“This was in March, 1828, the same month in which the advertisement appeared. I am particular in repeating the date because it marks the time of the last information I have to give, in connection with the disgraceful circumstances which I have here forced myself to relate. Of the child mentioned in the advertisement, I never heard anything, from that time to this. I do not even know when it was born. I only know that its guilty mother left her home in the December of 1827. Whether it lived after the date of the advertisement, or whether it died, I never discovered, and never wished to discover. I have kept myself retired since the days of my humiliation, hiding my sorrow in my own heart, and neither asking questions nor answering them.”
At this place Mat once more suspended the perusal of the letter. He had now read on for an unusually long time with unflagging attention, and with the same stern sadness always in his face, except when the name of Arthur Carr occurred in the course of the narrative. Almost on every occasion, when the finger by which he guided himself along the close lines of the letter, came to those words, it trembled a little, and the dangerous look grew ever brighter and brighter in his eyes. It was in them now, as he dropped the letter on his knee, and, turning round, took from the wall behind him, against which it leaned, a certain leather bag, already alluded to, as part of the personal property that he brought with him on installing himself in Kirk Street. He opened it, took out a feather fan, and an Indian tobacco-pouch of scarlet cloth; and then began to search in the bottom of the bag, from which, at length, he drew forth a letter. It was torn in several places, the ink of the writing in it was faded, and the paper was disfigured by stains of grease, tobacco, and dirt generally. The direction was in such a condition, that the word “Brazils,” at the end, was alone legible. Inside, it was not in a much better state. The date at the top, however, still remained tolerably easy to distinguish: it was “December 20th, 1827.”
Mat looked first at this, and then at the paragraph he had just been reading, in Joanna Grice’s narrative. After that, he began to count on his fingers, clumsily enough—beginning with the year 1828 as Number One, and ending with the current year, 1851, as Number Twenty-three. “Twenty-three,” he repeated aloud to himself, “twenty-three years: I shall remember that.”
He looked down a little vacantly, the next moment, at the old torn letter again. Some of the lines, here and there, had escaped stains and dirt sufficiently to be still easily legible; and it was over these that his eyes now wandered. The first words that caught his attention ran thus:—“I am now, therefore, in this bitter affliction, more than ever desirous that all past differences between us should be forgotten, and”—here the beginning of another line was hidden by a stain, beyond which, on the cleaner part of the letter, the writing proceeded:—“In this spirit, then, I counsel you, if you can get continued employment anywhere abroad, to accept it, instead of coming back”—(a rent in the paper made the next words too fragmentary to be easily legible). * * * “any good news be sure of hearing from me again. In the mean time, I say it once more, keep away, if you can. Your presence could do no good; and it is better for you, at your age, to be spared the sight of such sorrow as that we are now suffering.” (After this, dirt and the fading of the ink made several sentences near the end of the page almost totally illegible—the last three or four lines at the bottom of the letter alone remaining clear enough to be read with any ease.) * * * “the poor, lost, unhappy creature! But I shall find her, I know I shall find her; and then, let Joanna say or do what she may, I will forgive my own Mary, for I know she will deserve her pardon. As for him, I feel confident that he may be traced yet; and that I can shame him into making the atonement of marrying her. If he should refuse, then the black-hearted villain shall—”
At this point, Mat abruptly stopped in his reading; and, hastily folding up the letter, put it back in the bag again, along the feather fan and the Indian pouch. “I can’t go on that part of the story now, but the time may come—” He pursued the thought which thus expressed itself in him no further, but sat still for a few minutes, with his head on his hand and his heavy eyebrows contracted by an angry frown, staring sullenly at the flame of the candle. Joanna Grice’s letter still remained to be finished. He took it up, and looked back to the paragraph that he had last read.
“As for the child mentioned in the advertisement”—those were the words to which he was now referring. “The child?”—There was no mention of its sex. “I should like to know if it was a boy or a girl,” thought Mat.
