One morning, a considerable time after the events narrated in the last chapter, I sat on the sofa waiting for breakfast, and engaged in an interesting conversation with Dumps. The only difference in our mode of communication was that Dumps talked with his eyes, I with my tongue.
From what I have already said about my doggie, it will be understood that his eyes—which were brown and speaking eyes—lay behind such a forest of hair that it was only by clearing the dense masses away that I could obtain a full view of his liquid orbs. I am not sure that his ears were much less expressive than his eyes. Their variety of motion, coupled with their rate of action, served greatly to develop the full meaning of what his eyes said.
“Mrs Miff seems to have forgotten us this morning, Dumps,” I remarked, pulling out my watch.
One ear cocked forward, the other turned back towards the door, and a white gleam under the hair, indicating that the eyes turned in the same direction, said as plainly as there was any occasion for—
“No; not quite forgotten us. I hear her coming now.”
“Ha! so she is. Now you shall have a feed.” Both ears elevated to the full extent obviously meant “Hurrah!” while a certain motion of his body appeared to imply that, in consequence of his sedentary position, he was vainly attempting to wag the sofa.
“If you please, sir,” said my landlady, laying the breakfast tray on the table, “there’s a shoe-black in the kitchen says he wants to see you.”
“Ah! young Slidder, I fancy. Well, send him up.”
“He says he’s ’ad his breakfast an’ will wait till you have done, sir.”
“Very considerate. Send him up nevertheless.”
In a few minutes my protégé stood before me, hat in hand, looking, in the trim costume of the brigade, quite a different being from the ragged creature I had met with in Whitechapel. Dumps instantly assaulted him with loving demonstrations.
“How spruce you look, my boy!”
“Thanks to you, sir,” replied Slidder, with a familiar nod; “they do say I’m lookin’ up.”
“I hope you like the work. Have you had breakfast? Would a roll do you any good?”
“Thankee, I’m primed for the day. I came over, sir, to say that granny seems to me to be out o’ sorts. Since I’ve been allowed to sleep on the rug inside her door, I’ve noticed that she ain’t so lively as she used to was. Shivers a deal w’en it ain’t cold, groans now an’ then, an whimpers a good deal. It strikes me, now—though I ain’t a reg’lar sawbones—that there’s suthin’ wrong with her in’ards.”
“I’ll finish breakfast quickly and go over with you to see her,” said I.
“Don’t need to ’urry, sir,” returned Slidder; “she ain’t wery bad—not much wuss than or’nary—on’y I’ve bin too anxious about her—poor old thing. I’ll vait below till you’re ready.—Come along, Punch, an’ jine yer old pal in the kitchen till the noo ’un’s ready.”
After breakfast we three hurried out and wended our way eastward. As the morning was unusually fine I diverged towards one of the more fashionable localities to deliver a note with which I had been charged. Young Slidder’s spirits were high, and for a considerable time he entertained me with a good deal of the East-end gossip. Among other things, he told me of the great work that was being done there by Dr Barnardo and others of similar spirit, in rescuing waifs like himself from their wretched condition.
“Though some on us don’t think it so wretched arter all,” he continued. “There’s the Slogger, now, he won’t go into the ’ome on no consideration; says he wouldn’t give a empty sugar-barrel for all the ’omes in London. But then the Slogger’s a lazy muff. He don’t want to work—that’s about it. He’d sooner starve than work. By consikence he steals, more or less, an finds a ’ome in the ‘stone jug’ pretty frequent. As to his taste for a sugar-barrel, I ain’t so sure that I don’t agree with ’im. It’s big, you know—plenty of room to move, w’ich it ain’t so with a flour-barrel. An’ then the smell! Oh! you’ve no notion! W’y, that’s wuth the price of a night’s lodgin’ itself, to say nothin’ o’ the chance of a knot-hole or a crack full o’ sugar, that the former tenants has failed to diskiver.”
While the waif was commenting thus enthusiastically on the bliss of lodging in a sugar-barrel, we were surprised to see Dumps, who chanced to be trotting on in front come to a sudden pause and gaze at a lady who was in the act of ringing the door-bell of an adjoining house.
The door was opened by a footman, and the lady was in the act of entering when Dumps gave vent to a series of sounds, made up of a whine, a bark, and a yelp. At the same moment his tail all but twirled him off his legs as he rushed wildly up the stairs and began to dance round the lady in mad excitement.
