yet,” said Mrs. Pratchett, shutting her eyes and making as if she had just took a pill of unusual circumference, – which gave a remarkable force to her denial, – “nor yet any servant in this house. All have been changed, Mr. Christopher, within five year, and Somebody left his Luggage here before then.”
Inquiry of Miss Martin yielded (in the language of the Bard of A.1.) “confirmation strong.” So it had really and truly happened. Miss Martin is the young lady at the bar as makes out our bills; and though higher than I could wish considering her station, is perfectly well-behaved.
Farther investigations led to the disclosure that there was a bill against this Luggage to the amount of two sixteen six. The Luggage had been lying under the bedstead of 24 B over six year. The bedstead is a four-poster, with a deal of old hanging and valance, and is, as I once said, probably connected with more than 24 Bs, – which I remember my hearers was pleased to laugh at, at the time.
I don’t know why, – when DO we know why? – but this Luggage laid heavy on my mind. I fell a wondering about Somebody, and what he had got and been up to. I couldn’t satisfy my thoughts why he should leave so much Luggage against so small a bill. For I had the Luggage out within a day or two and turned it over, and the following were the items: – A black portmanteau, a black bag, a desk, a dressing-case, a brown-paper parcel, a hat-box, and an umbrella strapped to a walking-stick. It was all very dusty and fluey. I had our porter up to get under the bed and fetch it out; and though he habitually wallows in dust, – swims in it from morning to night, and wears a close-fitting waistcoat with black calimanco sleeves for the purpose, – it made him sneeze again, and his throat was that hot with it that it was obliged to be cooled with a drink of Allsopp’s draft.
The Luggage so got the better of me, that instead of having it put back when it was well dusted and washed with a wet cloth, – previous to which it was so covered with feathers that you might have thought it was turning into poultry, and would by-and-by begin to Lay, – I say, instead of having it put back, I had it carried into one of my places down-stairs. There from time to time I stared at it and stared at it, till it seemed to grow big and grow little, and come forward at me and retreat again, and go through all manner of performances resembling intoxication. When this had lasted weeks, – I may say months, and not be far out, – I one day thought of asking Miss Martin for the particulars of the Two sixteen six total. She was so obliging as to extract it from the books, – it dating before her time, – and here follows a true copy:
Mem.: January 1st, 1857. He went out after dinner, directing luggage to be ready when he called for it. Never called.
So far from throwing a light upon the subject, this bill appeared to me, if I may so express my doubts, to involve it in a yet more lurid halo. Speculating it over with the Mistress, she informed me that the luggage had been advertised in the Master’s time as being to be sold after such and such a day to pay expenses, but no farther steps had been taken. (I may here remark, that the Mistress is a widow in her fourth year. The Master was possessed of one of those unfortunate constitutions in which Spirits turns to Water, and rises in the ill-starred Victim.)
My speculating it over, not then only, but repeatedly, sometimes with the Mistress, sometimes with one, sometimes with another, led up to the Mistress’s saying to me, – whether at first in joke or in earnest, or half joke and half earnest, it matters not:
“Christopher, I am going to make you a handsome offer.”
(If this should meet her eye, – a lovely blue, – may she not take it ill my mentioning that if I had been eight or ten year younger, I would have done as much by her! That is, I would have made her a offer. It is for others than me to denominate it a handsome one.)
“Christopher, I am going to make you a handsome offer.”
“Put a name to it, ma’am.”
“Look here, Christopher. Run over the articles of Somebody’s Luggage. You’ve got it all by heart, I know.”
“A black portmanteau, ma’am, a black bag, a desk, a dressing-case, a brown-paper parcel, a hat-box, and an umbrella strapped to a walking-stick.”
“All just as they were left. Nothing opened, nothing tampered with.”
“You are right, ma’am. All locked but the brown-paper parcel, and that sealed.”
The Mistress was leaning on Miss Martin’s desk at the bar-window, and she taps the open book that lays upon the desk, – she has a pretty-made hand to be sure, – and bobs her head over it and laughs.
“Come,” says she, “Christopher. Pay me Somebody’s bill, and you shall have Somebody’s Luggage.”
I rather took to the idea from the first moment; but,
“It mayn’t be worth the money,” I objected, seeming to hold back.
“That’s a Lottery,” says the Mistress, folding her arms upon the book, – it ain’t her hands alone that’s pretty made, the observation extends right up her arms. “Won’t you venture two pound sixteen shillings and sixpence in the Lottery? Why, there’s no blanks!” says the Mistress; laughing and bobbing her head again, “you must win. If you lose, you must win! All prizes in this Lottery! Draw a blank, and remember, Gentlemen-Sportsmen, you’ll still be entitled to a black portmanteau, a black bag, a desk, a dressing-case, a sheet of brown paper, a hat-box, and an umbrella strapped to a walking-stick!”
To make short of it, Miss Martin come round me, and Mrs. Pratchett come round me, and the Mistress she was completely round me already, and all the women in the house come round me, and if it had been Sixteen two instead of Two sixteen, I should have thought myself well out of it. For what can you do when they do come round you?
So I paid the money – down – and such a laughing as there was among ’em! But I turned the tables on ’em regularly, when I said:
“My family-name is Blue-Beard. I’m going to open Somebody’s Luggage all alone in the Secret Chamber, and not a female eye catches sight of the contents!”
Whether I thought proper to have the firmness to keep to this, don’t signify, or whether any female eye, and if any, how many, was really present when the opening of the Luggage came off. Somebody’s Luggage is the question at present: Nobody’s eyes, nor yet noses.
What I still look at most, in connection with that Luggage, is the extraordinary quantity of writing-paper, and all written on! And not our paper neither, – not the paper charged in the bill, for we know our paper, – so he must have been always at it. And he had crumpled up this writing of his, everywhere, in every part and parcel of his luggage. There was writing in his dressing-case, writing in his boots, writing among his shaving-tackle, writing in his hat-box, writing folded away down among the very whalebones of his umbrella.
His clothes wasn’t bad, what there was of ’em. His dressing-case was poor, – not a particle of silver stopper, – bottle apertures with nothing in ’em, like empty little dog-kennels, – and a most searching description of tooth-powder diffusing itself around, as under a deluded mistake that all the chinks in the fittings was divisions in teeth. His clothes I parted with, well enough, to a second-hand dealer not far from St. Clement’s Danes, in the Strand, – him as the officers in the Army mostly dispose of their uniforms to, when hard pressed with debts of honour, if I may judge from their coats and epaulets diversifying the window with their backs towards the public. The same party bought in one lot the portmanteau, the bag, the desk, the dressing-case, the hat-box, the umbrella,
