Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished: A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure, - [sight word readers .txt] 📗

On the night of the day about which we have been writing, a woman, dressed in “unwomanly rags” crept out of the shadow of the houses near London Bridge. She was a thin, middle-aged woman, with a countenance from which sorrow, suffering, and sin had not been able to obliterate entirely the traces of beauty. She carried a bundle in her arms which was easily recognisable as a baby, from the careful and affectionate manner in which the woman’s thin, out-spread fingers grasped it.

Hurrying on to the bridge till she reached the middle of one of the arches, she paused and looked over. The Thames was black and gurgling, for it was intensely dark, and the tide half ebb at the time. The turbid waters chafed noisily on the stone piers as if the sins and sorrows of the great city had been somehow communicated to them.

But the distance from the parapet to the surface of the stream was great. It seemed awful in the woman’s eyes. She shuddered and drew back.

“Oh! for courage—only for one minute!” she murmured, clasping the bundle closer to her breast.

The action drew off a corner of the scanty rag which she called a shawl, and revealed a small and round, yet exceedingly thin face, the black eyes of which seemed to gaze in solemn wonder at the scene of darkness visible which was revealed. The woman stood between two lamps in the darkest place she could find, but enough of light reached her to glitter in the baby’s solemn eyes as they met her gaze, and it made a pitiful attempt to smile as it recognised its mother.

“God help me! I can’t,” muttered the woman with a shiver, as if an ice-block had touched her heart.

She drew the rag hastily over the baby’s head again, pressed it closer to her breast, retraced her steps, and dived into the shadows from which she had emerged.

This was one of the “lower orders” to whom Sir Richard Brandon had such an objection, whom he found it, he said, so difficult to deal with, (no wonder, for he never tried to deal with them at all, in any sense worthy of the name), and whom it was, he said, useless to assist, because all he could do in such a vast accumulation of poverty would be a mere drop in the bucket. Hence Sir Richard thought it best to keep the drop in his pocket where it could be felt and do good—at least to himself, rather than dissipate it in an almost empty bucket. The bucket, however, was not quite empty—thanks to a few thousands of people who differed from the knight upon that point.

The thin woman hastened through the streets as regardless of passers-by as they were of her, until she reached the neighbourhood of Commercial Street, Spitalfields.

Here she paused and looked anxiously round her. She had left the main thoroughfare, and the spot on which she stood was dimly lighted. Whatever she looked or waited for, did not, however, soon appear, for she stood under a lamp-post, muttering to herself, “I must git rid of it. Better to do so than see it starved to death before my eyes.”

Presently a foot-fall was heard, and a man drew near. The woman gazed intently into his face. It was not a pleasant face. There was a scowl on it. She drew back and let him pass. Then several women passed, but she took no notice of them. Then another man appeared. His face seemed a jolly one. The woman stepped forward at once and confronted him.

“Please, sir,” she began, but the man was too sharp for her.

“Come now—you’ve brought out that baby on purpose to humbug people with it. Don’t fancy you’ll throw dust in my eyes. I’m too old a cock for that. Don’t you know that you’re breaking the law by begging?”

“I’m not begging,” retorted the woman, almost fiercely.

“Oh! indeed. Why do you stop me, then?”

“I merely wished to ask if your name is Thompson.”

“Ah hem!” ejaculated the man with a broad grin, “well no, madam, my name is not Thompson.”

“Well, then,” rejoined the woman, still indignantly, “you may move on.”

She had used an expression all too familiar to herself, and the man, obeying the order with a bow and a mocking laugh, disappeared like those who had gone before him.

For some time no one else appeared save a policeman. When he approached, the woman went past him down the street, as if bent on some business, but when he was out of sight she returned to the old spot, which was near the entrance to an alley.

At last the woman’s patience was rewarded by the sight of a burly little elderly man, whose face of benignity was unmistakably genuine. Remembering the previous man’s reference to the baby, she covered it up carefully, and held it more like a bundle.

Stepping up to the newcomer at once, she put the same question as to name, and also asked if he lived in Russell Square.

“No, my good woman,” replied the burly little man, with a look of mingled surprise and pity, “my name is not Thompson. It is Twitter—Samuel Twitter, of Twitter, Slime and—, but,” he added, checking himself, under a sudden and rare impulse of prudence, “why do you ask my name and address?”

