‘Why, I am going to fetch my lodger home,’ said Paul.
‘A woman!’ cried Mr Bailey, ‘for a twenty-pun’ note!’
The little barber hastened to explain that she was neither a young woman, nor a handsome woman, but a nurse, who had been acting as a kind of house-keeper to a gentleman for some weeks past, and left her place that night, in consequence of being superseded by another and a more legitimate house-keeper—to wit, the gentleman’s bride.
‘He’s newly married, and he brings his young wife home to-night,’ said the barber. ‘So I’m going to fetch my lodger away—Mr Chuzzlewit’s, close behind the Post Office—and carry her box for her.’
‘Jonas Chuzzlewit’s?’ said Bailey.
‘Ah!’ returned Paul: ‘that’s the name sure enough. Do you know him?’
‘Oh, no!’ cried Mr Bailey; ‘not at all. And I don’t know her! Not neither! Why, they first kept company through me, a’most.’
‘Ah?’ said Paul.
‘Ah!’ said Mr Bailey, with a wink; ‘and she ain’t bad looking mind you. But her sister was the best. She was the merry one. I often used to have a bit of fun with her, in the hold times!’
Mr Bailey spoke as if he already had a leg and three-quarters in the grave, and this had happened twenty or thirty years ago. Paul Sweedlepipe, the meek, was so perfectly confounded by his precocious self-possession, and his patronizing manner, as well as by his boots, cockade, and livery, that a mist swam before his eyes, and he saw—not the Bailey of acknowledged juvenility from Todgers’s Commercial Boarding House, who had made his acquaintance within a twelvemonth, by purchasing, at sundry times, small birds at twopence each—but a highly-condensed embodiment of all the sporting grooms in London; an abstract of all the stable-knowledge of the time; a something at a high-pressure that must have had existence many years, and was fraught with terrible experiences. And truly, though in the cloudy atmosphere of Todgers’s, Mr Bailey’s genius had ever shone out brightly in this particular respect, it now eclipsed both time and space, cheated beholders of their senses, and worked on their belief in defiance of all natural laws. He walked along the tangible and real stones of Holborn Hill, an undersized boy; and yet he winked the winks, and thought the thoughts, and did the deeds, and said the sayings of an ancient man. There was an old principle within him, and a young surface without. He became an inexplicable creature; a breeched and booted Sphinx. There was no course open to the barber, but to go distracted himself, or to take Bailey for granted; and he wisely chose the latter.