“What’s your business, Morley?” he demanded eagerly.
“I’ve a lot of businesses,” said Mr Jones with a drunken leer, “but my principal one is fishcuring. I’m a sort of shipowner too. Leastwise I’ve got two craft—one bein’ a sloop, the other a boat. Moreover, I charter no end of vessels, an’ do a good deal in the insurance way. But you’ll understand more about these things all in good time, Billy. I live, while I’m at home, in Gravesend, but I’ve got a daughter and a mother livin’ at Yarmouth, so I may say I’ve got a home at both places. It’s a convenient sort o’ thing, you see,—a town residence and a country villa, as it were. Come, I’ll take you to the villa now, and introduce ’ee to the women.”
So saying, this rascal paid for the poison he had been administering in large doses to himself and his apprentice, and, taking Billy’s dirty little hand in his large horny fist, led him towards the centre of the town.
Poor Billy little knew the nature of the awful gulf of sin and misery into which he was now plunging with a headlong hilarious vivacity peculiarly his own. He was, indeed, well enough aware of the fact that he was a thief, and an outcast from society, and that he was a habitual breaker of the laws of God and man, but he was naturally ignorant of the extent of his guilt, as well as of the certain and terrible end to which it pointed, and, above all, he had not the most remote conception of the almost hopeless slavery to which he was doomed when once fairly secured in the baleful net which Morley Jones had begun to twine around him.
But a higher Power was leading the poor child in a way that he knew not—a way that was little suspected by his tempter—a way that has been the means of snatching many and many a little one from destruction in time past, and that will certainly save many more in time to come—as long as Christian men and women band together to unite their prayers and powers for the rescue of perishing souls.
Traversing several streets with unsteady gait—for he was now much the worse of drink—Mr Jones led his willing captive down one of those innumerable narrow streets, or passages, termed “rows,” which bear some resemblance to the “closes” of the Scottish capital. In width they are much the same, but in cleanliness there is a vast difference, for whereas the closes of the northern capital are notorious for dirt, the rows of Yarmouth are celebrated for their neat tidy aspect. What the cause of the neatness of the latter may be we cannot tell, but we can bear the testimony of an eye-witness to the fact that—considering the class of inhabitants who dwell in them, their laborious lives and limited means—the rows are wondrously clean. Nearly all of them are paved with pebbles or bricks. The square courts opening out of them on right and left, although ridiculously small, are so thoroughly scoured and swept that one might roll on their floors with white garments and remain unsoiled. In each court may be observed a water-bucket and scrubbing-brush wet, usually, from recent use, also a green painted box-garden of dimensions corresponding to the court, full of well-tended flowers. Almost every door has a wooden or stone step, and each step is worn and white with repeated scrubbings—insomuch that one is irresistibly led to suspect that the “Bloaters” must have a strong infusion of the Dutch element in their nature.
Emerging at the lower end of the row, Mr Jones and his small companion hastened along the centre of a narrow street which led them into one of much wider dimensions, named Friar’s Lane. Proceeding along this for some time, they diverged to the right into another of the rows not far from the old city-wall, at a place where one of the massive towers still rears its rugged head as a picturesque ruin. The moon sailed out from under a mass of clouds at this point, giving to objects the distinctness of daylight. Hitherto Billy Towler had retained some idea of the direction in which he was being led, but this last turn threw his topographical ideas into utter confusion.
“A queer place this,” he remarked, as they emerged from the narrowest passage they had yet traversed into a neat, snug, and most unexpected little square, with a garden in the middle of it, and a flagstaff in one corner.
“Adam-and-Eve gardens, they call it,” said Mr Jones; “we’re pretty nigh home now.”
“I wonder they didn’t call it Eden at once,” observed Billy; “it would have been shorter and comes to the same thing.”