Mr. Riley Gives His Advice Concerning a School for
Tom
The gentleman in the ample white cravat and shirt-frill,
taking his brandy-and-water so pleasantly with his
good friend Tulliver, is Mr. Riley, a gentleman with
a waxen complexion and fat hands, rather highly educated
for an auctioneer and appraiser, but large-hearted
enough to show a great deal of bonhomie toward
simple country acquaintances of hospitable habits.
Mr. Riley spoke of such acquaintances kindly as “people
of the old school.”
The conversation had come to a pause. Mr. Tulliver,
not without a particular reason, had abstained from
a seventh recital of the cool retort by which Riley
had shown himself too many for Dix, and how Wakem
had had his comb cut for once in his life, now the
business of the dam had been settled by arbitration,
and how there never would have been any dispute at
all about the height of water if everybody was what
they should be, and Old Harry hadn’t made the
lawyers.
Mr. Tulliver was, on the whole, a man of safe traditional
opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted
to his unassisted intellect, and had arrived at several
questionable conclusions; amongst the rest, that rats,
weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry.
Unhappily he had no one to tell him that this was
rampant Manichaeism, else he might have seen his error.
But to-day it was clear that the good principle was
triumphant: this affair of the water-power had
been a tangled business somehow, for all it seemed—look
at it one way—as plain as water’s
water; but, big a puzzle as it was, it hadn’t
got the better of Riley. Mr. Tulliver took his
brandy-and-water a little stronger than usual, and,
for a man who might be supposed to have a few hundreds
lying idle at his banker’s, was rather incautiously
open in expressing his high estimate of his friend’s
business talents.
But the dam was a subject of conversation that would
keep; it could always be taken up again at the same
point, and exactly in the same condition; and there
was another subject, as you know, on which Mr. Tulliver
was in pressing want of Mr. Riley’s advice.
This was his particular reason for remaining silent
for a short space after his last draught, and rubbing
his knees in a meditative manner. He was not
a man to make an abrupt transition. This was a
puzzling world, as he often said, and if you drive
your wagon in a hurry, you may light on an awkward
corner. Mr. Riley, meanwhile, was not impatient.
Why should he be? Even Hotspur, one would think,
must have been patient in his slippers on a warm hearth,
taking copious snuff, and sipping gratuitous brandy-and-water.
“There’s a thing I’ve got i’
my head,” said Mr. Tulliver at last, in rather
a lower tone than usual, as he turned his head and
looked steadfastly at his companion.
“Ah!” said Mr. Riley, in a tone of mild
interest. He was a man with heavy waxen eyelids
and high-arched eyebrows, looking exactly the same
under all circumstances. This immovability of
face, and the habit of taking a pinch of snuff before
he gave an answer, made him trebly oracular to Mr.
Tulliver.
