“You are a blue?” said the boy Lionel; “I don’t understand.”
“Young ‘un, I’m a Tory,—that’s blue; and Spruce is a Rad,—that’s pink! And, what is more to the purpose, he is a tailor, and I’m a cobbler.”
“Aha!” said the elder, with much interest; “more to the purpose is it? How so?”
The Cobbler put the forefinger of the right hand on the forefinger of the left; it is the gesture of a man about to ratiocinate or demonstrate, as Quintilian, in his remarks on the oratory of fingers, probably observes; or if he has failed to do so, it is a blot in his essay.
“You see, sir,” quoth the Cobbler, “that a man’s business has a deal to do with his manner of thinking. Every trade, I take it, has ideas as belong to it. Butchers don’t see life as bakers do; and if you talk to a dozen tallow-chandlers, then to a dozen blacksmiths, you will see tallow-chandlers are peculiar, and blacksmiths too.”
“You are a keen observer,” said he of the jean cap, admiringly; “your remark is new to me; I dare say it is true.”
“Course it is; and the stars have summat to do with it; for if they order a man’s calling, it stands to reason that they order a man’s mind to fit it. Now, a tailor sits on his board with others, and is always a-talking with ‘em, and a-reading the news; therefore he thinks, as his fellows do, smart and sharp, bang up to the day, but nothing ‘riginal and all his own, like. But a cobbler,” continued the man of leather, with a majestic air, “sits by hisself, and talks with hisself; and what he thinks gets into his head without being put there by another man’s tongue.”
“You enlighten me more and more,” said our friend with the nose in the air, bowing respectfully,—“a tailor is gregarious, a cobbler solitary. The gregarious go with the future, the solitary stick by the past. I understand why you are a Tory and perhaps a poet.”
“Well, a bit of one,” said the Cobbler, with an iron smile. “And many ‘s the cobbler who is a poet,—or discovers marvellous things in a crystal,—whereas a tailor, sir” (spoken with great contempt), “only sees the upper leather of the world’s sole in a newspaper.”
Here the conversation was interrupted by a sudden pressure of the crowd towards the theatre. The two young friends looked up, and saw that the new object of attraction was a little girl, who seemed scarcely ten years old, though in truth she was about two years older. She had just emerged from behind the curtain, made her obeisance to the crowd, and was now walking in front of the stage with the prettiest possible air of infantine solemnity. “Poor little thing!” said Lionel. “Poor little thing!” said the Cobbler. And had you been there, my reader, ten to one but you would have said the same. And yet she was attired in white satin, with spangled flounces and a tinsel jacket; and she wore a wreath of flowers (to be sure, the flowers were not real) on her long fair curls, with gaudy bracelets (to be sure, the stones were mock) on her slender arms. Still there was something in her that all this finery could not vulgarize; and since it could not vulgarize, you pitied her for it. She had one of those charming faces that look straight into the hearts of us all, young and old. And though she seemed quite self-possessed, there was no effrontery in her air, but the ease of a little lady, with a simple child’s unconsciousness that there was anything in her situation to induce you to sigh, “Poor thing!”
“You should see her act, young gents,” said the Cobbler: “she plays uncommon. But if you had seen him as taught her,—seen him a year ago.”
“Who’s he?”
“Waife, sir; mayhap you have heard speak of Waife?”
“I blush to say, no.”
“Why, he might have made his fortune at Common Garden; but that’s a long story. Poor fellow! he’s broke down now, anyhow. But she takes care of him, little darling: God bless thee!” and the Cobbler here exchanged a smile and a nod with the little girl, whose face brightened when she saw him amidst the crowd.
“By the brush and pallet of Raphael!” cried the elder of the young men, “before I am many hours older I must have that child’s head!”
“Her head, man!” cried the Cobbler, aghast.
“In my sketch-book. You are a poet,—I a painter. You know the little girl?”
“Don’t I! She and her grandfather lodge with me; her grandfather,—that’s Waife,—marvellous man! But they ill-uses him; and if it warn’t for her, he’d starve. He fed them all once: he can feed them no longer; he’d starve. That’s the world: they use up a genus, and when it falls on the road, push on; that’s what Joe Spruce calls a-progressing. But there’s the drum! they’re a-going to act; won’t you look in, gents?”
“Of course,” cried Lionel,—“of course. And, hark ye, Vance, we’ll toss up which shall be the first to take that little girl’s head.”
“Murderer in either sense of the word!” said Vance, with a smile that would have become Correggio if a tyro had offered to toss up which should be the first to paint a cherub.
CHAPTER II
The historian takes a view of the British stage as represented by the irregular drama, the regular having (ere the date of the events to which this narrative is restricted) disappeared from the vestiges of creation.
They entered the little theatre, and the Cobbler with them; but the last retired modestly to the threepenny row. The young gentlemen were favoured with reserved seats, price one shilling. “Very dear,” murmured Vance, as he carefully buttoned the pocket to which he restored a purse woven from links of steel, after the fashion of chain mail. Ah, Messieurs and Confreres the Dramatic Authors, do not flatter yourselves that we are about to give you a complacent triumph over the Grand Melodrame of “The Remorseless Baron and the Bandit’s Child.” We grant it was horrible rubbish, regarded in an aesthetic point of view, but it was mighty effective in the theatrical. Nobody yawned; you did not even hear a cough, nor the cry of that omnipresent baby, who is always sure to set up an unappeasable wail in the midmost interest of a classical five-act piece, represented for the first time on the metropolitan boards. Here the story rushed on, per fas aut nefas, and the audience went with it. Certes, some man who understood the stage must have put the incidents together, and then left it to each illiterate histrio to find the words,—words, my dear confreres, signify so little in an acting play. The movement is the thing. Grand secret! Analyze, practise it, and restore to grateful stars that lost Pleiad the British Acting Drama.
Of course the Bandit was an ill-used and most estimable man. He had some mysterious rights to the Estate and Castle of the Remorseless Baron. That titled usurper, therefore, did all in his power to hunt the Bandit out in his fastnesses and bring him to a bloody end. Here the interest centred itself in the Bandit’s child, who, we need not say, was the little girl in the wreath and spangles, styled in the playbill “Miss Juliet Araminta Wife,” and the incidents consisted in her various devices to foil the pursuit of the Baron and save her father. Some of these incidents were indebted to the Comic Muse, and kept the audience in a broad laugh. Her arch playfulness here was exquisite. With what vivacity she duped the High Sheriff, who had the commands of his king to take the Bandit alive or dead, into the belief that the very Lawyer employed by the Baron was the criminal in disguise, and what pearly teeth she showed when the Lawyer was seized and gagged! how dexterously she ascertained the weak point in the character of the “King’s Lieutenant” (jeune premier), who was deputed by his royal master to aid the Remorseless Baron in trouncing the Bandit! how cunningly she learned that he was in love with the Baron’s ward (jeune amoureuse), whom that unworthy noble intended to force into a marriage with himself on account of her fortune! how prettily she passed notes to and fro, the Lieutenant never suspecting that she was the Bandit’s child, and at last got the king’s soldier on her side, as the event proved! And oh, how gayly, and with what mimic art, she stole into the Baron’s castle, disguised as a witch, startled his conscience