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Page 11
While Mr. Helwyse is still lingering over his toilet, his neighbor the
fiddler, whom he had meant to ask to breakfast, comes out of his room,
violin-box in hand, walks along the passage-way, and is off down
stairs. An odd-looking figure; those stylish clothes become him as
little as they would a long-limbed, angular Egyptian statue. Fashion,
in some men, is an eccentricity, or rather a violence done to their
essential selves. A born fop would have looked as little at home in a
toga and sandals, as did this swarthy musician, doctor, priest, or
whatever he was, in his fashion-plate costume. Then why did he wear
it?
There are other things to be followed up before attending to that
question. But the man is gone, and Balder Helwyse has missed this
opportunity of making his acquaintance. Had he been an hour
earlier,--had any one of us, for that matter, ever been an hour
earlier or later,--who can tell how the destinies of the world would
be affected! Luckily for our peace of mind, the hypothesis involves an
impossibility.
IV.
A BRAHMAN.
Whoever has been in Boston remembers, or has seen, the old Beacon Hill
Bank, which stood, not on Beacon Hill, indeed, but in that part of
School Street now occupied by the City Hall. You passed down by the
dirty old church, on the northeast corner of School and Tremont
Streets, which stands trying to hide its ugly face behind a row of
columns like sooty fingers, and whose School-Street side is quite
bare, and has the distracted aspect peculiar to buildings erected on
an inclined plane;--passing this, you came in sight of the bank, a
darksome, respectable edifice of brick, two stories and a half high,
and gambrel-roofed. It stood a little back from the street, much as an
antiquated aristocrat might withdraw from the stream of modern life,
and fancy himself exclusive. The poor old bank! Its respectable brick
walls have contributed a few rubbish-heaps to the new land in the Back
Bay, perhaps; and its floors and gambrel-roof have long since vanished
up somebody's chimney; only its money--its baser part--still survives
and circulates. Aristocracy and exclusivism do not pay.
The bank, perhaps, took its title from the fact that it owed its chief
support to the Beacon Hill families,--Boston's aristocracy; and
Boston's standard names appeared upon its list of managers. If
business led you that way, you mounted the well-worn steps, and
entered the rather strict and formal door, over which clung the
weather-worn sign,--faded gold lettering upon a rusty black
background. Nothing that met your eyes looked new, although everything
was scrupulously neat. Opposite the doorway, a wooden flight of stairs
mounted to the next floor, where were the offices of some old Puritan
lawyers. Leaving the stairs on your left, you passed down a dusky
passage, and through a glass door, when behold! the banking-room, with
its four grave bald-headed clerks. But you did not come to draw or
deposit, your business was with the President. "Mr. MacGentle in?"
"That way, sir." You opened a door with "Private" painted in black
letters upon its ground-glass panel. Another bald-headed gentleman,
with a grim determination about the mouth, rose up from his table and
barred your way. This was Mr. Dyke, the breakwater against which the
waves of would-be intruders into the inner seclusion often broke
themselves in vain; and unless you had a genuine pass, your expedition
ended there.
Our pass--for we, too, are to call on Mr. MacGentle--would carry us
through solider obstructions than Mr. Dyke; it is the pass of
imagination. He does not even raise his head as we brush by him.
But, first, let us inquire who Mr. MacGentle is, besides President of
the Beacon Hill Bank. He is a man of refinement and cultivation, a
scholar and a reader, has travelled, and, it is said, could handle a
pen to better purpose than the signing bank-notes. In his earlier
years he studied law, and gained a certain degree of distinction in
the profession, although (owing, perhaps, to his having entered it
with too ideal and high-strung views as to its nature and scope) he
never met with what is vulgarly called success. Fortunately for the
ideal barrister, an ample private estate made him independent of
professional earnings. Later in life, he trod the confines of
politics, still, however, enveloping himself in that theoretical,
unpractical atmosphere which was his most marked, and, to some people,
least comprehensible characteristic. A certain mild halo of
statesmanship ever after invested him; not that he had at any time
actually borne a share in the government of the nation, but it was
understood that he might have done so, had he so chosen, or had his
political principles been tough and elastic enough to endure the wear
and strain of action. As it was, some of the most renowned men in the
Senate were known to have been his intimates at college, and he still
met and conversed with them on terms of equality.
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