The Old Curiosity Shop
character was still the same. Damp rotten houses, many to let, many
yet building, many half-built and mouldering away--lodgings, where it
would be hard to tell which needed pity most, those who let or those
who came to take--children, scantily fed and clothed, spread over every
street, and sprawling in the dust--scolding mothers, stamping their
slipshod feet with noisy threats upon the pavement--shabby fathers,
hurrying with dispirited looks to the occupation which brought them
‘daily bread’ and little more--mangling-women, washer-women, cobblers,
tailors, chandlers, driving their trades in parlours and kitchens and
back room and garrets, and sometimes all of them under the same
roof--brick-fields skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or
timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and blackened and blistered by
the flames--mounds of dock-weed, nettles, coarse grass and
oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion--small dissenting chapels to
teach, with no lack of illustration, the miseries of Earth, and plenty
of new churches, erected with a little superfluous wealth, to show the
way to Heaven.
At length these streets becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and
dwindled away, until there were only small garden patches bordering the
road, with many a summer house innocent of paint and built of old
timber or some fragments of a boat, green as the tough cabbage-stalks
that grew about it, and grottoed at the seams with toad-stools and
tight-sticking snails. To these succeeded pert cottages, two and two
with plots of ground in front, laid out in angular beds with stiff box
borders and narrow paths between, where footstep never strayed to make
the gravel rough. Then came the public-house, freshly painted in green
and white, with tea-gardens and a bowling green, spurning its old
neighbour with the horse-trough where the waggons stopped; then,
fields; and then, some houses, one by one, of goodly size with lawns,
some even with a lodge where dwelt a porter and his wife. Then came a
turnpike; then fields again with trees and hay-stacks; then, a hill,
and on the top of that, the traveller might stop, and--looking back at
old Saint Paul’s looming through the smoke, its cross peeping above the
cloud (if the day were clear), and glittering in the sun; and casting
his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew until he traced it down to
the furthest outposts of the invading army of bricks and mortar whose
station lay for the present nearly at his feet--might feel at last that
he was clear of London.
Near such a spot as this, and in a pleasant field, the old man and his
little guide (if guide she were, who knew not whither they were bound)
sat down to rest. She had had the precaution to furnish her basket
with some slices of bread and meat, and here they made their frugal
breakfast.
The freshness of the day, the singing of the birds, the beauty of the
waving grass, the deep green leaves, the wild flowers, and the thousand
exquisite scents and sounds that floated in the air--deep joys to most
of us, but most of all to those whose life is in a crowd or who live
solitarily in great cities as in the bucket of a human well--sunk into
their breasts and made them very glad. The child had repeated her
artless prayers once that morning, more earnestly perhaps than she had
ever done in all her life, but as she felt all this, they rose to her
lips again. The old man took off his hat--he had no memory for the
words--but he said amen, and that they were very good.
There had been an old copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress, with strange
plates, upon a shelf at home, over which she had often pored whole
evenings, wondering whether it was true in every word, and where those
distant countries with the curious names might be. As she looked back
upon the place they had left, one part of it came strongly on her mind.
‘Dear grandfather,’ she said, ‘only that this place is prettier and a
great deal better than the real one, if that in the book is like it, I
feel as if we were both Christian, and laid down on this grass all the
cares and troubles we brought with us; never to take them up again.’
‘No--never to return--never to return’--replied the old man, waving his
hand towards the city. ‘Thou and I are free of it now, Nell. They
shall never lure us back.’
‘Are you tired?’ said the child, ‘are you sure you don’t feel ill from
this long walk?’
‘I shall never feel ill again, now that we are once away,’ was his
reply. ‘Let us be stirring, Nell. We must be further away--a long,
long way further. We are too near to stop, and be at rest. Come!’
There was a pool of clear water in the field, in which the child laved
her hands and face, and cooled her feet before setting forth to walk
again. She would have the old man refresh himself in this way too, and
making him sit down upon the grass, cast the water on him with her
hands, and dried it with her simple dress.
‘I can do nothing for myself, my darling,’ said the grandfather; ‘I
don’t know how it is, I could once, but the time’s gone. Don’t leave
me, Nell; say that thou’lt not leave me. I loved thee all the while,
indeed I did. If I lose thee too, my dear, I must die!’
He laid his head upon her shoulder and moaned piteously. The time had
been, and a very few days before, when the child could not have
restrained her tears and must have wept with him. But now she soothed
him with gentle and tender words, smiled at his thinking they could
ever part, and rallied him cheerfully upon the jest. He was soon
calmed and fell asleep, singing to himself in a low voice, like a
little child.
He awoke refreshed, and they continued their journey. The road was
pleasant, lying between beautiful pastures and fields of corn, about
which, poised high in the clear blue sky, the lark trilled out her
happy song. The air came laden with the fragrance it caught upon its
way, and the bees, upborne upon its scented breath, hummed forth their
drowsy satisfaction as they floated by.
