Chapter XXV. A new quest
Though as comfortable as one could be who so sorely lacked food, Clare slept lightly. His baby was heavy on his mind, and he woke very early—woke at once to the anxious thought of a boy without food, money, or friends, and with a hungry baby. He woke, however, with a new train of reasoning in his mind. Babies could not work; babies always had their food given them; therefore babies who hadn’t food had a right to ask for it; babies couldn’t ask for it; therefore those who had the charge of them, and hadn’t food to give them, had a right to do the asking for them. He could not beg for himself as long as he was able to ask for work; but for baby it was his duty to beg, because she could not wait: she would not live till he found work. If he got work that very day, he would have to work the whole day before he got the money for it, and baby would be dead by that time! He crept out, so as not to awake the sleepers, and put on his clothes. They were not dry, but they would dry when the sun rose. He did not at all like leaving his baby with Tommy, but what was he to do? She might as well die of Tommy as of hunger! Perhaps it might be easier!
He thought over the nature of the boy, and what it would be best to say to him. He saw what many genial persons are slow to see, that kindness, in its natural shape, is to certain dispositions a great barrier in the way of learning either love or duty. With multitudes, nothing but undiluted fear or pain or shame can open the door for love to enter.
He searched the house for a medicine-bottle, such as he had seen plenty of at the parsonage, and found two. He chose the smaller, lest size should provoke disinclination. Then he woke Tommy, and said to him,
“Tommy, I’m going out to get baby’s breakfast.”
“Ain’t you going to give me any? Is the kid to have everything?”
“Tommy!” said Clare, with a steady look in his eyes that frightened him, “your turn will come next. You won’t die of want for a day or two yet. I’ll see to you as soon as I can. Only, remember, baby comes first! I’m going to leave her with you. You needn’t take her up. You’re not able to carry her. You would let her fall. But if, when I come home, I find anything has happened to her, I’ll put you in the water-butt—I WILL. And I’ll do it when the moon is in it.”
Tommy pulled a hideous face, and began to yell. Clare seized him by the throat.
“Make that noise again, you rascal, and I’ll choke you. If you’re good to baby while I’m away, I won’t eat a mouthful till you’ve had some; if you’re not good to her, you know what will happen! You’ve got the thing in your own hands!”
“She’ll go an’ do something I can’t help, an’ then you’ll go for to drown me!”
Again he began to howl, but Clare checked him as before. “If you wake her up, I’ll—” He had no words, and shook him for lack of any. “I see,” he resumed, “I shall have to lock you up in the coal-cellar till I come back! Here! come along!”
Tommy was quiet instantly, and fell to pleading. Clare lent a gracious ear, and yielding to Tommy’s protestations, left him with his treasure, and set out on his quest.
He got out through the kitchen, the rustiness of the fastenings of its door delaying him a little, and over the wall by the imprisoned door, taking care to lift as little as possible of his person above the coping as he crossed. He dared not go along the wall in the daylight, or get down in the smith’s yard; he dropped straight to the ground.
The country was level, and casting his eyes about, he saw, at no great distance, what looked like a farmstead. He knew cows were milked early, but did not know what time it was. Hoping anyhow to reach the place before the milk was put away in the pans, he set out to run straight across the fields. But he soon found he could not run, and had to drop into a walk.
When he got into the yard, he saw a young woman carrying a foaming pail of milk across to the dairy. He ran to her, and addressed her with his usual “Please, ma’am;” but the pail was heavy, and she kept on without answering him. Clare followed her, and looking into the dairy, saw an elderly woman.
“Please, ma’am, could you afford me as much fresh milk as would fill that bottle?” he said, showing it.
“Well, my man,” she answered pleasantly, “I think we might venture as far without fear of the workhouse! But what on earth made you bring such a thimble of a bottle as that?”
“I have no money to pay for it, you see, ma’am; and I thought a little bottle would be better to beg with; it wouldn’t be so hard on the farmer!”
“Bless the boy! Much good a drop of milk like that will do him!” said the woman, turning to the girl “Is it for your mother’s tea?”
“No, ma’am; it’s for a baby—a very little baby, ma’am!—I think it will hold enough,” he added, giving an anxious glance at the bottle in his hand, “to keep her alive till I get work.”
