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mournfully; 'but his reputation was too precious to be perilled by such
association. Whether you share that knowledge, or do not, my dear - '
'I do not,' she said quietly.
'It is still the truth, Harriet, and my mind is lighter when I think of
him for that which made it so much heavier then.' He checked himself in his
tone of melancholy, and smiled upon her as he said 'Good-bye!'
'Good-bye, dear John! In the evening, at the old time and place, I
shall meet you as usual on your way home. Good-bye.'
The cordial face she lifted up to his to kiss him, was his home, his
life, his universe, and yet it was a portion of his punishment and grief;
for in the cloud he saw upon it - though serene and calm as any radiant
cloud at sunset - and in the constancy and devotion of her life, and in the
sacrifice she had made of ease, enjoyment, and hope, he saw the bitter
fruits of his old crime, for ever ripe and fresh.
She stood at the door looking after him, with her hands loosely clasped
in each other, as he made his way over the frowzy and uneven patch of ground
which lay before their house, which had once (and not long ago) been a
pleasant meadow, and was now a very waste, with a disorderly crop of
beginnings of mean houses, rising out of the rubbish, as if they had been
unskilfully sown there. Whenever he looked back - as once or twice he did -
her cordial face shone like a light upon his heart; but when he plodded on
his way, and saw her not, the tears were in her eyes as she stood watching
him.
Her pensive form was not long idle at the door. There was daily duty to
discharge, and daily work to do - for such commonplace spirits that are not
heroic, often work hard with their hands - and Harriet was soon busy with
her household tasks. These discharged, and the poor house made quite neat
and orderly, she counted her little stock of money, with an anxious face,
and went out thoughtfully to buy some necessaries for their table, planning
and conniving, as she went, how to save. So sordid are the lives of such lo
natures, who are not only not heroic to their valets and waiting-women, but
have neither valets nor waiting-women to be heroic to withal!
While she was absent, and there was no one in the house, there
approached it by a different way from that the brother had taken, a
gentleman, a very little past his prime of life perhaps, but of a healthy
florid hue, an upright presence, and a bright clear aspect, that was
gracious and good-humoured. His eyebrows were still black, and so was much
of his hair; the sprinkling of grey observable among the latter, graced the
former very much, and showed his broad frank brow and honest eyes to great
advantage.
After knocking once at the door, and obtaining no response, this
gentleman sat down on a bench in the little porch to wait. A certain skilful
action of his fingers as he hummed some bars, and beat time on the seat
beside him, seemed to denote the musician; and the extraordinary
satisfaction he derived from humming something very slow and long, which had
no recognisable tune, seemed to denote that he was a scientific one.
The gentleman was still twirlIng a theme, which seemed to go round and
round and round, and in and in and in, and to involve itself like a
corkscrew twirled upon a table, without getting any nearer to anything, when
Harriet appeared returning. He rose up as she advanced, and stood with his
head uncovered.
'You are come again, Sir!' she said, faltering.
'I take that liberty,' he answered. 'May I ask for five minutes of your
leisure?'
After a moment's hesitation, she opened the door, and gave him
admission to the little parlour. The gentleman sat down there, drew his
chair to the table over against her, and said, in a voice that perfectly
corresponded to his appearance, and with a simplicity that was very
engaging:
'Miss Harriet, you cannot be proud. You signified to me, when I called
t'other morning, that you were. Pardon me if I say that I looked into your
face while you spoke, and that it contradicted you. I look into it again,'
he added, laying his hand gently on her arm, for an instant, 'and it
contradicts you more and more.'
She was somewhat confused and agitated, and could make no ready answer.
'It is the mirror of truth,' said her visitor, 'and gentleness. Excuse
my trusting to it, and returning.'
His manner of saying these words, divested them entirely of the
character of compliments. It was so plain, grave, unaffected, and sincere,
that she bent her head, as if at once to thank him, and acknowledge his
sincerity.
'The disparity between our ages,' said the gentleman, 'and the
plainness of my purpose, empower me, I am glad to think, to speak my mind.
That is my mind; and so you see me for the second time.'
'There is a kind of pride, Sir,' she returned, after a moment's
silence, 'or what may be supposed to be pride, which is mere duty. I hope I
cherish no other.'
'For yourself,' he said.
'For myself.'
'But - pardon me - ' suggested the gentleman. 'For your brother John?'
'Proud of his love, I am,' said Harriet, looking full upon her visitor,
and changing her manner on the instant - not that it was less composed and
quiet, but that there was a deep impassioned earnestness in it that made the
very tremble in her voice a part of her firmness, 'and proud of him. Sir,
you who strangely know the story of his life, and repeated it to me when you
were here last - '
'Merely to make my way into your confidence,' interposed the gentleman.
'For heaven's sake, don't suppose - '
'I am sure,' she said, 'you revived it, in my hearing, with a kind and
good purpose. I am quite sure of it.'
'I thank you,' returned her visitor, pressing her hand hastily. 'I am
much obliged to you. You do me justice, I assure you. You were going to say,
that I, who know the story of John Carker's life - '
'May think it pride in me,' she continued, 'when I say that I am proud
of him! I am. You know the time was, when I was not - when I could not be -
but that is past. The humility of many years, the uncomplaining expiation,
the true repentance, the terrible regret, the pain I know he has even in my
affection, which he thinks has cost me dear, though Heaven knows I am happy,
but for his sorrow I - oh, Sir, after what I have seen, let me conjure you,
if you are in any place of power, and are ever wronged, never, for any
wrong, inflict a punishment that cannot be recalled; while there is a GOD
above us to work changes in the hearts He made.'
'Your brother is an altered man,' returned the gentleman,
compassionately. 'I assure you I don't doubt it.'
'He was an altered man when he did wrong,' said Harriet. 'He is an
altered man again, and is his true self now, believe me, Sir.'
'But we go on, said her visitor, rubbing his forehead, in an absent
manner, with his hand, and then drumming thoughtfully on the table, 'we go
on in our clockwork routine, from day to day, and can't make out, or follow,
these changes. They - they're a metaphysical sort of thing. We - we haven't
leisure for it. We - we haven't courage. They're not taught at schools or
colleges, and we don't know how to set about it. In short, we are so
d-------d business-like,' said the gentleman, walking to the window, and
back, and sitting down again, in a state of extreme dissatisfaction and
vexation.
'I am sure,' said the gentleman, rubbing his forehead again; and
drumming on the table as before, 'I have good reason to believe that a
jog-trot life, the same from day to day, would reconcile one to anything.
One don't see anything, one don't hear anything, one don't know anything;
that's the fact. We go on taking everything for granted, and so we go on,
until whatever we do, good, bad, or indifferent, we do from habit. Habit is
all I shall have to report, when I am called upon to plead to my conscience,
on my death-bed. ''Habit," says I; ''I was deaf, dumb, blind, and paralytic,
to a million things, from habit." ''Very business-like indeed, Mr
What's-your-name,' says Conscience, ''but it won't do here!"'
The gentleman got up and walked to the window again and back: seriously
uneasy, though giving his uneasiness this peculiar expression.
'Miss Harriet,' he said, resuming his chair, 'I wish you would let me
serve you. Look at me; I ought to look honest, for I know I am so, at
present. Do I?'
'Yes,' she answered with a smile.
'I believe every word you have said,' he returned. 'I am full of
self-reproach that I might have known this and seen this, and known you and
seen you, any time these dozen years, and that I never have. I hardly know
how I ever got here - creature that I am, not only of my own habit, but of
other people'sl But having done so, let me do something. I ask it in all
honour and respect. You inspire me with both, in the highest degree. Let me
do something.'
'We are contented, Sir.'
'No, no, not quite,' returned the gentleman. 'I think not quite. There
are some little comforts that might smooth your life, and his. And his!' he
repeated, fancying that had made some impression on her. 'I have been in the
habit of thinking that there was nothing wanting to be done for him; that it
was all settled and over; in short, of not thinking at all about it. I am
different now. Let me do something for him. You too,' said the visitor, with
careful delicacy, 'have need to watch your health closely, for his sake, and
I fear it fails.'
'Whoever you may be, Sir,' answered Harriet, raising her eyes to his
face, 'I am deeply grateful to you. I feel certain that in all you say, you
have no object in the world but kindness to us. But years have passed since
we began this life; and to take from my brother any part of what has so
endeared him to me, and so proved his better resolution - any fragment of
the merit of his unassisted, obscure, and forgotten reparation - would be to
diminish the comfort it will be to him and me, when that time comes to each
of us, of which you spoke just now. I thank you better with these tears than
any words. Believe it, pray.
The gentleman was moved, and put the hand she held out, to his lips,
much as a tender father might kiss the hand of a dutiful child. But more
reverently.
'If the day should ever come, said Harriet, 'when he is restored, in
part, to the position he lost - '
'Restored!' cried the gentleman, quickly. 'How can that be hoped for?
In whose hands does the power of any restoration lie? It is no mistake of
mine, surely, to suppose that his having gained the priceless blessing of
his life, is one cause of the animosity shown to him by his brother.'
