Part 3

For the protection of the fruits of his first hobby, his second had come into play. In his youth, when the choice of a trade or profession had been offered to him by his father—also an auctioneer with a large business—he had elected to be a mechanical engineer. He had accordingly been apprenticed to an eminent firm, and had gone through the drudgery exacted from all, without distinction of class or means, who enter that profession, in which there is no royal road to learning. He had developed such ingenuity and ability, that there would have been no difficulty about a future partnership, when his father died suddenly. It was highly advisable that the business, a large and lucrative one, should be carried on. Young Cross, with that decision of character which marked him through life, instantly determined to abandon engineering and adopt his father’s trade, which prospered in his hands until it reached its present dimensions. But he never wasted anything; and he turned his mechanical knowledge and skill to such purpose by way of recreation, that amongst other sources of wealth he was the owner of several valuable patents of his own invention. He had a small workshop and forge fitted up in the rear of his house, and here he was accustomed often to occupy himself in the evening and early morning. It was his only amusement; for of books he was wont to say, and believe, that they were but the brains of other men, and of little use to a man who had brains of his own.

His next proceedings will show how he had turned his mechanical genius to account for the safe keeping of his diamonds. Any person opening the drawers in the nest would have found them full of old papers, and would also have found that they would not come entirely out of their places. Opening, however, the third drawer from the top, the auctioneer pulled at it strongly, until it came out with a sharp snap, exposing the opening into which it fitted. The back of this drawer was a movable flap, working on hinges, and retained in its place by a powerful spring, so that it required a considerable exertion of strength to extract the drawer from the nest. Putting his hand into the aperture, Mr Cross grasped an iron semicircular handle which fitted into a niche in the wall at the back of the drawers, and drew it towards him. As he did so, the seeming picture glided noiselessly away, leaving its frame surrounding a dark opening. Through this he passed into what was in effect a huge inner safe; a closet about four feet square by six in height, lined throughout with inch-thick steel, and within that again with four inches of fire-resisting composition contained in an iron skin. The sliding door was steel, very thick and massive, fastening with half-a-dozen spring catches, moving in a groove four inches in depth, and absolutely impervious to any one not acquainted with the machinery.

Every portion of this latter apparatus had been devised and constructed by the auctioneer with his own hands, and placed in position by him after the safe—made to his order by a famous maker—had been set up. The rest was a mere matter of stone-masonry, completed by ordinary workmen under his own eye; so that the secret was with him alone. Even now the whole has not been revealed. Prior to withdrawing the semicircular handle, it was necessary to turn it to the right, from a perpendicular to a horizontal position. Unless this were done, the act of pulling out the handle set in motion a clockwork apparatus, which at the end of thirty seconds released a heavy counterpoise, the effect of which was to close the sliding door of the inner safe smartly, and to throw out of gear the machinery which worked it. It could then only be opened by means of a second mechanical arrangement, connected with another handle which was concealed behind a block of stone in the wall near the roof. It is evident that any person entering the safe after opening the door, unless in possession of the second part of this secret, would be effectually trapped. His comrades, if any, would be unable to deliver him, and he would have to abide an ignominious capture. This device the auctioneer considered superior to any system of spring-guns or such-like vulgarities, which are almost as likely to injure the owner as the thief. Against each side of the safe were piled ordinary deed-boxes, containing the various securities representing the bulk of his fortune; but against the side opposite to the door was an iron box weighing perhaps five hundredweight, and clamped firmly to the floor.

The auctioneer knelt down, and with a small key fastened to the handle of the larger one, opened the box, disclosing a number of jewel-trays. As he lifted them out one after the other, the light of the lantern twinkled upon the rare and valuable gems, of all sizes and shapes, which lay loose upon the satin cushions. He looked at them long and earnestly, counting them over and over again, and flashing the more precious of them to and fro against the light.

‘Ay!’ he muttered—‘all for her—for little Amy. What use in them now? It’s all over—all over and done with for ever.’ But again came the thought that if Amy were to become a widow, she might wear the diamonds after all.

He closed and locked the box, rose from his knees, and went back to the nest of drawers outside. As he forced the handle into its place, the picture reappeared, and the sliding-door shut to with a click. Pushing back the movable flap, he insinuated the drawer into its place, replaced the papers taken from it, and closed it. Then, closing the inner strong-door, he stepped again into the street, shutting the outer door after him; and having satisfied himself that it was securely closed, went into the house and to bed, where he slept heavily, being quite tired out, until nearly ten o’clock in the morning.

* * * * *

Despite his vigils of the night before, Mr Cross was tolerably punctual to his eleven o’clock appointment at the rooms occupied by Captain Ferrard and his wife in Duke Street. That gentleman received him with smooth looks and fair words, for it was by no means his cue to be the first to quarrel. So he courteously hoped that Mr Cross was well, invited him to a seat, making no allusion to the fact that this was the first time they had met since the marriage, and then left his visitor to state the reason of his call.

