“A week, dear father. We shall return home this day week.”
“My dear child,” said Mr. Turveydrop, “let me, even under the present exceptional circumstances, recommend strict punctuality. It is highly important to keep the connexion together; and schools, if at all neglected, are apt to take offence.”
“This day week, father, we shall be sure to be home to dinner.”
“Good!” said Mr. Turveydrop. “You will find fires, my dear Caroline, in your own room, and dinner prepared in my apartment. Yes, yes, Prince!” anticipating some self-denying objection on his son’s part with a great air. “You and our Caroline will be strange in the upper part of the premises and will, therefore, dine that day in my apartment. Now, bless ye!”
They drove away, and whether I wondered most at Mrs. Jellyby or at Mr. Turveydrop, I did not know. Ada and my guardian were in the same condition when we came to talk it over. But before we drove away too, I received a most unexpected and eloquent compliment from Mr. Jellyby. He came up to me in the hall, took both my hands, pressed them earnestly, and opened his mouth twice. I was so sure of his meaning that I said, quite flurried, “You are very welcome, sir. Pray don’t mention it!”
“I hope this marriage is for the best, guardian,” said I when we three were on our road home.
“I hope it is, little woman. Patience. We shall see.”
“Is the wind in the east to-day?” I ventured to ask him.
He laughed heartily and answered, “No.”
“But it must have been this morning, I think,” said I.
He answered “No” again, and this time my dear girl confidently answered “No” too and shook the lovely head which, with its blooming flowers against the golden hair, was like the very spring. “Much YOU know of east winds, my ugly darling,” said I, kissing her in my admiration—I couldn’t help it.
Well! It was only their love for me, I know very well, and it is a long time ago. I must write it even if I rub it out again, because it gives me so much pleasure. They said there could be no east wind where Somebody was; they said that wherever Dame Durden went, there was sunshine and summer air.
I had not been at home again many days when one evening I went upstairs into my own room to take a peep over Charley’s shoulder and see how she was getting on with her copy-book. Writing was a trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash, and sidle into corners like a saddle-donkey. It was very odd to see what old letters Charley’s young hand had made, they so wrinkled, and shrivelled, and tottering, it so plump and round. Yet Charley was uncommonly expert at other things and had as nimble little fingers as I ever watched.
“Well, Charley,” said I, looking over a copy of the letter O in which it was represented as square, triangular, pear-shaped, and collapsed in all kinds of ways, “we are improving. If we only get to make it round, we shall be perfect, Charley.”
Then I made one, and Charley made one, and the pen wouldn’t join Charley’s neatly, but twisted it up into a knot.
“Never mind, Charley. We shall do it in time.”
Charley laid down her pen, the copy being finished, opened and shut her cramped little hand, looked gravely at the page, half in pride and half in doubt, and got up, and dropped me a curtsy.
“Thank you, miss. If you please, miss, did you know a poor person of the name of Jenny?”
“A brickmaker’s wife, Charley? Yes.”
“She came and spoke to me when I was out a little while ago, and said you knew her, miss. She asked me if I wasn’t the young lady’s little maid—meaning you for the young lady, miss—and I said yes, miss.”
“I thought she had left this neighbourhood altogether, Charley.”
“So she had, miss, but she’s come back again to where she used to live—she and Liz. Did you know another poor person of the name of Liz, miss?”
“I think I do, Charley, though not by name.”
“That’s what she said!” returned Charley. “They have both come back, miss, and have been tramping high and low.”
“Tramping high and low, have they, Charley?”
“Yes, miss.” If Charley could only have made the letters in her copy as round as the eyes with which she looked into my face, they would have been excellent. “And this poor person came about the house three or four days, hoping to get a glimpse of you, miss—all she wanted, she said—but you were away. That was when she saw me. She saw me a-going about, miss,” said Charley with a short laugh of the greatest delight and pride, “and she thought I looked like your maid!”
“Did she though, really, Charley?”
“Yes, miss!” said Charley. “Really and truly.” And Charley, with another short laugh of the purest glee, made her eyes very round again and looked as serious as became my maid. I was never tired of seeing Charley in the full enjoyment of that great dignity, standing before me with her youthful face and figure, and her steady manner, and her childish exultation breaking through it now and then in the pleasantest way.
“And where did you see her, Charley?” said I.
My little maid’s countenance fell as she replied, “By the doctor’s shop, miss.” For Charley wore her black frock yet.
I asked if the brickmaker’s wife were ill, but Charley said no. It was some one else. Some one in her cottage who had tramped down to Saint Albans and was tramping he didn’t know where. A poor boy, Charley said. No father, no mother, no any one. “Like as Tom might have been, miss, if Emma and me had died after father,” said Charley, her round eyes filling with tears.
“And she was getting medicine for him, Charley?”
“She said, miss,” returned Charley, “how that he had once done as much for her.”
My little maid’s face was so eager and her quiet hands were folded so closely in one another as she stood looking at me that I had no great difficulty in reading her thoughts. “Well, Charley,” said I, “it appears to me that you and I can do no better than go round to Jenny’s and see what’s the matter.”
The alacrity with which Charley brought my bonnet and veil, and having dressed me, quaintly pinned herself into her warm shawl and made herself look like a little old woman, sufficiently expressed her readiness. So Charley and I, without saying anything to any one, went out.
It was a cold, wild night, and the trees shuddered in the wind. The rain had been thick and heavy all day, and with little intermission for many days. None was falling just then, however. The sky had partly cleared, but was very gloomy—even above us, where a few stars were shining. In the north and north-west, where the sun had set three hours before, there was a pale dead light both beautiful and awful; and into it long sullen lines of cloud waved up like a sea stricken immovable as it was heaving. Towards London a lurid glare overhung the whole dark waste, and the contrast between these two lights, and the fancy which the redder light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on all the unseen buildings of the city and on all the faces of its many thousands of wondering inhabitants, was as solemn as might be.
I had no thought that night—none, I am quite sure—of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since that when we had stopped at the garden-gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then and there that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling with that spot and time and with everything associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill.
It was Saturday night, and most of the people belonging to the place where we were going were drinking elsewhere. We found it quieter than I had previously seen it, though quite as miserable. The kilns were burning, and a stifling vapour set towards us with a pale-blue glare.
We came to the cottage, where there was a feeble candle in the patched window. We tapped at the door and went in. The mother of the little child who had died was sitting in a chair on one side of the poor fire by the bed; and opposite to her, a wretched boy, supported by the chimney-piece, was cowering on the floor. He held under his arm, like a little bundle, a fragment of a fur cap; and as he tried to warm himself, he shook until the crazy door and window shook. The place was closer than before and had an unhealthy and a very peculiar smell.