'You touch upon a subject that is never breathed between us; not even
between us,' said Harriet.
'I beg your forgiveness,' said the visitor. 'I should have known it. I
entreat you to forget that I have done so, inadvertently. And now, as I dare
urge no more - as I am not sure that I have a right to do so - though Heaven
knows, even that doubt may be habit,' said the gentleman, rubbing his head,
as despondently as before, 'let me; though a stranger, yet no stranger; ask
two favours.'
'What are they?' she inquired.
'The first, that if you should see cause to change your resolution, you
will suffer me to be as your right hand. My name shall then be at your
service; it is useless now, and always insignificant.'
'Our choice of friends,' she answered, smiling faintly, 'is not so
great, that I need any time for consideration. I can promise that.'
'The second, that you will allow me sometimes, say every Monday
morning, at nine o'clock - habit again - I must be businesslike,' said the
gentleman, with a whimsical inclination to quarrel with himself on that
head, 'in walking past, to see you at the door or window. I don't ask to
come in, as your brother will be gone out at that hour. I don't ask to speak
to you. I merely ask to see, for the satisfaction of my own mind, that you
are well, and without intrusion to remind you, by the sight of me, that you
have a friend - an elderly friend, grey-haired already, and fast growing
greyer - whom you may ever command.'
The cordial face looked up in his; confided in it; and promised.
'I understand, as before,' said the gentleman, rising, 'that you
purpose not to mention my visit to John Carker, lest he should be at all
distressed by my acquaintance with his history. I am glad of it, for it is
out of the ordinary course of things, and - habit again!' said the
gentleman, checking himself impatiently, 'as if there were no better course
than the ordinary course!'
With that he turned to go, and walking, bareheaded, to the outside of
the little porch, took leave of her with such a happy mixture of
unconstrained respect and unaffected interest, as no breeding could have
taught, no truth mistrusted, and nothing but a pure and single heart
expressed.
Many half-forgotten emotions were awakened in the sister's mind by this
visit. It was so very long since any other visitor had crossed their
threshold; it was so very long since any voice of apathy had made sad music
in her ears; that the stranger's figure remained present to her, hours
afterwards, when she sat at the window, plying her needle; and his words
seemed newly spoken, again and again. He had touched the spring that opened
her whole life; and if she lost him for a short space, it was only among the
many shapes of the one great recollection of which that life was made.
Musing and working by turns; now constraining herself to be steady at
her needle for a long time together, and now letting her work fall,
unregarded, on her lap, and straying wheresoever her busier thoughts led,
Harriet Carker found the hours glide by her, and the day steal on. The
morning, which had been bright and clear, gradually became overcast; a sharp
wind set in; the rain fell heavily; and a dark mist drooping over the
distant town, hid it from the view.
She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers
who came wandering into London, by the great highway hard by, and who,
footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town before them, as if
foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water in the
sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on, cowering
before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements rejected them.
Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as she thought, In
one direction - always towards the town. Swallowed up in one phase or other
of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate
fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards,
the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death, - they passed on to
the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.
The chill wind was howling, and the rain was falling, and the day was
darkening moodily, when Harriet, raising her eyes from the work on which she
had long since been engaged with unremitting constancy, saw one of these
travellers approaching.
A woman. A solitary woman of some thirty years of age; tall;
well-formed; handsome; miserably dressed; the soil of many country roads in
varied weather - dust, chalk, clay, gravel - clotted on her grey cloak by
the streaming wet; no bonnet on her head, nothing to defend her rich black
hair from the rain, but a torn handkerchief; with the fluttering ends of
which, and with her hair, the wind blinded her so that she often stopped to
push them back, and look upon the way she was going.
She was in the act of doing so, when Harriet observed her. As her
hands, parting on her sunburnt forehead, swept across her face, and threw
aside the hindrances that encroached upon it, there was a reckless and
regardless beauty in it: a dauntless and depraved indifference to more than
weather: a carelessness of what was cast upon her bare head from Heaven or
earth: that, coupled with her misery and loneliness, touched the heart of
her fellow-woman. She thought of all that was perverted and debased within
her, no less than without: of modest graces of the mind, hardened and
steeled, like these attractions of the person; of the many gifts of the
Creator flung to the winds like the wild hair; of all the beautiful ruin
upon which the storm was beating and the night was coming.
Thinking of this, she did not turn away with a delicate indignation -
too many of her own compassionate and tender sex too often do - but pitied
her.
Her fallen sister came on, looking far before her, trying with her
eager eyes to pierce the mist in which the city was enshrouded, and
glancing, now and then, from side to side, with the bewildered - and
uncertain aspect of a stranger. Though her tread was bold and courageous,
she was fatigued, and after a moment of irresolution, - sat down upon a heap
of stones; seeking no shelter from the rain, but letting it rain on her as
it would.
She was now opposite the house; raising her head after resting it for a
moment on both hands, her eyes met those of Harriet.
In a moment, Harriet was at the door; and the other, rising from her
seat at her beck, came slowly, and with no conciliatory look, towards her.
'Why do you rest in the rain?' said Harriet, gently.
'Because I have no other resting-place,' was the reply.
'But there are many places of shelter near here. This,' referring to
the little porch, 'is better than where you were. You are very welcome to
rest here.'
The wanderer looked at her, in doubt and surprise, but without any
expression of thankfulness; and sitting down, and taking off one of her worn
shoes to beat out the fragments of stone and dust that were inside, showed
that her foot was cut and bleeding.
Harriet uttering an expression of pity, the traveller looked up with a
contemptuous and incredulous smile.
'Why, what's a torn foot to such as me?' she said. 'And what's a torn
foot in such as me, to such as you?'
'Come in and wash it,' answered Harriet, mildly, 'and let me give you
something to bind it up.'
The woman caught her arm, and drawing it before her own eyes, hid them
against it, and wept. Not like a woman, but like a stern man surprised into
that weakness; with a violent heaving of her breast, and struggle for
recovery, that showed how unusual the emotion was with her.
She submitted to be led into the house, and, evidently more in
gratitude than in any care for herself, washed and bound the injured place.
Harriet then put before her fragments of her own frugal dinner, and when she
had eaten of them, though sparingly, besought her, before resuming her road
(which she showed her anxiety to do), to dry her clothes before the fire.
Again, more in gratitude than with any evidence of concern in her own
behalf, she sat down in front of it, and unbinding the handkerchief about
her head, and letting her thick wet hair fall down below her waist, sat
drying it with the palms of her hands, and looking at the blaze.
'I daresay you are thinking,' she said, lifting her head suddenly,
'that I used to be handsome, once. I believe I was - I know I was - Look
here!' She held up her hair roughly with both hands; seizing it as if she
would have torn it out; then, threw it down again, and flung it back as
though it were a heap of serpents.
'Are you a stranger in this place?' asked Harriet.
'A stranger!' she returned, stopping between each short reply, and
looking at the fire. 'Yes. Ten or a dozen years a stranger. I have had no
almanack where I have been. Ten or a dozen years. I don't know this part.
It's much altered since I went away.'
'Have you been far?'
'Very far. Months upon months over the sea, and far away even then. I
have been where convicts go,' she added, looking full upon her entertainer.
'I have been one myself.'
'Heaven help you and forgive you!' was the gentle answer.
'Ah! Heaven help me and forgive me!' she returned, nodding her head at
the fire. 'If man would help some of us a little more, God would forgive us
all the sooner perhaps.'
But she was softened by the earnest manner, and the cordial face so
full of mildness and so free from judgment, of her, and said, less hardily:
'We may be about the same age, you and me. If I am older, it is not
above a year or two. Oh think of that!'
She opened her arms, as though the exhibition of her outward form would
show the moral wretch she was; and letting them drop at her sides, hung down
her head.
'There is nothing we may not hope to repair; it is never too late to
amend,' said Harriet. 'You are penitent
'No,' she answered. 'I am not! I can't be. I am no such thing. Why
should I be penitent, and all the world go free? They talk to me of my
penitence. Who's penitent for the wrongs that have been done to me?'
She rose up, bound her handkerchief about her head, and turned to move
away.
'Where are you going?' said Harriet.
'Yonder,' she answered, pointing with her hand. 'To London.'
'Have you any home to go to?'
'I think I have a mother. She's as much a mother, as her dwelling is a
home,' she answered with a bitter laugh.
'Take this,' cried Harriet, putting money in her hand. 'Try to do well.
It is very little, but for one day it may keep you from harm.'
'Are you married?' said the other, faintly, as she took it.
'No. I live here with my brother. We have not much to spare, or I would
give you more.'
'Will you let me kiss you?'
Seeing no scorn or repugnance in her face, the object of her charity
bent over her as she asked the question, and pressed her lips against her
cheek. Once more she caught her arm, and covered her eyes with it; and then
was gone.
Gone into the deepening night, and howling wind, and pelting rain;
urging her way on towards the mist-enshrouded city where the blurred lights
gleamed; and with her black hair, and disordered head-gear, fluttering round
her reckless face.
