"If I told you anything of the kind, I should tell you a lie; Valentine Hawkehurst is doing uncommonly well, and has got one of the prettiest little boxes between Wimbledon and Kingston. Ann Woolper lives with them, and is in better feather than she ever was in your time."
With this, Mr. Sheldon of Gray's Inn pushed his brother out on to the staircase, and shut his door. Philip sat upon the stairs, and drew his rags together a little, and rubbed his wretched limbs, while the bolts and chains whereby the lawyer defended his citadel clanked close behind him.
"I wonder whether he'll pay Hawkehurst a visit," thought George, as he bolted his door; and he had a kind of grim satisfaction in the idea that Valentine's Christmas peace might be disturbed by the advent of that grisly visitor.
CHAPTER X.
"ACCORDING TO THEIR DEEDS."
"Between Wimbledon and Kingston," muttered the tramp. "If I can drag myself as far as that, I'll go there this night."
He went down stairs and out into the pitiless cold and snow, and made his way down Fetter Lane, and across Blackfriars Bridge to the Surrey side of the water, stopping to beg here and there.
Upon this snowy Christmas night there were plenty of people abroad; and amongst them Philip Sheldon found pitying matrons, who explored the depths of their capacious pockets to find him a halfpenny, and good-natured young men, who flung the "copper" he besought with piteous professional whine.
When he had collected the price of a glass of gin, he went into the first public-house he came to, and spent his money. He was too ill to stay the cravings of his stomach with substantial food. Gin gave him temporary warmth and temporary strength, and enabled him to push on vigorously for a little while; and then came dreary periods of faintness and exhaustion, in which every step was sheer pain and weariness.
Something of his old self, some remnant of that hard strength of purpose which had once characterized him, remained with him still, utterly fallen and brutalized as he was. As a savage creature of the jungle might pursue a given course, pushing always onward to that camp or village whence the scent of human flesh and blood was wafted to his quivering nostrils, so Philip Sheldon pushed on towards the dwelling-place of that man and that woman whom of all creatures upon this earth he most savagely hated.