But away went all a man's thoughts of homage to anything but humanity when, after I had said "Good-bye" to Pilla, and seen my bag come down the stairs, and was casting a wrapper around me, while the cabman thumped himself betwixt the doors, the sweet little creature ran up to me again and tried to speak, but only mumbled, and would have gone down with her chin upon the floor, if I had not stretched both arms to catch her. Upon them she lay, like a lamb upon a rail, with all her body quivering, and the helplessness of her slack head thrown against my dancing waistcoat.
"What is it, dear child?" I asked in vain. All she could do was to spread one hand towards a big door; and then that hand fell, and she was all long hair and pink muslin. "Is there a woman here?" I called out, in terror of a fit, as I kept her from the floor; and a woman of great substance rushed up and caught her, and glared at me, as if I were a villain. "Poor lamb! Poor darling! The bad wicked man!" "Did you see how he swept her off her feet?" There were half-a-dozen handmaids now; and I left poor Pilla to them.
"A woman of great substance rushed up and caught her."
Then seeing how stupidly quick they were, I went to the door she had pointed at, and with heavy misgivings entered. It was a large high room, with a lot of gilt about it, and gorgeous books sprawling upon stamped leather; but the gas was turned down, and the light of the fire flickered with gushes of shape and shadow.
There was another and a darker shadow there. A dead man lay in the deep composure of a most luxurious chair; his head had fallen back against the rich morocco; and the fire that played on his dull wan eyes should warm no part of him any more,—Theophilus Erricker, a man who had made his fortune, in the rush, and kick, and pell-mell of life—by fair play, no doubt, when the rules permitted; and with kindness to his fellows, when so be it, the facts went the right way for him.
It was strong hospitality, and quick heart now, which had brought him to this sad extreme. Throughout the day, he had been doing too much for a man of his legs, and years, and weight, as several persons told him. But the old man kept up to the height of young time; and when Sir Benjamin Box (an alderman of substantial yet melancholy order) entreated him not to dance so much, stout Mr. Erricker challenged him, though Box was ten years his junior, to jump over a dining-room chair with him! And thus he carried on for hour after hour, dancing, and slapping old friends on the back, and running about among the pretty girls, like a waiter who has to subsist upon tips; and ever so much rasher than that man is, because he was stirring up his intellect, to the same high scale as his body. What wonder then—with his doctor called away to a wealthy confinement, and his good wife too busy to frown at him—that he verified the warnings of those who knew, but could not at such a time remind him, that he had all but created a vacancy in the Town Council last Easter Monday, through juvenile impetuosity?
What an awful crash of buffers, in the midst of headlong gaiety! Even to me, so new a friend, it seemed to sweep aside all thoughts of self, and plunge it in the great tide of human fate, that pitiless gulf-stream, in which we cannot even endeavour a course of our own, but are whirled along like a dollop of froth, or a shred of pop-weed among other weeds.