“Every word you say makes me the more determined to go to him!” declared Arabella.
“Assure you much better to send him some blunt, ma’am!”
“I will take him all I have, but oh, it is so little! I cannot think yet what is to be done!”
Mr. Scunthorpe looked a little thoughtful. “In that case, ma’am, better take you to him. Talking very wildly this morning. No saying what he might do.”
Mr. Scunthorpe pointed significantly to the ceiling. “You don’t think the old lady—?” he suggested delicately.
She shook her head. “Oh, no, no! Impossible!”
She almost ran to the door. “We have not a moment to waste, then!”
“No, no!” he assured her. “No need to be on the fret! Won’t cut his throat today! Told the girl to hide his razor.”
“What girl?”
He became very much confused, blushed, and uttered: “Girl he sent to my lodging with a message. Been looking after him.”
“Oh, God bless her!” Arabella cried fervently. “What is her name? How much I must owe her!”
As the lady in question had introduced herself to Mr. Scunthorpe as LeakyPeg, he was obliged to take refuge in prevarication, and to hope devoutly that they would not encounter her in Willow Walk. He said that he had not caught her name. Arabella seemed a little disappointed, but since this was no time for wasting over trifles she said no more, but ran out of the room to fetch her bonnet and shawl. It was impossible for her to leave the house without the butler’s being aware of it, but although he looked surprised, he made no comment, and in a few minutes’ time she and Mr. Scunthorpe were seated in a ramshackle hackney coach, which seemed as though, many years before, it had formed part of a nobleman’s equipage, but which had fallen into sad decay. The coverings to the seats and the squabs were tattered and dirty, and the vehicle smelled strongly of beer and old leather. These evils Arabella scarcely noticed, in such a turmoil was her mind. It was a struggle to support her spirits at all; she felt ready to sink; and was unable, while in such a state of agitation, to form any plan for Bertram’s relief. The only solution which had so far presented itself to her mind was an instinctive impulse, no sooner thought of than recoiled from, to send off an express to Heythram. Mr. Scunthorpe’s suggestion of applying to Lady Bridlington she well knew to be useless, nor would her pride tolerate the putting of herself under such added obligation to her godmother. Wild notions of selling Mama’s diamonds, and the pearl necklet that had belonged to Grandma Tallant, could not, she knew, be entertained, for these trinkets were not hers to dispose of at will.
Beside her, Mr. Scunthorpe, feeling vaguely that her spirits required support, tried to entertain her by pointing out, conscientiously, the various places of interest the hackney drove past. She scarcely heeded him, but when they reached Westminster, began to look about her a little, insensibly cheered by the respectability of the neighbourhood. But the hackney lumbered on, and in a surprisingly short space of time it was hard to realize that she must be within a stone’s throw of the Abbey, so squalid were her surroundings. An unlucky attempt made by Mr. Scunthorpe to divert her, by pointing out an ugly brick structure which he said was the Tothill Fields Bridewell, made her shudder so alarmingly that he hastily informed her that it was so crammed to overflowing with felons that there was no room for another soul behind its walls. A row of squat alms-houses was the next object of interest to be seen. This was followed by a charity school, but the district seemed to Arabella to be largely composed of wretched hovels, ancient mansions, fallen into depressing decay, and a superfluity of taverns. Frowsy looking women stood in the doorways of some of the hovels; half-naked urchins turned cartwheels on the dirty cobbles, in the hope of gaining largesse from persons well-breeched enough to travel in hackney coaches; at one corner, a fat woman seated behind an iron cauldron appeared to be dispensing tea to a curiously ill-assorted crowd of persons, ranging from bricklayers to bedizened young women; various street-cries echoed in the narrow streets, from offers of coal to entreaties for old iron; and the male population seemed to consist entirely of scavengers, sweeps, and unidentifiable persons with blue jowls, and mufflers round their necks in place of collars.
