(_Concluded from page 302_.)
It happened to be a dull time of year, and for some months my wheels
ceased to be rotatory: I got cold and damp; and the moths found their
way to my inside: one or two persons who came to inspect me declined
becoming purchasers, and peering closely at my panels, said something
about "old scratch." This hurt my feelings, for if my former possessor
was not quite so good as she might have been, it was no fault of mine.
At length, after a tedious inactivity, I was bought cheap by a young
physician, who having rashly left his provincial patients to set up in
London, took it into his head that nothing could be done there by a
medical man who did not go upon wheels; he therefore hired a house in a
good situation, and then set _me_ up, and bid my vendor put me down in
his bill.
It is quite astonishing how we flew about the streets and squares,
_acting great practice_; those who knew us by sight must have thought we
had a great deal to do, but we practised nothing but locomotion. Some
medical men thin the population, (so says Slander,) my master thinned
nothing but his horses. They were the only _good jobs_ that came in his
way, and certainly he made the most of them. He was obliged to _feed_
them, but he was very rarely _feed_ himself. It so happened that nobody
consulted us, and the unavoidable consumption of the family infected my
master's pocket, and his little resources were in a rapid decline.
Still he kept a good heart; indeed, in one respect, he resembled a
worm displayed in a bottle in a quack's shop window--he was never out of
spirits! He was deeply in debt, and his name was on every body's books,
always excepting the memorandum-books of those who wanted physicians.
Still I was daily turned out, and though nobody called him in, he was to
be seen, sitting very forward, apparently looking over notes supposed
to have been taken after numerous critical cases and eventful
consultations. Our own case was hopeless, our progress was arrested,
an execution was in the house, servants met with their deserts and were
turned off, goods were seized, my master was knocked up, and I was
knocked down for one hundred and twenty pounds.
Again my beauties blushed for a while unseen; but I was new painted,
and, like some other painted personages, looked, at a distance, almost
as good as new. Fortunately for me, an elderly country curate, just at
this period, was presented with a living, and the new incumbent thought
it incumbent upon him to present his fat lady and his thin daughter with
a leathern convenience. My life was now a rural one, and for ten long
years nothing worth recording happened to me. Slowly and surely did I
creep along green lanes, carried the respectable trio to snug, early,
neighbourly dinners, and was always under lock and key before twelve
o'clock. It must be owned I began to have rather an old-fashioned look;
my body was ridiculously small, and the rector's thin daughter, the
bodkin, or rather packing-needle of the party, sat more forward, and on
a smaller space than bodkins do now-a-days. I was perched up three feet
higher than more modern vehicles, and my two lamps began to look like
little dark lanterns. But my obsoleteness rendered me only more suited
to the service in which I was enlisted. Honest Roger, the red-haired
coachman, would have looked like a clown in a pantomime, in front of a
fashionable equipage; and Simon the footboy, who slouched at my back,
would have been mistaken for an idle urchin surreptitiously enjoying a
ride. But on my unsophisticated dickey and footboard no one could doubt
but that Roger and Simon were in their proper places. The rector died;
of course he had nothing more to do with the _living_, it passed into
other hands; and a clerical income being (alas, that it should be so!)
no inheritance, his relict suddenly plunged in widowhood and poverty,
had the aggravated misery of mourning for a deaf husband, while she was
conscious that the luxuries and almost the necessaries of life were for
ever snatched from herself and her child.
Again I found myself in London, but my beauty was gone, I had lost the
activity of youth, and when slowly I chanced to creak through Long Acre,
Houlditch, my very parent, who was standing at his door sending forth a
new-born Britska, glanced at me scornfully, and knew me not! I passed on
heavily--I thought of former days of triumph, and there was madness in
the thought I became a _crazy_ vehicle! straw was thrust into my inward
parts, I was numbered among the fallen,--yes, I was now a
hackney-chariot, and my number was one hundred!
What tongue can tell the degradations I have endured! The persons who
familiarly have _called_ me, the wretches who have sat in me--never can
this be told. Daily I take my stand in the same vile street, and nightly
am I driven to the minor theatres--to oyster-shops--to desperation!
One day, when empty and unoccupied, I was hailed by two police-officers
who were bearing between them a prisoner. It was the seducer of my
second ill-fated mistress; a first crime had done its usual work, it had
prepared the mind for a second, and a worse: the seducer had done a deed
of deeper guilt, and _I_ bore him one stage towards the gallows. Many
months after, a female called me at midnight: she was decked in tattered
finery, and what with fatigue and recent indulgence in strong liquors,
she was scarcely sensible, but she possessed dim traces of past beauty.
I can say nothing more of her, but that it was the fugitive wife whom I
had borne to Brighton so many years ago. No words of mine could paint
the living warning that I beheld. What had been the sorrows of unmerited
desertion and unkindness supported by conscious rectitude, compared with
the degraded guilt, the hopeless anguish, that I then saw?
I regret to say, I was last month nigh committing manslaughter; I broke
down in the Strand and dislocated the shoulder of a rich old maid.
I cannot help thinking that she deserved the visitation, for, as she
stepped into me in Oxford Street, she exclaimed, loud enough to be heard
by all neighbouring pedestrians, "Dear me! how dirty! I never was in
a hackney conveyance before!"--though I well remembered having been
favoured with her company very often. A medical gentleman happened to be
passing at the moment of our fall; it was my old medical master. He set
the shoulder, and so skilfully did he manage his patient, that he is
about to be married to the rich invalid, who will shoulder him into
prosperity at last.
I last night was the bearer of a real party of pleasure to Astley's:--a
bride and bridegroom, with the mother of the bride. It was the widow of
the old rector, whose thin daughter (by the by she is fattening fast)
has had the luck to marry the only son of a merchant well to do in the
world.
The voice suddenly ceased!--I awoke--the door was opened, the steps let
down--I paid the coachman double the amount of his fare, and in future,
whenever I stand in need of a jarvey, I shall certainly make a point of
calling for number One Hundred.
* * * * *