Another Mother and Daughter
In an ugly and dark room, an old woman, ugly and dark too, sat
listening to the wind and rain, and crouching over a meagre fire. More
constant to the last-named occupation than the first, she never changed her
attitude, unless, when any stray drops of rain fell hissing on the
smouldering embers, to raise her head with an awakened attention to the
whistling and pattering outside, and gradually to let it fall again lower
and lower and lower as she sunk into a brooding state of thought, in which
the noises of the night were as indistinctly regarded as is the monotonous
rolling of a sea by one who sits in contemplation on its shore.
There was no light in the room save that which the fire afforded.
Glaring sullenly from time to time like the eye of a fierce beast half
asleep, it revealed no objects that needed to be jealous of a better
display. A heap of rags, a heap of bones, a wretched bed, two or three
mutilated chairs or stools, the black walls and blacker ceiling, were all
its winking brightness shone upon. As the old woman, with a gigantic and
distorted image of herself thrown half upon the wall behind her, half upon
the roof above, sat bending over the few loose bricks within which it was
pent, on the damp hearth of the chimney - for there was no stove - she
looked as if she were watching at some witch's altar for a favourable token;
and but that the movement of her chattering jaws and trembling chin was too
frequent and too fast for the slow flickering of the fire, it would have
seemed an illusion wrought by the light, as it came and went, upon a face as
motionless as the form to which it belonged.
If Florence could have stood within the room and looked upon the
original of the shadow thrown upon the wall and roof as it cowered thus over
the fire, a glance might have sufficed to recall the figure of Good Mrs
Brown; notwithstanding that her childish recollection of that terrible old
woman was as grotesque and exaggerated a presentment of the truth, perhaps,
as the shadow on the wall. But Florence was not there to look on; and Good
Mrs Brown remained unrecognised, and sat staring at her fire, unobserved.
Attracted by a louder sputtering than usual, as the rain came hissing
down the chimney in a little stream, the old woman raised her head,
impatiently, to listen afresh. And this time she did not drop it again; for
there was a hand upon the door, and a footstep in the room.
'Who's that?' she said, looking over her shoulder.
'One who brings you news, was the answer, in a woman's voice.
'News? Where from?'
'From abroad.'
'From beyond seas?' cried the old woman, starting up.
'Ay, from beyond seas.'
The old woman raked the fire together, hurriedly, and going close to
her visitor who had entered, and shut the door, and who now stood in the
middle of the room, put her hand upon the drenched cloak, and turned the
unresisting figure, so as to have it in the full light of the fire. She did
not find what she had expected, whatever that might be; for she let the
cloak go again, and uttered a querulous cry of disappointment and misery.
'What is the matter?' asked her visitor.
'Oho! Oho!' cried the old woman, turning her face upward, with a
terrible howl.
'What is the matter?' asked the visitor again.
'It's not my gal!' cried the old woman, tossing up her arms, and
clasping her hands above her head. 'Where's my Alice? Where's my handsome
daughter? They've been the death of her!'
'They've not been the death of her yet, if your name's Marwood,' said
the visitor.
'Have you seen my gal, then?' cried the old woman. 'Has she wrote to
me?'
'She said you couldn't read,' returned the other.
'No more I can!' exclaimed the old woman, wringing her hands.
'Have you no light here?' said the other, looking round the room.
The old woman, mumbling and shaking her head, and muttering to herself
about her handsome daughter, brought a candle from a cupboard in the corner,
and thrusting it into the fire with a trembling hand, lighted it with some
difficulty and set it on the table. Its dirty wick burnt dimly at first,
being choked in its own grease; and when the bleared eyes and failing sight
of the old woman could distinguish anything by its light, her visitor was
sitting with her arms folded, her eyes turned downwards, and a handkerchief
she had worn upon her head lying on the table by her side.
'She sent to me by word of mouth then, my gal, Alice?' mumbled the old
woman, after waiting for some moments. 'What did she say?'
'Look,' returned the visitor.
The old woman repeated the word in a scared uncertain way; and, shading
her eyes, looked at the speaker, round the room, and at the speaker once
again.
'Alice said look again, mother;' and the speaker fixed her eyes upon
her.
Again the old woman looked round the room, and at her visitor, and
round the room once more. Hastily seizing the candle, and rising from her
seat, she held it to the visitor's face, uttered a loud cry, set down the
light, and fell upon her neck!
'It's my gal! It's my Alice! It's my handsome daughter, living and come
back!' screamed the old woman, rocking herself to and fro upon the breast
that coldly suffered her embrace. 'It's my gal! It's my Alice! It's my
handsome daughter, living and come back!' she screamed again, dropping on
the floor before her, clasping her knees, laying her head against them, and
still rocking herself to and fro with every frantic demonstration of which
her vitality was capable.
'Yes, mother,' returned Alice, stooping forward for a moment and
kissing her, but endeavouring, even in the act, to disengage herself from
her embrace. 'I am here, at last. Let go, mother; let go. Get up, and sit in
your chair. What good does this do?'
'She's come back harder than she went!' cried the mother, looking up in
her face, and still holding to her knees. 'She don't care for me! after all
these years, and all the wretched life I've led!'
'Why> mother!' said Alice, shaking her ragged skirts to detach the old
woman from them: 'there are two sides to that. There have been years for me
as well as you, and there has been wretchedness for me as well as you. Get
up, get up!'
Her mother rose, and cried, and wrung her hands, and stood at a little
distance gazing on her. Then she took the candle again, and going round her,
surveyed her from head to foot, making a low moaning all the time. Then she
put the candle down, resumed her chair, and beating her hands together to a
kind of weary tune, and rolling herself from side to side, continued moaning
and wailing to herself.
Alice got up, took off her wet cloak, and laid it aside. That done, she
sat down as before, and with her arms folded, and her eyes gazing at the
fire, remained silently listening with a contemptuous face to her old
mother's inarticulate complainings.
'Did you expect to see me return as youthful as I went away, mother?'
she said at length, turning her eyes upon the old woman. 'Did you think a
foreign life, like mine, was good for good looks? One would believe so, to
hear you!'
'It ain't that!' cried the mother. 'She knows it!'
'What is it then?' returned the daughter. 'It had best be something
that don't last, mother, or my way out is easier than my way in.
'Hear that!' exclaimed the mother. 'After all these years she threatens
to desert me in the moment of her coming back again!'
'I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me
as well as you,' said Alice. 'Come back harder? Of course I have come back
harder. What else did you expect?'
'Harder to me! To her own dear mother!' cried the old woman
'I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn't,'
she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and
compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer
feeling from her breast. 'Listen, mother, to a word or two. If we understand
each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps. I went away a girl,
and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful enough, and have come back
no better, you may swear. But have you been very dutiful to me?'
'I!' cried the old woman. 'To my gal! A mother dutiful to her own
child!'
'It sounds unnatural, don't it?' returned the daughter, looking coldly
on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; 'but I have
thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I have got
used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has
always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and then - to
pass away the time - whether no one ever owed any duty to me.
Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether
angrily or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical infirmity,
did not appear.
'There was a child called Alice Marwood,' said the daughter, with a
laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself, 'born,
among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her, nobody
stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her.'
'Nobody!' echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her
breast.
'The only care she knew,' returned the daughter, 'was to be beaten, and
stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better without that.
She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a crowd of little
wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks out of this childhood.
So much the worse for her. She had better have been hunted and worried to
death for ugliness.'
'Go on! go on!' exclaimed the mother.
'I am going on,' returned the daughter. 'There was a girl called Alice
Marwood. She was handsome. She was taught too late, and taught all wrong.
She was too well cared for, too well trained, too well helped on, too much
looked after. You were very fond of her - you were better off then. What
came to that girl comes to thousands every year. It was only ruin, and she
was born to it.'
'After all these years!' whined the old woman. 'My gal begins with
this.'
'She'll soon have ended,' said the daughter. 'There was a criminal
called Alice Marwood - a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And she
was tried, and she was sentenced. And lord, how the gentlemen in the Court
talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty, and on her having
perverted the gifts of nature - as if he didn't know better than anybody
there, that they had been made curses to her! - and how he preached about
the strong arm of the Law - so very strong to save her, when she was an
innocent and helpless little wretch! - and how solemn and religious it all
was! I have thought of that, many times since, to be sure!'
She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that
made the howl of the old woman musical.
'So Alice Marwood was transported, mother,' she pursued, 'and was sent
to learn her duty, where there was twenty times less duty, and more
wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is come back
a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In good time,
there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more strong arm, most
likely, and there will be an end of her; but the gentlemen needn't be afraid
of being thrown out of work. There's crowds of little wretches, boy and
girl, growing up in any of the streets they live in, that'll keep them to it
till they've made their fortunes.'
The old woman leaned her elbows on the table, and resting her face upon
her two hands, made a show of being in great distress - or really was,
perhaps.
