The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens [good fiction books to read .txt] 📗

o’clock.

Charged with this message, the fat boy returned, slumbering as peaceably in his dickey, over the stones, as if it had been a down bed on watch springs. By some extraordinary miracle he awoke of his own accord, when the coach stopped, and giving himself a good shake to stir up his faculties, went upstairs to execute his commission.

Now, whether the shake had jumbled the fat boy’s faculties together, instead of arranging them in proper order, or had roused such a quantity of new ideas within him as to render him oblivious of ordinary forms and ceremonies, or (which is also possible) had proved unsuccessful in preventing his falling asleep as he ascended the stairs, it is an undoubted fact that he walked into the sitting-room without previously knocking at the door; and so beheld a gentleman with his arms clasping his young mistress’s waist, sitting very lovingly by her side on a sofa, while Arabella and her pretty handmaid feigned to be absorbed in looking out of a window at the other end of the room. At the sight of this phenomenon, the fat boy uttered an interjection, the ladies a scream, and the gentleman an oath, almost simultaneously.

‘Wretched creature, what do you want here?’ said the gentleman, who it is needless to say was Mr. Snodgrass.

To this the fat boy, considerably terrified, briefly responded, ‘Missis.’

‘What do you want me for,’ inquired Emily, turning her head aside, ‘you stupid creature?’

‘Master and Mr. Pickwick is a-going to dine here at five,’ replied the fat boy.

‘Leave the room!’ said Mr. Snodgrass, glaring upon the bewildered youth.

‘No, no, no,’ added Emily hastily. ‘Bella, dear, advise me.’

Upon this, Emily and Mr. Snodgrass, and Arabella and Mary, crowded into a corner, and conversed earnestly in whispers for some minutes, during which the fat boy dozed.

‘Joe,’ said Arabella, at length, looking round with a most bewitching smile, ‘how do you do, Joe?’

‘Joe,’ said Emily, ‘you’re a very good boy; I won’t forget you, Joe.’

‘Joe,’ said Mr. Snodgrass, advancing to the astonished youth, and seizing his hand, ‘I didn’t know you before. There’s five shillings for you, Joe!”

‘I’ll owe you five, Joe,’ said Arabella, ‘for old acquaintance sake, you know;’ and another most captivating smile was bestowed upon the corpulent intruder.

The fat boy’s perception being slow, he looked rather puzzled at first to account for this sudden prepossession in his favour, and stared about him in a very alarming manner. At length his broad face began to show symptoms of a grin of proportionately broad dimensions; and then, thrusting half-a-crown into each of his pockets, and a hand and wrist after it, he burst into a horse laugh: being for the first and only time in his existence.

‘He understands us, I see,’ said Arabella. ‘He had better have something to eat, immediately,’ remarked Emily.

The fat boy almost laughed again when he heard this suggestion. Mary, after a little more whispering, tripped forth from the group and said—

‘I am going to dine with you to-day, sir, if you have no objection.’

‘This way,’ said the fat boy eagerly. ‘There is such a jolly meat-pie!’

With these words, the fat boy led the way downstairs; his pretty companion captivating all the waiters and angering all the chambermaids as she followed him to the eating-room.

There was the meat-pie of which the youth had spoken so feelingly, and there were, moreover, a steak, and a dish of potatoes, and a pot of porter.

‘Sit down,’ said the fat boy. ‘Oh, my eye, how prime! I am SO hungry.’

Having apostrophised his eye, in a species of rapture, five or six times, the youth took the head of the little table, and Mary seated herself at the bottom.

‘Will you have some of this?’ said the fat boy, plunging into the pie up to the very ferules of the knife and fork.

‘A little, if you please,’ replied Mary.

The fat boy assisted Mary to a little, and himself to a great deal, and was just going to begin eating when he suddenly laid down his knife and fork, leaned forward in his chair, and letting his hands, with the knife and fork in them, fall on his knees, said, very slowly—

‘I say! How nice you look!’

This was said in an admiring manner, and was, so far, gratifying; but still there was enough of the cannibal in the young gentleman’s eyes to render the compliment a double one.

‘Dear me, Joseph,’ said Mary, affecting to blush, ‘what do you mean?’

The fat boy, gradually recovering his former position, replied with a heavy sigh, and, remaining thoughtful for a few moments, drank a long draught of the porter. Having achieved this feat, he sighed again, and applied himself assiduously to the pie.

‘What a nice young lady Miss Emily is!’ said Mary, after a long silence.

The fat boy had by this time finished the pie. He fixed his eyes on Mary, and replied— ‘I knows a nicerer.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mary.

‘Yes, indeed!’ replied the fat boy, with unwonted vivacity.

‘What’s her name?’ inquired Mary.

‘What’s yours?’

‘Mary.’

‘So’s hers,’ said the fat boy. ‘You’re her.’ The boy grinned to add point to the compliment, and put his eyes into something between a squint and a cast, which there is reason to believe he intended for an ogle.

‘You mustn’t talk to me in that way,’ said Mary; ‘you don’t mean it.’

‘Don’t I, though?’ replied the fat boy. ‘I say?’

‘Well?’

‘Are you going to come here regular?’

‘No,’ rejoined Mary, shaking her head, ‘I’m going away again to-night. Why?’

‘Oh,’ said the fat boy, in a tone of strong feeling; ‘how we should have enjoyed ourselves at meals, if you had been!’

