I couldn’t trust myself to answer Ripston’s embarrassing question verbally, but I nodded my head in a manner intended to convey to him that I found “changing” the easiest thing in the world.
“Well, yer see, I dessay you found it easier than we did, yer didn’t have so much to change from as wot me and Mouldy had,” continued Rip. “Yer never got reg’ler hardened to it, like. Lor’! well I recollects what larks it used to be for me and poor Mouldy to watch yer in the market, sometimes, when yer thought we wasn’t lookin’, and see the funky way you had of doing things. You’d never ha’ made a out-and-out regular prig, don’t yer know; you never had pluck enough, Smiff; leastways, not pluck; it ain’t, it’s summat wot’s like pluck—like pluck wot’s gone bad, like a speckt apple; it’s the shape of pluck, but it’s rotten. Why, I don’t b’lieve, Smiff, that you’d ever ha’ knowed wot nailin’ even was, if we hadn’t ha’ put yer on it so jolly close as wot we did.”
“P’r’aps I never should,’ I replied, giving Ripston a look that must have been to him altogether incomprehensible.
“Well, you didn’t go werry deep—leastways not nigh so deep as me and Mouldy did; that’s a comfort, ain’t it?”
“Course it’s a comfort.”
“I say, Smiff, ain’t it rummy that we should come acrost each other, both changed?”
“Rather. That’s a pretty sort o’ dance, Rip.”
“Jigger dancin’, it’s jolly rubbish; that’s wot I calls dancin’. It wouldn’t ha’ been half so rummy if one on us had changed and the t’other one hadn’t. Lord, Smiff! I wonder what I should ha’ thought if I’d ha’ been carryin’ on the old game, and come acrost you to-night lookin’ so jolly ’spectable’! I wonder what I’d ha’ done if you’d spoke to me, as werry likely you wouldn’t? I’d ha’ hooked it away, I think. Yet I dunno; it’s werry likely I should ha’ cheeked it out—p’r’aps made larks ’bout yer bein’ a draper cove, and dressin’ like a toff. I should ha’ pretended not to b’lieve about yer havin’ grow’d ’spectable, and gone in for aggrawatin’ yer by callin’ yer swell-mobs, and that.”
All this while Ripston had talked to me in whispers, and with his head inclined to mine, so that it was impossible for the old woman who sat to my left, or the two girls in front, to hear a word of his discourse. I had never seen him so sprightly in all my life—never known him so chatty and communicative; but, as may easily be imagined, his talk had anything but an exhilarating effect on me. His every word and gesture was a reproach to me. Hard usage and studied neglect had corned my conscience so that it had lost its fine susceptibility, and was not easily pricked to wakefulness; but here was Ripston assailing it butt and bayonet, as it were. My acquaintance with the two boys had been of a peculiar sort—of a sort more likely than any other to beget friendship the most durable. The news of Mouldy’s death, and of the manner of it, had given me a terrible twisting. That alone was enough to make me cast down and miserable; but when my old friend Rip, whom I had always liked even better than Mouldy—Rip, turned honest, talking honest, looking honest unmistakably—took to gouging the wound, to stabbing and re-stabbing it so unmercifully, and yet so innocently, I felt ground down to the earth in shame and remorse. That I looked almost as bad as I felt I could not but be aware, and the dread lest Ripston should presently, by this means, detect me, increased each moment. The dread was not groundless. Rip’s natural shrewdness had not suffered in his conversion to honest ways. When he had finished drawing his funny picture of our meeting under other circumstances—him still a little prig, and me, as I was, a respectable linen-draper’s boy—he was convulsed with glee, in which, by a poke in the ribs, he invited me to join. Not I. At that moment I would have given very much more ready money than I was in possession of to have been able to have forced a laugh, though never so lame a one. But I couldn’t laugh or smile even. I could only look hard before me, as though I didn’t hear him, with my lips squeezed tight together, and my brow lowering. Ripston broke off short in the midst of a promising chuckle, and, with a face turned suddenly grave, laid his hand on my arm—
“What’s the matter Smiff? I say, Smiff, it’s all right, ain’t it? You ain’t purtendin’? You are a draper’s cove, ain’t yer?”
To my great relief, at that very moment the stage-curtain drew up on the first scene of the “Seven Steps to Tyburn;” and, to hide my confusion, although the stage was a mist to me, I clapped my hands, and cried “Bravo!” with the noisiest.
Chapter XXXIV. Which is devoted entirely to a description of the thrilling domestic drama entitled “The seven steps to Tyburn,” as performed at the “gaff” in Shoreditch.
There are a few people, acquaintances of my ragamuffinhood, with whom, before all others, I should like now to meet, that I might, as far as lay in my power, discharge my obligations to them; and, without doubt, the talented author of “The Seven Steps to Tyburn” is reckoned amongst the number. Should this meet his eye, if he will call on the publisher he can obtain my address, and I cordially invite him to come and see me. If, since he produced the celebrated domestic drama in question, the world has dealt kindly with him, and he is now prosperous and wealthy, (I have a faint suspicion that I detected the limnings of his masterly pen in a three-volume novel, entitled, “The F——of the F——,” recently published,) I have a bottle of “comet port” it will give me great delight to share with him. If—and such, alas! is the common fate of genius—he is still the threadbare man—altered only as regards the colour of his hair and the plumpness of his features—who, napless hat in hand, appeared before the curtain, responsive to the demands of a delirious audience, on the memorable evening of my visit to the Shoreditch gaff, why, then, if the small matter of ten pounds or so is of service to him, I am very sincerely his to command.
As my mind dwells on the events of that night, I am straight translated to that fourpenny box, and I can see Ripston, with his dirty face and his mouth a little ajar, so rapt, that he positively forgets to breathe in the ordinary way, and resorts to irregular and stertorous gasps and grunts in the unavoidable performance of that operation of nature. I can see the rattail plaits of hair of the two young women that occupied the seat in front of us hanging below the blue “curtains” of their straw bonnets. I can see—and I swear I never have seen its like since—the pattern of the gown the old woman who sat on my left-hand wore, the three plain rings on her “marriage finger” when she clapped her hands, and the mangey-looking old boa she wore about her neck, although it was hot enough to make the ham-sandwiches the young men brought round along with the play-bills and the ginger-beer, uncomfortably limp and clammy. I can see the audience, and the stage, and the orchestra, with its two performers, a harper and a fiddler; and I can see the play from first to last. In the modest hope that the readers who have taken an interest in my fortunes and misfortunes up to this point will not be averse to know something of the drama that so opportunely influenced them, I have been at the pains to set down the most salient features of “The Seven Steps to Tyburn.”