I had not lifted my veil when I first spoke to the woman, which was at the moment of our going in. The boy staggered up instantly and stared at me with a remarkable expression of surprise and terror.
His action was so quick and my being the cause of it was so evident that I stood still instead of advancing nearer.
“I won’t go no more to the berryin ground,” muttered the boy; “I ain’t a-going there, so I tell you!”
I lifted my veil and spoke to the woman. She said to me in a low voice, “Don’t mind him, ma’am. He’ll soon come back to his head,” and said to him, “Jo, Jo, what’s the matter?”
“I know wot she’s come for!” cried the boy.
“Who?”
“The lady there. She’s come to get me to go along with her to the berryin ground. I won’t go to the berryin ground. I don’t like the name on it. She might go a-berryin ME.” His shivering came on again, and as he leaned against the wall, he shook the hovel.
“He has been talking off and on about such like all day, ma’am,” said Jenny softly. “Why, how you stare! This is MY lady, Jo.”
“Is it?” returned the boy doubtfully, and surveying me with his arm held out above his burning eyes. “She looks to me the t’other one. It ain’t the bonnet, nor yet it ain’t the gownd, but she looks to me the t’other one.”
My little Charley, with her premature experience of illness and trouble, had pulled off her bonnet and shawl and now went quietly up to him with a chair and sat him down in it like an old sick nurse. Except that no such attendant could have shown him Charley’s youthful face, which seemed to engage his confidence.
“I say!” said the boy. “YOU tell me. Ain’t the lady the t’other lady?”
Charley shook her head as she methodically drew his rags about him and made him as warm as she could.
“Oh!” the boy muttered. “Then I s’pose she ain’t.”
“I came to see if I could do you any good,” said I. “What is the matter with you?”
“I’m a-being froze,” returned the boy hoarsely, with his haggard gaze wandering about me, “and then burnt up, and then froze, and then burnt up, ever so many times in a hour. And my head’s all sleepy, and all a-going mad-like—and I’m so dry—and my bones isn’t half so much bones as pain.”
“When did he come here?” I asked the woman.
“This morning, ma’am, I found him at the corner of the town. I had known him up in London yonder. Hadn’t I, Jo?”
“Tom-all-Alone’s,” the boy replied.
Whenever he fixed his attention or his eyes, it was only for a very little while. He soon began to droop his head again, and roll it heavily, and speak as if he were half awake.
“When did he come from London?” I asked.
“I come from London yes’day,” said the boy himself, now flushed and hot. “I’m a-going somewheres.”
“Where is he going?” I asked.
“Somewheres,” repeated the boy in a louder tone. “I have been moved on, and moved on, more nor ever I was afore, since the t’other one give me the sov’ring. Mrs. Snagsby, she’s always a-watching, and a-driving of me—what have I done to her?—and they’re all a-watching and a-driving of me. Every one of ’em’s doing of it, from the time when I don’t get up, to the time when I don’t go to bed. And I’m a-going somewheres. That’s where I’m a-going. She told me, down in Tom-all-Alone’s, as she came from Stolbuns, and so I took the Stolbuns Road. It’s as good as another.”
He always concluded by addressing Charley.
“What is to be done with him?” said I, taking the woman aside. “He could not travel in this state even if he had a purpose and knew where he was going!”
“I know no more, ma’am, than the dead,” she replied, glancing compassionately at him. “Perhaps the dead know better, if they could only tell us. I’ve kept him here all day for pity’s sake, and I’ve given him broth and physic, and Liz has gone to try if any one will take him in (here’s my pretty in the bed—her child, but I call it mine); but I can’t keep him long, for if my husband was to come home and find him here, he’d be rough in putting him out and might do him a hurt. Hark! Here comes Liz back!”
The other woman came hurriedly in as she spoke, and the boy got up with a half-obscured sense that he was expected to be going. When the little child awoke, and when and how Charley got at it, took it out of bed, and began to walk about hushing it, I don’t know. There she was, doing all this in a quiet motherly manner as if she were living in Mrs. Blinder’s attic with Tom and Emma again.
The friend had been here and there, and had been played about from hand to hand, and had come back as she went. At first it was too early for the boy to be received into the proper refuge, and at last it was too late. One official sent her to another, and the other sent her back again to the first, and so backward and forward, until it appeared to me as if both must have been appointed for their skill in evading their duties instead of performing them. And now, after all, she said, breathing quickly, for she had been running and was frightened too, “Jenny, your master’s on the road home, and mine’s not far behind, and the Lord help the boy, for we can do no more for him!” They put a few halfpence together and hurried them into his hand, and so, in an oblivious, half-thankful, half-insensible way, he shuffled out of the house.
“Give me the child, my dear,” said its mother to Charley, “and thank you kindly too! Jenny, woman dear, good night! Young lady, if my master don’t fall out with me, I’ll look down by the kiln by and by, where the boy will be most like, and again in the morning!” She hurried off, and presently we passed her hushing and singing to her child at her own door and looking anxiously along the road for her drunken husband.
I was afraid of staying then to speak to either woman, lest I should bring her into trouble. But I said to Charley that we must not leave the boy to die. Charley, who knew what to do much better than I did, and whose quickness equalled her presence of mind, glided on before me, and presently we came up with Jo, just short of the brick-kiln.
I think he must have begun his journey with some small bundle under his arm and must have had it stolen or lost it. For he still carried his wretched fragment of fur cap like a bundle, though he went bare-headed through the rain, which now fell fast. He stopped when we called to him and again showed a dread of me when I came up, standing with his lustrous eyes fixed upon me, and even arrested in his shivering fit.
I asked him to come with us, and we would take care that he had some shelter for the night.
“I don’t want no shelter,” he said; “I can lay amongst the warm bricks.”
“But don’t you know that people die there?” replied Charley.
“They dies everywheres,” said the boy. “They dies in their lodgings—she knows where; I showed her—and they dies down in Tom-all-Alone’s in heaps. They dies more than they lives, according to what I see.” Then he hoarsely whispered Charley, “If she ain’t the t’other one, she ain’t the forrenner. Is there THREE of ’em then?”
Charley looked at me a little frightened. I felt half frightened at myself when the boy glared on me so.
But he turned and followed when I beckoned to him, and finding that he acknowledged that influence in me, I led the way straight home. It was not far, only at the summit of the hill. We passed but one man. I doubted if we should have got home without assistance, the boy’s steps were so uncertain and tremulous. He made no complaint, however, and was strangely unconcerned about himself, if I may say so strange a thing.
