Rogues and Vagabonds. George R. Sims
Jabez.’
There was a soft sound as of the sudden collision of a pair of lips and a cheek, and then Mrs. Turvey, followed by Mr. Duck, went upstairs to the front door.
It was Topsey brought back. Mr. Duck bade Mrs. Turvey good-night on the steps as though nothing had happened, for Topsey’s sharp little ears were open, and he went off whistling ‘’Tis my delight on a shiny night,’ and Topsey went downstairs with her aunt.
She was full of the ghost. She acted the ghost. She showed her aunty how the ghost looked, and how it rose mysteriously from nothing and walked towards its victim.
Mrs. Turvey did not enter very heartily into the scene. She did not like ghosts at any time, but to-night, when her master’s death had been so suddenly communicated to her, she positively hated ghosts.
Do what she would, she could not shake off the idea that she was in a dead man’s house. All the stories of uneasy spirits visiting their earthly dwelling-places floated across her brain, and presently she turned sharply to the child, and told her not to chatter but to get ready for bed.
They slept on the ground floor, in a room that had been a servant’s room in the days when Mr. Egerton kept up an establishment.
Now in her confusion at parting with her elderly admirer right under Topsey’s watchful eye, Mrs. Turvey had forgotten to fasten up the front door. As a matter of fact, she had closed it so carelessly that the lock had not caught at all.
She suddenly recollected her omission to examine the fastenings with her usual care, so she sent Topsey to do it, while she got the bread and cheese out of the larder for her frugal supper.
Topsey ran up and got half-way down the hall. Then she started back, trembling in every limb. It was quite dark in the passage, but the door was slowly swinging back on its hinges. As it opened and the pale light of the street lamp wandered in, the figure of a man with a face ghastly in the glare of the flickering illumination from without glided towards her. Her brain was full of the ghost illusion she had seen that evening. This was just how the apparition had walked.
Slowly it came nearer and nearer to her.
With a sudden effort the terrified child found her voice and gave a wild cry.
‘Aunty!’ she shrieked. ‘Save me! The ghost! the ghost!’
Mrs. Turvey ran upstairs, terrified at the child’s cries.
She reached the hall, held up her arms, and fell down in a swoon.
The sea had given up its dead.
There, in the hall of his earthly dwelling, stood the ghost of Gurth Egerton.
CHAPTER III. MR. EDWARD MARSTON MEETS AN OLD FRIEND.
N ow, gentlemen, please!’
The landlord of the Blue Pigeons had one eye on the clock and the other on his customers. It wanted only five minutes to closing time, and the patrons of the Blue Pigeons required a great deal of soft persuasion, as a rule, before they shook themselves up from their free-and-easy attitudes at the counter and on the benches, and filed out into the street.
On this especial night there was every excuse for the apparent inattention with which they received the landlord’s hint. Inside it was warm and cheery, the brilliant gas flared upon polished pewter, and gay-coloured glass, through the open door of the bar-parlour the ruddy glare of the fire could be seen dancing on the hearth, and everything was suggestive of warmth and light and comfort.
Outside—oh, what a night it was outside! The rain was coming down in torrents, the streets were seas of slush, and every time the big door swung open to admit a benighted traveller a roaring blast of east wind followed him to give him a final buffet, and seemed to say, ‘Take that; and I’ll give you another when you come out.’
It was no wonder the Blue Pigeons was crammed such a night as this; it was no wonder that once under the hospitable portals, and sheltered from the rain and the wind, the customers hesitated to leave the haven behind them.
‘Now, gentlemen, please!’
This time the landlord put a little more determination into his warning note, and gave the sign to the potman to lower the gas and fidget with the front door.
Reluctantly the gentlemen and ladies drained their glasses, wiped their lips, and shook themselves together preparatory to turning out into the night. Coat-collars were turned up, shawls were flung over battered bonnets, hands were thrust deep into trousers pockets, there was a little laughing, more growling, and a great deal of swearing, mixed with maudlin farewells and some rough horseplay, and then the motley crowd of drinkers oozed through the swing doors, melted gradually, and vanished.
Where to?
To foul alleys and rookeries, to cellars and human kennels, to low lodging-houses and tumble-down hovels.
The lights of the Blue Pigeons go out one by one, silence steals over the street, and the great crowd of drinkers separates, and each component part of it wends his or her way to some place which is ‘home,’—some place—mean, vile, and awful though it be—which contains the scanty household gods and something near and dear.
Although the Blue Pigeons is within a stone’s throw of the Seven Dials, its immediate vicinity is wrapped in silence when the clock strikes one. As a rule the sounds of revelry and riot linger in the narrow streets long after the public has disgorged its prey, and men and women stand about at the street corners, and joke and laugh and quarrel, despite the rough injunction to move on bestowed upon them by the especial policeman told off to superintend their conduct.
To-night the rain is so pitiless and the air so keen and merciless that the lowest and meanest of the populace have hurried off to such shelter as they can find. A thick fog, too, has begun to settle down upon the scene of desolation, and it is not a time for the proverbial dog to be out of doors.
But there is one customer who still hovers about the closed doors of the “Blue Pigeons.”
He had been inside from nine until closing time, and has come out at the last moment with the rest.
He had stood about unnoticed among the little groups, shifting about from one to the other, and pretending to belong to them. In the Dials a pot of beer does duty for a good many mouths sometimes, and neither the landlord nor the potman noticed the stranger sufficiently to discover that during the entire evening he had been enjoying the warmth and light and the smell of the spirits and tobacco-smoke without spending one penny for the good of the house.
Edward Marston hadn’t anything to spend or he would have spent it. He had made a dive into the house to escape the storm, and it had sheltered him for an hour or two. Now the doors were shut, and he was out in the streets again—homeless! penniless!
‘I’m on my beam ends now, and no mistake,’ he said to himself. ‘What the dickens am I to do? I suppose I’d better go and get quietly into the river.’
He passed his hands over his soaked jacket, looked up at the sky and laughed.
‘I don’t think I need go to the river,’ he muttered; ‘if I stay here a little longer, I can be drowned where I am. I’ll look about for an arch or a gateway; I may as well stand in the dry, if it doesn’t cost any more than this.’
Edward Marston was a gentleman. You saw it in the face under the shapeless billycock hat; you saw it in the thin hands that every now and then wiped the rain-drops from his beard and moustache; you saw it in his bearing as he stepped from the poor shelter of the Blue Pigeons doorway and made a dart round the corner in search of a gateway.
He was evidently accustomed to something very like his present position, and there was nothing startlingly