The lady backed against the door in alarm. The footman, anxious apparently about his calves, seized an umbrella and made a wild assault on the dog, and I was confusedly conscious of Slidder exclaiming, “Why, if that ain’t my young lady!” as I sprang up the steps to the rescue.
“Down, Dumps, you rascal; down!” I exclaimed, seizing him by the brass collar with which I had invested him.—“Pardon the rudeness of my dog, madam,” I said, looking up; “I never saw him act in this way before. It is quite unaccountable—”
“Not quite so unaccountable as you think,” interrupted Slidder, who stood looking calmly on, with his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face.—“It’s your own dog, miss.”
“What do you mean, boy?” said the lady, a gaze of surprise chasing away the look of alarm which had covered her pretty face.
“I mean ’xactly what I says, miss. The dog’s your own: I sold it to you long ago for five bob!”
The girl—for she was little more than sixteen—turned with a startled, doubting look to the dog.
“If you don’t b’lieve it, miss, look at the vite spot on the bridge of ’is nose,” said Slidder, with a self-satisfied nod to the lady and a supremely insolent wink to the footman.
“Pompey!” exclaimed the girl, holding out a pair of the prettiest little gloved hands imaginable.
My doggie broke from my grasp with a shriek of joy, and sprang into her arms. She buried her face in his shaggy neck and absolutely hugged him.
I stood aghast. The footman smiled in an imbecile manner.
“You’d better not squeeze quite so hard, miss, or he’ll bust!” remarked the waif.
Recovering herself, and dropping the dog somewhat hurriedly, she turned to me with a flushed face and said—
“Excuse me, sir; this unexpected meeting with my dog—”
“Your dog!” I involuntarily exclaimed, while a sense of unmerited loss began to creep over me.
“Well, the dog was mine once, at all events—though I doubt not it is rightfully yours now,” said the young lady, with a smile that at once disarmed me. “It was stolen from me a few months after I had bought it from this boy, who seems strangely altered since then. I’m glad, however, to see that the short time I had the dog was sufficient to prevent its forgetting me. But perhaps,” she added, in a sad tone, “it would have been better if it had forgotten me.”
My mind was made up.
“No, madam,” said I, with decision; “it is well that the dog has not forgotten you. I would have been surprised, indeed, if it had. It is yours. I could not think of robbing you of it. I—I—am going to visit a sick woman and cannot delay; forgive me if I ask permission to leave the dog with you until I return in the afternoon to hand it formally over and bid it farewell.”
This was said half in jest yet I felt very much in earnest, for the thought of parting from my doggie, even to such a fair mistress, cost me no small amount of pain—much to my surprise, for I had not imagined it possible that I could have formed so strong an attachment to a dumb animal in so short a time. But, you see, being a bachelor of an unsocial spirit, my doggie and I had been thrown much together in the evenings, and had made the most of our time.
The young lady half laughed, and hesitatingly thanked me as she went into the house, followed by Dumps, alias Punch, alias Pompey, who never so much as cast one parting glance on me as I turned to leave. A shout caused me to turn again and look back. I beheld an infant rolling down the drawing-room stairs like a small Alpine boulder. A little girl was vainly attempting to arrest the infant, and three boys, of various sizes, came bounding towards the young lady with shouts of welcome. In the midst of the din my doggie uttered a cry of pain, the Babel of children’s voices was hushed by a bass growl, and the street door closed with a bang!
“Yell, that is a rum go!” exclaimed my little companion, as we walked slowly away. “Don’t it seem to you, now, as if it wor all a dream?”
“It does, indeed,” I replied, half inclined to laugh, yet with a feeling of sadness at my heart, for I knew that my doggie and I were parted for ever! Even if the young lady should insist on my keeping the dog, I felt that I could not agree to do so. No! I had committed myself, and the thing was done; for it was clear that, with the mutual affection existing between the lady and the dog, they would not willingly consent to be parted—it would be cruelty even to suggest a separation.
“Pshaw!” thought I, “why should the loss of a miserable dog—a mere mass of shapeless hair—affect me so much? Pooh! I will brush the subject away.”
So I brushed it away, but back it came again in spite of all my brushing, and insisted on remaining to trouble me.
Short though our friendship had been, it had, I found, become very warm and strong. I recalled a good many pleasant evenings when, seated alone in my room with a favourite author, I had read and tickled Dumps under the chin and behind the ears to such an extent that I had thoroughly gained his heart; and as “love begets love,” I had been drawn insensibly yet powerfully towards him. In short, Dumps and I understood each other.
