CHAPTER XV.
The “Yorkshire House.”—Its company.—And an adventure.
IN the course of some subsequent conversation, Colin's friend the coachman ascertained that his “green” passenger came from some place in the county of York, and instantaneously concluded, by a peculiar process of reasoning, that our hero ought of necessity to put up at a “Yorkshire House.” He forthwith recommended him to a tavern of some notoriety in the city, backing his recommendation with the assurance that, as he was but raw in London, it would be better for him to be amongst his own countrymen.
In the “Yorkshire House,” then, we will suppose him. His first business, after having refreshed himself, was to call for ink and paper, and indite an epistle to Squire Lupton, giving him not only an explicit statement of the cause of his precipitate retreat from Bram-leigh, and his consequent inability to attend at the Hall on the appointed day, but also detailing the horrible scene of the lawyer's confession respecting the situation of James Woodruff, which had led to his recent attempt, and compelled that retreat. This being done, and duly despatched, he hastily prepared himself, fevered and confused in brain as he was by the long night-journey, to take a turn in the streets. He longed, as every stranger does who first enters this mighty city, to wander among its endless maze of houses, and witness the vastness of its resources. He passed down one of the by-streets into Cheapside; wondered at the numbers of caravans and carts, the coaches and cabs, which blocked themselves to a temporary stand-still in the streets branching from either side; marvelled what all the vehicles that shot along could be employed for; where the contrary and cross currents of human beings could all possibly be setting in; or how the enormous evidences of almost inconceivable wealth, displayed on all sides, could ever have been thus accumulated. As he ruminated, the crowd every now and then half spun him round, now one way, now another, in the endeavour to pass or to outstrip him. Some belated clerk, hurrying to his duty, put a forcible but inoffensive hand upon his shoulder, and pushed him aside; the butcher's boy (and butchers' boys are always in a hurry) perhaps poked the projecting corner of his wooden tray or the shank of a leg of mutton into his ear; the baker drove a loaf into his ribs; the porter knocked his hat off with a box on his knot, accompanying the action with the polite expression of “By your leave;” the merchant pushed it into the gutter in order to avoid treading upon it, and the policeman, standing by the lamp-post, smiled as sedately as a wooden doll, whose lower jaw is pulled down with a string, and, when advice was useless, kindly told him to “take care of his hat.”
By the time he had passed through Fleet Street, and had returned along Oxford Street and Holborn, his head was in a whirl. In the course of a few short hours his senses had received more numerous and striking impressions than had been made upon them probably during the whole course of his previous life. London seemed to him a Babel, and himself one of those who were lost utterly in the confusion of tongues,—tongues not of men merely, but of iron and adamant, rattling together their horrible jargon, until his ears sounded and reverberated like two shells beside his head, and his brain became bewildered as if with (that which he had happily never yet experienced) a night's excess.
About seven o'clock in the evening he returned to his inn. Having placed himself quietly in a retired corner of the parlour of the “Yorkshire House,” and immediately beneath a sloping skylight extending the whole breadth of the room,—a position which very strongly suggested the idea that he was sitting under a cucumber frame,—Colin amused himself by making silent remarks upon the scene before him. Sundry very miscellaneous-looking personages formed the principal figures of the picture, and were relieved by numerous accessaries of mutton-chops, biscuits, broiled kidneys, pints of stout, and glasses of gin-punch; the whole being enveloped in an atmosphere of such dense smoke, as gave a very shadowy and mysterious character to every object seen through it.
“There's a fly on your nose, Mr. Prince,” remarked a lean hungry-looking fellow; “a blue-bottle, sir, just on the end there.”
The individual thus addressed was a sinister-looking man, who, it afterwards appeared was a native of Leeds, in which he had formerly carried on business, and contrived to scrape together a large fortune. In mercantile phraseology, he was a “thirty thousand pound man” and, though an ignorant and surly fellow, on account of his property he was looked up to by everybody as ignorant as himself. On hearing his friend Hobson's remark, Mr. Prince suddenly seized the end of his own nose, and grasped it in his hand, as he was in the regular habit of doing whenever the fly was mentioned, while with a very shallow assumption of facetiousness he replied, “Then I 've got him to-night, by Go'!”
