am waiting till you have found me a place, too," the young man replied. "I too would wish to experience the grateful heart. It is peculiar to Whitechapel."
"I was going to say," Angela went on, "that I hear you were connected with old Mr. Messenger for many years."
"I was," Mr. Bunker replied, and straightened his back with pride. "I was—everybody knows that I was his confidential factotum and his familiar friend, as David was unto Jonathan."
"Indeed! I used to—to—hear about him formerly a great deal."
"Which made his final behavior the more revolting," Mr. Bunker continued, completing his sentence.
"Really! How did he finally behave?"
"It was always—ah! for twenty years, between us, 'Bunker, my friend,' or 'Bunker, my trusted friend,' tell me this, go there, find out that. I bought his houses; I let his houses; I told him who were responsible tenants; I warned him when shooting of moons seemed likely; I found out their antecedents and told him their stories. He had hundreds of houses, and he knew everybody that lived in them, and what their fathers were and their mothers were, and even their grandmothers. For he was a Whitechapel man by birth, and was proud of it."
"But—the shameful behavior?"
"All the time"—he shook his head and looked positively terrible in his wrath—"all the time I was piling up his property for him, houses here, streets there, he would encourage me in his way. 'Go on, Bunker,' he would say, 'go on. A man who works for duty, like yourself, and to please his employers, and not out of consideration for the pay, is one of a million;' as I certainly was, Miss Kennedy. 'One of a million,' he said; 'and you will have your reward after I am gone.' Over and over again he said this, and of course I reckoned on it, and only wondered how much it would tot up to. Something, I thought, in four figures; it couldn't be less than four figures." Here he stopped and rubbed his bald head again.
Angela caught the eyes of his nephew, who in his seat behind was silently laughing. He had caught the situation which she herself now readily comprehended. She pictured to herself this blatant Professor of Disinterestedness and Zeal buzzing and fluttering about her grandfather, and the quiet old man egging him on to more protestations.
"Four figures, for certain it would be. Once I asked his advice as to how I should invest that reward when it did come. He laughed, miss. Yes, for once he laughed, which I never saw him do before or after. I often think he must be sorry now to think of that time he laughed. Yah! I'm glad of it."
So far as Angela could make it, his joy grew out of a persuasion that this particular fit of laughter was somehow interfering with her grandfather's present comforts, but perhaps she was wrong.
"He laughed," continued Mr. Bunker, "and he said that house property, in a rising neighborhood, and if it could be properly looked after, was the best investment for money. House property, he said, as far as the money would go."
"And when he died?" asked the listener, with another glance at Harry, the unsympathetic, whose face expressed the keenest enjoyment.
"Nothing, if you please; not one brass farthing. Hunks! Hunks!" He grew perfectly purple, and clutched his fist as if he would fain be punching of heads. "Not one word of me in his will. All for the girl: millions—millions—for her; and for me who done his work—nothing."
"You have the glow of virtue," said his nephew.
"It seems hard," said Angela quickly, for the man looked dangerous, and seemed capable of transferring his wrath to his nephew; "it seems hard to get nothing if anything was promised."
"It seems a pity," Harry chimed in, "that so much protesting was in vain. Perhaps Mr. Messenger took him at his word. What a dreadful thing to be believed!"
"A Hunks," replied Mr. Bunker; "a miserly Hunks."
"Let me write a letter for you," said Harry, "to the heiress; we might forward it with a deputation of grateful hearts from Stepney."
"Mind your own business," growled his uncle. "Well, miss, you wanted to hear about Mr. Messenger, and you have heard. What next?"
"I should very much like, if it were possible," Angela replied, "to see this great brewery, of which one hears so much. Could you, for instance, take me over, Mr. Bunker?"
"At a percentage," whispered his nephew, loud enough for both to hear.
"Messenger's brewery," he replied, "is as familiar to me as my own fireside. I've grown up beside it. I know all the people in it. They all know me. Perhaps they respect me. For it was well known that a handsome legacy was promised and expected. And nothing, after all. As for taking you over, of course I can. We will go at once. It will take time; and time is money."
"May I go too?" asked Harry.
"No, sir; you may not. It shall not be said in the Mile End Road that an industrious man like myself, a worker for clients, was seen in working-time with an idler."
The walk from Stepney Green to Messenger & Marsden's Brewery is not far. You turn to the left if your house is on one side, and to the right if it is on the other; then you pass a little way down one street, and a little way, turning again to the left, up another—a direction which will guide you quite clearly. You then find yourself before a great gateway, the portals of which are closed; beside it is a smaller door, at which, in a little lodge, sits one who guards the entrance.
Mr. Bunker nodded to the porter and entered unchallenged. He led the way across a court to a sort of outer office.
"Here," he said, "is the book for the visitors' names. We have them from all countries; great lords and ladies; foreign princes; and all the brewers from Germany and America, who come to get a wrinkle. Write your name in it, too. Something, let me tell you, to have your name in such noble company."
She took a pen and wrote hurriedly.
Mr. Bunker looked over her shoulder.
"Ho! ho!" he said, "that is a good one! See what you've written."
In fact, she had written her own name—Angela Marsden Messenger.
She blushed violently.
"How stupid of me! I was thinking of the heiress—they said it was her name."
She carefully effaced the name, and wrote under it, "A. M. Kennedy."
"That's better. And now come along. A good joke, too! Fancy their astonishment if they had come to read it!"
"Does she often come—the heiress?"
"Never once been anigh the place; never seen it; never asks after it; never makes an inquiry about it. Draws the money and despises it."
"I wonder she has not got more curiosity."
"Ah! It's a shame for such a property to come to a girl—a girl of twenty-one. Thirteen acres it covers—think of that! Seven hundred people it employs, most of them married. Why, if it was only to see her own vats, you'd think she'd got off of her luxurious pillows for once, and come here."
They entered a great hall remarkable at first for a curious smell, not offensive, but strong and rather pungent. In it stood half-a-dozen enormous vats, closed by wooden slides, like shutters, fitting tightly. A man standing by opened one of these, and presently Angela was able to make out, through the volumes of steam, something bright going round, and a brown mess going with it.
"That is hops. Hops for the biggest brewery, the richest, in all England. And all belonging to a girl who, likely enough, doesn't drink more than a pint and a half a day."
"I dare say not," said Angela; "it must be a dreadful thing indeed to have so much beer, and to be able to drink so little."
He led the way upstairs into another great hall, where there was the grinding of machinery and another smell, sweet and heavy.
"This is where we crush the malt," said Mr. Bunker—"see!" He stooped, and picked out of a great