The Old Curiosity Shop
the stage-coach-hire--outside stage-coach-hire all the way. Bless you,
they grudge me nothing. But as the time at which I am expected there,
left me ample leisure, I determined to walk instead. How glad I am, to
think I did so!’
‘How glad should we be!’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the schoolmaster, moving restlessly in his chair,
‘certainly, that’s very true. But you--where are you going, where are
you coming from, what have you been doing since you left me, what had
you been doing before? Now, tell me--do tell me. I know very little
of the world, and perhaps you are better fitted to advise me in its
affairs than I am qualified to give advice to you; but I am very
sincere, and I have a reason (you have not forgotten it) for loving
you. I have felt since that time as if my love for him who died, had
been transferred to you who stood beside his bed. If this,’ he added,
looking upwards, ‘is the beautiful creation that springs from ashes,
let its peace prosper with me, as I deal tenderly and compassionately
by this young child!’
The plain, frank kindness of the honest schoolmaster, the affectionate
earnestness of his speech and manner, the truth which was stamped upon
his every word and look, gave the child a confidence in him, which the
utmost arts of treachery and dissimulation could never have awakened in
her breast. She told him all--that they had no friend or
relative--that she had fled with the old man, to save him from a
madhouse and all the miseries he dreaded--that she was flying now, to
save him from himself--and that she sought an asylum in some remote
and primitive place, where the temptation before which he fell would
never enter, and her late sorrows and distresses could have no place.
The schoolmaster heard her with astonishment. ‘This child!’--he
thought--‘Has this child heroically persevered under all doubts and
dangers, struggled with poverty and suffering, upheld and sustained by
strong affection and the consciousness of rectitude alone! And yet the
world is full of such heroism. Have I yet to learn that the hardest
and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any
earthly record, and are suffered every day! And should I be surprised
to hear the story of this child!’
What more he thought or said, matters not. It was concluded that Nell
and her grandfather should accompany him to the village whither he was
bound, and that he should endeavour to find them some humble occupation
by which they could subsist. ‘We shall be sure to succeed,’ said the
schoolmaster, heartily. ‘The cause is too good a one to fail.’
They arranged to proceed upon their journey next evening, as a
stage-waggon, which travelled for some distance on the same road as
they must take, would stop at the inn to change horses, and the driver
for a small gratuity would give Nell a place inside. A bargain was
soon struck when the waggon came; and in due time it rolled away; with
the child comfortably bestowed among the softer packages, her
grandfather and the schoolmaster walking on beside the driver, and the
landlady and all the good folks of the inn screaming out their good
wishes and farewells.
What a soothing, luxurious, drowsy way of travelling, to lie inside
that slowly-moving mountain, listening to the tinkling of the horses’
bells, the occasional smacking of the carter’s whip, the smooth rolling
of the great broad wheels, the rattle of the harness, the cheery
good-nights of passing travellers jogging past on little short-stepped
horses--all made pleasantly indistinct by the thick awning, which
seemed made for lazy listening under, till one fell asleep! The very
going to sleep, still with an indistinct idea, as the head jogged to
and fro upon the pillow, of moving onward with no trouble or fatigue,
and hearing all these sounds like dreamy music, lulling to the
senses--and the slow waking up, and finding one’s self staring out
through the breezy curtain half-opened in the front, far up into the
cold bright sky with its countless stars, and downward at the driver’s
lantern dancing on like its namesake Jack of the swamps and marshes,
and sideways at the dark grim trees, and forward at the long bare road
rising up, up, up, until it stopped abruptly at a sharp high ridge as
if there were no more road, and all beyond was sky--and the stopping at
the inn to bait, and being helped out, and going into a room with fire
and candles, and winking very much, and being agreeably reminded that
the night was cold, and anxious for very comfort’s sake to think it
colder than it was!--What a delicious journey was that journey in the
waggon.
Then the going on again--so fresh at first, and shortly afterwards so
sleepy. The waking from a sound nap as the mail came dashing past like
a highway comet, with gleaming lamps and rattling hoofs, and visions of
a guard behind, standing up to keep his feet warm, and of a gentleman
in a fur cap opening his eyes and looking wild and stupefied--the
stopping at the turnpike where the man was gone to bed, and knocking at
the door until he answered with a smothered shout from under the
bed-clothes in the little room above, where the faint light was
burning, and presently came down, night-capped and shivering, to throw
the gate wide open, and wish all waggons off the road except by day.
The cold sharp interval between night and morning--the distant streak
of light widening and spreading, and turning from grey to white, and
from white to yellow, and from yellow to burning red--the presence of
day, with all its cheerfulness and life--men and horses at the
plough--birds in the trees and hedges, and boys in solitary fields,
frightening them away with rattles. The coming to a town--people busy
in the markets; light carts and chaises round the tavern yard;
tradesmen standing at their doors; men running horses up and down the
street for sale; pigs plunging and grunting in the dirty distance,
getting off with long strings at their legs, running into clean
chemists’ shops and being dislodged with brooms by ‘prentices; the
night coach changing horses--the passengers cheerless, cold, ugly, and
discontented, with three months’ growth of hair in one night--the
coachman fresh as from a band-box, and exquisitely beautiful by
contrast:--so much bustle, so many things in motion, such a variety of
incidents--when was there a journey with so many delights as that
journey in the waggon!