The woman looked, and her heart was drawn to the boy who stood gazing at her with his whole solemn, pathetic yet strong face—with his wide, clear eyes, his decided nose, large and straight, his rather long, fine mouth, trembling with eager anxiety, and his confident chin. She saw hunger in his grimy cheeks; she saw that his manners were those of a gentleman, and his clothes poor enough for any tramp, though evidently not made for a tramp. She would have concluded him escaped from cruel guardians, for she was a reader of The Family Herald; but that would not account for the baby! The baby did not tally!
“How old’s the baby?” she asked.
“I don’t know, ma’am; she only came to us last night.”
“Who brought her?”
She imagined the boy a simpleton, and expected one of such answers as inconvenient questions in natural history receive from nurses.
“I don’t know, ma’am. I took her out of the water-butt.”
The thing grew bewildering.
“Who put her there?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Whose baby is she, then?”
“Mine, I think, ma’am.”
“God bless the boy!” said the woman impatiently, and stared at him speechless.
Her daughter in the meantime had filled the phial with new milk. She handed it to him. He grasped it eagerly. Tears of joy came in his big hungry eyes.
“Oh, thank you, ma’am!” he said. “But, please, would you tell me,” he continued, looking from the one to the other, “how much water I must put in the milk to make it good for baby? I know it wants water, but I don’t know how much!”
“Oh, about half and half,” answered the elder woman. “‘Ain’t she got no mother?” she resumed.
“I think she must have a mother, but I daresay she’s a tramp,” answered Clare.
“I don’t want to give my good milk to a tramp!” she rejoined.
“I’m not a tramp, please, ma’am!—at least I wasn’t till the day before yesterday.”
The woman looked at him out of motherly eyes, and her heart swelled into her bosom.
“Wouldn’t you like some milk yourself?” she said.
“Oh, yes, ma’am!” answered Clare, with a deep sigh.
She filled a big cup from the warm milk in the pail, and held it out to him. He took it as a man on the scaffold might a reprieve from death, half lifted it to his lips, then let his hand sink. It trembled so, as he set the cup down on a shelf beside him, that he spilled a little. He looked ruefully at the drops on the brick floor.
“Please, ma’am, there’s Tommy!” he faltered.
His promise to Tommy had sprung upon him like a fiery flying serpent.
“Tommy! I thought you said the baby was a girl?”
“Yes, the baby’s a girl; but there’s Tommy as well! He’s another of us.”
“Your brother, of course!”
“No, ma’am; I’m afraid he’s a tramp. But there he is, you see, and I must share with him!”
It grew more and more inexplicable!
A gruff, loud voice came from the yard. It was the farmer’s. He was a bitter-tempered man, and his dislike of tramps was almost hatred. His wife and daughter knew that if he saw the boy he would be worse than rude to him.
“There’s the master!” cried the mother. “Drink, and make haste out of his way.”
“If it’s stealing,—” said Clare.
“Stealing! It’s no stealing! The dairy’s mine! I can give my milk where I please!”
“Well, ma’am, if the milk’s mine because you gave it me, it’s not begging to ask you to give me a piece of bread for it! I could take a share of that to Tommy!”
“Run, Chris,” cried the mother, hurriedly; “take the innocent with you—round outside the yard. Give him a hunch of bread, and let him go. For God’s sake don’t let your father see him! Run, my boy, run! There’s no time to drink the milk now!”
She poured it back into the pail, and set the cup out of the way.
There was a little passage and another door, by which they left as the farmer entered. The kick he would have given Clare with his heavy boot would, in its consequences, have reached the baby too. The girl ran with him to the back of the house.
“Wait a moment at that window,” she said.
Now whether it was loving-kindness all, or that she dared not take the time to divide it, I cannot tell, but she handed Clare a whole loaf, and that a good big one, of home-made bread, and disappeared before he could thank her, telling him to run for his life.
He was able now. With the farmer behind, and the hungry ones before him, he must run; and with the phial in his pocket and the loaf in his hands, he could run. Happily the farmer did not catch sight of him. His wife took care he should not. I believe, indeed, she got up a brand-new quarrel with him on the spur of the moment, that he might not have a chance.
Chapter XXVI. A new entrance
Clare sped jubilant. But soon came a check to his jubilation: it was one thing to drop from the wall, and quite another to climb to the top of it without the help of the door! The same moment he heard the clink of the smith’s hammer on his anvil, and to go by his yard in daylight would be to risk too much! For what would become of them if their retreat was discovered! He stood at the foot of the brick precipice, and stared up with helpless eyes and failing strength. Baby was inside, hungry, and with no better nurse than ill conditioned Tommy; her milk was in his pocket, Tommy’s bread in his hand, the insurmountable wall between him and them! He had the daylight now, however, and there was hardly any one about: perhaps he could find another entrance! Round the outside of the wall, therefore, like the Midianite in the rather comical hymn, did Clare prowl and prowl. But the wall rose straight and much too smooth wherever he looked. Searching its face he went all along the bottom of the garden, and then up the narrow lane between it and the garden of the next house, with increasing fear that there was no way but by the smith’s yard, and no choice but risk it.
