That Mr. Grabman slept calmly that night is probable enough, for his
gin-bottle was empty the next morning; and it was with eyes more than
usually heavy that he dozily followed the movements of Beck, who,
according to custom, opened the shutters of the little den adjoining his
sitting-room, brushed his clothes, made his fire, set on the kettle to
boil, and laid his breakfast things, preparatory to his own departure
to the duties of the day. Stretching himself, however, and shaking off
slumber, as the remembrance of the enterprise he had undertaken glanced
pleasantly across him, Grabman sat up in his bed and said, in a voice
that, if not maudlin, was affectionate, and if not affectionate, was
maudlin,--
“Beck, you are a good fellow. You have faults, you are human,--humanism
est errare; which means that you some times scorch my muffins. But,
take you all in all, you are a kind creature. Beck, I am going into
the country for some days. I shall leave my key in the hole in the
wall,--you know; take care of it when you come in. You were out late
last night, my poor fellow. Very wrong! Look well to yourself, or who
knows? You may be clutched by that blackguard resurrection-man, No. 7.
Well, well, to think of that Jason’s foolhardiness! But he’s the worse
devil of the two. Eh! what was I saying? And always give a look into
my room every night before you go to roost. The place swarms with
cracksmen, and one can’t be too cautious. Lucky dog, you, to have
nothing to be robbed of!”
Beck winced at that last remark. Grabman did not seem to notice his
confusion, and proceeded, as he put on his stockings: “And, Beck, you
are a good fellow, and have served me faithfully; when I come back,
I will bring you something handsome,--a backey-box or--who knows?--a
beautiful silver watch. Meanwhile, I think--let me see--yes, I can give
you this elegant pair of small-clothes. Put out my best,--the black
ones. And now, Beck, I’ll not keep you any longer.”
The poor sweep, with many pulls at his forelock, acknowledged the
munificent donation; and having finished all his preparations, hastened
first to his room, to examine at leisure, and with great admiration, the
drab small-clothes. “Room,” indeed, we can scarcely style the wretched
enclosure which Beck called his own. It was at the top of the house,
under the roof, and hot--oh, so hot--in the summer! It had one small
begrimed window, through which the light of heaven never came, for the
parapet, beneath which ran the choked gutter, prevented that; but the
rain and the wind came in. So sometimes, through four glassless frames,
came a fugitive tom-cat. As for the rats, they held the place as their
own. Accustomed to Beck, they cared nothing for him.
They were the Mayors of that Palace; he only le roi faineant. They ran
over his bed at night; he often felt them on his face, and was convinced
they would have eaten him, if there had been anything worth eating upon
his bones; still, perhaps out of precaution rather than charity, he
generally left them a potato or two, or a crust of bread, to take off
the edge of their appetites. But Beck was far better off than most who
occupied the various settlements in that Alsatia,--he had his room to
himself. That was necessary to his sole luxury,--the inspection of his
treasury, the safety of his mattress; for it he paid, without grumbling,
what he thought was a very high rent. To this hole in the roof there was
no lock,--for a very good reason, there was no door to it. You went up
a ladder, as you would go into a loft. Now, it had often been matter of
much intense cogitation to Beck whether or not he should have a door
to his chamber; and the result of the cogitation was invariably the
same,--he dared not! What should he want with a door,--a door with a
lock to it? For one followed as a consequence to the other. Such a novel
piece of grandeur would be an ostentatious advertisement that he had
something to guard. He could have no pretence for it on the ground that
he was intruded on by neighbours; no step but his own was ever caught
by him ascending that ladder; it led to no other room. All the offices
required for the lodgment he performed himself. His supposed poverty
was a better safeguard than doors of iron. Besides this, a door, if
dangerous, would be superfluous; the moment it was suspected that Beck
had something worth guarding, that moment all the picklocks and skeleton
keys in the neighbourhood would be in a jingle. And a cracksman of high
repute lodged already on the ground-floor. So Beck’s treasure, like the
bird’s nest, was deposited as much out of sight as his instinct
could contrive; and the locks and bolts of civilized men were equally
dispensed with by bird and Beck.
On a rusty nail the sweep suspended the drab small-clothes, stroked them
down lovingly, and murmured, “They be ‘s too good for I; I should
like to pop ‘em! But vould n’t that be a shame? Beck, be n’t you be a
hungrateful beast to go for to think of nothin’ but the tin, ven your
‘art ought to varm with hemotion? I vill vear ‘em ven I vaits on him.
Ven he sees his own smalls bringing in the muffins, he will say, ‘Beck,
you becomes ‘em!’”
