Zack had just let himself in with his latch-key.
"I'm glad he's come," muttered Mat, snatching up the letter from the floor, and crumpling it into his pocket. "There's another thing or two I want to find out, before I go any further--and Zack's the lad to help me."
CHAPTER IX.
MORE DISCOVERIES.
When Zack entered the room, and saw his strange friend, with legs crossed and hands in pockets, sitting gravely in the usual corner, on the floor, between a brandy-bottle on one side, and a guttering, unsnuffed candle on the other, he roared with laughter, and stamped about in his usual boisterous way, till the flimsy little house seemed to be trembling under him to its very foundations. Mat bore all this noise and ridicule, and all the jesting that followed it about the futility of drowning his passion for Madonna in the brandy-bottle, with the most unruffled and exemplary patience. The self-control which he thus exhibited did not pass without its reward. Zack got tired of making jokes which were received with the serenest inattention; and, passing at once from the fanciful to the practical, astonished his fellow-lodger, by suddenly communicating a very unexpected and very important piece of news.
"By-the-bye, Mat," he said, "we must sweep the place up, and look as respectable as we can, before to-morrow night. My friend Blyth is coming to spend a quiet evening with us. I stayed behind till all the visitors had gone, on purpose to ask him."
"Do you mean he's coming to have a drop of grog and smoke a pipe along with us two?" asked Mat rather amazedly.
"I mean he's coming here, certainly; but as for grog and pipes, he never touches either. He's the best and dearest fellow in the world; but I'm ashamed to say he's spooney enough to like lemonade and tea. Smoking would make him sick directly; and, as for grog, I don't believe a drop ever passes his lips from one year's end to another. A weak head--a wretchedly weak head for drinking," concluded Zack, tapping his forehead with an air of bland Bacchanalian superiority.
Mat seemed to have fallen into one of his thoughtful fits again. He made no answer, but holding the brandy-bottle standing by his side, up before the candle, looked in to see how much liquor was left in it.
"Don't begin to bother your head about the brandy: you needn't get any more of it for Blyth," continued Zack, noticing his friend's action. "I say, do you know that the best thing you ever did in your life was saving Valentine's picture in that way? You have regularly won his heart by it. He was suspicious of my making friends with you before; but now he doesn't seem to think there's a word in the English language that's good enough for you. He said he should be only too glad to thank you again, when I asked him to come and judge of what you were really like in your own lodging. Tell him some of those splendid stories of yours. I've been terrifying him already with one or two of them at secondhand. Oh Lord! how hospitably we'll treat him--won't we? You shall make his hair stand on end, Mat; and I'll drown him in his favorite tea."
"What does he do with them picters of his?" asked Mat. "Sell 'em?"
"Of course!" answered the other, confidently; "and gets enormous sums of money for them." Whenever Zack found an opportunity of magnifying a friend's importance, he always rose grandly superior to mere matter-of-fact restraints, and seized the golden moment without an instant of hesitation or a syllable of compromise.
"Get lots of money, does he?" proceeded Mat. "And keeps on hoarding of it up, I daresay, like all the rest of you over here?"
"He hoard money!" retorted Zack, "You never made a worse guess in your life. I don't believe be ever hoarded six-pence since he was a baby. If Mrs. Blyth didn't look after him, I don't suppose there would be five pounds in the house from one year's end to another."
There was a moment's silence. (It wasn't because he had money in it, then, thought Mat, that he shut down the lid of that big chest of his so sharp. I wonder whether--)
"He's the most generous fellow in the world," continued Zack, lighting a cigar; "and the best pay: ask any of his tradespeople."
This remark suspended the conjecture that was just forming in Mat's mind. He gave up pursuing it quite readily, and went on at once with his questions to Zack. Some part of the additional information that he desired to obtain from young Thorpe, he had got already. He knew now, that when Mr. Blyth, on the day of the picture-show, shut down the bureau so sharply on Mr. Gimble's approaching him, it was not, at any rate, because there was money in it.
"Is he going to bring anybody else in here along with him, to-morrow night?" asked Mat.
"Anybody else? Who should he bring? Why, you old barbarian, you don't expect him to bring Madonna into our jolly bachelor den to preside over the grog and pipes--do you?"
"How old is the young woman?" inquired Mat, contemplatively snuffing the candle with his fingers, as he put the question.
"Still harping on my daughter!" shouted Zack, with a burst of laughter. "She's older than she looks, I can tell you that. You wouldn't guess her at more than eighteen or nineteen. But the fact is, she's actually twenty-three;--steady there! you'll be through the window if you don't sit quieter in your queer corner than that."
(Twenty-three! The very number he had stopped at, when he reckoned off the difference on his fingers between 1828 and 1851, just before young Thorpe came in.)
"I suppose the next cool thing you will say, is that she's too old for you," Zack went on; "or, perhaps, you may prefer asking another question or two first. I'll tell you what, old Rough and Tough, the inquisitive part of your character is beginning to be--"
"Bother all this talking!" interrupted Mat, jumping up suddenly as he spoke, and taking a greasy pack of cards from the chimney-piece. "I don't ask no questions, and don't want no answers. Let's have a drop of grog and a turn-to at Beggar-my-Neighbor. Sixpence a time. Come on!"
They sat down at once to their cards and their brandy-and-water; playing uninterruptedly for an hour or more. Zack won; and--being additionally enlivened by the inspiring influences of grog--rose to a higher and higher pitch of exhilaration with every additional sixpence which his good luck extracted from his adversary's pocket. His gaiety seemed at last to communicate itself even to the imperturbable Mat, who in an interval of shuffling the cards, was heard to deliver himself suddenly of one of those gruff chuckles, which have been already described as the nearest approach he was capable of making towards a civilized laugh.
He was so seldom in the habit of exhibiting any outward symptoms of hilarity, that Zack, who was dealing for the new game, stopped in astonishment, and inquired with great curiosity what it was his friend was "grunting about." At first, Mat declined altogether to say;--then, on being pressed, admitted that his mind was just then running on the "old woman" Zack had spoken of; as having "suddenly fallen foul of him in Mr.