A dozen yards or so, however, from the end of the lane, where it took a sharp turn before entering the street, he spied an opening in the wall—the same from which, the night before, Tommy had returned with such a frightened face. Clare went through, and found a narrow passage running to the left for a short distance between two walls. At the end, half on one side, half on the other of the second wall, lay the well that had terrified Tommy. The wall crossed it with a low arch. On the further side of the well was a third wall, with a space of about two feet and a half between it and the side of the round well. Through that wall there might be a door!—or, if not, there might be some way of getting over it! To cross the well would be awkward, but he must do it! He tied the loaf in his pocket-handkerchief—he was far past fastidiousness, and Tommy knew neither the word nor the thing—and knotted the ends of it round his neck. But his chief anxiety was not to break the bottle in his jacket-pocket. He got on his knees on the parapet. How deep and dark the water looked! For a moment he felt a fear of it something like Tommy’s. How was he to cross the awful gulf? It was not like a free jump; he was hemmed in before and behind, and overhead also. But the baby drew him over the well, as the name of Beatrice drew Dante through the fire. The baby was waiting for him, and it had to be done! He made a cat-leap through beneath the arch, reaching out with his hands and catching at the parapet beyond. He did catch it, just enough of it to hold on by, so that his body did not follow his legs into the water. Oh, how cold they found it after his run! He held on, strained and heaved up, made a great reach across the width of the parapet with one hand, laid hold of its outer edge, made good his grasp on it, and drew himself out of the water, and out of the well.
He was in a narrow space, closed in with walls much higher than his head, out of which he saw no way but that by which he had come in—across the fearful well, that seemed, so dark was its water, to go down and down for ever.
He felt in his pocket. If then he had found baby’s bottle broken, I doubt if Clare would ever have got out of the place, except by the door into the next world. What little strength he had was nearly gone, and I think it would then have gone quite. But the bottle was safe and his courage came back.
He examined his position, and presently saw that the narrowness of his threatened prison would make it no prison at all. He found that, by leaning his back against one wall, pushing his feet against the opposite wall, and making of the third wall a rack for his shoulder, he could worm himself slowly up. It was a task for a strong man, and Clare, though strong for his years, was not at that moment strong. But there was the baby waiting, and here was her milk! He fell to, and, with an agony of exertion, wriggled himself at last to the top—so exhausted that he all but fell over on the other side. He pulled himself together, and dropped at once into, the garden. Happier boy than Clare was not in all England then. Hunger, wet, incipient nakedness, for he had torn his clothes badly, were nowhere. Baby was within his reach, and the milk within baby’s!
He ran, dripping like a spaniel, to find her, and shot up the stair to the room that held his treasure. To his joy he found both Tommy and the baby fast asleep, Tommy tired out with the weary tramping of the day before, and the baby still under the influence of the opiate her mother had given her to make her drown quietly.
Chapter XXVII. The baby has her breakfast
He waked Tommy, and showed him the loaf. Tommy sprang from his lair and snatched at it.
“No, Tommy,” said Clare, drawing back, “I can’t trust you! You would eat it all; and if I died of hunger, what would become of baby, left alone with you? I don’t feel at all sure you wouldn’t eat her!”
Baby started a feeble whimper.
“You must wait now till I’ve attended to her,” continued Clare. “If you had got up quietly without waking her, I would have given you your share at once.”
As he spoke, he pulled a blanket off the bed to wrap her in, and made haste to take her up. A series of difficulties followed, which I will leave to the imagination of mothers and aunts, and nurses in general—the worst being that there was no warm water to wash her in, and cold water would be worse than dangerous after what she had gone through with it the night before. Clare comforted himself that washing was a thing non-essential to existence, however desirable for well-being.
Then came a more serious difficulty: the milk must be mixed with water, and water as cold as Clare’s legs would kill the drug-dazed shred of humanity! What was to be done? It would be equally dangerous to give her the strong milk of a cow undiluted. There was but one way: he must feed her as do the pigeons. First, however, he must have water! The well was almost inaccessible: to get to it and return would fearfully waste life-precious time! The rain-water in the little pool must serve the necessity! It was preferable to that in the butt!