'There! I have done, mother,' said the daughter, with a motion of her
head, as if in dismissal of the subject. 'I have said enough. Don't let you
and I talk of being dutiful, whatever we do. Your childhood was like mine, I
suppose. So much the worse for both of us. I don't want to blame you, or to
defend myself; why should I? That's all over long ago. But I am a woman -
not a girl, now - and you and I needn't make a show of our history, like the
gentlemen in the Court. We know all about it, well enough.'
Lost and degraded as she was, there was a beauty in her, both of face
and form, which, even in its worst expression, could not but be recognised
as such by anyone regarding her with the least attention. As she subsided
into silence, and her face which had been harshly agitated, quieted down;
while her dark eyes, fixed upon the fire, exchanged the reckless light that
had animated them, for one that was softened by something like sorrow; there
shone through all her wayworn misery and fatigue, a ray of the departed
radiance of the fallen angel.'
Her mother, after watching her for some time without speaking, ventured
to steal her withered hand a little nearer to her across the table; and
finding that she permitted this, to touch her face, and smooth her hair.
With the feeling, as it seemed, that the old woman was at least sincere in
this show of interest, Alice made no movement to check her; so, advancing by
degrees, she bound up her daughter's hair afresh, took off her wet shoes, if
they deserved the name, spread something dry upon her shoulders, and hovered
humbly about her, muttering to herself, as she recognised her old features
and expression more and more.
'You are very poor, mother, I see,' said Alice, looking round, when she
had sat thus for some time.
'Bitter poor, my deary,' replied the old woman.
She admired her daughter, and was afraid of her. Perhaps her
admiration, such as it was, had originated long ago, when she first found
anything that was beautiful appearing in the midst of the squalid fight of
her existence. Perhaps her fear was referable, in some sort, to the
retrospect she had so lately heard. Be this as it might, she stood,
submissively and deferentially, before her child, and inclined her head, as
if in a pitiful entreaty to be spared any further reproach.
'How have you lived?'
'By begging, my deary.
'And pilfering, mother?'
'Sometimes, Ally - in a very small way. I am old and timid. I have
taken trifles from children now and then, my deary, but not often. I have
tramped about the country, pet, and I know what I know. I have watched.'
'Watched?' returned the daughter, looking at her.
'I have hung about a family, my deary,' said the mother, even more
humbly and submissively than before.
'What family?'
'Hush, darling. Don't be angry with me. I did it for the love of you.
In memory of my poor gal beyond seas.' She put out her hand deprecatingly,
and drawing it back again, laid it on her lips.
'Years ago, my deary,' she pursued, glancing timidly at the attentive
and stem face opposed to her, 'I came across his little child, by chance.'
'Whose child?'
'Not his, Alice deary; don't look at me like that; not his. How could
it be his? You know he has none.'
'Whose then?' returned the daughter. 'You said his.'
'Hush, Ally; you frighten me, deary. Mr Dombey's - only Mr Dombey's.
Since then, darling, I have seen them often. I have seen him.'
In uttering this last word, the old woman shrunk and recoiled, as if
with sudden fear that her daughter would strike her. But though the
daughter's face was fixed upon her, and expressed the most vehement passion,
she remained still: except that she clenched her arms tighter and tighter
within each other, on her bosom, as if to restrain them by that means from
doing an injury to herself, or someone else, in the blind fury of the wrath
that suddenly possessed her.
'Little he thought who I was!' said the old woman, shaking her clenched
hand.
'And little he cared!' muttered her daughter, between her teeth.
'But there we were, said the old woman, 'face to face. I spoke to him,
and he spoke to me. I sat and watched him as he went away down a long grove
of trees: and at every step he took, I cursed him soul and body.'
'He will thrive in spite of that,' returned the daughter disdainfully.
'Ay, he is thriving,' said the mother.
She held her peace; for the face and form before her were unshaped by
rage. It seemed as if the bosom would burst with the emotions that strove
within it. The effort that constrained and held it pent up, was no less
formidable than the rage itself: no less bespeaking the violent and
dangerous character of the woman who made it. But it succeeded, and she
asked, after a silence:
'Is he married?'
'No, deary,' said the mother.
'Going to be?'
'Not that I know of, deary. But his master and friend is married. Oh,
we may give him joy! We may give 'em all joy!' cried the old woman, hugging
herself with her lean arms in her exultation. 'Nothing but joy to us will
come of that marriage. Mind met'
The daughter looked at her for an explanation.
'But you are wet and tired; hungry and thirsty,' said the old woman,
hobbling to the cupboard; 'and there's little here, and little' - diving
down into her pocket, and jingling a few half- pence on the table - 'little
here. Have you any money, Alice, deary?'
The covetous, sharp, eager face, with which she 'asked the question and
looked on, as her daughter took out of her bosom the little gift she had so
lately received, told almost as much of the history of this parent and child
as the child herself had told in words.
'Is that all?' said the mother.
'I have no more. I should not have this, but for charity.'
'But for charity, eh, deary?' said the old woman, bending greedily over
the table to look at the money, which she appeared distrustful of her
daughter's still retaining in her hand, and gazing on. 'Humph! six and six
is twelve, and six eighteen - so - we must make the most of it. I'll go buy
something to eat and drink.'
With greater alacrity than might have been expected in one of her
appearance - for age and misery seemed to have made her as decrepit as ugly
- she began to occupy her trembling hands in tying an old bonnet on her
head, and folding a torn shawl about herself: still eyeing the money in her
daughter's hand, with the same sharp desire.
'What joy is to come to us of this marriage, mother?' asked the
daughter. 'You have not told me that.'
'The joy,' she replied, attiring herself, with fumbling fingers, 'of no
love at all, and much pride and hate, my deary. The joy of confusion and
strife among 'em, proud as they are, and of danger - danger, Alice!'
'What danger?'
'I have seen what I have seen. I know what I know!' chuckled the
mother. 'Let some look to it. Let some be upon their guard. My gal may keep
good company yet!'
Then, seeing that in the wondering earnestness with which her daughter
regarded her, her hand involuntarily closed upon the money, the old woman
made more speed to secure it, and hurriedly added, 'but I'll go buy
something; I'll go buy something.'
As she stood with her hand stretched out before her daughter, her
daughter, glancing again at the money, put it to her lips before parting
with it.
'What, Ally! Do you kiss it?' chuckled the old woman. 'That's like me -
I often do. Oh, it's so good to us!' squeezing her own tarnished halfpence
up to her bag of a throat, 'so good to us in everything but not coming in
heaps!'
'I kiss it, mother,' said the daughter, 'or I did then - I don't know
that I ever did before - for the giver's sake.'
'The giver, eh, deary?' retorted the old woman, whose dimmed eyes
glistened as she took it. 'Ay! I'll kiss it for the giver's sake, too, when
the giver can make it go farther. But I'll go spend it, deary. I'll be back
directly.'
'You seem to say you know a great deal, mother,' said the daughter,
following her to the door with her eyes. 'You have grown very wise since we
parted.'
'Know!' croaked the old woman, coming back a step or two, 'I know more
than you think I know more than he thinks, deary, as I'll tell you by and
bye. I know all'
The daughter smiled incredulously.
'I know of his brother, Alice,' said the old woman, stretching out her
neck with a leer of malice absolutely frightful, 'who might have been where
you have been - for stealing money - and who lives with his sister, over
yonder, by the north road out of London.'
'Where?'
'By the north road out of London, deary. You shall see the house if you
like. It ain't much to boast of, genteel as his own is. No, no, no,' cried
the old woman, shaking her head and laughing; for her daughter had started
up, 'not now; it's too far off; it's by the milestone, where the stones are
heaped; - to-morrow, deary, if it's fine, and you are in the humour. But
I'll go spend - '
'Stop!' and the daughter flung herself upon her, with her former
passion raging like a fire. 'The sister is a fair-faced Devil, with brown
hair?'
The old woman, amazed and terrified, nodded her head.
'I see the shadow of him in her face! It's a red house standing by
itself. Before the door there is a small green porch.'
Again the old woman nodded.
'In which I sat to-day! Give me back the money.'
'Alice! Deary!'
'Give me back the money, or you'll be hurt.'
She forced it from the old woman's hand as she spoke, and utterly
indifferent to her complainings and entreaties, threw on the garments she
had taken off, and hurried out, with headlong speed.
The mother followed, limping after her as she could, and expostulating
with no more effect upon her than upon the wind and rain and darkness that
encompassed them. Obdurate and fierce in her own purpose, and indifferent to
all besides, the daughter defied the weather and the distance, as if she had
known no travel or fatigue, and made for the house where she had been
relieved. After some quarter of an hour's walking, the old woman, spent and
out of breath, ventured to hold by her skirts; but she ventured no more, and
they travelled on in silence through the wet and gloom. If the mother now
and then uttered a word of complaint, she stifled it lest her daughter
should break away from her and leave her behind; and the daughter was dumb.
