CHAPTER VII
A TRAGI-COMEDY IN A CAB
In front of Donaldson’s Hospital, John counted it good fortune to perceive a cab a great way off, and by much shouting and waving of his arm, to catch the notice of the driver. He counted it good fortune, for the time was long to him till he should have done for ever with the Lodge; and the farther he must go to find a cab, the greater the chance that the inevitable discovery had taken place, and that he should return to find the garden full of angry neighbours. Yet when the vehicle drew up he was sensibly chagrined to recognise the port-wine cabman of the night before. “Here,” he could not but reflect, “here is another link in the Judicial Error.”
The driver, on the other hand, was pleased to drop again upon so liberal a fare; and as he was a man—the reader must already have perceived—of easy, not to say familiar, manners, he dropped at once into a vein of friendly talk, commenting on the weather, on the sacred season, which struck him chiefly in the light of a day of liberal gratuities, on the chance which had reunited him to a pleasing customer, and on the fact that John had been (as he was pleased to call it) visibly “on the ran-dan” the night before.
“And ye look dreidful bad the-day, sir, I must say that,” he continued. “There’s nothing like a dram for ye—if ye’ll take my advice of it; and bein’ as it’s Christmas, I’m no’ saying,” he added, with a fatherly smile, “but what I would join ye mysel’.”
John had listened with a sick heart.
“I’ll give you a dram when we’ve got through,” said he, affecting a sprightliness which sat on him most unhandsomely, “and not a drop till then. Business first and pleasure afterwards.”
With this promise the jarvey was prevailed upon to clamber to his place and drive, with hideous deliberation, to the door of the Lodge. There were no signs as yet of any public emotion; only, two men stood not far off in talk, and their presence, seen from afar, set John’s pulses buzzing. He might have spared himself his fright, for the pair were lost in some dispute of a theological complexion, and, with lengthened upper lip and enumerating fingers, pursued the matter of their difference, and paid no heed to John.