THE WHITE HORSE.—COMROGUES.—MOERDYK.—GEORGE CONFIDES IN THE CHEAP
JACK—WITH RESERVATION.
WHEN the Cheap Jack’s horse came to the brow of the hill, it stopped, and
with drooping neck stood still as before. The Cheap Jack was busy with
George, and it was at no word from him that the poor beast paused. It
knew at what point to wait, and it waited. There was little temptation
to go on. The road down the hill had just been mended with flints; some
of these were the size of an average turnip, and the hill was steep. So
the old horse poked out his nose, and stood almost dozing, till the sound
of the Cheap Jack’s shuffling footsteps caused him to prick his ears, and
brace his muscles for a fresh start.
The miller’s man came also, who was sulky, whilst the Cheap Jack was
civil. He gave his horse a cut across the knees, to remind him to plant
his feet carefully among the sharp boulders; and then, choosing a smooth
bit by the side of the road, he and George went forward together.
“You’ve took to picters, I see,” said George, nodding towards the cart.
“So I have, my dear,” said the Cheap Jack; “any thing for a livelihood;
an _honest_ livelihood, you know, George.” And he winked at the miller’s
man, who relaxed his sulkiness for a guffaw.
“_You’ve_ had so little in my way lately, George,” the hunchback
continued, looking sharply sideways up at his companion. “Sly business
has been slack, my dear, eh?”
But George made no answer, and the Cheap Jack, after relieving his
feelings by another cut at the horse, changed the subject.
“That’s a sharp little brat of the miller’s,” said he, alluding to Jan.
“And he ain’t much like the others. Old-fashioned, too. Children mostly
likes the gay picters, and worrits their mothers for ’em, bless ’em! But
he picked out an ancient-looking thing,—came from a bankrupt pawnshop, my
dear, in a lot. I almost think I let it go too cheap; but that’s my
failing. And a beggarly place like this ain’t like London. In London
there’s a place for every thing, my dear, and shops for old goods as well
as new, and customers too; and the older and dirtier some things is, the
more they fetches.”
There was a pause, for George did not speak; and the Cheap Jack, bent
upon amiability, repeated his remark,—“A sharp little brat, too!”
“What be ’ee harping on about him for?” asked George, suspiciously. “I
knows what I knows about un, but that’s no business of yours.”
“You know about most things, my dear,” said the Cheap Jack, flatteringly.
“They’ll have to get up very early that catch you napping. But what
about the child, George?”
“Never you mind,” said George. “But he ain’t none of the miller’s, I’ll
tell ’ee that; and he ain’t the missus’s neither.”
“What is he to _you_, my dear?” asked the dwarf, curiously, and, getting
no answer, he went on: “He’d be useful in a good many lines. He’d not do
bad in a circus, but he’d draw prime as a young prodigy.”
George looked round, “You be thinking of stealing _he_ then, as well as”—
“Hush, my dear,” said the dwarf. “No, no, I don’t want him. But there
was a good deal of snatching young kids done in my young days; for
sweeps, destitute orphans, juvenile performers, and so on.”
“_He_ wouldn’t suit you,” grinned George. “A comes of genteel folk, and
a’s not hard enough for how you’d treat un.”
“You’re out there, George,” said the dwarf. “Human beings is like
’osses; it’s the genteelest as stands the most. ’Specially if they’ve
been well fed when they was babies.”
At this point the Cheap Jack was interrupted by his horse stumbling over
a huge, jagged lump of flint, that, with the rest of the road-mending,
was a disgrace to a highway of a civilized country. A rate-payer or a
horse-keeper might have been excused for losing his temper with the
authorities of the road-mending department; but the Cheap Jack’s wrath
fell upon his horse. He beat him over the knees for stumbling, and
across the hind legs for slipping, and over his face for wincing, and
accompanied his blows with a torrent of abuse.
What a moment that must have been for Balaam’s ass, in which she found
voice to remonstrate against the unjust blows, which have, nevertheless,
fallen pretty thickly ever since upon her descendants and their
fellow-servants of ungrateful man! From how many patient eyes that old
reproach, of long service ill-requited, yet speaks almost as plainly as
the voice that “rebuked the madness of the prophet!”
The Cheap Jack’s white horse had a point of resemblance to the “genteel
human beings” of whom he had been speaking. It had “come of a good
stock,” and had seen better and kinder days; and to it, also, in its
misfortunes, there remained that nobility of spirit which rises in
proportion to the ills it meets with. The poor old thing was miserably
weak, and sore and jaded, and the flints were torture. But it rallied
its forces, gave a desperate struggle, and got the cart safely to the
bottom of the hill. Here the road turned sharply, and the horse went on.
