He listened with avidity to any proposition which held forth a prospect of food. The work, he said, only partly understanding it, would be difficult, but, therefore, the more to be desired. Common conjurers, he said, would spoil such a case. As for himself, he would undertake to do just whatever they wanted with the register, whether it was the substitution of a page or the tearing out of a page, under the very eyes of the parish clerk. "There must be," he said, "a patter suitable to the occasion. I will manage that for you. I'm afraid I can't make up as I ought for the part, because it would cost too much, but we must do without that. And now, Miss Kennedy, what is it exactly that you want me to do?"
He was disappointed on learning that there would be no "palming" of leaves, old or new, among the registers; nothing, in fact, but a simple journey, and a simple examination of the books. And though, as he confessed, he had as yet no experience in the art of falsifying parish registers, where science was concerned its interests were above those of mere morality.
CHAPTER XXII. DANIEL FAGG.
What would have happened if certain things had not happened? This is a question which is seldom set on examination papers, on account of the great scope it offers to the imaginative faculty, and we all know how dangerous a thing it is to develop this side of the human mind. Many a severe historian has been spoiled by developing his imagination. But for this, Scott might have been another Alison and Thackeray a Mill. In this Stepney business the appearance of Angela certainly worked changes at once remarkable and impossible to be dissociated from her name. Thus, but for her, the unfortunate claimants must have been driven back to their own country like baffled invaders "rolling sullenly over the frontier." Nelly would have spent her whole life in the sadness of short rations and long hours, with hopeless prayers for days of fatness. Rebekah and the improvers and the dressmakers and the apprentices would have endured the like hardness. Harry would have left the joyless city to its joylessness, and returned to the regions whose skies are all sunshine—to the young and fortunate—and its pavements all of gold. And there would have been no Palace of Delight. And what would have become of Daniel Fagg, one hardly likes to think. The unlucky Daniel had, indeed, fallen upon very evil days. There seemed to be no longer a single man left whom he could ask for a subscription to his book. He had used them all up. He had sent begging letters to every Fellow of every scientific society; he had levied contributions upon every secretary; he had attacked in person every official at the museums of Great Russell Street and South Kensington; he had tried all the publishers; he had written to every bishop, nobleman, clergyman, and philanthropist of whom he could hear, pressing upon them the claims of his great Discovery. Now he could do no more. The subscriptions he had received for publishing his book were spent in necessary food and lodgings: nobody at the Museum would even see him; he got no more answers to his letters: starvation stared him in the face.
For three days he had lived upon ninepence. Threepence a day for food. Think of that, ye who are fed regularly, and fed well. Threepence, to satisfy all the cravings of an excellent appetite! There was now no more money left. And in two days more the week's rent would be due.
On the morning when he came forth, hungry and miserable, without even the penny for a loaf, it happened that Angela was standing at her upper window, on the other side of the Green, and, fortunately for the unlucky scholar that she saw him. His strange behavior made her watch him. First he looked up and down the street in uncertainty; then, as if he had business which could not be delayed a moment, he turned to the right and marched straight away toward the Mile End Road. This was because he thought he would go to the Head of the Egyptian Department at the British Museum and borrow five shillings. Then he stopped suddenly: this was because he remembered that he would have to send in his name, and that the chief would certainly refuse to see him. Then he turned slowly and walked, dragging his limbs and hanging his head in the opposite direction—because he was resolved to make for the London Docks, and drop accidentally into the sluggish green water, the first drop of which kills almost as certainly as a glass of Bourbon whiskey. Then he thought that there would be some luxury in sitting down for a few moments to think comfortably over his approaching demise, and of the noise it would make in the learned world, and how remorseful and ashamed the scholars—especially he of the Egyptian Department—would feel for the short balance of their sin-laden days, and he took a seat on a bench in the green-garden with this view. As he thought he leaned forward, staring into vacancy, and in his face there grew so dark an expression of despair and terror that Angela shuddered and ran for her hat, recollecting that she had heard of his poverty and disappointments.
"I am afraid you are not well, Mr. Fagg."
He started and looked up. In imagination he was already lying dead at the bottom of the green-water, and before his troubled mind there were floating confused images of his former life, now past and dead and gone. He saw himself in his Australian cottage arriving at his grand discovery; he was lecturing about it on a platform; he was standing on the deck of a ship, drinking farewell nobblers with an enthusiastic crowd; and he was wandering hungry, neglected, despised, about the stony streets of London.