The Old Curiosity Shop
confided her to his son Sampson as an invaluable auxiliary; and from
the old gentleman’s decease to the period of which we treat, Miss Sally
Brass had been the prop and pillar of his business.
It is obvious that, having devoted herself from infancy to this one
pursuit and study, Miss Brass could know but little of the world,
otherwise than in connection with the law; and that from a lady gifted
with such high tastes, proficiency in those gentler and softer arts in
which women usually excel, was scarcely to be looked for. Miss Sally’s
accomplishments were all of a masculine and strictly legal kind. They
began with the practice of an attorney and they ended with it. She was
in a state of lawful innocence, so to speak. The law had been her
nurse. And, as bandy-legs or such physical deformities in children are
held to be the consequence of bad nursing, so, if in a mind so
beautiful any moral twist or handiness could be found, Miss Sally
Brass’s nurse was alone to blame.
It was upon this lady, then, that Mr Swiveller burst in full freshness as
something new and hitherto undreamed of, lighting up the office with
scraps of song and merriment, conjuring with inkstands and boxes of
wafers, catching three oranges in one hand, balancing stools upon his
chin and penknives on his nose, and constantly performing a hundred
other feats with equal ingenuity; for with such unbendings did Richard,
in Mr Brass’s absence, relieve the tedium of his confinement. These
social qualities, which Miss Sally first discovered by accident,
gradually made such an impression upon her, that she would entreat Mr
Swiveller to relax as though she were not by, which Mr Swiveller,
nothing loth, would readily consent to do. By these means a friendship
sprung up between them. Mr Swiveller gradually came to look upon her
as her brother Sampson did, and as he would have looked upon any other
clerk. He imparted to her the mystery of going the odd man or plain
Newmarket for fruit, ginger-beer, baked potatoes, or even a modest
quencher, of which Miss Brass did not scruple to partake. He would
often persuade her to undertake his share of writing in addition to her
own; nay, he would sometimes reward her with a hearty slap on the back,
and protest that she was a devilish good fellow, a jolly dog, and so
forth; all of which compliments Miss Sally would receive in entire good
part and with perfect satisfaction.
One circumstance troubled Mr Swiveller’s mind very much, and that was
that the small servant always remained somewhere in the bowels of the
earth under Bevis Marks, and never came to the surface unless the
single gentleman rang his bell, when she would answer it and
immediately disappear again. She never went out, or came into the
office, or had a clean face, or took off the coarse apron, or looked
out of any one of the windows, or stood at the street-door for a breath
of air, or had any rest or enjoyment whatever. Nobody ever came to see
her, nobody spoke of her, nobody cared about her. Mr Brass had said
once, that he believed she was a ‘love-child’ (which means anything but
a child of love), and that was all the information Richard Swiveller
could obtain.
‘It’s of no use asking the dragon,’ thought Dick one day, as he sat
contemplating the features of Miss Sally Brass. ‘I suspect if I asked
any questions on that head, our alliance would be at an end. I wonder
whether she is a dragon by-the-bye, or something in the mermaid way.
She has rather a scaly appearance. But mermaids are fond of looking at
themselves in the glass, which she can’t be. And they have a habit of
combing their hair, which she hasn’t. No, she’s a dragon.’
‘Where are you going, old fellow?’ said Dick aloud, as Miss Sally wiped
her pen as usual on the green dress, and uprose from her seat.
‘To dinner,’ answered the dragon.
‘To dinner!’ thought Dick, ‘that’s another circumstance. I don’t
believe that small servant ever has anything to eat.’
‘Sammy won’t be home,’ said Miss Brass. ‘Stop till I come back. I
sha’n’t be long.’
Dick nodded, and followed Miss Brass--with his eyes to the door, and
with his ears to a little back parlour, where she and her brother took
their meals.
‘Now,’ said Dick, walking up and down with his hands in his pockets,
‘I’d give something--if I had it--to know how they use that child, and
where they keep her. My mother must have been a very inquisitive
woman; I have no doubt I’m marked with a note of interrogation
somewhere. My feelings I smother, but thou hast been the cause of this
anguish, my--upon my word,’ said Mr Swiveller, checking himself and
falling thoughtfully into the client’s chair, ‘I should like to know
how they use her!’
After running on, in this way, for some time, Mr Swiveller softly
opened the office door, with the intention of darting across the street
for a glass of the mild porter. At that moment he caught a parting
glimpse of the brown head-dress of Miss Brass flitting down the kitchen
stairs. ‘And by Jove!’ thought Dick, ‘she’s going to feed the small
servant. Now or never!’
