In this phase of it, after the first, there were no compensations, but only degrees of misery. If my master had ever thought to make capital out of my restoration, he soon abandoned the idea as impracticable, and devoted all his persuasion to turning me, after the inhuman methods of his class, to his best profit. Once I stuck tight in one of those clogged “draw-in bends” which had been fatal to my predecessor. I could move no way, and in my struggles, a little crossed stay of iron, fixed in the chimney, so pressed upon my breast as almost to stop my heart. I was in a dreadful condition of terror and suffering, and in the midst he lit some damp straw on the hearth to smoke me down. The fumes took away my senses, and so, perhaps flattening the resistance of my lungs, released me. But I was in a sort of conscious delirium for days afterwards. Sometimes, where he had got the worst of a housewife’s bargaining, he would shout to me, working two-thirds up, “Pike the lew, boy!” which, in sweep’s jargon, meant, Leave the job unfinished, to spite the old slut! And then I would descend at once. Sometimes, where a cluster of flues ran into one shaft, I would come down into the wrong room, causing consternation amongst its inmates. But, through all, the idea of escape was very early a dead passion in me, so utterly in soot and sexlessness was I lost to any sense of self-identity.
So, always homeless, always enslaved, always wandering, I was one day, some nine months after my abduction, come with my master into the neighbourhood of Streatham, which is a little rural suburb of London, reclaimed, with other contiguous hamlets, from the thick woods and gipsy-haunted commons of that part of the country. For some days past we had moved, unhurriedly as was our wont, through an atmosphere charged with a curious nervous excitement. Housewives, avoiding contact with us, as with possibly compromising emissaries of ill-omen, had vanished into their cottages as we came near; tavern cronies, grouped at tap-doors, were to be seen looking citywards, until dark, tramping up the long white roads, drove them within with unreasonable frights of shapeless things approaching. Then, sure enough, the night horizon grew patched with flaring cressets, and we learned that London was in the hands of a No-Popery mob.
Its area of destruction spreading like an unchecked ink-blot, and we moving to meet it, brought us presently involved in the fringe of the disorder. Protestant Dulwich had sent its contingent to help petition Parliament against the legalising of the poor harried Catholics, and had got its warrant, as it chose to consider, for an anti-Romish crusade. And for that, whether right or wrong, I, at least, owe it gratitude.
We were rolling one afternoon along a certain Knight’s Hill or road which skirted a stretch of common, when we came upon a great inn, called The Horns, where was a considerable concourse of people assembled, all in blue cockades, and buzzing like a hive about to swarm. The word most in the mouths of this draff was Pope, which at first we took to mean the Vicar of Rome, but soon understood for the name of a young Jesuit who was lately come as chaplain to a Catholic family of the neighbourhood. Now, such insolent defiance of the penal laws was not to be tolerated, and so the loyal Protestant burghers of Dulwich were going, with no disrespect to the family, to cast down its graven images, and hang up its chaplain for a scarecrow to all propagandists who should venture out of the Holy See into our tight little island. And here they were gathered to organise themselves, the process taking good account of malt liquors; and hence, when they moved off, we, to cut the story short, accompanied them walking, foreseeing some prospect of “swag” in the crusade.
Going in a pretty compact body, with a great deal of howling and hymning, such as that with which all conscripts, either of the cross or guillotine, are accustomed to stimulate one another’s courage and vanity, we crossed a Croksted Lane, and again a sweep of wild heath, that spread towards the dense forests called Northwood, which fill all that shallow valley from Sydenham Wells on the north to Penge Common on the south. And presently coming to the trees, and entering a wide, elegant clearing amidst them, where the woods were banked behind, and the ground dropped towards us in terraces, on the highest we saw the house standing, a great sunny block of brick and stone, but shuttered now, and apparently lifeless.
The mob at first knocked on the door with a diffidence inspired of its varnished and portly exclusiveness; but, provoking no response, presently grew bolder and more clamorous. Still, I believe, its fervour would ultimately have wasted itself on this inflexible barrier, had not my master, with some disgusted expressions of contempt, come to the front and taunted it on to a violence the more vicious because it was shamefaced. Under his stimulus, then, the panels were beginning to crack, when in a moment the bolts flew, and there stood in the opening a little sinister fellow in grey, who asked us, curt and ironic, our business.
All but my master fell back before him, though there were some broken cries touching the Scarlet Woman, which the sweep took up.
The little man wrinkled his little acrid nose. He was nobody, it turned out, but the Scotch steward, holding staunch to his post; but he was cut and coloured like steel.
“D’ye ask here for your doxy?” he said. “Go back, man, and look where you left her in the tavern.”
The sweep, only half understanding, spat out a mouthful of oaths.