Every individual in the company who knew his business properly now forced a laugh at the great man's witty method of doing things, while Hobson replied, “I think not, Mr. Prince. He's too 'fly' for you again.”
“Look in your hand, Mr. Prince,” suggested a thick-headed fellow from the East-Riding, not unlike a bullock in top-boots. Mr. Prince thanked him for the hint; but declined adopting it, on the score that if he opened his hand he should lose him.
“Put him in Hobson's glass,” said another.
“Well,” replied Hobson, “as we all know Mr. Prince is very poor, I 'll give him sixpence if he will.”
This hint at Mr. Prince's poverty was exceedingly relished both by the Prince himself and all the toadeaters about him. Its ingenuity seemed to delight them, as did also the reply made by the great man himself. “I doubt whether you ever had a sixpence to spare in your life.”
Another mechanical laugh was here put in at Hobson's expense, which that gentleman not relishing quite so well as he would have done had the insinuation been made at the expense of any other person, he repelled it by challenging Mr. Prince to produce, there and then, as many sovereigns upon the table as any other man in the company. This touched Mr. Prince in a delicate place, and he growled out with a horrible oath, that he could buy Hobson and all his family up with only the simple interest of his capital. At the same time he put his hand in his breeches-pocket, and drew forth a broad-bellied greasy black pocket-book, which he slapped heavily on the table, as he swore there was more money in it than Hobson had ever even so much as seen together before. Hobson flatly denied it, and offered to bet glasses round that it did not contain twenty pounds more than his own.
“Done!” roared Mr. Prince, as his clenched fist fell on the table, with a weight which made all the pipes and glasses upon it dance a momentary hornpipe. A comparison of pocket-books was immediately instituted. Mr. Prince's was declared to contain one hundred and seventy bank-notes more than Hobson's, and Hobson was called upon for the grog. This being more than he expected, he endeavoured to evade the bet altogether, by insinuating that he should not believe Mr. Prince's notes were good, unless he looked at them himself. Several voices cried together “No, no!” and the rest vented their opinions in loud exclamations of “Shame, shame!—Too bad!” and the like.
Mr. Prince felt the indignity offered to his pocket-book most keenly. He looked unutterable things at Hobson, and bellowed loud enough to have been heard as far as Lad Lane, that he would not trust a single farthing of his money in the hands of such a needy, starving, penniless bankrupt as he was. Many of those present felt that this language was not exactly warrantable; but there were no cries of shame in favour of Mr. Hobson.
At this interesting period of the discussion, Colin's eyes chanced to be fixed very earnestly on the countenance of Mr. Prince, which that gentleman remarking, he forthwith turned suddenly on the young man with this abrupt demand:—
“What are you staring at, eh? Did you never see a man's face before.”
“Yes,” very quietly replied Colin; “I have seen many men's faces before.”
“What do you mean by that, eh?” cried Prince. “What does he mean?” addressing the company. “Come, come, young man, I 'll soon teach you how to know your betters.” And he strode towards Colin, with the apparent intention of practically illustrating the system he maintained. The latter instantly rose on his feet to meet him. All eyes were now turned towards these two, while the squabble with Hobson appeared for the time to be wholly forgotten.
“Beg my pardon, sir!” bellowed Prince.
“I shall beg no man's pardon whom I have neither injured nor insulted,” coolly answered Colin.
“I say, beg my pardon, sir!” repeated Prince. “Do you mean to take the law of me if I strike you? Say no, and I 'll knock you down.”
“No!” replied Colin, “I shall appeal to no law except that of my own force. If you strike me, I shall probably strike you again, old as you are.”