It was within an hour or so of midnight, when they left the regular
streets behind them, and entered on the deeper gloom of that neutral ground
association. Whether you share that knowledge, or do not, my dear - '
'I do not,' she said quietly.
'It is still the truth, Harriet, and my mind is lighter when I think of
him for that which made it so much heavier then.' He checked himself in his
tone of melancholy, and smiled upon her as he said 'Good-bye!'
'Good-bye, dear John! In the evening, at the old time and place, I
shall meet you as usual on your way home. Good-bye.'
The cordial face she lifted up to his to kiss him, was his home, his
life, his universe, and yet it was a portion of his punishment and grief;
for in the cloud he saw upon it - though serene and calm as any radiant
cloud at sunset - and in the constancy and devotion of her life, and in the
sacrifice she had made of ease, enjoyment, and hope, he saw the bitter
fruits of his old crime, for ever ripe and fresh.
She stood at the door looking after him, with her hands loosely clasped
in each other, as he made his way over the frowzy and uneven patch of ground
which lay before their house, which had once (and not long ago) been a
pleasant meadow, and was now a very waste, with a disorderly crop of
beginnings of mean houses, rising out of the rubbish, as if they had been
unskilfully sown there. Whenever he looked back - as once or twice he did -
her cordial face shone like a light upon his heart; but when he plodded on
his way, and saw her not, the tears were in her eyes as she stood watching
him.
Her pensive form was not long idle at the door. There was daily duty to
discharge, and daily work to do - for such commonplace spirits that are not
heroic, often work hard with their hands - and Harriet was soon busy with
her household tasks. These discharged, and the poor house made quite neat
and orderly, she counted her little stock of money, with an anxious face,
and went out thoughtfully to buy some necessaries for their table, planning
and conniving, as she went, how to save. So sordid are the lives of such lo
natures, who are not only not heroic to their valets and waiting-women, but
have neither valets nor waiting-women to be heroic to withal!
While she was absent, and there was no one in the house, there
approached it by a different way from that the brother had taken, a
gentleman, a very little past his prime of life perhaps, but of a healthy
florid hue, an upright presence, and a bright clear aspect, that was
gracious and good-humoured. His eyebrows were still black, and so was much
of his hair; the sprinkling of grey observable among the latter, graced the
former very much, and showed his broad frank brow and honest eyes to great
advantage.
After knocking once at the door, and obtaining no response, this
gentleman sat down on a bench in the little porch to wait. A certain skilful
action of his fingers as he hummed some bars, and beat time on the seat
beside him, seemed to denote the musician; and the extraordinary
satisfaction he derived from humming something very slow and long, which had
no recognisable tune, seemed to denote that he was a scientific one.
The gentleman was still twirlIng a theme, which seemed to go round and
round and round, and in and in and in, and to involve itself like a
corkscrew twirled upon a table, without getting any nearer to anything, when
Harriet appeared returning. He rose up as she advanced, and stood with his
head uncovered.
'You are come again, Sir!' she said, faltering.
'I take that liberty,' he answered. 'May I ask for five minutes of your
leisure?'
After a moment's hesitation, she opened the door, and gave him
admission to the little parlour. The gentleman sat down there, drew his
chair to the table over against her, and said, in a voice that perfectly
corresponded to his appearance, and with a simplicity that was very
engaging:
'Miss Harriet, you cannot be proud. You signified to me, when I called
t'other morning, that you were. Pardon me if I say that I looked into your
face while you spoke, and that it contradicted you. I look into it again,'
he added, laying his hand gently on her arm, for an instant, 'and it
contradicts you more and more.'
She was somewhat confused and agitated, and could make no ready answer.
'It is the mirror of truth,' said her visitor, 'and gentleness. Excuse
my trusting to it, and returning.'
His manner of saying these words, divested them entirely of the
character of compliments. It was so plain, grave, unaffected, and sincere,
that she bent her head, as if at once to thank him, and acknowledge his
sincerity.
'The disparity between our ages,' said the gentleman, 'and the
plainness of my purpose, empower me, I am glad to think, to speak my mind.
That is my mind; and so you see me for the second time.'
'There is a kind of pride, Sir,' she returned, after a moment's
silence, 'or what may be supposed to be pride, which is mere duty. I hope I
cherish no other.'
'For yourself,' he said.
'For myself.'
'But - pardon me - ' suggested the gentleman. 'For your brother John?'
'Proud of his love, I am,' said Harriet, looking full upon her visitor,
and changing her manner on the instant - not that it was less composed and
quiet, but that there was a deep impassioned earnestness in it that made the
very tremble in her voice a part of her firmness, 'and proud of him. Sir,
you who strangely know the story of his life, and repeated it to me when you
were here last - '
'Merely to make my way into your confidence,' interposed the gentleman.
'For heaven's sake, don't suppose - '
'I am sure,' she said, 'you revived it, in my hearing, with a kind and
good purpose. I am quite sure of it.'
'I thank you,' returned her visitor, pressing her hand hastily. 'I am
much obliged to you. You do me justice, I assure you. You were going to say,
that I, who know the story of John Carker's life - '
'May think it pride in me,' she continued, 'when I say that I am proud
of him! I am. You know the time was, when I was not - when I could not be -
but that is past. The humility of many years, the uncomplaining expiation,
the true repentance, the terrible regret, the pain I know he has even in my
affection, which he thinks has cost me dear, though Heaven knows I am happy,
but for his sorrow I - oh, Sir, after what I have seen, let me conjure you,
if you are in any place of power, and are ever wronged, never, for any
wrong, inflict a punishment that cannot be recalled; while there is a GOD
above us to work changes in the hearts He made.'
'Your brother is an altered man,' returned the gentleman,
compassionately. 'I assure you I don't doubt it.'
'He was an altered man when he did wrong,' said Harriet. 'He is an
altered man again, and is his true self now, believe me, Sir.'
'But we go on, said her visitor, rubbing his forehead, in an absent
manner, with his hand, and then drumming thoughtfully on the table, 'we go
on in our clockwork routine, from day to day, and can't make out, or follow,
these changes. They - they're a metaphysical sort of thing. We - we haven't
leisure for it. We - we haven't courage. They're not taught at schools or
colleges, and we don't know how to set about it. In short, we are so
d-------d business-like,' said the gentleman, walking to the window, and
back, and sitting down again, in a state of extreme dissatisfaction and
vexation.
'I am sure,' said the gentleman, rubbing his forehead again; and
drumming on the table as before, 'I have good reason to believe that a
jog-trot life, the same from day to day, would reconcile one to anything.
One don't see anything, one don't hear anything, one don't know anything;
that's the fact. We go on taking everything for granted, and so we go on,
until whatever we do, good, bad, or indifferent, we do from habit. Habit is
all I shall have to report, when I am called upon to plead to my conscience,
on my death-bed. ''Habit," says I; ''I was deaf, dumb, blind, and paralytic,
to a million things, from habit." ''Very business-like indeed, Mr
What's-your-name,' says Conscience, ''but it won't do here!"'
The gentleman got up and walked to the window again and back: seriously
uneasy, though giving his uneasiness this peculiar expression.
'Miss Harriet,' he said, resuming his chair, 'I wish you would let me
serve you. Look at me; I ought to look honest, for I know I am so, at
present. Do I?'
'Yes,' she answered with a smile.
'I believe every word you have said,' he returned. 'I am full of
self-reproach that I might have known this and seen this, and known you and
seen you, any time these dozen years, and that I never have. I hardly know
how I ever got here - creature that I am, not only of my own habit, but of
other people'sl But having done so, let me do something. I ask it in all
honour and respect. You inspire me with both, in the highest degree. Let me
do something.'
'We are contented, Sir.'
'No, no, not quite,' returned the gentleman. 'I think not quite. There
are some little comforts that might smooth your life, and his. And his!' he
repeated, fancying that had made some impression on her. 'I have been in the
habit of thinking that there was nothing wanting to be done for him; that it
was all settled and over; in short, of not thinking at all about it. I am
different now. Let me do something for him. You too,' said the visitor, with
careful delicacy, 'have need to watch your health closely, for his sake, and
I fear it fails.'
'Whoever you may be, Sir,' answered Harriet, raising her eyes to his
face, 'I am deeply grateful to you. I feel certain that in all you say, you
have no object in the world but kindness to us. But years have passed since
we began this life; and to take from my brother any part of what has so
endeared him to me, and so proved his better resolution - any fragment of
the merit of his unassisted, obscure, and forgotten reparation - would be to
diminish the comfort it will be to him and me, when that time comes to each
of us, of which you spoke just now. I thank you better with these tears than
any words. Believe it, pray.
The gentleman was moved, and put the hand she held out, to his lips,
much as a tender father might kiss the hand of a dutiful child. But more
reverently.
'If the day should ever come, said Harriet, 'when he is restored, in
part, to the position he lost - '
'Restored!' cried the gentleman, quickly. 'How can that be hoped for?
In whose hands does the power of any restoration lie? It is no mistake of
mine, surely, to suppose that his having gained the priceless blessing of
his life, is one cause of the animosity shown to him by his brother.'