‘I’m a plain business man, sir,’ said the auctioneer after a moment or two; ‘and I’ve got little time to spare, so I’ll come to the point at once. It seems, from what my daughter told me last night, that you and she don’t get on quite so well together as you should.’

‘Ay, ay!’ said the captain carelessly. The demon within him was being aroused. He had not the slightest intention of allowing this tradesman to lecture him. The latter waited for some further remark, but none came.

‘That isn’t as it should be between man and wife, you know,’ said he at last, somewhat nonplussed.

‘I’ll be as plain with you, Mr Cross, as you can possibly be with me,’ said the captain, turning round suddenly so as to face his visitor. ‘My wife has been complaining to you, it seems. Well, I suppose we have our trifling disagreements, like other couples, and scarcity of money does not tend to sweeten the temper—does it? I quite agree with you that this is not as it should be; but then, how few things are! Am I to suppose that it is only on this subject that you wish to speak to me?’

‘Don’t be hasty,’ replied Mr Cross. ‘I’m not saying it’s your fault, nor anybody’s fault. I come to you in a friendly way, not to have words about it. I’ve been thinking the matter over a good deal since last night, and I’ve come to fancy things might somehow be arranged between us, after all.’

Ferrard pricked up his ears. ‘Very good of you to say so,’ he said politely.

‘I don’t say that I’ve quite thought it out, and I don’t say what I will do, you understand, or what I won’t. But no doubt there’s a good deal of truth in your remark about money and temper. I’m a rough, cross-grained sort of fellow, and perhaps I may have been too quick over this affair. I’m afraid I wasn’t too civil to you that day; and you must own _you_ were a bit aggravating too. I only want my girl to be happy.’

‘I assure you, Mr Cross,’ said the captain, with engaging frankness, ‘that in that respect we are entirely at one. I have every desire for your daughter’s happiness—and, I may add, for my own; of course, in a secondary degree. But I have already pointed out to you, and you have been good enough to agree with me, that good temper and easy circumstances are intimately allied; and I think you will also admit that bad temper and happiness are entirely incompatible. And considering our respective tastes and habits, five hundred a year can scarcely be considered affluence.’

For all his desire to be conciliatory, he could not entirely repress the slight sneer which pervaded his tone and manner.

The auctioneer looked steadily and gravely at him as he replied: ‘I daresay we shall find some way of getting rid of the inconvenience, sir. But I’m due in the City long before this, so I’ll only say that I hope we shall be better acquainted, and we can’t be that without seeing more of one another. What do you say to a bit of dinner at my house on Thursday and staying the night? Then you and I can talk this little matter over by ourselves, between man and man. I’m going out of town for a week on Friday; and if you don’t mind, I’ll arrange for Amy to meet me at London Bridge and keep me company—she looks as if a whiff of the sea wouldn’t hurt her—and then, you know, you could think over any proposal I might make to you, alone and quietly; and tell me what you say to it, when we come back.’

The captain’s heart leaped within him at these proposals. Pressing claims were at this moment hanging over him, which it seemed that he might now be able to meet. He could ask no fairer opportunity for captivating his father-in-law and so turning his dearth into plenty. So he responded to the invitation with great heartiness, professed himself delighted at the prospect of so pleasant a trip for his wife; and they shook hands and parted.

Mr Cross stood on the doorstep for a moment, deep in thought. His mind sadly misgave him. He mistrusted his power of dealing with this cool, sarcastic, easy-mannered vagabond, as he would have dealt with one of his own class. He shook his head as he walked away. If the man would but die!

That night, feeling weary and worn out, he thought he would indulge in a little tinkering of some sort in his workshop—to him a never-failing source of relaxation. For some time past he had been engaged in making a duplicate set of keys for the doors of the strong-room and the iron box which held the diamonds, as a useful precaution in case the originals should be lost or mislaid. So, after dinner, he put on his leathern apron and again set to work, pipe in mouth. When he had finished the work, he paid the usual evening visit to his diamonds, using the new keys. With a touch or two of the small file which he carried in his hand, he found that they fitted perfectly.

Amy had been the same day to her father in the City, all anxiety to learn the result of the interview, as her husband declined to tell her anything. Mr Cross had, as we know, but little to tell; he could only bid her, as before, keep a good heart, and it would all come right. He informed her of the arrangements which had been made for Thursday and Friday next, named the hour at which she was to meet him at London Bridge, and sent her away a little perplexed, but rejoicing greatly at the prospect of the trip, and trusting implicitly in her father’s wisdom.

THE ART OF CONVERSATION.

