'Mr. Drood,' said Bazzard.
'What of him?'
'Has called,' said Bazzard.
'You might have shown him in.'
'I am doing it,' said Bazzard.
The visitor came in accordingly.
'Dear me!' said Mr. Grewgious, looking round his pair of office candles. 'I thought you had called and merely left your name and gone. How do you do, Mr. Edwin? Dear me, you're choking!'
'It's this fog,' returned Edwin; 'and it makes my eyes smart, like Cayenne pepper.'
'Is it really so bad as that? Pray undo your wrappers. It's fortunate I have so good a fire; but Mr. Bazzard has taken care of me.'
'No I haven't,' said Mr. Bazzard at the door.
'Ah! then it follows that I must have taken care of myself without observing it,' said Mr. Grewgious. 'Pray be seated in my chair.
No. I beg! Coming out of such an atmosphere, in MY chair.'
Edwin took the easy-chair in the corner; and the fog he had brought in with him, and the fog he took off with his greatcoat and neck-shawl, was speedily licked up by the eager fire.
'I look,' said Edwin, smiling, 'as if I had come to stop.'
' - By the by,' cried Mr. Grewgious; 'excuse my interrupting you;do stop. The fog may clear in an hour or two. We can have dinner in from just across Holborn. You had better take your Cayenne pepper here than outside; pray stop and dine.'
'You are very kind,' said Edwin, glancing about him as though attracted by the notion of a new and relishing sort of gipsy-party.
'Not at all,' said Mr. Grewgious; 'YOU are very kind to join issue with a bachelor in chambers, and take pot-luck. And I'll ask,'
said Mr. Grewgious, dropping his voice, and speaking with a twinkling eye, as if inspired with a bright thought: 'I'll ask Bazzard. He mightn't like it else. - Bazzard!'
Bazzard reappeared.
'Dine presently with Mr. Drood and me.'
'If I am ordered to dine, of course I will, sir,' was the gloomy answer.
'Save the man!' cried Mr. Grewgious. 'You're not ordered; you're invited.'
'Thank you, sir,' said Bazzard; 'in that case I don't care if Ido.'
'That's arranged. And perhaps you wouldn't mind,' said Mr.
Grewgious, 'stepping over to the hotel in Furnival's, and asking them to send in materials for laying the cloth. For dinner we'll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we'll have the best made-dish that can be recommended, and we'll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and we'll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare - in short, we'll have whatever there is on hand.'
These liberal directions Mr. Grewgious issued with his usual air of reading an inventory, or repeating a lesson, or doing anything else by rote. Bazzard, after drawing out the round table, withdrew to execute them.
'I was a little delicate, you see,' said Mr. Grewgious, in a lower tone, after his clerk's departure, 'about employing him in the foraging or commissariat department. Because he mightn't like it.'
'He seems to have his own way, sir,' remarked Edwin.
'His own way?' returned Mr. Grewgious. 'O dear no! Poor fellow, you quite mistake him. If he had his own way, he wouldn't be here.'
'I wonder where he would be!' Edwin thought. But he only thought it, because Mr. Grewgious came and stood himself with his back to the other corner of the fire, and his shoulder-blades against the chimneypiece, and collected his skirts for easy conversation.
'I take it, without having the gift of prophecy, that you have done me the favour of looking in to mention that you are going down yonder - where I can tell you, you are expected - and to offer to execute any little commission from me to my charming ward, and perhaps to sharpen me up a bit in any proceedings? Eh, Mr. Edwin?'
'I called, sir, before going down, as an act of attention.'
'Of attention!' said Mr. Grewgious. 'Ah! of course, not of impatience?'
'Impatience, sir?'
Mr. Grewgious had meant to be arch - not that he in the remotest degree expressed that meaning - and had brought himself into scarcely supportable proximity with the fire, as if to burn the fullest effect of his archness into himself, as other subtle impressions are burnt into hard metals. But his archness suddenly flying before the composed face and manner of his visitor, and only the fire remaining, he started and rubbed himself.
'I have lately been down yonder,' said Mr. Grewgious, rearranging his skirts; 'and that was what I referred to, when I said I could tell you you are expected.'
'Indeed, sir! Yes; I knew that Pussy was looking out for me.'
'Do you keep a cat down there?' asked Mr. Grewgious.
Edwin coloured a little as he explained: 'I call Rosa Pussy.'
'O, really,' said Mr. Grewgious, smoothing down his head; 'that's very affable.'
Edwin glanced at his face, uncertain whether or no he seriously objected to the appellation. But Edwin might as well have glanced at the face of a clock.
'A pet name, sir,' he explained again.
'Umps,' said Mr. Grewgious, with a nod. But with such an extraordinary compromise between an unqualified assent and a qualified dissent, that his visitor was much disconcerted.
'Did PRosa - ' Edwin began by way of recovering himself.
'PRosa?' repeated Mr. Grewgious.
'I was going to say Pussy, and changed my mind; - did she tell you anything about the Landlesses?'
'No,' said Mr. Grewgious. 'What is the Landlesses? An estate? Avilla? A farm?'
'A brother and sister. The sister is at the Nuns' House, and has become a great friend of P - '
'PRosa's,' Mr. Grewgious struck in, with a fixed face.
'She is a strikingly handsome girl, sir, and I thought she might have been described to you, or presented to you perhaps?'
'Neither,' said Mr. Grewgious. 'But here is Bazzard.'