Walker looked down: it was Tom Dale.
Who in London did not know little Tom Dale? He had cheeks like an apple, and his hair curled every morning, and a little blue stock, and always two new magazines under his arm, and an umbrella and a little brown frock-coat, and big square-toed shoes with which he went PAPPING down the street. He was everywhere at once. Everybody met him every day, and he knew everything that everybody ever did; though nobody ever knew what HE did. He was, they say, a hundred years old, and had never dined at his own charge once in those hundred years. He looked like a figure out of a waxwork, with glassy clear meaningless eyes: he always spoke with a grin; he knew what you had for dinner the day before he met you, and what everybody had had for dinner for a century back almost. He was the receptacle of all the scandal of all the world, from Bond Street to Bread Street; he knew all the authors, all the actors, all the “notorieties” of the town, and the private histories of each. That is, he never knew anything really, but supplied deficiencies of truth and memory with ready-coined, never-failing lies. He was the most benevolent man in the universe, and never saw you without telling you everything most cruel of your neighbour, and when he left you he went to do the same kind turn by yourself.
“Pooh! what's money to you, my dear boy?” said little Tom Dale, who had just come out of Ebers's, where he had been filching an opera-ticket. “You make it in bushels in the City, you know you do—-in thousands. I saw you go into Eglantine's. Fine business that; finest in London. Five-shilling cakes of soap, my dear boy. I can't wash with such. Thousands a year that man has made—hasn't he?”
“Upon my word, Tom, I don't know,” says the Captain.
“YOU not know? Don't tell me. You know everything—you agents. You KNOW he makes five thousand a year—ay, and might make ten, but you know why he don't.”
“Indeed I don't.”
“Nonsense. Don't humbug a poor old fellow like me. Jews—Amos—fifty per cent., ay? Why can't he get his money from a good Christian?”
“I HAVE heard something of that sort,” said Walker, laughing. “Why, by Jove, Tom, you know everything!”
“YOU know everything, my dear boy. You know what a rascally trick that opera creature served him, poor fellow. Cashmere shawls—Storr and Mortimer's—'Star and Garter.' Much better dine quiet off pea-soup and sprats—ay? His betters have, as you know very well.”
“Pea-soup and sprats! What! have you heard of that already?”