It was no comfort to me that everybody looked sorry. I had seen at least two of my father’s friends looking quite as downcast, and even more dejected, when trade was slack; and as for Mrs. Jenkins, I had seen her cry quite as hard, and wring her hands (which now she could not do, having the baby) when Mr. Jenkins came home drunk. The persons who had most cause to cry were dry-eyed enough. My father did not cry. He, looked wretched enough to do it, but he didn’t; he only stood with his eyes cast to the ground, nibbling the peak of his cap and listening to the parson just as I have afterwards seen a prisoner in the dock listening to a very light sentence from the lips of a judge. I didn’t cry. I wanted to cry very bad, but my eyes only burnt and smarted, and the tears wouldn’t come. I seemed too full of thoughts pulling this way and that way, and baulking my tears, just as one might fancy the rain-clouds beat about by contrary winds, with no chance of settling to a down-pour. The baby didn’t cry, being fast asleep; but I don’t think this was Mrs. Jenkins’s fault.
The parson having finished his prayers, shut the book and went away, and the party broke up. Mr. Crowl wasn’t half so proud as he seemed to be at first, but walked by my father’s side, chatting quite familiarly. He showed us a short cut out of the churchyard, into a by-street in which there was a public house, and waiting about just outside were the four men who carried the coffin.
“Shall we go back to the house, or”—
Mr. Crowl finished the sentence by jerking his thumb in a polite manner towards the public-house.
“In here’ll do very well for me if it’ll do for you,” said my father, at the same time tapping his trousers pocket independently.
So the whole party, with the four bearers, went into the public-house, and I, still holding my father’s hand, went in too. As we passed the bar, Mr. Crowl nodded and whispered to the landlady; and before we had been in the parlour two minutes, the waiter brought in some beer, and some gin, and some tobacco.
“How much?” asked my father, taking out his bag.
“I settle for this,” observed Mr. Crowl, waving his hand towards the bar—as a hint, I suppose, that the landlady knew all about it.
“Now, when I ask a man to drink”—began my father.
“My good friend, I always do it—it’s a point with me; honour bright, it is,” interrupted the undertaker, staying my father’s too ready hand by a touch of the splint with which he was about to light his pipe.
“Very good,” said my father, “it’s all the same; my turn next.”
So everybody took to smoking and drinking, and in a very short time the place grew so full of smoke that I could hardly breathe; so after in vain trying to make my father understand that I wanted to go, (he had got into an argument with one of the bearers as to the proper way to pronounce the word “asparagus,”) I unpinned my sash, and leaving it on the table, slipped out of the room and ran home.
Chapter VII. Which chiefly concerns the woman whom cruel fate decreed to be my stepmother.
The houses in Fryingpan Alley were let out in floors and single rooms. On the same floor with us there lived an Irishwoman of the name of Burke. She was a widow; her husband, a slater’s labourer, having, a few months after his marriage, fallen from the outer slant of a roof of the ridge-and-furrow pattern, and so hurt his spine, that he died on the evening of the day on which he was carried to Guy’s Hospital. Mrs. Burke was no favourite of mine—not because she was old or ugly; on the contrary, she was a much younger woman than my mother, and so merry as to be continually humming or singing, and so good-looking that no wake or other such jollification ever took place in the. neighbourhood without Mrs. Burke receiving an invitation to it. My dislike for her did not arise from the fact of her having carroty hair. I was not over-partial to hair of that colour, and am not to this day; but there were a good many people living in the alley whose hair was quite as red as was Mrs. Burke’s, and I got along well enough with them.
My chief objection was to her complexion, which was sandy. Her face and neck, and arms and hands, were dotted so closely that you could scarcely stick a pin between, with pinky-yellow spots, which in my ignorance I firmly believed could have been washed off had Mrs. Burke used sufficient soap and energy. That she did not remove them, but allowed them to remain and accumulate, (I suppose that they did not accumulate, but that they did was decidedly my impression at the time,) was to my mind a convincing proof that she was an unclean person, and one whom it would be better to have as little to do with as possible.
Under such circumstances, it was not to be wondered at that I could by no manner of means relish Mrs. Burke’s victuals. Nothing she could offer me—and, like all Irish people, she was mighty generous and free-handed, especially with her cupboard store—could conquer my dislike. I have refused her batter pudding (baked under pork, and steaming from the bake-house) on the plea that I wasn’t the least hungry, and two minutes afterwards she has met me deep in the enjoyment of a slice of bread of my mother’s cutting. If she gave me an apple, I could not eat it until I had pared off the rind ruinously thick. I have taken her baked potatoes and art-fully conveyed them down-stairs, and hid them in the dust-bin.
“Did you like the praties, Jimmy?”
“Yes, thanky, ma’am; they were very nice.”
And at that very moment up has come Mrs. Burke’s cat, with one of the identical potatoes in her jaws, laying it, all ashes as it was, on Mrs. Burke’s clean hearth, and munching it up under her nose.
There was no love lost between myself and Mrs. Burke after that time. She never met me but she gave me an evil look, and once she called me “a mite of shtuck-up thrumpery,” of which I told my mother, who took an early opportunity of asking her what she meant by it. She laughed—
“See now, Mrs. Ballisat I see the mischief the little rogues might make between friendly folks wid their funny mistakes! Me call the darlint ‘a mite of shtuck-up thrumpery,’ indeed! Mary forbid, ma’am. What I did call him ‘a mighty tip-top thrumpeter,’ and that bekase of the illigant voice that he has, for ever making itself heard about the house. Get out wid you, Master Jim; divil a compliment you ’ll get again out of me for one while.”
She was always extremely civil to my parents, which was not very surprising, considering the large quantities of vegetables my father used to give her, because of her being a lone woman.
It was Mrs. Burke whom I found occupying our room when I ran home from the public-house where my father was staying. As it was growing towards dusk, nobody noticed me as I came up the alley, and I crept in and went upstairs. I didn’t hurry up, as might be expected of a little boy who had had nothing to eat since breakfast. I had a vague notion that now it was all right in our room, but I was far from certain. I kept close to the wall, and stole noiselessly as high as the first landing of our flight, and peeped round the corner. So far all was right; for the door, which for several days bad been kept fast locked, and the key kept down in Jenkins’s room, was now ajar. I could see the wall that faced the fireplace through the open chink, and to my very great surprise the light of a fire was reflected on it. Never through all my life can I forget the queer sensations that for a moment beset me. Who could have lit the fire in our room? Who alone had a light to do so? My mother and no one else. Dusk was my time of coming home from play; it was tea-time. Times out of number I had come home exactly at this same time, and found my mother busy at the fireplace, putting sticks on the fire to make the kettle boil, ready for my father, so that he might not be kept waiting a moment. The light against the wall was just such as would be made by the reflection of blazing sticks. Was it, after all, a misapprehension on my part? Was it all a happy mistake about the black load and the pit-hole? Should I find my mother in the room, as she was when I last entered it five days ago, and saw her there? I don’t mean to say that all these thoughts passed through my mind with the distinctness with which they are here set down, but they all combined to make the glorious maze that suddenly fell on me. In the maze I found my way right up to the door, and there I met with certain cruel facts that brought me to my senses suddenly, as a dash of cold water in the face of one that faints.