But Rachel gently shook her head, and we diverged to other subjects.
Robert Truefit and I met by appointment, and walked together to Jimmy Virtue's leaving-shop. Jimmy Virtue was in his parlour, and upon our entrance he hastily gathered up an old pack of cards, with which he had been playing. The deal table was bare of cloth, and was smeared over with chalk figures representing many thousands of pounds.
'Hallo!' exclaimed Jimmy Virtue; 'there you are! I've been 'avin' a game of All-fours with Jack.'
I looked around for Jack, but saw no signs of him. There was but one tallow-candle burning in the room, and that was stuck in a ginger-beer bottle and was guttering down.
'I'll be with you in a minute,' said Jimmy Virtue; 'I've got a bundle to tie up in the shop.'
'This is a miserable place to live in,' I said to Robert Truefit when Jimmy Virtue had left the room. 'Who is Jack?'
'A shadow,' replied Robert Truefit; 'a shadow of Jimmy's creation, with whom he plays at cards in his loneliness, and cheats out of fabulous sums--money, Jack, and all being things of air. Look at the chalk-score on the table; Jimmy has won more than three thousand pounds of Jack. Is not truth stranger than fiction, Mr. Meadow? Jack sits there.'
Robert Truefit pointed to a chest upon which the imaginary Jack was supposed to sit while he was being robbed. So dimly-lighted was the room that I could easily have fancied a shadow was really sitting on the chest, gazing with lack-lustre eyes upon another shadow in Jimmy Virtue's chair, where Jimmy Virtue was not. A mournful picture of a desolate life, I thought.
Jimmy Virtue appeared to have forgotten us, for Robert Truefit and I had been ten minutes together, and were not disturbed.
'Is he attending to customers?' I asked.