“In what?” asked Mr. Chuzzlewit.
“Meaning him, sir?”
“Meaning both him and me.”
“Well, sir,” said Mr. Tapley. “In your old opinions of each other. As to him, sir, and his opinions, I know he’s a altered man. I know it. I know’d it long afore he spoke to you t’other day, and I must say it. Nobody don’t know half as much of him as I do. Nobody can’t. There was always a deal of good in him, but a little of it got crusted over, somehow. I can’t say who rolled the paste of that ’ere crust myself, but—”
“Go on,” said Martin. “Why do you stop?”
“But it—well! I beg your pardon, but I think it may have been you, sir. Unintentional I think it may have been you. I don’t believe that neither of you gave the other quite a fair chance. There! Now I’ve got rid on it,” said Mr. Tapley in a fit of desperation: “I can’t go a-carryin’ it about in my own mind, bustin’ myself with it; yesterday was quite long enough. It’s out now. I can’t help it. I’m sorry for it. Don’t wisit on him, sir, that’s all.”
It was clear that Mark expected to be ordered out immediately, and was quite prepared to go.
“So you think,” said Martin, “that his old faults are, in some degree, of my creation, do you?”
“Well, sir,” retorted Mr. Tapley, “I’m wery sorry, but I can’t unsay it. It’s hardly fair of you, sir, to make a ignorant man conwict himself in this way, but I do think so. I am as respectful disposed to you, sir, as a man can be; but I do think so.”
The light of a faint smile seemed to break through the dull steadiness of Martin’s face, as he looked attentively at him, without replying.
“Yet you are an ignorant man, you say,” he observed after a long pause.
“Werry much so,” Mr. Tapley replied.
“And I a learned, well-instructed man, you think?”
“Likewise wery much so,” Mr. Tapley answered.
The old man, with his chin resting on his hand, paced the room twice or thrice before he added:
“You have left him this morning?”
“Come straight from him now, sir.”
“For what: does he suppose?”
“He don’t know what to suppose, sir, no more than myself. I told him jest wot passed yesterday, sir, and that you had said to me, ‘Can you be here by seven in the morning?’ and that you had said to him, through me, ‘Can you be here by ten in the morning?’ and that I had said ‘Yes’ to both. That’s all, sir.”
His frankness was so genuine that it plainly was all.
“Perhaps,” said Martin, “he may think you are going to desert him, and to serve me?”
“I have served him in that sort of way, sir,” replied Mark, without the loss of any atom of his self-possession; “and we have been that sort of companions in misfortune, that my opinion is, he don’t believe a word on it. No more than you do, sir.”
“Will you help me to dress, and get me some breakfast from the hotel?” asked Martin.
“With pleasure, sir,” said Mark.
“And by-and-by,” said Martin, “remaining in the room, as I wish you to do, will you attend to the door yonder—give admission to visitors, I mean, when they knock?”
“Certainly, sir,” said Mr. Tapley.
“You will not find it necessary to express surprise at their appearance,” Martin suggested.
“Oh dear no, sir!” said Mr. Tapley, “not at all.”
Although he pledged himself to this with perfect confidence, he was in a state of unbounded astonishment even now. Martin appeared to observe it, and to have some sense of the ludicrous bearing of Mr. Tapley under these perplexing circumstances; for, in spite of the composure of his voice and the gravity of his face, the same indistinct light flickered on the latter several times. Mark bestirred himself, however, to execute the offices with which he was entrusted; and soon lost all tendency to any outward expression of his surprise, in the occupation of being brisk and busy.
But when he had put Mr. Chuzzlewit’s clothes in good order for dressing, and when that gentleman was dressed and sitting at his breakfast, Mr. Tapley’s feelings of wonder began to return upon him with great violence; and, standing beside the old man with a napkin under his arm (it was as natural and easy to joke to Mark to be a butler in the Temple, as it had been to volunteer as cook on board the Screw), he found it difficult to resist the temptation of casting sidelong glances at him very often. Nay, he found it impossible; and accordingly yielded to this impulse so often, that Martin caught him in the fact some fifty times. The extraordinary things Mr. Tapley did with his own face when any of these detections occurred; the sudden occasions he had to rub his eyes or his nose or his chin; the look of wisdom with which he immediately plunged into the deepest thought, or became intensely interested in the habits and customs of the flies upon the ceiling, or the sparrows out of doors; or the overwhelming politeness with which he endeavoured to hide his confusion by handing the muffin; may not unreasonably be assumed to have exercised the utmost power of feature that even Martin Chuzzlewit the elder possessed.
But he sat perfectly quiet and took his breakfast at his leisure, or made a show of doing so, for he scarcely ate or drank, and frequently lapsed into long intervals of musing. When he had finished, Mark sat down to his breakfast at the same table; and Mr. Chuzzlewit, quite silent still, walked up and down the room.
Mark cleared away in due course, and set a chair out for him, in which, as the time drew on towards
