Roundabout Papers Part 14

"This is the sleeping-room." (He p.r.o.nounces it DIS. Can this, by the way, give any clue to the nationality of this singular man?)

"If you sleep on these two old chairs you have a rickety couch; if on the floor, a dusty one."

"Suppose I sleep up dere?" said this strange man, and he actually pointed up to the ceiling. I thought him mad, or what he himself called "an ombog." "I know. You do not believe me; for why should I deceive you? I came but to propose a matter of business to you. I told you I could give you the clue to the mystery of the Two Children in Black, whom you met at Baden, and you came to see me. If I told you you would not believe, me. What for try and convinz you? Ha hey?" And he shook his hand once, twice, thrice, at me, and glared at me out of his eye in a peculiar way.

Of what happened now I protest I cannot give an accurate account. It seemed to me that there shot a flame from his eye into my brain, whilst behind his GLa.s.s eye there was a green illumination as if a candle had been lit in it. It seemed to me that from his long fingers two quivering flames issued, sputtering, as it were, which penetrated me, and forced me back into one of the chairs--the broken one--out of which I had much difficulty in scrambling, when the strange glamour was ended. It seemed, to me that, when I was so fixed, so transfixed in the broken chair, the man floated up to the ceiling, crossed his legs, folded his arms as if he was lying on a sofa, and grinned down at me. When I came to myself he was down from the ceiling, and, taking me out of the broken cane-bottomed chair, kindly enough--"Bah!" said he, "it is the smell of my medicine. It often gives the vertigo. I thought you would have had a little fit. Come into the open air." And we went down the steps, and into Shepherd's Inn, where the setting sun was just s.h.i.+ning on the statue of Shepherd; the laundresses were traipsing about; the porters were leaning against the railings; and the clerks were playing at marbles, to my inexpressible consolation.

"You said you were going to dine at the 'Gray's-inn Coffee-house,'"

he said. I was. I often dine there. There is excellent wine at the "Gray's-inn Coffee-house;" but I declare I NEVER SAID SO. I was not astonished at his remark; no more astonished than if I was in a dream.

Perhaps I WAS in a dream. Is life a dream? Are dreams facts? Is sleeping being really awake? I don't know. I tell you I am puzzled. I have read "The Woman in White," "The Strange Story"--not to mention that story "Stranger than Fiction" in the Cornhill Magazine--that story for which THREE credible witnesses are ready to vouch. I have had messages from the dead; and not only from the dead, but from people who never existed at all. I own I am in a state of much bewilderment: but, if you please, will proceed with my simple, my artless story.

Well, then. We pa.s.sed from Shepherd's Inn into Holborn, and looked for a while at Woodgate's bric-a-brac shop, which I never can pa.s.s without delaying at the windows--indeed, if I were going to be hung, I would beg the cart to stop, and let me have one look more at that delightful omnium gatherum. And pa.s.sing Woodgate's, we come to Gale's little shop, "No. 47," which is also a favorite haunt of mine.

Mr. Gale happened to be at his door, and as we exchanged salutations, "Mr. Pinto," I said, "will you like to see a real curiosity in this curiosity shop? Step into Mr. Gale's little back room."

In that little back parlor there are Chinese gongs; there are old Saxe and Sevres plates; there is Furstenberg, Carl Theodor, Worcester, Amstel, Nankin and other jimcrockery. And in the corner what do you think there is? There is an actual GUILLOTINE. If you doubt me, go and see--Gale, High Holborn, No. 47. It is a slim instrument, much slighter than those which they make now;--some nine feet high, narrow, a pretty piece of upholstery enough. There is the hook over which the rope used to play which unloosened the dreadful axe above; and look! dropped into the orifice where the head used to go--there is THE AXE itself, all rusty, with A GREAT NOTCH IN THE BLADE.

As Pinto looked at it--Mr. Gale was not in the room, I recollect; happening to have been just called out by a customer who offered him three pound fourteen and sixpence for a blue Shepherd in pate tendre,--Mr. Pinto gave a little start, and seemed crispe for a moment.

Then he looked steadily towards one of those great porcelain stools which you see in gardens--and--it seemed to me--I tell you I won't take my affidavit--I may have been maddened by the six gla.s.ses I took of that pink elixir--I may have been sleep-walking: perhaps am as I write now--I may have been under the influence of that astounding MEDIUM into whose hands I had fallen--but I vow I heard Pinto say, with rather a ghastly grin at the porcelain stool,

"Nay, nefer s.h.a.gue your gory locks at me, Dou canst not say I did it."

(He p.r.o.nounced it, by the way, I DIT it, by which I KNOW that Pinto was a German.)