Though he was now close to the end of the letter, he roused himself with difficulty to attend to the last few sentences which remained to be read. They began thus:—
“Before I say anything in conclusion, of the sale of our business, of my brother’s death, and of the life which I have been leading since that time, I should wish to refer, once for all, and very briefly, to the few things which my niece left behind her, when she abandoned her home. Circumstances may, one day, render this necessary. I desire then to state, that everything belonging to her is preserved in one of her boxes (now in my possession), just as she left it. When the letters signed ‘A. C.’ were discovered, as I have mentioned, on the occasion of repairs being made in the house, I threw them into the box with my own hand. They will all be found, more or less, to prove the justice of those first suspicions of mine, which my late brother so unhappily disregarded. In reference to money or valuables, I have only to mention that my niece took all her savings with her in her flight. I knew in what box she kept them, and I saw that box open and empty on her table, when I first discovered that she was gone. As for the only three articles of jewelry that she had, her brooch I myself saw her give to Ellen Gough—her earrings she always wore—and I can only presume (never having found it anywhere) that she took with her, in her flight, her Hair Bracelet.”
“There it is again!” cried Mat, dropping the letter in astonishment, the instant those two significant words, “Hair Bracelet,” caught his eye.
He had hardly uttered the exclamation, before he heard the door of the house flung open, then shut to again with a bang. Zack had just let himself in with his latch-key.
“I’m glad he’s come,” muttered Mat, snatching up the letter from the floor, and crumpling it into his pocket. “There’s another thing or two I want to find out, before I go any further—and Zack’s the lad to help me.”
CHAPTER IX. MORE DISCOVERIES.
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.
CHAPTER X. THE SQUAW’S MIXTURE.
Like the vast majority of those persons who are favored by Nature with, what is commonly termed, “a high flow of animal spirits,” Zack was liable, at certain times and seasons, to fall from the heights of exhilaration to the depths of despair, without stopping for a moment, by the way, at any intermediate stages of moderate cheerfulness, pensive depression, or tearful gloom. After he had parted from his mother, he presented himself again at Mr. Blyth’s house, in such a prostrate condition of mind, and talked of his delinquencies and their effect on his father’s spirits, with such vehement bitterness of self-reproach, as quite amazed Valentine, and even alarmed him a little on the lad’s account. The good-natured painter was no friend to contrite desperation of any kind, and no believer in repentance, which could not look hopefully forward to the future, as well as sorrowfully back at the past. So he laid down his brush, just as he was about to begin varnishing the “Golden Age;” and set himself to console Zack, by reminding him of all the credit and honor he might yet win, if he was regular in attending to his new studies—if he never flinched from work at the British Museum, and the private Drawing School to which he was immediately to be introduced—and if he ended as he well might end, in excusing to his father his determination to be an artist, by showing Mr. Thorpe a prize medal, won by the industry of his son’s hand in the Schools of the Royal Academy.
A necessary characteristic of people whose spirits are always running into extremes, is that they are generally able to pass from one change of mood to another with unusual facility. By the time Zack had exhausted Mr. Blyth’s copious stores of consolation, had partaken of an excellent and plentiful hot lunch, and had passed an hour up stairs with the ladies, he predicted his own reformation just as confidently as he had predicted his own ruin about two hours before; and went away to Kirk Street, to see that his friend Mat was at home to receive Valentine that evening, stepping along as nimbly and swinging his stick as cheerfully, as if he had already vindicated himself to his father by winning every prize medal that the Royal Academy could bestow.
Seven o’clock had been fixed as the hour at which Mr. Blyth was to present himself at the lodgings in Kirk Street. He arrived punctual to the appointed time, dressed jauntily for the occasion in a short blue frock coat, famous among all his acquaintances for its smartness of cut and its fabulous old age. From what Zack had told him of Mat’s lighter peculiarities of character, he anticipated a somewhat uncivilized reception from the elder of his two hosts; and when he got to Kirk Street, he certainly found that his expectations were, upon the whole, handsomely realized.
On mounting the dark and narrow wooden staircase of the tobacconist’s shop, his nose was greeted by a composite smell of fried liver and bacon, brandy and water, and cigar smoke, pouring hospitably down to meet him through the crevices of the drawing-room door. When he got into the room, the first object that struck his eyes at one end of it, was Zack, with his hat on, vigorously engaged in freshening up the dusty carpet with a damp mop; and Mat, at the other, presiding over the frying-pan, with his coat off, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, a glass of steaming hot grog on the chimney-piece above him, and a long pewter toasting-fork in his hand.