Until many years after, it did not occur to Clare as strange that there should be even a drop of water in that water-butt. Whence was it fed? There was no roof near, from which the rain might run into it. If there had ever been a pipe to supply it, surely, in a house so long forsaken, its continuity must have given way One always sees such barrels empty, dry, and cracked: this one was apparently known to be full of water, for what woman in her senses, however inferior those senses, would throw her child into an empty butt! How did it happen to be full? Clare was almost driven to the conclusion that it had been filled for the evil purpose to which it was that night put. Against this was the fact that it would not have been easy to fill such a huge vessel by hand. I suggested that the blacksmith and his predecessors might have used it for the purposes of the forge, and kept it and its feeder in repair. Mr. Skymer endeavoured repeatedly to find out what had become of the blacksmith, but never with any approach to success; the probability being that he had left the world long before his natural time, by disease engendered or quarrel occasioned through his drunkenness.
Clare laid the baby down, and fetched water from the pool. Then he mixed the milk with what seemed the right quantity, again took the baby up, who had been whimpering a little now and then all the time, laid a blanket, several times folded, on his wet knees, and laid her in her blanket upon it. These preparations made, he took a small mouthful of the milk and water, and held it until it grew warm. It was the only way, I condescend to remind any such reader as may think it proper to be disgusted. When then he put his mouth to the baby’s, careful not to let too much go at once, they managed so between them that she successfully appropriated the mouthful. It was followed by a second, a third, and more, until, to Clare’s delight, the child seemed satisfied, leaving some of the precious fluid for another meal. He put her in the bed again, and covered her up warm. All the time, Tommy had been watching the loaf with the eyes of a wild beast.
“Now, Tommy,” said Clare, “how much of this loaf do you think you ought to have?”
“Half, of course!” answered Tommy boldly, with perfect conviction of his fairness, and pride in the same.
“Are you as big as I am?”
Tommy held his peace.
“You ain’t half as big!” said Clare.
“I’m a bloomin’ lot hungrier!” growled Tommy.
“You had eggs last night, and I had none!”
“That wurn’t my fault!”
“What did you do to get this bread?”
“I staid at home with baby.”
“That’s true,” answered Clare. “But,” he went on, “suppose a horse and a pony had got to divide their food between them, would the pony have a right to half? Wouldn’t the horse, being bigger, want more to keep him alive than the pony?”
“Don’t know,” said Tommy.
“But you shall have the half,” continued Clare; “only I hope, after this, when you get anything given to you, you’ll divide it with me. I try to be fair, and I want you to be fair.”
Tommy made no reply. He did not trouble himself about fair play; he wanted all he could get—like most people; though, thank God, I know a few far more anxious to give than to receive fair play. Such men, be they noblemen or tradesmen, I worship.
Clare carefully divided the loaf, and after due deliberation, handed Tommy that which seemed the bigger half. Without a word of acknowledgment, Tommy fell upon it like a terrier. He would love Clare in a little while when he had something more to give—but stomach before heart with Tommy! His sort is well represented in every rank. There are not many who can at the same time both love and be hungry.
Chapter XXVIII. Treachery
“Now, Tommy,” said Clare, having eaten his half loaf, “I’m going out to look for work, and you must take care of baby. You’re not to feed her—you would only choke her, and waste the good milk.”
“I want to go out too,” said Tommy.
“To see what you can pick up, I suppose?”
“That’s my business.”
“I fancy it mine while you are with me. If you don’t take care of baby and be good to her, I’ll put you in the water-butt I took her out of—as sure as you ain’t in it now!”
“That you shan’t!” cried Tommy; “I’ll bite first!”
“I’ll tie your hands and feet, and put a stick in your mouth,” said Clare. “So you’d better mind.”
“I want to go with you!” whimpered Tommy.
“You can’t. You’re to stop and look after baby. I won’t be away longer than I can help; you may be sure of that.”
With repeated injunctions to him not to leave the room, Clare went.
Before going quite, however, he must arrange for returning. To swarm up between the two walls as he had done before, would be to bid good-bye to his jacket at least, and he knew how appearances were already against him. Spying about for whatever might serve his purpose, he caught sight of an old garden-roller, and was making for it, when Tommy, never doubting he was gone, came whistling round the corner of the house with his hands in his pocket-holes, and an impudent air of independence. Clare away, he was a lord in his own eyes! He could kill the baby when he pleased! Plainly his mood was, “He thinks I’m going to do as he tells me! Not if I knows it!” Clare saw him before he saw Clare, and rushed at him with a roar.
