Part 71

"Well, then, your congratulations, please. I asked her to marry me as we crossed Regent Circus, Oxford Street, on the way home; a hansom came by and scattered and splashed us. Then we came together again, and just opposite Peter Robinson's, she asked me if my mind was quite made up--if I was sure I wouldn't ever change. I swore by the eternal gods, and she said she would be my wife; so there we are, an engaged couple."

I must ask the reader to believe that I was equal to the occasion, and said what I ought to have said.

* * * * *

Mrs. Gibson was happy at last; she was satisfied that Barty was a "gentleman," in spite of the kink in his birth; and as for his prospects, money was a thing that never entered Mrs. Gibson's head, and she loved Barty as a son--was a little bit in love with him herself, I believe; she was not yet forty, and as pretty as she could be.

Besides, a week after, who should call upon her over the shop--there was a private entrance of course--but the Right Honorable Lady Caroline Grey and her niece, Miss Daphne Rohan, granddaughter of the late and niece of the present Marquis of Whitby!

And Mrs. Gibson felt as much at home with them in five minutes as if she'd known them all her life.

Leah was summoned from below, and kissed and congratulated by the two aristocratic relatives of Barty's, and relieved of her shyness in a very short time indeed.

As a matter of fact, Lady Caroline, who knew her nephew well, and thoroughly understood his position, was really well pleased; she had never forgotten her impression of Leah when she met her in the park with Ida and me a year back, and we all walked by the Serpentine together--a certain kind of beauty seems to break down all barriers of rank; and she knew Leah's character both from Barty and me, and from her own native shrewdness of observation. She had been delighted to hear from Barty of Leah's resolute participation in her father's troubles, and in his attempt--so successful through her--to rehabilitate his business. To her old-fashioned aristocratic way of looking at things, there was little to choose between a respectable West End shopkeeper and a medical practitioner or dentist or solicitor or architect--or even an artist, like Barty himself. Once outside the Church, the Army and Navy, or a Government office, what on earth did it matter who or what one was, or wasn't? The only thing she couldn't stand was that horrid form of bourgeois gentility, the pretension to seem something better than you really are. Mrs. Gibson was so naïvely honest in her little laments over her lost grandeur that she could hardly be called vulgar about it.

Mr. Gibson didn't appear; he was overawed, and distrusted himself. I doubt if Lady Caroline would have liked anything in the shape of jocose familiarity; and I fear her naturalness and simplicity and cordiality of manner, and the extreme plainness of her attire, might have put him at his ease almost a trifle too much.

Whether her ladyship would have been so sympathetic about this engagement if Barty had been a legitimate Rohan--say a son of her own--is perhaps to be doubted; but anyhow she had quite made up her mind that Leah was a quite exceptional person, both in mind and manners. She has often said as much to me, and has always had as high a regard for Barty's wife as for any woman she knows, and has still--the Rohans are a long-lived family. She has often told me she never knew a better, sincerer, nobler, or more sensible woman than Barty's wife.

Besides which, as I have been told, the ancient Yorkshire house of Rohan has always been singularly free from aristocratic hauteur; perhaps their religion may have accounted for this, and also their poverty.

This memorable visit, it must be remembered, happened nearly forty years ago, when social demarcations in England were far more rigidly defined than at present; then, the wife of a costermonger with a donkey did not visit the wife of a costermonger who had to wheel his barrow himself.

We are more sensible in these days, as all who like Mr. Chevalier's admirable coster-songs are aware. Old Europe itself has become less tolerant of distinctions of rank; even Austria is becoming so. It is only in southeastern Bulgaria--and even of this I am not absolutely sure--that the navvy who happens to be of noble birth refuses to work in the same gang with the navvy who isn't; and that's what I call real "esprit de corps," without which no aristocracy can ever hope to hold its own in these degenerate days.

Noblesse oblige!

Why, I've got a Lord Arthur in my New York agency, and two Hon'bles in Barge Yard, and another at Cape Town; and devilish good men of business they are, besides being good fellows all round. They hope to become partners some day; and, by Jove! they shall. Now I've said it, I'll stick to it.

The fact is, I'm rather fond of noble lords: why shouldn't I be? I might have been one myself any day these last ten years; I might now, if I chose; but there! Charles Lamb knew a man who wanted to be a tailor once, but hadn't got the spirit. I find I haven't got the spirit to be a noble lord. Even Barty might have been a lord--he, a mere man of letters!--but he refused every honor and distinction that was ever offered to him, either here or abroad--even the Prussian order of Merit!

Alfred Tennyson was a lord, so what is there to make such a fuss about. Give me lords who can't help themselves, because they were born so, and the stupider the better; and the older--for the older they are the grander their manners and the manners of their womankind.

Take, for instance, that splendid old dow, Penelope, Duchess of Rumtifoozleland--I always give nicknames to my grand acquaintances; not that she's particularly old herself, but she belongs to an antiquated order of things that is passing away--for she was a Fitztartan, a daughter of the ducal house of Comtesbois (pronounced County Boyce); and she's very handsome still.

Have you ever been presented to her Grace, O reader?

If so, you must have been struck by the grace of her Grace's manner, as with a ducal gesture and a few courtly words she recognizes the value of whatever immense achievements yours must have been to have procured you such an honor as such an introduction, and expresses her surprise and regret that she has not known you before. The formula is always the same, on every possible occasion. I ought to know, for I've had the honor of being presented to her Grace seven times this year.

Now this lofty forgetting of your poor existence--or mine--is not aristocratic hauteur or patrician insolence; it is bêtise pure et simple, as they call it in France. She was a daughter of the house of Comtesbois, and the Fitztartans were not the inventors of gunpowder, nor was she.

But for a stately, magnificent Grande Dame of the ancient régime, to meet for the seventh time, and be presented to--for the seventh time--with all due ceremony in the midst of a distinguished conservative crowd--say at a ball at Buckingham Palace--give me Penelope, Dowager Duchess of Rumtifoozleland!

(This seems a somewhat uncalled-for digression. But, anyhow, it shows that when it pleases me to do so I move in the very best society--just like Barty Josselin.)

* * * * *

So here was Mr. Nobody of Nowhere taking unto himself a wife from among the daughters of Heth; from the class he had always disliked, the buyers cheap and the sellers dear--whose sole aim in life is the making of money, and who are proud when they succeed and ashamed when they fail--and getting actually fond of his future father and mother in law, as I was!

When I laughed to him about old Gibson--John Gilpin, as we used to call him--being a tradesman, he said:

"Yes; but what an unsuccessful tradesman, my dear fellow!" as if that in itself atoned or made amends for everything.

"Besides, he's Leah's father! And as for Mrs. Gilpin, she's a dear, although she's always on pleasure bent; at all events, she's not of a frugal mind; and she's so pretty and dresses so well--and what a foot!--and she's got such easy manners, too; she reminds me of dear Lady Archibald! that's a mother-in-law I shall get on with.... I wish she didn't make such a fuss about living over the shop; I call that being above one's business in every way."