“Here’s the honored guest of the evening arrived before I’ve swabbed down the decks,” cried Zack, jogging his friend in the ribs with the long handle of the mop.
“How are you, to-night?” said Mat, with familiar ease, not moving from the frying-pan, but getting his right hand free to offer to Mr. Blyth by taking the pewter toasting-fork between his teeth. “Sit down anywhere you like; and just holler through the crack in the floor, under the bearskins there, if you want anything out of the Bocker-shop, below.”—(“He means Tobacco when he says Bocker,” interposed Zack, parenthetically.) “Can you set your teeth in a baked tater or two?” continued Mat, tapping a small Dutch oven before the fire with his toasting-fork. “We’ve got you a lot of fizzin’ hot liver and bacon to ease down the taters with what you call a relish. Nice and streaky, ain’t it?” Here the host of the evening stuck his fork into a slice of bacon, and politely passed it over his shoulder for Mr. Blyth to inspect, as he stood bewildered in the middle of the room.
“Oh, delicious, delicious!” cried Valentine, smelling as daintily at the outstretched bacon as if it had been a nosegay. “Really, my dear sir—.” He said no more; for at that moment he tripped himself up upon one of some ten or a dozen bottle-corks which lay about on the carpet where he was standing. There is very little doubt, if Zack had not been by to catch him, that Mr. Blyth would just then have concluded his polite remarks on the bacon by measuring his full length on the floor.
“Why don’t you put him into a chair?” growled Mat, looking round reproachfully from the frying-pan, as Valentine recovered his erect position again with young Thorpe’s assistance.
“I was just going to swab up that part of the carpet when you came in,” said Zack, apologetically, as he led Mr. Blyth to a chair.
“Oh don’t mention it,” answered Valentine, laughing. “It was all my awkwardness.”
He stopped abruptly again. Zack had placed him with his back to the fire, against a table covered with a large and dirty cloth which flowed to the floor, and under which, while he was speaking, he had been gently endeavoring to insinuate his legs. Amazement bereft him of the power of speech when, on succeeding in this effort, he found that his feet came in contact with a perfect hillock of empty bottles, oyster-shells, and broken crockery, heaped under the table. “Good gracious me! I hope I’m doing no mischief!” exclaimed Valentine, as a miniature avalanche of oyster-shells clattered down on his intruding foot, and a plump bottle with a broken neck rolled lazily out from under the table-cloth, and courted observation on the open floor.
“Kick about, dear old fellow, kick about as much as you please,” cried Zack, seating himself opposite Mr. Blyth, and bringing down a second avalanche of oyster-shells to encourage him. “The fact is, we are rather put to it for space here, so we keep the cloth always laid for dinner, and make a temporary lumber-room of the place under the table. Rather a new idea that, I think—not tidy perhaps, but original and ingenious, which is much better.”
“Amazingly ingenious!” said Valentine, who was now beginning to be amused as well as surprised by his reception in Kirk Street. “Rather untidy, perhaps, as you say, Zack; but new, and not disagreeable I suppose when you’re used to it. What I like about all this,” continued Mr. Blyth, rubbing his hands cheerfully, and kicking into view another empty bottle, as he settled himself in his chair—“What I like about this is, that it’s so thoroughly without ceremony. Do you know I really feel at home already, though I never was here before in my life?—Curious, Zack, isn’t it?”