'You touch upon a subject that is never breathed between us; not even
between us,' said Harriet.
'I beg your forgiveness,' said the visitor. 'I should have known it. I
entreat you to forget that I have done so, inadvertently. And now, as I dare
urge no more - as I am not sure that I have a right to do so - though Heaven
knows, even that doubt may be habit,' said the gentleman, rubbing his head,
as despondently as before, 'let me; though a stranger, yet no stranger; ask
two favours.'
'What are they?' she inquired.
'The first, that if you should see cause to change your resolution, you
will suffer me to be as your right hand. My name shall then be at your
service; it is useless now, and always insignificant.'
'Our choice of friends,' she answered, smiling faintly, 'is not so
great, that I need any time for consideration. I can promise that.'
'The second, that you will allow me sometimes, say every Monday
morning, at nine o'clock - habit again - I must be businesslike,' said the
gentleman, with a whimsical inclination to quarrel with himself on that
head, 'in walking past, to see you at the door or window. I don't ask to
come in, as your brother will be gone out at that hour. I don't ask to speak
to you. I merely ask to see, for the satisfaction of my own mind, that you
are well, and without intrusion to remind you, by the sight of me, that you
have a friend - an elderly friend, grey-haired already, and fast growing
greyer - whom you may ever command.'
The cordial face looked up in his; confided in it; and promised.
'I understand, as before,' said the gentleman, rising, 'that you
purpose not to mention my visit to John Carker, lest he should be at all
distressed by my acquaintance with his history. I am glad of it, for it is
out of the ordinary course of things, and - habit again!' said the
gentleman, checking himself impatiently, 'as if there were no better course
than the ordinary course!'
With that he turned to go, and walking, bareheaded, to the outside of
the little porch, took leave of her with such a happy mixture of
unconstrained respect and unaffected interest, as no breeding could have
taught, no truth mistrusted, and nothing but a pure and single heart
expressed.
Many half-forgotten emotions were awakened in the sister's mind by this
visit. It was so very long since any other visitor had crossed their
threshold; it was so very long since any voice of apathy had made sad music
in her ears; that the stranger's figure remained present to her, hours
afterwards, when she sat at the window, plying her needle; and his words
seemed newly spoken, again and again. He had touched the spring that opened
her whole life; and if she lost him for a short space, it was only among the
many shapes of the one great recollection of which that life was made.
Musing and working by turns; now constraining herself to be steady at
her needle for a long time together, and now letting her work fall,
unregarded, on her lap, and straying wheresoever her busier thoughts led,
Harriet Carker found the hours glide by her, and the day steal on. The
morning, which had been bright and clear, gradually became overcast; a sharp
wind set in; the rain fell heavily; and a dark mist drooping over the
distant town, hid it from the view.
She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers
who came wandering into London, by the great highway hard by, and who,
footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town before them, as if
foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water in the
sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on, cowering
before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements rejected them.
Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as she thought, In
one direction - always towards the town. Swallowed up in one phase or other
of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate
fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards,
the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death, - they passed on to
the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.
The chill wind was howling, and the rain was falling, and the day was
darkening moodily, when Harriet, raising her eyes from the work on which she
had long since been engaged with unremitting constancy, saw one of these
travellers approaching.
A woman. A solitary woman of some thirty years of age; tall;
well-formed; handsome; miserably dressed; the soil of many country roads in
varied weather - dust, chalk, clay, gravel - clotted on her grey cloak by
the streaming wet; no bonnet on her head, nothing to defend her rich black
hair from the rain, but a torn handkerchief; with the fluttering ends of
which, and with her hair, the wind blinded her so that she often stopped to
push them back, and look upon the way she was going.
She was in the act of doing so, when Harriet observed her. As her
hands, parting on her sunburnt forehead, swept across her face, and threw
aside the hindrances that encroached upon it, there was a reckless and
regardless beauty in it: a dauntless and depraved indifference to more than
weather: a carelessness of what was cast upon her bare head from Heaven or
earth: that, coupled with her misery and loneliness, touched the heart of
her fellow-woman. She thought of all that was perverted and debased within
her, no less than without: of modest graces of the mind, hardened and
steeled, like these attractions of the person; of the many gifts of the
Creator flung to the winds like the wild hair; of all the beautiful ruin
upon which the storm was beating and the night was coming.
Thinking of this, she did not turn away with a delicate indignation -
too many of her own compassionate and tender sex too often do - but pitied
her.
Her fallen sister came on, looking far before her, trying with her
eager eyes to pierce the mist in which the city was enshrouded, and
glancing, now and then, from side to side, with the bewildered - and
uncertain aspect of a stranger. Though her tread was bold and courageous,
she was fatigued, and after a moment of irresolution, - sat down upon a heap
of stones; seeking no shelter from the rain, but letting it rain on her as
it would.
She was now opposite the house; raising her head after resting it for a
moment on both hands, her eyes met those of Harriet.
In a moment, Harriet was at the door; and the other, rising from her
seat at her beck, came slowly, and with no conciliatory look, towards her.
'Why do you rest in the rain?' said Harriet, gently.
'Because I have no other resting-place,' was the reply.
'But there are many places of shelter near here. This,' referring to
the little porch, 'is better than where you were. You are very welcome to
rest here.'
The wanderer looked at her, in doubt and surprise, but without any
expression of thankfulness; and sitting down, and taking off one of her worn
shoes to beat out the fragments of stone and dust that were inside, showed
that her foot was cut and bleeding.
Harriet uttering an expression of pity, the traveller looked up with a
contemptuous and incredulous smile.
'Why, what's a torn foot to such as me?' she said. 'And what's a torn
foot in such as me, to such as you?'
'Come in and wash it,' answered Harriet, mildly, 'and let me give you
something to bind it up.'
The woman caught her arm, and drawing it before her own eyes, hid them
against it, and wept. Not like a woman, but like a stern man surprised into
that weakness; with a violent heaving of her breast, and struggle for
recovery, that showed how unusual the emotion was with her.
She submitted to be led into the house, and, evidently more in
gratitude than in any care for herself, washed and bound the injured place.
Harriet then put before her fragments of her own frugal dinner, and when she
had eaten of them, though sparingly, besought her, before resuming her road
(which she showed her anxiety to do), to dry her clothes before the fire.
Again, more in gratitude than with any evidence of concern in her own
behalf, she sat down in front of it, and unbinding the handkerchief about
her head, and letting her thick wet hair fall down below her waist, sat
drying it with the palms of her hands, and looking at the blaze.
'I daresay you are thinking,' she said, lifting her head suddenly,
'that I used to be handsome, once. I believe I was - I know I was - Look
here!' She held up her hair roughly with both hands; seizing it as if she
would have torn it out; then, threw it down again, and flung it back as
though it were a heap of serpents.
'Are you a stranger in this place?' asked Harriet.
'A stranger!' she returned, stopping between each short reply, and
looking at the fire. 'Yes. Ten or a dozen years a stranger. I have had no
almanack where I have been. Ten or a dozen years. I don't know this part.
It's much altered since I went away.'
'Have you been far?'
'Very far. Months upon months over the sea, and far away even then. I
have been where convicts go,' she added, looking full upon her entertainer.
'I have been one myself.'
'Heaven help you and forgive you!' was the gentle answer.
'Ah! Heaven help me and forgive me!' she returned, nodding her head at
the fire. 'If man would help some of us a little more, God would forgive us
all the sooner perhaps.'
But she was softened by the earnest manner, and the cordial face so
full of mildness and so free from judgment, of her, and said, less hardily:
'We may be about the same age, you and me. If I am older, it is not
above a year or two. Oh think of that!'
She opened her arms, as though the exhibition of her outward form would
show the moral wretch she was; and letting them drop at her sides, hung down
her head.
'There is nothing we may not hope to repair; it is never too late to
amend,' said Harriet. 'You are penitent
'No,' she answered. 'I am not! I can't be. I am no such thing. Why
should I be penitent, and all the world go free? They talk to me of my
penitence. Who's penitent for the wrongs that have been done to me?'
She rose up, bound her handkerchief about her head, and turned to move
away.
'Where are you going?' said Harriet.
'Yonder,' she answered, pointing with her hand. 'To London.'
'Have you any home to go to?'
'I think I have a mother. She's as much a mother, as her dwelling is a
home,' she answered with a bitter laugh.
'Take this,' cried Harriet, putting money in her hand. 'Try to do well.
It is very little, but for one day it may keep you from harm.'
'Are you married?' said the other, faintly, as she took it.
'No. I live here with my brother. We have not much to spare, or I would
give you more.'
'Will you let me kiss you?'
Seeing no scorn or repugnance in her face, the object of her charity
bent over her as she asked the question, and pressed her lips against her
cheek. Once more she caught her arm, and covered her eyes with it; and then
was gone.
Gone into the deepening night, and howling wind, and pelting rain;
urging her way on towards the mist-enshrouded city where the blurred lights
gleamed; and with her black hair, and disordered head-gear, fluttering round
her reckless face.
