“I believe it is, sir.”
“Well, then, Mr. D——, touching that little account between us, I have to request, sir, that—”
“Very good; nothing can be more reasonable; wait the appointed time, and you shall have all.”
This answer served, in some degree, to appease him; no, not exactly to appease him, because that would imply previous excitement, and he was invariably imperturbable in manner; it satisfied him, however, for the present, and he forthwith walked away, casting on me that equivocal sort of look with which Ajax turned from Ulysses, or Dido from Æneas, in the Shades.
A lapse of a few weeks ensued, during which I heard nothing further from my persecutor; when, one dark November evening—one of those peculiarly English evenings, full of fog and gloom, when the half-frozen sleet, joined in its descent by gutters from the house-tops, comes driving full in your face, blinding you to all external objects—on one of these blessed evenings, on my road to Camden Town, I chanced to miss my way, and was compelled, notwithstanding a certain shyness towards strangers, to ask my direction of the first respectable person I should meet. Many passed me by, but none sufficiently prepossessing; when, on turning down some nameless street that leads to Tottenham Court-road, I chanced to come behind a staid-looking gentleman, accoutred in a dark brown coat, with an umbrella—the cotton of which had shrunk half-way up the whalebone—held obliquely over his head. Hastily stepping up to him, “Pray, sir,” said I, “could you be kind enough to direct me to —— place, Camden Town?”
The unknown, thus addressed, made the slightest possible inclination towards me; and then, in an under tone, “I believe, sir, your name is D——?”
I paused; a vague sort of recollection came over me. Could it be?—no, surely not! And yet the voice—the manner—the—the—
My suspicions were soon converted into certainty, when the stranger, with his own peculiar expression, quietly broke forth a second time with, “Touching that little account—”
This was enough; it was more than enough—it was vexatiously superfluous. To be dunned for a debt, at the very time when the nerves could best dispense with the application; to be recalled back to the vulgarities of existence, at that precise moment when the imagination was most abstracted from all commercial common-places; to be stopped by a tailor, (and such a tailor!) when the mind was dreaming of a mistress—the bare idea was intolerable! So I thought; and, without further explanation, hurried precipitately from the spot, nor ever once paused till far removed from the husky tones of that sepulchral voice which had once before so highly excited my annoyance.
[The narrater then visits one of Mr. Champagne Wright’s masquerades, where he falls in love with a fresco nun. He receives a billet.]