Of course, they did not intend to occupy permanently an apartment so
splendid. It was in order to let the house again that Raggles
purchased it. As soon as a tenant was found, he subsided into the
greengrocer's shop once more; but a happy thing it was for him to walk
out of that tenement and into Curzon Street, and there survey his
house--his own house--with geraniums in the window and a carved bronze
knocker. The footman occasionally lounging at the area railing,
treated him with respect; the cook took her green stuff at his house
and called him Mr. Landlord, and there was not one thing the tenants
did, or one dish which they had for dinner, that Raggles might not know
of, if he liked.
He was a good man; good and happy. The house brought him in so
handsome a yearly income that he was determined to send his children to
good schools, and accordingly, regardless of expense, Charles was sent
to boarding at Dr. Swishtail's, Sugar-cane Lodge, and little Matilda to
Miss Peckover's, Laurentinum House, Clapham.
Raggles loved and adored the Crawley family as the author of all his
prosperity in life. He had a silhouette of his mistress in his back
shop, and a drawing of the Porter's Lodge at Queen's Crawley, done by
that spinster herself in India ink--and the only addition he made to
the decorations of the Curzon Street House was a print of Queen's
Crawley in Hampshire, the seat of Sir Walpole Crawley, Baronet, who was
represented in a gilded car drawn by six white horses, and passing by a
lake covered with swans, and barges containing ladies in hoops, and
musicians with flags and penwigs. Indeed Raggles thought there was no
such palace in all the world, and no such august family.
As luck would have it, Raggles' house in Curzon Street was to let when
Rawdon and his wife returned to London. The Colonel knew it and its
owner quite well; the latter's connection with the Crawley family had
been kept up constantly, for Raggles helped Mr. Bowls whenever Miss
Crawley received friends. And the old man not only let his house to
the Colonel but officiated as his butler whenever he had company; Mrs.
Raggles operating in the kitchen below and sending up dinners of which
old Miss Crawley herself might have approved. This was the way, then,
Crawley got his house for nothing; for though Raggles had to pay taxes
and rates, and the interest of the mortgage to the brother butler; and
the insurance of his life; and the charges for his children at school;
and the value of the meat and drink which his own family--and for a
time that of Colonel Crawley too--consumed; and though the poor wretch
was utterly ruined by the transaction, his children being flung on the
streets, and himself driven into the Fleet Prison: yet somebody must
pay even for gentlemen who live for nothing a year--and so it was this
unlucky Raggles was made the representative of Colonel Crawley's
defective capital.