Leaving him in the hall for a moment, shrunk into the corner of the window-seat and staring with an indifference that scarcely could be called wonder at the comfort and brightness about him, I went into the drawing-room to speak to my guardian. There I found Mr. Skimpole, who had come down by the coach, as he frequently did without notice, and never bringing any clothes with him, but always borrowing everything he wanted.
They came out with me directly to look at the boy. The servants had gathered in the hall too, and he shivered in the window-seat with Charley standing by him, like some wounded animal that had been found in a ditch.
“This is a sorrowful case,” said my guardian after asking him a question or two and touching him and examining his eyes. “What do you say, Harold?”
“You had better turn him out,” said Mr. Skimpole.
“What do you mean?” inquired my guardian, almost sternly.
“My dear Jarndyce,” said Mr. Skimpole, “you know what I am: I am a child. Be cross to me if I deserve it. But I have a constitutional objection to this sort of thing. I always had, when I was a medical man. He’s not safe, you know. There’s a very bad sort of fever about him.”
Mr. Skimpole had retreated from the hall to the drawing-room again and said this in his airy way, seated on the music-stool as we stood by.
“You’ll say it’s childish,” observed Mr. Skimpole, looking gaily at us. “Well, I dare say it may be; but I AM a child, and I never pretend to be anything else. If you put him out in the road, you only put him where he was before. He will be no worse off than he was, you know. Even make him better off, if you like. Give him sixpence, or five shillings, or five pound ten—you are arithmeticians, and I am not—and get rid of him!”
“And what is he to do then?” asked my guardian.
“Upon my life,” said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his engaging smile, “I have not the least idea what he is to do then. But I have no doubt he’ll do it.”
“Now, is it not a horrible reflection,” said my guardian, to whom I had hastily explained the unavailing efforts of the two women, “is it not a horrible reflection,” walking up and down and rumpling his hair, “that if this wretched creature were a convicted prisoner, his hospital would be wide open to him, and he would be as well taken care of as any sick boy in the kingdom?”
“My dear Jarndyce,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “you’ll pardon the simplicity of the question, coming as it does from a creature who is perfectly simple in worldly matters, but why ISN’T he a prisoner then?”
My guardian stopped and looked at him with a whimsical mixture of amusement and indignation in his face.
“Our young friend is not to be suspected of any delicacy, I should imagine,” said Mr. Skimpole, unabashed and candid. “It seems to me that it would be wiser, as well as in a certain kind of way more respectable, if he showed some misdirected energy that got him into prison. There would be more of an adventurous spirit in it, and consequently more of a certain sort of poetry.”
“I believe,” returned my guardian, resuming his uneasy walk, “that there is not such another child on earth as yourself.”
“Do you really?” said Mr. Skimpole. “I dare say! But I confess I don’t see why our young friend, in his degree, should not seek to invest himself with such poetry as is open to him. He is no doubt born with an appetite—probably, when he is in a safer state of health, he has an excellent appetite. Very well. At our young friend’s natural dinner hour, most likely about noon, our young friend says in effect to society, ‘I am hungry; will you have the goodness to produce your spoon and feed me?’ Society, which has taken upon itself the general arrangement of the whole system of spoons and professes to have a spoon for our young friend, does NOT produce that spoon; and our young friend, therefore, says ‘You really must excuse me if I seize it.’ Now, this appears to me a case of misdirected energy, which has a certain amount of reason in it and a certain amount of romance; and I don’t know but what I should be more interested in our young friend, as an illustration of such a case, than merely as a poor vagabond—which any one can be.”
“In the meantime,” I ventured to observe, “he is getting worse.”
“In the meantime,” said Mr. Skimpole cheerfully, “as Miss Summerson, with her practical good sense, observes, he is getting worse. Therefore I recommend your turning him out before he gets still worse.”
The amiable face with which he said it, I think I shall never forget.
“Of course, little woman,” observed my guardian, turning to me, “I can ensure his admission into the proper place by merely going there to enforce it, though it’s a bad state of things when, in his condition, that is necessary. But it’s growing late, and is a very bad night, and the boy is worn out already. There is a bed in the wholesome loft-room by the stable; we had better keep him there till morning, when he can be wrapped up and removed. We’ll do that.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Skimpole, with his hands upon the keys of the piano as we moved away. “Are you going back to our young friend?”
“Yes,” said my guardian.
“How I envy you your constitution, Jarndyce!” returned Mr. Skimpole with playful admiration. “You don’t mind these things; neither does Miss Summerson. You are ready at all times to go anywhere, and do anything. Such is will! I have no will at all—and no won’t—simply can’t.”
“You can’t recommend anything for the boy, I suppose?” said my guardian, looking back over his shoulder half angrily; only half angrily, for he never seemed to consider Mr. Skimpole an accountable being.
“My dear Jarndyce, I observed a bottle of cooling medicine in his pocket, and it’s impossible for him to do better than take it. You can tell them to sprinkle a little vinegar about the place where he sleeps and to keep it moderately cool and him moderately warm. But it is mere impertinence in me to offer any recommendation. Miss Summerson has such a knowledge of detail and such a capacity for the administration of detail that she knows all about it.”
We went back into the hall and explained to Jo what we proposed to do, which Charley explained to him again and which he received with the languid unconcern I had already noticed, wearily looking on at what was done as if it were for somebody else. The servants compassionating his miserable state and being very anxious to help, we soon got the loft-room ready; and some of the men about the house carried him across the wet yard, well wrapped up. It was pleasant to observe how kind they were to him and how there appeared to be a general impression among them that frequently calling him “Old Chap” was likely to revive his spirits. Charley directed the operations and went to and fro between the loft-room and the house with such little stimulants and comforts as we thought it safe to give him. My guardian himself saw him before he was left for the night and reported to me when he returned to the growlery to write a letter on the boy’s behalf, which a messenger was charged to deliver at day-light in the morning, that he seemed easier and inclined to sleep. They had fastened his door on the outside, he said, in case of his being delirious, but had so arranged that he could not make any noise without being heard.
Ada being in our room with a cold, Mr. Skimpole was left alone all this time and entertained himself by playing snatches of pathetic airs and sometimes singing to them (as we heard at a distance) with great expression and feeling. When we rejoined him in the drawing-room he said he would give us a little ballad which had come into his head “apropos of our young friend,” and he sang one about a peasant boy,
“Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam,Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home.”
“Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam,Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home.”
quite exquisitely. It was a song that always made him cry, he told us.
