The Pit Town Coronet Volume Ii Part 13

"In matters of dress, Miss Warrender, did I become a married man I should naturally defer to the wishes of my wife."

"You don't mean to say that you would dress like other people?"

"Yes, Miss Warrender, I should do so, though it would not be without a pang that I should relinquish what I look upon as the true clerical garb."

"Don't think of it, Mr. Puffin, don't think of it, for an instant. The n.o.ble savage in his war-paint, his wampum, his feathers and his scalps, is a dignified object; but dress him in a suit of common clothes and cut his hair and he ceases to be interesting."

"Do you really think, Miss Warrender, that I should lose influence if I adopted the costume of ordinary life, should I enter upon the perilous sea of matrimony?"

"Well, Mr. Puffin, if you dressed like other people and married, I don't see how, to use your own expression, 'the female members of your congregation could continue to look upon you as one of themselves,'

because if they did, you see you would be only Mrs. Puffin's sister after all."

"Yes, I am afraid that is the _reductio ad absurdum_. But we are wandering away, Miss Warrender; it was about my heart, and not about my garments, that I sought to converse with you."

"Oh, Mr. Puffin, I should make the worst of confidants; I never by any chance keep a secret."

"And yet I am ready to trust your discretion, Miss Warrender."

"I confess you rouse my curiosity. Do I know the lady?"

"Yes, Miss Warrender, she is your best friend and your worst enemy."

"Now you intrigue me, Mr. Puffin, for all my acquaintances address me as their dearest Lucy, and as for my enemies--I've guessed it, Mr. Puffin.

I never had an enemy till Mr. Sleek's hay making. I suppose Miss Connie Sleek is the bride-elect. Let me congratulate you, Mr. Puffin, but do tell me one thing, it is so interesting--what are Miss Sleek's ideas about the clerical garb?"

"I fear you wilfully misunderstand me, Miss Warrender. My aspirations are higher. I do not think Miss Sleek would ever be the ideal wife for a clergyman."

"You mystify me, Mr. Puffin."

Mr. Puffin possessed a copy of the "Bab Ballads." He remembered two lines in them that gave him that hope which they say springs eternal in the human breast.

"It isn't so much the lover who woos, As the lover's way of wooing."

He remembered that Mr. Gilbert's successful lover came to the point at once, so, to use a hunting simile, he sat well down in his saddle, and he hardened his heart.

"Dear Miss Warrender," he said, and there was a certain amount of dignity about the man, despite his long hair and his eccentric appearance, "I am only a working clergyman, but I am a gentleman; and I wish you, for both our sakes, to share my lot."

Here Lucy Warrender cast down her pretty eyes and smiled, for she felt that she had won Haggard's new bonnet fairly and honestly.

The parson continued, taking heart of grace from the false little smile upon her lips:

"I'm going to ask you to give up a great deal for the sake of religion, and for my sake, Miss Warrender. I'm going to ask you to give up the world, its frivolous enjoyments and its pleasures, and to tread with me a th.o.r.n.y and toilsome path which leads to higher things. I know my presumption, Miss Warrender. I know that in trying to do good according to my lights I often merely succeed in making myself ridiculous. If I am ridiculous in your eyes, Miss Warrender, you can have but one answer to give me. But my proposition to you is at least disinterested. I know you will believe that. I don't ask you for an answer now, Miss Warrender. I should scorn to s.n.a.t.c.h a favourable answer from an inexperienced girl."

Lucy gave another little smile.

"Think over what I have said, dear Miss Warrender; if you feel equal to making the sacrifice, so do I. Take time to think it over."

"No, Mr. Puffin. I have been foolish and wicked, perhaps, if I have unknowingly encouraged you; but you have spoken honestly enough to me, and the least you deserve is an honest answer. I am not fit, Mr.

Puffin, to be any man's wife--any honest man's wife--least of all a clergyman's."

Lucy felt that she had said a little too much, so she hastened to qualify it.

"I am but a worldly girl. I love pleasure and dissipation; it is my nature--a nature I can never change. Look on me, Mr. Puffin, as wholly unworthy of you. Were you to marry me, Mr. Puffin, you would commit an act that we should both repent. You would degrade yourself to my level; and, G.o.d knows, mine is a very low level. Take my answer as it is meant Mr. Puffin, in seriousness, and as irrevocable. Forgive me, Mr. Puffin, and do me one favour. I am utterly bad, Mr. Puffin, but try not to think unkindly of me, for I have no friends; and, as you told me just now, I am my own worst enemy."

Tears were standing in the pretty eyes. Lucy Warrender was not acting now.

The Reverend Barnes Puffin did not press his suit further.

