MR. EDWARD MARSTON MEETS AN OLD FRIEND.
Now, gentlemen, please!’
The landlord of the Blue Pigeons had one eye on the clock and the other
on his customers. It wanted only five minutes to closing time, and the
patrons of the Blue Pigeons required a great deal of soft persuasion,
as a rule, before they shook themselves up from their free-and-easy
attitudes at the counter and on the benches, and filed out into the
street.
On this especial night there was every excuse for the apparent
inattention with which they received the landlord’s hint. Inside it was
warm and cheery, the brilliant gas flared upon polished pewter, and
gay-coloured glass, through the open door of the bar-parlour the ruddy
glare of the fire could be seen dancing on the hearth, and everything
was suggestive of warmth and light and comfort.
Outside—oh, what a night it was outside! The rain was coming down in
torrents, the streets were seas of slush, and every time the big door
swung open to admit a benighted traveller a roaring blast of east wind
followed him to give him a final buffet, and seemed to say, ‘Take that;
and I’ll give you another when you come out.’
It was no wonder the Blue Pigeons was crammed such a night as this; it
was no wonder that once under the hospitable portals, and sheltered
from the rain and the wind, the customers hesitated to leave the haven
behind them.
‘Now, gentlemen, please!’
This time the landlord put a little more determination into his warning
note, and gave the sign to the potman to lower the gas and fidget with
the front door.
Reluctantly the gentlemen and ladies drained their glasses, wiped their
lips, and shook themselves together preparatory to turning out into the
night. Coat-collars were turned up, shawls were flung over battered
bonnets, hands were thrust deep into trousers pockets, there was a
little laughing, more growling, and a great deal of swearing, mixed
with maudlin farewells and some rough horseplay, and then the motley
crowd of drinkers oozed through the swing doors, melted gradually, and
vanished.
Where to?
To foul alleys and rookeries, to cellars and human kennels, to low
lodging-houses and tumble-down hovels.
The lights of the Blue Pigeons go out one by one, silence steals over
the street, and the great crowd of drinkers separates, and each
component part of it wends his or her way to some place which is
‘home,’—some place—mean, vile, and awful though it be—which contains
the scanty household gods and something near and dear.
Although the Blue Pigeons is within a stone’s throw of the Seven Dials,
its immediate vicinity is wrapped in silence when the clock strikes
one. As a rule the sounds of revelry and riot linger in the narrow
streets long after the public has disgorged its prey, and men and women
stand about at the street corners, and joke and laugh and quarrel,
despite the rough injunction to move on bestowed upon them by the
especial policeman told off to superintend their conduct.
To-night the rain is so pitiless and the air so keen and merciless that
the lowest and meanest of the populace have hurried off to such shelter
as they can find. A thick fog, too, has begun to settle down upon the
scene of desolation, and it is not a time for the proverbial dog to be
out of doors.
But there is one customer who still hovers about the closed doors of
the “Blue Pigeons.”
He had been inside from nine until closing time, and has come out at
the last moment with the rest.
He had stood about unnoticed among the little groups, shifting about
from one to the other, and pretending to belong to them. In the Dials a
pot of beer does duty for a good many mouths sometimes, and neither the
landlord nor the potman noticed the stranger sufficiently to discover
that during the entire evening he had been enjoying the warmth and
light and the smell of the spirits and tobacco-smoke without spending
one penny for the good of the house.
Edward Marston hadn’t anything to spend or he would have spent it. He
had made a dive into the house to escape the storm, and it had
sheltered him for an hour or two. Now the doors were shut, and he was
out in the streets again—homeless! penniless!
‘I’m on my beam ends now, and no mistake,’ he said to himself. ‘What
the dickens am I to do? I suppose I’d better go and get quietly into
the river.’
He passed his hands over his soaked jacket, looked up at the sky and
laughed.
‘I don’t think I need go to the river,’ he muttered; ‘if I stay here a
little longer, I can be drowned where I am. I’ll look about for an arch
or a gateway; I may as well stand in the dry, if it doesn’t cost any
more than this.’
Edward Marston was a gentleman. You saw it in the face under the
shapeless billycock hat; you saw it in the thin hands that every now
and then wiped the rain-drops from his beard and moustache; you saw it
in his bearing as he stepped from the poor shelter of the Blue Pigeons
doorway and made a dart round the corner in search of a gateway.
He was evidently accustomed to something very like his present
position, and there was nothing startlingly new to him in the utter
emptiness of his pockets; but it was the first time he had been
homeless.
He had been in America for some years, having left his native land in a
hurry. He had returned a few weeks since, almost penniless, and tried
in vain to drift into some means of gaining a livelihood. Every avenue
was closed against him, for his past life was a sealed book, and he had
no one to speak a good word for him. So he had hung on to existence
till his last copper was spent, and now he was without even a shelter
for the night.
He had been turned out of his lodging that morning, and everything he
had had been detained for the four weeks’ rent which he had promised
again and again, and which he had never been able to pay.
A few papers had been all that he had been allowed to secure from his
scanty belongings, and these only because they were of no value to any
one but himself.
As he hurried round the corner in search of a convenient gateway in
which to spend the night, he drew his hands out of his trousers pockets
to shake from the brim of his hat a small pool of water which had begun
to trickle down his neck. He drew the lining of his pocket up at the
same time, and a piece of folded paper fell on the ground. He picked it
up, opened it, and read it.