He was extremely gay all the rest of the evening, for he absolutely chirped—those were his delighted words—when he thought by what a happy talent for business he was surrounded. He gave us, in his glass of negus, “Better health to our young friend!” and supposed and gaily pursued the case of his being reserved like Whittington to become Lord Mayor of London. In that event, no doubt, he would establish the Jarndyce Institution and the Summerson Almshouses, and a little annual Corporation Pilgrimage to St. Albans. He had no doubt, he said, that our young friend was an excellent boy in his way, but his way was not the Harold Skimpole way; what Harold Skimpole was, Harold Skimpole had found himself, to his considerable surprise, when he first made his own acquaintance; he had accepted himself with all his failings and had thought it sound philosophy to make the best of the bargain; and he hoped we would do the same.
Charley’s last report was that the boy was quiet. I could see, from my window, the lantern they had left him burning quietly; and I went to bed very happy to think that he was sheltered.
There was more movement and more talking than usual a little before daybreak, and it awoke me. As I was dressing, I looked out of my window and asked one of our men who had been among the active sympathizers last night whether there was anything wrong about the house. The lantern was still burning in the loft-window.
“It’s the boy, miss,” said he.
“Is he worse?” I inquired.
“Gone, miss.”
“Dead!”
“Dead, miss? No. Gone clean off.”
At what time of the night he had gone, or how, or why, it seemed hopeless ever to divine. The door remaining as it had been left, and the lantern standing in the window, it could only be supposed that he had got out by a trap in the floor which communicated with an empty cart-house below. But he had shut it down again, if that were so; and it looked as if it had not been raised. Nothing of any kind was missing. On this fact being clearly ascertained, we all yielded to the painful belief that delirium had come upon him in the night and that, allured by some imaginary object or pursued by some imaginary horror, he had strayed away in that worse than helpless state; all of us, that is to say, but Mr. Skimpole, who repeatedly suggested, in his usual easy light style, that it had occurred to our young friend that he was not a safe inmate, having a bad kind of fever upon him, and that he had with great natural politeness taken himself off.
Every possible inquiry was made, and every place was searched. The brick-kilns were examined, the cottages were visited, the two women were particularly questioned, but they knew nothing of him, and nobody could doubt that their wonder was genuine. The weather had for some time been too wet and the night itself had been too wet to admit of any tracing by footsteps. Hedge and ditch, and wall, and rick and stack, were examined by our men for a long distance round, lest the boy should be lying in such a place insensible or dead; but nothing was seen to indicate that he had ever been near. From the time when he was left in the loft-room, he vanished.
The search continued for five days. I do not mean that it ceased even then, but that my attention was then diverted into a current very memorable to me.
As Charley was at her writing again in my room in the evening, and as I sat opposite to her at work, I felt the table tremble. Looking up, I saw my little maid shivering from head to foot.
“Charley,” said I, “are you so cold?”
“I think I am, miss,” she replied. “I don’t know what it is. I can’t hold myself still. I felt so yesterday at about this same time, miss. Don’t be uneasy, I think I’m ill.”
I heard Ada’s voice outside, and I hurried to the door of communication between my room and our pretty sitting-room, and locked it. Just in time, for she tapped at it while my hand was yet upon the key.
Ada called to me to let her in, but I said, “Not now, my dearest. Go away. There’s nothing the matter; I will come to you presently.” Ah! It was a long, long time before my darling girl and I were companions again.
Charley fell ill. In twelve hours she was very ill. I moved her to my room, and laid her in my bed, and sat down quietly to nurse her. I told my guardian all about it, and why I felt it was necessary that I should seclude myself, and my reason for not seeing my darling above all. At first she came very often to the door, and called to me, and even reproached me with sobs and tears; but I wrote her a long letter saying that she made me anxious and unhappy and imploring her, as she loved me and wished my mind to be at peace, to come no nearer than the garden. After that she came beneath the window even oftener than she had come to the door, and if I had learnt to love her dear sweet voice before when we were hardly ever apart, how did I learn to love it then, when I stood behind the window-curtain listening and replying, but not so much as looking out! How did I learn to love it afterwards, when the harder time came!
They put a bed for me in our sitting-room; and by keeping the door wide open, I turned the two rooms into one, now that Ada had vacated that part of the house, and kept them always fresh and airy. There was not a servant in or about the house but was so good that they would all most gladly have come to me at any hour of the day or night without the least fear or unwillingness, but I thought it best to choose one worthy woman who was never to see Ada and whom I could trust to come and go with all precaution. Through her means I got out to take the air with my guardian when there was no fear of meeting Ada, and wanted for nothing in the way of attendance, any more than in any other respect.
And thus poor Charley sickened and grew worse, and fell into heavy danger of death, and lay severely ill for many a long round of day and night. So patient she was, so uncomplaining, and inspired by such a gentle fortitude that very often as I sat by Charley holding her head in my arms—repose would come to her, so, when it would come to her in no other attitude—I silently prayed to our Father in heaven that I might not forget the lesson which this little sister taught me.
I was very sorrowful to think that Charley’s pretty looks would change and be disfigured, even if she recovered—she was such a child with her dimpled face—but that thought was, for the greater part, lost in her greater peril. When she was at the worst, and her mind rambled again to the cares of her father’s sick bed and the little children, she still knew me so far as that she would be quiet in my arms when she could lie quiet nowhere else, and murmur out the wanderings of her mind less restlessly. At those times I used to think, how should I ever tell the two remaining babies that the baby who had learned of her faithful heart to be a mother to them in their need was dead!
There were other times when Charley knew me well and talked to me, telling me that she sent her love to Tom and Emma and that she was sure Tom would grow up to be a good man. At those times Charley would speak to me of what she had read to her father as well as she could to comfort him, of that young man carried out to be buried who was the only son of his mother and she was a widow, of the ruler’s daughter raised up by the gracious hand upon her bed of death. And Charley told me that when her father died she had kneeled down and prayed in her first sorrow that he likewise might be raised up and given back to his poor children, and that if she should never get better and should die too, she thought it likely that it might come into Tom’s mind to offer the same prayer for her. Then would I show Tom how these people of old days had been brought back to life on earth, only that we might know our hope to be restored to heaven!
But of all the various times there were in Charley’s illness, there was not one when she lost the gentle qualities I have spoken of. And there were many, many when I thought in the night of the last high belief in the watching angel, and the last higher trust in God, on the part of her poor despised father.
And Charley did not die. She flutteringly and slowly turned the dangerous point, after long lingering there, and then began to mend. The hope that never had been given, from the first, of Charley being in outward appearance Charley any more soon began to be encouraged; and even that prospered, and I saw her growing into her old childish likeness again.
