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Winkle professed his heartfelt regret to hear it, and begged to know whether he could do anything to alleviate the sorrows of the suffering student. 'Nothing, my dear boy, nothing, said Ben. 'You recollect Arabella, Winkle? My sister Arabella a little girl, Winkle, with black eyes when we were down at Wardle's? I don't know whether you happened to notice her a nice little girl, Winkle.
But when the sun of October swings low in the south and he has become so fat that he seems to roll to and from his burrow on castors is when he shows his most surprising characteristic. Mr. Wardle's fat boy with all his fame never slept as the woodchuck then prepares to sleep, however well he matched his eating.
"I am not afraid of you or your knife, if that is what you mean." Indeed, absolute fearlessness was one of Gwen's characteristics. "What did you go to Mr. Wardle's for?" "On a visit to my wife." Gwen started. "Who is your wife?" said she. Susan Burr flashed into her mind first. But then, how about "Aunt Maria" on the envelope, and her readiness to act as this man's agent?
"We're getting the bowery ready down in the square tonight so's to have services out of doors." "He's coming to-morrow?" The words came from both Prudence and her father. "Of course he's coming. Ben Hadley brought word over. They'll have a turkey dinner at Beil Wardle's house and then services at two." The flushed little man with the revelation felt himself grow suddenly cold.
She had old Miss Wardle's letter in her hand, full, of course, of shocking anecdotes about lunatics, and the sufferings of Fleet prisoners, and all the statistics, and enquiries, and dry little commissions, with which that worthy lady's correspondence abounded. It was open in her hand, and rustled sharp and stiffly in the air, but it was not inviting just then.
By the time Queen Victoria was on the throne the grime had set in in earnest, and was hard at work long before the fifty-one Exhibition reported progress progress in bedevilment, says the Pessimist? Never mind him! Let him sulk in a corner while the Optimist dwells on the marvellous developments of which fifty-one was only symptomatic the quick-firing guns and smokeless powder; the mighty ships, a dozen of them big enough to take all the Athenians of the days of Pericles to the bottom at once; the machines that turn out books so cheap that their contents may be forgotten in six months, and no one be a penny the worse; the millionaires who have so much money they can't spend it heaps and heaps of wonders up-to-date that no one ever feels surprised at nowadays. The Optimist will tell you all about them. For the moment, let's pretend that none of them have come to pass, and get back to Cavendish Square at the date of the story, and the suite of rooms on the second floor that had been Sister Nora's town anchorage when she first made Dave Wardle's acquaintance as an unconscious Hospital patient, and that had been renovated since her father's death to serve as a pied-
Yet that satisfied him, he took no trouble to make further enquiries and then imagined the rest. In regard to the "George" he let his imagination run riot, dilated on this being Miss Wardle's room, this being the room where the couple were discovered, and further states that Dickens made the inn a favourite one of his when a boy in Lant Street, and speaks of the seat he used to sit in.
They whispered that he was failing. "He ought to be home this minute," was the first Mrs. Wardle's diagnosis to the fifth Mrs. Wardle, behind her hymn-book, "with his feet in a mustard bath and a dose of gamboge and a big brewing of catnip tea. I can tell a fever as far as I can see it."
No she does not care, he thought; and she let him think it: but her heart swelled to her throat, and she felt as if she could have screamed, 'Come back my only love my darling without you I must die! But she did not raise her head. She only read on, steadily, old Miss Wardle's letter over and over the same half-dozen lines.
Pickwick was told that they had all been to "inspect the furniture and fittings-up of the new house which the young couple were to tenant." This is very significant, for it throws a certain light on Trundle's situation. It is plain that this house was on Wardle's property, and that Trundle had none of his own.
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