“Look out for the taters!” roared Mat suddenly from the fireplace. Valentine started, first at the unexpected shout just behind him, next at the sight of a big truculently-knobbed potato which came flying over his head, and was dexterously caught, and instantly deposited on the dirty table-cloth by Zack. “Two, three, four, five, six,” continued Mat, keeping the frying-pan going with one hand, and tossing the baked potatoes with the other over Mr. Blyth’s head, in quick succession for young Thorpe to catch. “What do you think of our way of dishing up potatoes in Kirk Street?” asked Zack in great triumph. “It’s a little sudden when you’re not used to it,” stammered Valentine, ducking his head as each edible missile flew over him—“but it’s free and easy—it’s delightfully free and easy.” “Ready there with your plates. The liver’s a coming,” cried Mat in a voice of martial command, suddenly showing his great red-hot perspiring face at the table, as he wheeled round from the fire, with the hissing frying-pan in one hand and the long toasting-fork in the other. “My dear sir, I’m shocked to see you taking all this trouble,” exclaimed Mr. Blyth; “do pray let me help you!” “No, I’m damned if I do,” returned Mat with the most polite suavity and the most perfect good humor. “Let him have all the trouble, Blyth,” said Zack; “let him help you, and don’t pity him. He’ll make up for his hard work, I can tell you, when he sets in seriously to his liver and bacon. Watch him when he begins—he bolts his dinner like the lion in the Zoological Gardens.”
Mat appeared to receive this speech of Zack’s as a well-merited compliment, for he chuckled at young Thorpe and winked grimly at Valentine, as he sat down bare-armed to his own mess of liver and bacon. It was certainly a rare and even a startling sight to see this singular man eat. Lump by lump, without one intervening morsel of bread, he tossed the meat into his mouth rather than put it there—turned it apparently once round between his teeth—and then voraciously and instantly swallowed it whole. By the time a quarter of Mr. Blyth’s plateful of liver and bacon, and half of Zack’s had disappeared, Mat had finished his frugal meal; had wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and the back of his hand on the leg of his trousers; had mixed two glasses of strong hot rum-and-water for himself and Zack; and had set to work on the composition of a third tumbler, into which sugar, brandy, lemon-juice, rum, and hot water all seemed to drop together in such incessant and confusing little driblets, that it was impossible to tell which ingredient was uppermost in the whole mixture. When the tumbler was full, he set it down on the table, with an indicative bang, close to Valentine’s plate.
“Just try a toothful of that to begin with,” said Mat. “If you like it, say Yes; if you don’t, say No; and I’ll make it better next time.”
“You are very kind, very kind indeed,” answered Mr. Blyth, eyeing the tumbler by his side with some little confusion and hesitation; “but really, though I should be shocked to appear ungrateful, I’m afraid I must own—Zack, you ought to have told your friend—”
“So I did,” said Zack, sipping his rum-and-water with infinite relish.
“The fact is, my dear sir,” continued Valentine, “I have the most wretched head in the world for strong liquor of any kind—”
“Don’t call it strong liquor,” interposed Mat, emphatically tapping the rim of his guest’s tumbler with his fore-finger.
“Perhaps,” pursued Mr. Blyth, with a polite smile, “I ought to have said grog.”
“Don’t call it grog,” retorted Mat, with two disputatious taps on the rim of the glass.
“Dear me!” asked Valentine, amazedly, “what is it then?”
“It’s Squaw’s Mixture,” answered Mat, with three distinct taps of asseveration.
Mr. Blyth and Zack laughed, under the impression that their queer companion was joking with them. Mat looked steadily and sternly from one to the other; then repeated with the gruffest gravity—“I tell you, it’s Squaw’s Mixture.”
“What a very curious name! how is it made?” asked Valentine.
“Enough Brandy to spile the Water. Enough Rum to spile the Brandy and Water. Enough Lemon to spile the Rum and Brandy and Water. Enough Sugar to spile everything. That’s ‘Squaw’s Mixture,’” replied Mat with perfect calmness and deliberation.
Zack began to laugh uproariously. Mat became more inflexibly grave than ever. Mr. Blyth felt that he was growing interested on the subject of the Squaw’s Mixture. He stirred it diffidently with his spoon, and asked with great curiosity how his host first learnt to make it.
“When I was out, over there, in the Nor’-West,” began Mat, nodding towards the particular point of the compass that he mentioned.
“When he says Nor’-West, and wags his addled old head like that at the chimney-pots over the way, he means North America,” Zack explained.
