"The search will be expensive."
"There is oil for your wheels," answered Jason, putting a note-book into his confidant"s hands. "But mind you waste it not. No tricks, no false play, with me; you know Jason, or, if you like the name better, you know the Rattlesnake!"
"I will account for every penny," said Grabman, eagerly, and clasping his hands, while his pale face grew livid.
"I do not doubt it, my quill-driver. Look sharp, start to-morrow. Get thyself decent clothes, be sober, cleanly, and respectable. Act as a man who sees before him 5,000 pounds. And now, light me downstairs."
With the candle in his hand, Grabman stole down the rugged steps even more timorously than Beck had ascended them, and put his finger to his mouth as they came in the dread vicinity of No. 7. But Jason, or rather Gabriel Varney, with that fearless, reckless bravado of temper which, while causing half his guilt, threw at times a false glitter over its baseness, piqued by the cowardice of his comrade, gave a l.u.s.ty kick at the closed door, and shouted out: "Old grave-stealer, come out, and let me finish your picture. Out, out! I say, out!" Grabman left the candle on the steps, and made but three bounds to his own room.
At the third shout of his disturber the resurrection-man threw open his door violently and appeared at the gap, the upward flare of the candle showing the deep lines ploughed in his hideous face, and the immense strength of his gigantic trunk and limbs. Slight, fair, and delicate as he was, Varney eyed him deliberately, and trembled not.
"What do you want with me?" said the terrible voice, tremulous with rage.
"Only to finish your portrait as Pluto. He was the G.o.d of h.e.l.l, you know."
The next moment the vast hand of the ogre hung like a great cloud over Gabriel Varney. This last, ever on his guard, sprang aside, and the light gleamed on the steel of a pistol. "Hands off! Or--"
The click of the pistol-c.o.c.k finished the sentence. The ruffian halted.
A glare of disappointed fury gave a momentary l.u.s.tre to his dull eyes.
"P"r"aps I shall meet you again one o" these days, or nights, and I shall know ye in ten thousand."
"Nothing like a bird in the hand, Master Grave-stealer. Where can we ever meet again?"
"P"r"aps in the fields, p"r"aps on the road, p"r"aps at the Old Bailey, p"r"aps at the gallows, p"r"aps in the convict-s.h.i.+p. I knows what that is! I was chained night and day once to a chap jist like you. Didn"t I break his spurit; didn"t I spile his sleep! Ho, ho! you looks a bit less varmently howdacious now, my flash cove!"
Varney hitherto had not known one pang of fear, one quicker beat of the heart before. But the image presented to his irritable fancy (always p.r.o.ne to brood over terrors),--the image of that companion chained to him night and day,--suddenly quelled his courage; the image stood before him palpably like the Oulos Oneiros,--the Evil Dream of the Greeks.
He breathed loud. The body-stealer"s stupid sense saw that he had produced the usual effect of terror, which gratified his brutal self-esteem; he retreated slowly, inch by inch, to the door, followed by Varney"s appalled and staring eye, and closed it with such violence that the candle was extinguished.
Varney, not daring,--yes, literally not daring,--to call aloud to Grabman for another light, crept down the dark stairs with hurried, ghostlike steps; and after groping at the door-handle with one hand, while the other grasped his pistol with a strain of horror, he succeeded at last in winning access to the street, and stood a moment to collect himself in the open air,--the damps upon his forehead, and his limbs trembling like one who has escaped by a hairbreadth the crash of a falling house.
CHAPTER VII. THE RAPE OF THE MATTRESS.
That Mr. Grabman slept calmly that night is probable enough, for his gin-bottle was empty the next morning; and it was with eyes more than usually heavy that he dozily followed the movements of Beck, who, according to custom, opened the shutters of the little den adjoining his sitting-room, brushed his clothes, made his fire, set on the kettle to boil, and laid his breakfast things, preparatory to his own departure to the duties of the day. Stretching himself, however, and shaking off slumber, as the remembrance of the enterprise he had undertaken glanced pleasantly across him, Grabman sat up in his bed and said, in a voice that, if not maudlin, was affectionate, and if not affectionate, was maudlin,--
"Beck, you are a good fellow. You have faults, you are human,--humanism est errare; which means that you some times scorch my m.u.f.fins. But, take you all in all, you are a kind creature. Beck, I am going into the country for some days. I shall leave my key in the hole in the wall,--you know; take care of it when you come in. You were out late last night, my poor fellow. Very wrong! Look well to yourself, or who knows? You may be clutched by that blackguard resurrection-man, No. 7.