But after a few paces it stopped as before; this time in front of a small
public-house, where trembling, and bathed in perspiration, it waited for
its master.
The public-house was a small dark, dingy-looking hovel, with a reputation
fitted to its appearance.
A dirty, grim-looking man nodded to the Cheap Jack and George as they
entered, and a girl equally dirty, but much handsomer, brought glasses of
spirits, to which the friends applied themselves, at the Cheap Jack’s
expense. George grew more sociable, and the Cheap Jack reproached him
with want of confidence in his friends.
“You’re so precious sharp, my dear,” said the hunchback, who knew well on
what point George liked to be flattered, “that you overreaches yourself.
I don’t complain—after all the business we’ve done together—that it’s
turned slack all of a sudden. You says they’re down on you, and that’s
enough for me. I don’t complain that you’ve got your own plans and keeps
’em as secret as the grave, but I says you’ll regret it. If you was a
good scholar, George, you could do without friends, you’re so precious
sharp. But you’re no scholar, my dear, and you’ll be let in yet, by a
worse friend than Cheap John.”
George so bitterly regretted his want of common learning, and the
stupidity which made him still slow to decipher print, and utterly
puzzled by writing, that the Cheap Jack’s remarks told strongly. These,
and the conversation they had had on the hill, recalled to his mind a
matter which was still a mystery to the miller’s man.
“Look here, Jack,” said he, leaning across the dirty little table; “if
you be such a good scholar, what do M O E R D Y K spell?”
“Say it again, George,” said the dwarf. But when, after that, he still
looked puzzled, George laughed long and loudly.
“You be a good scholar!” he cried. “You be a fine friend, too, for a
iggerant man. If a can’t tell the first word of a letter, ’tis likely
’ee could read the whole, too!”
“The first word of a _letter_, eh?” said the dwarf.
“The very first,” said George. “’Tis a long way you’d get in it, and
stuck at the start!”
“Up in the corner, at the top, eh?” said the dwarf.
“So it be,” said George, and he laughed no longer.
“It’s the name of a place, then,” said the Cheap Jack; “and it ain’t to
be expected I should know the names of all the places in the world,
George, my dear.”
It was a great triumph for the Cheap Jack, as George’s face betrayed. If
George had trusted him a little more, he might have known the meaning of
the mysterious word years ago. The name of a place! The place from
which the letter was written. The place where something might be learned
about the writer of the letter, and of the gentleman to whom it was
written. For George knew so much. It was written to a gentleman, and to
a gentleman who had money, and who had secrets; and, therefore, a
gentleman from whom money might be got, by interfering in his secrets.
The miller’s man was very ignorant and very stupid, in spite of a certain
low cunning not at all incompatible with gross ignorance. He had no
knowledge of the world. His very knowledge of malpractices and mischief
was confined to the evil doings of one or two other ill-conditioned
country lads like himself, who robbed their neighbors on dark nights, and
disposed of the spoil by the help of such men as the Cheap Jack and the
landlord of the public-house at the bottom of the hill.
But by loitering about on that stormy night years ago, when he should
have been attending to the mill, he had picked up enough to show him that
the strange gentleman had no mind to have his proceedings as to the
little Jan generally known. This and some sort of traditional idea that
“sharp,” though penniless men had at times wrung a great deal of money
from rich people, by threatening to betray their secrets, was the sole
foundation of George’s hopes in connection with the letter. It was his
very ignorance which hindered him from seeing the innumerable chances
against his getting to know any thing important enough, even if he could
use his information, to procure a bribe.
He had long given up the idea as hopeless, though he had kept the letter,
but it revived when the Cheap Jack solved the puzzle which Abel could not
explain, and George finally promised to let his friend read the whole
letter for him. He also allowed that it concerned Jan, or that he
supposed it to do so. He related Jan’s history, and confessed that he
had picked up the letter, which was being blown about near the mill, on
the night of Jan’s arrival.
In this statement there was some truth, and some falsehood; for in the
opinion of the miller’s man, if your own interest obliged you to confide
in a friend, it was at least wise to hedge the confidence by not telling
all the truth, or by qualifying it with lies.
This mental process was, however, at least equally familiar to the Cheap
Jack, and he did not hesitate, in his own mind, to feel sure that the
letter had not been found, but stolen. In which he was farther from the
truth than if he had simply believed George.
But then he was not in the neighborhood five years back, and, as it
happened, he had never heard of the lost pocket-book.