Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/510

26, 1860.] more that, despite the deferential manner of the youth, I thought I saw a discerning smile of triumph in his face as he seemed to watch the effect upon me.

“A clever parrot, sir?” he said, inquiringly.

“Very: might I see it?”

“Well, sir, we never do show it.”

“As I thought.”

“It is a great favourite of Mrs. Chessells.”

“Likely enough.”

And I bethought me of the boy that crossed Holborn with the same message of peace to my fellow labourer in the fair field of law.

I turned out, as you may fancy, with a mental “non est inventus” indorsed on my ca. sa., my memory weighed down with that everlasting “leave your address, sir,” “wait upon you, sir, at any hour,” which had stopped my mouth very much as the word “security,”—the verbal equivalent of ratsbane—stopped that of Falstaff.

I was exercising whatever resources of thought I possessed to discover some mode of getting over the difficulty, and was deep in the speculation, when, as I paced my way home, getting along Brooke Street, my eye fell on one of those dirty, dingy, thoroughly respectable houses you often meet with at the West End, which, with no bill in the window, have yet assumed the right to be empty, and so out of the small repairs that you would take them to be in the first stage of decline supervening on a Chancery suit, if you had not learned from other sources that they are the deserted houses of people who are spending a fortune useful to their own country just to be contemned in some other.

The idea ripened in my mind in an instant; and having made a few inquiries about the owner, I went straight back to the decorator’s.

“I have rethought the matter,” I resumed, with the insolent nonchalance so much in favour with West End shopkeepers, “and as I have no time to lose, you can say that Mr. Singleton Jones, who has just returned from the continent, will be glad to see him at No. —, Brook Street, at twelve to-morrow, to arrange about putting it in order. At twelve precisely, No. —:” and I stalked out of the shop with my head at that angle of elevation which might have indicated an ex-officer of the Guards.

The empty house was near that part of Brook Street which opens into Bond Street, so that placing myself in the first floor of a public-house near by, I was able to watch the result of my appointment without prematurely exciting the suspicion of the rather shy gentleman I was awaiting. I was established in my new observatory but a few minutes when I recognised a succession of scouts—a servant girl in occasional communication with the young assistant—making a careful reconnaissance of the territory. Their report appears to have been satisfactory, for a little later I had the pleasure of seeing the sort of person Mr. Chessells had been described to me,—a dapper dandyish man with twinkling eyes, red hair and whiskers, approaching as from his own residence, and showing in his face and port all that animated air of business importance and urgency which one never sees in the men who carry on a steady respectable trade, and always in those who live by its affectation.

By the time Mr. Chessells—for it was he—had reached the house and knocked, I had reached it too. He seemed to understand at once that I was the owner of the house, for he took off his hat, spared me no number of bows, and, when I haughtily inquired if he were Mr. Chessells, found fresh occasion to be again liberal with his West End manifestations of obsequious affability.

One instant, and what a change! He had scarcely got through his course of salutations before his keen, accustomed eye missed, I suppose, those peculiar modifications a long innings of aristocratic ease impresses on the features, and his colour, going and coming with every beat of the heart, indicated pretty clearly that he had made a discovery out of the way of his trade, and was beginning to pass a rather awkward couple of minutes. The indecision he evidently felt involved too little flattery to me to bear imitation on my side, unless I meant to risk the unsatisfactory bail two heels sometimes put in to suits like ours. Foregoing, therefore, the pleasure of playing with my captive, I was not above avowing my honest calling, and making him the subject of her Majesty’s process, by a gentle touch on the shoulder, backed by the production of the warrant.

Wonderful surely that touch! More wonderful than the subtle breath which reaches the landscape to-night that—bud, blossom, and fruit,—is to-morrow all a canker! The true hocus pocus of a veritable social magic. Watch as I have done the marvels which await that touch from the suspension of active life—its first result—to the vice, the beggary, the harlot-life, the felon-doom that spread from it through a whole family for a generation, and pray what were the wand-carrying magicians of Egypt to us, with our mysterious slips of parchment, touching once and blighting for ever?

Oh! it shames me to think, with, alas! so little to palliate the infamy, how often—a providence of evil—I have kept watch over a peaceful household filled with the innocent and the young, undermining it through days, to apply at length the subtle agency that was to blow all to atoms, doing daily against hundreds, under the sanction of parliament, that for which they disembowelled Guy Fawkes for trying once against themselves!

Mr. Chessells, however, was less a victim than a part of the bad system. Like the toad thriving on the foul vapours of a dungeon, his successes, like my own, sprung from the very elements that poisoned better things. The incident appertained to his style of business, standing to it in the relation if not of a grant of supplies, at least of a vote of indemnity, and he accordingly at once accepted it as a “fait accompli,” showing the spirit of a generous opponent in his liberal acknowledgments to what he was pleased to call the ’cute move by which I had unearthed him.

“No, it ain’t badly done, Mr. Singleton Jones,” and he emphasised the name I had assumed. “Clean, very; though how I could have been such a blisted ninny as to come, cap in hand, to deliver myself up to a—bum, makes me wild to think about. But it don’t much signify. Instead of setting your house in order, I’ll give a coat of