When Ghost Meets Ghost Part 18

"Something like Mackerel," said Mr. Alibone.

"Wrong you are, for once, Jerry! 'Twarn't no more Mackerel than it was Camberwell."

Said Mr. Jerry:--"Take an even tizzy on it, Mo?" He twisted the paper about to recover the paragraph, and found it. "Here we are! 'Ralph Daverill, _alias_ Thornton, _alias_ Wix, _alias_!' ..."

"Never mind his ale-houses, Jerry. That's the name I'm consarned with--Daverill.... What's the matter with M'riar?"

Uncle Mo had not finished his sentence owing to an interruption. For Aunt M'riar, replacing some table-gear she was shifting, had sat down suddenly on the nearest chair.

"Never you mind me, you two. Just you go on talking." So said Aunt M'riar. Only she looked that scared it might have been a ghost. So Mrs.

Burr said after, who came in that very minute from a prolonged trying on.

"Take a little something, M'riar," said Uncle Mo. He got up and went to the cupboard close at hand, to get the something, which would almost certainly have taken the form of brandy. But Aunt M'riar she said never mind _her_!--she would be all right in a minute. And in a metaphorical minute she pulled herself together, and went on clearing off the supper-table. Suggestions of remedies or a.s.sistance seemed alike distasteful to her, whether from Mrs. Burr or the two men, and there was no doubt she was in earnest in preferring to be left to herself. So Mrs.

Burr she went up to her own supper, with thanks in advance for the newspaper when quite done with, according to the previous intention of Aunt M'riar.

The two smokers picked life up at the point of interruption, while Aunt M'riar made a finish of her operations in the kitchen. Uncle Mo said:--"Good job for you I didn't take your wager, Jerry. Camberwell isn't in it. Mackerel goes near enough to landing--as near as Davenant, which is what young Carrots called him."

This was the case--for Michael, though he had been silent at the time about the Inquest, had been unable to resist the temptation to correct Uncle Moses when the old boy asked: "_Wot_ did he say was the blooming name of the party he was after--Daverill--Daffodil?" His answer was:--"No it warn't! Davenant was what _he_ said." His ac.u.men had gone the length of perceiving in the stranger's name a resemblance to the version of it heard more plainly in the Court at Hammersmith. This correction had gratified and augmented his secret sense of importance, without leading to any inquiries. Uncle Mo accepted Davenant as more intrinsically probable than Daffodil or Daverill, and forgot both names promptly. For a subsequent mention of him as Devilskin, when he referred to the incident later in the day, can scarcely be set down to a recollection of the name. It was quite as much an appreciation of the owner.

"But what's your consarn with any of 'em, Mo?" said Mr. Jerry.

Uncle Moses took his pipe out of his mouth to say, almost oratorically:--"Don't you _re_-member, Jerry, me telling you--Sunday six weeks it was--about a loafing wagabond who came into this Court to hunt up a widder named Daverill or Daffodil, or some such a name?" Uncle Moses paused a moment. A plate had fallen in the kitchen. Nothing was broke, Aunt M'riar testified, and closed the door. Uncle Mo continued:--"I told you Davenant, because of young Radishes. But I'll pound it I was right and he was wrong. Don't you call to mind, Jeremiah?" For Uncle Mo often addressed his friend thus, for a greater impressiveness. Jeremiah recalled the incident on reflection. "There you are, you see," continued Uncle Mo. "Now you bear in mind what I tell you, sir;"--this mode of address was also to gain force--"He's him! That man's _him_--the very identical beggar! And this widder woman he was for hunting up, she's his mother or his aunt."

"Or his sister--no!--sister-in-law."

"Not if she's a widder's usual age, Jerry." Uncle Mo always figured to himself sisters, and even sisters-in-law, as essentially short of middle life. You may remember also his peculiar view that married twins could not survive their husbands.

"What sort of man did you make him out to be, Mo?"

"A bad sort in a turn-up with no rules. Might be handy with a knife on occasion. Foxy sort of wiper!"

"Not your sort, Mo?"

"Too much ill-will about him. Some of the Fancy may have run into bad feeling in my time, but mostly when they shook hands inside the ropes they meant it. How's yourself, M'riar?" Here Aunt M'riar came in after washing up, having apparently overheard none of the conversation.

"I'm nicely, Mo, thankee! Have you done with the paper, Mr. Alibone?...

Thanks--I'll give it to 'em upstairs.... Oh yes! I'm to rights. It was nothing but a swimming in the head! Goodnight!" And off went Aunt M'riar, leaving the friends to begin and end about two more pipes; to talk over bygones of the Ring and the Turf, and to part after midnight.

