Читать книгу Dr. Wainwright's Patient. A Novel онлайн

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So on till he arrived at his own house, where he opened the door from the outside, and entering the handsome old dining-room, was surprised to see the table laid for four persons.

"Hallo! what's this?" he said to a woman at the other end of the room with her back towards him. "Who is coming to dinner, Mrs. Stothard?"

"Have you forgotten?" said the woman addressed, without turning her head. "Dr. Wainwright."

"Oh, ah!" growled Captain Derinzy, in a subdued key. "Where's Annette?"

"In her own room."

"Why don't she come down?"

"Because she's heard Dr. Wainwright is expected, and has turned sulky, and won't move."

"Oh, dam!" said Captain Derinzy.

The "Office of H.M. Stannaries" is in a small back street in the neighbourhood of Whitehall. What H.M. Stannaries were was known to but very few of the initiated, and to no "externs" at all. Old Mr. Bult, who, from time immemorial had been the chief-clerk of the office, would, on being interrogated as to the meaning of the word or the duties of his position, take a large pinch of snuff, blow the scattered grains off his beautifully got-up shirt-frill, stare his querist straight in the face, and tell him that "there were certain matters of a departmental character, concerning which it was not considered advisable to involve oneself in communication with the public at large." The younger men were equally reticent. To those who tried to pump them, they replied that they "wrote things, you know; letters, and those kind of things," and "kept accounts." What of? Why, of the Stannaries, of course. But what were the Stannaries? Ah, that was going into a matter of detail which they did not feel themselves justified in explaining. Their ribald friends used to say that the men in the Stannaries Office could not tell you what they had to do, because they did nothing at all, or that they did so little that they were sworn to secrecy on receiving their appointments, lest any inquisitive Radical member, burning to distinguish himself before his constituents in the cause of Civil Service reform--a bray with which the dullest donkey can make himself heard--should rise in the House, and demand an inquiry, or a Parliamentary Commission, or some of those other dreadful inquisitions so loathsome to the official mind.