Another Mother and Daughter
In an ugly and dark room, an old woman, ugly and dark too, sat
listening to the wind and rain, and crouching over a meagre fire. More
constant to the last-named occupation than the first, she never changed her
attitude, unless, when any stray drops of rain fell hissing on the
smouldering embers, to raise her head with an awakened attention to the
whistling and pattering outside, and gradually to let it fall again lower
and lower and lower as she sunk into a brooding state of thought, in which
the noises of the night were as indistinctly regarded as is the monotonous
rolling of a sea by one who sits in contemplation on its shore.
There was no light in the room save that which the fire afforded.
Glaring sullenly from time to time like the eye of a fierce beast half
asleep, it revealed no objects that needed to be jealous of a better
display. A heap of rags, a heap of bones, a wretched bed, two or three
mutilated chairs or stools, the black walls and blacker ceiling, were all
its winking brightness shone upon. As the old woman, with a gigantic and
distorted image of herself thrown half upon the wall behind her, half upon
the roof above, sat bending over the few loose bricks within which it was
pent, on the damp hearth of the chimney - for there was no stove - she
looked as if she were watching at some witch's altar for a favourable token;
and but that the movement of her chattering jaws and trembling chin was too
frequent and too fast for the slow flickering of the fire, it would have
seemed an illusion wrought by the light, as it came and went, upon a face as
motionless as the form to which it belonged.
If Florence could have stood within the room and looked upon the
original of the shadow thrown upon the wall and roof as it cowered thus over
the fire, a glance might have sufficed to recall the figure of Good Mrs
Brown; notwithstanding that her childish recollection of that terrible old
woman was as grotesque and exaggerated a presentment of the truth, perhaps,
as the shadow on the wall. But Florence was not there to look on; and Good
Mrs Brown remained unrecognised, and sat staring at her fire, unobserved.
Attracted by a louder sputtering than usual, as the rain came hissing
down the chimney in a little stream, the old woman raised her head,
impatiently, to listen afresh. And this time she did not drop it again; for
there was a hand upon the door, and a footstep in the room.
'Who's that?' she said, looking over her shoulder.
'One who brings you news, was the answer, in a woman's voice.
'News? Where from?'
'From abroad.'
'From beyond seas?' cried the old woman, starting up.
'Ay, from beyond seas.'
The old woman raked the fire together, hurriedly, and going close to
her visitor who had entered, and shut the door, and who now stood in the
middle of the room, put her hand upon the drenched cloak, and turned the
unresisting figure, so as to have it in the full light of the fire. She did
not find what she had expected, whatever that might be; for she let the
cloak go again, and uttered a querulous cry of disappointment and misery.
'What is the matter?' asked her visitor.
'Oho! Oho!' cried the old woman, turning her face upward, with a
terrible howl.
'What is the matter?' asked the visitor again.
'It's not my gal!' cried the old woman, tossing up her arms, and
clasping her hands above her head. 'Where's my Alice? Where's my handsome
daughter? They've been the death of her!'
'They've not been the death of her yet, if your name's Marwood,' said
the visitor.
'Have you seen my gal, then?' cried the old woman. 'Has she wrote to
me?'
'She said you couldn't read,' returned the other.
'No more I can!' exclaimed the old woman, wringing her hands.
'Have you no light here?' said the other, looking round the room.
The old woman, mumbling and shaking her head, and muttering to herself
about her handsome daughter, brought a candle from a cupboard in the corner,
and thrusting it into the fire with a trembling hand, lighted it with some
difficulty and set it on the table. Its dirty wick burnt dimly at first,
being choked in its own grease; and when the bleared eyes and failing sight
of the old woman could distinguish anything by its light, her visitor was
sitting with her arms folded, her eyes turned downwards, and a handkerchief
she had worn upon her head lying on the table by her side.
'She sent to me by word of mouth then, my gal, Alice?' mumbled the old
woman, after waiting for some moments. 'What did she say?'
'Look,' returned the visitor.
The old woman repeated the word in a scared uncertain way; and, shading
her eyes, looked at the speaker, round the room, and at the speaker once
again.
'Alice said look again, mother;' and the speaker fixed her eyes upon
her.
Again the old woman looked round the room, and at her visitor, and
round the room once more. Hastily seizing the candle, and rising from her
seat, she held it to the visitor's face, uttered a loud cry, set down the
light, and fell upon her neck!
'It's my gal! It's my Alice! It's my handsome daughter, living and come
back!' screamed the old woman, rocking herself to and fro upon the breast
that coldly suffered her embrace. 'It's my gal! It's my Alice! It's my
handsome daughter, living and come back!' she screamed again, dropping on
the floor before her, clasping her knees, laying her head against them, and
still rocking herself to and fro with every frantic demonstration of which
her vitality was capable.
'Yes, mother,' returned Alice, stooping forward for a moment and
kissing her, but endeavouring, even in the act, to disengage herself from
her embrace. 'I am here, at last. Let go, mother; let go. Get up, and sit in
your chair. What good does this do?'
'She's come back harder than she went!' cried the mother, looking up in
her face, and still holding to her knees. 'She don't care for me! after all
these years, and all the wretched life I've led!'
'Why> mother!' said Alice, shaking her ragged skirts to detach the old
woman from them: 'there are two sides to that. There have been years for me
as well as you, and there has been wretchedness for me as well as you. Get
up, get up!'
Her mother rose, and cried, and wrung her hands, and stood at a little
distance gazing on her. Then she took the candle again, and going round her,
surveyed her from head to foot, making a low moaning all the time. Then she
put the candle down, resumed her chair, and beating her hands together to a
kind of weary tune, and rolling herself from side to side, continued moaning
and wailing to herself.
Alice got up, took off her wet cloak, and laid it aside. That done, she
sat down as before, and with her arms folded, and her eyes gazing at the
fire, remained silently listening with a contemptuous face to her old
mother's inarticulate complainings.
'Did you expect to see me return as youthful as I went away, mother?'
she said at length, turning her eyes upon the old woman. 'Did you think a
foreign life, like mine, was good for good looks? One would believe so, to
hear you!'
'It ain't that!' cried the mother. 'She knows it!'
'What is it then?' returned the daughter. 'It had best be something
that don't last, mother, or my way out is easier than my way in.
'Hear that!' exclaimed the mother. 'After all these years she threatens
to desert me in the moment of her coming back again!'
'I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me
as well as you,' said Alice. 'Come back harder? Of course I have come back
harder. What else did you expect?'
'Harder to me! To her own dear mother!' cried the old woman
'I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn't,'
she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and
compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer
feeling from her breast. 'Listen, mother, to a word or two. If we understand
each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps. I went away a girl,
and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful enough, and have come back
no better, you may swear. But have you been very dutiful to me?'
'I!' cried the old woman. 'To my gal! A mother dutiful to her own
child!'
'It sounds unnatural, don't it?' returned the daughter, looking coldly
on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; 'but I have
thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I have got
used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has
always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and then - to
pass away the time - whether no one ever owed any duty to me.
Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether
angrily or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical infirmity,
did not appear.
'There was a child called Alice Marwood,' said the daughter, with a
laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself, 'born,
among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her, nobody
stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her.'
'Nobody!' echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her
breast.
'The only care she knew,' returned the daughter, 'was to be beaten, and
stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better without that.
She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a crowd of little
wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks out of this childhood.
So much the worse for her. She had better have been hunted and worried to
death for ugliness.'
'Go on! go on!' exclaimed the mother.
'I am going on,' returned the daughter. 'There was a girl called Alice
Marwood. She was handsome. She was taught too late, and taught all wrong.
She was too well cared for, too well trained, too well helped on, too much
looked after. You were very fond of her - you were better off then. What
came to that girl comes to thousands every year. It was only ruin, and she
was born to it.'
'After all these years!' whined the old woman. 'My gal begins with
this.'
'She'll soon have ended,' said the daughter. 'There was a criminal
called Alice Marwood - a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And she
was tried, and she was sentenced. And lord, how the gentlemen in the Court
talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty, and on her having
perverted the gifts of nature - as if he didn't know better than anybody
there, that they had been made curses to her! - and how he preached about
the strong arm of the Law - so very strong to save her, when she was an
innocent and helpless little wretch! - and how solemn and religious it all
was! I have thought of that, many times since, to be sure!'
She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that
made the howl of the old woman musical.
'So Alice Marwood was transported, mother,' she pursued, 'and was sent
to learn her duty, where there was twenty times less duty, and more
wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is come back
a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In good time,
there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more strong arm, most
likely, and there will be an end of her; but the gentlemen needn't be afraid
of being thrown out of work. There's crowds of little wretches, boy and
girl, growing up in any of the streets they live in, that'll keep them to it
till they've made their fortunes.'
The old woman leaned her elbows on the table, and resting her face upon
her two hands, made a show of being in great distress - or really was,
perhaps.
