When Zack entered the room, and saw his strange friend, with legs
crossed and hands in pockets, sitting gravely in the usual corner,
on the floor, between a brandy-bottle on one side, and a guttering,
unsnuffed candle on the other, he roared with laughter, and stamped
about in his usual boisterous way, till the flimsy little house seemed
to be trembling under him to its very foundations. Mat bore all this
noise and ridicule, and all the jesting that followed it about the
futility of drowning his passion for Madonna in the brandy-bottle, with
the most unruffled and exemplary patience. The self-control which he
thus exhibited did not pass without its reward. Zack got tired of making
jokes which were received with the serenest inattention; and, passing at
once from the fanciful to the practical, astonished his fellow-lodger,
by suddenly communicating a very unexpected and very important piece of
news.
“By-the-bye, Mat,” he said, “we must sweep the place up, and look as
respectable as we can, before to-morrow night. My friend Blyth is coming
to spend a quiet evening with us. I stayed behind till all the visitors
had gone, on purpose to ask him.”
“Do you mean he’s coming to have a drop of grog and smoke a pipe along
with us two?” asked Mat rather amazedly.
“I mean he’s coming here, certainly; but as for grog and pipes, he never
touches either. He’s the best and dearest fellow in the world; but I’m
ashamed to say he’s spooney enough to like lemonade and tea. Smoking
would make him sick directly; and, as for grog, I don’t believe a drop
ever passes his lips from one year’s end to another. A weak head--a
wretchedly weak head for drinking,” concluded Zack, tapping his forehead
with an air of bland Bacchanalian superiority.
Mat seemed to have fallen into one of his thoughtful fits again. He made
no answer, but holding the brandy-bottle standing by his side, up before
the candle, looked in to see how much liquor was left in it.
“Don’t begin to bother your head about the brandy: you needn’t get any
more of it for Blyth,” continued Zack, noticing his friend’s action.
“I say, do you know that the best thing you ever did in your life was
saving Valentine’s picture in that way? You have regularly won his heart
by it. He was suspicious of my making friends with you before; but now
he doesn’t seem to think there’s a word in the English language that’s
good enough for you. He said he should be only too glad to thank you
again, when I asked him to come and judge of what you were really like
in your own lodging. Tell him some of those splendid stories of yours.
I’ve been terrifying him already with one or two of them at secondhand.
Oh Lord! how hospitably we’ll treat him--won’t we? You shall make his
hair stand on end, Mat; and I’ll drown him in his favorite tea.”
“What does he do with them picters of his?” asked Mat. “Sell ‘em?”
“Of course!” answered the other, confidently; “and gets enormous sums
of money for them.” Whenever Zack found an opportunity of magnifying
a friend’s importance, he always rose grandly superior to mere
matter-of-fact restraints, and seized the golden moment without an
instant of hesitation or a syllable of compromise.
“Get lots of money, does he?” proceeded Mat. “And keeps on hoarding of
it up, I daresay, like all the rest of you over here?”
_“He_ hoard money!” retorted Zack, “You never made a worse guess in your
life. I don’t believe he ever hoarded six-pence since he was a baby. If
Mrs. Blyth didn’t look after him, I don’t suppose there would be five
pounds in the house from one year’s end to another.”
There was a moment’s silence. (It wasn’t because he had money in it,
then, thought Mat, that he shut down the lid of that big chest of his so
sharp. I wonder whether--)
“He’s the most generous fellow in the world,” continued Zack, lighting a
cigar; “and the best pay: ask any of his tradespeople.”
This remark suspended the conjecture that was just forming in Mat’s
mind. He gave up pursuing it quite readily, and went on at once with
his questions to Zack. Some part of the additional information that he
desired to obtain from young Thorpe, he had got already. He knew now,
that when Mr. Blyth, on the day of the picture-show, shut down the
bureau so sharply on Mr. Gimble’s approaching him, it was not, at any
rate, because there was money in it.
“Is he going to bring anybody else in here along with him, to-morrow
night?” asked Mat.
“Anybody else? Who should he bring? Why, you old barbarian, you don’t
expect him to bring Madonna into our jolly bachelor den to preside over
the grog and pipes--do you?”
“How old is the young woman?” inquired Mat, contemplatively snuffing the
candle with his fingers, as he put the question.
“Still harping on my daughter!” shouted Zack, with a burst of laughter.
