Brightened by this unexpected commendation, Riah asked
were there more instructions for him?
‘No,’ said Fledgeby, ’you may toddle
now, Judah, and grope about on the orders you have
got.’ Dismissed with those pleasing words,
the old man took his broad hat and staff, and left
the great presence: more as if he were some superior
creature benignantly blessing Mr Fledgeby, than the
poor dependent on whom he set his foot. Left alone,
Mr Fledgeby locked his outer door, and came back to
his fire.
‘Well done you!’ said Fascination to himself.
’Slow, you may be; sure, you are!’ This
he twice or thrice repeated with much complacency,
as he again dispersed the legs of the Turkish trousers
and bent the knees.
‘A tidy shot that, I flatter myself,’
he then soliloquised. ’And a Jew brought
down with it! Now, when I heard the story told
at Lammle’s, I didn’t make a jump at Riah.
Not a hit of it; I got at him by degrees.’
Herein he was quite accurate; it being his habit, not
to jump, or leap, or make an upward spring, at anything
in life, but to crawl at everything.
‘I got at him,’ pursued Fledgeby, feeling
for his whisker, ’by degrees. If your Lammles
or your Lightwoods had got at him anyhow, they would
have asked him the question whether he hadn’t
something to do with that gal’s disappearance.
I knew a better way of going to work. Having got
behind the hedge, and put him in the light, I took
a shot at him and brought him down plump. Oh!
It don’t count for much, being a Jew, in a match
against me!’
Another dry twist in place of a smile, made his face
crooked here.
‘As to Christians,’ proceeded Fledgeby,
’look out, fellow-Christians, particularly you
that lodge in Queer Street! I have got the run
of Queer Street now, and you shall see some games
there. To work a lot of power over you and you
not know it, knowing as you think yourselves, would
be almost worth laying out money upon. But when
it comes to squeezing a profit out of you into the
bargain, it’s something like!’
With this apostrophe Mr Fledgeby appropriately proceeded
to divest himself of his Turkish garments, and invest
himself with Christian attire. Pending which
operation, and his morning ablutions, and his anointing
of himself with the last infallible preparation for
the production of luxuriant and glossy hair upon the
human countenance (quacks being the only sages he
believed in besides usurers), the murky fog closed
about him and shut him up in its sooty embrace.
If it had never let him out any more, the world would
have had no irreparable loss, but could have easily
replaced him from its stock on hand.
A RESPECTED FRIEND IN A NEW ASPECT
In the evening of this same foggy day when the yellow
window-blind of Pubsey and Co. was drawn down upon
the day’s work, Riah the Jew once more came
forth into Saint Mary Axe. But this time he carried
no bag, and was not bound on his master’s affairs.
He passed over London Bridge, and returned to the
Middlesex shore by that of Westminster, and so, ever
wading through the fog, waded to the doorstep of the
dolls’ dressmaker.
