“Oh! there’s where it is?” interjected the carpenter, with a funny frown at a low word from Ned Crummins. “Practicing, is he? Mr. Tinman’s practicing before the glass preparatory to his going to the palace in London.”
“He gave me a shillin’,” said Crummins.
Crickledon comprehended him immediately. “We sha’n’t speak about it, Ned.”
What did you see? was thus cautiously suggested.
The shilling was on Crummins’ tongue to check his betrayal of the secret scene. But remembering that he had only witnessed it by accident, and that Mr. Tinman had not completely taken him into his confidence, he thrust his hand down his pocket to finger the crown-piece lying in fellowship with the coin it multiplied five times, and was inspired to think himself at liberty to say: “All I saw was when the door opened. Not the house-door. It was the parlour-door. I saw him walk up to the glass, and walk back from the glass. And when he’d got up to the glass he bowed, he did, and he went back’ards just so.”
Doubtless the presence of a lady was the active agent that prevented Crummins from doubling his body entirely, and giving more than a rapid indication of the posture of Mr. Tinman in his retreat before the glass. But it was a glimpse of broad burlesque, and though it was received with becoming sobriety by the men in the carpenter’s shop, Annette plucked at her father’s arm.
She could not get him to depart. That picture of his old schoolmate Martin Tinman practicing before a chiwal glass to present himself at the palace in his Court suit, seemed to stupefy his Australian intelligence.
“What right has he got to go to Court?” Mr. Van Diemen Smith inquired, like the foreigner he had become through exile.
“Mr. Tinman’s bailiff of the town,” said Crickledon.
“And what was his objection to that glass I smashed?”