"Some people, sir," remarked Lamps in a tone of apology, "are sometimes what they don′t like."
"Nobody knows that better than I do," sighed the other. "I have been what I don′t like, all my life."
"When I first took, sir," resumed Lamps, "to composing little Comic-Songs—like—"
Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour.
"—To composing little Comic-Songs-like—and what was more hard—to singing ′em afterwards," said Lamps, "it went against the grain at that time, it did indeed."
Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps′s eye, Barbox Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and put a foot on the top bar. "Why did you do it, then?" he asked after a short pause; abruptly enough, but in a softer tone. "If you didn′t want to do it, why did you do it? Where did you sing them? Public-house?"
To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: "Bedside."
At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes. "She′s got up!" Lamps announced, excited. "What lays in her power is sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it′s laid in her power to get up to-night, by George!"
The legend "Barbox Brothers," in large white letters on two black surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent street, and, when the owner of the legend had shivered on the pavement half an hour, what time the porter′s knocks at the Inn Door knocked up the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the close air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.
II.
"You remember me, Young Jackson?"
"What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was you who told me that was my name. It was you who told me that on every twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called a birthday. I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!"
"What am I like, Young Jackson?"
"You are like a blight all through the year to me. You hard-lined, thin- lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on. You are like the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things, for you make me abhor them."
"You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In another voice from another quarter.
"Most gratefully, sir. You were the ray of hope and prospering ambition in my life. When I attended your course, I believed that I should come to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy—even though I was still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me, every day. As I had done every, every, every day, through my school-time and from my earliest recollection."
"What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
"You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to reveal herself to me. I hear you again, as one of the hushed crowd of young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in them."
"You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In a grating voice from quite another quarter.
"Too well.
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