Chapter 36

The Old Curiosity Shop

by Charles Dickens

As the single gentleman after some weeks' occupation of his
lodgings, still declined to correspond, by word or gesture, either
with Mr Brass or his sister Sally, but invariably chose Richard
Swiveller as his channel of communication; and as he proved himself
in all respects a highly desirable inmate, paying for everything
beforehand, giving very little trouble, making no noise, and keeping
early hours; Mr Richard imperceptibly rose to an important position
in the family, as one who had influence over this mysterious lodger,
and could negotiate with him, for good or evil, when nobody else
durst approach his person.

If the truth must be told, even Mr Swiveller's approaches to the
single gentleman were of a very distant kind, and met with small
encouragement; but, as he never returned from a monosyllabic
conference with the unknown, without quoting such expressions as
'Swiveller, I know I can rely upon you,'--'I have no hesitation in
saying, Swiveller, that I entertain a regard for you,'--'Swiveller,
you are my friend, and will stand by me I am sure,' with many other
short speeches of the same familiar and confiding kind, purporting to
have been addressed by the single gentleman to himself, and to form
the staple of their ordinary discourse, neither Mr Brass nor Miss
Sally for a moment questioned the extent of his influence, but
accorded to him their fullest and most unqualified belief. But quite
apart from, and independent of, this source of popularity, Mr
Swiveller had another, which promised to be equally enduring, and to
lighten his position considerably.

He found favour in the eyes of Miss Sally Brass. Let not the
light scorners of female fascination erect their ears to listen to a
new tale of love which shall serve them for a jest; for Miss Brass,
however accurately formed to be beloved, was not of the loving kind.
That amiable virgin, having clung to the skirts of the Law from her
earliest youth; having sustained herself by their aid, as it were, in
her first running alone, and maintained a firm grasp upon them ever
since; had passed her life in a kind of legal childhood. She had
been remarkable, when a tender prattler for an uncommon talent in
counterfeiting the walk and manner of a bailiff: in which character
she had learned to tap her little playfellows on the shoulder, and to
carry them off to imaginary sponging-houses, with a correctness of
imitation which was the surprise and delight of all who witnessed her
performances, and which was only to be exceeded by her exquisite
manner of putting an execution into her doll's house, and taking an
exact inventory of the chairs and tables. These artless sports had
naturally soothed and cheered the decline of her widowed father: a
most exemplary gentleman (called 'old Foxey' by his friends from his
extreme sagacity,) who encouraged them to the utmost, and whose chief
regret, on finding that he drew near to Houndsditch churchyard, was,
that his daughter could not take out an attorney's certificate and
hold a place upon the roll. Filled with this affectionate and
touching sorrow, he had solemnly confided her to his son Sampson as
an invaluable auxiliary; and from the old gentleman's decease to the
period of which we treat, Miss Sally Brass had been the prop and
pillar of his business.

It is obvious that, having devoted herself from infancy to this
one pursuit and study, Miss Brass could know but little of the world,
otherwise than in connection with the law; and that from a lady
gifted with such high tastes, proficiency in those gentler and softer
arts in which women usually excel, was scarcely to be looked for.
Miss Sally's accomplishments were all of a masculine and strictly
legal kind. They began with the practice of an attorney and they
ended with it. She was in a state of lawful innocence, so to speak.
The law had been her nurse. And, as bandy-legs or such physical
deformities in children are held to be the consequence of bad
nursing, so, if in a mind so beautiful any moral twist or handiness
could be found, Miss Sally Brass's nurse was alone to blame.

It was on this lady, then, that Mr Swiveller burst in full
freshness as something new and hitherto undreamed of, lighting up the
office with scraps of song and merriment, conjuring with inkstands
and boxes of wafers, catching three oranges in one hand, balancing
stools upon his chin and penknives on his nose, and constantly
performing a hundred other feats with equal ingenuity; for with such
unbendings did Richard, in Mr Brass's absence, relieve the tedium of
his confinement. These social qualities, which Miss Sally first
discovered by accident, gradually made such an impression upon her,
that she would entreat Mr Swiveller to relax as though she were not
by, which Mr Swiveller, nothing loth, would readily consent to do.
By these means a friendship sprung up between them. Mr Swiveller
gradually came to look upon her as her brother Sampson did, and as he
would have looked upon any other clerk. He imparted to her the
mystery of going the odd man or plain Newmarket for fruit,
ginger-beer, baked potatoes, or even a modest quencher, of which Miss
Brass did not scruple to partake. He would often persuade her to
undertake his share of writing in addition to her own; nay, he would
sometimes reward her with a hearty slap on the back, and protest that
she was a devilish good fellow, a jolly dog, and so forth; all of
which compliments Miss Sally would receive in entire good part and
with perfect satisfaction.

