The Solitary House (93 page)

“Do you rub your legs to rub life into ’em?” he asks of Grandfather Smallweed, after looking round the room.

“Why, it’s partly a habit, Mr. George, and—yes—it partly helps the circulation,” he replies.

“The cir-cu-la-tion!” repeats Mr. George, folding his arms upon his chest, and seeming to become two sizes larger. “Not much of that, I should think.”

“Truly I’m old, Mr. George,” says Grandfather Smallweed. “But I can carry my years. I’m older than
her
,” nodding at his wife, “and see what she is?—You’re a brimstone chatterer!” with a sudden revival of his late hostility.

“Unlucky old soul!” says Mr. George, turning his head in that direction. “Don’t scold the old lady. Look at her here, with her poor cap half off her head, and her poor hair all in a muddle. Hold up, ma’am. That’s better. There we are! Think of your mother, Mr. Smallweed,” says Mr. George, coming back to his seat from assisting her, “if your wife an’t enough.”

“I suppose you were an excellent son, Mr. George?” the old man hints, with a leer.

The colour of Mr. George’s face rather deepens, as he replies: “Why no. I wasn’t.”

“I am astonished at it.”

“So am I. I ought to have been a good son, and I think I meant to have been one. But I wasn’t. I was a thundering bad son, that’s the long and the short of it, and never was a credit to anybody.”

“Surprising!” cries the old man.

“However,” Mr. George resumes, “the less said about it, the better now. Come! You know the agreement. Always a pipe out of the two months’ interest! (Bosh! It’s all correct. You needn’t be afraid to order the pipe. Here’s the new bill, and here’s the two months’ interest-money, and a devil-and-all of a scrape it is to get it together in my business.)”

Mr. George sits, with his arms folded, consuming the family and the parlour while Grandfather Smallweed is assisted by Judy to two black leathern cases out of a locked bureau; in one of which he secures the document he has just received and from the other takes another similar document which he hands to Mr. George, who twists it up for a pipe-light. As the old man inspects, through his glasses, every up-stroke and down-stroke of
both documents, before he releases them from their leathern prison; and as he counts the money three times over, and requires Judy to say every word she utters at least twice, and is as tremulously slow of speech and action as it is possible to be; this business is a long time in progress. When it is quite concluded, and not before, he disengages his ravenous eyes and fingers from it, and answers Mr. George’s last remark by saying, “Afraid to order the pipe? We are not so mercenary as that, sir. Judy, see directly to the pipe and the glass of cold brandy-and-water for Mr. George.”

The sportive twins, who have been looking straight before them all this time, except when they have been engrossed by the black leathern cases, retire together, generally disdainful of the visitor, but leaving him to the old man, as two young cubs might leave a traveller to the parental bear.

“And there you sit, I suppose, all day long, eh?” says Mr. George, with folded arms.

“Just so, just so,” the old man nods.

“And don’t you occupy yourself at all?”

“I watch the fire—and the boiling and the roasting—”

“When there is any,” says Mr. George, with great expression.

“Just so. When there is any.”

“Don’t you read, or get read to?”

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. “No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don’t pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!”

“There’s not much to choose between your two states,” says the visitor, in a key too low for the man’s dull hearing, as he looks from him to the old woman and back again. “I say!” in a louder voice.

“I hear you.”

“You’ll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear.”

“My dear friend!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace him. “Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money
—he
might!”

“O! You can’t answer for him?” says Mr. George; finishing
the inquiry, in his lower key, with the words “You lying old rascal!”

“My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn’t trust him. He will have his bond, my dear friend.”

“Devil doubt him,” says Mr. George. Charley appearing with a tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy-and-water, he asks her, “How do you come here! you haven’t got the family face.”

“I goes out to work, sir,” returns Charley.

The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off, with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head, “You give the house almost a wholesome look. It wants a bit of youth as much as it wants fresh air.” Then he dismisses her, lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed’s friend in the city—the one solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman’s imagination.

“So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?”

“I think he might—I am afraid he would. I have known him do it,” says Grandfather Smallweed, incautiously, “twenty times.”

Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers “Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty—” and is then cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face as it crushes her in the usual manner.

“You’re a brimstone idiot. You’re a scorpion—a brimstone scorpion! You’re a sweltering toad. You’re a chattering clattering broomstick witch, that ought to be burnt!” gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. “My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?”

Mr. George, who has been looking first at one of them and then at the other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him, and shake him into his grave. Resisting the temptation, but agitating him violently enough to make his head
roll like a harlequin’s, he puts him smartly down in his chair again, and adjusts his skull-cap with such a rub, that the old man winks with both eyes for a minute afterwards.

“O Lord!” gasps Mr. Smallweed. “That’ll do. Thank you, my dear friend, that’ll do. O dear me, I’m out of breath. O Lord!” And Mr. Smallweed says it, not without evident apprehensions of his dear friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever.

The alarming presence, however, gradually subsides into its chair, and falls to smoking in long puffs; consoling itself with the philosophical reflection, “The name of your friend in the city begins with a D, comrade, and you’re about right respecting the bond.”

“Did you speak, Mr. George?” inquires the old man.

The trooper shakes his head; and leaning forward with his right elbow on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while his other hand, resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in a martial manner, continues to smoke. Meanwhile he looks at Mr. Smallweed with grave attention, and now and then fans the cloud of smoke away, in order that he may see him the more clearly.

