When Zack entered the room, and saw his strange friend, with legs crossed and hands in pockets, sitting gravely in the usual corner, on the floor, between a brandy-bottle on one side, and a guttering, unsnuffed candle on the other, he roared with laughter, and stamped about in his usual boisterous way, till the flimsy little house seemed to be trembling under him to its very foundations. Mat bore all this noise and ridicule, and all the jesting that followed it about the futility of drowning his passion for Madonna in the brandy-bottle, with the most unruffled and exemplary patience. The self-control which he thus exhibited did not pass without its reward. Zack got tired of making jokes which were received with the serenest inattention; and, passing at once from the fanciful to the practical, astonished his fellow-lodger, by suddenly communicating a very unexpected and very important piece of news.
“By-the-bye, Mat,” he said, “we must sweep the place up, and look as respectable as we can, before to-morrow night. My friend Blyth is coming to spend a quiet evening with us. I stayed behind till all the visitors had gone, on purpose to ask him.”
“Do you mean he’s coming to have a drop of grog and smoke a pipe along with us two?” asked Mat rather amazedly.
“I mean he’s coming here, certainly; but as for grog and pipes, he never touches either. He’s the best and dearest fellow in the world; but I’m ashamed to say he’s spooney enough to like lemonade and tea. Smoking would make him sick directly; and, as for grog, I don’t believe a drop ever passes his lips from one year’s end to another. A weak head—a wretchedly weak head for drinking,” concluded Zack, tapping his forehead with an air of bland Bacchanalian superiority.
Mat seemed to have fallen into one of his thoughtful fits again. He made no answer, but holding the brandy-bottle standing by his side, up before the candle, looked in to see how much liquor was left in it.
“Don’t begin to bother your head about the brandy: you needn’t get any more of it for Blyth,” continued Zack, noticing his friend’s action. “I say, do you know that the best thing you ever did in your life was saving Valentine’s picture in that way? You have regularly won his heart by it. He was suspicious of my making friends with you before; but now he doesn’t seem to think there’s a word in the English language that’s good enough for you. He said he should be only too glad to thank you again, when I asked him to come and judge of what you were really like in your own lodging. Tell him some of those splendid stories of yours. I’ve been terrifying him already with one or two of them at secondhand. Oh Lord! how hospitably we’ll treat him—won’t we? You shall make his hair stand on end, Mat; and I’ll drown him in his favorite tea.”
“What does he do with them picters of his?” asked Mat. “Sell ‘em?”
“Of course!” answered the other, confidently; “and gets enormous sums of money for them.” Whenever Zack found an opportunity of magnifying a friend’s importance, he always rose grandly superior to mere matter-of-fact restraints, and seized the golden moment without an instant of hesitation or a syllable of compromise.
“Get lots of money, does he?” proceeded Mat. “And keeps on hoarding of it up, I daresay, like all the rest of you over here?”
“He hoard money!” retorted Zack, “You never made a worse guess in your life. I don’t believe he ever hoarded six-pence since he was a baby. If Mrs. Blyth didn’t look after him, I don’t suppose there would be five pounds in the house from one year’s end to another.”
There was a moment’s silence. (It wasn’t because he had money in it, then, thought Mat, that he shut down the lid of that big chest of his so sharp. I wonder whether—)
“He’s the most generous fellow in the world,” continued Zack, lighting a cigar; “and the best pay: ask any of his tradespeople.”
This remark suspended the conjecture that was just forming in Mat’s mind. He gave up pursuing it quite readily, and went on at once with his questions to Zack. Some part of the additional information that he desired to obtain from young Thorpe, he had got already. He knew now, that when Mr. Blyth, on the day of the picture-show, shut down the bureau so sharply on Mr. Gimble’s approaching him, it was not, at any rate, because there was money in it.
“Is he going to bring anybody else in here along with him, to-morrow night?” asked Mat.
“Anybody else? Who should he bring? Why, you old barbarian, you don’t expect him to bring Madonna into our jolly bachelor den to preside over the grog and pipes—do you?”
“How old is the young woman?” inquired Mat, contemplatively snuffing the candle with his fingers, as he put the question.
“Still harping on my daughter!” shouted Zack, with a burst of laughter. “She’s older than she looks, I can tell you that. You wouldn’t guess her at more than eighteen or nineteen. But the fact is, she’s actually twenty-three;—steady there! you’ll be through the window if you don’t sit quieter in your queer corner than that.”
(Twenty-three! The very number he had stopped at, when he reckoned off the difference on his fingers between 1828 and 1851, just before young Thorpe came in.)
“I suppose the next cool thing you will say, is that she’s too old for you,” Zack went on; “or, perhaps, you may prefer asking another question or two first. I’ll tell you what, old Rough and Tough, the inquisitive part of your character is beginning to be—”
“Bother all this talking!” interrupted Mat, jumping up suddenly as he spoke, and taking a greasy pack of cards from the chimney-piece. “I don’t ask no questions, and don’t want no answers. Let’s have a drop of grog and a turn-to at Beggar-my-Neighbor. Sixpence a time. Come on!”
They sat down at once to their cards and their brandy-and-water; playing uninterruptedly for an hour or more. Zack won; and—being additionally enlivened by the inspiring influences of grog—rose to a higher and higher pitch of exhilaration with every additional sixpence which his good luck extracted from his adversary’s pocket. His gaiety seemed at last to communicate itself even to the imperturbable Mat, who in an interval of shuffling the cards, was heard to deliver himself suddenly of one of those gruff chuckles, which have been already described as the nearest approach he was capable of making towards a civilized laugh.
