Somebodys Luggage | Page 8

0 Pen and paper 0 0 6
Blotting-paper 0 0 6 Messenger to Paternoster Row and back 0 1 6
Again, when No Answer 0 1 6 Brandy 2s., Devilled Pork chop 2s. 0 4 0
Pens and paper 0 1 0 Messenger to Albemarle Street and back 0 1 0
Again (detained), when No Answer 0 1 6 Salt-cellar broken 0 3 6 Large
Liquour-glass Orange Brandy 0 1 6 Dinner, Soup, Fish, Joint, and bird
0 7 6 Bottle old East India Brown 0 8 0 Pen and paper 0 0 6 2 16 6
Mem.: January 1st, 1857. He went out after dinner, directing luggage to

be ready when he called for it. Never called.
So far from throwing a light upon the subject, this bill appeared to me,
if I may so express my doubts, to involve it in a yet more lurid halo.
Speculating it over with the Mistress, she informed me that the luggage
had been advertised in the Master's time as being to be sold after such
and such a day to pay expenses, but no farther steps had been taken. (I
may here remark, that the Mistress is a widow in her fourth year. The
Master was possessed of one of those unfortunate constitutions in
which Spirits turns to Water, and rises in the ill-starred Victim.)
My speculating it over, not then only, but repeatedly, sometimes with
the Mistress, sometimes with one, sometimes with another, led up to
the Mistress's saying to me,--whether at first in joke or in earnest, or
half joke and half earnest, it matters not:
"Christopher, I am going to make you a handsome offer."
(If this should meet her eye,--a lovely blue,--may she not take it ill my
mentioning that if I had been eight or ten year younger, I would have
done as much by her! That is, I would have made her a offer. It is for
others than me to denominate it a handsome one.)
"Christopher, I am going to make you a handsome offer."
"Put a name to it, ma'am."
"Look here, Christopher. Run over the articles of Somebody's Luggage.
You've got it all by heart, I know."
"A black portmanteau, ma'am, a black bag, a desk, a dressing-case, a
brown-paper parcel, a hat-box, and an umbrella strapped to a
walking-stick."
"All just as they were left. Nothing opened, nothing tampered with."
"You are right, ma'am. All locked but the brown-paper parcel, and that
sealed."
The Mistress was leaning on Miss Martin's desk at the bar-window, and
she taps the open book that lays upon the desk,--she has a pretty-made
hand to be sure,--and bobs her head over it and laughs.
"Come," says she, "Christopher. Pay me Somebody's bill, and you shall
have Somebody's Luggage."
I rather took to the idea from the first moment; but,
"It mayn't be worth the money," I objected, seeming to hold back.
"That's a Lottery," says the Mistress, folding her arms upon the
book,--it ain't her hands alone that's pretty made, the observation

extends right up her arms. "Won't you venture two pound sixteen
shillings and sixpence in the Lottery? Why, there's no blanks!" says the
Mistress; laughing and bobbing her head again, "you MUST win. If
you lose, you must win! All prizes in this Lottery! Draw a blank, and
remember, Gentlemen-Sportsmen, you'll still be entitled to a black
portmanteau, a black bag, a desk, a dressing-case, a sheet of brown
paper, a hat-box, and an umbrella strapped to a walking-stick!"
To make short of it, Miss Martin come round me, and Mrs. Pratchett
come round me, and the Mistress she was completely round me already,
and all the women in the house come round me, and if it had been
Sixteen two instead of Two sixteen, I should have thought myself well
out of it. For what can you do when they do come round you?
So I paid the money--down--and such a laughing as there was among
'em! But I turned the tables on 'em regularly, when I said:
"My family-name is Blue-Beard. I'm going to open Somebody's
Luggage all alone in the Secret Chamber, and not a female eye catches
sight of the contents!"
Whether I thought proper to have the firmness to keep to this, don't
signify, or whether any female eye, and if any, how many, was really
present when the opening of the Luggage came off. Somebody's
Luggage is the question at present: Nobody's eyes, nor yet noses.
What I still look at most, in connection with that Luggage, is the
extraordinary quantity of writing-paper, and all written on! And not our
paper neither,--not the paper charged in the bill, for we know our
paper,--so he must have been always at it. And he had crumpled up this
writing of his, everywhere,