Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/162

158 For eight long years he had nourished in his heart a glimmering though dying hope that he might one day receive some token of remembrance from the man who had taken a strange part in the eventful crisis of his life. This ray of light had lately died out, along with every other ray which had once illuminated his dreary life; but in the very moment when hope was abandoned, the token once eagerly looked for came upon him so suddenly, that the shock was too much for his shattered mind and feeble frame.

When Richard recovered from his swoon, he found himself alone with the boy from Slopperton. He was a little startled by the position of that young person, who had seated himself upon the small square deal table by the bedside, commanding from this elevation a full view of Richard's face, whereon his two small grey eyes were intently fixed, with that same odd look of concentration with which he had regarded the iron bars.

"Come now," said he, with the consolatory tone of an experienced sick-nurse; "come now, we mustn't give way like this, just because we hears from our friends; because, you see, if we does, our friends can't be no good to us whichever way their intention may be."

"You said you had a message for me," said Richard, in feeble but anxious tones.

"Well, it ain't a long un, and here it is," answered the young gentleman from his extempore pulpit; and then he continued, with very much the air of giving out a text—"Keep up your pecker."

"Keep up what?" muttered Richard.

"Your pecker. 'Keep up your pecker,' them's his words; and as he never yet vos known to make a dirty dinner off his own syllables, it ain't likely as he'll take and eat 'em. He says to me—on his fingers, in course—'Tell the gent to keep up his pecker, and leave all the rest to you; for you're a pocket edition of all the sharpness as ever knives was nothing to, or else say I've brought you up for no good whatsomedever.

This was rather a vague speech; so perhaps it is scarcely strange that Richard did not derive much immediate comfort from it. But, in spite of himself, he did derive a great deal of comfort from the presence of this boy, though he almost despised himself for attaching the least importance to the words of an urchin of little better than eight years of age. Certainly this urchin of eight had a shrewdness of manner which would have been almost remarkable in a man of the world of fifty, and Richard could scarcely help fancying that he must have graduated in some other hemisphere, and been thrown, small as to size, but full grown as to acuteness, into this; or it seemed as if some great strong man had been reduced into the compass of