The _Hit or Miss_ tavern, to customers (rough customers, at least)
who entered it on a foggy winter night, seemed merely a public by
the river’s brim. Not being ravaged and parched by a thirst for the
picturesque, Tommy and his mates failed to pause and observe the
architectural peculiarities of the building. Even if they had been of a
romantic and antiquarian turn, the fog was so thick that they could have
seen little to admire, though there was plenty to be admired. The _Hit
or Miss_ was not more antique in its aspect than modern in its fortunes.
Few public-houses, if any, boasted for their landlord such a person
as Robert Maitland, M.A., Fellow of St. Gatien’s, in the University of
Oxford.
It is, perhaps, desirable and even necessary to explain how this
arrangement came into existence. We have already made acquaintance with
“mine host” of the _Hit or Miss_, and found him to be by no means the
rosy, genial Boniface of popular tradition. That a man like Maitland
should be the lessee of a waterside tavern, like the _Hit or Miss_, was
only one of the anomalies of this odd age of ours. An age of revivals,
restorations, experiments--an age of dukes who are Socialists--an age
which sees the East-end brawling in Pall Mall, and parties of West-end
tourists personally conducted down Ratcliffe Highway--need not wonder at
Maitland’s eccentric choice in philanthropy.
Maitland was an orphan, and rich. He had been an unpopular lonely boy
at a public school, where he was known as a “sap,” or assiduous student,
and was remarked for an almost unnatural indifference to cricket and
rowing. At Oxford, as he had plenty of money, he had been rather less
unpopular. His studies ultimately won him a Fellowship at St. Gatien’s,
where his services as a tutor were not needed. Maitland now developed a
great desire to improve his own culture by acquaintance with humanity,
and to improve humanity by acquaintance with himself. This view of life
and duty had been urged on him by his college “coach,” philosopher, and
friend, Mr. Joseph Bielby. A man of some energy of character, Bielby had
made Maitland leave his desultory reading and dull hospitalities at St.
Gatien’s and betake himself to practical philanthropy.
“You tell me you don’t see much in life,” Bielby had said. “Throw
yourself into the life of others, who have not much to live on.”
Maitland made a few practical experiments in philanthropy at Oxford. He
once subsidized a number of glaziers out on strike, and thereon had
his own windows broken by conservative undergraduates. He urged on the
citizens the desirability of running a steam tramway for the people from
the station to Cowley, through Worcester, John’s, Baliol, and Wadham
Gardens and Magdalene. His signature headed a petition in favor of
having three “devils,” or steam-whoopers, yelling in different quarters
of the town between five and six o’clock every morning, that the
artisans might be awakened in time for the labors of the day.
As Maitland’s schemes made more noise than progress at Oxford, Bielby
urged him to come out of his Alma Mater and practise benevolence in
town. He had a great scheme for building over Hyde Park, and creating a
Palace of Art in Poplar with the rents of the new streets. While pushing
this ingenious idea in the columns of the _Daily Trumpet_, Maitland
looked out for some humbler field of personal usefulness. The happy
notion of taking a philanthropic public-house occurred to him, and was
acted upon at the first opportunity. Maitland calculated that in his own
bar-room he could acquire an intimate knowledge of humanity in its least
sophisticated aspects. He would sell good beer, instead of drugged and
adulterated stuff He would raise the tone of his customers, while he
would insensibly gain some of their exuberant vitality. He would shake
off the prig (which he knew to be a strong element in his nature), and
would, at the same time, encourage temperance by providing good malt
liquor.
The scheme seemed feasible, and the next thing to do was to acquire
a tavern. Now, Maitland had been in the Oxford movement just when
æstheticism was fading out, like a lovely sun-stricken lily, while
philanthropy and political economy and Mr. Henry George were coming in,
like roaring lions. Thus in Maitland there survived a little of the
old leaven of the student of Renaissance, a touch of the amateur of
“impressions” and of antiquated furniture. He was always struggling
against this “side,” as he called it, of his “culture,” and in his hours
of reaction he was all for steam tramways, “devils,” and Kindergartens
standing where they ought not. But there were moments when his old
innocent craving for the picturesque got the upper hand; and in one of
those moments Maitland had come across the chance of acquiring the lease
of the _Hit or Miss_.
