The Old Curiosity Shop
caravan, for at the open door (graced with a bright brass knocker) sat
a Christian lady, stout and comfortable to look upon, who wore a large
bonnet trembling with bows. And that it was not an unprovided or
destitute caravan was clear from this lady’s occupation, which was the
very pleasant and refreshing one of taking tea. The tea-things,
including a bottle of rather suspicious character and a cold knuckle of
ham, were set forth upon a drum, covered with a white napkin; and
there, as if at the most convenient round-table in all the world, sat
this roving lady, taking her tea and enjoying the prospect.
It happened that at that moment the lady of the caravan had her cup
(which, that everything about her might be of a stout and comfortable
kind, was a breakfast cup) to her lips, and that having her eyes lifted
to the sky in her enjoyment of the full flavour of the tea, not
unmingled possibly with just the slightest dash or gleam of something
out of the suspicious bottle--but this is mere speculation and not
distinct matter of history--it happened that being thus agreeably
engaged, she did not see the travellers when they first came up. It
was not until she was in the act of getting down the cup, and drawing a
long breath after the exertion of causing its contents to disappear,
that the lady of the caravan beheld an old man and a young child
walking slowly by, and glancing at her proceedings with eyes of modest
but hungry admiration.
‘Hey!’ cried the lady of the caravan, scooping the crumbs out of her
lap and swallowing the same before wiping her lips. ‘Yes, to be
sure--Who won the Helter-Skelter Plate, child?’
‘Won what, ma’am?’ asked Nell.
‘The Helter-Skelter Plate at the races, child--the plate that was run
for on the second day.’
‘On the second day, ma’am?’
‘Second day! Yes, second day,’ repeated the lady with an air of
impatience. ‘Can’t you say who won the Helter-Skelter Plate when
you’re asked the question civilly?’
‘I don’t know, ma’am.’
‘Don’t know!’ repeated the lady of the caravan; ‘why, you were there.
I saw you with my own eyes.’
Nell was not a little alarmed to hear this, supposing that the lady
might be intimately acquainted with the firm of Short and Codlin; but
what followed tended to reassure her.
‘And very sorry I was,’ said the lady of the caravan, ‘to see you in
company with a Punch; a low, practical, wulgar wretch, that people
should scorn to look at.’
‘I was not there by choice,’ returned the child; ‘we didn’t know our
way, and the two men were very kind to us, and let us travel with them.
Do you--do you know them, ma’am?’
‘Know ‘em, child!’ cried the lady of the caravan in a sort of shriek.
‘Know them! But you’re young and inexperienced, and that’s your excuse
for asking sich a question. Do I look as if I know’d ‘em, does the
caravan look as if it know’d ‘em?’
‘No, ma’am, no,’ said the child, fearing she had committed some
grievous fault. ‘I beg your pardon.’
It was granted immediately, though the lady still appeared much ruffled
and discomposed by the degrading supposition. The child then explained
that they had left the races on the first day, and were travelling to
the next town on that road, where they purposed to spend the night. As
the countenance of the stout lady began to clear up, she ventured to
inquire how far it was. The reply--which the stout lady did not come
to, until she had thoroughly explained that she went to the races on
the first day in a gig, and as an expedition of pleasure, and that her
presence there had no connexion with any matters of business or
profit--was, that the town was eight miles off.
This discouraging information a little dashed the child, who could
scarcely repress a tear as she glanced along the darkening road. Her
grandfather made no complaint, but he sighed heavily as he leaned upon
his staff, and vainly tried to pierce the dusty distance.
The lady of the caravan was in the act of gathering her tea equipage
together preparatory to clearing the table, but noting the child’s
anxious manner she hesitated and stopped. The child curtseyed, thanked
her for her information, and giving her hand to the old man had already
got some fifty yards or so away, when the lady of the caravan called to
her to return.
‘Come nearer, nearer still,’ said she, beckoning to her to ascend the
steps. ‘Are you hungry, child?’
‘Not very, but we are tired, and it’s--it IS a long way.’
‘Well, hungry or not, you had better have some tea,’ rejoined her new
acquaintance. ‘I suppose you are agreeable to that, old gentleman?’
The grandfather humbly pulled off his hat and thanked her. The lady of
the caravan then bade him come up the steps likewise, but the drum
proving an inconvenient table for two, they descended again, and sat
upon the grass, where she handed down to them the tea-tray, the bread
and butter, the knuckle of ham, and in short everything of which she
had partaken herself, except the bottle which she had already embraced
an opportunity of slipping into her pocket.
‘Set ‘em out near the hind wheels, child, that’s the best place,’ said
their friend, superintending the arrangements from above. ‘Now hand up
the teapot for a little more hot water, and a pinch of fresh tea, and
then both of you eat and drink as much as you can, and don’t spare
anything; that’s all I ask of you.’
They might perhaps have carried out the lady’s wish, if it had been
less freely expressed, or even if it had not been expressed at all.
But as this direction relieved them from any shadow of delicacy or
uneasiness, they made a hearty meal and enjoyed it to the utmost.
