“And has nothing been heard of them since?”
“Well, not exactly, but when they’d been gone about a week the girl got a letter from London, and when she opened it there was no letter or anything, but just a postal order for ’er wages. An’ if you ask me, I call that very ’andsome not to do a poor girl out of her wages.”
I was much more shocked than Mary-Ann. I was a very respectable youth. The reader cannot have failed to observe that I accepted the conventions of my class as if they were the laws of Nature, and though debts on the grand scale in books had seemed to me romantic, and duns and money lenders were familiar figures to my fancy, I could not but think it mean and paltry not to pay the tradesmen’s books. I listened with confusion when people talked in my presence of the Driffields, and when they spoke of them as my friends I said: “Hang it all, I just knew them”; and when they asked: “Weren’t they fearfully common?” I said: “Well, after all they didn’t exactly suggest the Vere de Veres, you know.” Poor Mr. Galloway was dreadfully upset.
“Of course I didn’t think they were wealthy,” he told me, “but I thought they had enough to get along. The house was very nicely furnished and the piano was new. It never struck me that they hadn’t paid for a single thing. They never stinted themselves. What hurts me is the deceit. I used to see quite a lot of them and I thought they liked me. They always made one welcome. You’d hardly believe it, but the last time I saw them when they shook hands with me Mrs. Driffield asked me to come next day and Driffield said: ‘Muffins for tea tomorrow.’ And all the time they had everything packed upstairs and that very night they took the last train to London.”
“What does Lord George say about it?”
“To tell you the truth I haven’t gone out of my way to see him lately. It’s been a lesson to me. There’s a little proverb about evil communications which I’ve thought well to bear in mind.”
I felt very much the same about Lord George, and I was a little nervous, too. If he took it into his head to tell people that at Christmas I had been going to see the Driffields almost every day, and it came to my uncle’s ears, I foresaw an unpleasant fuss. My uncle would accuse me of deceit and prevarication and disobedience and of not behaving like a gentleman, and I did not at the moment see what answer I could make. I knew him well enough to be aware that he would not let the matter drop, and that I should be reminded of my transgression for years. I was just as glad not to see Lord George. But one day I ran into him face to face in the High Street.
“Hulloa, youngster,” he cried, addressing me in a way I particularly resented. “Back for the holidays, I suppose.”
“You suppose quite correctly,” I answered with what I thought withering sarcasm.
Unfortunately he only bellowed with laughter.
“You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself if you don’t look out,” he answered heartily. “Well, it looks as if there was no more whist for you and me just yet. Now you see what comes of living beyond your means. What I always say to my boys is, if you’ve got a pound and you spend nineteen and six you’re a rich man, but if you spend twenty shillings and sixpence you’re a pauper. Look after the pence, young fellow, and the pounds’ll look after themselves.”
But though he spoke after this fashion there was in his voice no note of disapproval, but a bubble of laughter as though in his heart he were tittering at these admirable maxims.
“They say you helped them to bunk,” I remarked.
“Me?” His face assumed a look of extreme surprise, but his eyes glittered with sly mirth. “Why, when they came and told me the Driffields had shot the moon you could have knocked me down with a feather. They owed me four pounds seventeen and six for coal. We’ve all been let in, even poor old Galloway who never got his muffins for tea.”
I had never thought Lord George more blatant. I should have liked to say something final and crushing, but as I could not think of anything I just said that I must be getting along and with a curt nod left him.
XI
Musing thus over the past, while I waited for Alroy Kear, I chuckled when I considered this shabby incident of Edward Driffield’s obscurity in the light of the immense respectability of his later years. I wondered whether it was because, in my boyhood, he was as a writer held in such small esteem by the people about me that I had never been able to see in him the astonishing merit that the best critical opinion eventually ascribed to him. He was for long thought to write very bad English, and indeed he gave you the impression of writing with the stub of a blunt pencil; his style was laboured, an uneasy mixture of the classical and the slangy, and his dialogue was such as could never have issued from the mouth of a human being. Toward the end of his career, when he dictated his books, his style, acquiring a conversational ease, became flowing and limpid; and then the critics, going back to the novels of