He was so seldom in the habit of exhibiting any outward symptoms of hilarity, that Zack, who was dealing for the new game, stopped in astonishment, and inquired with great curiosity what it was his friend was “grunting about.” At first, Mat declined altogether to say;—then, on being pressed, admitted that his mind was just then running on the “old woman” Zack had spoken of; as having “suddenly fallen foul of him in Mr. Blyth’s house, because he wanted to give the young woman a present:” which circumstance, Mat added, “so tickled his fancy, that he would have paid a crown piece out of his pocket only to have seen and heard the whole squabble all through from beginning to end.”
Zack, whose fancy was now exactly in the right condition to be “tickled” by anything that “tickled” his friend, seized in high glee the humorous side of the topic suggested to him; and immediately began describing poor Mrs. Peckover’s personal peculiarities in a strain of the most ridiculous exaggeration. Mat listened, as he went on, with such admiring attention, and seemed to be so astonishingly amused by everything he said, that, in the excitement of success, he ran into the next room, snatched the two pillows off the bed, fastened one in front and the other behind him, tied the patchwork counterpane over all for a petticoat, and waddled back into his friend’s presence, in the character of fat Mrs. Peckover, as she appeared on the memorable evening when she stopped him mysteriously in the passage of Mr. Blyth’s house.
Zack was really a good mimic; and he now hit off all the peculiarities of Mrs. Peckover’s voice, manner, and gait to the life—Mat chuckling all the while, rolling his huge head from side to side, and striking his heavy fist applaudingly on the table. Encouraged by the extraordinary effect his performances produced, Zack went through the whole of his scene with Mrs. Peckover in the passage, from beginning to end; following that excellent woman through all the various mazes of “rhodomontade” in which she then bewildered herself, and imitating her terror when he threatened to run upstairs and ask Mr. Blyth if Madonna really had a hair bracelet, with such amazing accuracy and humor, as made Mat declare that what he had just beheld for nothing, would cure him of ever paying money again to see any regular play-acting as long as he lived.
By the time young Thorpe had reached the climax of his improvised dramatic entertainment, he had so thoroughly exhausted himself that he was glad to throw aside the pillows and the counterpane, and perfectly ready to spend the rest of the evening quietly over the newspaper. His friend did not interrupt him by a word, except at the moment when he sat down; and then Mat said, simply and carelessly enough, that he thought he should detect the original Mrs. Peckover directly by Zack’s imitation, if ever he met with her in the streets. To which Young Thorpe merely replied that he was not very likely to do anything of the sort; because Mrs. Peckover lived at Rubbleford, where her husband had some situation, and where she herself kept a little dairy and muffin shop. “She don’t come to town above once a-year,” concluded Zack as he lit a cigar; “and then the old beauty stops in-doors all the time at Blyth’s!”
Mat listened to this answer attentively, but offered no further remark. He went into the back room, where the water was, and busied himself in washing up all the spare crockery of the bachelor household in honor of Mr. Blyth’s expected visit.
In process of time, Zack—on whom literature of any kind, high or low, always acted more or less as a narcotic—grew drowsy over his newspaper, let his grog get cold, dropped his cigar out of his mouth, and fell fast asleep in his chair. When he woke up, shivering, his watch had stopped, the candle was burning down in the socket, the fire was out, and his fellow-lodger was not to be seen either in the front or the back room. Young Thorpe knew his friend’s strange fancy for “going out over night (as Mat phrased it) to catch the morning the first thing in the fields” too well to be at all astonished at now finding himself alone. He moved away sleepily to bed, yawning out these words to himself:—“I shall see the old boy back again as usual to-morrow morning as soon as I wake.”
When the morning came, this anticipation proved to be fallacious. The first objects that greeted Zack’s eyes when he lazily awoke about eleven o’clock, were an arm and a letter, introduced cautiously through his partially opened bedroom door. Though by no means contemptible in regard to muscular development, this was not the hairy and herculean arm of Mat. It was only the arm of the servant of all work, who held the barbarian lodger in such salutary awe that she had never been known to venture her whole body into the forbidden region of his apartments since he had first inhabited them. Zack jumped out of bed and took the letter. It proved to be from Valentine, and summoned him to repair immediately to the painter’s house to see Mrs. Thorpe, who earnestly desired to speak with him. His color changed as he read the few lines Mr. Blyth had written, and thought of the prospect of meeting his mother face to face for the first time since he had left his home. He hurried on his clothes, however, without a moment’s delay, and went out directly—now walking at the top of his speed, now running, in his anxiety not to appear dilatory or careless in paying obedience to the summons that had just reached him.
On arriving at the painter’s house, he was shown into one of the parlors on the ground floor; and there sat Mrs. Thorpe, with Mr. Blyth to keep her company. The meeting between mother and son was characteristic on both sides. Without giving Valentine time enough to get from his chair to the door—without waiting an instant to ascertain what sentiments towards him were expressed in Mrs. Thorpe’s face—without paying the smallest attention to the damage he did to her cap and bonnet—Zack saluted his mother with the old shower of hearty kisses and the old boisterously affectiona............