"Shut your mouth, mother Appleface," hiccoughed Charlie.
"And fork out somefink on account, Miss," oozed from his brother.
The latter began to move with uncertain steps after Phyllida, who shrank towards the shelter of the inglenook.
"Jacob! Jacob! Simon Tabrum! Polly Patch! Mary Maria!" screamed the landlady, snatching at the only article of offence in reach, which happened to be a pair of bellows. With these she puffed away furiously, to the enormous delight of the drunken postillions, who continued to advance and indeed probably found the air of the bellows very grateful to their heated brains.
It is unlikely that anything more serious than a volley of oaths would have occurred, if a tall elderly gentleman in a chestnut-brown frogged riding-coat had not come in at that moment; but as he did come in, no doubt the room was the sweeter for the interruption.
"Oh, your honour," said Mrs. Tabrum, "will 'ee please turn out these drunken rogues, seeing as all the house is away at their business and no one near by."
The elderly gentleman clenched his riding-stick a trifle more firmly and directed his steel-grey eyes—equally potent weapons—towards the abashed brothers. They did not wait to be addressed, but hurried as quickly as the fumes of liquor allowed them, to the more congenial atmosphere of the taproom. It is comforting to reflect, while they twisted their way out, that Charlie and Dicky Maggs were hanged at Tyburn for a peculiarly atrocious robbery and brutal assault upon a blind rat-tamer, who, with many clinging rats and mice and a scarlet-frilled dog, was a familiar figure in the villages round London. It is not perhaps so comforting to reflect upon the poor old man lying insensible in a puddle, with his tame rats and mice wandering aimlessly in and out of his innumerable pockets and his scarlet-frilled dog with three broken ribs moaning in the middle of a quickset bush. Egad! I vow the Tyburn horse never responded so readily to Jack Ketch's whip and never a pair of rogues went so ashen grey at the tide of a mob's execrations in all the livid chronicles of quick and evil ends.
The elderly gentleman in the chestnut Surtout turned from the exit of Charlie and Dickie Maggs to survey the subject of their insolence. It would have puzzled an onlooker to say precisely what effect was produced on the elderly gentleman's countenance by this deliberate inspection of Miss Phyllida Courteen, now melting in tears of apprehension and only barely restrained from hystericks by Mrs. Tabrum's plump hands in extensive motion.
When the iron-grey clouds of a chill December afternoon dissolve for a moment in the scud of a high gale and shed a ray of pallid sunlight on a spent blossom, we are almost glad to see the thin azure thus displayed as quickly veiled, and welcome the sullen twilight that succeeds. The elderly gentleman's countenance took on for a brief moment a strange light, but the frosted smile betrayed so much grim sorrow behind that it was quite a relief to see his face resume a normal frigidity as he muttered a regret and inquired into the chances of a good night's lodging.