While I was meditating on these things my companion, who had walked along in silence, suddenly said—
“You needn’t take on so, sir, about Punch.”
“How d’you know I’m taking on so?”
“’Cause you look so awful solemncholy. An’ there’s no occasion to do so. You can get the critter back again.”
“I fear not Slidder, for I have already given it to the young lady, and you have seen how fond she is of it; and the dog evidently likes her better than it likes me.”
“Yell, I ain’t surprised at that. It on’y proves it to be a dog of good taste; but you can get it back for all that.”
“How so?” I asked, much amused by the decision and self-sufficiency of the boy’s manner.
“Vy, you’ve on’y got to go and marry the young lady, w’en, of course, all her property becomes yours, Punch included, don’t you see?”
“True, Slidder; it had not occurred to me in that light,” said I, laughing heartily, as much at the cool and quiet insolence of the waif’s manner as at his suggestion. “But then, you see, there are difficulties in the way. Young ladies who dwell in fine mansions are not fond of marrying penniless doctors.”
“Pooh!” replied the urchin; “that ’as nuffin’ to do with it. You’ve on’y got to set up in a ’ouse close alongside, with a big gold mortar over the door an’ a one-’oss broom, an’ you’ll ’ave ’er in six months—or eight if she’s got contrairy parents. Then you’ll want a tiger, of course, to ’old the ’oss; an’ I knows a smart young feller whose name begins with a S, as would just suit. So, you see, you’ve nothing to do but to go in an win.”
The precocious waif looked up in my face with such an expression of satisfaction as he finished this audacious speech, that I could not help gazing at him in blank amazement. What I should have replied I know not, for we arrived just then at the abode of old Mrs Willis.
The poor old lady was suffering from a severe attack of influenza, which, coupled with age and the depression caused by her heavy sorrow, had reduced her physical powers in an alarming degree. It was obvious that she urgently required good food and careful nursing. I never before felt so keenly my lack of money. My means barely sufficed to keep myself, educational expenses being heavy. I was a shy man, too, and had never made friends—at least among the rich—to whom I could apply on occasions like this.
“Dear granny,” I said, “you would get along nicely if you would consent to go to a hospital.”
“Never!” said the old lady, in a tone of decision that surprised me.
“I assure you, granny, that you would be much better cared for and fed there than you can be here, and it would not be necessary to give up your room. I would look after it until you are better.”
Still the old lady shook her head, which was shaking badly enough from age as it was.
Going to the corner cupboard, in which Mrs Willis kept her little store of food and physic, I stood there pondering what I should do.
“Please, sir,” said Slidder, sidling up to me, “if you wants mutton-chops, or steaks, or port wine, or anythink o’ that sort, just say the word and I’ll get ’em.”
“You, boy—how?”
“Vy, ain’t the shops full of ’em? I’d go an help myself, spite of all the bobbies that valks in blue.”
“Oh, Slidder,” said I, really grieved, for I saw by his earnest face that he meant it, “would you go and steal after all I have said to you about that sin?”
“Vell, sir, I wouldn’t prig for myself—indeed I wouldn’t—but I’d do it to make the old ’ooman better.”
“That would not change stealing into a virtue. No, my boy, we must try to hit on some other way of providing for her wants.”
“The Lord will provide,” said Mrs Willis, from the bed.
She had overheard us. I hastened to her side.
“Yes, granny, He will provide. Meanwhile He has given me enough money to spare a little for your immediate wants. I will send some things, which your kind neighbour, Mrs Jones, will cook for you. I’ll give her directions as I pass her door. Slidder will go home with me and fetch you the medicines you require. Now, try to sleep till Mrs Jones comes with the food. You must not speak to me. It will make you worse.”
“I only want to ask, John, have you any—any news about—”
“No, not yet, granny; but don’t be cast down. If you can trust God for food, surely you can trust Him for protection, not only to yourself, but to Edie. Remember the words, ‘Commit thy way unto the Lord, and He will bring it to pass.’”
“Thank you, John,” replied the old woman, as she sank back on her pillow with a little sigh.
After leaving Mrs Willis I was detained so long with some of my patients that it was late before I could turn my steps westward. The night was very cold, with a keen December wind blowing, and heavy black clouds driving across the dark sky. It was after midnight as I drew near the neighbourhood of the house in which I had left Dumps so hurriedly that morning. In my haste I had neglected to ask the name of the young lady with whom I had left him, or to note the number of the house; but I recollected its position, and resolved to go round by it for the purpose of ascertaining the name on the door.
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