"Good-bye, Miss Warrender," he said, in a choking voice. "But never say you have no friends. We may never meet again. I have merited my rebuff, but I thank you for your forbearance. And if you ever need a friend, you have a faithful one in me."

He pressed her hand and took his leave. As he walked out of the rose garden with a dejected air, it was very evident that his wooing had not prospered. But Lucy Warrender never asked Haggard to pay his lost wager.

The Reverend Barnes Puffin bore his misfortune like a man. He felt that Lucy's determination was final, and that it would be hopeless to try his luck again with her; but she hadn't laughed at him, and that was something. Still, Mr. Puffin felt that it behoved him to leave King's Warren. Just as it is a matter of tradition, an un-written law, that a ministry when beaten on a great political question goes out of office, so it is the custom among curates who have been unsuccessful in their love affairs in the parish, _if the parish is aware of the fact_, to tender their resignation. The curate sought an interview with the Reverend John Dodd and announced his decision. The vicar did not attempt to combat it. A celibate clergyman has many advantages; but a celibate clergyman who is prepared to renounce his principles ceases to inspire respect among the female portion of his congregation. As a Celibate, rapturous maidens will go on sighing and weeping for him, for while he represents the Unattainable there is something almost saint-like about him; but as a curate who has been refused by a member of his own congregation, the nimbus suddenly disappears from his brow; he ceases to be a modern apostle, and turns out to be an ordinary and unsuccessful fisherman after all. And this is one reason why the modern fisherman always carries a creel. Isaac Walton was contented to bring home the spoils of his art strung upon an osier; but the modern creel conveys an impression of dignity; the natural supposition is that there is something in it, hence its popularity.

So the Reverend Barnes Puffin went back to hard work at the east end of London, and after a time attained the preferment which the archdeacon had prophesied; but he still retains the celibate garb, and in his dreams he sees a glorified Lucy Warrender--fair hair, brown eyes and all--and the lovely vision is quite sufficient for him. He thinks of her as he fondly fancied her, and looks on her as a sort of guardian angel still. Who shall grudge him the fond delusion?

CHAPTER X.

A RATHER SHADY CHARACTER.

The lower middle cla.s.ses are a never-failing stalking-horse; we can all afford to laugh at them as ridiculous, vulgar, improvident and wicked.

Even the mock hero, the good young man who tries to raise himself, has something comic in him. But we haven't seen anything of the lower orders in this history as yet, and it is only incidentally that we quit King's Warren for the grimy neighbourhood of St. Luke's. Just behind the great hospital for lunatics is Matilda Street. They are all private houses in Matilda Street, and from the number of bra.s.s plates it seems at first a professional sort of neighbourhood. Most of the houses are evidently occupied by at least three families, for the right-hand doorpost nearly always contains three bells, one for each floor. But the bra.s.s plates are not those of lawyers and doctors; many of them indicate the places of business of working jewellers and watchmakers, and the latter predominate; dial painters, engine turners, escapement makers, swivel manufacturers and so on, _ad infinitum_. Then there are pianoforte tuners, and dealers of many sorts. Those of the plates which have only a surname upon them, indicate that the place is a lodging house. Though we are in the black heart of London, in one of the darkest, poorest and most melancholy quarters, there is a great deal of window gardening going on; plants of every kind and sort may be seen on the window ledges, from ground floor to attic; the humble Creeping Jenny is a great favourite, and it seems to thrive wonderfully in the damp thick atmosphere. Some of the ground floor windows are discreetly screened by wonderful specimens of lank spindly geraniums--hapless plants which have never been known to bloom, but whose sickly-looking leaves of abnormal pallor struggle towards the light, what little there is of it.

Matilda Street, being in the heart of St. Luke's, naturally contains many fanciers. Numerous bow-windowed, bra.s.s-bound cages, each with its little bit of turf, are hung outside the windows in all directions, and the imprisoned skylarks they contain warble away merrily, giving quite a rural air to Matilda Street, E.C. Seedy-looking men and boys, carrying tiny square cages carefully tied up in handkerchiefs, are continually popping in and out; these are the chaffinch fanciers, and each cage contains a sightless songster, who at his master's command is prepared to pour forth his simple rural melody at any hour of the day or night in a long unbroken series of cheeps and chirrups. In Matilda Street lives a trainer of piping bullfinches, a man who has pa.s.sed his whole life turning a melodeon and teaching his pupils the tune of "Rule, Britannia." Dog-breeding and dog-dealing are favourite occupations in Matilda Street; mysterious men emerge at dusk, leading dogs and carrying them in their arms, their pockets, or their bosoms, to exhibit them at numerous local shows held in neighbouring pot-houses. The little back yards--they call them gardens in Matilda Street--are filled with sheds and wondrous home-made constructions, in which fancy poultry and rabbits are kept. Even the roofs of the houses bristle with pigeon-lofts and artful-looking structures for the capture of wandering birds. Should a stray pigeon alight on one of these contrivances, attracted by the hemp seed which is profusely scattered thereon, or by the presence of a decoy securely fastened by the leg, a sudden click may be heard, and the bird finds himself in an instant imprisoned in an artful arrangement of wire walls, which has closed on him with the rapidity of a conjuring trick.