“You thought I was gone!” he cried. “I told you not to leave the room! Come along to the water-butt!”
Tommy shivered when he heard him, and gave a shriek when he saw him coming. He shook till his teeth chattered. But terror not always paralyzes instinct in the wild animal. As Clare came running, he took one step toward him, and dropped on the ground at his feet. Clare shot away over his head, struck his own against a tree, and lay for a minute stunned. Tommy’s success was greater than he had hoped. He scudded into the house, and closed and bolted the door to the kitchen.
When Clare came to himself, he found he had a cut on his head. It would never do to go asking for work with a bloody face! The little pool served at once for basin and mirror, and while he washed he thought.
He had no inclination to punish Tommy for the trick he had played him; he had but done after his kind! It would serve a good end too: Tommy would imagine him lurking about to have his revenge, and would not venture his nose out. He discovered afterward that the little wretch had made fast the cellar-door, so that, if he had entered that way, he would have been caught in a trap, and unable to go or return.
He got the iron roller to the foot of the wall, where he had come over the night before, and where now first he perceived there had once been a door; managed, with its broken handle for a lever, to set it up on end, filled it with earth, and heaped a mound of earth about it to steady it, placed a few broken tiles and sherds of chimney-pots upon it, and from this rickety perch found he could reach the top easily.
The next thing was to arrange for getting up from the other side. For this he threw over earth and stones and whatever rubbish came to his hand, the sole quality required in his material being, that it should serve to lift him any fraction of an inch higher. The space was so narrow that his mound did not require to be sustained by the width of its base except in one direction; everywhere else the walls kept in the heap, and he made good speed. At length he descended by it, sure of being able to get up again.
He had been gone an hour before Tommy dared again leave the room where the baby was. He had planned what to do if Clare got into it: he would threaten, if he came a step nearer, to kill the baby! But if he had him in the coal-cellar, he would make his own conditions! A tramp would not keep a promise, but Clare would! and until he promised not to touch him, he should not come out—not if he died of hunger!
At length he could bear imprisonment no longer. He opened the room-door with the caution of one who thought a tiger might be lying against it. He saw no one, and crept out with half steps. By slow degrees, interrupted by many an inroad of terror and many a swift retreat, he got down the stair and out into the garden; whence, after closest search, he was at length satisfied his enemy had departed. For a time he was his own master! To one like Tommy—and such are not rare—it is a fine thing to be his own master. But the same person who is the master is the servant—and what a master to serve! Tommy, however, was quite satisfied with both master and servant, for both were himself. What was he to do? Go after something to eat, of course! He would be back long before Clare! He had gone to look for work—and who would give him work? If Tommy were as big as Clare, lots of people would give him work! But catch him working! Not if he knew it!—not Tommy!
Never till she was grown up, never, indeed, until she was a middle-aged woman and Mr. Skymer’s housekeeper, did the baby know in what danger she was that morning, alone with surnameless Tommy.
His first sense of relation to any creature too weak to protect itself, was the consciousness of power to torment that creature. But in this case the exercise of the power brought him into another relation, one with the water-butt! He went back to the room where the child lay in her blankets like a human chrysalis, and stood for a moment regarding her with a hatred far from mild: was he actually expected to give time and personal notice to that contemptible thing lying there unable to move? He wasn’t a girl or an old woman! He must go and get something to eat! that was what a man was for! Better twist her neck at once and go!
But he could not forget the water-butt—proximate mother of the child. Its idea came sliding into Tommy’s range, grew and grew upon Tommy, came nearer and nearer, until the baby was nowhere, and nothing in the world but the water-butt. His consciousness was possessed with it. It was preparing to swallow him in its loathsome deep! All at once it jumped back from him, and stood motionless by the side of the wall. Now was his chance! Now he must mizzle! Not a moment longer would he stop in the same place with the horrible thing!
But the baby! Clare would bring him back and put him in the butt! No, he wouldn’t! What harm would come to the brat? She was not able to roll herself off the bed! She could do nothing but go to sleep again! Out he must and would go! He wanted something to eat! He would be in again long before Clare could get back!
He left the room and the house, ran down the garden, scrambled up the door, got on the top of the wall, and dropped into the waste land behind it—nor once thought that the only way back was by the very jaws of the water-butt.