“She’s older than she looks, I can tell you that. You wouldn’t guess
her at more than eighteen or nineteen. But the fact is, she’s actually
twenty-three;--steady there! you’ll be through the window if you don’t
sit quieter in your queer corner than that.”
(Twenty-three! The very number he had stopped at, when he reckoned off
the difference on his fingers between 1828 and 1851, just before young
Thorpe came in.)
“I suppose the next cool thing you will say, is that she’s too old for
you,” Zack went on; “or, perhaps, you may prefer asking another question
or two first. I’ll tell you what, old Rough and Tough, the inquisitive
part of your character is beginning to be--”
“Bother all this talking!” interrupted Mat, jumping up suddenly as he
spoke, and taking a greasy pack of cards from the chimney-piece. “I
don’t ask no questions, and don’t want no answers. Let’s have a drop of
grog and a turn-to at Beggar-my-Neighbor. Sixpence a time. Come on!”
They sat down at once to their cards and their brandy-and-water; playing
uninterruptedly for an hour or more. Zack won; and--being additionally
enlivened by the inspiring influences of grog--rose to a higher and
higher pitch of exhilaration with every additional sixpence which his
good luck extracted from his adversary’s pocket. His gaiety seemed at
last to communicate itself even to the imperturbable Mat, who in an
interval of shuffling the cards, was heard to deliver himself suddenly
of one of those gruff chuckles, which have been already described as the
nearest approach he was capable of making towards a civilized laugh.
He was so seldom in the habit of exhibiting any outward symptoms of
hilarity, that Zack, who was dealing for the new game, stopped in
astonishment, and inquired with great curiosity what it was his friend
was “grunting about.” At first, Mat declined altogether to say;--then,
on being pressed, admitted that his mind was just then running on the
“old woman” Zack had spoken of; as having “suddenly fallen foul of
him in Mr. Blyth’s house, because he wanted to give the young woman a
present:” which circumstance, Mat added, “so tickled his fancy, that he
would have paid a crown piece out of his pocket only to have seen and
heard the whole squabble all through from beginning to end.”
Zack, whose fancy was now exactly in the right condition to be “tickled”
by anything that “tickled” his friend, seized in high glee the humorous
side of the topic suggested to him; and immediately began describing
poor Mrs. Peckover’s personal peculiarities in a strain of the most
ridiculous exaggeration. Mat listened, as he went on, with such admiring
attention, and seemed to be so astonishingly amused by everything he
said, that, in the excitement of success, he ran into the next room,
snatched the two pillows off the bed, fastened one in front and
the other behind him, tied the patchwork counterpane over all for a
petticoat, and waddled back into his friend’s presence, in the character
of fat Mrs. Peckover, as she appeared on the memorable evening when she
stopped him mysteriously in the passage of Mr. Blyth’s house.
Zack was really a good mimic; and he now hit off all the peculiarities
of Mrs. Peckover’s voice, manner, and gait to the life--Mat chuckling
all the while, rolling his huge head from side to side, and striking his
heavy fist applaudingly on the table. Encouraged by the extraordinary
effect his performances produced, Zack went through the whole of
his scene with Mrs. Peckover in the passage, from beginning to end;
following that excellent woman through all the various mazes of
“rhodomontade” in which she then bewildered herself, and imitating her
terror when he threatened to run upstairs and ask Mr. Blyth if Madonna
really had a hair bracelet, with such amazing accuracy and humor, as
made Mat declare that what he had just beheld for nothing, would cure
him of ever paying money again to see any regular play-acting as long as
he lived.
By the time young Thorpe had reached the climax of his improvised
dramatic entertainment, he had so thoroughly exhausted himself that he
was glad to throw aside the pillows and the counterpane, and perfectly
ready to spend the rest of the evening quietly over the newspaper. His
friend did not interrupt him by a word, except at the moment when he sat
down; and then Mat said, simply and carelessly enough, that he
thought he should detect the original Mrs. Peckover directly by Zack’s
imitation, if ever he met with her in the streets. To which Young Thorpe
merely replied that he was not very likely to do anything of the sort;
because Mrs. Peckover lived at Rubbleford, where her husband had some
situation, and where she herself kept a little dairy and muffin shop.
“She don’t come to town above once a-year,” concluded Zack as he lit a
cigar; “and then the old beauty stops in-doors all the time at Blyth’s!”
Mat listened to this answer attentively, but offered no further remark.
He went into the back room, where the water was, and busied himself in
washing up all the spare crockery of the bachelor household in honor of
Mr. Blyth’s expected visit.
