Leaky Peg stared very hard at her for a moment, and then said pugnaciously: “I found the covey on the mop, blue as megrim, see? and him no more than a mouth! Half flash and half foolish, that’s him. Strike me, I don’t know what I see in the hick!”
“Miss Tallant, better come upstairs!” said the anguished Mr. Scunthorpe, to whom Leaky Peg’s vocabulary was rather more intelligible than to Arabella.
“You dub your mummer, you death’s head on a mop-stick!” Leaky Peg advised him. “Leave me and the swell mort be!” She turned back to Arabella, and said roughly: “Lurched, ain’t he? He tells me there’s a fastener out after him. He hadn’t so much as a meg in his truss when I come up with him in the boozing-ken. I took him along with me—strike me if I know why!” She jerked her thumb towards the stairs. “You want to take him away: this ain’t his lay, nor it ain’t mine neither! Spouting a kid’s mish all to buy him mutton and smash, which he don’t eat! Me! You take him off; you’re welcome!”
Gathering from these words that Leaky Peg had been keeping Bertram supplied with food, Arabella, tears standing in her eyes, seized one of her hands, and pressed it fervently between both her own, saying: “How good you are! Indeed, I thank you! He is only a boy, you know, and what must have become of him without you I dare not think!”
“Well, it’s little enough I got from it!” remarked Leaky Peg caustically. “You and him with your breakteeth words! You get up them dancers, you and that moulder alongside you that looks like a toothdrawer! First door on the right: stale-drunk, he is, but he ain’t backt yet!”
With these heartening words she turned on her heel, and strode out of the house, driving before her Quartern Sue, who had had the temerity to venture on to the threshold again. Mr. Scunthorpe made haste to usher Arabella up the stairs, saying reproachfully: “Shouldn’t talk to her, ma’am! Not at all the thing! Assure you!”
“The thing!” she exclaimed scornfully. “She has a kind heart, sir!”
Abashed, Mr. Scunthorpe begged pardon, and tapped at a door at the head of the stairs.
Bertram’s voice sounded from within the room, and without waiting for her escort to usher her in Arabella lifted the latch and quickly entered.
The apartment, which looked out on to a filthy yard, where lean cats prowled amongst garbage-heaps, was small, rather dark, and furnished with a sagging bed pushed up against one wall, a deal table, two wooden chairs, and a strip of threadbare carpet. The remains of a loaf of bread, a heel of cheese, together with a glass, a jug, and an empty bottle stood on the table; and on the mantelshelf, presumably placed there by Leaky Peg, was a cracked mug containing a wilting bunch of flowers. Bertram, who was stretched on the bed, raised himself on his elbow as the door opened, an apprehensive look in his face. He was fully dressed, but was wearing a handkerchief knotted round his neck, and looked both ill and unkempt. When he saw Arabella, he uttered something like a sob, and struggled up, and to his feet. “Bella!”