It was as well, after all, that Margaret was not with him, he reflected; he could not have borne to have had Timothy under the same roof with her. The preacher had said many times, in the course of his experiences in London, that it was "as well"; and said it with a sigh.
He lodged at this time in one of the streets turning out of Commercial Road. He always seemed to have an extraordinary knack of getting employment. His fingers, which never held money long, were seldom at a loss in making it; and, perhaps, his luck had something to do with the fact that no one ever forgot him, his personality being so strongly marked.
He had made one friend in London during that short visit fifteen years before, namely Giles Potter, rat catcher, bird fancier, and bird stuffer; and some people whispered dog stealer as well. Why the tipsy, jolly, old reprobate was so fond of the preacher, of all men, no one ever knew.
The Barnabas Thorpe of the present, with his fanatical and water-drinking earnestness, who preached in season and out of season, would seem to have little to do with the desperate and crack-brained young sailor, whom Giles had held back from murdering the man who had robbed him of his sweetheart in the winter of 1834; but Giles had recognised and welcomed him.
The preacher worked all day in the back room of 33 Walton Street, curing and stuffing with fingers that were a good deal steadier than his companion's, and in grave silence for the most part, till the light faded, when he would go out into the streets to preach; all the suppressed energy of those long hours in a close atmosphere finding vent in sermons that attracted larger crowds daily, and were beginning to be talked about, even in the West End. Giles would go to hear him sometimes; a disreputable, slouching old figure, in a rough fur cap; a figure with loose thick lips and stubbled chin and kindly merry black eyes.
"Lord bless you, I always knew Barnabas had something queer inside him!" he would say; "but I didn't reckon it would take this shape. To think of him turning Methody! But he was bound to be something. If he hadn't turned saint, he'd have swung from the gallows by now; he's the sort who serves any master hard, whether it's God, or the devil! Let's drink to his being made archbishop! He'd wake them all up a bit."
Giles drank to that end pretty often, and Barnabas did the work meanwhile: the business had not been so flourishing for years.
Possibly it was out of consideration for those services, or, possibly, because, with all his faults, a kinder-hearted old rascal never breathed, that Giles, after much grumbling, allowed Barnabas to bring Timothy under his roof.
"You'll repent it, Barnabas!" he said. "Mark my words, we shall have an inquest and no end of bother; and you'll wish you had taken good advice, which is always as much wasted on you as good beer. That's as evil-looking a sneak as ever I saw, and he's capable of dying on purpose to spite you. Bring him in, if you're a fool; but you'll live to repent it!"
Something in the words made the preacher's careworn face graver still.