Sketches by Boz, illustrative of everyday life and every-day people - Charles Dickens (best way to read an ebook .txt) 📗

of sauterne, bucellas, and sherry, and took wine with everybody—except Tibbs. No one ever thought of him.

Between the fish and an intimated sirloin, there was a prolonged interval.

Here was an opportunity for Mr. Hicks. He could not resist the singularly appropriate quotation—


‘But beef is rare within these oxless isles;
Goats’ flesh there is, no doubt, and kid, and mutton,
And when a holiday upon them smiles,
A joint upon their barbarous spits they put on.’


‘Very ungentlemanly behaviour,’ thought little Mrs. Tibbs, ‘to talk in that way.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr. Calton, filling his glass. ‘Tom Moore is my poet.’

‘And mine,’ said Mrs. Maplesone.

‘And mine,’ said Miss Julia.

‘And mine,’ added Mr. Simpson.

‘Look at his compositions,’ resumed the knocker.

‘To be sure,’ said Simpson, with confidence.

‘Look at Don Juan,’ replied Mr. Septimus Hicks.

‘Julia’s letter,’ suggested Miss Matilda.

‘Can anything be grander than the Fire Worshippers?’ inquired Miss Julia.

‘To be sure,’ said Simpson.

‘Or Paradise and the Peri,’ said the old beau.

‘Yes; or Paradise and the Peer,’ repeated Simpson, who thought he was getting through it capitally.

‘It’s all very well,’ replied Mr. Septimus Hicks, who, as we have before hinted, never had read anything but Don Juan. ‘Where will you find anything finer than the description of the siege, at the commencement of the seventh canto?’

‘Talking of a siege,’ said Tibbs, with a mouthful of bread—‘when I was in the volunteer corps, in eighteen hundred and six, our commanding officer was Sir Charles Rampart; and one day, when we were exercising on the ground on which the London University now stands, he says, says he, Tibbs (calling me from the ranks), Tibbs—’

‘Tell your master, James,’ interrupted Mrs. Tibbs, in an awfully distinct tone, ‘tell your master if he _won’t_ carve those fowls, to send them to me.’ The discomfited volunteer instantly set to work, and carved the fowls almost as expeditiously as his wife operated on the haunch of mutton. Whether he ever finished the story is not known but, if he did, nobody heard it.

As the ice was now broken, and the new inmates more at home, every member of the company felt more at ease. Tibbs himself most certainly did, because he went to sleep immediately after dinner. Mr. Hicks and the ladies discoursed most eloquently about poetry, and the theatres, and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters; and Mr. Calton followed up what everybody said, with continuous double knocks. Mrs. Tibbs highly approved of every observation that fell from Mrs. Maplesone; and as Mr. Simpson sat with a smile upon his face and said ‘Yes,’ or ‘Certainly,’ at intervals of about four minutes each, he received full credit for understanding what was going forward. The gentlemen rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room very shortly after they had left the dining-parlour. Mrs. Maplesone and Mr. Calton played cribbage, and the ‘young people’ amused themselves with music and conversation. The Miss Maplesones sang the most fascinating duets, and accompanied themselves on guitars, ornamented with bits of ethereal blue ribbon. Mr. Simpson put on a pink waistcoat, and said he was in raptures; and Mr. Hicks felt in the seventh heaven of poetry or the seventh canto of Don Juan—it was the same thing to him. Mrs. Tibbs was quite charmed with the newcomers; and Mr. Tibbs spent the evening in his usual way—he went to sleep, and woke up, and went to sleep again, and woke at supper-time.

* * * * *


We are not about to adopt the licence of novel-writers, and to let ‘years roll on;’ but we will take the liberty of requesting the reader to suppose that six months have elapsed, since the dinner we have described, and that Mrs. Tibbs’s boarders have, during that period, sang, and danced, and gone to theatres and exhibitions, together, as ladies and gentlemen, wherever they board, often do. And we will beg them, the period we have mentioned having elapsed, to imagine farther, that Mr. Septimus Hicks received, in his own bedroom (a front attic), at an early hour one morning, a note from Mr. Calton, requesting the favour of seeing him, as soon as convenient to himself, in his (Calton’s) dressing-room on the second-floor back.

‘Tell Mr. Calton I’ll come down directly,’ said Mr. Septimus to the boy. ‘Stop—is Mr. Calton unwell?’ inquired this excited walker of hospitals, as he put on a bed-furniture-looking dressing-gown.

‘Not as I knows on, sir,’ replied the boy. ‘ Please, sir, he looked rather rum, as it might be.’

‘Ah, that’s no proof of his being ill,’ returned Hicks, unconsciously. ‘Very well: I’ll be down directly.’ Downstairs ran the boy with the message, and down went the excited Hicks himself, almost as soon as the message was delivered. ‘Tap, tap.’ ‘Come in.’—Door opens, and discovers Mr. Calton sitting in an easy chair. Mutual shakes of the hand exchanged, and Mr. Septimus Hicks motioned to a seat. A short pause. Mr. Hicks coughed, and Mr. Calton took a pinch of snuff. It was one of those interviews where neither party knows what to say. Mr. Septimus Hicks broke silence.

‘I received a note—’ he said, very tremulously, in a voice like a Punch with a cold.

‘Yes,’ returned the other, ‘you did.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Yes.’

