The Old Curiosity Shop

Chapter 36

As the single gentleman after some weeks' occupation of his
lodgings, still declined to correspond, by word or gesture, either
with Mr Brass or his sister Sally, but invariably chose Richard
Swiveller as his channel of communication; and as he proved himself
in all respects a highly desirable inmate, paying for everything
beforehand, giving very little trouble, making no noise, and
keeping early hours; Mr Richard imperceptibly rose to an important
position in the family, as one who had influence over this
mysterious lodger, and could negotiate with him, for good or evil,
when nobody else durst approach his person.

If the truth must be told, even Mr Swiveller's approaches to the
single gentleman were of a very distant kind, and met with small
encouragement; but, as he never returned from a monosyllabic
conference with the unknown, without quoting such expressions as
'Swiveller, I know I can rely upon you,'--'I have no hesitation in
saying, Swiveller, that I entertain a regard for you,'--'Swiveller,
you are my friend, and will stand by me I am sure,' with many other
short speeches of the same familiar and confiding kind, purporting
to have been addressed by the single gentleman to himself, and to
form the staple of their ordinary discourse, neither Mr Brass nor
Miss Sally for a moment questioned the extent of his influence, but
accorded to him their fullest and most unqualified belief.
But quite apart from, and independent of, this source of
popularity, Mr Swiveller had another, which promised to be equally
enduring, and to lighten his position considerably.

He found favour in the eyes of Miss Sally Brass. Let not the light
scorners of female fascination erect their ears to listen to a new
tale of love which shall serve them for a jest; for Miss Brass,
however accurately formed to be beloved, was not of the loving
kind. That amiable virgin, having clung to the skirts of the Law
from her earliest youth; having sustained herself by their aid, as
it were, in her first running alone, and maintained a firm grasp
upon them ever since; had passed her life in a kind of legal
childhood. She had been remarkable, when a tender prattler for an
uncommon talent in counterfeiting the walk and manner of a bailiff:
in which character she had learned to tap her little playfellows on
the shoulder, and to carry them off to imaginary sponging-houses,
with a correctness of imitation which was the surprise and delight
of all who witnessed her performances, and which was only to be
exceeded by her exquisite manner of putting an execution into her
doll's house, and taking an exact inventory of the chairs and
tables. These artless sports had naturally soothed and cheered the
decline of her widowed father: a most exemplary gentleman (called
'old Foxey' by his friends from his extreme sagacity,) who
encouraged them to the utmost, and whose chief regret, on finding
that he drew near to Houndsditch churchyard, was, that his daughter
could not take out an attorney's certificate and hold a place upon
the roll. Filled with this affectionate and touching sorrow, he
had solemnly 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 on 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.