The door opened, and there entered to us, quietly, the most remarkable-looking man that I had ever seen.Judging him by his figure and his movements, he was still young.Judging him by his face, and comparing him with Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two.His complexion was of a gipsy darkness;his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house.His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West.His forehead rose high and straight from the brow.His marks and wrinkles were innumerable.From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown--eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits--looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will.Add to this a quantity of thick closely curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner.Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour.Round the sides of his head--without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary contrast--it had turned completely white.The line between the two colours preserved no sort of regularity.
At one place, the white hair ran up into the black; at another, the black hair ran down into the white.I looked at the man with a curiosity which, I am ashamed to say, I found it quite impossible to control.His soft brown eyes looked back at me gently; and he met my involuntary rudeness in staring at him, with an apology which I was conscious that I had not deserved.
`I beg your pardon,' he said.`I had no idea that Mr.Betteredge was engaged.' He took a slip of paper from his pocket, and handed it to Betteredge.
`The list for next week,' he said.His eyes just rested on me again--and he left the room as quietly as he had entered it.
`Who is that?' I asked.
`Mr.Candy's assistant,' said Betteredge.`By the by, Mr.Franklin, you will be sorry to hear that the little doctor has never recovered that illness he caught, going home from the birthday dinner.He's pretty well in health; but he lost his memory in the fever, and he has never recovered more than the wreck of it since.The work all falls on his assistant.Not much of it now, except among the poor.They can't help themselves, you know.They must put up with the man with the piebald hair, and the gipsy complexion--or they would get no doctoring at all.'
`You don't seem to like him, Betteredge?'
`Nobody likes him, sir.'
`Why is he so unpopular?'
`Well, Mr.Franklin, his appearance is against him, to begin with.And then there's a story that Mr.Candy took him with a very doubtful character.
Nobody knows who he is--and he hasn't a friend in the place.How can you expect one to like him, after that?'
`Quite impossible, of course! May I ask what he wanted with you, when he gave you that bit of paper?'
`Only to bring me the weekly list of the sick people about here, sir, who stand in need of a little wine.My lady always had a regular distribution of good sound port and sherry among the infirm poor; and Miss Rachel wishes the custom to be kept up.Times have changed! times have changed! I remember when Mr.Candy himself brought the list to my mistress.Now it's Mr.Candy's assistant who brings the list to me.I'll go on with the letter, if you will allow me, sir,' said Betteredge, drawing Rosanna Spearman's confession back to him.`It isn't lively reading, I grant you.But, there! it keeps me from getting sour with thinking of the past.' He put on his spectacles, and wagged his head gloomily.`There's a bottom of good sense, Mr.Franklin, in our conduct to our mothers, when they first start us on the journey of life.We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world.And we are all of us right.'
Mr.Candy's assistant had produced too strong an impression on me to be immediately dismissed from my thoughts.I passed over the last unanswerable utterance of the Betteredge philosophy, and returned to the subject of the man with the piebald hair.
`What is his name?' I asked.
`As ugly a name as need be,' Betteredge answered gruffly.`Ezra Jennings.'