'There! I have done, mother,' said the daughter, with a motion of her
head, as if in dismissal of the subject. 'I have said enough. Don't let you
and I talk of being dutiful, whatever we do. Your childhood was like mine, I
suppose. So much the worse for both of us. I don't want to blame you, or to
defend myself; why should I? That's all over long ago. But I am a woman -
not a girl, now - and you and I needn't make a show of our history, like the
gentlemen in the Court. We know all about it, well enough.'
Lost and degraded as she was, there was a beauty in her, both of face
and form, which, even in its worst expression, could not but be recognised
as such by anyone regarding her with the least attention. As she subsided
into silence, and her face which had been harshly agitated, quieted down;
while her dark eyes, fixed upon the fire, exchanged the reckless light that
had animated them, for one that was softened by something like sorrow; there
shone through all her wayworn misery and fatigue, a ray of the departed
radiance of the fallen angel.'
Her mother, after watching her for some time without speaking, ventured
to steal her withered hand a little nearer to her across the table; and
finding that she permitted this, to touch her face, and smooth her hair.
With the feeling, as it seemed, that the old woman was at least sincere in
this show of interest, Alice made no movement to check her; so, advancing by
degrees, she bound up her daughter's hair afresh, took off her wet shoes, if
they deserved the name, spread something dry upon her shoulders, and hovered
humbly about her, muttering to herself, as she recognised her old features
and expression more and more.
'You are very poor, mother, I see,' said Alice, looking round, when she
had sat thus for some time.
'Bitter poor, my deary,' replied the old woman.
She admired her daughter, and was afraid of her. Perhaps her
admiration, such as it was, had originated long ago, when she first found
anything that was beautiful appearing in the midst of the squalid fight of
her existence. Perhaps her fear was referable, in some sort, to the
retrospect she had so lately heard. Be this as it might, she stood,
submissively and deferentially, before her child, and inclined her head, as
if in a pitiful entreaty to be spared any further reproach.
'How have you lived?'
'By begging, my deary.
'And pilfering, mother?'
'Sometimes, Ally - in a very small way. I am old and timid. I have
taken trifles from children now and then, my deary, but not often. I have
tramped about the country, pet, and I know what I know. I have watched.'
'Watched?' returned the daughter, looking at her.
'I have hung about a family, my deary,' said the mother, even more
humbly and submissively than before.
'What family?'
'Hush, darling. Don't be angry with me. I did it for the love of you.
In memory of my poor gal beyond seas.' She put out her hand deprecatingly,
and drawing it back again, laid it on her lips.
'Years ago, my deary,' she pursued, glancing timidly at the attentive
and stem face opposed to her, 'I came across his little child, by chance.'
'Whose child?'
'Not his, Alice deary; don't look at me like that; not his. How could
it be his? You know he has none.'
'Whose then?' returned the daughter. 'You said his.'
'Hush, Ally; you frighten me, deary. Mr Dombey's - only Mr Dombey's.
Since then, darling, I have seen them often. I have seen him.'
In uttering this last word, the old woman shrunk and recoiled, as if
with sudden fear that her daughter would strike her. But though the
daughter's face was fixed upon her, and expressed the most vehement passion,
she remained still: except that she clenched her arms tighter and tighter
within each other, on her bosom, as if to restrain them by that means from
doing an injury to herself, or someone else, in the blind fury of the wrath
that suddenly possessed her.
'Little he thought who I was!' said the old woman, shaking her clenched
hand.
'And little he cared!' muttered her daughter, between her teeth.
'But there we were, said the old woman, 'face to face. I spoke to him,
and he spoke to me. I sat and watched him as he went away down a long grove
of trees: and at every step he took, I cursed him soul and body.'
'He will thrive in spite of that,' returned the daughter disdainfully.
'Ay, he is thriving,' said the mother.
She held her peace; for the face and form before her were unshaped by
rage. It seemed as if the bosom would burst with the emotions that strove
within it. The effort that constrained and held it pent up, was no less
formidable than the rage itself: no less bespeaking the violent and
dangerous character of the woman who made it. But it succeeded, and she
asked, after a silence:
'Is he married?'
'No, deary,' said the mother.
'Going to be?'
'Not that I know of, deary. But his master and friend is married. Oh,
we may give him joy! We may give 'em all joy!' cried the old woman, hugging
herself with her lean arms in her exultation. 'Nothing but joy to us will
come of that marriage. Mind met'
The daughter looked at her for an explanation.
'But you are wet and tired; hungry and thirsty,' said the old woman,
hobbling to the cupboard; 'and there's little here, and little' - diving
down into her pocket, and jingling a few half- pence on the table - 'little
here. Have you any money, Alice, deary?'
The covetous, sharp, eager face, with which she 'asked the question and
looked on, as her daughter took out of her bosom the little gift she had so
lately received, told almost as much of the history of this parent and child
as the child herself had told in words.
'Is that all?' said the mother.
'I have no more. I should not have this, but for charity.'
'But for charity, eh, deary?' said the old woman, bending greedily over
the table to look at the money, which she appeared distrustful of her
daughter's still retaining in her hand, and gazing on. 'Humph! six and six
is twelve, and six eighteen - so - we must make the most of it. I'll go buy
something to eat and drink.'
With greater alacrity than might have been expected in one of her
appearance - for age and misery seemed to have made her as decrepit as ugly
- she began to occupy her trembling hands in tying an old bonnet on her
head, and folding a torn shawl about herself: still eyeing the money in her
daughter's hand, with the same sharp desire.
'What joy is to come to us of this marriage, mother?' asked the
daughter. 'You have not told me that.'
'The joy,' she replied, attiring herself, with fumbling fingers, 'of no
love at all, and much pride and hate, my deary. The joy of confusion and
strife among 'em, proud as they are, and of danger - danger, Alice!'
'What danger?'
'I have seen what I have seen. I know what I know!' chuckled the
mother. 'Let some look to it. Let some be upon their guard. My gal may keep
good company yet!'
Then, seeing that in the wondering earnestness with which her daughter
regarded her, her hand involuntarily closed upon the money, the old woman
made more speed to secure it, and hurriedly added, 'but I'll go buy
something; I'll go buy something.'
As she stood with her hand stretched out before her daughter, her
daughter, glancing again at the money, put it to her lips before parting
with it.
'What, Ally! Do you kiss it?' chuckled the old woman. 'That's like me -
I often do. Oh, it's so good to us!' squeezing her own tarnished halfpence
up to her bag of a throat, 'so good to us in everything but not coming in
heaps!'
'I kiss it, mother,' said the daughter, 'or I did then - I don't know
that I ever did before - for the giver's sake.'
'The giver, eh, deary?' retorted the old woman, whose dimmed eyes
glistened as she took it. 'Ay! I'll kiss it for the giver's sake, too, when
the giver can make it go farther. But I'll go spend it, deary. I'll be back
directly.'
'You seem to say you know a great deal, mother,' said the daughter,
following her to the door with her eyes. 'You have grown very wise since we
parted.'
'Know!' croaked the old woman, coming back a step or two, 'I know more
than you think I know more than he thinks, deary, as I'll tell you by and
bye. I know all'
The daughter smiled incredulously.
'I know of his brother, Alice,' said the old woman, stretching out her
neck with a leer of malice absolutely frightful, 'who might have been where
you have been - for stealing money - and who lives with his sister, over
yonder, by the north road out of London.'
'Where?'
'By the north road out of London, deary. You shall see the house if you
like. It ain't much to boast of, genteel as his own is. No, no, no,' cried
the old woman, shaking her head and laughing; for her daughter had started
up, 'not now; it's too far off; it's by the milestone, where the stones are
heaped; - to-morrow, deary, if it's fine, and you are in the humour. But
I'll go spend - '
'Stop!' and the daughter flung herself upon her, with her former
passion raging like a fire. 'The sister is a fair-faced Devil, with brown
hair?'
The old woman, amazed and terrified, nodded her head.
'I see the shadow of him in her face! It's a red house standing by
itself. Before the door there is a small green porch.'
Again the old woman nodded.
'In which I sat to-day! Give me back the money.'
'Alice! Deary!'
'Give me back the money, or you'll be hurt.'
She forced it from the old woman's hand as she spoke, and utterly
indifferent to her complainings and entreaties, threw on the garments she
had taken off, and hurried out, with headlong speed.
The mother followed, limping after her as she could, and expostulating
with no more effect upon her than upon the wind and rain and darkness that
encompassed them. Obdurate and fierce in her own purpose, and indifferent to
all besides, the daughter defied the weather and the distance, as if she had
known no travel or fatigue, and made for the house where she had been
relieved. After some quarter of an hour's walking, the old woman, spent and
out of breath, ventured to hold by her skirts; but she ventured no more, and
they travelled on in silence through the wet and gloom. If the mother now
and then uttered a word of complaint, she stifled it lest her daughter
should break away from her and leave her behind; and the daughter was dumb.
It was within an hour or so of midnight, when they left the regular
streets behind them, and entered on the deeper gloom of that neutral ground