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 learn 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 easychair, 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 reelection 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 clockwork; 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 Arms,’ 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 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 doorbell was again rung. “There’s Scruby,” said George Vavasor, “and now we can go to business.”
Chapter XIII.
Mr Grimes Gets His Odd Money
The 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 the “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