SKILLED ASSISTANCE

The night-watchman, who had left his seat on the jetty to answer the gate-bell, came back with disgust written on a countenance only too well designed to express it.

“If she’s been up ’ere once in the last week to, know whether the Silvia is up she’s been four or five times,” he growled.  “He’s forty-seven if he’s a day; ’is left leg is shorter than ’is right, and he talks with a stutter.  When she’s with ’im you’d think as butter wouldn’t melt in ’er mouth; but the way she talked to me just now you’d think I was paid a-purpose to wait on her.  I asked ’er at last wot she thought I was here for, and she said she didn’t know, and nobody else neither.  And afore she went off she told the potman from the ‘Albion,’ wot was listening, that I was known all over Wapping as the Sleeping Beauty.

“She ain’t the fust I’ve ’ad words with, not by a lot.  They’re all the same; they all start in a nice, kind, soapy sort o’ way, and, as soon as they don’t get wot they want, fly into a temper and ask me who, I think I am.  I told one woman once not to be silly, and I shall never forget it as long as I live-never.  For all I know, she’s wearing a bit o’ my ’air in a locket to this day, and very likely boasting that I gave it to her.

“Talking of her reminds me of another woman.  There was a Cap’n Pinner, used to trade between ’ere and Hull on a schooner named the Snipe.  Nice little craft she was, and ’e was a very nice feller.  Many and many’s the pint we’ve ’ad together, turn and turn-about, and the on’y time we ever ’ad a cross word was when somebody hid his clay pipe in my beer and ’e was foolish enough to think I’d done it.

“He ’ad a nice little cottage, ’e told me about, near Hull, and ’is wife’s father, a man of pretty near seventy, lived with ’em.  Well-off the old man was, and, as she was his only daughter, they looked to ’ave all his money when he’d gorn.  Their only fear was that ’e might marry agin, and, judging from wot ’e used to tell me about the old man, I thought it more than likely.

“‘If it wasn’t for my missis he’d ha’ been married over and over agin,’ he ses one day.  ‘He’s like a child playing with gunpowder.’

“’’Ow would it be to let ‘im burn hisself a bit?’ I ses.

“‘If you was to see some o’ the gunpowder he wants to play with, you wouldn’t talk like that,’ ses the cap’n.  ’You’d know better.  The on’y thing is to keep ’em apart, and my pore missis is wore to a shadder a-doing of it.’

“It was just about a month arter that that he brought the old man up to London with ’im.  They ’ad some stuff to put out at Smith’s Wharf, t’other side of the river, afore they came to us, and though they was on’y there four or five days, it was long enough for that old man to get into trouble.