It was a
dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional
intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the
streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the
house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled
against the darkness. Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and
among haunts little loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of
the lowest orders, was wending his solitary way. He stopped twice or thrice at
different shops and houses of a description correspondent with the appearance
of the quartier in which they were situated, and tended inquiry for some
article or another which did not seem easily to be met with. All the answers he
received were couched in the negative; and as he turned from each door he
muttered to himself, in no very elegant phraseology, his disappointment and
discontent. At length, at one house, the landlord, a sturdy butcher, after
rendering the same reply the inquirer had hitherto received, added, "But
if this vill do as vell, Dummie, it is quite at your sarvice!" Pausing
reflectively for a moment, Dummie responded that he thought the thing proffered
might do as well; and thrusting it into his ample pocket, he strode away with
as rapid a motion as the wind and the rain would allow. He soon came to a nest
of low and dingy buildings, at the entrance to which, in half-effaced
characters, was written "Thames Court." Halting at the most
conspicuous of these buildings, an inn or alehouse, through the half-closed
windows of which blazed out in ruddy comfort the beams of the hospitable
hearth, he knocked hastily at the door. He was admitted by a lady of a certain
age, and endowed with a comely rotundity of face and person.
"Hast
got it, Dummie?" said she, quickly, as she closed the door on the guest.
"Noa,
noa! not exactly; but I thinks as 'ow—"
"Pish,
you fool!" cried the woman, interrupting him peevishly. "Vy, it is no
use desaving me. You knows you has only stepped from my boosing-ken to another,
and you has not been arter the book at all. So there's the poor cretur a raving
and a dying, and you—"
"Let
I speak!" interrupted Dummie in his turn. "I tells you I vent first
to Mother Bussblone's, who, I knows, chops the whiners morning and evening to
the young ladies, and I axes there for a Bible; and she says, says she, 'I' as
only a "Companion to the Halter," but you'll get a Bible, I think, at
Master Talkins', the cobbler as preaches.' So I goes to Master Talkins, and he
says, says he, 'I 'as no call for the Bible,—'cause vy? I 'as a call vithout;
but mayhap you'll be a getting it at the butcher's hover the vay,—'cause vy?
The butcher 'll be damned!' So I goes hover the vay, and the butcher says, says
he, 'I 'as not a Bible, but I 'as a book of plays bound for all the vorld just
like 'un, and mayhap the poor cretur may n't see the difference.' So I takes
the plays, Mrs. Margery, and here they be surely! And how's poor Judy?"
"Fearsome!
she'll not be over the night, I'm a thinking."
"Vell,
I'll track up the dancers!"
So
saying, Dummie ascended a doorless staircase, across the entrance of which a
blanket, stretched angularly from the wall to the chimney, afforded a kind of
screen; and presently he stood within a chamber which the dark and painful
genius of Crabbe might have delighted to portray. The walls were whitewashed,
and at sundry places strange figures and grotesque characters had been traced
by some mirthful inmate, in such sable outline as the end of a smoked stick or
the edge of a piece of charcoal is wont to produce. The wan and flickering
light afforded by a farthing candle gave a sort of grimness and menace to these
achievements of pictorial art, especially as they more than once received
embellishments from portraits of Satan such as he is accustomed to be drawn. A
low fire burned gloomily in the sooty grate, and on the hob hissed "the
still small voice" of an iron kettle. On a round deal table were two
vials, a cracked cup, a broken spoon of some dull metal, and upon two or three
mutilated chairs were scattered various articles of female attire. On another
table, placed below a high, narrow, shutterless casement (athwart which,
instead of a curtain, a checked apron had been loosely hung, and now waved
fitfully to and fro in the gusts of wind that made easy ingress through many a
chink and cranny), were a looking-glass, sundry appliances of the toilet, a box
of coarse rouge, a few ornaments of more show than value, and a watch, the
regular and calm click of which produced that indescribably painful feeling
which, we fear, many of our readers who have heard the sound in a sick-chamber
can easily recall. A large tester-bed stood opposite to this table, and the
looking-glass partially reflected curtains of a faded stripe, and ever and anon
(as the position of the sufferer followed the restless emotion of a disordered
mind) glimpses of the face of one on whom Death was rapidly hastening. Beside
this bed now stood Dummie, a small, thin man dressed in a tattered plush
jerkin, from which the rain-drops slowly dripped, and with a thin, yellow,
cunning physiognomy grotesquely hideous in feature, but not positively
villanous in expression. On the other side of the bed stood a little boy of
about three years old, dressed as if belonging to the better classes, although
the garb was somewhat tattered and discoloured. The poor child trembled
violently, and evidently looked with a feeling of relief on the entrance of
Dummie. And now there slowly, and with many a phthisical sigh, heaved towards
the foot of the bed the heavy frame of the woman who had accosted Dummie below,
and had followed him, haud passibus aequis, to the room of the sufferer; she
stood with a bottle of medicine in her hand, shaking its contents up and down,
and with a kindly yet timid compassion spread over a countenance crimsoned with
habitual libations. This made the scene,—save that on a chair by the bedside
lay a profusion of long, glossy, golden ringlets, which had been cut from the
head of the sufferer when the fever had begun to mount upwards, but which, with
a jealousy that portrayed the darling littleness of a vain heart, she had
seized and insisted on retaining near her; and save that, by the fire,
perfectly inattentive to the event about to take place within the chamber, and
to which we of the biped race attach so awful an importance, lay a large gray
cat, curled in a ball, and dozing with half-shut eyes, and ears that now and
then denoted, by a gentle inflection, the jar of a louder or nearer sound than
usual upon her lethargic senses. The dying woman did not at first attend to the
entrance either of Dummie or the female at the foot of the bed, but she turned
herself round towards the child, and grasping his arm fiercely, she drew him
towards her, and gazed on his terrified features with a look in which
exhaustion and an exceeding wanness of complexion were even horribly contrasted
by the glare and energy of delirium.
Source: (Source: Project Gutenberg's Paul
Clifford, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in public domain, written 1830)
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