Read The Nonesuch for Free Online Page B

more than two of them. They were followed by a travelling-carriage, which was later discovered to contain only a couple of soberly-clad servants, and a disappointingly small amount of baggage. It soon became known that Sir Waldo was driving himself from London, by easy stages; and although this accorded, in the main, with the younger gentlemen’s ideas of how a noted whip should travel, easy stages fell tamely on their ears, spoiling visions of some sporting vehicle, slap up to the echo, swirling through the village in a cloud of dust.
    No one of more note than the ostler at the Crown witnessed Sir Waldo’s arrival in Oversett, and his account of this momentous event was discouraging. Instead of a curricle-and-four, which even provincials knew to be the highest kick of fashion, Sir Waldo was driving a phaeton; and so far from swirling through the village he had entered it at a sedate trot, and had pulled up his team outside the Crown, to ask the way to Broom Hall. No, said Tom Ostler, it wasn’t a high-perch phaeton: just an ordinary perch-phaeton, drawn by four proper good ’uns – a bang-up set-out of blood and bone! There was another gentleman with Sir Waldo, and a groom riding behind. Very pleasant-spoken, Sir Waldo, but not at all the regular dash Tom Ostler had been led to expect: he wasn’t rigged out half as fine as Mr Ash, for instance, or even Mr Underhill.
    This was dispiriting, and worse was to follow. The Squire, paying his promised call, was agreeably surprised by Sir Waldo: a circumstance which might please the Squire’s contemporaries but which conjured up in the minds of Mr Underhill, Mr Banningham, and, indeed, Mr Arthur Mickleby as well, a sadly dull picture. No buck of the first head, it was gloomily felt, would have met with the Squire’s approval. Arthur ventured to ask if he was a great swell. ‘How the devil should I know?’ said his father irascibly. ‘He ain’t all daintification, if that’s what you mean.’ He eyed Arthur’s exquisitely starched shirt-points, and the wonderful arrangement of his neckcloth, and added, with awful sarcasm: ‘ You ’ ll cast him quite into the shade! Lord, he’ll be like a farthing-candle held to the sun!’
    To his wife he was rather more forthcoming. Mrs Mickleby was as eager as her son to learn what Sir Waldo was like, and far less easy to snub. Goaded, the Squire said: ‘Fashionable? Nothing of the sort! Turns out in excellent style, and looks the gentleman – which is more than Arthur does, since he took to aping the smarts!’
    ‘Oh, don’t be so provoking!’ exclaimed Mrs Mickleby. ‘My cousin told me he was of the first style of elegance – bang-up to the nines ,he said! You know his droll way!’
    ‘Well, he ain’t bang-up to the nines. Not the kind of man to be cutting a dash amongst a set of quiet folk like us, my dear!’
    Mrs Mickleby opened her mouth to utter a retort, saw the malicious gleam in the Squire’s eye, and shut it again.
    Pleased with this success, the Squire relented. ‘It’s of no use to ask me what sort of coat he was wearing, or how he ties his neckcloth, because I didn’t take any note of such frippery nonsense – which I should have done if he’d been sporting a waistcoat like that Jack-a-dandy one Ash was wearing the last time I saw him! Seemed to me he looked just as he ought. Nothing out of the ordinary!’ He paused, considering the matter. ‘Got a certain sort of something about him,’ he pronounced. ‘ I don’t know what it is! You’d better ask him to dinner, and see for yourself. Told him I hoped he’d come and eat his mutton with us one day.’
    ‘Told him – Mr Mickleby! You did not! Eat his mutton with us – ! Of all the vulgar, shabby-genteel – What did he say?’
    ‘Said he’d be very happy to do so,’ replied the Squire, enjoying his triumph.
    ‘Very civil of him! I shall hope to show him, my dear Ned, that although we may be quiet folk we are not precisely savages !Who is the