Part 34 (2/2)

'Wot sort of a looking man he is?' repeated Rowley. 'Well, I don't very well know wot you would say, Mr. Anne. He ain't a beauty, any'ow.'

'Is he tall?'

'Tall? Well, no, I shouldn't say tall Mr. Anne.'

'Well, then, is he short?'

'Short? No, I don't think I would say he was what you would call short. No, not piticular short, sir.'

'Then, I suppose, he must be about the middle height?'

'Well, you might say it, sir; but not remarkable so.'

I smothered an oath.

'Is he clean-shaved?' I tried him again.

'Clean-shaved?' he repeated, with the same air of anxious candour.

'Good heaven, man, don't repeat my words like a parrot!' I cried. 'Tell me what the man was like: it is of the first importance that I should be able to recognise him.'

'I'm trying to, Mr. Anne. But clean-shaved? I don't seem to rightly get hold of that p'int. Sometimes it might appear to me like as if he was; and sometimes like as if he wasn't. No, it wouldn't surprise me now if you was to tell me he 'ad a bit o' whisker.'

'Was the man red-faced?' I roared, dwelling on each syllable.

'I don't think you need go for to get cross about it, Mr. Anne!' said he. 'I'm tellin' you every blessed thing I see! Red-faced? Well, no, not as you would remark upon.'

A dreadful calm fell upon me.

'Was he anywise pale?' I asked.

'Well, it don't seem to me as though he were. But I tell you truly, I didn't take much heed to that.'

'Did he look like a drinking man?'

'Well, no. If you please, sir, he looked more like an eating one.'

'Oh, he was stout, was he?'

'No, sir. I couldn't go so far as that. No, he wasn't not to say stout. If anything, lean rather.'

I need not go on with the infuriating interview. It ended as it began, except that Rowley was in tears, and that I had acquired one fact. The man was drawn for me as being of any height you like to mention, and of any degree of corpulence or leanness; clean-shaved or not, as the case might be; the colour of his hair Rowley 'could not take it upon himself to put a name on'; that of his eyes he thought to have been blue-nay, it was the one point on which he attained to a kind of tearful certainty. 'I'll take my davy on it,' he a.s.severated. They proved to have been as black as sloes, very little and very near together. So much for the evidence of the artless! And the fact, or rather the facts, acquired? Well, they had to do not with the person but with his clothing. The man wore knee-breeches and white stockings; his coat was 'some kind of a lightish colour-or betwixt that and dark'; and he wore a 'mole-skin weskit.' As if this were not enough, he presently haled me from my breakfast in a prodigious flutter, and showed me an honest and rather venerable citizen pa.s.sing in the Square.

'That's him, sir,' he cried, 'the very moral of him! Well, this one is better dressed, and p'r'aps a trifler taller; and in the face he don't favour him noways at all, sir. No, not when I come to look again, 'e don't seem to favour him noways.'

'Jacka.s.s!' said I, and I think the greatest stickler for manners will admit the epithet to have been justified.

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