Volume II Part 23 (2/2)

The town clock was striking eleven, and the antiquated time-piece on the staircase (which never spoke but it dropped pearls and crystals, like the fairy in the story) was lisping the hour, when there came three tremendous knocks at the street door. Mrs. Bilkins, who was dusting the bra.s.s-mounted chronometer in the hall, stood transfixed, with arm uplifted. The admirable old lady had for years been carrying on a guerilla warfare with itinerant venders of furniture polish, and pain-killer, and crockery cement and the like. The effrontery of the triple knock convinced her the enemy was at her gates--possibly that dissolute creature with twenty-four sheets of note-paper and twenty-four envelopes for fifteen cents.

Mrs. Bilkins swept across the hall, and opened the door with a jerk.

The suddenness of the movement was apparently not antic.i.p.ated by the person outside, who, with one arm stretched feebly towards the receding knocker, tilted gently forward, and rested both hands on the threshold in an att.i.tude which was probably common enough with our ancestors of the Simian period, but could never have been considered graceful. By an effort that testified to the excellent condition of his muscles, the person instantly righted himself, and stood swaying unsteadily on his toes and heels, and smiling rather vaguely on Mrs. Bilkins.

It was a slightly-built but well-knitted young fellow, in the not unpicturesque garb of our marine service. His woollen cap, pitched forward at an acute angle with his nose, showed the back part of a head thatched with short yellow hair, which had broken into innumerable curls of painful tightness. On his ruddy cheeks a spa.r.s.e, sandy beard was making a timid _debut_. Add to this a weak, good-natured mouth, a pair of devil-may-care blue eyes, and the fact that the man was very drunk, and you have a pre-Raphaelite portrait--we may as well say at once--of Mr. Larry O'Rourke of Mullingar, County Westmeath, and late of the United States sloop-of-war Santee.

The man was a total stranger to Mrs. Bilkins but the instant she caught sight of the double white anchors embroidered on the lapels of his jacket, she unhesitatingly threw back the door, which with great presence of mind she had partly closed.

A drunken sailor standing on the step of the Bilkins mansion was no novelty. The street, as we have stated, led down to the wharves, and sailors were constantly pa.s.sing. The house ab.u.t.ted directly on the street; the granite door-step was almost flush with the sidewalk, and the huge, old-fas.h.i.+oned bra.s.s knocker--seemingly a brazen hand that had been cut off at the wrist, and nailed against the oak as a warning to malefactors--extended itself in a kind of grim appeal to everybody. It seemed to possess strange fascinations for all seafaring folk; and when there was a man-of-war in port the rat-tat-tat of that knocker would frequently startle the quiet neighborhood long after midnight. There appeared to be an occult understanding between it and the blue-jackets.

Years ago there was a young Bilkins, one Pendexter Bilkins--a sad losel, we fear--who ran away to try his fortunes before the mast, and fell overboard in a gale off Hatteras. ”Lost at sea,” says the chubby marble slab in the Old South Burying-Ground, ”_aetat._ 18.” Perhaps that is why no blue-jacket, sober or drunk, was ever repulsed from the door of the Bilkins mansion.

Of course Mrs. Bilkins had her taste in the matter, and preferred them sober. But as this could not always be, she tempered her wind, so to speak, to the shorn lamb. The flushed, prematurely-old face that now looked up at her moved the good lady's pity.

”What do you want?” she asked, kindly.

”Me wife.”

”There's no wife for you here,” said Mrs. Bilkins, somewhat taken aback.

”His wife!” she thought; ”it's a mother the poor boy stands in need of.”

”Me wife,” repeated Mr. O'Rourke, ”for betther or for worse.”

”You had better go away,” said Mrs. Bilkins, bridling up, ”or it will be the worse for you.”

”To have and to howld,” continued Mr. O'Rourke, wandering retrospectively in the mazes of the marriage service, ”to have and to howld till death--bad luck to him!--takes one or the ither of us.”

”You're a blasphemous creature,” said Mrs. Bilkins, severely.

”Thim's the words his riverince spake this mornin', standin' foreninst us,” explained Mr. O'Rourke. ”I stood here, see, and me jew'l stood there, and the howly chaplain beyont.”

And Mr. O'Rourke with a wavering forefinger drew a diagram of the interesting situation on the door-step.

”Well,” returned Mrs. Bilkins, ”if you're a married man, all I have to say is, there's a pair of fools instead of one. You had better be off; the person you want doesn't live here.”

”Bedad, thin, but she does.”

”Lives here?”

”Sorra a place else.”

”The man's crazy,” said Mrs. Bilkins to herself.

While she thought him simply drunk, she was not in the least afraid; but the idea that she was conversing with a madman sent a chill over her.

She reached back her hand preparatory to shutting the door, when Mr.

O'Rourke, with an agility that might have been expected from his previous gymnastics, set one foot on the threshold and frustrated the design.

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