One circumstance troubled Mr Swiveller's mind very much, and
that was that the small servant always remained somewhere in the
bowels of the earth under Bevis Marks, and never came to the surface
unless the single gentleman rang his bell, when she would answer it
and immediately disappear again. She never went out, or came into
the office, or had a clean face, or took off the coarse apron, or
looked out of any one of the windows, or stood at the street-door for
a breath of air, or had any rest or enjoyment whatever. Nobody ever
came to see her, nobody spoke of her, nobody cared about her. Mr
Brass had said once, that he believed she was a 'love-child' (which
means anything but a child of love), and that was all the information
Richard Swiveller could obtain.

'It's of no use asking the dragon,' thought Dick one day, as he
sat contemplating the features of Miss Sally Brass. 'I suspect if I
asked any questions on that head, our alliance would be at an end. I
wonder whether she is a dragon by-the-bye, or something in the
mermaid way. She has rather a scaly appearance. But mermaids are
fond of looking at themselves in the glass, which she can't be. And
they have a habit of combing their hair, which she hasn't. No, she's
a dragon.'

'Where are you going, old fellow?' said Dick aloud, as Miss
Sally wiped her pen as usual on the green dress, and uprose from her
seat.

'To dinner,' answered the dragon.

'To dinner!' thought Dick, 'that's another circumstance. I
don't believe that small servant ever has anything to eat.'

'Sammy won't be home,' said Miss Brass. 'Stop till I come back.
I sha'n't be long.'

Dick nodded, and followed Miss Brass--with his eyes to the door,
and with his ears to a little back parlour, where she and her brother
took their meals.

'Now,' said Dick, walking up and down with his hands in his
pockets, 'I'd give something--if I had it--to know how they use that
child, and where they keep her. My mother must have been a very
inquisitive woman; I have no doubt I'm marked with a note of
interrogation somewhere. My feelings I smother, but thou hast been
the cause of this anguish, my--upon my word,' said Mr Swiveller,
checking himself and falling thoughtfully into the client's chair, 'I
should like to know how they use her!'

After running on, in this way, for some time, Mr Swiveller
softly opened the office door, with the intention of darting across
the street for a glass of the mild porter. At that moment he caught
a parting glimpse of the brown head-dress of Miss Brass flitting down
the kitchen stairs. 'And by Jove!' thought Dick, 'she's going to
feed the small servant. Now or never!'

First peeping over the handrail and allowing the head-dress to
disappear in the darkness below, he groped his way down, and arrived
at the door of a back kitchen immediately after Miss Brass had
entered the same, bearing in her hand a cold leg of mutton. It was a
very dark miserable place, very low and very damp: the walls
disfigured by a thousand rents and blotches. The water was trickling
out of a leaky butt, and a most wretched cat was lapping up the drops
with the sickly eagerness of starvation. The grate, which was a wide
one, was wound and screwed up tight, so as to hold no more than a
little thin sandwich of fire. Everything was locked up; the
coal-cellar, the candle-box, the salt-box, the meat-safe, were all
padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle could have lunched upon.
The pinched and meagre aspect of the place would have killed a
chameleon. He would have known, at the first mouthful, that the air
was not eatable, and must have given up the ghost in despair.

The small servant stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally,
and hung her head.

'Are you there?' said Miss Sally.

'Yes, ma'am,' was the answer in a weak voice.

'Go further away from the leg of mutton, or you'll be picking
it, I know,' said Miss Sally.

The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took a key
from her pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary waste
of cold potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she placed
before the small servant, ordering her to sit down before it, and
then, taking up a great carving-knife, made a mighty show of
sharpening it upon the carving-fork.

'Do you see this?' said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square
inches of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it out
on the point of the fork.

The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes
to see every shred of it, small as it was, and answered, 'yes.'

'Then don't you ever go and say,' retorted Miss Sally, 'that you
hadn't meat here. There, eat it up.'

This was soon done. 'Now, do you want any more?' said Miss
Sally.

The hungry creature answered with a faint 'No.' They were
evidently going through an established form.

'You've been helped once to meat,' said Miss Brass, summing up
the facts; 'you have had as much as you can eat, you're asked if you
want any more, and you answer, 'no!' Then don't you ever go and say
you were allowanced, mind that.'

With those words, Miss Sally put the meat away and locked the
safe, and then drawing near to the small servant, overlooked her
while she finished the potatoes.

It was plain that some extraordinary grudge was working in Miss
Brass's gentle breast, and that it was that which impelled her,
without the smallest present cause, to rap the child with the blade
of the knife, now on her hand, now on her head, and now on her back,
as if she found it quite impossible to stand so close to her without
administering a few slight knocks. But Mr Swiveller was not a little
surprised to see his fellow-clerk, after walking slowly backwards
towards the door, as if she were trying to withdraw herself from the
room but could not accomplish it, dart suddenly forward, and falling
on the small servant give her some hard blows with her clenched hand.
The victim cried, but in a subdued manner as if she feared to raise
her voice, and Miss Sally, comforting herself with a pinch of snuff,
ascended the stairs, just as Richard had safely reached the
office.