Part 2

The night was very fine and still, and the great, wide river ran under the arches, as silently as Time itself rolls on to meet the eternal sea. Black barges and hulks lay quiet at their moorings—the yellow lights of the great city seemed to twinkle, jeering-like, at the pure shining stars overhead. And Nick’s mother went on before us with light, unsteady steps to the End, that was in store.

About the middle of the bridge she stopped, and began to wave her arms and talk to herself, as wildly as before.

Some of the words she said were plainly to be heard; the rest were lost in muttering; and, with the dread, that had been growing in me for some time, cold and heavy at my heart, I bid the boy wait where he was, and went forward by myself and spoke to her.

“Poor soul!” I says, “haven’t you no home to go to?”

She looked at me with eyes that didn’t know me, and nodded her head.

“Then go to it,” I says, “for the love of Heaven.”

She nods and whispers, “I am going.”

“Then here’s a trifle to help you,” I says, “and I would spare more if I could, be sure.”

But she put my hand away with the money in it.

“This is the Last Act,” she says, not speaking to me, but loud and clear, as if she had been giving orders to someone at a distance. “Ring down the curtain!”

She clapped her hands above her head, and laughed that awful laugh, and, before I could breathe, jumped on the parapet, as lightly as a rope-dancer.

I screamed for help and caught at her poor clothing, but the rotten stuff seemed to melt in my hands, and Nick’s mother was gone—down in the black water!

I see it all, like a picture, as I write, and my dear boy a-trying to jump in after her, and me a-holding him in my arms, and the policemen that came running up.

* * * * *

She was never seen again. The river that has kept so many cruel secrets since London Town was London Town, and will go on a-keeping of ’em till want and poverty, misery and despair, are names that stand for nothing, took her and hid her out of sight.

Her story we heard long after. Let those that have never known temptation be gentle in their thoughts of her. Let them as has knowed it and overcome it, thank the Merciful Power as made ’em stronger to suffer and endure than Nick’s dead mother.

It seems all this while, as if I was neglecting Nan. The best of children always, and the most willing, and helpin’ me at the wash-tub, with all her little strength, as, even with my pattens on, she were hardly tall enough to reach it.

I have said my boy was handsome in his open-faced, bright-eyed, manly way, and so he were, but Nan was worth turning round to look at any day in the week. With her clear, brown skin and her big, grey eyes, that would change in colour according to her moods—an’ she had plenty of ’em!—with her bush of dancin’ black curls—as I could never damp out straight—an’ her red laughing mouth, and lively, high spirited ways, she was just Nick’s companion picture.

She was over-ruling and high in her ways with other children, taking the lead in their games in her hours of play-time, dividing whatever came to ’em in the way of sweets and such truck, and making no fuss about boxing the ears of any big boy as tried to rob ’em.

But she’d break off in the middle of hopscotch or honey-pots, if she saw Nick a-coming. (She was wonderfully fond of him and he of her, as I’ve said before.)

She had a high, shrill voice in singing, you could hear her above all the other children; and to see her dance, to the organs’ playing, was quite wonderful. It seems strange to me, looking back, that Nick should have none of that kind of talent in him.

But, bless you, then and now he was as solid as a rock.

Looking back again, it seems to me, as if Them Two brought me and Cheevers luck, from the very beginning, for before they was twelve years old, as near as I can guess, in spite of the call on us, that an extra two in family must ever make, me and Cheevers had extended the premises by taking the opposite room on the ground floor, and was paying a neighbour, as owned a shed in a backyard for stabling of a donkey.

That was a rise in the world for us, our getting that donkey! It dropped upon us, as one might say, from the skies, ’Ampstead ’Eath being so much above the level of Lemon’s-passage.

For Nick and Nan were wonderful fond of ’Ampstead ’Eath, and would make nothing of trudging all the way there of a holiday, with a calico net to catch tittlebashes in, an’ a medicine bottle to put ’em in, when caught they were.

I’d give ’em a good slice of bread-an’-dripping each, an’ could trust ’em to be away the whole day without drowning themselves, though nothing more or less, when they did come back, but a mask of mud.

