Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/266



"Sir, you are a gentleman; sir, your health. Hag, drink better days to us both. That woman, sir, is a hag, but she is an honour to her sex-faithful!"

"It is astonishing how faithful ladies are when not what is called beautiful. I speak from painful experience," said Losely, growing debonnair as the liquor relaxed his gloom, and regaining that levity of tongue which sometimes strayed into wit, and which-springing originally from animal spirits and redundant health--still came to him mechanically whenever roused by companionship from alternate intervals of lethargy and pain. "But, now, Mr. Rugge, I am all ears; perhaps you will be kind enough to be all tale."

With tragic aspect, unrelaxed by that _jeu de mots_, and still wholly unrecognising in the massive form and discoloured swollen countenance of the rough-clad stranger, the elegant proportions, the healthful, blooming, showy face, and elaborate fopperies of the Jasper Losely who had sold to him a Phenomenon which proved so evanishing, Rugge entered into a prolix history of his wrongs at the hands of Waife, of Losely, of Sophy. Only of Mrs. Crane did he speak with respect; and Jasper then for the first time learned--and rather with anger for the interference than gratitude for the generosity--that she had repaid the L100, and thereby cancelled Rugge's claim upon the child. The ex-manager then proceeded to the narrative of his subsequent misfortunes--all of which he laid to the charge of Waife and the Phenomenon. "Sir," said he, "I was ambitious. From my childhood's hour I dreamed of the great York Theatre--dreamed of it literally thrice. Fatal Vision! But like other dreams, that dream would have faded--been forgotten in the workday world--and I should not have fallen into the sere and yellow, but have had, as formerly, troops of friends, and not been reduced to the horrors of poverty and a faithful Hag. But, sir, when I first took to my bosom that fiend William Waife, he exhibited a genius, sir, that Dowton (you have seen Dowton?--grand) was a stick as compared with. Then my ambition, sir, blazed and flared up-obstreperous, and my childhood's dream haunted me; and I went about musing [Hag, you recollect!]--and muttering 'The Royal Theatre at York.' But, incredible though it seem, the ungrateful scorpion left me with a treacherous design to exhibit the parts I had fostered