The Old Curiosity Shop

Chapter 45

In all their journeying, they had never longed so ardently, they
had never so pined and wearied, for the freedom of pure air and
open country, as now. No, not even on that memorable morning,
when, deserting their old home, they abandoned themselves to the
mercies of a strange world, and left all the dumb and senseless
things they had known and loved, behind--not even then, had they
so yearned for the fresh solitudes of wood, hillside, and field, as
now, when the noise and dirt and vapour, of the great manufacturing
town reeking with lean misery and hungry wretchedness, hemmed them
in on every side, and seemed to shut out hope, and render escape
impossible.

'Two days and nights!' thought the child. 'He said two days and
nights we should have to spend among such scenes as these. Oh! if
we live to reach the country once again, if we get clear of these
dreadful places, though it is only to lie down and die, with what
a grateful heart I shall thank God for so much mercy!'

With thoughts like this, and with some vague design of travelling
to a great distance among streams and mountains, where only very
poor and simple people lived, and where they might maintain
themselves by very humble helping work in farms, free from such
terrors as that from which they fled--the child, with no resource
but the poor man's gift, and no encouragement but that which flowed
from her own heart, and its sense of the truth and right of what
she did, nerved herself to this last journey and boldly pursued her
task.

'We shall be very slow to-day, dear,' she said, as they toiled
painfully through the streets; 'my feet are sore, and I have pains
in all my limbs from the wet of yesterday. I saw that he looked at
us and thought of that, when he said how long we should be upon the
road.'

'It was a dreary way he told us of,' returned her grandfather,
piteously. 'Is there no other road? Will you not let me go some
other way than this?'

'Places lie beyond these,' said the child, firmly, 'where we may
live in peace, and be tempted to do no harm. We will take the road
that promises to have that end, and we would not turn out of it, if
it were a hundred times worse than our fears lead us to expect. We
would not, dear, would we?'

'No,' replied the old man, wavering in his voice, no less than in
his manner. 'No. Let us go on. I am ready. I am quite ready,
Nell.'

The child walked with more difficulty than she had led her
companion to expect, for the pains that racked her joints were of
no common severity, and every exertion increased them. But they
wrung from her no complaint, or look of suffering; and, though the
two travellers proceeded very slowly, they did proceed. Clearing
the town in course of time, they began to feel that they were
fairly on their way.

A long suburb of red brick houses--some with patches of
garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the
shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling
vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and
furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and
unwholesome than in the town itself--a long, flat, straggling
suburb passed, they came, by slow degrees, upon a cheerless region,
where not a blade of grass was seen to grow, where not a bud put
forth its promise in the spring, where nothing green could live but
on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly
sweltering by the black road-side.

Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its
dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them
with a dismal gloom. On every side, and far as the eye could see
into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and
presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form,
which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague
of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On
mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough
boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and
writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains,
shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in
torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their
agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to
the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down,
unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men,
women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended
the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or
scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. Then came more of the
wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in their
wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round and
round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left,
was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never
ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or
inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all
these horrors with a dense dark cloud.

But night-time in this dreadful spot!--night, when the smoke was
changed to fire; when every chimney spirited up its flame; and
places, that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red-hot, with
figures moving to and fro within their blazing jaws, and calling to
one another with hoarse cries--night, when the noise of every
strange machine was aggravated by the darkness; when the people
near them looked wilder and more savage; when bands of unemployed
labourers paraded the roads, or clustered by torch-light round
their leaders, who told them, in stern language, of their wrongs,
and urged them on to frightful cries and threats; when maddened
men, armed with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers
of women who would restrain them, rushed forth on errands of terror
and destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own--
night, when carts came rumbling by, filled with rude coffins (for
contagious disease and death had been busy with the living crops);
when orphans cried, and distracted women shrieked and followed in
their wake--night, when some called for bread, and some for drink
to drown their cares, and some with tears, and some with staggering
feet, and some with bloodshot eyes, went brooding home--night,
which, unlike the night that Heaven sends on earth, brought with it
no peace, nor quiet, nor signs of blessed sleep--who shall tell
the terrors of the night to the young wandering child!

And yet she lay down, with nothing between her and the sky; and,
with no fear for herself, for she was past it now, put up a prayer
for the poor old man. So very weak and spent, she felt, so very
calm and unresisting, that she had no thought of any wants of her
own, but prayed that God would raise up some friend for him. She
tried to recall the way they had come, and to look in the direction
where the fire by which they had slept last night was burning. She
had forgotten to ask the name of the poor man, their friend, and
when she had remembered him in her prayers, it seemed ungrateful
not to turn one look towards the spot where he was watching.

A penny loaf was all they had had that day. It was very little,
but even hunger was forgotten in the strange tranquillity that
crept over her senses. She lay down, very gently, and, with a
quiet smile upon her face, fell into a slumber. It was not like
sleep--and yet it must have been, or why those pleasant dreams of
the little scholar all night long! Morning came. Much weaker,
diminished powers even of sight and hearing, and yet the child made
no complaint--perhaps would have made none, even if she had not
had that inducement to be silent, travelling by her side. She felt
a hopelessness of their ever being extricated together from that
forlorn place; a dull conviction that she was very ill, perhaps
dying; but no fear or anxiety.

