Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens [big ebook reader txt] 📗

But for a grave waggishness in Mr. Rugg’s manner of delivering this introduction to the feast, it might have appeared that Miss Dorrit was expected to be one of the company. Pancks recognised the sally in his usual way, and took in his provender in his usual way. Miss Rugg, perhaps making up some of her arrears, likewise took very kindly to the mutton, and it rapidly diminished to the bone. A bread-and-butter pudding entirely disappeared, and a considerable amount of cheese and radishes vanished by the same means. Then came the dessert.

Then also, and before the broaching of the rum and water, came Mr. Pancks’s notebook. The ensuing business proceedings were brief but curious, and rather in the nature of a conspiracy. Mr. Pancks looked over his notebook, which was now getting full, studiously; and picked out little extracts, which he wrote on separate slips of paper on the table; Mr. Rugg, in the meanwhile, looking at him with close attention, and Young John losing his uncollected eye in mists of meditation. When Mr. Pancks, who supported the character of chief conspirator, had completed his extracts, he looked them over, corrected them, put up his notebook, and held them like a hand at cards.

“Now, there’s a churchyard in Bedfordshire,” said Pancks. “Who takes it?”

“I’ll take it, sir,” returned Mr. Rugg, “if no one bids.”

Mr. Pancks dealt him his card, and looked at his hand again.

“Now, there’s an Enquiry in York,” said Pancks. “Who takes it?”

“I’m not good for York,” said Mr. Rugg.

“Then perhaps,” pursued Pancks, “you’ll be so obliging, John Chivery?”

Young John assenting, Pancks dealt him his card, and consulted his hand again.

“There’s a Church in London; I may as well take that. And a Family Bible; I may as well take that, too. That’s two to me. Two to me,” repeated Pancks, breathing hard over his cards. “Here’s a Clerk at Durham for you, John, and an old seafaring gentleman at Dunstable for you, Mr. Rugg. Two to me, was it? Yes, two to me. Here’s a Stone; three to me. And a Stillborn Baby; four to me. And all, for the present, told.”

When he had thus disposed of his cards, all being done very quietly and in a suppressed tone, Mr. Pancks puffed his way into his own breast-pocket and tugged out a canvas bag; from which, with a sparing hand, he told forth money for travelling expenses in two little portions. “Cash goes out fast,” he said anxiously, as he pushed a portion to each of his male companions, “very fast.”

“I can only assure you, Mr. Pancks,” said Young John, “that I deeply regret my circumstances being such that I can’t afford to pay my own charges, or that it’s not advisable to allow me the time necessary for my doing the distances on foot; because nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to walk myself off my legs without fee or reward.”

This young man’s disinterestedness appeared so very ludicrous in the eyes of Miss Rugg, that she was obliged to effect a precipitate retirement from the company, and to sit upon the stairs until she had had her laugh out. Meanwhile Mr. Pancks, looking, not without some pity, at Young John, slowly and thoughtfully twisted up his canvas bag as if he were wringing its neck. The lady, returning as he restored it to his pocket, mixed rum and water for the party, not forgetting her fair self, and handed to everyone his glass. When all were supplied, Mr. Rugg rose, and silently holding out his glass at arm’s length above the centre of the table, by that gesture invited the other three to add theirs, and to unite in a general conspiratorial clink. The ceremony was effective up to a certain point, and would have been wholly so throughout, if Miss Rugg, as she raised her glass to her lips in completion of it, had not happened to look at Young John; when she was again so overcome by the contemptible comicality of his disinterestedness as to splutter some ambrosial drops of rum and water around, and withdraw in confusion.

Such was the dinner without precedent, given by Pancks at Pentonville; and such was the busy and strange life Pancks led. The only waking moments at which he appeared to relax from his cares, and to recreate himself by going anywhere or saying anything without a pervading object, were when he showed a dawning interest in the lame foreigner with the stick, down Bleeding Heart Yard.

The foreigner, by name John Baptist Cavalletto⁠—they called him Mr. Baptist in the Yard⁠—was such a chirping, easy, hopeful little fellow, that his attraction for Pancks was probably in the force of contrast. Solitary, weak, and scantily acquainted with the most necessary words of the only language in which he could communicate with the people about him, he went with the stream of his fortunes, in a brisk way that was new in those parts. With little to eat, and less to drink, and nothing to wear but what he wore upon him, or had brought tied up in one of the smallest bundles that ever were seen, he put as bright a face upon it as if he were in the most flourishing circumstances when he first hobbled up and down the Yard, humbly propitiating the general goodwill with his white teeth.

It was uphill work for a foreigner, lame or sound, to make his way with the Bleeding Hearts. In the first place, they were vaguely persuaded that every foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it to be a sound constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to his own country. They never thought of inquiring how many of their own countrymen would be returned upon their hands from diverse parts of the world, if the principle were generally recognised; they considered it particularly and peculiarly British. In the third place, they had a notion that it was a sort of Divine visitation upon a foreigner that he was not an Englishman, and