第116章

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 Iasked 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.