That ancient bridge-house pleased him, and he closed with his
opportunity. The _Hit or Miss_ was as attractive to an artistic as most
public-houses are to a thirsty soul When the Embankment was made, the
bridge-house had been one of a street of similar quaint and many-gabled
old buildings that leaned up against each other for mutual support near
the rivers edge. But the Embankment slowly brought civilization that
way: the dirty rickety old houses were both condemned and demolished,
till at last only the tavern remained, with hoardings and empty spaces,
and a dust-yard round it.
The house stood at what had been a corner. The red-tiled roof was so
high-pitched as to be almost perpendicular. The dormer windows of the
attics were as picturesque as anything in Nuremberg. The side-walls
were broken in their surface by little odd red-tiled roofs covering
projecting casements, and the house was shored up and supported by huge
wooden beams. You entered (supposing you to enter a public-house) by a
low-browed door in front, if you passed in as ordinary customers did. At
one corner was an odd little board, with the old-fashioned sign:
“Jack’s Bridge House.
“_Hit or Miss_--Luck’s All.”
But there was a side-door, reached by walking down a covered way,
over which the strong oaken rafters (revealed by the unflaking of the
plaster) lay bent and warped by years and the weight of the building.
From this door you saw the side, or rather the back, which the house
kept for its intimates; a side even more picturesque with red-tiled
roofs and dormer windows than that which faced the street. The passage
led down to a slum, and on the left hand, as you entered, lay the empty
space and the dust-yard where the carts were sheltered in sheds, or left
beneath the sky, behind the ruinous hoarding.
Within, the _Hit or Miss_ looked cosey enough to persons entering out of
the cold and dark. There was heat, light, and a bar-parlor with a wide
old-fashioned chimney-place, provided with seats within the ingle.
On these little benches did Tommy and his friends make haste to place
themselves, comfortably disposed, and thawing rapidly, in a room within
a room, as it were; for the big chimney-place was like a little chamber
by itself. Not on an ordinary night could such a party have gained
admittance to the bar-parlor, where Maitland himself was wont to appear,
now and then, when he visited the tavern, and to produce by his mere
presence, and without in the least intending it, an Early Closing
Movement.
But to-night was no common night, and Mrs. Gullick, the widowed
landlady, or rather manager, was as eager to hear all the story of the
finding of poor Dicky Shields as any of the crowd outside had been.
Again and again the narrative was repeated, till conjecture once more
began to take the place of assertion.
“I wonder,” asked one of the men, “how old Dicky got the money for a
boose?”
“The money, ay, and the chance,” said another. “That daughter of his--a
nice-looking girl she is--kept poor Dicky pretty tight.”
“Didn’t let him get--” the epigrammatist of the company was just
beginning to put in, when the brilliant witticism he was about to utter
burst at once on the intellect of all his friends.
“Didn’t let him _get_ tight, you was a-goin’ to say, Tommy,” howled
three or four at once, and there ensued a great noise of the slapping
of thighs, followed by chuckles which exploded, at intervals, like
crackers.
“Dicky ‘ad been ‘avin’ bad times for long,” the first speaker went on.
“I guess he ‘ad about tattooed all the parish as would stand a pint for
tattooing. There was hardly a square inch of skin not made beautiful
forever about here.”
“Ah! and there was no sale for his beastesses and bird-ses nuther; or
else he was clean sold out, and hadn’t no capital to renew his stock of
hairy cats and young parrots.”
“The very stuffed beasts, perched above old Dicky’s shop, had got to
look real mangey and mouldy. I think I see them now: the fox in the
middle, the long-legged moulting foreign bird at one end, and that ‘ere
shiny old rhinoceros in the porch under them picters of the dying deer
and t’other deer swimming. Poor old Dicky! Where he raised the price o’
a drain, let alone a booze, beats me, it does.”