The woman gave an almost hysterical laugh at having been so successful in her somewhat clumsy scheme, and, without uttering another word, darted down the alley. She passed rapidly round by a back way to another point of the same street she had left—well ahead of the spot where she had stood so long and so patiently that night. Here she suddenly uncovered the baby’s face and kissed it passionately for a few moments. Then, wrapping it in the ragged shawl, with its little head out, she laid it on the middle of the footpath full in the light of a lamp, and retired to await the result.

When the woman rushed away, as above related, Mr Samuel Twitter stood for some minutes rooted to the spot, lost in amazement. He was found in that condition by the returning policeman.

“Constable,” said he, cocking his hat to one side the better to scratch his bald head, “there are strange people in this region.”

“Indeed there are, sir.”

“Yes, but I mean very strange people.”

“Well, sir, if you insist on it, I won’t deny that some of them are very strange.”

“Yes, well—good-night, constable,” said Mr Twitter, moving slowly forward in a mystified state of mind, while the guardian of the night continued his rounds, thinking to himself that he had just parted from one of the very strangest of the people.

Suddenly Samuel Twitter came to a full stop, for there lay the small baby gazing at him with its solemn eyes, apparently quite indifferent to the hardness and coldness of its bed of stone.

“Abandoned!” gasped the burly little man.

Whether Mr Twitter referred to the infant’s moral character, or to its being shamefully forsaken, we cannot now prove, but he instantly caught the bundle in his arms and gazed at it. Possibly his gaze may have been too intense, for the mild little creature opened a small mouth that bore no proportion whatever to the eyes, and attempted to cry, but the attempt was a failure. It had not strength to cry.

The burly little man’s soul was touched to the centre by the sight. He kissed the baby’s forehead, pressed it to his ample breast, and hurried away. If he had taken time to think he might have gone to a police-office, or a night refuge, or some such haven of rest for the weary, but when Twitter’s feelings were touched he became a man of impulse. He did not take time to think—except to the extent that, on reaching the main thoroughfare, he hailed a cab and was driven home.

The poor mother had followed him with the intention of seeing him home. Of course the cab put an end to that. She felt comparatively easy, however, knowing, as she did, that her child was in the keeping of “Twitter, Slime and —.” That was quite enough to enable her to trace Mr Twitter out. Comforting herself as well as she could with this reflection, she sat down in a dark corner on a cold door-step, and, covering her face with both hands, wept as though her heart would break.

Gradually her sobs subsided, and, rising, she hurried away, shivering with cold, for her thin cotton dress was a poor protection against the night chills, and her ragged shawl was—gone with the baby.

In a few minutes she reached a part of the Whitechapel district where some of the deepest poverty and wretchedness in London is to be found. Turning into a labyrinth of small streets and alleys, she paused in the neighbourhood of the court in which was her home—if such it could be called.

“Is it worth while going back to him?” she muttered. “He nearly killed baby, and it wouldn’t take much to make him kill me. And oh! he was so different—once!”

While she stood irresolute, the man of whom she spoke chanced to turn the corner, and ran against her, somewhat roughly.

“Hallo! is that you?” he demanded, in tones that told too clearly where he had been spending the night.

“Yes, Ned, it’s me. I was just thinking about going home.”

“Home, indeed—’stime to b’goin’ home. Where’v you bin? The babby ’ll ’v bin squallin’ pretty stiff by this time.”

“No fear of baby now,” returned the wife almost defiantly; “it’s gone.”

“Gone!” almost shouted the husband. “You haven’t murdered it, have you?”

“No, but I’ve put it in safe keeping, where you can’t get at it, and, now I know that, I don’t care what you do to me.”

“Ha! we’ll see about that. Come along.”

He seized the woman by the arm and hurried her towards their dwelling.

It was little better than a cellar, the door being reached by a descent of five or six much-worn steps. To the surprise of the couple the door, which was usually shut at that hour, stood partly open, and a bright light shone within.

“Wastin’ coal and candle,” growled the man with an angry oath, as he approached.

“Hetty didn’t use to be so extravagant,” remarked the woman, in some surprise.

As she spoke the door was flung wide open, and an overgrown but very handsome girl peered out.

“Oh! father, I thought it was your voice,” she said. “Mother, is that you? Come in, quick. Here’s Bobby brought home in a cab with a broken leg.”

On hearing this the man’s voice softened, and, entering the room, he went up to a heap of straw in one corner whereon our little friend Bobby Frog—the street-Arab—lay.

“Hallo! Bobby, wot’s wrong with ’ee? You ain’t used to come to grief,” said the father, laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and giving him a rough shake.

Things oftentimes “are not what