"Will ye leave the money?" asked the woman, as if a thought struck her.
"Certainly not," replied Celie, "but I will write you a line stating that I hold myself responsible for anything he is proved guilty of stealing, to the extent of ten pounds."
It was thus that Cleg Kelly became newsboy and general assistant to Mistress Roy and her husband at Roy's corner.
As Celie went out, she heard Mr. Roy stretching himself and yawning, as though awakening out of a deep sleep.
"Wha's that ye hae had in?" he inquired pleasantly.
"What business is that o' yours, ye muckle slabber?" returned his wife with instant aggression.
And the cockroaches continue to rustle all the time beneath the carpet of old newspapers.
ADVENTURE VIII. THE FLIGHT OF SHEEMUS
aristocratic hauteur. He was not any longer a prowler on the streets, with only a stance for which he might have to fight. He was a newsvendor's assistant. He would not even accept wager of battle upon provocation offered. He could, however, still kick; and as he had an admirable pair of boots with tackety soles an inch thick to do it with, he soon made himself the most respected boy in the crowd.
On returning to the Pleasance, he was admitted through the chink of the door by Mistress Roy, who was comprehensively dressed in a vast yellow flannel bed-gown, which grew murkier and murkier towards her feet. Her hair was tumbling about her eyes. That, too, was of a yellow grey, as though part of the bed-gown had been ravelled out and attached loosely to her head. Feathers and woolly dust were stuck impartially over hair and bed-gown.
"Write the names on the papers as I cry them," she said to Cleg, "and look slippy."
Cleg was quick to obey. He had, in fact, his pencil ready.
"Cready, number seventeen three stairs back. Dinna write a' that. Write the name, an' mind the rest," said Mistress Roy.
"MacVane, twenty-wan, shop," and so on went the list interminably.
Mistress Roy kept no books, but in her memory she had the various counts and reckonings of all grades of her customers. She retained there, for instance, the exact amounts of the intricate scores of the boys who took in the "Boys of the City." She knew who had not paid for the last chapter of "Ned Kelly; or, the Iron-clad Australian Bushranger." She had a mental gauge on the great roll of black twist tobacco which lay on the counter among old "Evening Scraps." She knew exactly how much there was in the casks of strong waters under the stairs, from which, every Sunday, her numerous friends and callers were largely entertained.
When Cleg went out to deliver his papers he had nearly a hundred calls to make. But such was his sense of locality and his knowledge of the district that, with the help of a butcher's boy of his acquaintance (to whom he promised a reading of the "Desperadoes of New Orleans; or, the Good Ku Klux"), he managed to deliver all except a single "Scotsman" to one Mackimmon, who lived in a big land at the corner of Rankeillor Street. Him he was utterly unable to discover.
Upon his return Mistress Roy was waiting for him.
"Did ye deliver them a'?" she asked, bending forward her head in a threatening manner as if expecting a negative reply.
"A' but yin!" said Cleg, who was in good spirits, and pleased with himself.
His mistress took up a brush. Cleg's hand dropped lightly upon a pound weight. He did not mean to play the abused little message-boy if he knew it.
"And what yin might that be?" said Mistress Roy.
"Mackimmon," said the boy briefly, "he's no in Rankeillor Street ava'."
The hand that held the brush went back in act to throw. Now this was, from the point of view of psychological dynamics, a mistake in tactics. A woman should never attempt to throw anything in controversy, least of all a brush. Her stronghold is to advance to the charge with all her natural weapons and vigour. But to throw a brush is to abdicate her providential advantages. And so Mistress Roy found.
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and that was the course described by the pound weight on which Cleg Kelly dropped his hand. It sped fair and level from his hand, flung low as he had many a time skimmed stones on Saint Margaret's Loch in the hollow under the Crags.
"Ouch! " suddenly said Mistress Roy, taken, as she herself said, "in the short of the wind." The hearth-brush with which she had been wont to correct her former message boys fell helplessly to the ground.
"Fetch me a toothfu' frae the back o' the door. Oh, ye villain, Cleg Kelly! I'm a' overcome like!" she said.
Cleg went to the back of the door where there was a keg with a spigot. He brought his mistress a drink in a little tinnikin.
She seemed to have forgotten to be angry, and bent her brows upon him more pleasantly than she had yet done.
"I thocht that ye were a religious boy," she said.
Cleg stood back a little with Mackimmon's paper still in his hand.
"Pund wecht for besom shank is good religion," said the imperfect Christian but excellent message-boy.