“Why,” said Mrs. Gullick, who had been in the outer room during the
conversation, “why, it was a sailor gentleman that stood Dicky treat A
most pleasant-spoken man for a sailor, with a big black beard He used to
meet Dicky here, in the private room up-stairs, and there Dicky used
to do him a turn of his trade--tattooing him, like. ‘I’m doing him to
pattern, mum,’ Dicky sez, sez he: ‘a _facsimile_ o’ myself, mum.’ It
wasn’t much they drank neither--just a couple of pints; for sez the
sailor gentleman, he sez, ‘I’m afeared, mum, our friend here can’t carry
much even of _your_ capital stuff. We must excuse’ sez he, ‘the failings
of an artis’; but I doesn’t want his hand to shake or slip when he’s a
doin’ _me_,’ sez he. ‘Might > spile the pattern,’ he sez, ‘also hurt’
And I wouldn’t have served old Dicky with more than was good for him,
myself, not if it was ever so, I wouldn’t I promised that poor daughter
of his, before Mr. Maitland sent her to school--years ago now--I
promised as I would keep an eye on her father, and speak of--A hangel,
if here isn’t Mr. Maitland his very self!”
And Mrs. Gullick arose, with bustling courtesy, to welcome her landlord,
the Fellow of St. Gatien’s.
Immediately there was a stir among the men seated in the ingle. One by
one--some with a muttered pretence at excuse, others with shame-faced
awkwardness--they shouldered and shuffled out of the room. Maitland’s
appearance had produced its usual effect, and he was left alone with his
tenant.
“Well, Mrs. Gullick,” said poor Maitland, ruefully, “I came here for
a chat with our friends--a little social relaxation--on economic
questions, and I seem to have frightened them all away.”
“Oh, sir, they’re a rough lot, and don’t think themselves company for
the likes of you. But,” said Mrs. Gullick, eagerly--with the delight of
the oldest aunt in telling the saddest tale--“you ‘ve heard this hawful
story? Poor Miss Margaret, sir! It makes my blood--”
What physiological effect on the circulation Mrs. Gullick was about
to ascribe to alarming intelligence will never be known; for Maitland,
growing a little more pallid than usual, interrupted her:
“What has happened to Miss Margaret? Tell me, quick!”
“Nothing to _herself_, poor lamb, but her poor father, sir.”
Maitland seemed sensibly relieved.
“Well, what about her father?”
“Gone, sir--gone! In a cartload o’ snow, this very evening, he was
found, just outside o* this very door.”
“In a cartload of snow!” cried Maitland. “Do you mean that he went away
in it, or that he was found in it dead?”
“Yes, indeed, sir; dead for many hours, the doctor said; and in this
very house he had been no later than last night, and quite steady, sir,
I do assure you. He had been steady--oh, steady for weeks.”
Maitland assumed an expression of regret, which no doubt he felt to
a certain extent But in his sorrow there could not but have been some
relief. For Maitland, in the course of his philanthropic labors, had
known old Dicky Shields, the naturalist and professional tattooer, as
a hopeless _mauvais sujet_. But Dicky’s daughter, Margaret, had been a
daisy flourishing by the grimy waterside, till the young social reformer
transplanted her to a school in the purer air of Devonshire. He was
having her educated there, and after she was educated--why, then,
Maitland had at one time entertained his own projects or dreams. In the
way of their accomplishment Dicky Shields had been felt as an obstacle;
not that he objected--on the other hand, he had made Maitland put his
views in writing. There were times--there had lately, above all, been
times--when Maitland reflected uneasily on the conditional promises in
this document Dicky was not an eligible father-in-law, however good and
pretty a girl his daughter might be. But now Dicky had ceased to be an
obstacle; he was no longer (as he certainly had been) in any man’s way;
he was nobody’s enemy now, not even his own.
The vision of all these circumstances passed rapidly, like a
sensation rather than a set of coherent thoughts, through Maitland’s
consciousness.
