‘By the bye,’ it comes into Jasper’s
mind to say, as he idly examines the keys, ’I
have been going to ask you, many a day, and have always
forgotten. You know they sometimes call you Stony
Durdles, don’t you?’
‘Cloisterham knows me as Durdles, Mr. Jasper.’
‘I am aware of that, of course. But the
boys sometimes—’
‘O! if you mind them young imps of boys—’
Durdles gruffly interrupts.
’I don’t mind them any more than you do.
But there was a discussion the other day among the
Choir, whether Stony stood for Tony;’ clinking
one key against another.
(’Take care of the wards, Mr. Jasper.’)
‘Or whether Stony stood for Stephen;’
clinking with a change of keys.
(’You can’t make a pitch pipe of ’em,
Mr. Jasper.’)
‘Or whether the name comes from your trade.
How stands the fact?’
Mr. Jasper weighs the three keys in his hand, lifts
his head from his idly stooping attitude over the
fire, and delivers the keys to Durdles with an ingenuous
and friendly face.
But the stony one is a gruff one likewise, and that
hazy state of his is always an uncertain state, highly
conscious of its dignity, and prone to take offence.
He drops his two keys back into his pocket one by
one, and buttons them up; he takes his dinner-bundle
from the chair-back on which he hung it when he came
in; he distributes the weight he carries, by tying
the third key up in it, as though he were an Ostrich,
and liked to dine off cold iron; and he gets out of
the room, deigning no word of answer.
Mr. Sapsea then proposes a hit at backgammon, which,
seasoned with his own improving conversation, and
terminating in a supper of cold roast beef and salad,
beguiles the golden evening until pretty late.
Mr. Sapsea’s wisdom being, in its delivery to
mortals, rather of the diffuse than the epigrammatic
order, is by no means expended even then; but his
visitor intimates that he will come back for more
of the precious commodity on future occasions, and
Mr. Sapsea lets him off for the present, to ponder
on the instalment he carries away.
John Jasper, on his way home through the Close, is
brought to a stand-still by the spectacle of Stony
Durdles, dinner-bundle and all, leaning his back against
the iron railing of the burial-ground enclosing it
from the old cloister-arches; and a hideous small boy
in rags flinging stones at him as a well-defined mark
in the moonlight. Sometimes the stones hit him,
and sometimes they miss him, but Durdles seems indifferent
to either fortune. The hideous small boy, on
the contrary, whenever he hits Durdles, blows a whistle
of triumph through a jagged gap, convenient for the
purpose, in the front of his mouth, where half his
teeth are wanting; and whenever he misses him, yelps
out ‘Mulled agin!’ and tries to atone
for the failure by taking a more correct and vicious
aim.