Observe, please, that until Mr. Jerry read aloud from the _Star_ Mr.

Wix's _aliases_, Aunt M'riar had had no report of this escaped convict, except under the name of Davenant; and, indeed, very little under that, because Uncle Mo, in narrating to her the man's visit to Sapps Court, though he gave the name of his inquiry as Davenant, spoke of the man himself almost exclusively as Devilskin. And really she had paid very little attention to the story, or the names given. At the time of the man's appearance in the Court nothing transpired to make her a.s.sociate him with any past experience of her own. He was talked about at dinner on that Sunday certainly; but then, consider the responsibilities of the carving and distribution of that shoulder of mutton.

Aunt M'riar did not give the newspaper to Mrs. Burr, to read to Mrs.

Prichard, till next day. Perhaps it was too late, at near eleven o'clock. When she did, it was with a reservation. Said she to Mrs.

Burr:--"You won't mind losing the bit I cut out, just to keep for the address?--the cheapest shoes I ever did!--and an easy walk just out of Oxford Street." She added that Dave was very badly off in this respect.

But she said nothing about what was on the other side of the shoe-shop advertis.e.m.e.nt. Was she bound to do so? Surely one side of a newspaper-cutting justifies the scissors. If Aunt M'riar could want one side, ever so little, was she under any obligation to know anything about the other side?

Anyhow, the result was that old Mrs. Prichard lost this opportunity of knowing that her son was at large. And even if the paragraph had not been removed, its small type might have kept her old eyes at bay.

Indeed, Mrs. Burr's testimony went to show that the old lady's inspection of the paper scarcely amounted to solid perusal. Said she, accepting the _Star_ from Aunt M'riar next morning, apropos of the withdrawn paragraph: "That won't be any denial to Mrs. Prichard, ma'am.

There's a-many always wants to read the bit that's tore off, showin' a contradictious temper like. But she ain't that sort, being more by way of looking at the paper than studying of its contents." Mrs. Burr then preached a short homily on the waste of time involved in a close a.n.a.lysis of the daily press, such as would enable the reader to discriminate between each day's issue and the next. For her part the news ran similar one day with another, without, however, blunting her interest in human affairs. She imputed an a.n.a.logous att.i.tude of mind to old Mrs. Prichard, the easier of maintenance that the old lady's failing sight left more interpretations of the text open to her imagination.

Mrs. Burr, moreover, went on to say that Mrs. Prichard had been that upset by hearing about the builders, that she wasn't herself. This odd result could not but interfere with the reading of even the lightest literature. Its cause calls for explanation. Circ.u.mstances had arisen which, had they occurred in the wintertime, would have been a serious embarra.s.sment to the attic tenants in Sapps Court. As it chanced, the weather was warm and dry; otherwise old Mrs. Prichard and Mrs. Burr would just have had to turn out, to allow the builder in, to attend to the front wall. For there was no doubt that it was bulging and ought to have been seen to, aeons ago. And it was some days since the landlord's attention had been called, and Bartletts the builders had waked all the dwellers in Sapps Court who still slept at six o'clock, by taking out a half a brick or two to make a bearing for as many putlogs--p.r.o.nounced pudlocks--as were needed for a little bit of scaffold. For there was more than you could do off a ladder, if you was G.o.d A'mighty Himself.

Thus Mr. Bartlett, and Aunt M'riar condemned his impiety freely. Before the children! Closely examined, his speech was reverential, and an acknowledgment of the powers of the Constructor of the Universe as against the octave-stretch forlorn of our limitations. But it was Anthropomorphism, no doubt.

CHAPTER XVI

OF LONDON BUILDERS, AND THEIR GREAT SKILL. OF THE HUMILIATING POSITION OF A SHAMEFACED BAT. HOW MR. BARTLETT MADE ALL GOOD. A PEEP INTO MRS. PRICHARD'S MIND, LEFT ALONE WITH HER PAST. MR.

BARTLETT'S TRUCK, AND DAVE WARDLE'S ANNEXATION OF IT. MRS.

TAPPING'S IMPRESSIONABILITY. AN ITALIAN MUSICIAN'S MONKEY. A CLEAN FINISH. THE BULL AND THE DUCKPOND. OF MRS. PRICHARD'S JEALOUSY OF MRS. MARROWBONE. CANON LAW. HOW DAVE DESCRIBED HER RIVAL. HER SISTER PHOEBE. BUT--WHY DAVERILL, OF ALL NAMES IN THE WORLD?

