From the workshop of the Golden Key, there issued forth a tinkling sound, so merry and good-humoured, that it suggested the idea of some one working blithely, and made quite pleasant music. No man who hammered on at a dull monotonous duty, could have brought such cheerful notes from steel and iron; none but a chirping, healthy, honest-hearted fellow, who made the best of everything, and felt kindly towards everybody, could have done it for an instant. He might have been a coppersmith, and still been musical. If he had sat in a jolting waggon, full of rods of iron, it seemed as if he would have brought some harmony out of it.
Tink, tink, tink — clear as a silver bell, and audible at every pause of the streets’ harsher noises, as though it said, ‘I don’t care; nothing puts me out; I am resolved to he happy.’ Women scolded, children squalled, heavy carts went rumbling by, horrible cries proceeded from the lungs of hawkers; still it struck in again, no higher, no lower, no louder, no softer; not thrusting itself on people’s notice a bit the more for having been outdone by louder sounds — tink, tink, tink, tink, tink.
It was a perfect embodiment of the still small voice, free from all cold, hoarseness, huskiness, or unhealthiness of any kind; foot-passengers slackened their pace, and were disposed to linger near it; neighbours who had got up splenetic that morning, felt good-humour stealing on them as they heard it, and by degrees became quite sprightly; mothers danced their babies to its ringing; still the same magical tink, tink, tink, came gaily from the workshop of the Golden Key.
Who but the locksmith could have made such music! A gleam of sun shining through the unsashed window, and chequering the dark workshop with a broad patch of light, fell full upon him, as though attracted by his sunny heart. There he stood working at his anvil, his face all radiant with exercise and gladness, his sleeves turned up, his wig pushed off his shining forehead — the easiest, freest, happiest man in all the world. Beside him sat a sleek cat, purring and winking in the light, and falling every now and then into an idle doze, as from excess of comfort. Toby looked on from a tall bench hard by; one beaming smile, from his broad nut-brown face down to the slack-baked buckles in his shoes. The very locks that hung around had something jovial in their rust, and seemed like gouty gentlemen of hearty natures, disposed to joke on their infirmities. There was nothing surly or severe in the whole scene. It seemed impossible that any one of the innumerable keys could fit a churlish strong-box or a prison-door. Cellars of beer and wine, rooms where there were fires, books, gossip, and cheering laughter — these were their proper sphere of action. Places of distrust and cruelty, and restraint, they would have left quadruple-locked for ever.
Tink, tink, tink. The locksmith paused at last, and wiped his brow. The silence roused the cat, who, jumping softly down, crept to the door, and watched with tiger eyes a bird-cage in an opposite window. Gabriel lifted Toby to his mouth, and took a hearty draught.
Then, as he stood upright, with his head flung back, and his portly chest thrown out, you would have seen that Gabriel’s lower man was clothed in military gear. Glancing at the wall beyond, there might have been espied, hanging on their several pegs, a cap and feather, broadsword, sash, and coat of scarlet; which any man learned in such matters would have known from their make and pattern to be the uniform of a serjeant in the Royal East London Volunteers.
As the locksmith put his mug down, empty, on the bench whence it had smiled on him before, he glanced at these articles with a laughing eye, and looking at them with his head a little on one side, as though he would get them all into a focus, said, leaning on his hammer:
‘Time was, now, I remember, when I was like to run mad with the desire to wear a coat of that colour. If any one (except my father) had called me a fool for my pains, how I should have fired and fumed! But what a fool I must have been, sure-ly!’
‘Ah!’ sighed Mrs Varden, who had entered unobserved. ‘A fool indeed. A man at your time of life, Varden, should know better now.’
‘Why, what a ridiculous woman you are, Martha,’ said the locksmith, turning round with a smile.
‘Certainly,’ replied Mrs V. with great demureness. ‘Of course I am. I know that, Varden. Thank you.’
‘I mean —’ began the locksmith.
‘Yes,’ said his wife, ‘I know what you mean. You speak quite plain enough to be understood, Varden. It’s very kind of you to adapt yourself to my capacity, I am sure.’
‘Tut, tut, Martha,’ rejoined the locksmith; ‘don’t take offence at nothing. I mean, how strange it is of you to run down volunteering, when it’s done to defend you and all the other women, and our own fireside and everybody else’s, in case of need.’
‘It’s unchristian,’ cried Mrs Varden, shaking her head.
‘Unchristian!’ said the locksmith. ‘Why, what the devil —’
Mrs Varden looked at the ceiling, as in expectation that the consequence of this profanity would be the immediate descent of the four-post bedstead on the second floor, together with the best sitting-room on the first; but no visible judgment occurring, she heaved a deep sigh, and begged her husband, in a tone of resignation, to go on, and by all means to blaspheme as much as possible, because he knew she liked it.
The locksmith did for a moment seem disposed to gratify her, but he gave a great gulp, and mildly rejoined:
‘I was going to say, what on earth do you call it unchristian for? Which would be most unchristian, Martha — to sit quietly down and let our houses be sacked by a foreign army, or to turn out like men and drive ’em off? Shouldn’t I be a nice sort of a Christian, if I crept into a corner of my own chimney and looked on while a parcel of whiskered savages bore off Dolly — or you?’
When he said ‘or you,’ Mrs Varden, despite herself, relaxed into a smile. There was something complimentary in the idea. ‘In such a state of things as that, indeed —’ she simpered.
