Their tongues a little loosened by the punch, the old folks would have sung his praises to the verge of tediousness had he not almost sternly interrupted them.
“Shut up, mother,” he cried at last, quite gruffly, “what I does I does to please myself. I likes to see people comfortable about me. If they wasn’t, it’s me as would be more upset than them.”
I did not see him again for nearly two years. Then one October evening, strolling about the East End, I met him coming out of a little Chapel in the Burdett Road. He was so changed that I should not have known him had not I overheard a woman as she passed him say, “Good-evening, Mr. Burridge.”
A pair of bushy side-whiskers had given to his red face an aggressively respectable appearance. He was dressed in an ill-fitting suit of black, and carried an umbrella in one hand and a book in the other.
In some mysterious way he managed to look both thinner and shorter than my recollection of him. Altogether, he suggested to me the idea that he himself—the real man—had by some means or other been extracted, leaving only his shrunken husk behind. The genial juices of humanity had been squeezed out of him.
“Not Jack Burridge!” I exclaimed, confronting him in astonishment.
His little eyes wandered shiftily up and down the street. “No, sir,” he replied (his tones had lost their windy boisterousness—a hard, metallic voice spoke to me), “not the one as you used to know, praise be the Lord.”
“And have you given up the old business?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, “that’s all over; I’ve been a vile sinner in my time, God forgive me for it. But, thank Heaven, I have repented in time.”
“Come and have a drink,” I said, slipping my arm through his, “and tell me all about it.”