I have heard of strange things being discovered on ’Ampstead ’Eath in unexpected places, but that in a lonely part, where there are sandpits and blackberry bushes, and the grass grows short and thin, being sat upon so much by picnickers on Bank Holidays, a first-class perambulator should be found, with a stout, well-dressed baby sittin’ up inside it, sucking its thumb, come upon me as a startler.

“We looked all round,” said Nick, “but not a speck of a livin’ soul was there to be seen. If any lady had come along, Nan would ha’ run up to her and asked her: ‘O please ’m, did you happen to lose a ‘baby?’”

“But we saw nobody, for a fog had come on, and all the people, out walkin’ on the ’Eath, had gone home. An’ somehow, we never thought of handin’ the perambulator over to a policeman; the most nat’ral thing seemed to be, to wheel it straight to you.

“Nobody noticed us, till we got into the Passage, and then Old Cutties, as keeps the whelk-stall, sings out: ‘’Ullo, Nick! I never knowed you was a family man!’ and some more on ’em come round and wanted to have a look at the baby. But we wouldn’t allow no larks. And now, here it is, an’ what are we goin’ to do with it?”

“Feed it fust,” says Cheevers, as the baby, after staring at each of us in turn, opened its blessed mouth in a hungry roar. “Give it some bread and milk, and then lay information at the police station.

“The superintendent will telegraph to Hampstead, and if that child has got such a thing as a distracted parent a-looking for it everywheres, that parent will be down herein a jiffy!”

Not in a jiffy, but in a neat dogcart did the owner of that poor innocent turn up, as if the gift of prophecy had descended on Cheevers, and before two hours was past.

A genteeler-lookin’ young couple I never did see; him junior partner in a City firm of shippers, and her his young wife, married to him but eighteen months. And the story of how she lost that baby, deliberate and by her own act, as told to me, by her own lips with streaming eyes, was as here set down.

Says she, huggin’ the baby, till you’d ha’ thought she’d ’a squeezed it to death, but that mothers have a way of doin’ these things—“Mrs. Cheevers, I do assure you it’s nobody’s fault but my own, and to my shame, be it said.

“My dear Alfred,” as was her husband, “knows, that before I married him I had literary ambitions, and had nearly written a whole novel,” says she, “when our marriage made me break off at the end of the second volume.

“At first, with one thing and another, I had no time to take it up agin,” she says, “yet still the cravin’ to win glory by my pen, was in me, so to speak. An’ when baby was six months old, which happened a week ago, a longin’ came over me,” she says, “to go on with that story.

“So I laid in a store of pens and ink and paper, unbeknown to Alfred, and began. But my ideas refused to flow. I could not remember the endin’ of them people in the story, try how I would. And this very afternoon as ever was, I made up my mind to give up the ideas of a literary career and sink into contented obscurity.

“So, quite calm and resigned, I wheeled out the baby in her perambulator for an airin’, an’ just about the high part of the Heath I stopped for a rest. If you’ll believe me, Mrs. Cheevers—I’d no sooner sat down, than the whole thing came back upon me like a flash of thunder. I felt, as if I should die if I didn’t go home and write it all down.”

“And you did go?” I says, quite petrifacted with surprise, “and left your baby!”

“I forgot all about her,” says the young lady, beginning to cry again. “How such a thing could happen, I don’t know. But happen it did. I never thought of her till I walked in at our own garden-gate—and then I flew back like the wind. But she was gone. And now that I’ve got her back—as I don’t deserve to, being such an unnatural parent as to abandon my own child—I’ll burn that novel, as soon as I get home.”

So off she went, with many thanks an’ blessings, and her young husband and her baby, and we heard no more of ’em for three days. Until a young man in cords come down our court leadin’ a handsome donkey drawing a neat, plain truck behind it.

