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Updated: June 27, 2025
But Mr Tappertit, who had a soul above the vulgar herd, and who, on account of his greatness, could only afford to be merry now and then, threw himself on a bench with the air of a man who was faint with dignity. He looked with an indifferent eye, alike on skittles, cards, and dice, thinking only of the locksmith's daughter, and the base degenerate days on which he had fallen.
He admitted that there were grounds of suspicion that there were circumstances connected with the prisoner's peculiar mode of life that were not reconcilable with the lowness of his finances; but yet of direct testimony there was not a vestige, and of circumstantial evidence there were not only links wanting in the chain, but, in fact, there was not a single link extending beyond the locksmith's dwelling.
Miggs was hovering about too; and the fact of her existence, the mere circumstance of her ever having been born, appeared, after Dolly, such an unaccountable practical joke. It was impossible to talk. It couldn't be done. He had nothing left for it but to stir his tea round, and round, and round, and ruminate on all the fascinations of the locksmith's lovely daughter. Gabriel was dull too.
Lest the reader should be at any loss to discover the cause of Miss Miggs's deep emotion, it may be whispered apart that, happening to be listening, as her custom sometimes was, when Gabriel and his wife conversed together, she had heard the locksmith's joke relative to the foreign black who played the tambourine, and bursting with the spiteful feelings which the taunt awoke in her fair breast, exploded in the manner we have witnessed.
'Ay, call me that; call me that always, exclaimed the locksmith's little daughter; 'never speak coldly to me, never be distant, never again reprove me for the follies I have long repented, or I shall die, Joe. 'I reprove you! said Joe. 'Yes for every kind and honest word you uttered, went to my heart.
'I shall bless your name, sobbed the locksmith's little daughter, 'as long as I live. I shall never hear it spoken without feeling as if my heart would burst. I shall remember it in my prayers, every night and morning till I die! 'Will you? said Joe, eagerly. 'Will you indeed? It makes me well, it makes me very glad and proud to hear you say so.
There was sound sense and much consolation in this reasoning: the obvious probabilities of the case were in favour of the fulfilment of the locksmith's expectations. But a scene of trial and excitement of prolonged agony and hope deferred lay before him, the extent of which it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for him then to have foreseen.
The locksmith looked him up and dow.n He seemed respectable enough, this mild-eyed youth with the locked closet. But the locksmith knew the tricks of his trade. "Then I'll take a bunch of `blanks' over with me and open her up for you." "I'd rather get her open by myself." "It will cost you a dollar," was the locksmith's ultimatum. "It's worth a dollar," agreed Trotter. "But how'll we do it?"
Simon Tappertit, who had at first implicitly believed that the locksmith's daughter, unable any longer to suppress her secret passion for himself, was about to give it full vent in its intensity, and to declare that she was his for ever, looked extremely foolish when she said these words; the more so, as they were received by Hugh and Dennis with a loud laugh, which made her draw back, and regard him with a fixed and earnest look.
Into this ill-favoured pit, the locksmith's vagrant 'prentice groped his way; and stopping at a house from whose defaced and rotten front the rude effigy of a bottle swung to and fro like some gibbeted malefactor, struck thrice upon an iron grating with his foot. After listening in vain for some response to his signal, Mr Tappertit became impatient, and struck the grating thrice again.
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