Уилки Коллинз - Hide and Seek

“The public like excitement,” soliloquized Mr. Jubber, as he disappeared behind the red curtain. “I must have all this in the bills to-morrow. It’s safe to draw at least thirty shillings extra into the house at night.”

In the meantime, Valentine, after some blundering at wrong doors, at last found his way out of the circus, and stood alone on the cool grass, in the cloudless autumn moonlight. He struck his stick violently on the ground, which at that moment represented to him the head of Mr. Jubber; and was about to return straight to the rectory, when he heard a breathless voice behind him, calling:—“Stop, sir! oh, do please stop for one minute!”

He turned round. A buxom woman in a tawdry and tattered gown was running towards him as fast as her natural impediments to quick progression would permit.

“Please, sir,” she cried—“Please, sir, wasn’t you the gentleman that was taken queer at seeing our little Foundling? I was peeping through the red curtain, sir, just at the time.”

Instead of answering the question, Valentine instantly began to rhapsodize about the child’s face.

“Oh, sir! if you know anything about her,” interposed the woman, “for God’s sake don’t scruple to tell it to me! I’m only Mrs. Peckover, sir, the wife of Jemmy Peckover, the clown, that you saw in the circus to-night. But I took and nursed the little thing by her poor mother’s own wish; and ever since that time—”

“My dear, good soul,” said Mr. Blyth, “I know nothing of the poor little creature. I only wish from the bottom of my heart that I could do something to help her and make her happy. If Lavvie and I had had such an angel of a child as that,” continued Valentine, clasping his hands together fervently, “deaf and dumb as she is, we should have thanked God for her every day of our lives!”

Mrs. Peckover was apparently not much used to hear such sentiments as these from strangers. She stared up at Mr. Blyth with two big tears rolling over her plump cheeks.

“Mrs. Peckover! Hullo there, Peck! where are you?” roared a stern voice from the stable department of the circus, just as the clown’s wife seemed about to speak again.

Mrs. Peckover started, curtsied, and, without uttering another word, went back even faster than she had come out. Valentine looked after her intently, but made no attempt to follow: he was thinking too much of the child to think of that. When he moved again, it was to return to the rectory.

He penetrated at once into the library, where Doctor Joyce was spelling over the “Rubbleford Mercury,” while Mrs. Joyce sat opposite to him, knitting a fancy jacket for her youngest but one. He was hardly inside the door before he began to expatiate in the wildest manner on the subject of the beautiful deaf and dumb girl. If ever man was in love with a child at first sight, he was that man. As an artist, as a gentleman of refined tastes, and as the softest-hearted of male human beings, in all three capacities, he was enslaved by that little innocent, sad face. He made the Doctor’s head whirl again; he fairly stopped Mrs. Joyce’s progress with the fancy jacket, as he sang the child’s praises, and compared her face to every angel’s face that had ever been painted, from the days of Giotto to the present time. At last, when he had fairly exhausted his hearers and himself, he dashed abruptly out of the room, to cool down his excitement by a moonlight walk in the rectory garden.

“What a very odd man he is!” said Mrs. Joyce, taking up a dropped stitch in the fancy jacket.

“Valentine, my love, is the best creature in the world,” rejoined the doctor, folding up the Rubbleford Mercury, and directing it for the post; “but, as I often used to tell his poor father (who never would believe me), a little cracked. I’ve known him go on in this way about children before—though I must own, not quite so wildly, perhaps, as he talked just now.”

“Do you think he’ll do anything imprudent about the child? Poor thing! I’m sure I pity her as heartily as anybody can.”

“I don’t presume to think,” answered the doctor, calmly pressing the blotting-paper over the address he had just written. “Valentine is one of those people who defy all conjecture. No one can say what he will do, or what he won’t. A man who cannot resist an application for shelter and supper from any stray cur who wags his tail at him in the street; a man who blindly believes in the troubles of begging-letter impostors; a man whom I myself caught, last time he was down here, playing at marbles with three of my charity-boys in the street, and promising to treat them to hardbake and gingerbeer afterwards, is—in short, is not a man whose actions it is possible to speculate on.”

Here the door opened, and Mr. Blyth’s head was popped in, surmounted by a ragged straw hat with a sky-blue ribbon round it. “Doctor,” said Valentine, “may I ask an excellent woman, with whom I have made acquaintance, to bring the child here to-morrow morning for you and Mrs. Joyce to see?”

“Certainly,” said the good-humored rector, laughing. “The child by all means, and the excellent woman too.”

“Not if it’s Miss Florinda Beverley!” interposed Mrs. Joyce (who had read the Circus placard). “Florinda, indeed! Jezebel would be a better name for her!”

“My dear Madam, it isn’t Florinda,” cried Valentine, eagerly. “I quite agree with you; her name ought to be Jezebel. And, what’s worse, her legs are out of drawing.”

“Mr. Blyth!!!” exclaimed Mrs. Joyce, indignant at this professional criticism on Jezebel’s legs.

“Why don’t you tell us at once who the excellent woman is?” cried the doctor, secretly tickled by the allusion which had shocked his wife.

“Her name’s Peckover,” said Valentine; “she’s a respectable married woman; she doesn’t ride in the circus at all; and she nursed the poor child by her mother’s own wish.”

“We shall be delighted to see her to-morrow,” said the warm-hearted rector—“or, no—stop! Not to-morrow; I shall be out. The day after. Cake and cowslip wine for the deaf and dumb child at twelve o’clock—eh, my dear?”

“That’s right! God bless you! you’re always kindness itself,” cried Valentine; “I’ll find out Mrs. Peckover, and let her know. Not a wink of sleep for me to-night—never mind!” Here Valentine suddenly shut the door, then as suddenly opened it again, and added, “I mean to finish that infernal horse-picture to-morrow, and go to the circus again in the evening.” With these words he vanished; and they heard him soon afterwards whistling his favorite “Drops of Brandy,” in the rectory garden.

“Cracked! cracked!” cried the doctor. “Dear old Valentine!”

“I’m afraid his principles are very loose,” said Mrs. Joyce, whose thoughts still ran on the unlucky professional allusion to Jezebel’s legs.

The next morning, when Mr. Blyth presented himself at the stables, and went on with the portrait of the cover-hack, the squire had no longer the slightest reason to complain of the painter’s desire to combine in his work picturesqueness of effect with accuracy of resemblance. Valentine argued no longer about introducing “light and shade,” or “keeping the background subdued in tone.” His thoughts were all with the deaf and dumb child and Mrs. Peckover; and he smudged away recklessly, just as he was told, without once uttering so much as a word of protest. By the evening he had concluded his labor. The squire said it was one of the best portraits of a horse that had ever been taken: to which piece of criticism the writer of the present narrative is bound in common candor to add, that it was also the very worst picture that Mr. Blyth had ever painted.

On returning to Rubbleford, Valentine proceeded at once to the circus; placing himself, as nearly as he could, in the same position which he had occupied the night before.