It was a great morning when I could tell Ada all this as she stood out in the garden; and it was a great evening when Charley and I at last took tea together in the next room. But on that same evening, I felt that I was stricken cold.
Happily for both of us, it was not until Charley was safe in bed again and placidly asleep that I began to think the contagion of her illness was upon me. I had been able easily to hide what I felt at tea-time, but I was past that already now, and I knew that I was rapidly following in Charley’s steps.
I was well enough, however, to be up early in the morning, and to return my darling’s cheerful blessing from the garden, and to talk with her as long as usual. But I was not free from an impression that I had been walking about the two rooms in the night, a little beside myself, though knowing where I was; and I felt confused at times—with a curious sense of fullness, as if I were becoming too large altogether.
In the evening I was so much worse that I resolved to prepare Charley, with which view I said, “You’re getting quite strong, Charley, are you not?”
“Oh, quite!” said Charley.
“Strong enough to be told a secret, I think, Charley?”
“Quite strong enough for that, miss!” cried Charley. But Charley’s face fell in the height of her delight, for she saw the secret in MY face; and she came out of the great chair, and fell upon my bosom, and said “Oh, miss, it’s my doing! It’s my doing!” and a great deal more out of the fullness of her grateful heart.
“Now, Charley,” said I after letting her go on for a little while, “if I am to be ill, my great trust, humanly speaking, is in you. And unless you are as quiet and composed for me as you always were for yourself, you can never fulfil it, Charley.”
“If you’ll let me cry a little longer, miss,” said Charley. “Oh, my dear, my dear! If you’ll only let me cry a little longer. Oh, my dear!”—how affectionately and devotedly she poured this out as she clung to my neck, I never can remember without tears—“I’ll be good.”
So I let Charley cry a little longer, and it did us both good.
“Trust in me now, if you please, miss,” said Charley quietly. “I am listening to everything you say.”
“It’s very little at present, Charley. I shall tell your doctor to-night that I don’t think I am well and that you are going to nurse me.”
For that the poor child thanked me with her whole heart. “And in the morning, when you hear Miss Ada in the garden, if I should not be quite able to go to the window-curtain as usual, do you go, Charley, and say I am asleep—that I have rather tired myself, and am asleep. At all times keep the room as I have kept it, Charley, and let no one come.”
Charley promised, and I lay down, for I was very heavy. I saw the doctor that night and asked the favour of him that I wished to ask relative to his saying nothing of my illness in the house as yet. I have a very indistinct remembrance of that night melting into day, and of day melting into night again; but I was just able on the first morning to get to the window and speak to my darling.
On the second morning I heard her dear voice—Oh, how dear now!—outside; and I asked Charley, with some difficulty (speech being painful to me), to go and say I was asleep. I heard her answer softly, “Don’t disturb her, Charley, for the world!”
“How does my own Pride look, Charley?” I inquired.
“Disappointed, miss,” said Charley, peeping through the curtain.
“But I know she is very beautiful this morning.”
“She is indeed, miss,” answered Charley, peeping. “Still looking up at the window.”
With her blue clear eyes, God bless them, always loveliest when raised like that!
I called Charley to me and gave her her last charge.
“Now, Charley, when she knows I am ill, she will try to make her way into the room. Keep her out, Charley, if you love me truly, to the last! Charley, if you let her in but once, only to look upon me for one moment as I lie here, I shall die.”
“I never will! I never will!” she promised me.
“I believe it, my dear Charley. And now come and sit beside me for a little while, and touch me with your hand. For I cannot see you, Charley; I am blind.”
It is night in Lincoln’s Inn—perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law, where suitors generally find but little day—and fat candles are snuffed out in offices, and clerks have rattled down the crazy wooden stairs and dispersed. The bell that rings at nine o’clock has ceased its doleful clangour about nothing; the gates are shut; and the night-porter, a solemn warder with a mighty power of sleep, keeps guard in his lodge. From tiers of staircase windows clogged lamps like the eyes of Equity, bleared Argus with a fathomless pocket for every eye and an eye upon it, dimly blink at the stars. In dirty upper casements, here and there, hazy little patches of candlelight reveal where some wise draughtsman and conveyancer yet toils for the entanglement of real estate in meshes of sheep-skin, in the average ratio of about a dozen of sheep to an acre of land. Over which bee-like industry these benefactors of their species linger yet, though office-hours be past, that they may give, for every day, some good account at last.
In the neighbouring court, where the Lord Chancellor of the rag and bottle shop dwells, there is a general tendency towards beer and supper. Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, whose respective sons, engaged with a circle of acquaintance in the game of hide and seek, have been lying in ambush about the by-ways of Chancery Lane for some hours and scouring the plain of the same thoroughfare to the confusion of passengers—Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins have but now exchanged congratulations on the children being abed, and they still linger on a door-step over a few parting words. Mr. Krook and his lodger, and the fact of Mr. Krook’s being “continually in liquor,” and the testamentary prospects of the young man are, as usual, the staple of their conversation. But they have something to say, likewise, of the Harmonic Meeting at the Sol’s Arms, where the sound of the piano through the partly opened windows jingles out into the court, and where Little Swills, after keeping the lovers of harmony in a roar like a very Yorick, may now be heard taking the gruff line in a concerted piece and sentimentally adjuring his friends and patrons to “Listen, listen, listen, tew the wa-ter fall!” Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper compare opinions on the subject of the young lady of professional celebrity who assists at the Harmonic Meetings and who has a space to herself in the manuscript announcement in the window, Mrs. Perkins possessing information that she has been married a year and a half, though announced as Miss M. Melvilleson, the noted siren, and that her baby is clandestinely conveyed to the Sol’s Arms every night to receive its natural nourishment during the entertainments. “Sooner than which, myself,” says Mrs. Perkins, “I would get my living by selling lucifers.” Mrs. Piper, as in duty bound, is of the same opinion, holding that a private station is better than public applause, and thanking heaven for her own (and, by implication, Mrs. Perkins’) respectability. By this time the pot-boy of the Sol’s Arms appearing with her supper-pint well frothed, Mrs. Piper accepts that tankard and retires indoors, first giving a fair good night to Mrs. Perkins, who has had her own pint in her hand ever since it was fetched from the same hostelry by young Perkins before he was sent to bed. Now there is a sound of putting up shop-shutters in the court and a smell as of the smoking of pipes; and shooting stars are seen in upper windows, further indicating retirement to rest. Now, too, the policeman begins to push at doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles; and to administer his beat, on the hypothesis that every one is either robbing or being robbed.