“I take it,” he says, making just as much and as little change in his position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips, with a round, full action, “that I am the only man alive (or dead either), that gets the value of a pipe out of
you
?”

“Well,” returns the old man, “it’s true that I don’t see company, Mr. George, and that I don’t treat. I can’t afford to it. But as you, in your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition—”

“Why, it’s not for the value of it; that’s no great thing. It was a fancy to get it out of you. To have something in for my money.”

“Ha! You’re prudent, prudent, sir!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, rubbing his legs.

“Very. I always was.” Puff. “It’s a sure sign of my prudence, that I ever found the way here.” Puff. “Also, that I am what I am.” Puff. “I am well known to be prudent,” says Mr. George, composedly smoking. “I rose in life, that way.”

“Don’t be down-hearted, sir. You may rise yet.”

Mr. George laughs and drinks.

“Ha’n’t you no relations, now,” asks Grandfather Smallweed, with a twinkle in his eyes, “who would pay off this little principal, or who would lend you a good name or two that I could persuade my friend in the city to make you a further advance upon? Two good names would be sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha’n’t you no such relations, Mr. George?”

Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, “If I had, I shouldn’t trouble them. I have been trouble enough to my belongings in my day. It
may
be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who has wasted the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people that he never was a credit to, and live upon them; but it’s not my sort. The best kind of amends then, for having gone away, is to keep away, in my opinion.”

“But natural affection, Mr. George,” hints Grandfather Smallweed.

“For two good names, hey?” says Mr. George, shaking his head, and still composedly smoking. “No. That’s not my sort either.”

Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair since his last adjustment, and is now a bundle of clothes, with a voice in it calling for Judy. That Houri appearing, shakes him up in the usual manner, and is charged by the old gentleman to remain near him. For he seems chary of putting his visitor to the trouble of repeating his late attentions.

“Ha!” he observes, when he is in trim again. “If you could have traced out the Captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you. If, when you first came here, in consequence of our advertisements in the newspapers—when I say ‘our,’ I’m alluding to the advertisements of my friend in the city, and one or two others who embark their capital in the same way, and are so friendly towards me as sometimes to give me a lift with my little pittance—if, at that time, you could have helped us, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you.”

“I was willing enough to be ‘made,’ as you call it,” says Mr. George, smoking not quite so placidly as before, for since the entrance of Judy he has been in some measure disturbed by a fascination, not of the admiring kind, which obliges him to look
at her as she stands by her grandfather’s chair; “but, on the whole, I am glad I wasn’t now.”

“Why, Mr. George? In the name of—of Brimstone, why?” says Grandfather Smallweed, with a plain appearance of exasperation. (Brimstone apparently suggested by his eye lighting on Mrs. Smallweed in her slumber.)

“For two reasons, comrade.”

“And what two reasons, Mr. George? In the name of the—”

“Of our friend in the city?” suggests Mr. George, composedly drinking.

“Ay, if you like. What two reasons?”

“In the first place,” returns Mr. George; but still looking at Judy, as if, she being so old and so like her grandfather, it is indifferent which of the two he addresses; “you gentlemen took me in. You advertised that Mr. Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to the saying, once a captain always a captain) was to hear of something to his advantage.”

“Well?” returns the old man, shrilly and sharply.

“Well!” says Mr. George, smoking on. “It wouldn’t have been much to his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole bill and judgment trade of London.”

“How do you know that? Some of his rich relations might have paid his debts, or compounded for ’em. Besides, he had taken
us
in. He owed us immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled him than had no return. If I sit here thinking of him,” snarls the old man, holding up his impotent ten fingers, “I want to strangle him now.” And in a sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the unoffending Mrs. Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of her chair.

“I don’t need to be told,” returns the trooper, taking his pipe from his lips for a moment, and carrying his eyes back from following the progress of the cushion, to the pipe-bowl which is burning low, “that he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I have been at his right hand many a day, when he was charging upon ruin full-gallop. I was with him, when he was sick and well, rich and poor, I laid this hand upon him, after he had run through everything and broken down everything beneath him—when he held a pistol to his head.”

“I wish he had let it off!” says the benevolent old man, “and blown his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!”

“That would have been a smash indeed,” returns the trooper coolly; “any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone by; and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to lead to a result so much to his advantage. That’s reason number one.”

“I hope number two’s as good?” snarls the old man.

“Why, no. It’s more of a selfish reason. If I had found him, I must have gone to the other world to look. He was there.”

“How do you know he was there?”

“He wasn’t here.”

“How do you know he wasn’t here?”

“Don’t lose your temper as well as your money,” says Mr. George, calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “He was drowned long before. I am convinced of it. He went over a ship’s side. Whether intentionally or accidentally, I don’t know. Perhaps your friend in the city does.—Do you know what that tune is, Mr. Smallweed?” he adds, after breaking off to whistle one, accompanied on the table with the empty pipe.

“Tune!” replies the old man. “No. We never have tunes here.”

“That’s the Dead March in Saul. They bury soldiers to it; so it’s the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty granddaughter—excuse me, miss—will condescend to take care of this pipe for two months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good evening, Mr. Smallweed!”

“My dear friend!” The old man gives him both his hands.

“So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me, if I fail in a payment?” says the trooper, looking down upon him like a giant.