They were now in the open country; the houses were very few and
scattered at long intervals, often miles apart. Occasionally they came
upon a cluster of poor cottages, some with a chair or low board put
across the open door to keep the scrambling children from the road,
others shut up close while all the family were working in the fields.
These were often the commencement of a little village: and after an
interval came a wheelwright’s shed or perhaps a blacksmith’s forge;
then a thriving farm with sleepy cows lying about the yard, and horses
peering over the low wall and scampering away when harnessed horses
passed upon the road, as though in triumph at their freedom. There
were dull pigs too, turning up the ground in search of dainty food, and
grunting their monotonous grumblings as they prowled about, or crossed
each other in their quest; plump pigeons skimming round the roof or
strutting on the eaves; and ducks and geese, far more graceful in their
own conceit, waddling awkwardly about the edges of the pond or sailing
glibly on its surface. The farm-yard passed, then came the little inn;
the humbler beer-shop; and the village tradesman’s; then the lawyer’s
and the parson’s, at whose dread names the beer-shop trembled; the
church then peeped out modestly from a clump of trees; then there were
a few more cottages; then the cage, and pound, and not unfrequently, on
a bank by the way-side, a deep old dusty well. Then came the
trim-hedged fields on either hand, and the open road again.
They walked all day, and slept that night at a small cottage where beds
were let to travellers. Next morning they were afoot again, and though
jaded at first, and very tired, recovered before long and proceeded
briskly forward.
They often stopped to rest, but only for a short space at a time, and
still kept on, having had but slight refreshment since the morning. It
was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon, when drawing near another
cluster of labourers’ huts, the child looked wistfully in each,
doubtful at which to ask for permission to rest awhile, and buy a
draught of milk.
It was not easy to determine, for she was timid and fearful of being
repulsed. Here was a crying child, and there a noisy wife. In this,
the people seemed too poor; in that, too many. At length she stopped
at one where the family were seated round the table--chiefly because
there was an old man sitting in a cushioned chair beside the hearth,
and she thought he was a grandfather and would feel for hers.
There were besides, the cottager and his wife, and three young sturdy
children, brown as berries. The request was no sooner preferred, than
granted. The eldest boy ran out to fetch some milk, the second dragged
two stools towards the door, and the youngest crept to his mother’s
gown, and looked at the strangers from beneath his sunburnt hand.
‘God save you, master,’ said the old cottager in a thin piping voice;
‘are you travelling far?’
‘Yes, Sir, a long way’--replied the child; for her grandfather appealed
to her.
‘From London?’ inquired the old man.
The child said yes.
Ah! He had been in London many a time--used to go there often once,
with waggons. It was nigh two-and-thirty year since he had been there
last, and he did hear say there were great changes. Like enough! He
had changed, himself, since then. Two-and-thirty year was a long time
and eighty-four a great age, though there was some he had known that
had lived to very hard upon a hundred--and not so hearty as he,
neither--no, nothing like it.
‘Sit thee down, master, in the elbow chair,’ said the old man, knocking
his stick upon the brick floor, and trying to do so sharply. ‘Take a
pinch out o’ that box; I don’t take much myself, for it comes dear, but
I find it wakes me up sometimes, and ye’re but a boy to me. I should
have a son pretty nigh as old as you if he’d lived, but they listed him
for a so’ger--he come back home though, for all he had but one poor
leg. He always said he’d be buried near the sun-dial he used to climb
upon when he was a baby, did my poor boy, and his words come true--you
can see the place with your own eyes; we’ve kept the turf up, ever
since.’
He shook his head, and looking at his daughter with watery eyes, said
she needn’t be afraid that he was going to talk about that, any more.
He didn’t wish to trouble nobody, and if he had troubled anybody by
what he said, he asked pardon, that was all.
The milk arrived, and the child producing her little basket, and
selecting its best fragments for her grandfather, they made a hearty
meal. The furniture of the room was very homely of course--a few rough
chairs and a table, a corner cupboard with their little stock of
crockery and delf, a gaudy tea-tray, representing a lady in bright red,
walking out with a very blue parasol, a few common, coloured scripture
subjects in frames upon the wall and chimney, an old dwarf
clothes-press and an eight-day clock, with a few bright saucepans and a
kettle, comprised the whole. But everything was clean and neat, and as
the child glanced round, she felt a tranquil air of comfort and content
to which she had long been unaccustomed.
‘How far is it to any town or village?’ she asked of the husband.
‘A matter of good five mile, my dear,’ was the reply, ‘but you’re not
going on to-night?’
‘Yes, yes, Nell,’ said the old man hastily, urging her too by signs.
‘Further on, further on, darling, further away if we walk till
midnight.’
‘There’s a good barn hard by, master,’ said the man, ‘or there’s
travellers’ lodging, I know, at the Plow an’ Harrer. Excuse me, but
you do seem a little tired, and unless you’re very anxious to get on--’
‘Yes, yes, we are,’ returned the old man fretfully. ‘Further away,
dear Nell, pray further away.’