"And I bought Gallowglass for half-a-crown off a barrow in Camberwell, and Shakespeare was give me by a young fellow who found him dullish reading—and the Book that beats 'em both I picked up in the fourpenny box at a second-hand bookseller's in Clement's Inn!"
King Solomon and the son of Sirach of Jerusalem, with the Prophets Isaiah and Hosea, were Mr. Knewbit's favorite Old Testament authors. Of the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus he never wearied. One wonders how much he understood, but he quarried diligently in their pages, and sometimes emerged into the light figuratively laden with jewels. Marvelous passages would drive home to the brain of the man in blinding flashes of illumination, and he would lose the place in his excitement,—being an unmethodical if omnivorous reader,—and never be able to find them again.... So he quoted his Prophets from memory and generally inaccurately, yet seldom without point or inappropriately. At other times, wearied with their glorious obscurity, he reverted to the plainest and simplest of all the stories ever written, and the sweetest and the saddest too....
He spoke of the Saviour as though he had known Him....
"I never could forgive them fellers"—I conceive he meant the Disciples—"for cutting off and leaving Him to be pinched by that gang in the Garden. It was mean, that's what I call it. Mean! But I will say they owned up their shabbiness in their writings afterward. Though you notice they hurry over that part. And I'm not surprised! That young feller downstairs yet, Maria?"
This was at eight o 'clock on the Sunday morning following Mr. Knewbit's meeting with Carolan on Waterloo Bridge. Miss Ling, stepping nimbly about the big front kitchen in the basement, busy with her task of getting breakfast, returned that "Mr. Breagh had got up and gone out at half-past six."
"For a shave?"
Mr. Knewbit rubbed his own bristly chin rather dubiously as he asked the question. Miss Ling, impaling a round of stale loaf upon a tin toasting-fork, shook her neat head and answered in the negative. Mr. Breagh had mentioned that he was going to church.
"To church.... We'll hope he has gone," said Mr. Knewbit still more dubiously, "though between me and you and the toasting-fork it sounds too good to be true.... And 'The Brunswick Arms' is handy round the corner. If the young man don't rattle at the area-gate by the time you've finished your toasting, I shall made bold to go and look for him at the Bar. Hulloa! Here he is! Now, that's what you might call a pleasant disappointment!"
For he had glanced up at the strip of area-railings commanded by the upper panes of the kitchen window, and seen the legs of P. C. Breagh stride by at a great rate, stop, turn back, and descend the area-steps.
You are to see Miss Ling receiving his morning greeting with the wide smile that revealed an unbroken row of sound white teeth ("every one her own," as Mr. Knewbit would say) and made her thin, triangular face so pleasant. She was a staid spinster, owning to forty-nine, who would have died rather than confess to being fifty. Her magnificent hair, genuinely black and shining like ebony, was coiled upon the top of her head too tightly for beauty. Her well-marked eyebrows and candid brown eyes slanted a little upward at the temples, and her skin was rather yellowish than olive. She was of a flat and bony figure, active and sound and tough, and, in a plain way, a first-rate cook and caterer.