Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/198



"Sir," returned the sprucer wayfarer, "it is the question I would have asked of you."

"Strange!"

"Very strange indeed that more than one person can, in this busy age, employ himself in discovering a Podden Place! Not a soul to inquire of,—not a shop that I see, not an orange-stall!"

"Ha!" cried the other, in a hoarse sepulchral voice, "Ha! there is a pot-boy! Boy! boy! boy! I say. Hold, there! hold! Is this Podden Place,—Upper?"

"Yes, it be," answered the pot-boy, with a sleepy air, caught in that sleepy atmosphere; and chiming his pewter against an area rail with a dull clang, he chanted forth "Pots oho!" with a note as dirge-like as that which in the City of the Plague chanted "Out with the dead!"

Meanwhile the two wayfarers exchanged bows and parted; the sprucer wayfarer whether from the indulgence of a reflective mood, or from an habitual indifference to things and persons not concerning him, ceased to notice his fellow-solitary, and rather busied himself in sundry little coquetries appertaining to his own person. He passed his hand through his hair, re-arranged the cock of his hat, looked complacently at his boots, which still retained the gloss of the morning's varnish, drew down his wristbands, and, in a word, gave sign of a man who desires to make an effect, and feels that he ought to do it. So occupied was he in this self-commune that when he stopped at length at one of the small doors in the small street and lifted his hand to the knocker, he started to see that Wayfarer the Second was by his side. The two men now examined each other briefly but deliberately. Wayfarer the First was still young,—certainly handsome, but with an indescribable look about the eye and lip, from which the other recoiled with an instinctive awe,—a hard look, a cynical look,—a sidelong, quiet, defying, remorseless look. His clothes were so new of gloss that they seemed put on for the first time, were shaped to the prevailing fashion, and of a taste for colours less subdued than is usual with Englishmen, yet still such as a person of good mien could wear without incurring the charge of vulgarity, though liable to that of self-conceit. If you doubted that the man were a gentleman, you would have been puzzled to guess what else he could be. Were it not for the look we have mentioned, and which was perhaps not habitual, his appearance might have been called prepossessing. In his figure there