“Ah,” replied Peace, “I know my own business best; money’s no object to me, for I like things well done, whatever it costs.”
He had a peculiar light which enabled him to show varying colours in rapid succession, and the effect was to dazzle and bewilder the person in whose face it was flashed. He guarded the lamp very carefully.
Mr. Knight, the neighbour who served him with milk, said they were a remarkable lot for playing early in the morning. Frequently when he went out with the milk in the morning he would find Peace playing on the fiddle, and the lad of seventeen, Willie Ward, strumming on the guitar. “And capital music it was too,” he added; “sometimes sacred, but they played all sorts as well—operatic and dance music.”
Occasionally the boy had the violin and Peace the guitar, and they would go at it for hours, getting a name for the eccentricity which they took pains to encourage on all sides.
Very rarely when Peace was at home was the sound of music unheard, and Mrs. Thompson could do her part on the harmonium. “The old gentleman” was fond of the harmonium; he preferred it to the piano for sacred music.
“There was a fulness and depth about the notes,” he said, “which gave the peculiar solemnity he liked in the rendering of sacred music.”
There is a tradition that Peace was once induced to go to some Methodist chapel, but we think that this story must be relegated to the region of fiction. Nobody at Peckham believed it, and the gentleman who was said to have taken him denied that he ever did anything of the kind. Peace on the Sunday had always a little chapel of his own, in which the service was exclusively musical.
He read the daily papers with great diligence, yet music had greater charms to soothe his savage breast, so that when he was wrapt up in his harmonies, the papers lay unregarded on the doorstep; and sometimes when the pair of Peaces fiddled and guitared, the milkman, who was not so enamoured of the melodious art, perused the papers to see if they were worth a penny.
Mr. Knight usually delivered the milk at Mr. Thompson’s house himself. He gave rather a different account of the appearance of the habitation in the morning from that given by the other neighbours, who were privileged to drop in to tea in the evening. He said that things were very higgledy-piggledy. All the kitchen utensils seemed to be in a mess. One morning he particularly remembered seeing all the tea and supper things in the fire-place within the fender, and on the rug in front of the fire was Mrs. Thompson lying full length, with a cushion for a pillow. She had evidently lain there all night; Thompson himself was then “up.” Perhaps he had been at an unusual distance that morning. “The family,” he said, seemed to live well. They wanted for nothing, but they appeared to have it in a rough and ready fashion. That was his idea of how they lived when they had no visitors, but Mr. S. Smith, of Ryde-villas, who let them the house, declared that at Peace’s little tea parties “everything was up to the knocker.” Peace’s life in the Evelina-road is perhaps the most remarkable period in his whole career; and as far as his lawless depredations are concerned, appears to be almost incredible. But we must not let this little sketch break the continuity of our story.
A few days after Mrs. Bourne’s visit to our hero, Bandy-legged Bill put in an appearance. After his escape from the doctor’s house he had, as already mentioned, been playing at hide and seek. It was Bourne himself who had aroused the detectives and sought thereby to bring the unfortunate gipsy under the ban of the law, but despite the vigilance of Mr. Wrench, Bill had succeeded in keeping out of harm’s way. To explain how this was done would be only a waste of space, which we hope to occupy with more important and interesting details.