with a piece of paper and a pencil, he suddenly stopped short, for he saw that he was not alone, and shuffling off his high stool he hurried towards the new-comer, in the hope that some solicitor had sent orders for some large amount of work, or that, better still, an estimate was wanted for a new magazine.
“Any chance of a job, sir?” said the new-comer, who might have been Septimus Hardon twenty years older, and more shabby. There was ‘old compositor’ oozing out of him at every corner, and the corners in his person were many; he smelt of stale tobacco-smoke, and he was taking almost his last pinch of snuff out of a dirty piece of paper, with his long, lithe, active fingers as Septimus Hardon approached him. A shabby black frock-coat was buttoned tightly to his chin; his shiny black trousers had the gloss of age thick upon them; Wellington boots were upon his feet that rivalled his tall hat for dilapidations; old, sallow, dirty, and wild-looking, he was not the man a master would have employed unless from some latent idea that he suited the district. “Any chance of a job, sir?”
Septimus Hardon shook his head and sighed, which was, to say the least of it, unbusiness-like.
The old man echoed the sigh, leaned one hand upon the case of type at his elbow, and began to finger the letters, bringing up the bright unused types from the bottom of the boxes. He then sighed again, took in at one glance the fittings of the office, and ended by fixing his eyes upon the owner.
“Might do a deal of work with all this, sir.”
Septimus Hardon nodded drearily, and sighed again, instead of promptly ordering the man off his premises.
“Yes; should be glad of an hour’s work or so, sir. Seems hard here in this world of ours that when a man’s ready and willing to work he can’t get it to do, sir; don’t it?”
Septimus nodded, and looked hard at the man, thinking how his was after all the worse lot.
“I’m faint, sir,” continued the old printer, “and hungry, and hard up;” and then he looked down at his clothes with a dreary smile upon his grim, unshorn face.
“I would give you work with pleasure,” said Septimus; “but I might as well close the office for all that comes to my share.”
The man scraped the last of his snuff out of the shabby piece of newspaper, and lost it all beneath his long dirty finger and thumb-nails; when, not to disappoint his itching organ, he ran a lean finger along a ledge where dust lay thick, and administered it to his nose in an absent way, snapped his fingers loudly to get rid of the residue, and then slowly turned to go; but, on reaching the door, he faced round again:
“If you’d stand an advance of a shilling, sir, I’d come honestly another time and work it out; for I am hard up, sir, and no mistake.”
Mistake there certainly was none; but shillings were then scarce things with Septimus Hardon. A shilling, the sum tossed carelessly to the cabman for a few hundred yards’ ride, meant, perhaps, the dinner of himself and family; and he knew in his heart that the odds were very long against his ever seeing man or shilling again; but there was so great a knowledge of want in his heart that he could not bear to see it in others, and almost the last shilling in his pocket was slipped into the visitor’s hand.
The old printer took the money with his trembling fingers; looked at it, then at the donor; tried to speak, but choked over it; and then, with something like a maundering tear in each eye, he shuffled out of the office, taking with him: The solicitor’s work; The magazine estimate; and, most needed of all, Septimus Hardon’s shilling.
There was so little weight in the pocket before, that the shilling was not missed; and in spite of the black look of his affairs there was something in the act which made Septimus Hardon’s heart feel light as his pocket, as, thrusting his papers into the desk and locking it, he went and stood before a piece of looking-glass and stretched his face to take out the care-wrinkles, smiled two or three times to give a pleasant tarnish to his countenance, and then, loudly humming a tune, he hurried up to the first-floor, where Mrs Septimus, Lucy, and the children, were located.
Carey-street was a most desirable place for residence or business, as any landlord would have told you in the old days, before the houses I write of were carted away by contractors, and huge law-courts threatened in their stead. Lucy Grey knew the place now by heart. There was generally something out of the common way to be seen there, in spite of the place being so retired and its echoes so seldom disturbed by carriages, unless by those of the judges, when coachman and footman thought it advisable to wash down the legal dust of the place by copious draughts of porter at the Barley Mow or the Blue Horse. The dust-cart – that hearse for bearing off the remains of many a dancing, merry, cheery fire – might be seen there in the morning; and at every cloud of dust raised by the emptying of the fantail man’s basket, scraps of parchment and torn folios of cold, bitter cold crabbed writing, were caught up by the fierce winds of the place, and away they went scudding down the street, to the amusement of Septimus Hardon’s children; for the mocking wind tossed the scraps on high, as if to show how light and empty they were. Interesting words they were too, mostly about “our client” and his “heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns;” while of a morning the man whom Septimus Hardon himself knew well as a class, “our client” himself, might be seen in the streets; now early in his suit – Chancery suit, perhaps, – wrapped in it and looking busy and important, glossy and shiny, and, on the whole, apparently liking it. Now with the suit old and shabby, with the pocket-holes frayed and worn with the passage in and out of papers – papers always without end, while the owner crept along, dejected and dismal as Septimus himself, ready at times to enter his office, and sit down and make him the repository of the fact that he hoped the Lord Chancellor or his Vice will give judgment next week. Now he went along, silent and thoughtful; now he brightened up and became energetic, and gesticulated to an audience composed of the apple-woman at the corner, who sat there beneath the lamp summer and winter, like some dowdy old hen in a nest, for her lower extremities were all tightly tucked in a worn sieve-basket.
“Our client” generally went into Carey-street to eat his sandwiches; now looking crumby, now crusty, as the case might be, while he paced irresolutely up and down, or round into the Lane or Portugal-street, or even into the Fields for a change, to gaze at the trees beyond those railings, upon every spike of which a disappointed or broken heart might be stuck by way of ornament. As before said, “our client” had generally plenty of papers with him; some yellow and frayed, some new, but all carefully tied with red tape, which by its friction has a wonderful effect upon black-kid gloves, soon wearing out the fingers, as the papers are untied in doorways for reference while the tape-string is held in the mouth.
“Our client” was decidedly the principal object of interest in Carey-street; but there were thin, clever, cold-looking lawyers; thin, cold, and underpaid clerks, blue-bag bearing; portly thick clerks, warm, glossy, and gold-chained, red-bag bearing – bags gasping and choking fearfully with their contents – choking horribly with the papers thrust into them, sticking out of their very mouths; long-headed barristers, whose eyes seemed to have turned cold and oysterish – meaningless, and as if gazing within – men upon whose long heads briefs rained incessantly; men in gowns, men bewigged, and with the insignia of their rank put on all ways – straight, crooked, here awry, and there awry, with the frontal apex descending upon the nose, and the caudal beauty behind raised at right angles to display the undergrowth, black, brown, grey, or sandy, or perhaps resting upon the nape of the wearer’s neck, with the tails beating a white powdery tune upon his back, like a hare’s feet upon a tabor; shabby witnesses, shabby porters, shabby inhabitants; dirt everywhere, and a sharp, gritty, pouncey dust flying before the wind to bring tears into the eyes.
Lucy Grey knew all this by heart, and so did Septimus Hardon’s children – lessons learned from the windows, or during their walks, when Lucy showed them the wonders of the shops at hand, and that ever-banging, restless door where the shabby law-writers went in and out, night