FOURPENNYWORTH OF CRUMPETS

If you have ever given attention to buildings in the course of erection in London, you must have been struck with their marvellous stability.

The mere fact that they should remain standing for five minutes after the removal of the scaffold must have seemed to you to reflect credit on the skill of the builder; but that they should do so for a lifetime--even for a century!--a thing absolutely incredible. Especially you must have been impressed by the nine-inch wall, in which every other course at least consists of bats and closures. You will have marvelled that so large a percentage of bricks can appear to have been delivered broken; but this you would have been able to account for had you watched the builder at work, noting his vicious practice of halving a sound brick whenever he wants a bat. It is an instinct, deep-rooted in bricklayers, against which unprofessional remonstrance is useless--an instinct that he fights against with difficulty whenever popular prejudice calls for full bricks on the face. So when the wall is not to be rendered in compo or plaster, he just shoves a few in, on the courses of stretchers, leaving every course of headers to a lifetime of effrontery. What does it matter to him? But it must be most painful to a conscientious bat to be taken for a full brick by every pa.s.ser-by, and to be unable to contradict it.

Now the real reason why the top wall of No. 7, Sapps Court was bulging was one that never could surprise anyone conversant to this extent with nine-inch walls. For there is a weakest point in every such wall, where the plate is laid to receive the joists, or jystes; which may be p.r.o.nounced either way, but should always be nine-inch. For if they are six-inch you have to shove 'em in nearer together, and that weakens your wall, put it how you may. You work it out and see if it don't come out so. So said the builder, Mr. Bartlett, at No. 7, Sapps Court, when having laid bare the ends of the top-floor joists in Mrs. Prichard's front attic it turned out just like he said it would--six-inch jystes with no hold to 'em, and onto that all perished at the ends! Why ever they couldn't go to a new floor when they done the new roof Mr. Bartlett could not conceive. They had not, and what was worse they had carried up the wall on the top of the old brickwork, adding to the dead weight; and it only fit to pull down, as you might say.

However, the weather was fine and warm all the time Mr. Bartlett rebuilt two foot of wall by sections; which he did careful, a bit at a time. And all along, till they took away the scaffolding and made good them two or three pudlock-holes off of a ladder, they was no annoyance at all to Mrs. Prichard, nor yet to Mrs. Burr, excepting a little of that sort of flaviour that goes with old brickwork, and a little of another that comes with new, and a bit of plasterers' work inside to make good.

Testimony was current in and about the house to this effect, and may be given broadly in the terms in which it reached Uncle Moses. His comment was that the building trade was a bad lot, mostly; you had only to take your eye off it half a minute, and it was round at the nearest bar trying the four-half. Mr. Jerry's experience had been the same.

Mrs. Burr was out all day, most of the time; so it didn't matter to her.

But it was another thing for the old woman, sometimes alone for hours together; alone with her past. At such times her sleeping or waking dreams mixed with the talk of the bricklayers outside, or the sound of a piano from one of the superior houses that back-wall screened the Court from--though they had no call to give theirselves airs that the Court could see--a piano on which talent was playing scales with both hands, but which wanted tuning. Old Mrs. Prichard was not sensitive about a little discord now and again. As she sat there alone, knitting worsteds or dozing, it brought back old times to her, before her troubles began.

She and her sister could both play easy tunes, such as the "Harmonious Blacksmith" and the "Evening Hymn," on the square piano she still remembered so well at the Mill. And this modern piano--heard through open windows in the warm summer air, and mixing with the indistinguishable sounds of distant traffic--had something of the effect of that instrument of seventy years ago, breaking the steady monotone of rushing waters under the wheel that scarcely ever paused, except on Sunday. What had become of the old square piano she and Phoebe learned to play scales on? What becomes of all the old furnishings of the rooms of our childhood? Did any man ever identify the bed he slept in, the table he ate at, half a century ago, in the chance-medley of second-hand--third-hand--furniture his father's insolvency or his own consigned it to? Would she know the old square piano again now, with all its resonances dead--a poor, faint jargon only in some few scattered wires, far apart? Yes--she would know it among a hundred, by the inlaid bay-leaves on the lid that you could lift up to look inside. But that was accounted lawless, and forbidden by authority.

