CHAPTER I.

Dr. Crips’s healing mixture.

His Christian name was Nicholas but his familiars called him Nickie the Kid.  The title did not imply that Nicholas possessed the artless gaiety, the nimbleness, or any of the simple virtues of the young of the common goat.  Kid was short for “kidder,” a term that as gone out recently in favour of “smoodger,” and which implies a quality of suave and ingratiating cunning backed by ulterior motives.

The familiars of Mr. Nicholas Crips were a limited circle, and all “beats,” that is to say, gentlemen sitting on the rail dividing honest toil from open crime.  They were not workers, neither were they thieves, excepting in very special circumstances, when the opportunity made honesty almost an impertinence.  The sobriquet coming from such a source acquires peculiar significance.  The god-fathers of Nickie the Kid were all experts, and obtained bed and board mainly by exercising the art of dissimulation.  To stand out conspicuously as a specialist in such company one needed to possess very bright and peculiar qualities.

Mr. Nicholas Crips was blonde, bony man perhaps five feet nine in height, but looking taller because of the spareness of his limbs.  This spareness was not cultivated, as Nickie the Kid was partial to creature comforts, but was of great assistance to him in a profession in which it was often necessary to profess chronic sickness and touching physical decrepitude.  Mr Crips despised whiskers, but, as shaving was an extravagant indulgence, his slightly cadaverous countenance was often littered with a crisp, pale stubble, not unlike dry grass.

To-day Nickie wore a suit of black cloth.  It had once been a very imposing suit, and had adorned a great person, but having fallen on evil days, was dusty and rusty, while the knees of Mr. Crips poked familiarly through a long slit in each leg of the stained trousers.  The frock coat went badly with the damaged tan boots and the moth-eaten rag cap Nicholas was wearing.

Mr. Crips was making back-door call, and telling housewives what the doctors at the hospital had said about his peculiar ailment which, it appears, was an interesting heart weakness.

“Above all, I must be careful never to over-exert myself, madam—­those are the doctor’s orders,” said Nickie, in his sad, calm way.  “The smallest excitement, the slightest strain, and my life goes out like that.”  Nickie puffed an imaginary candle with dramatic significance.

This was the preliminary to a mild appeal for creature and medical comforts, and it had two objects—­to open the soul to compassion, and bar all considerations of manual labour.