallon. Look at that, now.’

‘But then you don’t sell it, as you get it. You
stretch it.’

That’s in course. I’m not going to tell you a lie, Mr Vavasor. You know what’s what as well as I do, and a sight better, I expect. There’s a dozen different ways of handling beer, Mr Vavasor. But what’s the use of that, when they can take four or five pounds a day over the counter for their rot-gut stuff at the “Cadogan Anns”, and I can’t do no better nor yet perhaps so well, for
a real honest glass of beer. Stretch it! It’s my belief the more you poison their liquor, the more the people likes it!’

Mr Grimes was a stout man, not very tall, with a mottled red face, and large protruding eyes. As regards his own person, Mr Grimes might have been taken as a fair sample of the English innkeeper, as described for many years past. But in his outer garments he was very unlike
that description. He wore a black, swallow-tailed coat, made, however, to set very loose upon his back, a black waistcoat, and black pantaloons. He carried, moreover, in his hands a black chimney-pot hat. Not only have the top-boots and breeches vanished from the costume of innkeepers, but also the long, particoloured waistcoat, and the birds’-eye fogle
¹
round their necks. They get themselves
up to look like Dissenting ministers or undertakers, except that there is still a something about their rosy gills which tells a tale of the spigot and corkscrew.

Mr Grimes had only just finished the tale of his own hard ways
as a publican, when the door-bell was again rung. ‘There’s Scruby,’ said George Vavasor, ‘and now we can go to business.’

*          *          *

T
HE
handmaiden at George Vavasor’s lodgings announced ‘another gent’, and then Mr Scruby entered the room in which were seated George, and Mr Grimes the publican from die ‘Handsome Man’ on the Brompton Road. Mr Scruby was an attorney from Great Marlborough Street, supposed to be very knowing in the ways of metropolitan elections; and he had now stepped round,
as he called it, with the object of saying a few words to Mr Grimes, partly on the subject of the forthcoming contest at Chelsea, and partly on that of the contest last past. These words were to be said in the presence of Mr Vavasor, the person interested. That some other words had been spoken between Mr Scruby and Mr Grimes on the same subjects behind Mr Vavasor’s back I think very probable.
But even though this might have been so I am not prepared to say that Mr Vavasor had been deceived by their combinations.

The two men were very civil to each other in their salutations, the attorney assuming an air of patronizing condescension, always calling the other Grimes; whereas Mr Scruby was treated with considerable deference by the publican, and was always called Mr Scruby. ‘Business
is business’, said the publican as soon as these salutations were over; ‘isn’t it now, Mr Scruby?’

‘And I suppose Grimes thinks Sunday morning a particularly good time for business,’ said the attorney, laughing.

‘It’s quiet, you know’ said Grimes. ‘But it warn’t me as named Sunday morning. It was Mr Vavasor here. But it is quiet; ain’t it, Mr Scruby?’

Mr Scruby acknowledged that it was quiet,
especially looking
out over the river, and then they proceeded to business. ‘We must pull the governor through better next time than we did last,’ said the attorney.

‘Of course we must, Mr Scruby; but, Lord love you, Mr Vavasor, whose fault was it? What notice did I get, – just tell me that? Why, Travers’s name was up on the liberal interest ever so long before the governor had ever thought about
it’

‘Nobody is blaming you, Mr Grimes’ said George.

‘And nobody can’t, Mr Vavasor. I done my work true as steel, and there ain’t another man about the place as could have done half as much. You ask Mr Scruby else. Mr Scruby knows, if ere a man in London does. I tell you what it is, Mr Vavasor, them Chelsea fellows, who lives mostly down by the river, ain’t like your Maryboners or Finsburyites.
It wants something of a man to manage them. Don’t it Mr Scruby?’

‘It wants something of a man to manage any of them as far as my experience goes’ said Mr Scruby.

‘Of course it do; and there ain’t one in London knows so much about it as you do, Mr Scruby. I will say that for you. But the long and the short of it is this; – business is business, and money is money’

‘Money is money, certainly’
said Mr Scruby. ‘There’s no doubt in the world about that, Grimes; – and a deal of it you had out of the last election’

‘No, I hadn’t; begging your pardon, Mr Scruby, for making so free. What I had to my own cheek
¹
wasn’t nothing to speak of. I wasn’t paid for my time; that’s what I wasn’t. You look how a publican’s business gets cut up at them elections; – and then the state of the house afterwards!
What would the governor say to me if I was to put down painting inside and out in my little bill?’