In process of time, Zack--on whom literature of any kind, high or low,
always acted more or less as a narcotic--grew drowsy over his newspaper,
let his grog get cold, dropped his cigar out of his mouth, and fell fast
asleep in his chair. When he woke up, shivering, his watch had stopped,
the candle was burning down in the socket, the fire was out, and his
fellow-lodger was not to be seen either in the front or the back room.
Young Thorpe knew his friend’s strange fancy for “going out over night
(as Mat phrased it) to catch the morning the first thing in the fields”
too well to be at all astonished at now finding himself alone. He moved
away sleepily to bed, yawning out these words to himself:--“I shall see
the old boy back again as usual to-morrow morning as soon as I wake.”
When the morning came, this anticipation proved to be fallacious. The
first objects that greeted Zack’s eyes when he lazily awoke about eleven
o’clock, were an arm and a letter, introduced cautiously through his
partially opened bedroom door. Though by no means contemptible in regard
to muscular development, this was not the hairy and herculean arm
of Mat. It was only the arm of the servant of all work, who held the
barbarian lodger in such salutary awe that she had never been known to
venture her whole body into the forbidden region of his apartments since
he had first inhabited them. Zack jumped out of bed and took the letter.
It proved to be from Valentine, and summoned him to repair immediately
to the painter’s house to see Mrs. Thorpe, who earnestly desired to
speak with him. His color changed as he read the few lines Mr. Blyth had
written, and thought of the prospect of meeting his mother face to
face for the first time since he had left his home. He hurried on his
clothes, however, without a moment’s delay, and went out directly--now
walking at the top of his speed, now running, in his anxiety not to
appear dilatory or careless in paying obedience to the summons that had
just reached him.
On arriving at the painter’s house, he was shown into one of the parlors
on the ground floor; and there sat Mrs. Thorpe, with Mr. Blyth to keep
her company. The meeting between mother and son was characteristic on
both sides. Without giving Valentine time enough to get from his chair
to the door--without waiting an instant to ascertain what sentiments
towards him were expressed in Mrs. Thorpe’s face--without paying the
smallest attention to the damage he did to her cap and bonnet--Zack
saluted his mother with the old shower of hearty kisses and the old
boisterously affectionate hug of his nursery and schoolboy days. And
she, poor woman, on her side, feebly faltered over her first words of
reproof--then lost her voice altogether, pressed into his hand a little
paper packet of money that she had brought for him, and wept on his
breast without speaking another word. Thus it had been with them long
ago, when she was yet a young woman and he but a boy--thus, even as it
was now in the latter and the sadder time!
Mrs. Thorpe was long in regaining the self-possession which she had lost
on seeing her son for the first time since his flight from home. Zack
expressed his contrition over and over again, and many times reiterated
his promise to follow the plan Mr. Blyth had proposed to him when they
met at the turnpike, before his mother became calm enough to speak three
words together without bursting into tears. When she at last recovered
herself sufficiently to be able to address him with some composure, she
did not speak, as he had expected, of his past delinquencies or of his
future prospects, but of the lodging which he then inhabited, and of
the stranger whom he had suffered to become his friend. Although Mat’s
gallant rescue of “Columbus” had warmly predisposed Valentine in
his favor, the painter was too conscientious to soften facts on that
account, when he told Zack’s mother where her son was now living, and
what sort of companion he had chosen to lodge with. Mrs. Thorpe was
timid, and distrustful as all timid people are; and she now entreated
him with nervous eagerness to begin his promised reform by leaving Kirk
Street, and at once dropping his dangerous intimacy with the vagabond
stranger who lived there.
Zack defended his friend to his mother, exactly as he had already
defended him to Valentine--but without shaking her opinion, until he
bethought himself of promising that in this matter, as in all others,
he would be finally guided by the opinion of Mr. Blyth. The assurance
so given, accompanied as it was by the announcement that Valentine was
about to form his own judgment of Mr. Marksman by visiting the house in
Kirk Street that very night, seemed to quiet and satisfy Mrs. Thorpe.
Her last hopes for her son’s future, now that she was forced to admit
the sad necessity of conniving at his continued absence from home,
rested one and all on Mr. Blyth alone.
This first difficulty smoothed over, Zack asked with no little
apprehension and anxiety, whether his father’s anger showed any symptoms
of subsiding as yet. The question was an unfortunate one. Mrs. Thorpe’s
eyes began to fill with tears again, the moment she heard it. The news
she had now to tell her son, in answering his inquiries, was of a very
melancholy and a very hopeless kind.
