The Fortunes of Nigel

'I was a gentleman once,' said Tunstall, 'and I hope I have done nothing to lose the name of one.'

'Weel, weel, as ye list,' said Richie Moniplies; 'but I am mickle beholden to ye baith—and I am not a hair the less like to bear it in mind that I say but little about it just now.—Gude-night to you, my kind countryman.' So saying, he thrust out of the sleeve of his ragged doublet a long bony hand and arm, on which the muscles rose like whip- cord. Master George shook it heartily, while Jenkin and Frank exchanged sly looks with each other.

Richie Moniplies would next have addressed his thanks to the master of the shop, but seeing him, as he afterwards said, 'scribbling on his bit bookie, as if he were demented,' he contented his politeness with 'giving him a hat,' touching, that is, his bonnet, in token of salutation, and so left the shop.

'Now, there goes Scotch Jockey, with all his bad and good about him,' said Master George to Master David, who suspended, though unwillingly, the calculations with which he was engaged, and keeping his pen within an inch of the tablets, gazed on his friend with great lack-lustre eyes, which expressed any thing rather than intelligence or interest in the discourse addressed to him.—'That fellow,' proceeded Master George, without heeding his friend's state of abstraction, 'shows, with great liveliness of colouring, how our Scotch pride and poverty make liars and braggarts of us; and yet the knave, whose every third word to an Englishman is a boastful lie, will, I warrant you, be a true and tender friend and follower to his master, and has perhaps parted with his mantle to him in the cold blast, although he himself walked in cuerpo, as the Don says. —Strange! that courage and fidelity—for I will warrant that the knave is stout—should have no better companion than this swaggering braggadocio humour.—But you mark me not, friend Davie.'

'I do—I do, most heedfully,' said Davie.—'For, as the sun goeth round the dial-plate in twenty-four hours, add, for the moon, fifty minutes and a half——'

'You are in the seventh heavens, man,' said his companion.

'I crave your pardon,' replied Davie.—'Let the wheel A go round in twenty-four hours—I have it—and the wheel B in twenty-four hours, fifty minutes and a half—fifty-seven being to fifty-four, as fifty- nine to twenty-four hours, fifty minutes and a half, or very nearly,— I crave your forgiveness, Master George, and heartily wish you good- even.'

'Good-even?' said Master George; 'why, you have not wished me good-day yet. Come, old friend, lay by these tablets, or you will crack the inner machinery of your skull, as our friend yonder has got the outer-case of his damaged.—Good-night, quotha! I mean not to part with you so easily. I came to get my four hours' nunchion from you, man, besides a tune on the lute from my god-daughter, Mrs. Marget.'

'Good faith! I was abstracted, Master George—but you know me.

Whenever I get amongst the wheels,' said Mr. Ramsay, 'why, 'tis——'

'Lucky that you deal in small ones,' said his friend; as, awakened from his reveries and calculations, Ramsay led the way up a little back-stair to the first storey, occupied by his daughter and his little household.

The apprentices resumed their places in the front-shop, and relieved Sam Porter; when Jenkin said to Tunstall—'Didst see, Frank, how the old goldsmith cottoned in with his beggarly countryman? When would one of his wealth have shaken hands so courteously with a poor Englishman?—Well, I'll say that for the best of the Scots, that they will go over head and ears to serve a countryman, when they will not wet a nail of their finger to save a Southron, as they call us, from drowning. And yet Master George is but half-bred Scot neither in that respect; for I have known him do many a kind thing to the English too.'

'But hark ye, Jenkin,' said Tunstall, 'I think you are but half-bred English yourself. How came you to strike on the Scotsman's side after all?'

'Why, you did so, too,' answered Vincent.

'Ay, because I saw you begin; and, besides, it is no Cumberland fashion to fall fifty upon one,' replied Tunstall.

'And no Christ Church fashion neither,' said Jenkin. 'Fair play and Old England for ever!—Besides, to tell you a secret, his voice had a twang in it—in the dialect I mean—reminded me of a little tongue, which I think sweeter—sweeter than the last toll of St. Dunstan's will sound, on the day that I am shot of my indentures—Ha!— you guess who I mean, Frank?'

'Not I, indeed,' answered Tunstall.—'Scotch Janet, I suppose, the laundress.'

'Off with Janet in her own bucking-basket!—No, no, no!—You blind buzzard,—do you not know I mean pretty Mrs. Marget?'

'Umph!' answered Tunstall, dryly.

A flash of anger, not unmingled with suspicion, shot from Jenkin's keen black eyes.

'Umph!—and what signifies umph? I am not the first 'prentice has married his master's daughter, I suppose?'

'They kept their own secret, I fancy,' said Tunstall, 'at least till they were out of their time.'

'I tell you what it is, Frank,' answered Jenkin, sharply, 'that may be the fashion of you gentlefolks, that are taught from your biggin to carry two faces under the same hood, but it shall never be mine.'

'There are the stairs, then,' said Tunstall, coolly; 'go up and ask Mrs. Marget of our master just now, and see what sort of a face he will wear under his hood.'

'No, I wonnot,' answered Jenkin; 'I am not such a fool as that neither. But I will take my own time; and all the Counts in Cumberland shall not cut my comb, and this is that which you may depend upon.'

Francis made no reply; and they resumed their usual attention to the business of the shop, and their usual solicitations to the passengers.

CHAPTER III

Bobadil. I pray you, possess no gallant of your acquaintance with a knowledge of my lodging.

Master Matthew. Who, I, sir?—Lord, sir!

Ben Jonson.

The next morning found Nigel Olifaunt, the young Lord of Glenvarloch, seated, sad and solitary, in his little apartment, in the mansion of John Christie, the ship-chandler; which that honest tradesman, in gratitude perhaps to the profession from which he derived his chief support, appeared to have constructed as nearly as possible upon the plan of a ship's cabin.

It was situated near to Paul's Wharf, at the end of one of those intricate and narrow lanes, which, until that part of the city was swept away by the Great Fire in 1666, constituted an extraordinary labyrinth of small, dark, damp, and unwholesome streets and alleys, in one corner or other of which the plague was then as surely found lurking, as in the obscure corners of Constantinople in our own time. But John Christie's house looked out upon the river, and had the advantage, therefore, of free air, impregnated, however, with the odoriferous fumes of the articles in which the ship-chandler dealt, with the odour of pitch, and the natural scent of the ooze and sludge left by the reflux of the tide.

Upon the whole, except that his dwelling did not float with the flood- tide, and become stranded with the ebb, the young lord was nearly as comfortably accommodated as he was while on board the little trading brig from the long town of Kirkaldy, in Fife, by which he had come a passenger to London. He received, however, every attention which could be paid him by his honest landlord, John Christie; for Richie Moniplies had not thought it necessary to preserve his master's incognito so completely, but that the honest ship- chandler could form a guess that his guest's quality was superior to his appearance.

As for Dame Nelly, his wife, a round, buxom, laughter-loving dame, with black eyes, a tight well-laced bodice, a green apron, and a red petticoat edged with a slight silver lace, and judiciously shortened so as to show that a short heel, and a tight clean ankle, rested upon her well-burnished shoe,—she, of course, felt interest in a young man, who, besides being very handsome, good-humoured, and easily satisfied with the accommodations her house afforded, was evidently of a rank, as well as manners, highly superior to the skippers (or Captains, as they called themselves) of merchant vessels, who were the usual tenants of the apartments which she let to hire;