“’Tis from him with the pudding. They call him the Flying Pieman; but his proper business is to paint pictures, at which he has a fine skill, they say. Fortune missed him, however. He married ‘for love’—a course for which there is plenty of precedent, but no authority—and love begets a family, but nothing to put in its empty crops. At the last pinch he kicked over his easel and went out to sell puddings. He did nought by halves. If his pictures are half as good as his victuals he deserves the Presidency. He hath made himself a character in the neighbourhood, but a finer one in God’s eyes, I will venture. ’Tis said that, no whit faithless to his art, he trades all day that he may indulge his real bent after hours. That is to be a man and an example.”
“To me, sir, to me, you would say; and so he is. I have no family; but that is an accident—not an excuse. I take the pieman to my heart, and see no ostentatious vanity in his shirt-frill. I read another moral here too. This is ‘Heavy Hill,’ and goes to Tyburn.”
“Oh, Heaven send you to the House of Correction! Come on, I beg. My office is close by.”
“Then your prayer is answered. You shall do the overseer, and whip me with maxims.”
The lawyer smacked in his lips as if he were sampling some sharp but not disagreeable berry; regarded his incorrigible companion a moment through covert eyelids; then turned and led the way across the road and under the old gate-arch of Gray’s Inn.
Beyond this portal, a short distance, pleasant tranquillity prevailed. It is the humour of the Law to hatch in antique solitudes the plots that vex many lives with turmoil and disquiet. Around its Inn Halls the Devil’s cloisters invite to peripatetic contemplation of quibble and sophistry; and its silent gardens cherish that grimy tree of Death whose trunk is freckled like the serpent’s with discs of yellow.
Up a step or two, through a venerable doorway with fluted pilasters, the long man ushered his visitor, and so to a dusty comfortable room on the first floor, where tiers of japanned boxes, the caskets of dead passions and aspirations, were piled high against the walls like coffins in a family vault.
“Mr. Creel?” said the baronet, sitting up on a high stool and crossing his legs.
The lawyer bowed.
“So I read it on the door, sir. Believe me, I hold the name in honour for my father’s sake.”