“Tell me everything you know of this wretched business,” he said, rising
and closing the door which led into the outer room.
“Well, sir, you have not been here for some weeks, or you would know
that Dicky had found a friend lately--an old shipmate, or petty-officer,
he called him--a sailor-man. Well-to-do, he seemed; the mate of a
merchant vessel he might be. He had known Dicky, I think, long ago at
sea, and he’d bring him here ‘to yarn with him,’ he said, once or twice
it might be in this room, but mainly in the parlor up-stairs. He let old
Dicky tattoo him a bit, up there, to put him in the way of earning an
honest penny by his trade--a queer trade it was. Never more than a
pint, or a glass of hot rum and water, would he give the old man. Most
considerate and careful, sir, he ever was. Well, last night he brought
him in about nine, and they sat rather late; and about twelve the sailor
comes in, rubbing his eyes, and ‘Good-night, mum,’ sez he. ‘My friend’s
been gone for an hour. An early bird he is, and I’ve been asleep by
myself. If you please, I’ll just settle our little score. It’s the last
for a long time, for I’m bound to-morrow for the China Seas, eastward.
Oh, mum, a sailor’s life!’ So he pays, changing a half-sovereign, like a
gentleman, and out he goes, and that’s the last I ever see o’ poor Dicky
Shields till he was brought in this afternoon, out of the snow-cart,
cold and stiff, sir.”
“And how do you suppose all this happened? How did Shields get _into_
the cart?”
“Well, that’s just what they’ve been wondering at, though the cart
was handy and uncommon convenient for a man as ‘ad too much, if ‘ad he
‘_ad_; as believe it I cannot, seeing a glass of hot rum and water would
not intoxicate a babe. May be he felt faint, and laid down a bit, and
never wakened. But, Lord a mercy, what’s _that_?” screamed Mrs. Gullick,
leaping to her feet in terror.
The latched door which communicated with the staircase had been burst
open, and a small brown bear had rushed erect into the room, and, with a
cry, had thrown itself on Mrs. Gullick’s bosom.
“Well, if ever I ‘_ad_ a fright!” that worthy lady exclaimed, turning
toward the startled Maitland, and embracing at the same time the little
animal in an affectionate clasp. “Well, if _ever_ there was such a child
as you, Lizer! What is the matter with you _now_?”
“Oh, mother,” cried the bear, “I dreamed of that big Bird I saw on the
roof, and I ran down-stairs before I was ‘arf awake, I was that horful
frightened.”
“Well, you just go up-stairs again--and here’s a sweet-cake
for you--and you take this night-light,” said Mrs. Gullick, producing
the articles she mentioned, “and put it in the basin careful, and
knock on the floor with the poker if you want me. If it wasn’t for that
bearskin Mr. Toopny was kind enough to let you keep, you’d get your
death o’ cold, you would, running about in the night. And look ‘ere,
Lizer,” she added, patting the child affectionately on the shoulder, “do
get that there Bird out o’ your head. It’s just nothing but indigestion
comes o’ you and the other children--himps they may well call you,
and himps I’m sure you are--always wasting your screws on pasty and
lemonade and raspberry vinegar. Just-nothing but indigestion.”
Thus admonished, the bear once more threw its arms, in a tight embrace,
about Mrs. Gullick’s neck; and then, without lavishing attention on
Maitland, passed out of the door, and could be heard skipping up-stairs.
“I’m sure, sir, I ask your pardon,” exclaimed poor Mrs. Gullick; “but
Lizer’s far from well just now, and she did have a scare last night, or
else, which is more likely, her little inside (saving your presence) has
been upset with a supper the Manager gave all them pantermime himps.”
“But, Mrs. Gullick, why is she dressed like a bear?”
“She’s such a favorite with the Manager, sir, and the Property Man,
and all of them at the _Hilarity_, you can’t _think_, sir,” said Mrs.
Gullick, not in the least meaning to impugn Maitland’s general capacity
for abstract speculation. “A regular little genius that child is, though
I says it as shouldn’t. Ah, sir, she takes it from her poor father,
sir.” And Mrs. Gullick raised her apron to her eyes.