Well, well, to think of that Jason"s foolhardiness! But he"s the worse devil of the two. Eh! what was I saying? And always give a look into my room every night before you go to roost. The place swarms with cracksmen, and one can"t be too cautious. Lucky dog, you, to have nothing to be robbed of!"
Beck winced at that last remark. Grabman did not seem to notice his confusion, and proceeded, as he put on his stockings: "And, Beck, you are a good fellow, and have served me faithfully; when I come back, I will bring you something handsome,--a backey-box or--who knows?--a beautiful silver watch. Meanwhile, I think--let me see--yes, I can give you this elegant pair of small-clothes. Put out my best,--the black ones. And now, Beck, I"ll not keep you any longer."
The poor sweep, with many pulls at his forelock, acknowledged the munificent donation; and having finished all his preparations, hastened first to his room, to examine at leisure, and with great admiration, the drab small-clothes. "Room," indeed, we can scarcely style the wretched enclosure which Beck called his own. It was at the top of the house, under the roof, and hot--oh, so hot--in the summer! It had one small begrimed window, through which the light of heaven never came, for the parapet, beneath which ran the choked gutter, prevented that; but the rain and the wind came in. So sometimes, through four gla.s.sless frames, came a fugitive tom-cat. As for the rats, they held the place as their own. Accustomed to Beck, they cared nothing for him.
They were the Mayors of that Palace; he only le roi faineant. They ran over his bed at night; he often felt them on his face, and was convinced they would have eaten him, if there had been anything worth eating upon his bones; still, perhaps out of precaution rather than charity, he generally left them a potato or two, or a crust of bread, to take off the edge of their appet.i.tes. But Beck was far better off than most who occupied the various settlements in that Alsatia,--he had his room to himself. That was necessary to his sole luxury,--the inspection of his treasury, the safety of his mattress; for it he paid, without grumbling, what he thought was a very high rent. To this hole in the roof there was no lock,--for a very good reason, there was no door to it. You went up a ladder, as you would go into a loft. Now, it had often been matter of much intense cogitation to Beck whether or not he should have a door to his chamber; and the result of the cogitation was invariably the same,--he dared not! What should he want with a door,--a door with a lock to it? For one followed as a consequence to the other. Such a novel piece of grandeur would be an ostentatious advertis.e.m.e.nt that he had something to guard. He could have no pretence for it on the ground that he was intruded on by neighbours; no step but his own was ever caught by him ascending that ladder; it led to no other room. All the offices required for the lodgment he performed himself. His supposed poverty was a better safeguard than doors of iron. Besides this, a door, if dangerous, would be superfluous; the moment it was suspected that Beck had something worth guarding, that moment all the picklocks and skeleton keys in the neighbourhood would be in a jingle. And a cracksman of high repute lodged already on the ground-floor. So Beck"s treasure, like the bird"s nest, was deposited as much out of sight as his instinct could contrive; and the locks and bolts of civilized men were equally dispensed with by bird and Beck.
On a rusty nail the sweep suspended the drab small-clothes, stroked them down lovingly, and murmured, "They be "s too good for I; I should like to pop "em! But vould n"t that be a shame? Beck, be n"t you be a hungrateful beast to go for to think of nothin" but the tin, ven your "art ought to varm with hemotion? I vill vear "em ven I vaits on him.
Ven he sees his own smalls bringing in the m.u.f.fins, he will say, "Beck, you becomes "em!""
Fraught with this n.o.ble resolution, the sweep caught up his broom, crept down the ladder, and with a furtive glance at the door of the room in which the cracksman lived, let himself out and shambled his way to his crossing. Grabman, in the mean while, dressed himself with more care than usual, shaved his beard from a four days" crop, and while seated at his breakfast, read attentively over the notes which Varney had left to him, pausing at times to make his own pencil memoranda. He then packed up such few articles as so moderate a wors.h.i.+pper of the Graces might require, deposited them in an old blue brief-bag, and this done, he opened his door, and creeping to the threshold, listened carefully.
Below, a few sounds might be heard,--here, the wail of a child; there, the shrill scold of a woman in that accent above all others adapted to scold,--the Irish. Farther down still, the deep ba.s.s oath of the choleric resurrection-man; but above, all was silent. Only one floor intervened between Grabman"s apartment and the ladder that led to Beck"s loft. And the inmates of that room gave no sound of life. Grabman took courage, and shuffling off his shoes, ascended the stairs; he pa.s.sed the closed door of the room above; he seized the ladder with a shaking hand; he mounted, step after step; he stood in Beck"s room.
