“What was that he said?” I heard my father ask her, in a voice as though his temper had suddenly cooled.
“He ses he hates me. Never mind him, Jim; he’ll know better some day,” said Mrs. Burke, soothingly.
“But what did he say about—about Judas?”
“Did he? I didn’t hear,” replied Mrs. Burke, lightly. “It’s my opinion, Jim, he’s so full of the ould un he don’t know what he’s sayin’.”
If by the “ould un” she meant the devil, Mrs. Burke was quite right when she said that I was full of him. My wrath against her made my throat swell and my eyes feel hot as fire. For the time I felt nothing of the cruel weals that scored my body. Nobody but the devil could have filled my young head with such terrible wishes against her. I wished she might die. I wished that death—my image of death, the dreadful eyeless bird with the sharp spikes—might creep into her bed in the night, and sting and tear her till she was glad to run and hide in the pit-hole.
But nothing of the sort happened. She made her appearance bright and brisk as ever next morning and for many succeeding mornings, until that one came when my father married her.
The wedding was a very quiet one. Not a single individual in the alley knew anything about it, and even I was in utter ignorance that so important an event was about to take place. One evening, however, they—my father and Mrs. Burke—came home together, (I knew that she had dressed in her smartest and gone out in the morning, but that was not a circumstance of such unfrequent occurrence to excite my curiosity,) and they brought home with them a young man, a friend of my father’s, who had, it appeared, obligingly kept an eye on my father’s barrow while he and Mrs. Burke stepped into the church. I was about with the baby when they came home, and was called in and sent for a pint of rum.
When the rum was brought the strange young man filled a glass.
“Well,” said he, “Lord bless every happy couple, I says. May you live long and die happy both on yer. I looks to’ords you, ma’am.”
Mrs. Burke acknowledged the compliment by looking towards the young man and inclining her head smilingly; whereon the young man inclined his head smilingly, and drank off half his rum.
“And I looks to’ords you, Jim,” continued he, grasping my father’s hand. “If you make her as good a husband as wot you are a pal, she won’t have nothink to holler about.”
My father nodded in an affable manner, and the young man having emptied the glass, my father took it and filled it.
“Here ’s the foresaid,” said he, (as a rule he was a man very sparing of his words,) and tossed off the rum at a draught; an example that Mrs. Burke dutifully followed.
She had put the baby into my arms again, and finding nothing to interest me in the conversation that ensued on the rum-drinking, I was about to leave the room when my father called me back.
“Come here, Jim; you see who that is a-sitting on that chair?” and he pointed towards the Irish-woman.
“Of course I do,” I replied, and laughing that he should ask so simple a question.
“Well, who is it?” said he, looking serious.
“Why, Mrs. Burke.”
“Say it agin. Think what you are a-goin’ to say, and say it slow.”
“Mrs. Burke.”
“Werry good. Now hark to me. Let that be the last time you let that name pass your lips, ’cos it’s wrong. Her name ain’t no more Burke than it is Green or Tomkins.”
“Isn’t it? What is it then, father?”
“It’s mother, that’s what it is. You’ve had a good long spell of rest off calling anybody mother, so now you can go at it agin hearty. D’ ye understand? You’ve got to call her mother, and to act by her as a mother. If you don’t you’ll ketch something wot you won’t like; so I tell yer.”
There was not much to cry about in this last observation of my father’s, but somehow I fell directly to crying instead of answering him. It couldn’t be that I was grieved to hear the news of his marriage, for what possible difference could it make to me? That it gave Mrs. Burke more authority over me was true from a legal point of view, but unless it likewise conferred on her additional powers of spite and muscle, I couldn’t possibly be a loser by the change.
“Well; what do you say?” continued my father, gruffly. “Ain’t you got so much as thanky to say? Ain’t you glad to get another mother?”
I made him no answer. I don’t know whether it was owing to his using the word mother so repeatedly, but I couldn’t speak for crying.
“Now what’s the little beggar snivelling about?” observed my father, savagely; and turning to Mrs. Burke, “Well, I’m cust! I suppose I am to ask his pinion as to what’s good for me, am I?”
“Don’t mind him, my dear,” said his new wife; “he can be as cross-grained as Ould Nick when he takes it into his head, as well to my sorrow I have been made to know many and many’s the time, though I was never the woman to throuble you, Jim, wid my complaints. But there, I needn’t tell you nothing wus of him than you know.”
I know that she alluded to the scandalous affair of the half-crown, (she was continually alluding to it as a means of turning my father’s wrath against me when it suited her purpose,) and I had it on my tongue to give her a saucy answer. I suppose the strange young man detected my intention, for he winked at me in a good-humoured sort of way to hold my tongue, and beckoned me towards him.
“Lor, don’t be too hard on the youngster,” said he. “It ain’t them as is hurt cries most. P’r’aps he’s crying because he’s so jolly glad to get another mother. How old is he, Jim?”
“I don’ know; how old is he, Kitty?” asked my father of Mrs. Burke.
“Bortherin on sivin.”
“Hain’t he amost old enough to begin to think about cutting his own grass, Jim?”
“Quite old enough,” chimed in my stepmother, promptly, “and quite big enough. He’ll have to do it too before he’s much older.”
“Well, he do go puty nigh to’ords doin’ it, don’t he?” asked my father, with a bit of a scowl, which must have made known to his wife, if before she was ignorant of it, what an uncertain-tempered man he was.
“I’d be glad to know how,” sneered she.
“How? why, luggin’ young Poll about mornin’, noon, and night, that’s how. Pr’aps you don’t think that’s work?”
“Work, indade! Shquatting about wid a mite of a thing on his lap, and as often jining in play wid he rest as not!”
“What do you think, Jack?” asked my father of the stranger.
The stranger emphatically replied that sooner than nurse a kid he would prefer “shoring” oysters from morning till night.
“Of course you would. Werry well I recollects the time when you had a kid to nuss,’ (this perhaps accounted for the stranger’s sympathy with me.) “Work, indeed! If there’s one job for payin’ out the back more than another, it is nursing a baby.”
“I knows that I was precious glad to cut it as soon as I saw an opening, though it was to go at nothing better than barking.”
As the good-natured stranger made this last observation, he slipped a penny into my hand, and in consequence of my anxiety to get away to spend it, I lost the rest of the conversation.
The words the strange young man had uttered, however, sank deep into my mind—”he was precious glad to cut it and get a place as barker,” he had said. Well, and so should I be very glad to cut it and become barker.
But what was “barking?” I thought a great deal about the matter, and could arrive at no more feasible conclusion than that a “barker” was a boy that attended a drover, and helped him to drive his sheep by means of imitating the bark of a dog. Living so close to Smithfield market, droves of sheep were not unfrequently to be met with, and I had repeatedly seen boys engaged at the very trade I imagined the stranger to mean. Indeed, more than once, having got rid of the baby for half-an-hour, I had lent a hand at sheepdriving myself, and liked the job very much. I was, however, not nearly so clever at it as were some boys I knew, and who could not only bark like a dog, but even imitate the yelp of the animal when hit with a stick, and that in a manner calculated to impose on the most sensible sheep ever driven to Smithfield.