Certain things are supposed to come by the grace of nature and the free gift of providence; and the Art of Conversation is one of them. No one dreams of cultivating this art, either in its perfected form or in those rudiments which stand as a ‘grammar in use for beginners;’ that is—correct diction, just expression, that inflection of the voice which shall be eloquent without being theatrical, and that emphasis which shall be indicative without being exaggerated. People drawl out their words into long tails or clip them into docked stumps; they loop them on to the other with a running chain of ‘_er_s,’ or they bite them off short, each word falling plumb and isolated, disconnected from all the rest; they let their labials go by the board, and bury their _r_s in the recesses of their larynx; they throw the accent on the wrong syllable, and transform their vowels according to their liking; they say ‘wuz’ for ‘was,’ ‘onnibus’ for ‘omnibus,’ and ‘y’ are’ for ‘you are;’ they shoulder out all the middle aspirates and some of the initial, and forget that words ending in ‘ing’ have a final _g_ which is neither to be burked out of existence nor hardened into a ringing _k_. All which lingual misdemeanours they commit with a clear conscience and a light heart, because ignorant that they have committed any misdemeanour at all.

Even people of birth and breeding, who should be without offence in those matters, fail in their grammar, and say the queerest things in the world. ‘These sort of things;’ ‘Who have you asked?’ ‘Every one of them know you;’ ‘Between you and I;’ ‘Neither men or women;’ ‘No one’ as the antecedent, and ‘they’ as the relative—these are just a few of the commonest errors of daily speech of which no one is ashamed, and to which were you to make a formal objection, you would be thought a pedant for your pains, and laughed at when your back was turned. If these things are done in the green tree of method, what may not be looked for in the dry of substance? And sure it is that we find very queer things indeed in that dry of substance, and prove for ourselves how the Art of Conversation is reduced to its primitive elements, which few give themselves the trouble to embellish, and fewer still to perfect.

To begin at the beginning, how seldom people pay undivided attention to the conversation on hand, and how often their thoughts wander and stray everywhere but where they should be! The most absurd, the most trivial, thing distracts them. A spider on the wall breaks the thread of an enthralling narrative, and a butterfly on the lawn breaks into the gravest, or the most poetic, talk as ruthlessly as the proverbial bull smashes into the proverbial china-shop. Another alumnus in the same school, though of a different class, will not let you speak without interruption. Like a cockerel, spurring and springing at its brother, this kind dashes at you with an answer before you have half stated your case. ‘You mean this?’ he says, performing that feat called ‘taking the words out of your mouth.’ And forthwith he begins his refutation of that which you have not said and probably had no intention of saying. Another will not wait until you have finished. His words cross and intermingle with yours in hopeless confusion of both sound and sense. You both speak together, and neither listens to the other—you, because you ‘have the floor,’ and he, because he wishes to have it. Conversation with such is impossible. It is a battle of words—mere words—like a heap of loose stones shot pell-mell out of a cart; and not that orderly interchange of ideas which is what true conversation should be.

Others, cousins-german to these, interfere in talk with which they have no business. They do not join in; thus enlarging the basis and enriching the superstructure; but they break in with something quite irrelevant, destroying the most interesting discussion on the most puerile pretence, as a feather whisk might knock down a Sèvres vase. This form of bad-breeding is much in use among women when they are jealous, and want to make themselves unpleasant to each other. The poet or the lord, the bishop or the general, that grand name or this great fortune—the man who is the feminine cynosure and whose attention confers distinction—is talking to some one singled out from the rest. He has to be detached and made to transfer himself. Accordingly, one of the boldest of the discontented outsiders goes up to the charge, and in the midst of a talk on literature, art, politics, on his travels or her experiences, cuts in with a question about the next flower-show or the last murder; with Who? What? When? How? no nearer to the subject on hand than the moon is near to Middlesex. This is an offence of daily occurrence, even among well-bred people—human nature having the ugly trick of breaking out of the delicate swaddling-clothes in which education and refinement would fain confine it.

Sometimes your interlocutor is a mother abnormally occupied with her children, and unable for two consecutive minutes to free her thoughts from the petty details of their lives. She does not even pretend to listen to what you are saying. All the time you are speaking, her eyes are wandering about the room, to make sure that Tom is not forgetting his manners, and that Jane is not making holes in hers—that Frank is where he should be, and Sarah not where she should not be—that Edith is not talking too much, and that Charley is not talking too little: it does not matter what she is anxious about, seeing that if it be not one thing it will be another. And you need not be offended, nor take her inattention as a slight special to yourself. The Golden-mouthed himself could not fix her thoughts, wandering as they always are over the pathless spaces of her maternal fear. She is one of the most disagreeable of the whole tribe of the conversational awkward-squad. You have nothing for it but to stop dead—in the midst of a sentence, if need be—until she has brought her roving eyes back to the point which presupposes attention, and appears to be conscious that you are speaking to her.