It is a close night, though the damp cold is searching too, and there is a laggard mist a little way up in the air. It is a fine steaming night to turn the slaughter-houses, the unwholesome trades, the sewerage, bad water, and burial-grounds to account, and give the registrar of deaths some extra business. It may be something in the air—there is plenty in it—or it may be something in himself that is in fault; but Mr. Weevle, otherwise Jobling, is very ill at ease. He comes and goes between his own room and the open street door twenty times an hour. He has been doing so ever since it fell dark. Since the Chancellor shut up his shop, which he did very early to-night, Mr. Weevle has been down and up, and down and up (with a cheap tight velvet skull-cap on his head, making his whiskers look out of all proportion), oftener than before.
It is no phenomenon that Mr. Snagsby should be ill at ease too, for he always is so, more or less, under the oppressive influence of the secret that is upon him. Impelled by the mystery of which he is a partaker and yet in which he is not a sharer, Mr. Snagsby haunts what seems to be its fountain-head—the rag and bottle shop in the court. It has an irresistible attraction for him. Even now, coming round by the Sol’s Arms with the intention of passing down the court, and out at the Chancery Lane end, and so terminating his unpremeditated after-supper stroll of ten minutes’ long from his own door and back again, Mr. Snagsby approaches.
“What, Mr. Weevle?” says the stationer, stopping to speak. “Are YOU there?”
“Aye!” says Weevle, “Here I am, Mr. Snagsby.”
“Airing yourself, as I am doing, before you go to bed?” the stationer inquires.
“Why, there’s not much air to be got here; and what there is, is not very freshening,” Weevle answers, glancing up and down the court.
“Very true, sir. Don’t you observe,” says Mr. Snagsby, pausing to sniff and taste the air a little, “don’t you observe, Mr. Weevle, that you’re—not to put too fine a point upon it—that you’re rather greasy here, sir?”
“Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place to-night,” Mr. Weevle rejoins. “I suppose it’s chops at the Sol’s Arms.”
“Chops, do you think? Oh! Chops, eh?” Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again. “Well, sir, I suppose it is. But I should say their cook at the Sol wanted a little looking after. She has been burning ’em, sir! And I don’t think”—Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again and then spits and wipes his mouth—“I don’t think—not to put too fine a point upon it—that they were quite fresh when they were shown the gridiron.”
“That’s very likely. It’s a tainting sort of weather.”
“It IS a tainting sort of weather,” says Mr. Snagsby, “and I find it sinking to the spirits.”
“By George! I find it gives me the horrors,” returns Mr. Weevle.
“Then, you see, you live in a lonesome way, and in a lonesome room, with a black circumstance hanging over it,” says Mr. Snagsby, looking in past the other’s shoulder along the dark passage and then falling back a step to look up at the house. “I couldn’t live in that room alone, as you do, sir. I should get so fidgety and worried of an evening, sometimes, that I should be driven to come to the door and stand here sooner than sit there. But then it’s very true that you didn’t see, in your room, what I saw there. That makes a difference.”
“I know quite enough about it,” returns Tony.
“It’s not agreeable, is it?” pursues Mr. Snagsby, coughing his cough of mild persuasion behind his hand. “Mr. Krook ought to consider it in the rent. I hope he does, I am sure.”
“I hope he does,” says Tony. “But I doubt it.”
“You find the rent too high, do you, sir?” returns the stationer. “Rents ARE high about here. I don’t know how it is exactly, but the law seems to put things up in price. Not,” adds Mr. Snagsby with his apologetic cough, “that I mean to say a word against the profession I get my living by.”
Mr. Weevle again glances up and down the court and then looks at the stationer. Mr. Snagsby, blankly catching his eye, looks upward for a star or so and coughs a cough expressive of not exactly seeing his way out of this conversation.
“It’s a curious fact, sir,” he observes, slowly rubbing his hands, “that he should havebeen—”
“Who’s he?” interrupts Mr. Weevle.
“The deceased, you know,” says Mr. Snagsby, twitching his head and right eyebrow towards the staircase and tapping his acquaintance on the button.
“Ah, to be sure!” returns the other as if he were not over-fond of the subject. “I thought we had done with him.”
“I was only going to say it’s a curious fact, sir, that he should have come and lived here, and been one of my writers, and then that you should come and live here, and be one of my writers too. Which there is nothing derogatory, but far from it in the appellation,” says Mr. Snagsby, breaking off with a mistrust that he may have unpolitely asserted a kind of proprietorship in Mr. Weevle, “because I have known writers that have gone into brewers’ houses and done really very respectable indeed. Eminently respectable, sir,” adds Mr. Snagsby with a misgiving that he has not improved the matter.
“It’s a curious coincidence, as you say,” answers Weevle, once more glancing up and down the court.
“Seems a fate in it, don’t there?” suggests the stationer.
“There does.”
“Just so,” observes the stationer with his confirmatory cough. “Quite a fate in it. Quite a fate. Well, Mr. Weevle, I am afraid I must bid you good night”—Mr. Snagsby speaks as if it made him desolate to go, though he has been casting about for any means of escape ever since he stopped to speak—“my little woman will be looking for me else. Good night, sir!”
If Mr. Snagsby hastens home to save his little woman the trouble of looking for him, he might set his mind at rest on that score. His little woman has had her eye upon him round the Sol’s Arms all this time and now glides after him with a pocket handkerchief wrapped over her head, honouring Mr. Weevle and his doorway with a searching glance as she goes past.
“You’ll know me again, ma’am, at all events,” says Mr. Weevle to himself; “and I can’t compliment you on your appearance, whoever you are, with your head tied up in a bundle. Is this fellow NEVER coming!”
This fellow approaches as he speaks. Mr. Weevle softly holds up his finger, and draws him into the passage, and closes the street door. Then they go upstairs, Mr. Weevle heavily, and Mr. Guppy (for it is he) very lightly indeed. When they are shut into the back room, they speak low.
“I thought you had gone to Jericho at least instead of coming here,” says Tony.
“Why, I said about ten.”
“You said about ten,” Tony repeats. “Yes, so you did say about ten. But according to my count, it’s ten times ten—it’s a hundred o’clock. I never had such a night in my life!”
“What has been the matter?”
“That’s it!” says Tony. “Nothing has been the matter. But here have I been stewing and fuming in this jolly old crib till I have had the horrors falling on me as thick as hail. THERE’S a blessed-looking candle!” says Tony, pointing to the heavily burning taper on his table with a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.
“That’s easily improved,” Mr. Guppy observes as he takes the snuffers in hand.
“IS it?” returns his friend. “Not so easily as you think. It has been smouldering like that ever since it was lighted.”