To our door he brought it, an’ there hands to me an envelope with

“FOR MR. AND MRS. CHEEVERS”

wrote upon it, and inside, more writing—

“FROM NICK AND NAN,”

and a five-pound note. And as Mr. and Mrs. Hurley, the pa and ma of the lost baby, had chose this way, so delicate an’ so kind, of rewardin’ us for the little we had done, and as Them Two showed such pleasure in the pleasure of Cheevers and me, what could we do, but thankfully accept?

An’ after that no more shoving the barrow, with rheumatic pains in Cheevers’ joints, but a shaggy willing beast to draw it, not too nice to eat damaged greens or anything else, when they ran short.

While Nick saw to that donkey his own self, and many a time I have sat behind him, as proud and glad, as if he was four bays with rosettes behind their ears, when Cheevers thought a jaunt as far as Kew ’ud do me good, and over them tram-ruts is certainly a stimulant to the liver.

Them days were good days, though there was showers between the sunshine, but of what came after, others better fitted may better tell, and so with ever love to both my dears, always boy and girl to me!—

MARY CHEEVERS.

EVE THE SECOND.

THE OPINION OF DAVID DIX, NIGHT WATCHMAN, ABOUT THAT BOY AND THAT GIRL.

_By B. L. FARJEON._

It is many years ago, since I used to walk my beat of a night in the East-end of London, where I was born and worked my way steadily up the ladder of life, which, if you please, is no ladder at all, strictly speaking, but a double flight of steps. When you get to the top of one side of this flight, you begin to go down on the other side, till you reach the bottom, where a bed is made for you, and your life’s toils and struggles are over.

I am supposing that you reach man’s allotted span, and are not called upon to say farewell to the world, till your hair is white and all your vital forces spent.

This good fortune is mine, and I am waiting for the summons, with a firm belief in the Divine message of a better world beyond.

Not that I have anything to complain of; I have done my duty to the best of my ability, and if I fell short now and then, it was not from lack of willingness to do what was set down for me, but because I had gone to the extent of my powers and was unable to go further; up to this point only can you, with any sense of justice, make a man responsible. And this, mind you, opens a wide question, into which I am not going to enter—the question of responsibility for committed acts.

Under what circumstances you are born, how you are brought up, by what influences your earlier years have been surrounded—these form a succession of lessons, which you are bound to accept, because you know no better, and are taught no better.

Judges and legislators should take this into account, and pass judgment according; though I have observed that a gentleman or lady, who has broken the law of the land, is, as a rule, let off more lightly than the poor wretch, who has not had the advantage of good teaching and a proper education. In my opinion, it should be the other way.

My grandfather was a night watchman, and my father stepped into his shoes; and when he was too tired to walk in them any longer I put them on with a proud and cheerful heart, thinking it a fine thing to do, as my betters had done before me.

So that you see there were three generations of us, and as we were all steady men, confidence was placed in us. I often heard it said, “You may trust David Dix; he is like his father.”

In my father’s time, I have no doubt, they said the same of him. He was a good stamp of a man, and he gave me a home education, and taught me how to speak and write fair English, for which I say “God bless him.” By so doing, he took the locks off the caves of enchantment, we find in books. “Open, Sesame!” I cried, flourishing my spelling book—and I saw wonders.

I had both public and private duties to perform.

My public duties mainly were to see that the houses and shops were properly secured, to keep an eye on suspicious characters, and to take care that no place was broken into and robbed.

Poor as were the streets, I perambulated night after night, for seven nights in the week and three hundred and sixty-five nights in the year, very few burglaries took place in them. Thieves and cracksmen, when they got to know me, had a wholesome fear of my watchfulness, and fought shy of the premises I protected.

My private duties were chiefly to rouse people, who wanted to get up very early in the morning. A penny a week was my charge for this, and I sometimes had as many as thirty or forty people on my books.

I bring to mind two memorable nights in connection with Nick and Nan. The girl came first, the lad second.

I had for company at this time a white mastiff, I called Dummy, who trotted at my heels, from the moment I commenced my work of a night, till I got home in the morning and threw myself, regularly tired out, on my bed.

Dummy was not a nice-tempered dog, but he never interfered with anyone, who did not interfere with him, or unless he had, in his own opinion, a good reason for interfering.

