Pollyooly. Edgar Jepson
the pensions of the old servants who had for so many years served his father and uncles and aunts. It had proved a great saving to him: in the case of Hannah Bride alone he saved thirty pounds a year.
Then Hannah Bride had lost the savings of her forty-seven years' service with Lady Constantia Deeping in an imaginary gold-mine, the offspring of the fertile fancy of three gentlemen who spent their laborious days in the City of London, and the instrument with which they extracted money from simple old men and women whose country experience had gifted them with an insufficient distrust of the Oriental imagination.
Thus it came about that, thanks to the Duke of Osterley and these three gentlemen, Hannah Bride came to London to begin the world afresh at the age of sixty-seven.
Mrs. Brown had been her mainstay. She had found for her lodging an attic at the top of the house in which she herself lived, and it was from her that Hannah Bride had learned that the post of laundress to two sets of rooms in the Inner Temple was vacant, had applied for them, and had been so lucky as to obtain them.
After the manner of her class, Mrs. Brown reckoned a funeral an occasion for feasting, and she was giving the children buttered toast with jam on it. They both enjoyed it; the Lump with the natural freedom from care of his two and a half years, Pollyooly in spite of her anxiety about the future, and her grief at her aunt's death. During the rest of the meal she discussed with Mrs. Brown the prospects of getting work, when she should have lost her Temple posts. Mrs. Brown assured her with confident conviction that, as soon as Mr. Ruffin and Mr. Gedge-Tomkins learned of her aunt's death, they would insist on having a laundress—those who clean and cook in chambers in the Temple have from times immemorial borne the title of 'Laundress'—staider and of more trustworthy years; and Pollyooly sadly believed her.
After tea she took the Lump up to their attic and washed him. Then they sallied forth into their street, that little slum, much of it seventeenth century, on which the back windows of the middle block of the King's Bench Walk look down, and which is all that is left of the Alsatia of the Stuarts. It is not unlikely that in the very room in which they had eaten the funeral feast of buttered toast and jam, the great hero of the restoration, Colonel Blood, caroused, drinking the English sun to sleep, and lighting lamps that would have outburned the Eddystone had it chanced to have been built at the time.
It is to be feared that Pollyooly, in spite of her mourning, walked down that immemorial slum with a truculent swagger which went ill with her angelic air. She was at variance with certain young Alsatians who had taken shrill exception to the redness of her hair, and she prosecuted a relentless feud against them with a vigor, the result of a childhood spent in the healthy air of Muttle-Deeping, which they feared and envied. The two children came down the street without encounter, and went to the gardens on the Embankment. There, while the Lump disported himself, in his sedate way, on the dry turf with an unmaned wooden horse, Pollyooly sat and considered the dark future. In her black frock, with her desolate, delicate air, she looked but a frail creature to face the world, a frail provider of the needs of the carefree cherub.
Next morning, however, when she betook herself in her oft-washed blue print frock, for she was keeping the black frock, which had been purchased out of the burial-money, as best, to No. 75 in the King's Bench Walk, she wore the serene and cheerful air proper to a dauntless spirit; and as she swept and dusted the rooms in her care, she sang softly the songs of the country child.
It was half-past eight; she was cooking the breakfast of the Honorable John Ruffin, when there came a knock at his oak, as the outer door of a set of chambers is inexplicably called, seeing that it is so often made of pitch-pine. She peered cautiously through the slit of the letter-box, as she had been carefully instructed to do lest she should open the oak to the seedy dun. She saw, standing without, a stout gentleman of a rich Assyrian air, wearing a very shiny silk hat: a well-to-do figure, reassuring to her childish mind; and she opened the oak.
"I want to see Mr. Ruffin," said the stout gentleman sharply.
There was a touch of hostility in his tone, and Pollyooly's quick ear caught it: "You can't see him. He's not had breakfast; it's no use bothering him before breakfast," she said quickly.
"Rats," said the stout gentleman shortly; and he pushed rudely past her, went along the passage to the sitting-room, and, without knocking, entered it.
The sitting-room was empty of human occupant,
"I want to see Mr. Ruffin," said the stout gentleman sharply
but bestrewn with human wearing apparel; and then the Honorable John Ruffin came into it from his bedroom.
"What the deuce do you mean by forcing your way unannounced, Fitzgerald?" he said sharply.
"I've come for my money—the rest of my money," said Mr. Montague Fitzgerald in a tone of fierce bluster.
The tone seemed to soothe the Honorable John Ruffin; the slight frown cleared from his excellent brow; and he smiled an amiable, though mocking smile.
"Didn't you get my letter?" he said in a gentle, rather drawling voice.
"Yes; I got it all right. And I've come to find out what it means," said Mr. Montague Fitzgerald yet more blusterously.
"It means what it says. You've come to the end of fleecing me. I've paid off your loan and twenty per cent. interest on it; and I'm not going to pay a farthing more," said the Honorable John Ruffin in the sweetest tone of his well-modulated voice.
Mr. Montague Fitzgerald gasped; then he thundered, "My money! I'm going to 'ave it!"
"Not from me," said the Honorable John Ruffin with unabated sweetness.
"I will have it! I'll show you what's what, if you try to come any of these swindling games over me! I will have it!" roared Mr. Montague Fitzgerald.
"You can get it from the devil—or the High Court," said the Honorable John Ruffin with cloying sweetness.
Mr. Montague Fitzgerald burst into a warm perspiration. The Honorable John Ruffin's first suggestion was absurd—there was no money there. His second suggestion was little better—the High Court was the last place to which Mr. Montague Fitzgerald wished to go for several months. On a recent visit to it, to obtain a little matter of sixty per cent. from another unfortunate client, the judge had taken occasion to remark on his methods of dealing with inexperienced youth with a crude frankness which had considerably contracted the sphere of his lucrative usefulness to the community; he wished it contracted no further.
He hesitated a moment; then in a very different, indeed a honeyed, tone, he said, "Now, Mr. Ruffin, you're a man of honor—"
"Am I?" said the Honorable John Ruffin sharply.
"You are," said Mr. Montague Fitzgerald warmly.
"In that case you ought not to be in my rooms for a moment; and if you don't clear out this very instant, I'll kick you out," said the Honorable John Ruffin; and he made a step forward with such a stern light of resolution shining in his eyes that Mr. Montague Fitzgerald reached the door in a single bound and vanished through it.
"Ruffin by name and Ruffin by nature," he said as he came down the passage; and he pushed back his hat to wipe his warm and beaded brow with a large silk handkerchief of garish hue.
"I told you not to go and bother Mr. Ruffin before breakfast," said Pollyooly with unsympathetic severity.
The money-lender scowled at her, and said ferociously, "I'll make him pay for it as sure as my name's Montague Fitzgerald!"
"I shouldn't think you will. Mr. Ruffin doesn't pay anything unless he wants to," said Pollyooly with an air of superior knowledge; and she laughed gleefully as she turned to the bacon she was grilling, for she had heard heart to heart