After passing the entrances to several noisome alleys, the hackney turned into Willow Walk, and proceeded down it for some way before drawing up outside a dingy house, whose windows showed, besides fluttering oddments of washing hung out to dry, several broken panes of glass. In the open doorway, an old woman sat in a rocking-chair, puffing at a clay pipe, and engaged in conversation with a younger female, who held a squalling infant on one arm, which she from time to time shook, or refreshed from a black bottle, from which she herself took frequent pulls. Arabella had no positive knowledge of what was in that black bottle, but that it must contain strong liquor she felt convinced. The thought of Bertram was momentarily banished from her head; as Mr. Scunthorpe handed her down from the hackney, and punctilliously brushed off the straws that clung to the flounce of her simple cambric dress, she opened her reticule, hunted in it for a shilling, and astonished the mother of the infant by pressing it into her hand, and saying earnestly: “Pray buy the baby some milk! Oh, pray do not give it that horrid stuff!”
Both women stared at her with fallen jaws. The old Irishwoman, the first to regain command over her faculties, burst into a cackle of mirth, and informed her that she was talking to no less a personage than Quartern Sue. This conveyed little to Arabella, but while she was still puzzling over the appellation, Quartern Sue, recovering from her stupefaction, had launched forth into a catalogue of her embarrassments, and was holding her hand cupped suggestively. Mr. Scunthorpe, beads of sweat standing upon his brow, took it upon himself to hustle his charge into the house, whispering to her that she must not get into talk with such ill-famed women. Quartern Sue, never one to let slip an opportunity, followed them, her beggar’s whine rising to a crescendo, but was repulsed at the foot of a rickety, uncarpeted stairway by a strapping young woman, with a tousle of greasy yellow hair, a countenance which not all the ravages of gin had entirely deprived of comeliness, and a tawdry dress, stained in various places, and with the bodice cut so low as to reveal glimpses of a dirty shift. This lady, having driven Quartern Sue forth by a series of remarks, not one of which was intelligible to Arabella, turned and confronted the genteel visitors with a belligerent look on her face, and her arms set widely akimbo. She demanded of Mr. Scunthorpe, with whom she appeared to be acquainted, what he meant by bringing a flash mort to the ken. Mr. Scunthorpe uttered the one word, Sister! in strangled accents, upon which the blonde beauty turned a pair of fierce, bloodshot eyes upon Arabella, and ejaculated: “Ho! Sister, is it?”
“Girl who brought me the message!” explained Mr. Scunthorpe in a blushful aside to Arabella.
The blonde beauty needed no other passport to Arabella’s favour. If she was conscious—as she could hardly have-failed to have been—of the strong aroma of daffy which hung about the person of Leaky Peg, she gave no sign of it, but started forward, with her hands held out, and impulsive words on her lips. “Oh, are you the girl who has been kind to my brother? You must let me thank you! I can never, never repay you! Mr. Scunthorpe here has been telling me that it was you who took care of him when he—when he came to this place!”
Leaky Peg stared very hard at her for a moment, and then said pugnaciously: “I found the covey on the mop, blue as megrim, see? and him no more than a mouth! Half flash and half foolish, that’s him. Strike me, I don’t know what I see in the hick!”
“Miss Tallant, better come upstairs!” said the anguished Mr. Scunthorpe, to whom Leaky Peg’s vocabulary was rather more intelligible than to Arabella.
“You dub your mummer, you death’s head on a mop-stick!” Leaky Peg advised him. “Leave me and the swell mort be!” She turned back to Arabella, and said roughly: “Lurched, ain’t he? He tells me there’s a fastener out after him. He hadn’t so much as a meg in his truss when I come up with him in the boozing-ken. I took him along with me—strike me if I know why!” She jerked her thumb towards the stairs. “You want to take him away: this ain’t his lay, nor it ain’t mine neither! Spouting a kid’s mish all to buy him mutton and smash, which he don’t eat! Me! You take him off; you’re welcome!”
Gathering from these words that Leaky Peg had been keeping Bertram supplied with food, Arabella, tears standing in her eyes, seized one of her hands, and pressed it fervently between both her own, saying: “How good you are! Indeed, I thank you! He is only a boy, you know, and what must have become of him without you I dare not think!”
“Well, it’s little enough I got from it!” remarked Leaky Peg caustically. “You and him with your breakteeth words! You get up them dancers, you and that moulder alongside you that looks like a toothdrawer! First door on the right: stale-drunk, he is, but he ain’t backt yet!”
With these heartening words she turned on her heel, and strode out of the house, driving before her Quartern Sue, who had had the temerity to venture on to the threshold again. Mr. Scunthorpe made haste to usher Arabella up the stairs, saying reproachfully: “Shouldn’t talk to her, ma’am! Not at all the thing! Assure you!”
