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Dryce was in a brown study, sitting looking at the fire, and sipping a glass of hot negus, when Mrs. Harris knocked at the door. "Excuse me, sir, but have you missed your keys?" "Hang the keys!" said Mr. Dryce absently. "I beg your pardon, Mrs. Harris; sit down a moment. I was thinking what I could buy our little fellow for a present." "But these keys, sir?
"It is, sir, very extraordinary," said the clerk, groping on the floor and patting the carpet with his hands. "I know I had them when I came up here, and I can't open my desk where I keep my money." "Oh! never mind, Jaggers," said Mr. Dryce sleepily. "Here are a couple of sovereigns. If we find the keys, you can have them to-morrow; and if not, we will have a new lock. Come, good night!
"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, with a scared look, as he opened the room door, "but have you seen my keys anywhere? I must have dropped them somewhere in the room, I think." "No," replied Mr. Dryce, "I've seen nothing most extraordinary!" he said to himself, thinking of the child and forgetting Jaggers.
"The precious! why, if he hasn't been asleep all the time!" said Mr. Dryce, kissing the warm rosy cheek; "take him off to bed directly, and bring him down to breakfast in the morning." Mrs. Harris only just escaped meeting Jaggers on the stairs, up which he was coming, followed by Betty with a flaring tallow candle, and looking carefully on every stair.
Dryce was every week taking a less active part in the business, and the Christmas quarter was stealing on with the balance-sheet not even thought of in the press of country orders. Mr. Richard Dryce was still hale and active; but those who knew him best, thought that he was breaking.
"I want you to come downstairs with me, Mrs. Harris," he said: "these are the keys Mr. Jaggers has lost, and I'm afraid I shall want a policeman." First the door of the great iron safe let into the wall. Mr. Dryce knew that it was a cunningly-made lock, and thought that no key but his would open it.
Dryce was master in his own house, and the little guest was fed. Then Doctor Banks was sent for, and he declared that it would be necessary to provide a nurse, while, as luck would have it, he had that very morning been sent for to see a casual applicant for relief at the Union workhouse a woman who had just lost a child.
She was so timid, and had at first such a scared look, that Mr. Dryce had much trouble to induce her to stay; but it was quite wonderful the way in which the child took to her, and so a room was got ready for them both, and she was comfortably settled, almost, as the housekeeper said, "as if she was a lady, though for the matter of that, Doctor Banks knew more about her than he said."
Still, however it may have been, though he was born in the gloomy house, and was subject to the same influences, the younger Dryce whose name was Robert never took kindly to the dull routine to which his father's habits doomed him.
To most people there might have been nothing in the place or its associations to evoke much gentle feeling; but as the tones of the organ swelled and the music grew louder, old Richard Dryce sat down in the corner of his own pew and leaned his head upon the book-board, with his hands clasped before his face.