Now, although this dialogue must have been satisfactory, both gentlemen felt there was something more important to be said; therefore they did as most men in such a situation would have done—they looked at the table with a determined aspect. The conversation had been opened, however, and Mr. Calton had made up his mind to continue it with a regular double knock. He always spoke very pompously.

‘Hicks,’ said he, ‘I have sent for you, in consequence of certain arrangements which are pending in this house, connected with a marriage.’

‘With a marriage!’ gasped Hicks, compared with whose expression of countenance, Hamlet’s, when he sees his father’s ghost, is pleasing and composed.

‘With a marriage,’ returned the knocker. ‘I have sent for you to prove the great confidence I can repose in you.’

‘And will you betray me?’ eagerly inquired Hicks, who in his alarm had even forgotten to quote.

‘_I_ betray _you_! Won’t _you_ betray_ me_?’

‘Never: no one shall know, to my dying day, that you had a hand in the business,’ responded the agitated Hicks, with an inflamed countenance, and his hair standing on end as if he were on the stool of an electrifying machine in full operation.

‘People must know that, some time or other—within a year, I imagine,’ said Mr. Calton, with an air of great self-complacency. ‘We _may_ have a family.’

‘_We_!—That won’t affect you, surely?’

‘The devil it won’t!’

‘No! how can it?’ said the bewildered Hicks. Calton was too much inwrapped in the contemplation of his happiness to see the equivoque between Hicks and himself; and threw himself back in his chair. ‘Oh, Matilda!’ sighed the antique beau, in a lack-a-daisical voice, and applying his right hand a little to the left of the fourth button of his waistcoat, counting from the bottom. ‘Oh, Matilda!’

‘What Matilda?’ inquired Hicks, starting up.

‘Matilda Maplesone,’ responded the other, doing the same.

‘I marry her to-morrow morning,’ said Hicks.

‘It’s false,’ rejoined his companion: ‘I marry her!’

‘You marry her?’

‘I marry her!’

‘You marry Matilda Maplesone?’

‘Matilda Maplesone.’

‘_Miss_ Maplesone marry _you_?’

‘Miss Maplesone! No; Mrs. Maplesone.’

‘Good Heaven!’ said Hicks, falling into his chair: ‘You marry the mother, and I the daughter!’

‘Most extraordinary circumstance!’ replied Mr. Calton, ‘and rather inconvenient too; for the fact is, that owing to Matilda’s wishing to keep her intention secret from her daughters until the ceremony had taken place, she doesn’t like applying to any of her friends to give her away. I entertain an objection to making the affair known to my acquaintance just now; and the consequence is, that I sent to you to know whether you’d oblige me by acting as father.’

‘I should have been most happy, I assure you,’ said Hicks, in a tone of condolence; ‘but, you see, I shall be acting as bridegroom. One character is frequently a consequence of the other; but it is not usual to act in both at the same time. There’s Simpson—I have no doubt he’ll do it for you.’

‘I don’t like to ask him,’ replied Calton, ‘he’s such a donkey.’

Mr. Septimus Hicks looked up at the ceiling, and down at the floor; at last an idea struck him. ‘Let the man of the house, Tibbs, be the father,’ he suggested; and then he quoted, as peculiarly applicable to Tibbs and the pair—


‘Oh Powers of Heaven! what dark eyes meets she there?
’Tis—’tis her father’s—fixed upon the pair.’


‘The idea has struck me already,’ said Mr. Calton: ‘but, you see, Matilda, for what reason I know not, is very anxious that Mrs. Tibbs should know nothing about it, till it’s all over. It’s a natural delicacy, after all, you know.’

‘He’s the best-natured little man in existence, if you manage him properly,’ said Mr. Septimus Hicks. ‘Tell him not to mention it to his wife, and assure him she won’t mind it, and he’ll do it directly. My marriage is to be a secret one, on account of the mother and _my_ father; therefore he must be enjoined to secrecy.’

A small double knock, like a presumptuous single one, was that instant heard at the street-door. It was Tibbs; it could be no one else; for no one else occupied five minutes in rubbing his shoes. He had been out to pay the baker’s bill.

‘Mr. Tibbs,’ called Mr. Calton in a very bland tone, looking over the banisters.

‘Sir!’ replied he of the dirty face.

‘Will you have the kindness to step up-stairs for a moment?’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Tibbs, delighted to be taken notice of. The bedroom-door was carefully closed, and Tibbs, having put his hat on the floor (as most timid men do), and been accommodated with a seat, looked as astounded as if he were suddenly summoned before the familiars of the Inquisition.

‘A rather unpleasant occurrence, Mr. Tibbs,’ said Calton, in a very portentous manner, ‘obliges me to consult you, and to beg you will not communicate what I am about to say, to your wife.’

Tibbs acquiesced, wondering in his own mind what the deuce the other could have done, and imagining that at least he must have broken the best decanters.

Mr. Calton resumed; ‘I am placed, Mr. Tibbs, in rather an unpleasant situation.’

Tibbs looked at Mr. Septimus Hicks, as if he thought Mr. H.’s being in the immediate vicinity of his fellow-boarder might constitute the unpleasantness of his situation; but as he did not exactly know what to say, he merely ejaculated the monosyllable ‘Lor!’

‘Now,’ continued the knocker, ‘let me beg you will exhibit no manifestations of surprise, which may be overheard by the domestics, when I tell you—command your feelings of astonishment—that two inmates of this house intend to