“When I was out Nor’-West,” repeated Mat, heedless of the interruption, “working along with the exploring gang, our stock of liquor fell short, and we had to make the best of it in the cold with a spirt of spirits and a pinch of sugar, drowned in more hot water than had ever got down the throat of e’er a man of the lot of us before. We christened the brew ‘Squaw’s Mixture,’ because it was such weak stuff that even a woman couldn’t have got drunk on it if she tried. Squaw means woman in those parts, you know; and Mixture means—what you’ve got afore you now. I knowed you couldn’t stand regular grog, and that’s why I cooked it up for you. Don’t keep on stirring of it with a spoon like that, or you’ll stir it away altogether. Try it.”
“Let me try it—let’s see how weak it is,” cried Zack, reaching over to Valentine.
“Don’t you go a-shoving of your oar into another man’s rollocks,” said Mat, dexterously knocking Zack’s spoon out of his hand just as it touched Mr. Blyth’s tumbler. “You stick to your grog; I’ll stick to my grog; and he’ll stick to Squaw’s Mixture.” With those words, Mat leant his bare elbows on the table, and watched Valentine’s first experimental sip with great curiosity.
The result was not successful. When Mr. Blyth put down the tumbler, all the watery part of the Squaw’s Mixture seemed to have got up into his eyes, and all the spirituous part to have stopped short at his lungs. He shook his head, coughed, and faintly exclaimed—“Too strong.”
“Too hot you mean?” said Mat.
“No, indeed,” pleaded poor Mr. Blyth, “I really meant too strong.”
“Try again,” suggested Zack, who was far advanced towards the bottom of his own tumbler already. “Try again. Your liquor all went the wrong way last time.”
“More sugar,” said Mat, neatly tossing two lumps into the glass from where he sat. “More lemon (squeezing one or two drops of juice, and three or four pips, into the mixture). More water (pouring in about a tea-spoonful, with a clumsy flourish of the kettle). Try again.”
“Thank you, thank you a thousand times. Really, do you know, it tastes much nicer now,” said Mr. Blyth, beginning cautiously with a spoonful of the squaw’s mixture at a time.
Mat’s spirits seemed to rise immensely at this announcement. He lit his pipe, and took up his glass of grog; nodded to Valentine and young Thorpe, just as he had nodded to the northwest point of the compass a minute or two before; muttered gruffly, “Here’s all our good healths;” and finished half his liquor at a draught.
“All our good healths!” repeated Mr. Blyth, gallantly attacking the squaw’s mixture this time without any intermediate assistance from the spoon.
“All our good healths!” chimed in Zack, draining his glass to the bottom. “Really, Mat, it’s quite bewildering to see how your dormant social qualities are waking up, now you’re plunged into the vortex of society. What do you say to giving a ball here next? You’re just the man to get on with the ladies, if you could only be prevailed on to wear your coat, and give up airing your tawny old arms in public.”
“Don’t, my dear sir! I particularly beg you won’t,” cried Valentine, as Mat, apparently awakened to a sense of polite propriety by Zack’s last hint, began to unroll one of his tightly-tucked-up shirt-sleeves. “Pray consult your own comfort, and keep your sleeves as they were—pray do! As an artist, I have been admiring your arms from the professional point of view ever since we first sat down to table. I never remember, in all my long experience of the living model, having met with such a splendid muscular development as yours.”
Saying those words, Mr. Blyth waved his hand several times before his host’s arms, regarding them with his eyes partially closed, and his head very much on one side, just as he was accustomed to look at his pictures. Mat stared, smoked vehemently, folded the objects of Valentine’s admiration over his breast, and, modestly scratching his elbows, looked at young Thorpe with an expression of utter bewilderment. “Yes! decidedly the most magnificent muscular development I ever remember studying,” reiterated Mr. Blyth, drumming with his fingers on the table, and concentrating the whole of his critical acumen in one eye by totally closing the other.
“Hang it, Blyth!” remonstrated Zack, “don’t keep on looking at his arms as if they were a couple of bits of prize beef! You may talk about his muscular development as much as you please, but you can’t have the smallest notion of what it’s really equal to till you try it. I say, old Rough-and-Tough! jump up, and show him how strong you are. Just lift him on your toe, like you did me. (Here Zack pulled Mat unceremoniously out of his chair.) Come along, Blyth! Get opposite to him—give him hold of your hand—stand on the toe part of his right foot—don’t wriggle about—stiffen your hand and aim, and—there!—what do you say to his muscular development now?” concluded Zack, with an air of supreme triumph, as Mat slowly lifted from the ground the foot on which Mr. Blyth was standing, and, steadying himself on his left leg, raised the astonished painter with his right nearly two feet high in the air.