Fraught with this noble resolution, the sweep caught up his broom, crept
down the ladder, and with a furtive glance at the door of the room in
which the cracksman lived, let himself out and shambled his way to his
crossing. Grabman, in the mean while, dressed himself with more care
than usual, shaved his beard from a four days’ crop, and while seated at
his breakfast, read attentively over the notes which Varney had left to
him, pausing at times to make his own pencil memoranda. He then packed
up such few articles as so moderate a worshipper of the Graces might
require, deposited them in an old blue brief-bag, and this done, he
opened his door, and creeping to the threshold, listened carefully.
Below, a few sounds might be heard,--here, the wail of a child; there,
the shrill scold of a woman in that accent above all others adapted
to scold,--the Irish. Farther down still, the deep bass oath of the
choleric resurrection-man; but above, all was silent. Only one floor
intervened between Grabman’s apartment and the ladder that led to Beck’s
loft. And the inmates of that room gave no sound of life. Grabman took
courage, and shuffling off his shoes, ascended the stairs; he passed the
closed door of the room above; he seized the ladder with a shaking hand;
he mounted, step after step; he stood in Beck’s room.
Now, O Nicholas Grabman! some moralists may be harsh enough to condemn
thee for what thou art doing,--kneeling yonder in the dim light, by that
curtainless pallet, with greedy fingers feeling here and there, and a
placid, self-hugging smile upon thy pale lips. That poor vagabond whom
thou art about to despoil has served thee well and faithfully, has borne
with thine ill-humours, thy sarcasms, thy swearings, thy kicks, and
buffets; often, when in the bestial sleep of drunkenness he has found
thee stretched helpless on thy floor, with a kindly hand he has moved
away the sharp fender, too near that knavish head, now bent on his ruin,
or closed the open window, lest the keen air, that thy breath tainted,
should visit thee with rheum and fever. Small has been his guerdon for
uncomplaining sacrifice of the few hours spared to this weary drudge
from his daily toil,--small, but gratefully received. And if Beck had
been taught to pray, he would have prayed for thee as for a good man,
O miserable sinner! And thou art going now, Nicholas Grabman, upon an
enterprise which promises thee large gains, and thy purse is filled; and
thou wantest nothing for thy wants or thy swinish luxuries. Why should
those shaking fingers itch for the poor beggar-man’s hoards?
But hadst thou been bound on an errand that would have given thee a
million, thou wouldst not have left unrifled that secret store which thy
prying eye had discovered, and thy hungry heart had coveted. No; since
one night,--fatal, alas! to the owner of loft and treasure, when,
needing Beck for some service, and fearing to call aloud (for the
resurrection-man in the floor below thee, whose oaths even now ascend to
thine ear, sleeps ill, and has threatened to make thee mute forever
if thou disturbest him in the few nights in which his dismal calling
suffers him to sleep at all), thou didst creep up the ladder, and didst
see the unconscious miser at his nightly work, and after the sight didst
steal down again, smiling,--no; since that night, no schoolboy ever more
rootedly and ruthlessly set his mind upon nest of linnet than thine was
set upon the stores in Beck’s mattress.
And yet why, O lawyer, should rigid moralists blame thee more than such
of thy tribe as live, honoured and respectable, upon the frail and the
poor? Who among them ever left loft or mattress while a rap could be
wrung from either? Matters it to Astraea whether the spoliation be made
thus nakedly and briefly, or by all the acknowledged forms in which,
item on item, six-and-eightpence on six-and-eightpence, the inexorable
hand closes at length on the last farthing of duped despair? Not--Heaven
forbid!--that we make thee, foul Nicholas Grabman, a type for all the
class called attorneys-at-law! Noble hearts, liberal minds, are there
amongst that brotherhood, we know and have experienced; but a type
art thou of those whom want and error and need have proved--alas! too
well--the lawyers of the poor. And even while we write, and even while
ye read, many a Grabman steals from helpless toil the savings of a life.
Ye poor hoards,--darling delights of your otherwise joyless owner,--how
easily has his very fondness made ye the prey of the spoiler! How
gleefully, when the pence swelled into a shilling, have they been
exchanged into the new bright piece of silver, the newest and brightest
that could be got; then the shillings into crowns, then the crowns into
gold,--got slyly and at a distance, and contemplated with what rapture;
so that at last the total lay manageable and light in its radiant
compass. And what a total! what a surprise to Grabman! Had it been but
a sixpence, he would have taken it; but to grasp sovereigns by the
handful, it was too much for him; and as he rose, he positively laughed,
from a sense of fun.
But amongst his booty there was found one thing that specially moved
his mirth: it was a child’s coral, with its little bells. Who could have
given Beck such a bauble, or how Beck could have refrained from turning
it into money, would have been a fit matter for speculation. But it was
not that at which Grabman chuckled; he laughed, first because it was
an emblem of the utter childishness and folly of the creature he was
leaving penniless, and secondly, because it furnished his ready wit with
a capital contrivance to shift Beck’s indignation from his own shoulders
to a party more liable to suspicion. He left the coral on the floor
near the bed, stole down the ladder, reached his own room, took up his
brief-bag, locked his door, slipped the key in the rat-hole, where the
trusty, plundered Beck alone could find it, and went boldly downstairs;
passing successively the doors within which still stormed the
resurrection-man, still wailed the child, still shrieked the Irish
shrew, he paused at the ground-floor occupied by Bill the cracksman and
his long-fingered, slender, quick-eyed imps, trained already to pass
through broken window-panes, on their precocious progress to the hulks.
