It was towards this moving spectacle that the staircase and the sweet sounds guided Kit, on whose arrival before his door, Mr. Brass stopped his singing, but not his smiling, and nodded affably, at the same time beckoning to him with his pen.
“Kit,” said Mr. Brass, in the pleasantest way imaginable, “how do you do?”
Kit being rather shy of his friend, made a suitable reply, and had his hand upon the lock of the street door when Mr. Brass called him softly back.
“You are not to go, if you please, Kit,” said the attorney in a mysterious and yet businesslike way. “You are to step in here, if you please. Dear me, dear me! When I look at you,” said the lawyer, quitting his stool, and standing before the fire with his back towards it, “I am reminded of the sweetest little face that ever my eyes beheld. I remember your coming there twice or thrice when we were in possession. Ah Kit, my dear fellow, gentlemen in my profession have such painful duties to perform sometimes that you needn’t envy us—you needn’t indeed!”
“I don’t sir,” said Kit, “though it isn’t for the like of me to judge.”
“Our only consolation, Kit,” pursued the lawyer, looking at him in a sort of pensive abstraction, “is, that although we cannot turn away the wind, we can soften it; we can temper it, if I may say so, to the shorn lambs.”
“Shorn indeed!” thought Kit. “Pretty close!” But he didn’t say so.
“On that occasion, Kit,” said Mr. Brass, “on that occasion that I have just alluded to, I had a hard battle with Mr. Quilp (for Mr. Quilp is a very hard man) to obtain them the indulgence they had. It might have cost me a client. But suffering virtue inspired me, and I prevailed.”
“He’s not so bad after all,” thought honest Kit, as the attorney pursed up his lips and looked like a man who was struggling with his better feelings.
“I respect you, Kit,” said Brass with emotion. “I saw enough of your conduct at that time to respect you, though your station is humble, and your fortune lowly. It isn’t the waistcoat that I look at. It is the heart. The checks in the waistcoat are but the wires of the cage. But the heart is the bird. Ah! How many sich birds are perpetually moulting, and putting their beaks through the wires to peck at all mankind!”
This poetic figure, which Kit took to be in special allusion to his own checked waistcoat, quite overcame him; Mr. Brass’s voice and manner added not a little to its effect, for he discoursed with all the mild austerity of a hermit, and wanted but a cord round the waist of his rusty surtout, and a skull on the chimneypiece, to be completely set up in that line of business.
“Well, well,” said Sampson, smiling as good men smile when they compassionate their own weakness or that of their fellow-creatures, “this is wide of the bull’s-eye. You’re to take that, if you please.” As he spoke, he pointed to a couple of half-crowns upon the desk.
Kit looked at the coins, and then at Sampson, and hesitated.
“For yourself,” said Brass.
“From—”
“No matter about the person they came from,” replied the lawyer. “Say me, if you like. We have eccentric friends overhead, Kit, and we musn’t ask questions or talk too much—you understand. You’re to take them, that’s all; and between you and me, I don’t think they’ll be the last you’ll have to take from the same place. I hope not. Goodbye, Kit. Goodbye!”
With many thanks, and many more self-reproaches for having on such slight grounds suspected one who in their very first conversation turned out such a different man from what he had supposed, Kit took the money and made the best of his way home. Mr. Brass remained airing himself at the fire; and resumed his vocal exercise, and his seraphic smile, simultaneously.
“May I come in?” said Miss Sally, peeping.
“Oh yes, you may come in,” returned her brother.
“Ahem?” coughed Miss Brass interrogatively.
“Yes,” returned Sampson, “I should say as good as done.”
LVII
Mr. Chuckster’s indignant apprehensions were not without foundation. Certainly the friendship between the single gentleman and Mr. Garland was not suffered to cool, but had a rapid growth and flourished exceedingly. They were soon in habits of constant intercourse and communication; and the single gentleman labouring at this time under a slight attack of illness—the consequence most probably of his late excited feelings and subsequent disappointment—furnished a reason for their holding yet more frequent correspondence; so that some one of the inmates of Abel Cottage, Finchley, came backwards and forwards between that place and Bevis Marks, almost every day.
As the pony had now thrown off all disguise, and without any mincing of the matter or beating about the bush, sturdily refused to be driven by anybody but Kit, it generally happened that whether old Mr. Garland came, or Mr. Abel, Kit was of the party. Of all messages and inquiries, Kit was in right of his position the bearer; thus it came about that, while the single gentleman remained indisposed, Kit turned into Bevis Marks every morning with nearly as much regularity as the General Postman.
Mr. Sampson Brass, who no doubt had his reasons for looking sharply about him, soon learnt to distinguish the pony’s trot and the clatter of the little chaise at the corner of the street. Whenever
