The Missing Link | Page 8

a fancy dress ball. All the guests were masked or otherwise disguised. Nickie had never encountered a softer thing. He determined to make a night of it at the expense of the host of "White-cliff." To avoid unpleasantness at the door, Nickie boldly climbed up the trellis of a vine, and entered the noisy crowded ballroom through an open window, rolling head over heels among the guests.
His appearance provoked a shout of laughter. This was the proper way for a tramp to enter such a house. It was accepted as a quaint effort of humour. Weary Willie was applauded, and his appearance, when he rose to his feet, occasioned fresh merriment.
The "make-up" of Mr. Crips was certainly very effective, but with the exception of the false nose it was nothing but his ordinary habit. He wore a pair of old grey trousers, lashed up with one brace, and belted with a strip of red material; between the fringed legs of this garment and his broken canvas shoes the tops of socks, one white, the other plaid, were plainly visible. The fact that they were only tops, and not whole socks, was not to be missed, as they had worked up, and an inch of bare ankle protruded. Nickie's coat was an old black Beaufort, from which two buttons' hung on grey threads, which was split half-way up the back, and from below the tails of which fluttered strips of torn lining. He wore no vest, and had on a woman's faded pink print blouse as a shirt. He had a linen collar that had long since lost all claims to whiteness and all pretence of dignity, and his hat was a small round boxer, with scarcely any rim. On one of the buttons of his Beaufort hung a strip of ordinary sugar bag, on which he had written with a stub of pencil the word "Program."
Mr. Nicholas Crips looked the part to the life. He had not shaved for a week, and his lank hair was reaching out in all directions from under his ridiculous hat, and from various strands dangled fragments of his last couch under the boat shed. Nickie had nothing of the painted, unconvincing theatrical accessories of the usual fancy dress tramp; he looked real, and his success was instantaneous and complete.
I have endeavoured to show that Mr. Crips was not a diffident man; he did not distress himself with scruples; fear of failure in an enterprise of this kind never worried him. He walked across the grand ball-room, swaggering in his rags, lifted his hat to a Watteau shepherdess who was laughing at him from a settee in a recess, and said:
"Would yer darnce with er poor man, kind lydie?"
Again the crowd laughed. A tall Mary Queen of Scots peered at Nickie through her lorgnette, and said.
"How very whimsical!" The little shepherdess was a merry spirit, and bowed willingly. Nickie wrote "Milk Made" on his absurd programme, and the quaintly assorted pair joined in the waltz. How, where and when Nickie the Kid had learnt to dance Heaven knows, but he waltzed well, and after that he danced with Mary Stuart in a set.
He was particularly attracted by Mary Stuart. She was a fine woman and the rakish Nicholas had a discriminating eye where the sex was concerned. Mary had a bold eye too, and a breezy manner. She took great joy in the tramp.
A feature of Nickie's very humorous and original impersonation of the Yarra-banker was his waggish begging. When he had danced, before leaving his partner, he assumed a most lugubrious manner, and said:
"Dear lydie, would you kindly assist a pore decayed gent, what's got a bedridden wife an' nine starvin' children, all twins? Just a copper, lydie. The bailiffs is in, lydie, an' if I don't take 'orne nine-pence for the rent they'll seize ther kerosene case, an' ther flour-sack, and ther rest iv ther drorin-room furniture, kind lydie."
A gay vivandiere led Nickie to a portly Henry VIII. "Sire," she said, "this poor man claims king's bounty for his three sets of triplets. I humbly commend him to your majesty."
"Just a trifle to assist a poor man, kind gent," whined Nickie the Kid. "Not a morsel iv turkey's passed me lips for seven days. Just a few pence, sir, to buy champagne fer me widders and orphans. I don't care about meself, kind sir."
King Henry promptly dropped half-a-crown into Nickie's hat. Two, or three laughing guests standing about contributed silver. There was an impression in the ballroom that the sum of the quaint tramp's collection would go to a charity. None but Nickie himself knew the charitable object to which the money was to be devoted.
Nickie danced with all sorts and conditions of women. Romeo slapped him on the back.
"Splendid, deah boy!" he