Any spectator observing the performance of this feat of strength, and looking only at Mat, might well have thought it impossible that any human being could present a more comical aspect than he now exhibited, with his black skull-cap pushed a little on one side, and showing an inch or so of his bald head, with his grimly-grinning face empurpled by the violent physical exertion of the moment, and with his thick heavy figure ridiculously perched on one leg. Mr. Blyth, however, was beyond all comparison the more laughable object of the two, as he soared nervously into the air on Mat’s foot, tottering infirmly in the strong grasp that supported him, till he seemed to be trembling all over, from the tips of his crisp black hair to the flying tails of his frock-coat. As for the expression of his round rosy face, with the bright eyes fixed in a startled stare, and the plump cheeks crumpled up by an uneasy smile, it was so exquisitely absurd, as young Thorpe saw it over his fellow-lodger’s black skull-cap, that he roared again with laughter. “Oh! look up at him!” cried Zack, falling back in his chair. “Look at his face, for heaven’s sake, before you put him down!”
But Mat was not to be moved by this appeal. All the attention his eyes could spare during those few moments, was devoted, not to Mr. Blyth’s face but to Mr. Blyth’s watch-chain. There hung the bright little key of the painter’s bureau, dangling jauntily to and fro over his waistcoat-pocket. As the right foot of the Sampson of Kirk Street hoisted him up slowly, the key swung temptingly backwards and forwards between them. “Come take me! come take me!” it seemed to say, as Mat’s eyes fixed greedily on it every time it dangled towards him.
“Wonderful! wonderful!” cried Mr. Blyth, looking excessively relieved when he found himself safely set down on the floor again.
“That’s nothing to some of the things he can do,” said Zack. “Look here! Put yourself stomach downwards on the carpet; and if you think the waistband of your trousers will stand it, he’ll take you up in his teeth.”
“Thank you, Zack, I’m perfectly satisfied without risking the waistband of my trousers,” rejoined Valentine, returning in a great hurry to the table.
“The grog’s getting cold,” grumbled Mat. “Do you find it slip down easy now?” he continued, handing the squaw’s mixture in the friendliest manner to Mr. Blyth.
“Astonishingly easy!” answered Valentine, drinking this time almost with the boldness of Zack himself. “Now it’s cooler, one tastes the sugar. Whenever I’ve tried to drink regular grog, I have never been able to get people to give it me sweet enough. The delicious part of this is that there’s plenty of sugar in it. And, besides, it has the merit (which real grog has not) of being harmless. It tastes strong to me, to be sure; but then I’m not used to spirits. After what you say, however, of course it must be harmless—perfectly harmless, I have no doubt.” Here he sipped again, pretty freely this time, by way of convincing himself of the innocent weakness of the squaw’s mixture.
While Mr. Blyth had been speaking, Mat’s hands had been gradually stealing down deeper and deeper into the pockets of his trousers, until his finger and thumb, and a certain plastic substance hidden away in the left-hand pocket came gently into contact, just as Valentine left off speaking. “Let’s have another toast,” cried Mat, quite briskly, the instant the last word was out of his guest’s mouth. “Come on, one of you and give us another toast,” he reiterated, with a roar of barbarous joviality, taking up his glass in his right hand, and keeping his left still in his pocket.
“Give you another toast, you noisy old savage!” repeated Zack, “I’ll give you five, all at once! Mr. Blyth, Mrs. Blyth, Madonna, Columbus, and The Golden Age—three excellent people and two glorious pictures; let’s lump them all together, in a friendly way, and drink long life and success to them in beakers of fragrant grog!” shouted the young gentleman, making perilously rapid progress through his second glass, as he spoke.
“Do you know, I’m afraid I must change to some other place, if you have no objection,” said Mr. Blyth, after he had duly honored the composite toast just proposed. “The fire here, behind me, is getting rather too hot.”
