Colin satisfied the inquirer on this particular; and in return received the coachman's promise to direct him to a respectable house, at which he might put up until he had done one of two things, either obtained a situation or “got himself cleaned out.”
CHAPTER XV.
The “Yorkshire House.”—Its company.—And an adventure.
IN the course of some subsequent conversation, Colin's friend the coachman ascertained that his “green” passenger came from some place in the county of York, and instantaneously concluded, by a peculiar process of reasoning, that our hero ought of necessity to put up at a “Yorkshire House.” He forthwith recommended him to a tavern of some notoriety in the city, backing his recommendation with the assurance that, as he was but raw in London, it would be better for him to be amongst his own countrymen.
In the “Yorkshire House,” then, we will suppose him. His first business, after having refreshed himself, was to call for ink and paper, and indite an epistle to Squire Lupton, giving him not only an explicit statement of the cause of his precipitate retreat from Bram-leigh, and his consequent inability to attend at the Hall on the appointed day, but also detailing the horrible scene of the lawyer's confession respecting the situation of James Woodruff, which had led to his recent attempt, and compelled that retreat. This being done, and duly despatched, he hastily prepared himself, fevered and confused in brain as he was by the long night-journey, to take a turn in the streets. He longed, as every stranger does who first enters this mighty city, to wander among its endless maze of houses, and witness the vastness of its resources. He passed down one of the by-streets into Cheapside; wondered at the numbers of caravans and carts, the coaches and cabs, which blocked themselves to a temporary stand-still in the streets branching from either side; marvelled what all the vehicles that shot along could be employed for; where the contrary and cross currents of human beings could all possibly be setting in; or how the enormous evidences of almost inconceivable wealth, displayed on all sides, could ever have been thus accumulated. As he ruminated, the crowd every now and then half spun him round, now one way, now another, in the endeavour to pass or to outstrip him. Some belated clerk, hurrying to his duty, put a forcible but inoffensive hand upon his shoulder, and pushed him aside; the butcher's boy (and butchers' boys are always in a hurry) perhaps poked the projecting corner of his wooden tray or the shank of a leg of mutton into his ear; the baker drove a loaf into his ribs; the porter knocked his hat off with a box on his knot, accompanying the action with the polite expression of “By your leave;” the merchant pushed it into the gutter in order to avoid treading upon it, and the policeman, standing by the lamp-post, smiled as sedately as a wooden doll, whose lower jaw is pulled down with a string, and, when advice was useless, kindly told him to “take care of his hat.”
By the time he had passed through Fleet Street, and had returned along Oxford Street and Holborn, his head was in a whirl. In the course of a few short hours his senses had received more numerous and striking impressions than had been made upon them probably during the whole course of his previous life. London seemed to him a Babel, and himself one of those who were lost utterly in the confusion of tongues,—tongues not of men merely, but of iron and adamant, rattling together their horrible jargon, until his ears sounded and reverberated like two shells beside his head, and his brain became bewildered as if with (that which he had happily never yet experienced) a night's excess.
About seven o'clock in the evening he returned to his inn. Having placed himself quietly in a retired corner of the parlour of the “Yorkshire House,” and immediately beneath a sloping skylight extending the whole breadth of the room,—a position which very strongly suggested the idea that he was sitting under a cucumber frame,—Colin amused himself by making silent remarks upon the scene before him. Sundry very miscellaneous-looking personages formed the principal figures of the picture, and were relieved by numerous accessaries of mutton-chops, biscuits, broiled kidneys, pints of stout, and glasses of gin-punch; the whole being enveloped in an atmosphere of such dense smoke, as gave a very shadowy and mysterious character to every object seen through it.
“There's a fly on your nose, Mr. Prince,” remarked a lean hungry-looking fellow; “a blue-bottle, sir, just on the end there.”