Jack Maggs Read Online Free PDF Page B

round box, and a large powder puff. These were duly offered, and declined.
    “Still, old fellow,” said Maggs, “a cove needs more in the way of assistance than a saucer and a box.”
    “Oh, a cove does, does he?”
    “He does, yes,” insisted Maggs.
    “You must excuse me,” shrugged Constable, “for it is quarter past the hour, and with Mrs Halfstairs it is eat when she says or never.”
    “Mr Constable, I am asking you to render me assistance.”
    The footman laid his hand upon the wooden door knob. “Mr Maggs, I am refusing it.”
    Maggs’s hand snapped around the other’s wrist. Thus, even as the footman’s silver-buckled shoes scuttled out the open door, the upper part of his body was yanked smartly inwards. Maggs leaned across his prisoner’s flailing arms and drove the bolt home in the door.
    “Now Thingstable,” he said. “You are about to place us both in peril.”
    “Oh fie . . . ,” said Constable in a tight, disdainful voice. He held his free hand to his neck. “I tremble-Kemble. You’ll kill me? Is that what you have in mind? By God, I think it is. He wants to kill me.”
    Softly, softly, thought Jack Maggs.
    “Please, Sir, go ahead. No, no really, I do beg you, it would be a pleasure to be done away with by someone so nicely fitted out.”
    “Fellow,” said Jack Maggs calmly, “you mistake me.”
    “But this is rich, Mr Maggs. This is too rich for you to understand, but my friend, Mr Pope, with whom I stood and served for fifteen years—we were boys together in Lineham Hall—has done himself in. In this very room. Here, where we would chat after our day’s labours. And she, the meddling duchess, has me dress you in his very clothes, and now you say you wish to kill me . . . oh, please, you really have no notion what a pleasure it would be.”
    “No one said anything about killing, my dear fellow.”
    “I am no one’s dear anything,” said Constable, and burst into tears.
    “Well, I must say then, I am sorry.”
    “Sorry you wish to kill me? Or sorry to know such a thing has happened?”
    “Don’t never try to beat me in the game of sorrow.”
    “You think to match me?”
    “I will sink you,” said Maggs gravely.
    The pair of them stood opposite each other like two horses at a fence.
    “All I require is that you assist me with my hair.”
    “Assist?”
    “I do not know how to achieve the correct effect with the hair.”
    “Ha-ha,” said Constable, pushing his long finger against Maggs’s chest. “What are you? A toffee-twister, a dimber-damber?”
    Jack Maggs took the finger, and held it hard inside his fist. Then he pulled the finger’s owner closer to him. “Listen carefully, fool. You do not have the devil’s notion who you’re dealing with.”
    The pale blue eyes wandered over Maggs’s face.
    “Who am I dealing with?” he asked at last.
    “If you are very lucky, you are dealing with a footman.”
    “A footman?”
    “Hurry up, man. Before I change my mind.”
    The stranger’s left cheek twitched violently.
    “I’ll fetch the water,” Edward Constable said. “You’ll want it warm.”
    When he was gone, Jack Maggs sat heavily on the crib, pushing his hand hard against the place on his cheek where the tic was centred. This tic pulled long cords of pain which ran from his left eye down to his back teeth, a pain now so intense that not even the thought that the footman might be on his way to call the police could rouse him from his seat.
    Some time later, when the attack had finally begun to subside, Edward Constable returned. He brought a steaming copper kettle to the wash-stand.
    “Now soak it,” he said.
    Maggs looked up bleakly.
    “Hair,” Edward Constable said. “You must remove your shirt and soak your hair.”
    The big man bent slowly over the basin in his woollen singlet.
    “Singlet off.”
    “Singlet stays on.”
    Constable put two fingers against Jack Maggs’s scalp and pushed his head into the bowl. The water was hot. Maggs cried