“You’d better go and get me something,” he said to the boy; “coffee and fish or cold meat will do.”
“No fear; I ain’t a-goin’ for nothing,” replied the boy. “I’ll do your errands for a tanner a week and your leavings, but not no less.”
“You shall have it,” said Reginald. Whereupon the boy undertook the commission and departed.
The meal was a dismal one. The herrings were badly over-smoked and the coffee was like mud, and the boy’s conversation, which filled in a running accompaniment, was not conducive to digestion.
“I’d ’most a mind to try some prussic in that corfee,” said that bloodthirsty young gentleman, “if I’d a known where the chemist downstairs keeps his’n. Then they’d ’a said you’d poisoned yourself ’cos you was blue coming to this ’ere ’ole. I’d ’a been put in the box at the inquige, and I’d ’a said Yes, you was blue, and I thought there was a screw loose the minit I see yer, and I’d seen yer empty a paper of powder in your corfee while you thort nobody wasn’t a-looking. And the jury’d say it was tempory ’sanity and sooiside, and say they considers I was a honest young feller, and vote me a bob out of the poor-box. There you are. What do you think of that?”
“I suppose that’s what the man in The Pirate’s Bride ought to have done,” said Reginald, with a faint smile.
“To be sure he ought. Why, it’s enough to disgust any one with the flat, when he goes and takes the prussic hisself. Of course he’d get found out.”
“Well, it’s just as well you’ve not put any in my coffee,” said Reginald. “It’s none too nice as it is. And I’d advise you, young fellow, to burn all those precious story-books of yours, if that’s the sort of stuff they put into your head.”
The boy stared at him in horrified amazement.
“Burn ’em! Oh, Walker!”