It was on this garret landing-place that a hard-featured square-faced man, elderly and shabby, stopped to unlock the door of the front attic, into which, having surmounted the task of turning the rusty key in its still more rusty wards, he walked with the air of legal owner.
This person wore a wig of short, coarse, red hair, which he took off with his hat, and hung upon a nail. Having adopted in its place a dirty cotton nightcap, and groped about in the dark till he found a remnant of candle, he knocked at the partition which divided the two garrets, and inquired, in a loud voice, whether Mr. Noggs had a light.
The sounds that came back were stifled by the lath and plaster, and it seemed moreover as though the speaker had uttered them from the interior of a mug or other drinking vessel; but they were in the voice of Newman, and conveyed a reply in the affirmative.
‘A nasty night, Mr. Noggs!’ said the man in the nightcap, stepping in to light his candle.
‘Does it rain?’ asked Newman.
‘Does it?’ replied the other pettishly. ‘I am wet through.’
‘It doesn’t take much to wet you and me through, Mr. Crowl,’ said Newman, laying his hand upon the lappel of his threadbare coat.
‘Well; and that makes it the more vexatious,’ observed Mr. Crowl, in the same pettish tone.
Uttering a low querulous growl, the speaker, whose harsh countenance was the very epitome of selfishness, raked the scanty fire nearly out of the grate, and, emptying the glass which Noggs had pushed towards him, inquired where he kept his coals.
Newman Noggs pointed to the bottom of a cupboard, and Mr. Crowl, seizing the shovel, threw on half the stock: which Noggs very deliberately took off again, without saying a word.
‘You have not turned saving, at this time of day, I hope?’ said Crowl.
Newman pointed to the empty glass, as though it were a sufficient refutation of the charge, and briefly said that he was going downstairs to supper.
‘To the Kenwigses?’ asked Crowl.
Newman nodded assent.
‘Think of that now!’ said Crowl. ‘If I didn’t – thinking that you were certain not to go, because you said you wouldn’t – tell Kenwigs I couldn’t come, and make up my mind to spend the evening with you!’
‘I was obliged to go,’ said Newman. ‘They would have me.’
‘Well; but what’s to become of me?’ urged the selfish man, who never thought of anybody else. ‘It’s all your fault. I’ll tell you what – I’ll sit by your fire till you come back again.’
Newman cast a despairing glance at his small store of fuel, but, not having the courage to say no – a word which in all his life he never had said at the right time, either to himself or anyone else – gave way to the proposed arrangement. Mr. Crowl immediately went about making himself as comfortable, with Newman Nogg’s means, as circumstances would admit of his being made.
The lodgers to whom Crowl had made allusion under the designation of ‘the Kenwigses,’ were the wife and olive branches of one Mr. Kenwigs, a turner in ivory, who was looked upon as a person of some consideration on the premises, inasmuch as he occupied the whole of the first floor, comprising a suite of two rooms. Mrs. Kenwigs, too, was quite a lady in her manners, and of a very genteel family, having an uncle who collected a water-rate; besides which distinction, the two eldest of her little girls went twice a week to a dancing school in the neighbourhood, and had flaxen hair, tied with blue ribbons, hanging in luxuriant pigtails down their backs; and wore little white trousers with frills round the ankles – for all of which reasons, and many more equally valid but too numerous to mention, Mrs. Kenwigs was considered a very desirable person to know, and was the constant theme of all the gossips in the street, and even three or four doors round the corner at both ends.
It was the anniversary of that happy day on which the Church of England as by law established, had bestowed Mrs. Kenwigs upon Mr. Kenwigs; and in grateful commemoration of the same, Mrs. Kenwigs had invited a few select friends to cards and a supper in the first floor, and had put on a new gown to receive them in: which gown, being of a flaming colour and made upon a juvenile principle, was so successful that Mr. Kenwigs said the eight years of matrimony and the five children seemed all a dream, and Mrs Kenwigs younger and more blooming than on the very first Sunday he had kept company with her.
Beautiful as Mrs. Kenwigs looked when she was dressed though, and so stately that you would have supposed she had a cook and housemaid at least, and nothing to do but order them about, she had a world of trouble with the preparations; more, indeed, than she, being of a delicate and genteel constitution, could have sustained, had not the pride of housewifery upheld her. At last, however, all the things that had to be got together were got together, and all the things that had to be got out of the way were got out of the way, and everything was ready, and the collector himself having promised to come, fortune smiled upon the occasion.
The party was admirably selected. There were, first of all, Mr. Kenwigs and Mrs. Kenwigs, and four olive Kenwigses who sat up to supper; firstly, because it was but right that they should have a treat on such a day; and secondly, because their going to bed, in presence of the company, would have been inconvenient, not to say improper. Then, there was a young lady who had made Mrs. Kenwigs’s dress, and who – it was the most convenient thing in the world – living in the two-pair back, gave up her bed to the baby, and got a little girl to watch it. Then, to match this young lady, was a young man, who had known Mr. Kenwigs when he was a bachelor, and was much esteemed by the ladies, as bearing the reputation of a rake. To these were added a newly-married couple, who had visited Mr. and Mrs Kenwigs in their courtship; and a sister of Mrs. Kenwigs’s, who was quite a beauty; besides whom, there was another young man, supposed to entertain honourable designs upon the lady last mentioned; and Mr. Noggs, who was a genteel person to ask, because he had been a gentleman once. There were also an elderly lady from the back-parlour, and one more young lady, who, next to the collector, perhaps was the great lion of the party, being the daughter of a theatrical fireman, who ‘went on’ in the pantomime, and had the greatest turn for the stage that was ever known, being able to sing and recite in a manner that brought the tears into Mrs. Kenwigs’s eyes. There was only one drawback upon the pleasure of seeing such friends, and that was, that the lady in the back-parlour, who was very fat, and turned of sixty, came in a low book-muslin dress and short kid gloves, which so exasperated Mrs. Kenwigs, that that lady assured her visitors, in private, that if it hadn’t happened that the supper was cooking at the back-parlour grate at that moment, she certainly would have requested its representative to withdraw.
‘My dear,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, ‘wouldn’t it be better to begin a round game?’
‘Kenwigs, my dear,’ returned his wife, ‘I am surprised at you. Would you begin without my uncle?’
‘I forgot the collector,’ said Kenwigs; ‘oh no, that would never do.’
‘He’s so particular,’ said Mrs. Kenwigs, turning to the other married lady, ‘that if we began without him, I should be out of his will for ever.’
‘Dear!’ cried the married lady.
‘You’ve no idea what he is,’ replied Mrs. Kenwigs; ‘and yet as good a creature as ever breathed.’
‘The kindest-hearted man as ever was,’ said Kenwigs.
‘It goes to his heart, I believe, to be forced to cut the water off, when the people don’t pay,’ observed the bachelor friend, intending a joke.
‘George,’ said Mr. Kenwigs, solemnly, ‘none of that, if you please.’
‘It was only my joke,’ said the friend, abashed.
‘George,’ rejoined Mr. Kenwigs, ‘a joke is a wery good thing – a wery good thing – but when that joke is made at the expense of Mrs Kenwigs’s feelings, I set my face against it. A man in public life expects to be sneered at – it is the fault of his elewated sitiwation, and not of himself. Mrs. Kenwigs’s relation is a public man,