A pause in the talk between us, followed--and Gabriel Betteredge came
out from his retirement at the window.
"Can you favour me with your attention, sir?" he inquired, addressing
himself to me.
"I am quite at your service," I answered.
Betteredge took a chair and seated himself at the table. He produced a
huge old-fashioned leather pocket-book, with a pencil of dimensions to
match. Having put on his spectacles, he opened the pocket-book, at a
blank page, and addressed himself to me once more.
"I have lived," said Betteredge, looking at me sternly, "nigh on fifty
years in the service of my late lady. I was page-boy before that, in the
service of the old lord, her father. I am now somewhere between seventy
and eighty years of age--never mind exactly where! I am reckoned to have
got as pretty a knowledge and experience of the world as most men. And
what does it all end in? It ends, Mr. Ezra Jennings, in a conjuring
trick being performed on Mr. Franklin Blake, by a doctor's assistant
with a bottle of laudanum--and by the living jingo, I'm appointed, in my
old age, to be conjurer's boy!"
Mr. Blake burst out laughing. I attempted to speak.
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