The door was open, and gave a pleasant sight of the worthy family
within. Bill himself, a stout-looking fellow with a florid, jolly
countenance, and a pipe in his mouth, was sitting at his window, with
his brawny legs lolling on a table covered with the remains of a very
tolerable breakfast. Four small Bills were employed in certain sports
which, no doubt, according to the fashionable mode of education,
instilled useful lessons under the artful guise of playful amusement.
Against the wall, at one corner of the room, was affixed a row of bells,
from which were suspended exceedingly tempting apples by slender
wires. Two of the boys were engaged in the innocent entertainment of
extricating the apples without occasioning any alarm from the bells;
a third was amusing himself at a table, covered with mock rings and
trinkets, in a way that seemed really surprising; with the end of a
finger, dipped probably in some glutinous matter, he just touched one
of the gewgaws, and lo, it vanished!--vanished so magically that
the quickest eye could scarcely trace whither; sometimes up a cuff,
sometimes into a shoe,--here, there, anywhere, except back again upon
the table. The fourth, an urchin apparently about five years old,--he
might be much younger, judging from his stunted size; somewhat older,
judging from the vicious acuteness of his face,--on the floor under his
father’s chair, was diving his little hand into the paternal pockets in
search for a marble sportively hidden in those capacious recesses.
On the rising geniuses around him Bill the cracksman looked, and his
father’s heart was proud. Pausing at the threshold, Grabman looked in
and said cheerfully, “Good-day to you; good-day to you all, my little
dears.”
“Ah, Grabman,” said Bill, rising, and making a bow,--for Bill valued
himself much on his politeness,--“come to blow a cloud, eh? Bob,” this
to the eldest born, “manners, sir; wipe your nose, and set a chair for
the gent.”
“Many thanks to you, Bill, but I can’t stay now; I have a long journey
to take. But, bless my soul, how stupid I am! I have forgotten my
clothes-brush. I knew there was some thing on my mind all the way I was
coming downstairs. I was saying, ‘Grabman, there is something forgotten!
’”
“I know what that ‘ere feelin’ is,” said Bill, thoughtfully; “I had it
myself the night afore last; and sure enough, when I got to the ----.
But that’s neither here nor there. Bob, run upstairs and fetch down Mr.
Grabman’s clothes-brush. ‘T is the least you can do for a gent who
saved your father from the fate of them ‘ere innocent apples. Your fist,
Grabman. I have a heart in my buzzom; cut me open, and you will find
there `Halibi, and Grabman!’ Give Bob your key.”
“The brush is not in my room,” answered Grabman; “it is at the top of
the house, up the ladder, in Beck’s loft,--Beck, the sweeper. The stupid
dog always keeps it there, and forgot to give it me. Sorry to occasion
my friend Bob so much trouble.”
“Bob has a soul above trouble; his father’s heart beats in his buzzom.
Bob, track the dancers. Up like a lark, and down like a dump.”
Bob grinned, made a mow at Mr. Grabman, and scampered up the stairs.
“You never attends our free-and-easy,” said Bill; “but we toasts you
with three times three, and up standing. ‘T is a hungrateful world! But
some men has a heart; and to those who has a heart, Grabman is a trump!”
“I am sure, whenever I can do you a service, you may reckon on me.
Meanwhile, if you could get that cursed bullying fellow who lives under
me to be a little more civil, you would oblige me.”
“Under you? No. 7? No. 7, is it? Grabman, h-am I a man? Is this a h-arm,
and this a bunch of fives? I dares do all that does become a man; but
No. 7 is a body-snatcher! No. 7 has bullied me, and I bore it! No. 7
might whop me, and this h-arm would let him whop! He lives with graves
and churchyards and stiff ‘uns, that damnable No. 7! Ask some’at else,
Grabman. I dares not touch No. 7 any more than the ghostesses.”
Grabman sneered as he saw that Bill, stout rogue as he was, turned
pale while he spoke; but at that moment Bob reappeared with the
clothes-brush, which the ex-attorney thrust into his pocket, and
shaking Bill by the hand, and patting Bob on the head, he set out on his
journey.
Bill reseated himself, muttering, “Bully a body-snatcher! Drot that
Grabman, does he want to get rid of poor Bill?”
Meanwhile Bob exhibited slyly, to his second brother, the sight of
Beck’s stolen coral. The children took care not to show it to their
father. They were already inspired by the laudable ambition to set up in
business on their own account.