For if I could make him believe that learning
was a good thing, and that we might lead better lives, I should be a’most
content to die.’
‘Don’t talk stuff about dying, Liz.’
She placed her hands in one another on his shoulder, and laying her rich
brown cheek against them as she looked down at the fire, went on
thoughtfully:
‘Of an evening, Charley, when you are at the school, and father’s—’
‘At the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters,’ the boy struck in, with a backward
nod of his head towards the public-house.
‘Yes. Then as I sit a-looking at the fire, I seem to see in the burning
coal—like where that glow is now—’
‘That’s gas, that is,’ said the boy, ‘coming out of a bit of a forest
that’s been under the mud that was under the water in the days of Noah’s
Ark. Look here! When I take the poker—so—and give it a dig—’
‘Don’t disturb it, Charley, or it’ll be all in a blaze. It’s that dull
glow near it, coming and going, that I mean. When I look at it of an
evening, it comes like pictures to me, Charley.’
‘Show us a picture,’ said the boy. ‘Tell us where to look.’
‘Ah! It wants my eyes, Charley.’
‘Cut away then, and tell us what your eyes make of it.’
‘Why, there are you and me, Charley, when you were quite a baby that never
knew a mother—’
‘Don’t go saying I never knew a mother,’ interposed the boy, ‘for I knew a
little sister that was sister and mother both.’
The girl laughed delightedly, and her eyes filled with pleasant tears, as
he put both his arms round her waist and so held her.
‘There are you and me, Charley, when father was away at work and locked us
out, for fear we should set ourselves afire or fall out of window, sitting
on the door-sill, sitting on other door-steps, sitting on the bank of the
river, wandering about to get through the time. You are rather heavy to
carry, Charley, and I am often obliged to rest. Sometimes we are sleepy
and fall asleep together in a corner, sometimes we are very hungry,
sometimes we are a little frightened, but what is oftenest hard upon us is
the cold. You remember, Charley?’
‘I remember,’ said the boy, pressing her to him twice or thrice, ‘that I
snuggled under a little shawl, and it was warm there.’
‘Sometimes it rains, and we creep under a boat or the like of that:
sometimes it’s dark, and we get among the gaslights, sitting watching the
people as they go along the streets. At last, up comes father and takes us
home. And home seems such a shelter after out of doors! And father pulls
my shoes off, and dries my feet at the fire, and has me to sit by him
while he smokes his pipe long after you are abed, and I notice that
father’s is a large hand but never a heavy one when it touches me, and
that father’s is a rough voice but never an angry one when it speaks to
me. So, I grow up, and little by little father trusts me, and makes me his
companion, and, let him be put out as he may, never once strikes me.’
The listening boy gave a grunt here, as much as to say ‘But he strikes methough!’
‘Those are some of the pictures of what is past, Charley.’
‘Cut away again,’ said the boy, ‘and give us a fortune-telling one; a
future one.’
‘Well! There am I, continuing with father and holding to father, because
father loves me and I love father. I can’t so much as read a book,
because, if I had learned, father would have thought I was deserting him,
and I should have lost my influence. I have not the influence I want to
have, I cannot stop some dreadful things I try to stop, but I go on in the
hope and trust that the time will come. In the meanwhile I know that I am
in some things a stay to father, and that if I was not faithful to him he
would—in revenge-like, or in disappointment, or both—go wild
and bad.’
‘Give us a touch of the fortune-telling pictures about me.’
‘I was passing on to them, Charley,’ said the girl, who had not changed
her attitude since she began, and who now mournfully shook her head; ‘the
others were all leading up.