The attack of palpitations in the heart which had seized Mr. Thorpe on
the day of his son’s flight from Baregrove Square, had been immediately
and successfully relieved by the medical remedies employed; but it had
been followed, within the last day or two, by a terrible depression of
spirits, under which the patient seemed to have given way entirely, and
for which the doctor was unable to suggest any speedy process of cure.
Few in number at all times, Mr. Thorpe’s words had now become fewer than
ever. His usual energy appeared to be gone altogether. He still went
through all the daily business of the religious Societies to which he
belonged, in direct opposition to the doctor’s advice; but he performed
his duties mechanically, and without any apparent interest in the
persons or events with which he was brought in contact. He had only
referred to his son once in the last two days; and then it was not to
talk of reclaiming him, not to ask where he had gone, but only to desire
briefly and despairingly that his name might not be mentioned again.
So far as Zack’s interests or apprehensions were now concerned, there
was, consequently no fear of any new collision occurring between
his father and himself. When Mrs. Thorpe had told her husband (after
receiving Valentine’s answer to her letter) that their runaway son was
“in safe hands,” Mr. Thorpe never asked, as she had feared he would,
“What hands?” And again, when she hinted that it might be perhaps
advisable to assist the lad to some small extent, as long as he kept
in the right way, and suffered himself to be guided by the “safe hands”
already mentioned, still Mr. Thorpe made no objections and no inquiries,
but bowed his head, and told her to do as she pleased: at the same time
whispering a few words to himself; which were not uttered loud enough
for her to hear. She could only, therefore, repeat the sad truth that,
since his energies had given way, all his former plans and all his
customary opinions, in reference to his son, seemed to have undergone
some disastrous and sudden alteration. It was only in consequence of
this alteration, which appeared to render him as unfit to direct her
how to act as to act himself; that she had ventured to undertake the
responsibility of arranging the present interview with Zack, and
of bringing him the small pecuniary assistance which Mr. Blyth had
considered to be necessary in the present melancholy emergency.
The enumeration of all these particulars--interrupted, as it
constantly was, by unavailing lamentations on one side and by useless
self-reproaches on the other--occupied much more time than either mother
or son had imagined. It was not till the clock in Mr. Blyth’s hall
struck, that Mrs. Thorpe discovered how much longer her absence from
home had lasted than she had intended it should on leaving Baregrove
Square. She rose directly, in great trepidation--took a hurried leave
of Valentine, who was loitering about his front garden--sent the kindest
messages she could think of to the ladies above stairs--and departed at
once for home. Zack escorted her to the entrance of the square; and,
on taking leave, showed the sincerity of his contrition in a very
unexpected and desperate manner, by actually offering to return home
then and there with his mother, if she wished it! Mrs. Thorpe’s heart
yearned to take him at his word, but she remembered the doctor’s orders
and the critical condition of her husband’s health; and forced herself
to confess to Zack that the favorable time for his return had not yet
arrived. After this--with mutual promises to communicate again soon
through Valentine--they parted very sadly, just at the entrance of
Baregrove Square: Mrs. Thorpe hurrying nervously to her own door, Zack
returning gloomily to Mr. Blyth’s house.
Meanwhile, how had Mat been occupying himself, since he had left his
young friend alone in the lodging in Kirk Street?
He had really gone out, as Zack had supposed, for one of those long
night-walks of his, which usually took him well into the country before
the first grey of daylight had spread far over the sky. On ordinary
occasions, he only indulged in these oddly-timed pedestrian excursions
because the restless habits engendered by his vagabond life, made him
incapable of conforming to civilized hours by spending the earliest part
of the morning, like other people, inactively in bed. On this particular
occasion, however, he had gone out with something like a special
purpose; for he had left Kirk Street, not so much for the sake of taking
a walk, as for the sake of thinking clearly and at his ease. Mat’s
brain was never so fertile in expedients as when he was moving his limbs
freely in the open air.
Hardly a chance word had dropped from Zack that night which had not
either confirmed him in his resolution to possess himself of Valentine’s
Hair Bracelet, or helped to suggest to him the manner in which his
determination to obtain it might be carried out. The first great
necessity imposed on him by his present design, was to devise the means
of secretly opening the painter’s bureau; the second was to hit on
some safe method--should no chance opportunity occur--of approaching it
unobserved. Mat had remarked that Mr. Blyth wore the key of the bureau
attached to his watch chain; and Mat had just heard from young Thorpe
that Mr. Blyth was about to pay them a visit in Kirk Street. On the
evening of that visit, therefore, the first of the two objects--the
discovery of a means of secretly opening the bureau--might, in some way,
be attained. How?