‘I might come here sometimes, perhaps, to see you,’ said Mary, plaiting the table-cloth in assumed coyness, ‘if you would do me a favour.’

The fat boy looked from the pie-dish to the steak, as if he thought a favour must be in a manner connected with something to eat; and then took out one of the half-crowns and glanced at it nervously.

‘Don’t you understand me?’ said Mary, looking slily in his fat face.

Again he looked at the half-crown, and said faintly, ‘No.’

‘The ladies want you not to say anything to the old gentleman about the young gentleman having been upstairs; and I want you too.’

,is that all?’ said the fat boy, evidently very much relieved, as he pocketed the half-crown again. ‘Of course I ain’t a-going to.’

‘You see,’ said Mary, ‘Mr. Snodgrass is very fond of Miss Emily, and Miss Emily’s very fond of him, and if you were to tell about it, the old gentleman would carry you all away miles into the country, where you’d see nobody.’

‘No, no, I won’t tell,’ said the fat boy stoutly.

‘That’s a dear,’ said Mary. ‘Now it’s time I went upstairs, and got my lady ready for dinner.’

‘Don’t go yet,’ urged the fat boy.

‘I must,’ replied Mary. ‘Good-bye, for the present.’

The fat boy, with elephantine playfulness, stretched out his arms to ravish a kiss; but as it required no great agility to elude him, his fair enslaver had vanished before he closed them again; upon which the apathetic youth ate a pound or so of steak with a sentimental countenance, and fell fast asleep.

There was so much to say upstairs, and there were so many plans to concert for elopement and matrimony in the event of old Wardle continuing to be cruel, that it wanted only half an hour of dinner when Mr. Snodgrass took his final adieu. The ladies ran to Emily’s bedroom to dress, and the lover, taking up his hat, walked out of the room. He had scarcely got outside the door, when he heard Wardle’s voice talking loudly, and looking over the banisters beheld him, followed by some other gentlemen, coming straight upstairs. Knowing nothing of the house, Mr. Snodgrass in his confusion stepped hastily back into the room he had just quitted, and passing thence into an inner apartment (Mr. Wardle’s bedchamber), closed the door softly, just as the persons he had caught a glimpse of entered the sitting-room. These were Mr. Wardle, Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Nathaniel Winkle, and Mr. Benjamin Allen, whom he had no difficulty in recognising by their voices.

‘Very lucky I had the presence of mind to avoid them,’ thought Mr. Snodgrass with a smile, and walking on tiptoe to another door near the bedside; ‘this opens into the same passage, and I can walk quietly and comfortably away.’

There was only one obstacle to his walking quietly and comfortably away, which was that the door was locked and the key gone.

‘Let us have some of your best wine to-day, waiter,’ said old Wardle, rubbing his hands.

‘You shall have some of the very best, sir,’ replied the waiter.

‘Let the ladies know we have come in.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

Devoutly and ardently did Mr. Snodgrass wish that the ladies could know he had come in. He ventured once to whisper, ‘Waiter!’ through the keyhole, but the probability of the wrong waiter coming to his relief, flashed upon his mind, together with a sense of the strong resemblance between his own situation and that in which another gentleman had been recently found in a neighbouring hotel (an account of whose misfortunes had appeared under the head of ‘Police’ in that morning’s paper), he sat himself on a portmanteau, and trembled violently.

‘We won’t wait a minute for Perker,’ said Wardle, looking at his watch; ‘he is always exact. He will be here, in time, if he means to come; and if he does not, it’s of no use waiting. Ha! Arabella!’

‘My sister!’ exclaimed Mr. Benjamin Allen, folding her in a most romantic embrace.

‘Oh, Ben, dear, how you do smell of tobacco,’ said Arabella, rather overcome by this mark of affection.

‘Do I?’ said Mr. Benjamin Allen. ‘Do I, Bella? Well, perhaps I do.’

Perhaps he did, having just left a pleasant little smoking-party of twelve medical students, in a small back parlour with a large fire.

‘But I am delighted to see you,’ said Mr. Ben Allen. ‘Bless you, Bella!’

‘There,’ said Arabella, bending forward to kiss her brother; ‘don’t take hold of me again, Ben, dear, because you tumble me so.’

At this point of the reconciliation, Mr. Ben Allen allowed his feelings and the cigars and porter to overcome him, and looked round upon the beholders with damp spectacles.

‘is nothing to be said to me?’ cried Wardle, with open arms.

‘A great deal,’ whispered Arabella, as she received the old gentleman’s hearty caress and congratulation. ‘You are a hard-hearted, unfeeling, cruel monster.’

‘You are a little rebel,’ replied Wardle, in the same tone, ‘and I am afraid I shall be obliged to forbid you the house. People like you, who get married in spite of everybody, ought not to be let loose on society. But come!’ added the old gentleman aloud, ‘here’s the dinner; you shall sit by me. Joe; why, damn the boy, he’s awake!’

To the great distress of his master, the fat boy was indeed in a state of remarkable vigilance, his eyes being wide open, and looking as if they intended to remain so. There was an alacrity in his manner, too, which was equally unaccountable; every time his eyes met those of Emily or Arabella, he smirked and grinned; once, Wardle could have sworn, he saw him wink.

This alteration in the fat boy’s demeanour originated in his increased sense of his own importance, and the dignity he acquired from having been taken into the confidence of the young ladies; and the smirks, and grins, and winks were so many condescending assurances that they might depend upon his fidelity. As these tokens were rather calculated to awaken suspicion than allay