Now, O Nicholas Grabman! some moralists may be harsh enough to condemn thee for what thou art doing,--kneeling yonder in the dim light, by that curtainless pallet, with greedy fingers feeling here and there, and a placid, self-hugging smile upon thy pale lips. That poor vagabond whom thou art about to despoil has served thee well and faithfully, has borne with thine ill-humours, thy sarcasms, thy swearings, thy kicks, and buffets; often, when in the b.e.s.t.i.a.l sleep of drunkenness he has found thee stretched helpless on thy floor, with a kindly hand he has moved away the sharp fender, too near that knavish head, now bent on his ruin, or closed the open window, lest the keen air, that thy breath tainted, should visit thee with rheum and fever. Small has been his guerdon for uncomplaining sacrifice of the few hours spared to this weary drudge from his daily toil,--small, but gratefully received. And if Beck had been taught to pray, he would have prayed for thee as for a good man, O miserable sinner! And thou art going now, Nicholas Grabman, upon an enterprise which promises thee large gains, and thy purse is filled; and thou wantest nothing for thy wants or thy swinish luxuries. Why should those shaking fingers itch for the poor beggar-man"s h.o.a.rds?
But hadst thou been bound on an errand that would have given thee a million, thou wouldst not have left unrifled that secret store which thy prying eye had discovered, and thy hungry heart had coveted. No; since one night,--fatal, alas! to the owner of loft and treasure, when, needing Beck for some service, and fearing to call aloud (for the resurrection-man in the floor below thee, whose oaths even now ascend to thine ear, sleeps ill, and has threatened to make thee mute forever if thou disturbest him in the few nights in which his dismal calling suffers him to sleep at all), thou didst creep up the ladder, and didst see the unconscious miser at his nightly work, and after the sight didst steal down again, smiling,--no; since that night, no schoolboy ever more rootedly and ruthlessly set his mind upon nest of linnet than thine was set upon the stores in Beck"s mattress.
And yet why, O lawyer, should rigid moralists blame thee more than such of thy tribe as live, honoured and respectable, upon the frail and the poor? Who among them ever left loft or mattress while a rap could be wrung from either? Matters it to Astraea whether the spoliation be made thus nakedly and briefly, or by all the acknowledged forms in which, item on item, six-and-eightpence on six-and-eightpence, the inexorable hand closes at length on the last farthing of duped despair? Not--Heaven forbid!--that we make thee, foul Nicholas Grabman, a type for all the cla.s.s called attorneys-at-law! n.o.ble hearts, liberal minds, are there amongst that brotherhood, we know and have experienced; but a type art thou of those whom want and error and need have proved--alas! too well--the lawyers of the poor. And even while we write, and even while ye read, many a Grabman steals from helpless toil the savings of a life.
Ye poor h.o.a.rds,--darling delights of your otherwise joyless owner,--how easily has his very fondness made ye the prey of the spoiler! How gleefully, when the pence swelled into a s.h.i.+lling, have they been exchanged into the new bright piece of silver, the newest and brightest that could be got; then the s.h.i.+llings into crowns, then the crowns into gold,--got slyly and at a distance, and contemplated with what rapture; so that at last the total lay manageable and light in its radiant compa.s.s. And what a total! what a surprise to Grabman! Had it been but a sixpence, he would have taken it; but to grasp sovereigns by the handful, it was too much for him; and as he rose, he positively laughed, from a sense of fun.
But amongst his booty there was found one thing that specially moved his mirth: it was a child"s coral, with its little bells. Who could have given Beck such a bauble, or how Beck could have refrained from turning it into money, would have been a fit matter for speculation. But it was not that at which Grabman chuckled; he laughed, first because it was an emblem of the utter childishness and folly of the creature he was leaving penniless, and secondly, because it furnished his ready wit with a capital contrivance to s.h.i.+ft Beck"s indignation from his own shoulders to a party more liable to suspicion. He left the coral on the floor near the bed, stole down the ladder, reached his own room, took up his brief-bag, locked his door, slipped the key in the rat-hole, where the trusty, plundered Beck alone could find it, and went boldly downstairs; pa.s.sing successively the doors within which still stormed the resurrection-man, still wailed the child, still shrieked the Irish shrew, he paused at the ground-floor occupied by Bill the cracksman and his long-fingered, slender, quick-eyed imps, trained already to pa.s.s through broken window-panes, on their precocious progress to the hulks.