This was the problem which Mat set off to solve to his own perfect
satisfaction, in the silence and loneliness of a long night’s walk.
In what precise number of preliminary mental entanglements he involved
himself; before arriving at the desired solution, it would not be very
easy to say. As usual, his thoughts wandered every now and then from
his subject in the most irregular manner; actually straying away, on one
occasion as far as the New World itself; and unintelligibly occupying
themselves with stories he had heard, and conversations he had held
in various portions of that widely-extended sphere, with vagabond
chance-comrades from all parts of civilized Europe. How his mind
ever got back from these past times and foreign places to present
difficulties and future considerations connected with the guest who was
expected in Kirk Street, Mat himself would have been puzzled to tell.
But it did eventually get back, nevertheless; and, what was still more
to the purpose, it definitely and thoroughly worked out the intricate
problem that had been set it to solve.
Not a whispered word of the plan he had now hit on dropped from Mat’s
lips, as, turning it this way and that in his thoughts, he walked
briskly back to town in the first fresh tranquillity of the winter
morning. Discreet as he was, however, either some slight practical hints
of his present project must have oozed out through his actions when he
got back to London; or his notion of the sort of hospitable preparation
which ought to be made for the reception of Mr. Blyth, was more
barbarously and extravagantly eccentric than all the rest of his notions
put together.
Instead of going home at once, when he arrived at Kirk Street, he
stopped at certain shops in the neighborhood to make some purchases
which evidently had reference to the guest of the evening; for the first
things he bought were two or three lemons and a pound of loaf sugar.
So far his proceedings were no doubt intelligible enough; but they
gradually became more and more incomprehensible when he began to walk up
and down two or three streets, looking about him attentively, stopping
at every locksmith’s and ironmonger’s shop that he passed, waiting to
observe all the people who might happen to be inside them, and then
deliberately walking on again. In this way he approached, in course of
time, a very filthy little row of houses, with some very ill-looking
male and female inhabitants visible in detached positions, staring out
of windows or lingering about public-house doors.
Occupying the lower story of one of these houses was a small grimy shop,
which, judging by the visible stock-in-trade, dealt on a much larger
scale in iron and steel ware that was old and rusty, than in iron and
steel ware that was new and bright. Before the counter no customer
appeared; behind it there stood alone a squalid, bushy browed,
hump-backed man, as dirty as the dirtiest bit of iron about him, sorting
old nails. Mat, who had unintelligibly passed the doors of respectable
ironmongers, now, as unintelligibly, entered this doubtful and dirty
shop; and addressed himself to the unattractive stranger behind the
counter. The conference in which the two immediately engaged was
conducted in low tones, and evidently ended to the satisfaction of
both; for the squalid shopman began to whistle a tune as he resumed his
sorting of the nails, and Mat muttered to himself; “That’s all right,”
as he came out on the pavement again.
His next proceeding--always supposing that it had reference to the
reception of Mr. Blyth--was still more mysterious. He went into one
of those grocer’s shops which are dignified by the title of “Italian
Warehouses,” and bought a small lump of the very best refined wax! After
making this extraordinary purchase, which he put into the pocket of his
trousers, he next entered the public-house opposite his lodgings;
and, in defiance of what Zack had told him about Valentine’s temperate
habits, bought and brought away with him, not only a fresh bottle of
Brandy, but a bottle of old Jamaica Rum besides.
Young Thorpe had not returned from Mr. Blyth’s when Mat entered the
lodgings with these purchases. He put the bottles, the sugar, and
the lemons in the cupboard--cast a satisfied look at the three clean
tumblers and spoons already standing on the shelf--relaxed so far from
his usual composure of aspect as to smile--lit the fire, and
heaped plenty of coal on, to keep it alight--then sat down on his
bearskins--wriggled himself comfortably into the corner, and threw his
handkerchief over his face; chuckling gruffly for the first time since
the past night, as he put his hand in his pockets, and so accidentally
touched the lump of wax that lay in one of them.
“Now I’m all ready for the Painter-Man,” growled Mat behind the
handkerchief, as he quietly settled himself to go to sleep.