First peeping over the handrail and allowing the head-dress to
disappear in the darkness below, he groped his way down, and arrived at
the door of a back kitchen immediately after Miss Brass had entered the
same, bearing in her hand a cold leg of mutton. It was a very dark
miserable place, very low and very damp: the walls disfigured by a
thousand rents and blotches. The water was trickling out of a leaky
butt, and a most wretched cat was lapping up the drops with the sickly
eagerness of starvation. The grate, which was a wide one, was wound
and screwed up tight, so as to hold no more than a little thin sandwich
of fire. Everything was locked up; the coal-cellar, the candle-box,
the salt-box, the meat-safe, were all padlocked. There was nothing
that a beetle could have lunched upon. The pinched and meagre aspect
of the place would have killed a chameleon. He would have known, at
the first mouthful, that the air was not eatable, and must have given up
the ghost in despair. The small servant stood with humility in presence
of Miss Sally, and hung her head.
‘Are you there?’ said Miss Sally.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ was the answer in a weak voice.
‘Go further away from the leg of mutton, or you’ll be picking it, I
know,’ said Miss Sally.
The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took a key from her
pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary waste of cold
potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she placed before the
small servant, ordering her to sit down before it, and then, taking up
a great carving-knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it upon the
carving-fork.
‘Do you see this?’ said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square inches
of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it out on the
point of the fork.
The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see
every shred of it, small as it was, and answered, ‘yes.’
‘Then don’t you ever go and say,’ retorted Miss Sally, ‘that you hadn’t
meat here. There, eat it up.’
This was soon done. ‘Now, do you want any more?’ said Miss Sally.
The hungry creature answered with a faint ‘No.’ They were evidently
going through an established form.
‘You’ve been helped once to meat,’ said Miss Brass, summing up the
facts; ‘you have had as much as you can eat, you’re asked if you want
any more, and you answer, ‘no!’ Then don’t you ever go and say you were
allowanced, mind that.’
With those words, Miss Sally put the meat away and locked the safe, and
then drawing near to the small servant, overlooked her while she
finished the potatoes.
It was plain that some extraordinary grudge was working in Miss Brass’s
gentle breast, and that it was that which impelled her, without the
smallest present cause, to rap the child with the blade of the knife,
now on her hand, now on her head, and now on her back, as if she found
it quite impossible to stand so close to her without administering a
few slight knocks. But Mr Swiveller was not a little surprised to see
his fellow-clerk, after walking slowly backwards towards the door, as
if she were trying to withdraw herself from the room but could not
accomplish it, dart suddenly forward, and falling on the small servant
give her some hard blows with her clenched hand. The victim cried, but
in a subdued manner as if she feared to raise her voice, and Miss
Sally, comforting herself with a pinch of snuff, ascended the stairs,
just as Richard had safely reached the office.
CHAPTER 37
The single gentleman among his other peculiarities--and he had a very
plentiful stock, of which he every day furnished some new
specimen--took a most extraordinary and remarkable interest in the
exhibition of Punch. If the sound of a Punch’s voice, at ever so
remote a distance, reached Bevis Marks, the single gentleman, though in
bed and asleep, would start up, and, hurrying on his clothes, make for
the spot with all speed, and presently return at the head of a long
procession of idlers, having in the midst the theatre and its
proprietors. Straightway, the stage would be set up in front of Mr
Brass’s house; the single gentleman would establish himself at the
first floor window; and the entertainment would proceed, with all its
exciting accompaniments of fife and drum and shout, to the excessive
consternation of all sober votaries of business in that silent
thoroughfare. It might have been expected that when the play was done,
both players and audience would have dispersed; but the epilogue was as
bad as the play, for no sooner was the Devil dead, than the manager of
the puppets and his partner were summoned by the single gentleman to
his chamber, where they were regaled with strong waters from his
private store, and where they held with him long conversations, the
purport of which no human being could fathom. But the secret of these
discussions was of little importance. It was sufficient to know that
while they were proceeding, the concourse without still lingered round
the house; that boys beat upon the drum with their fists, and imitated
Punch with their tender voices; that the office-window was rendered
opaque by flattened noses, and the key-hole of the street-door luminous
with eyes; that every time the single gentleman or either of his guests
was seen at the upper window, or so much as the end of one of their
noses was visible, there was a great shout of execration from the
excluded mob, who remained howling and yelling, and refusing
consolation, until the exhibitors were delivered up to them to be
attended elsewhere. It was sufficient, in short, to know that Bevis
Marks was revolutionised by these popular movements, and that peace and
quietness fled from its precincts.
Nobody was rendered more indignant by these proceedings than Mr Sampson
Brass, who, as he could by no means afford to lose so profitable an
inmate, deemed it prudent to pocket his lodger’s affront along with his
cash, and to annoy the audiences who clustered round his door by such
imperfect means of retaliation as were open to him, and which were
confined to the trickling down of foul water on their heads from unseen
watering pots, pelting them with fragments of tile and mortar from the
roof of the house, and bribing the drivers of hackney cabriolets to
come suddenly round the corner and dash in among them precipitately.
It may, at first sight, be matter of surprise to the thoughtless few
that Mr Brass, being a professional gentleman, should not have legally
indicted some party or parties, active in the promotion of the
nuisance, but they will be good enough to remember, that as Doctors
seldom take their own prescriptions, and Divines do not always practise