I heard Pinto say those very words, and sitting on the porcelain stool I saw, dimly at first, then with an awful distinctness--a ghost--an eidolon--a form--A HEADLESS MAN seated, with his head in his lap, which wore an expression of piteous surprise.

At this minute, Mr. Gale entered from the front shop to show a customer some delf plates; and he did not see--but WE DID--the figure rise up from the porcelain stool, shake its head, which it held in its hand, and which kept its eyes fixed sadly on us, and disappear behind the guillotine.

"Come to the 'Gray's-inn Coffee-house,'" Pinto said, "and I will tell you how THE NOTCH CAME TO THE AXE." And we walked down Holborn at about thirty-seven minutes past six o'clock.

If there is anything in the above statement which astonishes the reader, I promise him that in the next chapter of this little story he will be astonished still more.

PART II.

"You will excuse me," I said, to my companion, "for remarking, that when you addressed the individual sitting on the porcelain stool, with his head in his lap, your ordinarily benevolent features"--(this I confess was a bouncer, for between ourselves a more sinister and ill-looking rascal than Mons. P. I have seldom set eyes on)--"your ordinarily handsome face wore an expression that was by no means pleasing. You grinned at the individual just as you did at me when you went up to the cei--, pardon me, as I THOUGHT you did, when I fell down in a fit in your chambers;" and I qualified my words in a great flutter and tremble; I did not care to offend the man--I did not DARE to offend the man.

I thought once or twice of jumping into a cab, and flying; of taking refuge in Day and Martin's Blacking Warehouse; of speaking to a policeman, but not one would come. I was this man's slave. I followed him like his dog. I COULD not get away from him. So, you see, I went on meanly conversing with him, and affecting a simpering confidence.

I remember, when I was a little boy at school, going up fawning and smiling in this way to some great hulking bully of a sixth-form boy.

So I said in a word, "Your ordinarily handsome face wore a disagreeable expression," &c.

"It is ordinarily VERY handsome," said he, with such a leer at a couple of pa.s.sers-by, that one of them cried, "Oh, crikey, here's a precious guy!" and a child, in its nurse's arms, screamed itself into convulsions. "Oh, oui, che suis tres-choli garcon, bien peau, cerdainement," continued Mr. Pinto; "but you were right. That--that person was not very well pleased when he saw me. There was no love lost between us, as you say; and the world never knew a more worthless miscreant. I hate him, voyez-vous? I hated him alife; I hate him dead.

I hate him man; I hate him ghost: and he know it, and tremble before me.

If I see him twenty tausend years hence--and why not?--I shall hate him still. You remarked how he was dressed?"

"In black satin breeches and striped stockings; a white pique waistcoat, a gray coat, with large metal b.u.t.tons, and his hair in powder. He must have worn a pigtail--only--"

"Only it was CUT OFF! Ha, ha, ha!" Mr. Pinto cried, yelling a laugh, which I observed made the policeman stare very much. "Yes. It was cut off by the same blow which took off the scoundrel's head--ho, ho, ho!"

And he made a circle with his hook-nailed finger round his own yellow neck, and grinned with a horrible triumph. "I promise you that fellow was surprised when he found his head in the pannier. Ha! ha! Do you ever cease to hate those whom you hate?"--fire flashed terrifically from his gla.s.s eye, as he spoke--"or to love dose whom you once loved. Oh, never, never!" And here his natural eye was bedewed with tears. "But here we are at the 'Gray's-inn Coffee-house.' James, what is the joint?"

That very respectful and efficient waiter brought in the bill of fare, and I, for my part, chose boiled leg of pork and pease-pudding, which my acquaintance said would do as well as anything else; though I remarked he only trifled with the pease-pudding, and left all the pork on the plate. In fact, he scarcely ate anything. But he drank a prodigious quant.i.ty of wine; and I must say that my friend Mr. Hart's port-wine is so good that I myself took--well, I should think, I took three gla.s.ses.

Yes, three, certainly. HE--I mean Mr. P.--the old rogue, was insatiable: for we had to call for a second bottle in no time. When that was gone, my companion wanted another. A little red mounted up to his yellow cheeks as he drank the wine, and he winked at it in a strange manner. "I remember," said he, musing, "when port-wine was scarcely drunk in this country--though the Queen liked it, and so did Harley; but Bolingbroke didn't--he drank Florence and Champagne. Dr. Swift put water to his wine. 'Jonathan,' I once said to him--but bah! autres temps, autres moeurs. Another magnum, James."

