Accordingly, about half an hour later, when Aunt M'riar was beginning to wonder at the non-appearance of Uncle Mo, Master Micky knocked at her door, and was admitted.
"'Cos I've got a message for you, missis," said he. He accepted the obvious need of his visit for explanation, without incorporating it in words. "It come from that party—party with a side-twist in the mug—party as come this way of a Sunday morning, askin' for old Mother Prichard—party I see in Hy' Park along of young Dave...."
Aunt M'riar was taken aback. "How ever come you to see more of him?" said she. For really this was, for the moment, a greater puzzle to her than why, being seen, he should send her a message.
Micky let the message stand over, to account for it. "'Cos I did see him, and I ain't a liar. I see him next door to my great-aunt, as ever is. Keep along the 'Ammersmith Road past the Plough and Harrow, and so soon as ever you strike the Amp'shrog, you bear away to the left, and anybody'll tell you The Pidgings, as soon as look at you. Small 'ouse, by the river. Kep' by Miss Horkings, now her father's kicked. Female party." This was due to a vague habit of the speaker's mind, which divided the opposite sex into two genders, feminine and neuter; the latter including all those samples, unfortunate enough—or fortunate enough, according as one looks at it—to present no attractions to masculine impulses. Micky would never have described his great-aunt as a female party. She was, though worthy, neuter beyond a doubt.
Aunt M'riar accepted Miss Hawkins, without further analysis. "She don't know me, anyways," said she. "Nor yet your Hyde Park man, as far as I see. How come he to know my name? Didn't he never tell you?" She was incredulous about that message.
"He don't know nobody's name, as I knows on. Wot he said to me was a message to the person of the house at the end o' the Court. Same like you, missis!"
"And what was the message?"
"I'll tell you that, missis, straight away and no lies." Micky gathered himself up, and concentrated on a flawless delivery of the message:—"He said he was a-coming to see his mother; that's what he said—his mother, the old lady upstairs. Providin' she wasn't nobody else! He didn't say no names. On'y he said if she didn't come from Skillick's she was somebody else."
"Mrs. Prichard, she came from Skillick's, I know. Because she said so. That's over three years ago." Aunt M'riar was of a transparent, truthful nature. If she had been more politic, she would have kept this back. "Didn't he say nothing else?" she asked.
"Yes, he did, and this here is what it was:—'Tell the person of the house,' he says, 'to mention my name,' he says. 'Name o' Darvill,' he says. So I was a-lyin', missis, you see, by a sort o' chance like, when I said he said no names. 'Cos he did. He said his own. Not but what he goes by the name of Wix."