“I beg your pardon, miss, gone to the —”
“Li-ver; where you pays in for young uns’ berryins and that,” she responded; “she ain’t at home, but he is. I’ll call him.”
And so she did. And presently a husky voice from the next floor called out, “Hullo! what is it?”
“Here’s a gentleman wants yer, and here’s a letter as the postman jest left.”
“Ask him if he’s the doctor; I’ve got the young un, I can’t come down,” the husky voice was again heard to exclaim.
To be sure I was not a doctor, not a qualified practitioner that is to say, but as far as the Oxleek family knew me I was “M.D.;” and pacifying my grumbling conscience with this small piece of jesuitism, I blandly nodded my head to the young woman when she recited to me Mr. Oxleek’s query.
“Then you’d better go up, and p’raps you wouldn’t mind taking this letter up with you,” said she.
I went up; it was late in the evening and candlelight, in the room on the next floor that is, but not on the stairs; but had it been altogether dark, I might have discovered Mr. Oxleek by the stench of his tobacco. I walked in at the half-open door.
There was Mr. Oxleek by the fire, the very perfection of an indolent, ease-loving, pipe-smoking, beer-soaking wretch as ever sat for his portrait. He was a man verging on fifty, I should think, with a pair of broad shoulders fit to carry a side of beef, and as greasy about the cuffs and collar of his tattered jacket as though at some early period of his existence he had carried sides of beef. But that must have been many years ago, for the grease had all worn black with age, and the shoulders of the jacket were all fretted through by constant friction against the back of the easy-chair he sat in. He wore slippers—at least, he wore one slipper; the other one, all slouched down at heel, had slipped off his lazy foot a few inches too far for easy recovery, and there it lay. A villanously dirty face had Mr. Oxleek, and a beard of at least a month’s growth. It was plain to be seen that one of Mr. Oxleek’s most favourite positions of sitting was with his head resting against that part of the wall that was by the side of the mantelshelf, for there, large as a dinner plate, was the black greasy patch his dirty hair had made. He had been smoking, for there, still smouldering, was his filthy little pipe on the shelf, and by the side of it a yellow jug all streaked and stained with ancient smears of beer.
He was not quite unoccupied, however; he was nursing a baby! He, the pipe-sucking, beer-swigging, unshaven, dirty, lazy ruffian, was nursing a poor little creature less than a year old, as I should judge, with its small, pinched face reposing against his ragged waistcoat, in the pocket of which his tobacco was probably kept. The baby wore its bedgown, as though it had once been put to bed, and roused to be nursed. It was a very old and woefully begrimed bedgown, bearing marks of Mr. Oxleek’s dirty paws, and of his tobacco dust, and of physic clumsily administered and spilt. It would appear too much like “piling up the agony” did I attempt to describe that baby’s face. It was the countenance of an infant that had cried itself to sleep, and to whom pain was so familiar, that it invaded its dreams, causing its mites of features to twitch and quiver so that it would have been a mercy to wake it.