said the old man, shaking his head as he again looked at the holly. “His mother — my son William’s my youngest son — and I, have sat among ’em all, boys and girls, little children and babies, many a year, when the berries like these were not shining half so bright all round us, as their bright faces. Many of ’em are gone; she’s gone; and my son George (our eldest, who was her pride more than all the rest!) is fallen very low: but I can see them, when I look here, alive and healthy, as they used to be in those days; and I can see him, thank God, in his innocence. It’s a blessed thing to me, at eighty-seven.”
The keen look that had been fixed upon him with so much earnestness, had gradually sought the ground.
“When my circumstances got to be not so good as formerly, through not being honestly dealt by, and I first come here to be custodian,” said the old man, “ — which was upwards of fifty years ago — where’s my son William? More than half a century ago, William!”
“That’s what I say, father,” replied the son, as promptly and dutifully as before, “that’s exactly where it is. Two times ought’s an ought, and twice five ten, and there’s a hundred of ’em.”
“It was quite a pleasure to know that one of our founders — or more correctly speaking,” said the old man, with a great glory in his subject and his knowledge of it, “one of the learned gentlemen that helped endow us in Queen Elizabeth’s time, for we were founded afore her day — left in his will, among the other bequests he made us, so much to buy holly, for garnishing the walls and windows, come Christmas. There was something homely and friendly in it. Being but strange here, then, and coming at Christmas time, we took a liking for his very picter that hangs in what used to be, anciently, afore our ten poor gentlemen commuted for an annual stipend in money, our great Dinner Hall. — A sedate gentleman in a peaked beard, with a ruff round his neck, and a scroll below him, in old English letters, ‘Lord! keep my memory green!’ You know all about him, Mr. Redlaw?”
“I know the portrait hangs there, Philip.”
“Yes, sure, it’s the second on the right, above the panelling. I was going to say — he has helped to keep my memory green, I thank him; for going round the building every year, as I’m a doing now, and freshening up the bare rooms with these branches and berries, freshens up my bare old brain. One year brings back another, and that year another, and those others numbers! At last, it seems to me as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in, — and they’re a pretty many, for I’m eighty-seven!”
“Merry and happy,” murmured Redlaw to himself.
The room began to darken strangely.
“So you see, sir,” pursued old Philip, whose hale wintry cheek had warmed into a ruddier glow, and whose blue eyes had brightened while he spoke, “I have plenty to keep, when I keep this present season. Now, where’s my quiet Mouse? Chattering’s the sin of my time of life, and there’s half the building to do yet, if the cold don’t freeze us first, or the wind don’t blow us away, or the darkness don’t swallow us up.”
The quiet Mouse had brought her calm face to his side, and silently taken his arm, before he finished speaking.
“Come away, my dear,” said the old man. “Mr. Redlaw won’t settle to his dinner, otherwise, till it’s cold as the winter. I hope you’ll excuse me rambling on, sir, and I wish you good night, and, once again, a merry — ”
“Stay!” said Mr. Redlaw, resuming his place at the table, more, it would have seemed from his manner, to reassure the old keeper, than in any remembrance of his own appetite. “Spare me another moment, Philip. William, you were going to tell me something to your excellent wife’s honour. It will not be disagreeable to her to hear you praise her. What was it?”
“Why, that’s where it is, you see, sir,” returned Mr. William Swidger, looking towards his wife in considerable embarrassment. “Mrs. William’s got her eye upon me.”
“But you’re not afraid of Mrs. William’s eye?”
“Why, no, sir,” returned Mr. Swidger, “that’s what I say myself. It wasn’t made to be afraid of. It wouldn’t have been made so mild, if that was the intention. But I wouldn’t like to — Milly! — him, you know. Down in the Buildings.”
Mr. William, standing behind the table, and rummaging disconcertedly among the objects upon it, directed persuasive glances at Mrs. William, and secret jerks of his head and thumb at Mr. Redlaw, as alluring her towards him.
“Him, you know, my love,” said Mr. William. “Down in the Buildings. Tell, my dear! You’re the works of Shakespeare in comparison with myself. Down in the Buildings, you know, my love. — Student.”
“Student?” repeated Mr. Redlaw, raising his head.
“That’s what I say, sir!” cried Mr. William, in the utmost animation of assent. “If it wasn’t the poor student down in the Buildings, why should you wish to hear it from Mrs. William’s lips? Mrs. William, my dear — Buildings.”
“I didn’t know,” said Milly, with a quiet frankness, free from any haste or confusion, “that William had said anything about it, or I wouldn’t have come. I asked him not to. It’s a sick young gentleman, sir — and very poor, I am afraid — who is too ill to go home this holiday-time, and lives, unknown to any one, in but a common kind of lodging for a gentleman, down in Jerusalem Buildings. That’s all, sir.”
“Why have I never heard of him?” said the Chemist, rising hurriedly. “Why has he not made his situation known to me? Sick! — give me my hat and cloak. Poor! — what house? — what number?”
“Oh, you mustn’t go there, sir,” said Milly, leaving her father-in-law, and calmly confronting him with her collected little face and folded hands.
“Not go there?”
“Oh dear, no!” said Milly, shaking her head as at a most manifest and self-evident impossibility. “It couldn’t be thought of!”
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“Why, you see, sir,” said Mr. William Swidger, persuasively and confidentially, “that’s what I say. Depend upon it, the young gentleman would never have made his situation known to one of his own sex. Mrs. Williams has got into his confidence, but that’s quite different. They all confide in Mrs. William; they all trust her. A man, sir, couldn’t have got a whisper out of him; but woman, sir, and Mrs. William combined — !”
“There is good sense and delicacy in what you say, William,” returned Mr. Redlaw, observant of the gentle and composed face at his shoulder. And laying his finger on his lip, he secretly put his purse into her hand.
“Oh dear no, sir!” cried Milly, giving it back again. “Worse and worse! Couldn’t be dreamed of!”
Such a staid matter-of-fact housewife she was, and so unruffled by the momentary haste of this rejection, that, an instant afterwards, she was tidily picking up a few leaves which had strayed from between her scissors and her apron, when she had arranged the holly.
Finding, when she rose from her stooping posture, that Mr. Redlaw was still regarding her with doubt and astonishment, she quietly repeated — looking about, the while, for any other fragments that might have escaped her observation:
“Oh dear no, sir! He said that of all the world he would not be known to you, or receive help from you — though he is a student in your class. I have made no terms of secrecy with you, but I trust to your honour completely.”
“Why did he say so?”
“Indeed I can’t tell, sir,” said Milly, after thinking a little, “because I am not at all clever, you know; and I wanted to be useful to him in making things neat and comfortable about him, and employed myself that way. But I know he is poor, and lonely, and I think he is somehow neglected too. — How dark it is!”
The room had darkened