“Why, what’s the matter with you, Tony?” inquires Mr. Guppy, looking at him, snuffers in hand, as he sits down with his elbow on the table.
“William Guppy,” replies the other, “I am in the downs. It’s this unbearably dull, suicidal room—and old Boguey downstairs, I suppose.” Mr. Weevle moodily pushes the snuffers-tray from him with his elbow, leans his head on his hand, puts his feet on the fender, and looks at the fire. Mr. Guppy, observing him, slightly tosses his head and sits down on the other side of the table in an easy attitude.
“Wasn’t that Snagsby talking to you, Tony?”
“Yes, and he—yes, it was Snagsby,” said Mr. Weevle, altering the construction of his sentence.
“On business?”
“No. No business. He was only sauntering by and stopped to prose.”
“I thought it was Snagsby,” says Mr. Guppy, “and thought it as well that he shouldn’t see me, so I waited till he was gone.”
“There we go again, William G.!” cried Tony, looking up for an instant. “So mysterious and secret! By George, if we were going to commit a murder, we couldn’t have more mystery about it!”
Mr. Guppy affects to smile, and with the view of changing the conversation, looks with an admiration, real or pretended, round the room at the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, terminating his survey with the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the mantelshelf, in which she is represented on a terrace, with a pedestal upon the terrace, and a vase upon the pedestal, and her shawl upon the vase, and a prodigious piece of fur upon the shawl, and her arm on the prodigious piece of fur, and a bracelet on her arm.
“That’s very like Lady Dedlock,” says Mr. Guppy. “It’s a speaking likeness.”
“I wish it was,” growls Tony, without changing his position. “I should have some fashionable conversation, here, then.”
Finding by this time that his friend is not to be wheedled into a more sociable humour, Mr. Guppy puts about upon the ill-used tack and remonstrates with him.
“Tony,” says he, “I can make allowances for lowness of spirits, for no man knows what it is when it does come upon a man better than I do, and no man perhaps has a better right to know it than a man who has an unrequited image imprinted on his ’eart. But there are bounds to these things when an unoffending party is in question, and I will acknowledge to you, Tony, that I don’t think your manner on the present occasion is hospitable or quite gentlemanly.”
“This is strong language, William Guppy,” returns Mr. Weevle.
“Sir, it may be,” retorts Mr. William Guppy, “but I feel strongly when I use it.”
Mr. Weevle admits that he has been wrong and begs Mr. William Guppy to think no more about it. Mr. William Guppy, however, having got the advantage, cannot quite release it without a little more injured remonstrance.
“No! Dash it, Tony,” says that gentleman, “you really ought to be careful how you wound the feelings of a man who has an unrequited image imprinted on his ’eart and who is NOT altogether happy in those chords which vibrate to the tenderest emotions. You, Tony, possess in yourself all that is calculated to charm the eye and allure the taste. It is not—happily for you, perhaps, and I may wish that I could say the same—it is not your character to hover around one flower. The ole garden is open to you, and your airy pinions carry you through it. Still, Tony, far be it from me, I am sure, to wound even your feelings without a cause!”
Tony again entreats that the subject may be no longer pursued, saying emphatically, “William Guppy, drop it!” Mr. Guppy acquiesces, with the reply, “I never should have taken it up, Tony, of my own accord.”
“And now,” says Tony, stirring the fire, “touching this same bundle of letters. Isn’t it an extraordinary thing of Krook to have appointed twelve o’clock to-night to hand ’em over to me?”
“Very. What did he do it for?”
“What does he do anything for? HE don’t know. Said to-day was his birthday and he’d hand ’em over to-night at twelve o’clock. He’ll have drunk himself blind by that time. He has been at it all day.”
“He hasn’t forgotten the appointment, I hope?”
“Forgotten? Trust him for that. He never forgets anything. I saw him to-night, about eight—helped him to shut up his shop—and he had got the letters then in his hairy cap. He pulled it off and showed ’em me. When the shop was closed, he took them out of his cap, hung his cap on the chair-back, and stood turning them over before the fire. I heard him a little while afterwards, through the floor here, humming like the wind, the only song he knows—about Bibo, and old Charon, and Bibo being drunk when he died, or something or other. He has been as quiet since as an old rat asleep in his hole.”
“And you are to go down at twelve?”
“At twelve. And as I tell you, when you came it seemed to me a hundred.”
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy after considering a little with his legs crossed, “he can’t read yet, can he?”
“Read! He’ll never read. He can make all the letters separately, and he knows most of them separately when he sees them; he has got on that much, under me; but he can’t put them together. He’s too old to acquire the knack of it now—and too drunk.”
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, “how do you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?”
“He never spelt it out. You know what a curious power of eye he has and how he has been used to employ himself in copying things by eye alone. He imitated it, evidently from the direction of a letter, and asked me what it meant.”
“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs again, “should you say that the original was a man’s writing or a woman’s?”
“A woman’s. Fifty to one a lady’s—slopes a good deal, and the end of the letter ‘n,’ long and hasty.”
Mr. Guppy has been biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue, generally changing the thumb when he has changed the cross leg. As he is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve. It takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast.
“Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is there a chimney on fire?”
“Chimney on fire!”
“Ah!” returns Mr. Guppy. “See how the soot’s falling. See here, on my arm! See again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won’t blow off—smears like black fat!”
They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs. Comes back and says it’s all right and all quiet, and quotes the remark he lately made to Mr. Snagsby about their cooking chops at the Sol’s Arms.
“And it was then,” resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their conversation before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the table, with their heads very near together, “that he told you of his having taken the bundle of letters from his lodger’s portmanteau?”
“That was the time, sir,” answers Tony, faintly adjusting his whiskers. “Whereupon I wrote a line to my dear boy, the Honourable William Guppy, informing him of the appointment for to-night and advising him not to call before, Boguey being a slyboots.”
The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually assumed by Mr. Weevle sits so ill upon him to-night that he abandons that and his whiskers together, and after looking over his shoulder, appears to yield himself up a prey to the horrors again.
“You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare, and to get yourself into a position to tell him all about them. That’s the arrangement, isn’t it, Tony?” asks Mr. Guppy, anxiously biting his thumb-nail.
“You can’t speak too low. Yes. That’s what he and I agreed.”
“I tell you what, Tony—”
“You can’t speak too low,” says Tony once more. Mr. Guppy nods his sagacious head, advances it yet closer, and drops into a whisper.
“I tell you what. The first thing to be done is to make another packet like the real one so that if he should ask to see the real one while it’s in my possession, you can show him the dummy.”
“And suppose he detects the dummy as soon as he sees it, which with his biting screw of an eye is about five hundred times more likely than not,” suggests Tony.