This was all very well. "My good sir," I said, "it may suit you to order bottles of '20 port, at a guinea a bottle; but that kind of price does not suit me. I only happen to have thirty-four and sixpence in my pocket, of which I want a s.h.i.+lling for the waiter, and eighteenpence for my cab. You rich foreigners and SWELLS may spend what you like" (I had him there: for my friend's dress was as shabby as an old-clothesman's); "but a man with a family, Mr. What-d'you-call'im, cannot afford to spend seven or eight hundred a year on his dinner alone."

"Bah!" he said. "Nunkey pays for all, as you say. I will what you call stant the dinner, if you are SO POOR!" and again he gave that disagreeable grin, and placed an odious crooked-nailed and by no means clean finger to his nose. But I was not so afraid of him now, for we were in a public place; and the three gla.s.ses of port-wine had, you see, given me courage.

"What a pretty snuff-box!" he remarked, as I handed him mine, which I am still old-fas.h.i.+oned enough to carry. It is a pretty old gold box enough, but valuable to me especially as a relic of an old, old relative, whom I can just remember as a child, when she was very kind to me. "Yes; a pretty box. I can remember when many ladies--most ladies, carried a box--nay, two boxes--tabatiere, and bonbonniere. What lady carries snuff-box now, hey? Suppose your astonishment if a lady in an a.s.sembly were to offer you a prise? I can remember a lady with such a box as this, with a tour, as we used to call it then; with paniers, with a tortoise-sh.e.l.l cane, with the prettiest little high-heeled velvet shoes in the world!--ah! that was a time, that was a time! Ah, Eliza, Eliza, I have thee now in my mind's eye! At Bungay on the Waveney, did I not walk with thee, Eliza? Aha, did I not love thee? Did I not walk with thee then? Do I not see thee still?"

This was pa.s.sing strange. My ancestress--but there is no need to publish her revered name--did indeed live at Bungay St. Mary's, where she lies buried. She used to walk with a tortoise-sh.e.l.l cane. She used to wear little black velvet shoes, with the prettiest high heels in the world.

"Did you--did you--know, then, my great gr-ndm-ther?" I said.

He pulled up his coat-sleeve--"Is that her name?" he said.

"Eliza ----"

There, I declare, was the very name of the kind old creature written in red on his arm.

"YOU knew her old," he said, divining my thoughts (with his strange knack); "I knew her young and lovely. I danced with her at the Bury ball. Did I not, dear, dear Miss ----?"

As I live, he here mentioned dear gr-nny's MAIDEN name. Her maiden name was ----. Her honored married name was ----.

"She married your great gr-ndf-th-r the year Poseidon won the Newmarket Plate," Mr. Pinto dryly remarked.

Merciful powers! I remember, over the old s.h.a.green knife and spoon case on the sideboard in my gr-nny's parlor, a print by Stubbs of that very horse. My grandsire, in a red coat, and his fair hair flowing over his shoulders, was over the mantel-piece, and Poseidon won the Newmarket Cup in the year 1783!

"Yes; you are right. I danced a minuet with her at Bury that very night, before I lost my poor leg. And I quarrelled with your grandf----, ha!"

As he said "Ha!" there came three quiet little taps on the table--it is the middle table in the "Gray's-inn Coffee-house," under the bust of the late Duke of W-ll-ngt-n.

"I fired in the air," he continued "did I not?" (Tap, tap, tap.) "Your grandfather hit me in the leg. He married three months afterwards.

'Captain Brown,' I said, 'who could see Miss Sm-th without loving her?'

She is there! She is there!" (Tap, tap, tap.) "Yes, my first love--"

But here there came tap, tap, which everybody knows means "No."

"I forgot," he said, with a faint blush stealing over his wan features, "she was not my first love. In Germ--- in my own country--there WAS a young woman--"

Tap, tap, tap. There was here quite a lively little treble knock; and when the old man said, "But I loved thee better than all the world, Eliza," the affirmative signal was briskly repeated.

And this I declare UPON MY HONOR. There was, I have said, a bottle of port-wine before us--I should say a decanter. That decanter was LIFTED up, and out of it into our respective gla.s.ses two b.u.mpers of wine were poured. I appeal to Mr. Hart, the landlord--I appeal to James, the respectful and intelligent waiter, if this statement is not true? And when we had finished that magnum, and I said--for I did not now in the least doubt of her presence--"Dear gr-nny, may we have another magnum?"

the table DISTINCTLY rapped "No."

"Now, my good sir," Mr. Pinto said, who really began to be affected by the wine, "you understand the interest I have taken in you. I loved Eliza ----" (of course I don't mention family names). "I knew you had that box which belonged to her--I will give you what you like for that box. Name your price at once, and I pay you on the spot."

"Why, when we came out, you said you had not sixpence in your pocket."