Others yawn in your face with frank and undisguised weariness; and some put up the transparent screen of a fan or two fingers; others, again, make that constrained grimace which accompanies the eating and the swallowing of the yawn, and think that their sudden gulp and hesitation will pass unobserved. Some give wrong answers, with their eyes fixed on yours, as if listening devoutly to all you say, and absorbed in your conversation. They have mastered this part of the form, and can look as if drinking in to the last verbal drop. The reality is analogous to that condition of Baron Münchhausen’s horse with which we are all familiar, and which we express by the phrase: ‘Going in at one ear and out by another.’ One who had learned this art of looking attention without giving it, once fell into a pit whence was no possible extraction. ‘Do you call gentlemen in England It?’ said an English-speaking German who thought his sweet companion had been entirely interested in his talk. Her eyes—and what eyes they were!—had been all he could desire—fixed, listening, interested. Meanwhile, her ears had been occupied elsewhere. At her back, on the ottoman where she was sitting, was being carried on a conversation in which she was deeply interested. Before her sat her German, labouring heavily among the stiff clay-clods of his imperfect English. Her answer to his remark betrayed the absence of the mind underneath all the steadfastness of her bewildering eyes. ‘Do you call gentlemen in England It?’ he repeated with mingled reproach, sorrow, and—enlightenment. That random answer to his previous question cost her the offer of a spray of orange blossom—and him the pain of its refusal.

Beyond these rudiments comes the higher art reaching into grace, and needing enlightened intelligence for its perfection. The section which we have been considering belongs only to the grammar, the beginning, the mere infancy of things, like the New Zealander’s tattoo for personal decoration, or his hideous idol for representative art. Beyond the good-breeding of attention comes the supreme art, we had almost said the science of conversation—of all things the most difficult, to judge by its rarity at least in England. It is more common in France, where it is better understood, and where a good conversationalist is prized as a Master in his own degree. And be it observed—a good conversationalist is not the same thing as a good anecdotist, a good debater, a good talker—this last too often sinning with Coleridge in monopolising all the talk to himself, and granting only some ‘brilliant flashes of silence’ wherein the ruck may have their innings. A good conversationalist, on the contrary, is essentially reciprocal. He flings his own ball, but he catches the return and waits for its throw. He has a light touch, and that kind of skill which glances off rather than hits fair and square. He has also the power of suggestiveness and direction, as perfect in its way as the skill with which certain adepts can make a ball wind in and out of stumps and stakes by the clever twist of their first throw off. He is not one of those who run a subject to earth and finish it all the same as one would finish a fox; but he keeps it alive and going with the neatest, deftest, little fillips possible—as the Japanese keep up their paper butterflies with airy puffs of their flimsy fans, or as a thaumaturgist guides his spinning-plates with the tip of his forefinger. When it is all over, and you ask yourself what you have got by it, you are forced to confess, Nothing. You have been superficially amused, and for the moment interested; but you have learned nothing, and are no richer mentally than you were before the verbal butterfly began to flutter and the wordy plate to spin.

We in England, however, know but little of this kind of talk. We have men who argue, and men who assert; and we have men, and women too, who come down with a thud on the toes of all whom they encounter in the various walks of conversation. But of the light bright thrust and parry, the brilliant quarte and tierce, the flashing ‘pinked’ and quick _riposte_ characteristic of the palmy days of Parisian society, we have but very little. For foils we use bludgeons; for paper butterflies, leaden bullets. We are too much in earnest to be graceful, and too anxious about our subject to be careful of our method. Hence we have better dialecticians than conversationalists, and better fighters than fencers. But really, say, at a dinner, or in the crowded corners of a fashionable soirée, you cannot go into the mazes of ‘evidences,’ nor discuss the value of esoteric Buddhism, nor yet winnow your sheaf of political economy, beginning with Adam Smith and ending with Henry George. You can only play with words and toss up airy bubbles of ideas. And he who can play with most dexterity, and whose airy bubbles have the brightest iridescence, is the hero of the moment and the master of the situation.

As a rule, authors are but dull dogs in conversation. They keep their good things for their books. Those who expect in literary society the feast of reason and the flow of soul, find themselves for the most part wofully disappointed. More is to be got out of the amateurist set—that fringe which would be if it could, and which hangs on to the main body as the best thing it can do in the circumstances. But authors of the professional and bread-winning class will talk only of things already known, repeating what they have written, but taking care not to forestall what they have not yet printed. They, and all professionals of any denomination whatsoever, are also given to talk shop among themselves; and shop is usually disagreeable to the outsider.