“Change along with me,” said Mat. “I don’t mind heat, nor cold neither, for the matter of that.”
Valentine accepted this offer with great gratitude. “By-the-bye, Zack,” he said, placing himself comfortably in his host’s chair, between the table and the wall—“I was going to ask a favor of our excellent friend here, when you suggested that wonderful and matchless trial of strength which we have just had. You have been of such inestimable assistance to me already, my dear sir,” he continued, turning towards Mat, with all his natural cordiality of disposition now fully developed, under the fostering influence of the Squaw’s Mixture. “You have laid me under such an inexpressible obligation in saving my picture from destruction—”
“I wish you could make up your mind to say what you want in plain words,” interrupted Mat. “I’m one of your rough-handed, thick-headed sort, I am. I’m not gentleman enough to understand parlarver. It don’t do me no good: it only worrits me into a perspiration.” And Mat, shaking down his shirt-sleeve, drew it several times across his forehead, as a proof of the truth of his last assertion.
“Quite right! quite right!” cried Mr. Blyth, patting him on the shoulder in the most friendly manner imaginable. “In plain words, then, when I mentioned, just now, how much I admired your arms in an artistic point of view, I was only paving the way for asking you to let me make a drawing of them, in black and white, for a large picture that I mean to paint later in the year. My classical figure composition, you know, Zack—you have seen the sketch—Hercules bringing to Eurystheus the Erymanthian boar—a glorious subject; and our friend’s arms, and, indeed, his chest, too, if he would kindly consent to sit for it, would make the very studies I most want for Hercules.”
“What on earth is he driving at?” asked Mat, addressing himself to young Thorpe, after staring at Valentine for a moment or two in a state of speechless amazement.
“He wants to draw your arms—of course you will be only too happy to let him—you can’t understand anything about it now—but you will when you begin to sit—pass the cigars—thank Blyth for meaning to make a Hercules of you-and tell him you’ll come to the painting-room whenever he likes,” answered Zack, joining his sentences together in his most offhand manner, all in a breath.
“What painting-room? Where is it?” asked Mat, still in a densely stupefied condition.
“My painting-room,” replied Valentine. “Where you saw the pictures, and saved Columbus, yesterday.”
Mat considered for a moment—then suddenly brightened up, and began to look quite intelligent again. “I’ll come,” he said, “as soon as you like—the sooner the better,” clapping his fist emphatically on the table, and drinking to Valentine with his heartiest nod.
“That’s a worthy, good-natured fellow!” cried Mr. Blyth, drinking to Mat in return, with grateful enthusiasm. “The sooner the better, as you say. Come to-morrow evening.”
“All right. To-morrow evening,” assented Mat. His left hand, as he spoke, began to work stealthily round and round in his pocket, molding into all sorts of strange shapes, that plastic substance, which had lain hidden there ever since his shopping expedition in the morning.
“I should have asked you to come in the day-time,” continued Valentine; “but, as you know, Zack, I have the Golden Age to varnish, and one or two little things to alter in the lower part of Columbus; and then, by the latter end of the week, I must leave home to do those portraits in the country which I told you of, and which are wanted before I thought they would be. You will come with our friend, of course, Zack? I dare say I shall have the order for you to study at the British Museum, by to-morrow. As for the Private Drawing Academy—”
“No offense; but I can’t stand seeing you stirring up them grounds in the bottom of your glass any longer,” Mat broke in here; taking away Mr. Blyth’s tumbler as he spoke, throwing the sediment of sugar, the lemon pips, and the little liquor left to cover them, into the grate behind; and then, hospitably devoting himself to the concoction of a second supply of that palatable and innocuous beverage, the Squaw’s Mixture.
“Half a glass,” cried Mr. Blyth. “Weak—remember my wretched head for drinking, and pray make it weak.”
As he spoke, the clock of the neighboring parish church struck.
“Only nine,” exclaimed Zack, referring ostentatiously to the watch which he had taken out of pawn the day before. “Pass the rum, Mat, as soon as you’ve done with it—put the kettle on to boil—and now, my lads, we’ll begin spending the evening in earnest!”