Matilda Street is a decidedly poor neighbourhood; but, strange to say, it is a favourite "pitch" for the bogus starving British workman and his interesting family, when he is upon what he terms the "kinchin lay." The man generally goes barefoot, his face is half covered by a stubbly crop of bristles, which pathetically indicate that he cannot even afford the cheap luxury of the British workman--a ha'penny shave. He doesn't let his beard grow--that would look far too comfortable; artful gashes in his trousers exhibit his knees, which appeal in a startling manner to the feelings of the benevolent; either elbow is clasped to show how he suffers from the inclemency of the weather; by his side walks his pattern wife, who always wears a large white ap.r.o.n; she invariably carries an infant of tender years; at either side of the pair march the rest of the family. They keep to the centre of the road; the woman watches the windows of one side of the street, the man those of the other; and from morning till night they howl a single verse of some hymn with monotonous obstinacy, varying it with a plaintive lament that "They've got no work to do." They are quite right in choosing places like Matilda Street, for there is little or no traffic to interrupt the effect of the procession; besides, in such a place as this no policeman would interrupt them; and, strange to say, it is in shy and poor neighbourhoods that the "kinchin lay" reaps its richest harvest.

Matilda Street is essentially a shy neighbourhood--perhaps that is why the tenant of number 13 has chosen it as his residence. On the door-plate of number 13 is the simple inscription, "Parsons, agent."

It's rather a puzzle to make out what Mr. Parsons is agent for; no clients ever come to see him, and he seems to pa.s.s the greater part of his day in smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. But Mr. Parsons has his profession--he was born in it, so to speak, and his father was a professor before him; but his father failed, and his father's unfortunate failure has been a lesson to him. The real fact is that Mr.

Parson's father was a burglar of the fine old school. His was a life of vicissitude; and though an ambitious and fairly successful man, the law, against which he had waged war for many years, got the better of him at last; and after having pa.s.sed nearly forty years of his life in Her Majesty's jails, death at length prevented his obtaining the ticket-of-leave he had almost earned, and his consequent return to business.

It is all very well for the majority of us to wonder why Mr. Parsons didn't attempt to earn an honest livelihood, but we must remember that he had been brought up to a profession of which most people disapprove from his earliest infancy. As quite a little fellow he had accompanied his father on many a successful nocturnal expedition; it had been his duty to keep watch for the guardians of public order, and to signal their approach. He had been taught to rapidly dispose of precious plunder in a neat little crucible, plunged in a fierce fire of c.o.ke; as he got bigger, he it was who sat ready at the corner of the street in a tax-cart, prepared to rapidly drive off with the "swag" when of a bulky nature.

But though Mr. Parsons, Senior, had been a clever professor of the predatory art, though his triumphs had been numerous and his operations exceedingly brilliant and extensive, he could not be called a success.

To pa.s.s forty years of one's life in jail, to be perpetually blackmailed by one's accomplices, to obtain only a small proportion of one's legitimate earnings from those rascals the "fences" or dealers in stolen property, and at last after all to die in prison, is not a brilliant prospect. Now Mr. Parsons the son was a philosopher. On his father's death he found himself the possessor of a complete and almost perfect set of what may be termed his father's trade utensils. There was also a little secret h.o.a.rd of valuable gems. Mr. Parsons put his burglarious implements in a place of safety; he lived abroad upon the proceeds of his little fortune for some years; and when he came back to England his own mother, if she had been alive, would not have known him. Then he settled down at number 13, Matilda Street, and commenced the practice of his profession upon principles of his own: not as a mere mercenary occupation, but as a fine art. Mr. Parsons kept well away from his father's old haunts and from the perfidious acquaintances who had degraded him and been the cause of his ultimate ruin. Mr. Parsons had no low tastes; he disliked drink and bad company; he had but one ambition, and that was to obtain a comfortable competence from the skilful exercise of his profession. He wisely concluded that it is not sufficient to commit a successful burglary, if you are afterwards found out. He was a careful student of the police reports and the trials at the Central Criminal Court, and the more he studied those interesting records, the more he became convinced of the wickedness of human nature, the inefficiency of the police, and the tendency of accomplices to "split." Mr. Parsons, then, being a thoroughly practical man was also a theorist; he made several determinations, which he strictly kept to. In the first place, he came to the conclusion that a suspect is always watched, and that accomplices, however useful, are extremely dangerous.

