第9章

“Good evening, Mr.Hunsden,” muttered I with a bow, and then, like a shy noodle as I was, I began moving away—and why? Simply because Mr.Hunsden was a manufacturer and a millowner, and I was only a clerk, and my instinct propelled me from my superior.I had frequently seen Hunsden in Bigben Close, where he came almost weekly to transact business with Mr.Crimsworth, but I had never spoken to him, nor he to me, and I owed him a sort of involuntary grudge, because he had more than once been the tacit witness of insults offered by Edward to me.I had the conviction that he could only regard me as a poor-spirited slave, wherefore I now went about to shun his presence and eschew his conversation.

“Where are you going?” asked he, as I edged off sideways.I had already noticed that Mr.Hunsden indulged in abrupt forms of speech, and I perversely said to myself—“He thinks he may speak as he likes to a poor clerk; but my mood is not, perhaps, so supple as he deems it, and his rough freedom pleases me not at all.”

I made some slight reply, rather indifferent than courteous, andcontinued to move away.He coolly planted himself in my path.“Stay here awhile,” said he: “it is so hot in the dancing-room;besides, you don’t dance; you have not had a partner to-night.”

He was right, and as he spoke neither his look, tone, nor manner displeased me; my amour-propre was propitiated; he had not addressed me out of condescension, but because, having repaired to the cool dining-room for refreshment, he now wanted some one to talk to, by way of temporary amusement.I hate to be condescended to, but I like well enough to oblige; I stayed.

“That is a good picture,” he continued, recurring to the portrait.

“Do you consider the face pretty?” I asked.

“Pretty! no—how can it be pretty, with sunk eyes and hollow cheeks? but it is peculiar; it seems to think.You could have a talk with that woman, if she were alive, on other subjects than dress, visiting, and compliments.”

I agreed with him, but did not say so.He went on.

“Not that I admire a head of that sort; it wants character and force; there’s too much of the sen-si-tive (so he articulated it, curling his lip at the same time) in that mouth; besides, there is Aristocrat written on the brow and defined in the figure; I hate your aristocrats.”

“You think, then, Mr.Hunsden, that patrician descent may beread in a distinctive cast of form and features?”

“Patrician descent be hanged! Who doubts that your lordlings may have their ‘distinctive cast of form and features’ as much as we —shire tradesmen have ours? But which is the best? Not theirs assuredly.As to their women, it is a little different: they cultivate beauty from childhood upwards, and may by care and training attain to a certain degree of excellence in that point, just like theoriental odalisques.Yet even this superiority is doubtful.Compare the figure in that frame with Mrs.Edward Crimsworth—which is the finer animal?”

Irepliedquietly:“CompareyourselfandMr.EdwardCrimsworth, Mr Hunsden.”

“Oh, Crimsworth is better filled up than I am, I know besides he has a straight nose, arched eyebrows, and all that; but these advantages—if they are advantages—he did not inherit from his mother, the patrician, but from his father, old Crimsworth, who, my father says, was as veritable a —shire blue-dyer as ever put indigo in a vat yet withal the handsomest man in the three Ridings.It is you, William, who are the aristocrat of your family, and you are not as fine a fellow as your plebeian brother by long chalk.”

There was something in Mr.Hunsden’s point-blank mode of speech which rather pleased me than otherwise because it set me at my ease.I continued the conversation with a degree of interest.

“How do you happen to know that I am Mr.Crimsworth’s brother? I thought you and everybody else looked upon me only in the light of a poor clerk.”

“Well, and so we do; and what are you but a poor clerk? You do Crimsworth’s work, and he gives you wages—shabby wages they are, too.”