“I ain’t here for harm, young master, I suppose?”
I was not so sure of that. I had leisure to entertain the retort in my mind, while he slowly lifted his heavy glance from the pavement, up my legs and arms, to my face.
“Then you have left the forge?” I said.
“Do this look like a forge?” replied Orlick, sending his glance all round him with an air of injury. “Now, do it look like it?”
I asked him how long he had left Gargery’s forge?
“One day is so like another here,” he replied, “that I don’t know without casting it up. However, I come here some time since you left.”
“I could have told you that, Orlick.”
“Ah!” said he, dryly. “But then you’ve got to be a scholar.”
By this time we had come to the house, where I found his room to be one just within the side-door, with a little window in it looking on the courtyard. In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on the wall, to which he now added the gate key; and his patchwork-covered bed was in a little inner division or recess. The whole had a slovenly, confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he, looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,—as indeed he was.
“I never saw this room before,” I remarked; “but there used to be no Porter here.”