Now the late Mr. Gullick had been a clown of considerable merit; but,
like too many artists, he was addicted beyond measure to convivial
enjoyment. Maitland had befriended him in his last days, and had
appointed Mrs. Gullick (and a capital appointment it was) to look after
his property when he became landlord of the _Hit or Miss_.
“What a gift, sir, that child always had! Why, when she was no more
than four, I well remember her going to fetch the beer, and her being a
little late, and Gullick with the thirst on him, when she came in with
the jug, he made a cuff at her, not to hurt her, and if the little thing
didn’t drop the jug, and take the knap! Lord, I thought Gullick would ‘a
died laughing, and him so thirsty, too.”
“Take the knap?” said Maitland, who imagined that “the knap” must be
some malady incident to childhood.
“Oh, sir, it’s when one person cuffs at another on the stage, you know,
and the other slaps his own hand, on the far side, to make the noise
of a box on the ear: that’s what we call ‘taking the knap’ in the
profession. And the beer was spilt, and the jug broken, and all--Lizer
was that clever? And this is her second season, just ended, as a himp
at the _Hilarity_ pantermime; and they’re that good to her, they let her
bring her bearskin home with her, what she wears, you know, sir, as the
Little Bear in ‘The Three Bears,’ don’t you know, sir.”
Maitland was acquainted with the legend of the Great Bear, the Middle
Bear, and the Little Tiny Small Bear, and had even proved, in a learned
paper, that the Three Bears were the Sun, the Moon, and the Multitude
of Stars in the Aryan myth. But he had not seen the pantomime founded on
the traditional narrative.
“But what was the child saying about a big Bird?” he asked. “What was it
that frightened her?”
“Oh, sir, I think it was just tiredness, and may be, a little something
hot at that supper last night; and, besides, seeing so many queer things
in pantermimes might put notions in a child’s head. But when she came
home last night, a little late, Lizer was very strange. She vowed and
swore she had seen a large Bird, far bigger than any common bird, skim
over the street. Then when I had put her to bed in the attic, down she
flies, screaming she saw the Bird on the roof. I had hard work to
get her to sleep. To-day I made her lay a-bed and wear her theatre
pantermime bearskin, that fits her like another skin--and she’ll be too
big for it next year--just to keep her warm in that cold garret. That’s
all about it, sir. She’ll be well enough in a day or two, will Lizer.”
“I am sure I hope she will, Mrs. Gullick,” said Maitland; “and, as I am
passing his way, I will ask Dr. Barton to call and see the little girl.
Now I must go, and I think the less we say to anyone about Miss Shields,
you know, the better. It will be very dreadful for her to learn about
her father’s death, and we must try to prevent Her from hearing how it
happened.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Mrs. Gullick, bobbing; “and being safe away at
school, sir, we’ll hope she won’t be told no more than she needn’t know
about it.”
Maitland went forth into the thick night: a half-hearted London thaw was
filling the shivering air with a damp brown fog.
He walked to the nearest telegraph office, and did not observe, in the
raw darkness and in the confusion of his thoughts, that he was followed
at no great distance by a man muffled up in a great-coat and a woollen
comforter. The stranger almost shouldered against him, as he stood
reading his telegram, and conscientiously docking off a word here and
there to save threepence,
“From Robert Maitland to Miss Marlett.
“The Dovecot, Conisbeare,
“Tiverton.
“I come to-morrow, leaving by 10.30 train. Do
not let Margaret see newspaper. Her father dead.
Break news.”
This telegram gave Maitland, in his excited state, more trouble to
construct than might have been expected. We all know the wondrous
badness of post-office pens or pencils, and how they tear or blot the
paper when we are in a hurry; and Maitland felt hurried, though there
was no need for haste. Meantime the man in the woollen comforter was
buying stamps, and, finishing his bargain before the despatch was
stamped and delivered, went out into the fog, and was no more seen.