Smash went Mr. Prince's fist at Colin's face; but the latter parried the blow adroitly, and by a cool “counter” succeeded in pressing Mr. Prince's nose very much closer to his face than nature herself had intended it to be. Cries of “Shame!” again arose against Colin, and some attempts were made to seize and turn him out. These, however, were prevented by other portions of the company, who exclaimed loudly in favour of fair play, and against any interference. In the mean time Mr. Prince grew furious, and raised his stick to strike Colin with the determination of a butcher about to knock a bull on the head. The youth again parried the intended blow, and turned the weapon aside by receiving it in a slanting direction on his right arm. In order to close with him on the opposite side, Prince now jumped on the table; but this manouvre the young man avoided, and at the same instant a shower of broken glass fell upon him. Colin's enraged assailant's stick had gone through the lid of the “city cucumber-frame,” and some half dozen fractured squares attested his powers of mischief. A loud laugh echoed from every part of the room, which put Mr. Prince in a perfect whirlwind of passion. He plunged at his young opponent as though he meditated crushing him by the mere weight of his body; but as the coolness of the latter enabled him to take advantage of the slightest circumstance in his favour, he slipped aside at the critical moment, and his antagonist's head went with the power of a paviour's rammer against the wall. This terminated the fight. Mr. Prince lay on the floor, and groaned with pain and vexation, until he was picked up, and placed, almost as inanimate as a sack of potatoes, in his chair.
In an instant afterwards a gentleman, dressed in a dark-blue great-coat, and who, as Colin thought, was so very rich in that particular article of clothing as to lay himself under the necessity of having them numbered on the collar, made his appearance in the room; and at the instance of the landlord stepped forwards, and collared our hero, with the intention of conveying him to the station-house. Against this proceeding several friendly individuals protested, and joined vehemently in the opinions expressed by a stout young Welshman, who sat with a pipe in his mouth, that “Py cot! it was too bad to meddle with him instead of the old one.” This timely interference saved Colin for the present, and the policeman was obliged to retire.
Deeply fatigued as our hero was from previous want of rest, he early retired to his apartment, and soon fell into a slumber of many hours' duration. On rising in the morning, what was his astonishment to find a roll of paper like bank-notes lying near him, for the presence of which he knew not how to account?
After some hesitation he dressed, and rang for the servant.
“That roll of paper,” said he, when she appeared, “lay on my chair when I woke. It was not there last night, and it does not belong to me. How it came there I know not. The papers appear to be bank-notes. You had better take them to your master, and inquire whether any person in the house has lost them.”
The girl looked surprised; but took them up, and followed his advice.
Very soon after Colin heard a hue and cry raised below-stairs; and after a few minutes, a rush of people towards his room.
“Is this him?” demanded a man, with a belt round his body, and a glazed rim on the edge of his hat-crown.
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“That's him!” replied the servant-girl. “He gave them to me.”
“Come, young man, I want you,” said the policeman, seizing Colin roughly. “Come along with me.” And, in spite of all his entreaties and protestations, he was harried away. It appeared that Mr. Prince, who occupied a room on the same floor as his young antagonist, had identified the notes as his own, and declared that Colin must have robbed him.
After the lapse of a very short period, Colin stood before the grave magisterial authorities sitting at Guildhall, with Mr. Prince as his accuser. The charge having been heard, Colin replied to it with all the fearlessness, determination, and indignation, which the consciousness of innocence is sure to inspire. He related the occurrences of the previous evening, and concluded by expressing his firm belief that the money had been placed upon his chair in order to bring him into trouble. When searched, ten sovereigns and some silver had been found upon him. He was asked to account for the possession of so much money? To this question he flatly refused to answer, as well as those bearing upon his own character and employment; who he was; where he came from; and what place he had left when he arrived at the Yorkshire House.
In this dilemma an idea struck the subtle brain of Mr. Prince. He felt now perfectly secure of his victim. He owned the sovereigns also, and declared they were part of the money which had been abstracted during the night from his pocket-book. Here, however, he overstepped the mark. Colin instantly requested that the landlord of the inn might be called to witness that the money was in his possession at the time he arrived there, and many hours before it could even be pretended that he saw the individual who now stood forwards as his accuser. To this fact the landlord honestly bore testimony,—a piece of evidence which caused the face of Colin's accuser to assume the tint of a thundercloud with the sunshine on it—he looked black and white at the same time. Boots also declared that on going up-stairs to leave the gentlemen's boots at their doors, he saw some person come out of the young man's room, who certainly bore very little resemblance to the occupant of that room himself. After some further investigation Mr. Prince was accommodated with a reprimand from the bench, and the case was dismissed.