It was an old acceptance, torn with lying long in folds and dirty with
being carried about.
‘Birnie’s acceptance for £500,’ said Marston, as he read it over. ‘Ten
years old, and not worth the paper it’s written on. I wonder how that
got in my trousers pocket, instead of being with the other papers! I
must have put it in in the hurry. I wonder whether Birnie’s alive or
dead! If he’s alive, I hope he’s as badly off as I am—curse him!’
He folded the old acceptance carefully, and put it back in his pocket.
‘Birnie owed me more than this when I left England. By Jove, if I had
the thousandth part of it now I should be happy. I could get out of
this confounded rain and lie quiet a bit. I wonder what’s become of the
old set—if they’ve all gone to the dogs, like I have! Egerton was a
queer fish, but he had rich relations. Ralph must have left a lot of
money behind him, and Gurth Egerton would have some of it by hook or by
crook. I wonder what the upshot of that affair was.
Walking along and thinking, with his eyes on the streaming streets, he
was suddenly aroused from his reverie by a vigorous ‘Hi, my man!’
A carriage, evidently a doctor’s brougham, was drawn up in the middle
of the roadway, and a gentleman was leaning out of the carriage window,
and shouting at him to arrest his attention.
‘Hi, my man!’ said the gentleman, peering through the fog, as Marston
looked up, ‘can you tell me which is Little Queer Street about here?
This fog makes all the streets look alike.’
‘No, I can’t,’ answered Marston; ‘I’m a stranger myself.’
‘Well, Would you mind looking for me? My coachman can’t see the names
written up at the corners from the road, and I can’t tramp up and down
the neighbourhood in the rain—I should get wet.’
‘What about me?’ asked Marston, with an offended tone in his voice.
The occupant of the carriage gave a short little laugh.
‘My good friend, I don’t think a little more rain will do you much
harm; you don’t appear to have been under an umbrella lately.’
Marston remembered that he was a penniless outcast, soaked to the skin;
for the moment he had forgotten it, and fancied he was a gentleman
walking home.
‘What do you want me to look for?’ he said, altering his tone.
‘Little Queer Street, No. 15; and if you find it I’ll give you a
shilling.’
Marston walked up one side street and down another, peering through the
fog towards those wonderful arrangements in white and black with which
the Board of Works are good enough to label the street corners, and
which are so high up and so small that an ordinary-sighted person
requires a ladder and a magnifying glass before he can tell what they
are, and at night even this would be insufficient unless accompanied by
an electric light.
After much wandering up and down, and straining of the eyeballs and
cross-examination of a solitary policeman, who was standing up out of
the wet, and enjoying a quiet pipe down a particularly deserted side
street, Marston discovered where Little Queer Street was, and
ascertained which side of the way and which end was honoured by the
presence of that No. 15, which was evidently about to be visited by a
gentleman who kept his carriage.
He came back with the intelligence, and communicated it to the
coachman.
‘Wait a minute, Cook, I haven’t rewarded this poor fellow for his
trouble,’ said the doctor, for the coachman was whipping up the horses,
without waiting for such a trifle.
The doctor fumbled first in his trousers pockets, then in his
waistcoat, and then in his overcoat.
‘Cook,’ he exclaimed, presently, ‘have you got a shilling?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Dear me, how very peculiar! no more have I. My good man I’m very
sorry—most extraordinary thing—but I’ve come out without any money.
Here, however, is my card. Call to-morrow and I will leave a shilling
with the servant for you. Drive on, Cook.’
Cook, the coachman, whipped up his horses and shot off, splashing
Marston with mud, and leaving him crestfallen and disappointed in the
middle of the road, with a card in his hand.
‘My luck!’ he said, as the light of the carriage vanished in the mist;
‘my infernal luck! That shilling would have been a bed and breakfast. I
earned that shilling, and I never wanted it more in my life. What the
dickens does a two-horse doctor do here, I wonder! I thought he was
sent by Providence to give me a shilling, at first. Bah! Providence
turned me up long ago. Let’s look at the card.’
He came out of the roadway, and stood under a lamp-post to read the
name of his debtor.
The light flickered and blew to and fro in the night air, and the rain,
driven against the glass, made a mist through which the rays fell
feebly. But feebly as they fell on the small piece of pasteboard and
the face of the man who read it, they showed the sudden gleam of joy
that flashed into his white damp face.
For a moment he stood speechless as one dazed; then he read the card
aloud, to make sure that he was not dreaming:
‘Dr. Oliver Birnie,
‘The Lodge,
‘Lilac Tree Road,
‘St. John’s Wood.’
‘Oliver Birnie!’ he exclaimed, triumphantly. ‘And keeps a carriage and
pair! By Jove! Providence has not deserted me. I’m glad I didn’t
recognise him in the dim light of carriage lamps, or I should have
cried out and betrayed myself. I can do better by waiting, perhaps. Ah,
Mr. Oliver Birnie! it isn’t a shilling I’ve earned to-night—it’s many
and many a golden pound. I’ve one bird safe, at any rate. Now I’ve only
Gurth Egerton to find. If he’s gone up in the world too, you are all
right for a little while, Ned Marston.’