The door was open, and gave a pleasant sight of the worthy family within. Bill himself, a stout-looking fellow with a florid, jolly countenance, and a pipe in his mouth, was sitting at his window, with his brawny legs lolling on a table covered with the remains of a very tolerable breakfast. Four small Bills were employed in certain sports which, no doubt, according to the fas.h.i.+onable mode of education, instilled useful lessons under the artful guise of playful amus.e.m.e.nt.
Against the wall, at one corner of the room, was affixed a row of bells, from which were suspended exceedingly tempting apples by slender wires. Two of the boys were engaged in the innocent entertainment of extricating the apples without occasioning any alarm from the bells; a third was amusing himself at a table, covered with mock rings and trinkets, in a way that seemed really surprising; with the end of a finger, dipped probably in some glutinous matter, he just touched one of the gewgaws, and lo, it vanished!--vanished so magically that the quickest eye could scarcely trace whither; sometimes up a cuff, sometimes into a shoe,--here, there, anywhere, except back again upon the table. The fourth, an urchin apparently about five years old,--he might be much younger, judging from his stunted size; somewhat older, judging from the vicious acuteness of his face,--on the floor under his father"s chair, was diving his little hand into the paternal pockets in search for a marble sportively hidden in those capacious recesses.
On the rising geniuses around him Bill the cracksman looked, and his father"s heart was proud. Pausing at the threshold, Grabman looked in and said cheerfully, "Good-day to you; good-day to you all, my little dears."
"Ah, Grabman," said Bill, rising, and making a bow,--for Bill valued himself much on his politeness,--"come to blow a cloud, eh? Bob," this to the eldest born, "manners, sir; wipe your nose, and set a chair for the gent."
"Many thanks to you, Bill, but I can"t stay now; I have a long journey to take. But, bless my soul, how stupid I am! I have forgotten my clothes-brush. I knew there was some thing on my mind all the way I was coming downstairs. I was saying, "Grabman, there is something forgotten!
"I know what that "ere feelin" is," said Bill, thoughtfully; "I had it myself the night afore last; and sure enough, when I got to the ----.
But that"s neither here nor there. Bob, run upstairs and fetch down Mr.
Grabman"s clothes-brush. "T is the least you can do for a gent who saved your father from the fate of them "ere innocent apples. Your fist, Grabman. I have a heart in my buzzom; cut me open, and you will find there "Halibi, and Grabman!" Give Bob your key."
"The brush is not in my room," answered Grabman; "it is at the top of the house, up the ladder, in Beck"s loft,--Beck, the sweeper. The stupid dog always keeps it there, and forgot to give it me. Sorry to occasion my friend Bob so much trouble."
"Bob has a soul above trouble; his father"s heart beats in his buzzom.
Bob, track the dancers. Up like a lark, and down like a dump."
Bob grinned, made a mow at Mr. Grabman, and scampered up the stairs.
"You never attends our free-and-easy," said Bill; "but we toasts you with three times three, and up standing. "T is a hungrateful world! But some men has a heart; and to those who has a heart, Grabman is a trump!"
"I am sure, whenever I can do you a service, you may reckon on me.
Meanwhile, if you could get that cursed bullying fellow who lives under me to be a little more civil, you would oblige me."
"Under you? No. 7? No. 7, is it? Grabman, h-am I a man? Is this a h-arm, and this a bunch of fives? I dares do all that does become a man; but No. 7 is a body-s.n.a.t.c.her! No. 7 has bullied me, and I bore it! No. 7 might whop me, and this h-arm would let him whop! He lives with graves and churchyards and stiff "uns, that d.a.m.nable No. 7! Ask some"at else, Grabman. I dares not touch No. 7 any more than the ghostesses."
Grabman sneered as he saw that Bill, stout rogue as he was, turned pale while he spoke; but at that moment Bob reappeared with the clothes-brush, which the ex-attorney thrust into his pocket, and shaking Bill by the hand, and patting Bob on the head, he set out on his journey.
Bill reseated himself, muttering, "Bully a body-s.n.a.t.c.her! Drot that Grabman, does he want to get rid of poor Bill?"
Meanwhile Bob exhibited slyly, to his second brother, the sight of Beck"s stolen coral. The children took care not to show it to their father. They were already inspired by the laudable ambition to set up in business on their own account.