He was a faithful creature, and would not make friends with strangers, and although I have always been sociably inclined myself, I did not find fault with him, for this disinclination for any society but mine. Every man likes something, that he can call really his own, and Dummy’s conservative ways made me all the more attached to him.

One night, about ten o’clock, there was a scrimmage in Chapel-street, and before I knew where I was, I found myself in the middle of it.

It was an ugly row between Lascar sailors and sugar-bakers, and I don’t know which looked most like devils, the Lascars with their dark faces and flashing eyes, or the sugar-bakers, who had trooped out of the factory, naked to their waists, and with their matted hair hanging in disorder about their perspiring foreheads. They had snatched some of their red-hot tools from the furnace, and the Lascars out with their knives. Dummy was in the middle of the fight, and I was a good deal knocked about.

When it was all over, I was some distance from the spot, upon which the row had commenced, and Dummy was not by my side. I went about the streets calling and looking for him, and after half an hour’s search, I saw him on the ground, with his leg badly gashed, and a girl kneeling by him and attending to the wound.

“Mind, my girl,” I cried, “or the dog will bite you. He’s savage to strangers.”

I knelt down, and Dummy licked my hand.

“He won’t hurt me,” said Nan. “Poor doggie! His leg’s cut to the bone.”

And so it was, but Nan had done what she could for it, and the look of gratitude in Dummy’s eyes showed that he properly appreciated her kindness. From that night Dummy and Nan were friends, and there were occasions when he would even leave me to go to her.

For some time before this adventure I had noticed Nan and Nick walking together of an evening, when I was sitting at my window smoking my pipe, but I had not paid much attention to them.

Now, however, they had become objects of interest to me, and I wondered how it was, that I had been blind to little ways of theirs which were different from the ways of other boys and girls.

They would walk along the streets talking and smiling—Nick doing most of the talking and Nan most of the smiling—as earnestly as if they were the only people in the world. Sometimes he would have an open book or a paper in his hand, from which he would be reading to her, and she would be listening with all her might, and her eyes would shine as mine used to shine, when I was deep in a fascinating story.

I discovered afterwards that he was farther advanced than I was at his age, and that though they were both fond of Dickens and Bulwer and Ainsworth, they often read books of adventure (which were scarcer then, than they are now) and even dipped into poetry and imaginative stories of a superior kind. When we were better acquainted Nick introduced me to favorite books of his—“Undine,” “The Lady of the Lake,” and other of Sir Walter Scott’s poems, and “Marco Polo.”

It was a curious mixture, and how it was, he came to pick the best books out of the baskets on the second-hand bookstalls, is more than I can say; it was a kind of instinct that was born in him, I suppose, and it went towards the making, in the end, of a man out of the common run.

What brought me into closer connection with him, was his coming to me one night, and saying,

“You call people up early in the morning; I wish you would call me up.”

“I will, my lad,” I said. “What time?”

“Five o’clock,” he replied. “I can wake myself, as a rule, by fixing it well in my mind, the night before, and saying, ‘Five o’clock, five o’clock, five o’clock, I must get up, I must get up, I must get up at five o’clock,’ and keeping on saying it, till I fall asleep; but I might miss it now and then, and I don’t want to miss it once.”

“Because,” said I, “you have to get to work at a certain time?”

“Yes,” he answered, “because of that.”

“And it’s not in you to be a minute late,” I observed, “as much as one morning in a month.”

“I don’t want,” said he to this, “to be a minute late one morning in a year.”

I looked at him in admiration; there was purpose, there was earnestness in his face, and there was a glow in his eyes, that made me take to him more and more, and to feel almost like a father to him. “This is a boy,” said I to myself, “that is going to get on in the world.”

“I’ll call you,” I said. “Is it a new place you’ve got?”

“Yes,” he answered, “and I’m to get five shillings a week, and a shilling rise at the end of twelve months, if I give satisfaction. Then there’s a chance of overtime.”

I nodded. “What time are you due in the morning?”

“Half-past seven.”

“It must be a long way off from here?”

“Oh, no; I can get there in twenty minutes.”