She dreamed herself back into the old time, and could see it all. The sound of the piano became mixed, as she sat half dozing, with the smell of the lilies of the valley which--according to a pleasing fiction of Dolly Wardle--that little person's doll had brought upstairs for her, keeping wide awake until she see 'em safe on the table in a mug. But the sound and the smell were of the essence of the mill, and were sweet to the old heart that was dying slowly down--would soon die outright. Both merged in a real dream with her sister's voice in it, saying inexplicably: "In the pocket of your shot silk, dear." Then she woke with a start, sorry to lose the dream; specially annoyed that she had not heard what the carman--outside with her father--had begun to say about the thing Phoebe was speaking of. She forgot what that was, and it was very stupid of her.

That was Mr. Bartlett outside, laying bricks; not the carman at all.

What was that he was saying?

"B'longed to a Punch's show, he did. Couldn't stand it no longer, he couldn't. The tune it got on his narves, it did! If it hadn't 'a been for a sort o' reel ease he got takin' of it quick and slow--like the h.o.a.rperer--he'd have gave in afore; so there was no pretence. It's all werry fine to say temp'ry insanity, but I tell you it's the contrairy when a beggar comes to his senses and drownds hisself. Wot'd the Pope do if he had to play the same tune over and over and over and over?...

Mortar, John! And 'and me up a nice clean cutter. That's your quorlity, my son." And the Court rang musically to the destruction of a good brick.

John--who was only Mr. Bartlett's son for purposes of rhetoric--slapped his cold unwholesome mortar-pudding with a spade; and ceded an instalment, presumably. Then his voice came: "Wot didn't he start on a new toon for, for a wariation?"

Mr. Bartlett was doing something very nice and exact with the three-quarter he had just evolved, so his reply came in fragments as from a mind preoccupied. "Tried it on he had--that game--more times than once.... But the boys they took it up, and aimed stones.... And the public kep' its money in its pocket--not to encourage noo Frenchified notions--not like when they was a boy. So the poor beggar had to jump in off of the end of Southend Pier, and go out with the tide." He added, as essential, that Southend Pier was better than two mile long; so there was water to drownd a man when the tide was in.

The attention of very old people may be caught by a familiar word, though such talk as this ripples by unheeded. The sad tale of the Punch's showman--the exoteric one, evidently--roused no response in the mind of old Mrs. Prichard, until it ended with the tragedy at Southend.

The name brought back that terrible early experience of the sailing of the convict-ship--of her despairing effort at a farewell to be somehow heard or seen by the man whom she almost thought of as in a grave, buried alive! She was back again in the boat in the Medway, keeping the black spot ahead in view--the accursed galley that was bearing away her life, her very life; the man no sin could change from what he was to her; the treasure of her being. She could hear again the monotonous beat of her rowers' pair of oars, ill-matched against the four sweeps of the convicts, ever gaining--gaining....

Surely she would be too late for that last chance, that seemed to her the one thing left to live for. And then the upspringing of that blessed breeze off the land that saved it for her. She could recall her terror lest the flagging of their speed for the hoisting of the sail should undo them; the rea.s.suring voice of a hopeful boatman--"You be easy, missis; we'll catch 'em up!"--the less confident one of his mate--"Have a try at it, anyhow!" Then her joy when the sail filled and the plashing of her way spoke Hope beneath her bulwark as she caught the wind. Then her dread that the Devil's craft ahead would make sail too, and overreach them after all, and the blessing in her heart for her hopeful oarsman, whose view was that the officer in charge would not spare his convicts any work he could inflict. "He'll see to it they arn their breaffastis, missis. _He_ ain't going to unlock their wristis off of the oars for to catch a ha'porth o' blow. You may put your money on him for that." And then the sweet ship upon the water, and her last sight of the man she loved as he was dragged aboard into the h.e.l.l within--scarcely a man now--only "213 M"!

Then the long hours that followed, there in the open boat beneath the sun, whose setting found her still gazing in her dumb despair on what was to be his floating home for months. Such a home! Sc.r.a.ps of her own men's talk were with her still--the names of pa.s.sing craft--the discontent in the fleet--the names of landmarks on either coast. Among these Southend--the word that caught her ear and set her a-thinking. But there was no pier two miles long there then. She was sure of that.

What was it Mr. Bartlett was talking about now? A grievance this time!

But grievances are the breath of life to the Human Race. The source of this one seemed to be Sapps proprietor, who was responsible for the restrictions on Mr. Bartlett's enthusiasm, which might else have pulled the house down and rebuilt it. "Wot couldn't he do like I told him for?"--thus ran the indictment--"Goard A'mighty don't know, nor yet anybody else! Why--_he_ don't know, hisself! I says to him, I says, just you clear out them lodgers, I says, and give me the run of the premises, I says, and it shan't cost you a fi'-pun note more in the end, I says.