“Then we’ll face it out. They don’t belong to him, and they never did. You found that, and you placed them in my hands—a legal friend of yours—for security. If he forces us to it, they’ll be producible, won’t they?”
“Ye-es,” is Mr. Weevle’s reluctant admission.
“Why, Tony,” remonstrates his friend, “how you look! You don’t doubt William Guppy? You don’t suspect any harm?”
“I don’t suspect anything more than I know, William,” returns the other gravely.
“And what do you know?” urges Mr. Guppy, raising his voice a little; but on his friend’s once more warning him, “I tell you, you can’t speak too low,” he repeats his question without any sound at all, forming with his lips only the words, “What do you know?”
“I know three things. First, I know that here we are whispering in secrecy, a pair of conspirators.”
“Well!” says Mr. Guppy. “And we had better be that than a pair of noodles, which we should be if we were doing anything else, for it’s the only way of doing what we want to do. Secondly?”
“Secondly, it’s not made out to me how it’s likely to be profitable, after all.”
Mr. Guppy casts up his eyes at the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the mantelshelf and replies, “Tony, you are asked to leave that to the honour of your friend. Besides its being calculated to serve that friend in those chords of the human mind which—which need not be called into agonizing vibration on the present occasion—your friend is no fool. What’s that?”
“It’s eleven o’clock striking by the bell of Saint Paul’s. Listen and you’ll hear all the bells in the city jangling.”
Both sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant, resounding from towers of various heights, in tones more various than their situations. When these at length cease, all seems more mysterious and quiet than before. One disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound—strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow. So sensitive the two friends happen to be that the air is full of these phantoms, and the two look over their shoulders by one consent to see that the door is shut.
“Yes, Tony?” says Mr. Guppy, drawing nearer to the fire and biting his unsteady thumb-nail. “You were going to say, thirdly?”
“It’s far from a pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in the room where he died, especially when you happen to live in it.”
“But we are plotting nothing against him, Tony.”
“May be not, still I don’t like it. Live here by yourself and see how YOU like it.”
“As to dead men, Tony,” proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading this proposal, “there have been dead men in most rooms.”
“I know there have, but in most rooms you let them alone, and—and they let you alone,” Tony answers.
The two look at each other again. Mr. Guppy makes a hurried remark to the effect that they may be doing the deceased a service, that he hopes so. There is an oppressive blank until Mr. Weevle, by stirring the fire suddenly, makes Mr. Guppy start as if his heart had been stirred instead.
“Fah! Here’s more of this hateful soot hanging about,” says he. “Let us open the window a bit and get a mouthful of air. It’s too close.”
He raises the sash, and they both rest on the window-sill, half in and half out of the room. The neighbouring houses are too near to admit of their seeing any sky without craning their necks and looking up, but lights in frowsy windows here and there, and the rolling of distant carriages, and the new expression that there is of the stir of men, they find to be comfortable. Mr. Guppy, noiselessly tapping on the window-sill, resumes his whispering in quite a light-comedy tone.
“By the by, Tony, don’t forget old Smallweed,” meaning the younger of that name. “I have not let him into this, you know. That grandfather of his is too keen by half. It runs in the family.”
“I remember,” says Tony. “I am up to all that.”
“And as to Krook,” resumes Mr. Guppy. “Now, do you suppose he really has got hold of any other papers of importance, as he has boasted to you, since you have been such allies?”
Tony shakes his head. “I don’t know. Can’t imagine. If we get through this business without rousing his suspicions, I shall be better informed, no doubt. How can I know without seeing them, when he don’t know himself? He is always spelling out words from them, and chalking them over the table and the shop-wall, and asking what this is and what that is; but his whole stock from beginning to end may easily be the waste-paper he bought it as, for anything I can say. It’s a monomania with him to think he is possessed of documents. He has been going to learn to read them this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from what he tells me.”
“How did he first come by that idea, though? That’s the question,” Mr. Guppy suggests with one eye shut, after a little forensic meditation. “He may have found papers in something he bought, where papers were not supposed to be, and may have got it into his shrewd head from the manner and place of their concealment that they are worth something.”
“Or he may have been taken in, in some pretended bargain. Or he may have been muddled altogether by long staring at whatever he HAS got, and by drink, and by hanging about the Lord Chancellor’s Court and hearing of documents for ever,” returns Mr. Weevle.
Mr. Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and balancing all these possibilities in his mind, continues thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, until he hastily draws his hand away.
“What, in the devil’s name,” he says, “is this! Look at my fingers!”
A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder.
“What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out of window?”
“I pouring out of window! Nothing, I swear! Never, since I have been here!” cries the lodger.
And yet look here—and look here! When he brings the candle here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps away down the bricks, here lies in a little thick nauseous pool.
“This is a horrible house,” says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window. “Give me some water or I shall cut my hand off.”
He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells, and washes, that he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy and stood silently before the fire when Saint Paul’s bell strikes twelve and all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in the dark air, and in their many tones. When all is quiet again, the lodger says, “It’s the appointed time at last. Shall I go?”
Mr. Guppy nods and gives him a “lucky touch” on the back, but not with the washed hand, though it is his right hand.
He goes downstairs, and Mr. Guppy tries to compose himself before the fire for waiting a long time. But in no more than a minute or two the stairs creak and Tony comes swiftly back.
“Have you got them?”
“Got them! No. The old man’s not there.”
He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval that his terror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him and asks loudly, “What’s the matter?”
“I couldn’t make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there—and the soot is there, and the oil is there—and he is not there!” Tony ends this with a groan.
Mr. Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has retreated close to it and stands snarling, not at them, at something on the ground before the fire. There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as usual. On one chair-back hang the old man’s hairy cap and coat.
“Look!” whispers the lodger, pointing his friend’s attention to these objects with a trembling finger. “I told you so. When I saw him last, he took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old letters, hung his cap on the back of the chair—his coat was there already, for he had pulled that off before he went to put the shutters up—and I left him turning the letters over in his hand, standing just where that crumbled black thing is upon the floor.”
Is he hanging somewhere? They look up. No.
“See!” whispers Tony. “At the foot of the same chair there lies a dirty bit of thin red cord that they tie up pens with. That went round the letters. He undid it slowly, leering and laughing at me, before he began to turn them over, and threw it there. I saw it fall.”
“What’s the matter with the cat?” says Mr. Guppy. “Look at her!”
“Mad, I think. And no wonder in this evil place.”
They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light.
Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is—is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? Oh, horror, he IS here! And this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.
Help, help, help! Come into this house for heaven’s sake! Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all lord chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.