“Then what on earth do you want to be called at five o’clock for?”

“I want an hour to myself, Mr. Dix; there is so much I’d like to know.”

“Very well, Nick; I’ll call you.”

“And if I don’t wake,” said he, “please pull me out of bed, will you?”

“I’ll get you up all right.”

“How much a week do you charge, Mr. Dix?” he asked.

“My charge to you,” I said, “will be nothing a week.”

“No,” said he in a tone of decision, “that will not be fair. If I work I want to be paid for it. Please tell me how much?”

“Won’t you let me do it out of a friendly feeling, Nick?”

“Not this, please, Mr. Dix. It will make me feel ever so much better, if you will let me pay what other people pay.”

I said to myself, “This boy is arguing out of a spirit of right and justice, and it will not be kind on my part to baulk him;” so I told him I would charge him a penny a week, and upon these terms we settled it.

He was never once late. Hail, rain, snow, or shine, there he was, trudging out every morning at seven o’clock, with a bright face and a willing heart singing softly to himself a favorite song of Nan’s as he went along. Often he was up and dressed before I went to wake him, and nineteen times out of the other twenty he would call,

“Thank you, Mr. Dix, I’m dressing myself. How glad you must be that the night’s over.”

And there he was at his books, every morning for an hour and a half at least, with a little bit of candle, if it was dark, as happy and hopeful as a prince—perhaps more so, because princes, having everything they want, must, in my opinion, have a precious dull time of it.

Why, a prince going to his private box at the opera can’t get a thousandth part of the pleasure, that Nick enjoyed as, with Nan with her sprightly step and pretty face at his side, he marched about once every three months to the sixpenny gallery at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, where Mr. Samuel Phelps was doing his best to amuse, in an intellectual way, the poor people in the north and east of London.

Mr. Phelps did a power of good in his day, and there are many well-to-do people living now, who have the best of all reasons to be grateful to him.

Often of a morning Nan would walk with Nick to the place he worked in and would leave him there, and more often she would go and meet him when his work was over. Being a bright, capable lad, Nick, you may depend, had many temptations from boys and girls of his age to join in pleasures which lead to no good; but he resisted them all with firmness and good temper, and as he never preached to them that it was wrong to do this or that—being, indeed, too busy to meddle with anyone’s business but his own or Nan’s—he did himself no harm by refusing.

At the end of the year he got his shilling rise, and at the end of six months another shilling, and with seven shillings a week he considered himself quite rich. And all this time he went on reading and studying, and storing up for the future. It is surprising what a boy can do for himself in this way. All the schooling in the world is of small value in comparison with what an earnest youngster can teach himself out of school hours.

As time went on Nan’s walks with Nick to and from his workshop became less frequent. She was growing in years and beauty, and she felt that she ought to do something towards earning a living.

There was a little confectioner’s and cake shop in Whitechapel, opposite the butchers’ stalls, and she obtained a situation there. I don’t know how much a week she got; it must have been very little, because the shop did a poor business, but Nan was happy in the knowledge that she was making herself useful. What struck me as being a very beautiful thing was the pride she and Nick took in each other, the thoughtful, loving way in which they would look at each other, the dependence and trust she placed in him, the tender and protecting air he showed towards her.

It did not occur to me that they were too much in each other’s company, and that Nan’s beauty was a dangerous possession; if it had, I don’t think it would have troubled me, so strong was my belief in Nick’s honesty and straightforwardness, and in Nan’s sense of what was right.

Once a week Nick had to work till nearly midnight, and Nan took it into her head to go and meet him on his way home.

I spoke to Nick about it, and said it was hardly safe, for a young and pretty girl like Nan, to be out by herself at such an hour. There were rough characters living round about, and when they had had too much to drink, it was as well to give them a wide berth. Nick, in his turn, spoke to Nan, and bade her not to venture out alone so late at night. He told her in my presence, but she pleaded so hard to be allowed to go and meet him that I saw he was wavering, and would give way, so I said,

“Well, you shall go, Nan; but not alone. Dummy shall go with you.”