Again dispatched to the place of four letters with an oath which must have been forged there by some writhing soul, I could stay him no longer, for making a rush past me, Dan Gillies was off in the direction of the Flesh-market Close, up which I saw him turn.
His oaths still rung in my ear. I have often thought of the wonderful aptitude of the grown-up Raggediers at swearing; they begin early, if they do not lisp, in defiances of God, and you will hear the oaths ringing amidst the clink of their halfpennies as they play pitch-and-toss. Their little manhood is scarcely clothed in buckram, when they would look upon themselves as simpletons if they do not vindicate their independence by daring both man and Heaven. You may say they don’t understand the terms they use. Perhaps few swearers do; but in these urchins the oaths are the sparks of the steel of their souls, and there is not one of them unprepared to shew by their cruelty that their terrible words are true feelings. It may appear whimsical in me, but I have often thought that if this firmness of character—for it is really a mental constitution—were directed and trained by education and religion in the track of duty, it would develop itself as an energy fitted for great and good things. A man like me has no voice in the Privy Council; but literature, as I have heard said, is a big whispering-gallery, whereby the humblest of minds may communicate with the highest. Let it be that my whisper is laughed at, as everything is grinned at or laughed at which is said for the hopefulness of our wynd reprobates; but I have learned by experience, that while the greatest vices spring from the dregs of society, the Conglomerates, as they are called in that book (which describes them so well,) “The Castes of Edinburgh,” so the greatest virtues sometimes spring from the same source. How much of the vice they are forced to retain, and how much of the virtue they are compelled to lose, is one of the whispers which ought to reach the ears of the great.
At the time Dan left me, I was not in this grand way of thinking. Nay, to be very plain, I was laughing in my sleeve; because, in the first place, a detective is not a Methodist preacher; and in the second place, because I have a right to my fun as well as others; and in the third place, because I came to the conclusion that Dan Gillies had some reason for shaving his whiskers which ought to interest me. In short, I had no doubt that Dan and his “wife” had been at the ship-launch.
With the laugh, I suppose, still hanging about my lips as a comfortable solace after my ineffectual hunt after the brewer’s clerk and the jolly maman, I entered the Office, where the first information I got was, that a lady had been robbed of her purse at Leith, and that a young wench was in hands there as having been an accomplice along with a swell of a pickpocket who had escaped.
“I was thinking as much,” said I, with a revival of my laugh; “I know the man.”
And so I might well say, for I had now got to the secret of the shaved whiskers.
“What mean you?” said the lieutenant.
“Why, just that if you want the man, I will bring him to you. I will give you the reason of my confidence at another time.”
“To be sure we want him,” was the rather sharp reply of my superior.
“Then I will fetch him,” said I.