“What time will you be risin’ in the mornin’, Mr. Ballisat?” asked she, respectfully.
“What time, ma’am? oh, about the usuaclass="underline" why?”
“Bekase of your breakfast. If you’ll kindly give us the hour, I’ll be up and have the kettle biling.”
“Breakfast! Lor’ bless yer!” laughed my father, “I gets my breakfast in the market.”
“And why, may I ask? Shure the bit of breakfast must be more comfortable at your own fireside than in the cowld market, Jim?”
“So it is, but I’m off at five to-morrow morning, and so you see it can’t be managed,” replied my father.
“And why not?” asked Mrs. Burke, opening her brown eyes in affected astonishment. “Is it bekase you are left alone that you are to go out in the cowld widout the dhrap of coffee to warm you? Shure, sir, I should be no dacent woman, though it wor three o’clock instead of five when you went out. Good night, Mr. Ballisat; no fear but the kettle will be biling in time for yer.”
And she kept her word. I slept with my father, and while it was yet quite dark there came a knock at our door.
“There’s the pleseman knocking to say it’s a quarter to five, Jimmy,” said my father, sleepily; “just hop out and tap at the window, my boy.”
But at the same moment Mrs. Burke’s cheery voice was heard outside the room door—
“It’s half afther four, Mr. Ballisat, and the kettle’s biling, and there’s a nice bit of the fish all hot and a-waitin’ for you,” said she; and then she tripped back to her own room, humming as gay as a lark. Presently she was back again—
“May I throuble you to bring out the needle off the mantel-shelf, Mr. Ballisat? I’ve just bethought me I left it there overnight. My silly head will niver save my fingers, which have been itching to get at the bit of work this half an hour.”
“All right, ma’am,” called my father, and then, in an under-tone, and to himself, he muttered—
“’Send I may live! I never come across such a woman!”
Chapter IX. My new mother. I derive a valuable hint from a conversation between my father and his pal.
The reader, of course, foresees the ending of such a beginning—Mrs. Burke became my stepmother. I cannot exactly state how long a time elapsed from the time of my father burying his first wife to his marrying the second, but it must have been several months—seven, at the least, I should say, for when it happened, my sister Polly had grown to be quite a big child; indeed, I recollect that it was as much as I could do to carry her from one end of the alley to the other without resting. But however long a time it was, it saw no alteration in my sentiments towards Mrs. Burke. It is not enough to say I liked her as little as ever. When I first made her acquaintance I simply disliked her; now I hated her deeply and thoroughly. She hated me, and made no scruple of letting me know it. The very first morning after the memorable day of my mother’s funeral she told me her mind without reserve.
“Come here, my dear,” said she, gripping me by the arm and pulling me towards her, as she sat on her chair. “You recollect the divil’s prank you had it on your tongue’s tip to play me lasht night?” She spoke in allusion to the threatened sack exposure.
I made her no answer, but she could of course see that I well understood what she meant.
“You thought you might dare me becase ov yer father being prisint! You thought bekase of me winkin’ and coaxin’, and givin’ you sugar, that I was afeard you’d open your ugly mouth! Hould up your head, you sarpint, and look at me! Listen here, now. You’ve got the ould un in yer, and I mane to take it out of yer. I’m goin’ to be alwis wid you, to look afther and feed you; you’ll get nayther bite nor sup but when it’s plisant to me to give it you. So mind your behayvour. Dare so much as make a whisper to yer father of what I say or what I do, and I’ll make your shkin too hot to hould you.”
And seeing how hopeless it was to show fight against such a creature, I am sure I did mind my behaviour. I did her bidding in every particular, and fetched her little private errands, and kept her secrets faithfully; but she didn’t treat me at all well. If she didn’t make my skin too hot to hold me, it was not for want of trying. From breakfast time to within a few minutes of my father’s coming home, I was kept at it, drudge, drudge, drudge, as hard as any charwoman. Indeed, no charwoman would have engaged to perform the many various jobs that were put on me. The baby was my chief care. I was either lugging her about the alley, or sitting on my stool at the street door, or in the back yard, (Mrs. Burke could not bear to hear the baby cry,) hushing her to sleep; and when, after long and patient exertion, this was accomplished, and she was laid in her cradle, I was set to making waxed ends for Mrs. Burke’s sack-making, or fetching up coals, or sifting cinders, or slopping about with a house-flannel and scrubbing-brush. Of one sort and another, there was always employment found for me from the time little Polly went to sleep until she woke up again; and all without so much as a kind word or look even.
She was a wicked woman. She used to buy gin with the housekeeping money, and threaten me with all sorts of dreadful punishments if I did not promise to tell my father, should he ask me, what a beautiful dinner I had had. She was artful to that extent, that she would send me to the broken victual shop at Cowcross for a penny or a three-halfpenny bone, and this she would place in the cupboard, so that my father, when he came home, might see it, and believe that it was what was left from the nice little joint we had partaken of at dinner-time. She was always very particular in telling me to be sure and bring a small bone or bones, such as those of the loin of mutton, or a dainty spare-rib of pork, or a blade-bone of lamb—any bone, indeed, that might belong to a joint of meat of a sort that might be bought as a dinner for two persons. Once I recollect bringing back a single lean rib-bone of beef of at least twenty inches in length, which was, of course, ill-suited to her fraudulent designs, and so exasperated her that she banged me about the head with it, and then packed me off to the rag-shop to sell it for a halfpenny. I was terribly hungry at the time, and what little meat there was on the bone was very crisp, and brown, and tempting, and I begged leave to eat it; but she wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t want it herself. She would eat scarcely an ounce of meat from Monday till Saturday, liking gin so much better.
She would even go out of her way to do me an injury in the matter of food. There was always a bit of something hot got ready for my father’s supper, and when—as happened at least four days out of seven—I had no more than a crust of bread between breakfast and tea, I would contrive to make myself conspicuous, when he sat down to eat, in hopes of getting a bit. If Mrs. Burke’s back was turned, I was pretty sure to come in for a mouthful; but so sure as she caught my father in the act of helping me from his plate, she would instantly interfere.
“For the love of Hivin, man, hould your hand, unless you’d have him stretched on a bed of sickness wid over-ateing. He is a very dacent boy, Jim, but his gluttony at his meals is somethin’ awful. ’Twas ony this blissed dinner-time—and there he is, and can’t deny it—that he was helped three times to biled mutton, and each time enough for a man and his dog, as the sayin’ is.”
“And yet you comes a-prowlin’ round and a-showin’ your teeth at me as though you hadn’t tasted a bit for a week, you greedy young willin!” my father would observe, savagely. “You ’re better fed than taught—that’s what you are. Be off to bed, now, before you ketch a larruping.”