Sometimes walking for a mile or two while her grandfather rode inside,
and sometimes even prevailing upon the schoolmaster to take her place
and lie down to rest, Nell travelled on very happily until they came to
a large town, where the waggon stopped, and where they spent a night.
They passed a large church; and in the streets were a number of old
houses, built of a kind of earth or plaster, crossed and re-crossed in
a great many directions with black beams, which gave them a remarkable
and very ancient look. The doors, too, were arched and low, some with
oaken portals and quaint benches, where the former inhabitants had sat
on summer evenings. The windows were latticed in little diamond panes,
that seemed to wink and blink upon the passengers as if they were dim
of sight. They had long since got clear of the smoke and furnaces,
except in one or two solitary instances, where a factory planted among
fields withered the space about it, like a burning mountain. When they
had passed through this town, they entered again upon the country, and
began to draw near their place of destination.
It was not so near, however, but that they spent another night upon the
road; not that their doing so was quite an act of necessity, but that
the schoolmaster, when they approached within a few miles of his
village, had a fidgety sense of his dignity as the new clerk, and was
unwilling to make his entry in dusty shoes, and travel-disordered
dress. It was a fine, clear, autumn morning, when they came upon the
scene of his promotion, and stopped to contemplate its beauties.
‘See--here’s the church!’ cried the delighted schoolmaster in a low
voice; ‘and that old building close beside it, is the schoolhouse, I’ll
be sworn. Five-and-thirty pounds a-year in this beautiful place!’
They admired everything--the old grey porch, the mullioned windows, the
venerable gravestones dotting the green churchyard, the ancient tower,
the very weathercock; the brown thatched roofs of cottage, barn, and
homestead, peeping from among the trees; the stream that rippled by the
distant water-mill; the blue Welsh mountains far away. It was for such
a spot the child had wearied in the dense, dark, miserable haunts of
labour. Upon her bed of ashes, and amidst the squalid horrors through
which they had forced their way, visions of such scenes--beautiful
indeed, but not more beautiful than this sweet reality--had been always
present to her mind. They had seemed to melt into a dim and airy
distance, as the prospect of ever beholding them again grew fainter;
but, as they receded, she had loved and panted for them more.
‘I must leave you somewhere for a few minutes,’ said the schoolmaster,
at length breaking the silence into which they had fallen in their
gladness. ‘I have a letter to present, and inquiries to make, you
know. Where shall I take you? To the little inn yonder?’
‘Let us wait here,’ rejoined Nell. ‘The gate is open. We will sit in
the church porch till you come back.’
‘A good place too,’ said the schoolmaster, leading the way towards it,
disencumbering himself of his portmanteau, and placing it on the stone
seat. ‘Be sure that I come back with good news, and am not long gone!’
So, the happy schoolmaster put on a bran-new pair of gloves which he
had carried in a little parcel in his pocket all the way, and hurried
off, full of ardour and excitement.
The child watched him from the porch until the intervening foliage hid
him from her view, and then stepped softly out into the old
churchyard--so solemn and quiet that every rustle of her dress upon the
fallen leaves, which strewed the path and made her footsteps noiseless,
seemed an invasion of its silence. It was a very aged, ghostly place;
the church had been built many hundreds of years ago, and had once had
a convent or monastery attached; for arches in ruins, remains of oriel
windows, and fragments of blackened walls, were yet standing; while
other portions of the old building, which had crumbled away and fallen
down, were mingled with the churchyard earth and overgrown with grass,
as if they too claimed a burying-place and sought to mix their ashes
with the dust of men. Hard by these gravestones of dead years, and
forming a part of the ruin which some pains had been taken to render
habitable in modern times, were two small dwellings with sunken windows
and oaken doors, fast hastening to decay, empty and desolate.
Upon these tenements, the attention of the child became exclusively
riveted. She knew not why. The church, the ruin, the antiquated
graves, had equal claims at least upon a stranger’s thoughts, but from
the moment when her eyes first rested on these two dwellings, she could
turn to nothing else. Even when she had made the circuit of the
enclosure, and, returning to the porch, sat pensively waiting for their
friend, she took her station where she could still look upon them, and
felt as if fascinated towards that spot.
CHAPTER 47
Kit’s mother and the single gentleman--upon whose track it is expedient
to follow with hurried steps, lest this history should be chargeable
with inconstancy, and the offence of leaving its characters in
situations of uncertainty and doubt--Kit’s mother and the single
gentleman, speeding onward in the post-chaise-and-four whose departure
from the Notary’s door we have already witnessed, soon left the town