"Ask Mamma"; or, The Richest Commoner In England. Robert Smith Surtees
the fog to Doughty Street, “No.——, Gruvenor Square—eight o’clock—eight o’clock—No.——, Gruvenor Square—was there ever such a beauty!—be with her to a certainty, be with her to a certainty.” Saying which, he gave an ecstatic bound, and next moment found himself sprawling a-top of a murder!—crying apple-woman in the gutter. Leaving him there to get up at his leisure, let us return to his late companion in the coach.
Scarcely was the door closed on his exit, ere a sharp shrill “You don’t know me!—you don’t know me!” sounded from under the pheasant-feather bonnet, and shot through Miss Willing like a thrill.
“Yes, no, yes; who is it?” ejaculated she, thankful they were alone.
“Sarey Grimes, to be sure,” replied the voice, in a semi-tone of exultation.
“Sarah Grimes!” exclaimed Miss Willing, recollecting the veriest little imp of mischief that ever came about a place, the daughter of a most notorious poacher. “So it is! Why, Sarah, who would ever have thought of seeing you grown into a great big woman.”
“I thought you didn’t know me,” replied Sarah; “I used often to run errands for you,” added she.
“I remember,” replied Miss Willing, feeling in her reticule for her purse. Sarah had carried certain delicate missives in the country that Miss Willing would now rather have forgotten, how thankful she was that the creature had not introduced herself when her fat friend was in the coach. “What are you doing now?” asked Miss Willing, jingling up the money at one end of the purse to distinguish between the gold and the silver.
Sarey explained that being now out of place (she had been recently dismissed from a cheesemonger’s at Lutterworth for stealing a copper coal-scoop, a pound of whitening, and a pair of gold spectacles, for which a donkey-travelling general merchant had given her seven and sixpence), the guard of the coach, who was her great-uncle, had given her a lift up to town to try what she could do there again; and Miss Willing’s quick apprehension seeing that there was some use to be made of such a sharp-witted thing, having selected a half-sovereign out of her purse, thus addressed her:
“Well, Sarah, I’m glad to see you again. You are very much improved, and will be very good-looking. There’s half a sovereign for you,” handing it to her, “and if you’ll come to me at six o’clock to-morrow evening in Grosvenor Square, I dare say I shall be able to look out some things that may be useful to you.”
“Thanke, mum; thanke!” exclaimed Sarey, delighted at the idea. “I’ll be with you, you may depend.”
“You know Big Ben,” continued Miss Willing, “who was my lord’s own man; he’s hall-porter now, ring and tell him you come for me, and he’ll let you in at the door.”
“Certainly, mum, certainly,” assented Pheasant-feathers, thinking how much more magnificent that would be than sneaking down the area.
And the coach having now reached the Green Man, Miss Willing alighted and took a coach to Grosvenor Square, leaving Miss Grimes to pursue its peregrinations to the end of its journey.
And Billy Pringle having, with the aid of the “pollis,” appeased the basket-woman’s wrath, was presently ensconced in his beautiful house in Doughty Street.
So, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle—down goes the curtain on this somewhat long chapter.
CHAPTER IV.
A GLASS COACH.—MISS WILLING (EN GRAND COSTUME)
NEXT day our friend Billy was buried in looking after his lost luggage and burnishing up the gilt bugle-horn buttons of the coat, waist-coat, and shorts of the Royal Epping Archers, in which he meant to figure in the evening. Having, through the medium of his “Boyle,” ascertained the rank of the owner of the residence where he was going to be regaled, he ordered a glass-coach—not a coach made of glass, juvenile readers, in which we could see a gentleman disparting himself like a gold-fish in a glass bowl, but a better sort of hackney coach with a less filthy driver, which, by a “beautiful fiction” of the times, used to be considered the hirer’s “private carriage.”
It was not the “thing” in those days to drive up to a gentleman’s door in a public conveyance, and doing the magnificent was very expensive: for the glass fiction involved a pair of gaunt raw-boned horses, which, with the napless-hatted drab-turned-up-with-grease-coated-coachman, left very little change out of a sovereign. How thankful we ought to be to railways and Mr. Fitzroy for being able to cut about openly at the rate of sixpence a mile. The first great man who drove up St. James’s Street at high tide in a Hansom, deserves to have his portrait painted at the public expense, for he opened the door of common sense and utility.
What a follow-my-leader-world it is! People all took to street cabs simultaneously, just as they did to walking in the Park on a Sunday when Count D’Orsay set up his “ ‘andsomest ombrella in de vorld,” being no longer able to keep a horse. But we are getting into recent times instead of attending Mr. Pringle to his party. He is supposed to have ordered his glass phenomenon.
Now Mr. Forage, the job-master, in Lamb’s Conduit Street, with whom our friend did his magnificence, “performed funerals” also, as his yard-doors indicated, and being rather “full,” or more properly speaking, empty, he acted upon the principle of all coaches being black in the dark, and sent a mourning one, so there was a striking contrast between the gaiety of the Royal Epping Archers’ uniform—pea-green coat with a blue collar, salmon-coloured vest and shorts—in which Mr. Pringle was attired, and the gravity of the vehicle that conveyed him. However, our lover was so intent upon taking care of his pumps, for the fog had made the flags both slippery and greasy, that he popped in without noticing the peculiarity, and his stuttering knock-knee’d hobble-de-hoy, yclept “Paul,” having closed the door and mounted up behind, they were presently jingling away to the west, Billy putting up first one leg and then the other on to the opposite seat to admire his white-gauze-silk-encased calves by the gas and chemists’ windows as they passed. So he went fingering and feeling at his legs, and pulling and hauling at his coat—for the Epping Archer uniform had got rather tight, and, moreover, had been made on the George-the-Fourth principle, of not being easily got into—along Oxford Street, through Hanover Square, and up Brook Street, to the spacious region that contained the object of his adoration. The coach presently drew up at a stately Italian-column porticoed mansion: down goes Paul, but before he gets half through his meditated knock, the door opens suddenly in his face, and he is confronted by Big Ben in the full livery—we beg pardon—uniform of the Delacey family, beetroot-coloured coat, with cherry-coloured vest and shorts, the whole elaborately bedizened with gold-lace.
Original Size
The unexpected apparition, rendered more formidable by the blazing fire in the background, throwing a lurid light over the giant, completely deprived little Paul of his breath, and he stood gaping and shaking as if he expected the monster to address him.
“Who may you please to want?” at length demanded Ben, in a deep sonorous tone of mingled defiance and contempt.
“P—p—p—please, wo—wo—wo—want,” stuttered little Paul, now recollecting that he had never been told who to ask for.
“Yes, who do you wish to see?” demanded Ben, in a clear explanatory tone, for though he had agreed to dress up for the occasion on the reciprocity principle of course—Miss Willing winking at his having two nephews living in the house—he by no means undertook to furnish civility to any of the undergraduates of life, as he called such apologies as Paul.
“I—I—I’ll ask,” replied Paul, glad to