While they were thus engaged, the lady of the caravan alighted on the
earth, and with her hands clasped behind her, and her large bonnet
trembling excessively, walked up and down in a measured tread and very
stately manner, surveying the caravan from time to time with an air of
calm delight, and deriving particular gratification from the red panels
and the brass knocker. When she had taken this gentle exercise for
some time, she sat down upon the steps and called ‘George’; whereupon a
man in a carter’s frock, who had been so shrouded in a hedge up to this
time as to see everything that passed without being seen himself,
parted the twigs that concealed him, and appeared in a sitting
attitude, supporting on his legs a baking-dish and a half-gallon stone
bottle, and bearing in his right hand a knife, and in his left a fork.
‘Yes, Missus,’ said George.
‘How did you find the cold pie, George?’
‘It warn’t amiss, mum.’
‘And the beer,’ said the lady of the caravan, with an appearance of
being more interested in this question than the last; ‘is it passable,
George?’
‘It’s more flatterer than it might be,’ George returned, ‘but it an’t
so bad for all that.’
To set the mind of his mistress at rest, he took a sip (amounting in
quantity to a pint or thereabouts) from the stone bottle, and then
smacked his lips, winked his eye, and nodded his head. No doubt with
the same amiable desire, he immediately resumed his knife and fork, as
a practical assurance that the beer had wrought no bad effect upon his
appetite.
The lady of the caravan looked on approvingly for some time, and then
said,
‘Have you nearly finished?’
‘Wery nigh, mum.’ And indeed, after scraping the dish all round with
his knife and carrying the choice brown morsels to his mouth, and after
taking such a scientific pull at the stone bottle that, by degrees
almost imperceptible to the sight, his head went further and further
back until he lay nearly at his full length upon the ground, this
gentleman declared himself quite disengaged, and came forth from his
retreat.
‘I hope I haven’t hurried you, George,’ said his mistress, who appeared
to have a great sympathy with his late pursuit.
‘If you have,’ returned the follower, wisely reserving himself for any
favourable contingency that might occur, ‘we must make up for it next
time, that’s all.’
‘We are not a heavy load, George?’
‘That’s always what the ladies say,’ replied the man, looking a long
way round, as if he were appealing to Nature in general against such
monstrous propositions. ‘If you see a woman a driving, you’ll always
perceive that she never will keep her whip still; the horse can’t go
fast enough for her. If cattle have got their proper load, you never
can persuade a woman that they’ll not bear something more. What is the
cause of this here?’
‘Would these two travellers make much difference to the horses, if we
took them with us?’ asked his mistress, offering no reply to the
philosophical inquiry, and pointing to Nell and the old man, who were
painfully preparing to resume their journey on foot.
‘They’d make a difference in course,’ said George doggedly.
‘Would they make much difference?’ repeated his mistress. ‘They can’t
be very heavy.’
‘The weight o’ the pair, mum,’ said George, eyeing them with the look
of a man who was calculating within half an ounce or so, ‘would be a
trifle under that of Oliver Cromwell.’
Nell was very much surprised that the man should be so accurately
acquainted with the weight of one whom she had read of in books as
having lived considerably before their time, but speedily forgot the
subject in the joy of hearing that they were to go forward in the
caravan, for which she thanked its lady with unaffected earnestness.
She helped with great readiness and alacrity to put away the tea-things
and other matters that were lying about, and, the horses being by that
time harnessed, mounted into the vehicle, followed by her delighted
grandfather. Their patroness then shut the door and sat herself down
by her drum at an open window; and, the steps being struck by George
and stowed under the carriage, away they went, with a great noise of
flapping and creaking and straining, and the bright brass knocker,
which nobody ever knocked at, knocking one perpetual double knock of
its own accord as they jolted heavily along.
CHAPTER 27
When they had travelled slowly forward for some short distance, Nell
ventured to steal a look round the caravan and observe it more closely.
One half of it--that moiety in which the comfortable proprietress was
then seated--was carpeted, and so partitioned off at the further end as
to accommodate a sleeping-place, constructed after the fashion of a
berth on board ship, which was shaded, like the little windows, with
fair white curtains, and looked comfortable enough, though by what kind
of gymnastic exercise the lady of the caravan ever contrived to get
into it, was an unfathomable mystery. The other half served for a
kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove whose small chimney passed
through the roof. It held also a closet or larder, several chests, a
great pitcher of water, and a few cooking-utensils and articles of
crockery. These latter necessaries hung upon the walls, which, in that
portion of the establishment devoted to the lady of the caravan, were
ornamented with such gayer and lighter decorations as a triangle and a
couple of well-thumbed tambourines.
The lady of the caravan sat at one window in all the pride and poetry
of the musical instruments, and little Nell and her grandfather sat at
the other in all the humility of the kettle and saucepans, while the
machine jogged on and shifted the darkening prospect very slowly. At
first the two travellers spoke little, and only in whispers, but as
they grew more familiar with the place they ventured to converse with
greater freedom, and talked about the country through which they were
passing, and the different objects that presented themselves, until the
old man fell asleep; which the lady of the caravan observing, invited
Nell to come and sit beside her.