"What has Miss Angelina M'Falzen been doing at the house of Mrs Bairnsfather?" cried Sharp, as he turned from the window of the carriage (now in the Canongate) to the face of Samuel, whose eyes were fixed by the charm of his glorious hallucination.
"Lending her the 'Pilgrim's Progress!'" answered Samuel, as he started from his dream.
Now Sharp could not for the life of him understand this ready answer of his friend, for he had put the query to awaken him from his dream, and without the slightest hope of receiving a reply to a question which savoured so much of the character of questions in general; so he left him to his dream, and, in a short time, they were at Cockenzie.
CHAP. V.—THE TEA-PARTY.
"Well, my dear," said Mr Bairnsfather to his wife, when he came home to tea on that same afternoon of which we have now been narrating the incidents, "I hope you are getting over our losses; yet I have no very good news for you to-day—for all that Thriven intends to offer of dividend is five shillings in the pound."
"It is but a weary world this we live in," said the disconsolate wife. "We are all pilgrims; and there is for each of us some slough of despond, through which we must struggle to the happy valley."
"What, ho!" rejoined the husband; "I have come home to tea, and you are giving me a piece of Bunyan. Come, lay down your book, for Mr Wrench and Mr Horner are to be here to get some of your souchong."
"And I," replied the good-wife, "asked Miss Angelina M'Falzen to come back and get a cup with us. I could not do less to the devout creature; for she took the trouble of going to Mr Thriven's to-day, and getting from him the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' that she might bring it to me, to reconcile me to the evils of life, and, among the rest, the loss which we have sustained by her friend's failure."
"Poh! I hate all 'Pilgrim's-Progress'-reading insolvents!" rejoined the husband, taking the book out of his wife's hands. "Go, love, and get ready the tea, while I sojourn with the Elstow tinker in the valley of humiliation, out of which a cup of China brown stout and some converse will transport me to the 'house beautiful.'"
And Mr Bairnsfather, while his wife went to prepare tea, and his many children were dispersed here and there and everywhere, got very rapidly into "Vanity Fair," of the which, being somewhat aweary, as he said, with a yawn, he turned the leaves over and over, and at last fixed his eyes on the leaf that had once been, though it was now no longer, blank. The awl of the Elstow tinker himself never could have gone with greater determination through the leather of a pair of bellows, than did Mr Bairnsfather's eye seem to penetrate that written page. Like the seer of the vision of a ghost in the night, he drew his head back, and he removed it forwards, and he shut his eyes, and opened his eyes, and rubbed his eyes; and the more he did all this, the more he was at a loss to comprehend what the writing on the said blank leaf was intended to carry to the eyes of mortals. It was of the handwriting of Mr Samuel Ramsay Thriven, for a certainty—he could swear to it; for the bill he had in his possession—and whereby he would lose three-fourth parts of two hundred pounds—was written in the same character. What could it mean?