So he determined to carry on his profession upon strictly business principles. Wise man that he was, he appreciated the fable of the hare and the tortoise. It was better, he thought, to earn a safe and comfortable living; and he determined, should he ever be so fortunate as to make a great _coup_, to immediately retire from business. He trusted to his own clear head, his own clever fingers, and himself. So he habitually worked alone. He pa.s.sed his afternoons in "looking round."

His operations were very carefully planned, and generally successfully carried out.

It will be seen from all this that Mr. Parsons was no common criminal, but he was a dangerous man for all that; for on his nocturnal expeditions he was in the habit of carrying an ugly sheath knife, not as a weapon of offence, be it remembered, but purely as a last resource for the protection of his own personal liberty.

It was a fine summer afternoon, and Mr. Parsons was lounging through one of the better streets of St. John's Wood; that neighbourhood, sarcastically designated "the shady grove of the Evangelist," had peculiar attractions for Mr. Parsons; it is wealthy, the large houses stand mostly in their own grounds, and the big well-kept gardens offer favourable hiding-places to the midnight thief. Mr. Parsons lounged along, peacefully smoking a briar-root pipe; the houses where the paint was shabby or the gardens were ill-kept did not attract his attention; these signs were quite sufficient for him, and in his mind he put their owners down as "electro." Other houses which were guarded by dogs also failed to interest him, but Mr. Parsons took more than a pa.s.sing glance at Azalea Lodge.

Azalea Lodge stood back some twenty feet from the road way; the entire outside of the house was painted or grained; there was a great deal of gilding on the railings, a large gas lamp of the latest construction was fixed over each of the polished oak gates that formed the entrances to the little carriage-drive; the carriage-drive itself was asphalted, and clean as a new pin; the shrubs in the small front garden were expensive ones, and well pruned and trimmed; beyond the porch projected a rather elaborate gla.s.s structure set in ornamental iron work, and the centre of the well-whitened stone steps was covered with striped horsehair matting. Flowering shrubs in pots were ranged up these steps, while the sides of the porch proper were crammed with them.

Elaborate floral decorations were on every window-ledge; not mere plants in pots, but great blocks of colour artfully arranged: scarlet geraniums and calceolarias with glossy-leaved fuchsias of many hues blazed in frames of blue lobelia, while dwarf ivies, nasturtiums and the pretty variegated periwinkle hung down in thick festoons, hiding the window sills. The beds in the front garden were made to show up in startling contrast to the closely-shaven turf by means of cocoanut fibre, into which potted flowering plants were plunged in reckless profusion. In one window of the drawing-room was a quasi-oriental _jardiniere_ in which stood a large orchid covered with delicate blooms of mauve and yellow; in the next appeared the top of a parrot's cage of plated metal, on which sat a tame white c.o.c.katoo, who seemed to enjoy the splendour by which he was surrounded. The very linings of the curtains were of rich corded silk, and a half open window showed in the dim vista a distant vision of the heavy frames of numerous oil paintings. From top to bottom the bedroom windows were discreetly screened by lace curtains tied up with coloured ribbon.

All these pretty things have taken somewhat long to describe, but the eagle eye of Mr. Parsons took them all in at a glance. A fishmonger's cart stopped at the side door, and Mr. Parsons noticed with satisfaction that a fine piece of salmon and a lobster were taken into the house by the purveyor's a.s.sistant. Mr. Parsons continued his walk as far as the next house, which proved to be an empty one and in the hands of the painters; their ladders and paint pots stood about in every direction, but the workmen themselves had evidently gone to dinner. Mr. Parsons shook out the contents of his pipe, pocketed it, and walking up to the hall door, which stood invitingly open, confidently entered the empty house; he walked into the drawing-room and on to the open Italian balcony beyond it, which commanded a view of the grounds of Azalea Lodge, and then Mr. Parsons stood wrapped in meditation. Something that he saw at a heavily-barred window on the ground floor of Azalea Lodge evidently gave him food for reflection. On a table covered with green baize lay a quant.i.ty of elaborate specimens of the silversmith's art, racing cups and trophies, vases and statuettes of burnished silver were there in profusion, and a heap of leathers and brushes showed that they were undergoing the process of cleaning. The eyes of Mr. Parsons sparkled with satisfaction; he looked round to see if he was observed.