‘As that!’ repeated the locksmith. ‘Well, that would be the state of things directly. Even Miggs would go. Some black tambourine-player, with a great turban on, would be bearing HER off, and, unless the tambourine-player was proof against kicking and scratching, it’s my belief he’d have the worst of it. Ha ha ha! I’d forgive the tambourine-player. I wouldn’t have him interfered with on any account, poor fellow.’ And here the locksmith laughed again so heartily, that tears came into his eyes — much to Mrs Varden’s indignation, who thought the capture of so sound a Protestant and estimable a private character as Miggs by a pagan negro, a circumstance too shocking and awful for contemplation.
The picture Gabriel had drawn, indeed, threatened serious consequences, and would indubitably have led to them, but luckily at that moment a light footstep crossed the threshold, and Dolly, running in, threw her arms round her old father’s neck and hugged him tight.
‘Here she is at last!’ cried Gabriel. ‘And how well you look, Doll, and how late you are, my darling!’
How well she looked? Well? Why, if he had exhausted every laudatory adjective in the dictionary, it wouldn’t have been praise enough. When and where was there ever such a plump, roguish, comely, bright-eyed, enticing, bewitching, captivating, maddening little puss in all this world, as Dolly! What was the Dolly of five years ago, to the Dolly of that day! How many coachmakers, saddlers, cabinet-makers, and professors of other useful arts, had deserted their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and, most of all, their cousins, for the love of her! How many unknown gentlemen — supposed to be of mighty fortunes, if not titles — had waited round the corner after dark, and tempted Miggs the incorruptible, with golden guineas, to deliver offers of marriage folded up in love-letters! How many disconsolate fathers and substantial tradesmen had waited on the locksmith for the same purpose, with dismal tales of how their sons had lost their appetites, and taken to shut themselves up in dark bedrooms, and wandering in desolate suburbs with pale faces, and all because of Dolly Varden’s loveliness and cruelty! How many young men, in all previous times of unprecedented steadiness, had turned suddenly wild and wicked for the same reason, and, in an ecstasy of unrequited love, taken to wrench off door-knockers, and invert the boxes of rheumatic watchmen! How had she recruited the king’s service, both by sea and land, through rendering desperate his loving subjects between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five! How many young ladies had publicly professed, with tears in their eyes, that for their tastes she was much too short, too tall, too bold, too cold, too stout, too thin, too fair, too dark — too everything but handsome! How many old ladies, taking counsel together, had thanked Heaven their daughters were not like her, and had hoped she might come to no harm, and had thought she would come to no good, and had wondered what people saw in her, and had arrived at the conclusion that she was ‘going off’ in her looks, or had never come on in them, and that she was a thorough imposition and a popular mistake!
And yet here was this same Dolly Varden, so whimsical and hard to please that she was Dolly Varden still, all smiles and dimples and pleasant looks, and caring no more for the fifty or sixty young fellows who at that very moment were breaking their hearts to marry her, than if so many oysters had been crossed in love and opened afterwards.
Dolly hugged her father as has been already stated, and having hugged her mother also, accompanied both into the little parlour where the cloth was already laid for dinner, and where Miss Miggs — a trifle more rigid and bony than of yore — received her with a sort of hysterical gasp, intended for a smile. Into the hands of that young virgin, she delivered her bonnet and walking dress (all of a dreadful, artful, and designing kind), and then said with a laugh, which rivalled the locksmith’s music, ‘How glad I always am to be at home again!’
‘And how glad we always are, Doll,’ said her father, putting back the dark hair from her sparkling eyes, ‘to have you at home. Give me a kiss.’
If there had been anybody of the male kind there to see her do it — but there was not — it was a mercy.
‘I don’t like your being at the Warren,’ said the locksmith, ‘I can’t bear to have you out of my sight. And what is the news over yonder, Doll?’
‘What news there is, I think you know already,’ replied his daughter. ‘I am sure you do though.’
‘Ay?’ cried the locksmith. ‘What’s that?’
‘Come, come,’ said Dolly, ‘you know very well. I want you to tell me why Mr Haredale — oh, how gruff he is again, to be sure!— has been away from home for some days past, and why he is travelling about (we know he IS travelling, because of his letters) without telling his own niece why or wherefore.’
‘Miss Emma doesn’t want to know, I’ll swear,’ returned the locksmith.
‘I don’t know that,’ said Dolly; ‘but I do, at any rate. Do tell me. Why is he so secret, and what is this ghost story, which nobody is to tell Miss Emma, and which seems to be mixed up with his going away? Now I see you know by your colouring so.’
‘What the story means, or is, or has to do with it, I know no more than you, my dear,’ returned the locksmith, ‘except that it’s some foolish fear of little Solomon’s — which has, indeed, no meaning in it, I suppose. As to Mr Haredale’s journey, he goes, as I believe —’
‘Yes,’ said Dolly.
‘As I believe,’ resumed the locksmith, pinching her cheek, ‘on business, Doll. What it may be, is quite another matter. Read Blue Beard, and don’t be too curious, pet; it’s no business of yours or mine, depend upon that; and here’s dinner, which is much more to the purpose.’
Dolly might have remonstrated against this summary dismissal of the subject, notwithstanding the appearance of dinner, but at the mention of Blue Beard Mrs Varden interposed, protesting she could not find it in her conscience to sit tamely by, and............