“Oh! I will, indeed I will, sir,” cried Jan. He had taken a good deal of medicine during his illness, and he had learned the art of gulping. He emptied the little tumbler into his mouth, and swallowed the contents at a gulp.
They choked him, but that was nothing. Then he felt as if something seized him in the inside of every limb. After he lost the power of moving, he could hear, and he heard the Cheap Jack say, “I’d go in for the Young Prodigy; genteel from the first; only, if we goes among the nobs, he may be recognized. He’s a rum-looking beggar.”
“If you don’t go a drinking every penny he earns,” said Sal, pointedly, “we’ll soon get enough in a common line to take us to Ameriky, and he’ll be safe enough there.” On this Jan thought that he made a most desperate struggle and remonstrance. But in reality his lips never moved from their rigidity, and he only rolled his head upon his shoulder. After which he remembered no more.
CHAPTER XXXI.
SCREEVING.—AN OLD SONG.—MR. FORD’S CLIENT.—THE PENNY GAFF.—JAN RUNS AWAY.
There was a large crowd, but large crowds gather quickly in London from small causes. It was in an out-of-the-way spot too, and the police had not yet tried to disperse it.
The crowd was gathered round a street-artist who was “screeving,” or drawing pictures on the pavement in colored chalks. A good many men have followed the trade in London with some success, but this artist was a wan, meagre-looking child. It was Jan. He drew with extraordinary rapidity; not with the rapidity of slovenliness, but with the rapidity of a genius in the choice of what Ruskin calls “fateful lines.” At his back stood the hunchback, who “pattered” in description of the drawings as glibly as he used to “puff” his own wares as a Cheap Jack.
“Cats on the roof of a ’ouse. Look at ’em, ladies and gentlemen; and from their harched backs to their tails and whiskers, and the moon a-shining in the sky, you’ll say they’re as natteral as life. Bo-serve the fierceness in the eye of that black Tom. The one that’s a-coming round the chimney-pot is a Sandy; yellow ochre in the body, and the markings in red. There isn’t a harpist living could do ’em better, though I says it that’s the lad’s father.”
The cats were very popular, and so were the Prize Pig, Playful Porkers, Sow and her Little Ones, as exhibited by the Cheap Jack. But the prime favorite was “The Faithful Friend,” consisting of sketches of Rufus in various attitudes, including a last sleep on the grave of a supposititious master, which Jan drew with a heart that ached as if it must break.