“Well, well,” said he, “I’ll come to-morrow. In the meantime, I’ll think of this, and how we can best proceed. And perhaps I’ll think of it, dear Harriet, and—and—think of me a little in connexion with it.”
He handed her down to a coach she had in waiting at the door; and if his landlady had not been deaf, she would have heard him muttering as he went back upstairs, when the coach had driven off, that we were creatures of habit, and it was a sorrowful habit to be an old bachelor.
The violoncello lying on the sofa between the two chairs, he took it up, without putting away the vacant chair, and sat droning on it, and slowly shaking his head at the vacant chair, for a long, long time. The expression he communicated to the instrument at first, though monstrously pathetic and bland, was nothing to the expression he communicated to his own face, and bestowed upon the empty chair: which was so sincere, that he was obliged to have recourse to Captain Cuttle’s remedy more than once, and to rub his face with his sleeve. By degrees, however, the violoncello, in unison with his own frame of mind, glided melodiously into the Harmonious Blacksmith, which he played over and over again, until his ruddy and serene face gleamed like true metal on the anvil of a veritable blacksmith. In fine, the violoncello and the empty chair were the companions of his bachelorhood until nearly midnight; and when he took his supper, the violoncello set up on end in the sofa corner, big with the latent harmony of a whole foundry full of harmonious blacksmiths, seemed to ogle the empty chair out of its crooked eyes, with unutterable intelligence.
When Harriet left the house, the driver of her hired coach, taking a course that was evidently no new one to him, went in and out by bye-ways, through that part of the suburbs, until he arrived at some open ground, where there were a few quiet little old houses standing among gardens. At the garden-gate of one of these he stopped, and Harriet alighted.
Her gentle ringing at the bell was responded to by a dolorous-looking woman, of light complexion, with raised eyebrows, and head drooping on one side, who curtseyed at sight of her, and conducted her across the garden to the house.
“How is your patient, nurse, tonight?” said Harriet.
“In a poor way, Miss, I am afraid. Oh how she do remind me, sometimes, of my Uncle’s Betsey Jane!” returned the woman of the light complexion, in a sort of doleful rapture.
“In what respect?” asked Harriet.
“Miss, in all respects,” replied the other, “except that she’s grown up, and Betsey Jane, when at death’s door, was but a child.”
“But you have told me she recovered,” observed Harriet mildly; “so there is the more reason for hope, Mrs Wickam.”