A loathing of food that she was not conscious of until they
expended their last penny in the purchase of another loaf,
prevented her partaking even of this poor repast. Her grandfather
ate greedily, which she was glad to see.

Their way lay through the same scenes as yesterday, with no variety
or improvement. There was the same thick air, difficult to
breathe; the same blighted ground, the same hopeless prospect, the
same misery and distress. Objects appeared more dim, the noise
less, the path more rugged and uneven, for sometimes she stumbled,
and became roused, as it were, in the effort to prevent herself
from falling. Poor child! the cause was in her tottering feet.

Towards the afternoon, her grandfather complained bitterly of
hunger. She approached one of the wretched hovels by the way-side,
and knocked with her hand upon the door.

'What would you have here?' said a gaunt man, opening it.

'Charity. A morsel of bread.'

'Do you see that?' returned the man hoarsely, pointing to a kind of
bundle on the ground. 'That's a dead child. I and five hundred
other men were thrown out of work, three months ago. That is my
third dead child, and last. Do you think I have charity to bestow,
or a morsel of bread to spare?'

The child recoiled from the door, and it closed upon her. Impelled
by strong necessity, she knocked at another: a neighbouring one,
which, yielding to the slight pressure of her hand, flew open.

It seemed that a couple of poor families lived in this hovel, for
two women, each among children of her own, occupied different
portions of the room. In the centre, stood a grave gentleman in
black who appeared to have just entered, and who held by the arm a
boy.

'Here, woman,' he said, 'here's your deaf and dumb son. You may
thank me for restoring him to you. He was brought before me, this
morning, charged with theft; and with any other boy it would have
gone hard, I assure you. But, as I had compassion on his
infirmities, and thought he might have learnt no better, I have
managed to bring him back to you. Take more care of him for the
future.'

'And won't you give me back MY son!' said the other woman, hastily
rising and confronting him. 'Won't you give me back MY son, Sir,
who was transported for the same offence!'

'Was he deaf and dumb, woman?' asked the gentleman sternly.

'Was he not, Sir?'

'You know he was not.'

'He was,' cried the woman. 'He was deaf, dumb, and blind, to all
that was good and right, from his cradle. Her boy may have learnt
no better! where did mine learn better? where could he? who was
there to teach him better, or where was it to be learnt?'

'Peace, woman,' said the gentleman, 'your boy was in possession of
all his senses.'

'He was,' cried the mother; 'and he was the more easy to be led
astray because he had them. If you save this boy because he may
not know right from wrong, why did you not save mine who was never
taught the difference? You gentlemen have as good a right to
punish her boy, that God has kept in ignorance of sound and speech,
as you have to punish mine, that you kept in ignorance yourselves.
How many of the girls and boys--ah, men and women too--that are
brought before you and you don't pity, are deaf and dumb in their
minds, and go wrong in that state, and are punished in that state,
body and soul, while you gentlemen are quarrelling among yourselves
whether they ought to learn this or that? --Be a just man, Sir,
and give me back my son.'

'You are desperate,' said the gentleman, taking out his snuff-box,
'and I am sorry for you.'

'I AM desperate,' returned the woman, 'and you have made me so.
Give me back my son, to work for these helpless children. Be a
just man, Sir, and, as you have had mercy upon this boy, give me
back my son!'

The child had seen and heard enough to know that this was not a
place at which to ask for alms. She led the old man softly from
the door, and they pursued their journey.

With less and less of hope or strength, as they went on, but with
an undiminished resolution not to betray by any word or sigh her
sinking state, so long as she had energy to move, the child,
throughout the remainder of that hard day, compelled herself to
proceed: not even stopping to rest as frequently as usual, to
compensate in some measure for the tardy pace at which she was
obliged to walk. Evening was drawing on, but had not closed in,
when--still travelling among the same dismal objects--they came to
a busy town.

Faint and spiritless as they were, its streets were insupportable.
After humbly asking for relief at some few doors, and being
repulsed, they agreed to make their way out of it as speedily as
they could, and try if the inmates of any lone house beyond, would
have more pity on their exhausted state.

They were dragging themselves along through the last street, and
the child felt that the time was close at hand when her enfeebled
powers would bear no more. There appeared before them, at this
juncture, going in the same direction as themselves, a traveller on
foot, who, with a portmanteau strapped to his back, leaned upon a
stout stick as he walked, and read from a book which he held in his
other hand.

It was not an easy matter to come up with him, and beseech his aid,
for he walked fast, and was a little distance in advance. At
length, he stopped, to look more attentively at some passage in his
book. Animated with a ray of hope, the child shot on before her
grandfather, and, going close to the stranger without rousing him
by the sound of her footsteps, began, in a few faint words, to
implore his help.

He turned his head. The child clapped her hands together, uttered
a wild shriek, and fell senseless at his feet.