“Really,” he remarks, rubbing his hands complacently, “this will be quite a cheerful family tea, to which I’ve long been a stranger — only it ain’t tea, and we ain’t a family — but that’s like me. Draw up to the table, my good sir, and let’s begin, for I’m absolutely starving. My dinner must have gone all the wrong way, on account of the worry I’ve been in, for I’m sure I don’t know what’s become of it. Dear me! it’s just occurred to me that perhaps you don’t like coffee.”
“Oh, yes, I do, sir.”
“Well, that’s a blessing! Now let me try and pour out for you, and if I don’t make it to your liking, pray mention it, and I shall be extremely obliged to you. I’m such a remarkably helpless man, and so little used to pouring out anything for anybody except myself — and I’m nobody — that I’m almost sure to bungle. Here’s cream, here’s sugar, here’s (holding it close, to make out what) something I can’t specify, but it’s something to eat, and very nice, I dare say. Now, do try it. I shall feel personally flattered if you like it.”
Handing all these things to his guest, and pressing them upon him, as if he had got the notion into his head that he must be on the point of perishing from starvation, Mr. Grewgious, in spite of his protestations of hunger, touches not a morsel, nor imbibes a drop, until he has seen his visitor fully occupied.
“And now,” says Mr. Grewgious, “to return to the subject of your qualifications. There’s one question I must ask you, which I almost forgot, though it’s a most important one — can you poke a fire?”
Smiling for the first time during the interview, the young man answers with some surprise at the question —
“I hope so, sir. Are you very particular about the manner of doing it?”
“No, it isn’t that. Every human individual, I do believe, has his own particular way of poking a fire; I’ve got my way, and I dare say you have yours. But I mean, whether you are liable to forget to do it?”
“If I should be so foolish, sir, I should have to suffer the penalty; but I do not think my memory is so short.”
“Why, you see,” says Mr. Grewgious, smoothing his head somewhat dejectedly, “I had a clerk — alas! I have him no more! — who, being a genius, and a writer of tragedies, couldn’t be expected, you know (and I didn’t expect it, I am sure) to think of such a thing as a fire, and, every day a’most, his fire used to go out.”
“He couldn’t have been so liable to take cold as I, then, or he would have remembered to replenish it for his own sake.”
“Not liable to take cold! Bless you! he was liable to take it to a most extraordinary degree. Cold in the head, cold on the chest, cold in the stomach, cold running to rheumatism, or to a cough, or to seed and becoming chronic. It makes me hot to think in how many dreadful forms cold used to attack and prostrate him.”
The stranger, not knowing what to say to this, yet conscious that Mr. Grewgious’ eyes are emphatically demanding a comment, says, with an expression of surprise and concern —
“Indeed!”
“Of course I felt it my bounden duty not to let the unfortunate young man, so highly talented, fall a prey to cold of any kind on my premises,” continues Mr. Grewgious. “I therefore took upon myself to attend to his fire, privately, and without letting him know of my intention. But, unfortunately, I am as liable to forget as he is to take cold, particularly when engrossed in my accounts, and the pangs of conscience I have suffered, when he would hint severely — as he did, sometimes — that cold might turn to inflammation, and inflammation might carry him off in a winking, and that then I should have to bear, not only his loss — which, naturally, would be hard upon me — but the whole weight of his inflamed blood and unfinished tragedies upon my luckless head.”
There is a sort of twinkle in Mr. Grewgious’ eye at this juncture which rather modifies the tragic solemnity of his words, but it disappears, as he goes on again.