Mr. Guppy, looking as if he would give his own reddening
and still reddening ears to be one of those people
at present instead of himself, replies, “Sir,
if I attend to my profession and do what is right
by Kenge and Carboy, my friends and acquaintances are
of no consequence to them nor to any member of the
profession, not excepting Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields.
I am not under any obligation to explain myself further;
and with all respect for you, sir, and without offence—I
repeat, without offence—”
“—I don’t intend to do it.”
“Quite so,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn with
a calm nod. “Very good; I see by these
portraits that you take a strong interest in the fashionable
great, sir?”
He addresses this to the astounded Tony, who admits
the soft impeachment.
“A virtue in which few Englishmen are deficient,”
observes Mr. Tulkinghorn. He has been standing
on the hearthstone with his back to the smoked chimney-piece,
and now turns round with his glasses to his eyes.
“Who is this? ‘Lady Dedlock.’
Ha! A very good likeness in its way, but it
wants force of character. Good day to you, gentlemen;
good day!”
When he has walked out, Mr. Guppy, in a great perspiration,
nerves himself to the hasty completion of the taking
down of the Galaxy Gallery, concluding with Lady Dedlock.
“Tony,” he says hurriedly to his astonished
companion, “let us be quick in putting the things
together and in getting out of this place. It
were in vain longer to conceal from you, Tony, that
between myself and one of the members of a swan-like
aristocracy whom I now hold in my hand, there has
been undivulged communication and association.
The time might have been when I might have revealed
it to you. It never will be more. It is
due alike to the oath I have taken, alike to the shattered
idol, and alike to circumstances over which I have
no control, that the whole should be buried in oblivion.
I charge you as a friend, by the interest you have
ever testified in the fashionable intelligence, and
by any little advances with which I may have been
able to accommodate you, so to bury it without a word
of inquiry!”
This charge Mr. Guppy delivers in a state little short
of forensic lunacy, while his friend shows a dazed
mind in his whole head of hair and even in his cultivated
whiskers.
England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks.
Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t
come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to
speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been
no government. It is a mercy that the hostile
meeting between those two great men, which at one time
seemed inevitable, did not come off, because if both
pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle had
killed each other, it is to be presumed that England
