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Updated: June 20, 2025
Ricardo pressed the point on the tormented hotel-keeper. Schomberg kept his eyes down obstinately. "I don't wish any harm to the girl " he muttered. "But did she bolt from you? A fair bilk? Come!" "Devil only knows what that villainous Swede had done to her what he promised her, how he frightened her. She couldn't have cared for him, I know."
This could be no other than an incantation, and Bilk stood rooted to the spot, unable to advance or retreat. He heard a rustling in the hedge, and the incantation suddenly ceased. Then a figure like that of an old man bent with age and clad in a ragged coat which nearly touched the ground advanced slowly, saying in croaking accent as he did so "Ah, young gentleman, we've waited for ye.
The history they gave of themselves was, that the former could ride, drive, swear, kick scoundrels, bilk prostitutes, commit adultery, and breed riots: the latter could cant, lie, act the hypocrite, hum the proctors, and protect their companions in debauchery: in gluttony drunkenness and libidinous thoughts they were all avowed rivals.
This it seems was by no means an uncommon occurrence among the dishonest waterside knaves of those days, and it afforded vast sport to a mob of small craft that gathered round, and the people in which covered me with ridicule and abuse, calling me a Thames Bilk, and advising the waterman to hold me over the side of the boat by the scruff of the neck and give me a Ducking.
But one winter, when things seemed at their worst, and it really appeared likely that Bilk would have to be given up as a bad job, his tormentors suddenly conceived an idea, and proceeded to put it into practice in the manner I am about to relate in this most veracious history.
Suffice it to say, the two dear lads put their heads together for some time, and were extremely busy in the privacy of their own study all that evening. Bilk, little dreaming of the compassion and interest he was evoking in the hearts of his schoolfellows, retired early to his sorrowful couch, and mourned his departed gipsies till slumber gently stepped in and soothed his troubled mind.
Nor has the schoolmaster done anything for or against the young man's political views, his ideas of social exclusiveness, the peculiar code of honour that makes it disgraceful to bilk a cabman and permissible to obtain goods on credit from a tradesman without the means to pay.
Another long pause, and then another long recital in gibberish by the old woman, broken by the same coughing and groaning as before. Then the man said "Stand up, and hold your hands above your head." Bilk obeyed. "You want to know how to escape the peril?" said the man. Bilk, with his hands still up, nodded. "To-night at nine o'clock you will hear a bell." Again Bilk nodded.
Fancy the gipsies knowing that! "You will go up to a small room with a chair and a bed in it, and undress." A pause, and another nod from the astonished Bilk. "You will put on a long white robe coming down to your ankles. At half- past nine the place will be dark as black as pitch." Bilk shuddered a little at the prospect. "Then will be the time to escape your peril, or else to fall a victim.
Just about eligible to travel with this bilk here Shadbelly Higgins this loud-mouthed sneak that shoots people in the back and calls himself a desperado. If there's anything I do particularly despise, it's a lynching mob; I've never seen one that had a man in it. It has to tally up a hundred against one before it can pump up pluck enough to tackle a sick tailor.
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