The lady, returning as he restored it to his
pocket, mixed rum and water for the party, not forgetting her fair self,
and handed to every one his glass. When all were supplied, Mr Rugg rose,
and silently holding out his glass at arm's length above the centre of
the table, by that gesture invited the other three to add theirs, and to
unite in a general conspiratorial clink. The ceremony was effective up
to a certain point, and would have been wholly so throughout, if Miss
Rugg, as she raised her glass to her lips in completion of it, had not
happened to look at Young John; when she was again so overcome by the
contemptible comicality of his disinterestedness as to splutter some
ambrosial drops of rum and water around, and withdraw in confusion.
Such was the dinner without precedent, given by Pancks at Pentonville;
and such was the busy and strange life Pancks led. The only waking
moments at which he appeared to relax from his cares, and to recreate
himself by going anywhere or saying anything without a pervading object,
were when he showed a dawning interest in the lame foreigner with the
stick, down Bleeding Heart Yard.
The foreigner, by name John Baptist Cavalletto--they called him Mr
Baptist in the Yard--was such a chirping, easy, hopeful little fellow,
that his attraction for Pancks was probably in the force of contrast.
Solitary, weak, and scantily acquainted with the most necessary words
of the only language in which he could communicate with the people about
him, he went with the stream of his fortunes, in a brisk way that was
new in those parts. With little to eat, and less to drink, and nothing
to wear but what he wore upon him, or had brought tied up in one of the
smallest bundles that ever were seen, he put as bright a face upon it as
if he were in the most flourishing circumstances when he first hobbled
up and down the Yard, humbly propitiating the general good-will with his
white teeth.
It was uphill work for a foreigner, lame or sound, to make his way with
the Bleeding Hearts. In the first place, they were vaguely persuaded
that every foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it
to be a sound constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to
his own country. They never thought of inquiring how many of their own
countrymen would be returned upon their hands from divers parts of the
world, if the principle were generally recognised; they considered it
particularly and peculiarly British. In the third place, they had a
notion that it was a sort of Divine visitation upon a foreigner that he
was not an Englishman, and that all kinds of calamities happened to
his country because it did things that England did not, and did not do
things that England did. In this belief, to be sure, they had long been
carefully trained by the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings, who were always
proclaiming to them, officially, that no country which failed to submit
itself to those two large families could possibly hope to be under the
protection of Providence; and who, when they believed it, disparaged
them in private as the most prejudiced people under the sun.