‘I beg your pardon, ma’am, that ain’t no use; you ain’t got a horder, and it is as much as the porter’s place is worth to take anyone in without a horder.’
‘Then, what’s to be done with the poor boy?’
‘Ah, that’s the question,’ said the policeman, and he was right there. What’s to be done with our boys, rich or poor, good or bad, is a question some of us find increasingly hard to answer.
‘Then you can’t help me?’ said the actress.
‘Oh no, mum; we’ve plenty of such boys about.’
‘What’s to be done?’ said the lady she still looked at the poor boy. ‘Is it right to leave him thus?’ There was a tear in her voice as she spoke. All seemed so hard and unmoved, and the urgency was so pressing.
‘Dear madam,’ said the Mayor, who felt himself bound to say something, ‘the case is a hard one, but there’s no help for it. We can’t encourage such hoys as that. If we did, the town would be overrun with them. They are always begging.’
‘I wasn’t beggin’,’ said the boy, who now began to feel interested in the discussion. ‘I don’t want to go beggin’. I want a job.’
‘Ah, all the boys say that,’ said the Vicar, ‘the young rascals! If I had my way, I would give them a good whipping all round.’
‘Yes, and if we listened to all these stories the bench would have to sit all day long,’ said the Town Clerk, giving the boy a copper and ordering him off.
‘Off,’ said the actress – ‘where to?’
‘To Parker’s Buildings,’ said the Mayor. ‘That’s where these young rascals live. There is not a worse place in the whole town.’
‘Nor in the country nayther,’ said the policeman. ‘It would be a good job if the whole place were burnt down.’ The policeman always backed up the opinions of his worship the Mayor, as, indeed, he did those of all his betters. It was a habit that paid.
‘Well, the poor boy looks really ill; can’t you get him into the hospital?’ asked the actress.
‘I am sorry,’ said the Vicar, ‘but the committee of the hospital don’t meet for a week, and we can do nothing in such a case. If it had been winter we could have sent him to the soup-kitchen; but in the summer-time we are not prepared for such an irregularity.’ At length a happy thought struck him. Turning to the boy, he said, ‘What’s your name, my little man?’
‘Little Beast.’
‘Little Beast! Good heavens! what a name for a child. Who gave you that name?’
‘Mother. Mother allus calls me Little Beast, ’cause I won’t let her hit brother.’
The boy spoke honestly, that was clear. There was some good in him; the devil had not yet got him in his grip. Was he to be saved? The Mayor, and the Town Clerk and the Vicar seemed inclined to answer that question in the negative. A passage of Scripture – a word of the Master’s – came into the actress’s recollection as she looked at the little waif, ragged, half starved, filthy, in their midst. Said the Master, when His disciples asked Him which should be greatest in the kingdom of heaven, taking a little child and setting him in their midst, ‘Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever, therefore, shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and whoso receiveth one such child in My name receiveth Me. Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones, for I say unto you that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of My Father which is in heaven.’
‘Save the child,’ whispered the woman’s heart of the actress; ‘to-morrow it will be too late, and human law, with all its terrors, will track him, and he will be a rebel against man and God.’
‘Excuse me,’ said the Mayor, ‘but the train has been signalled, and will be in in a few minutes.’
‘I am ready,’ said the lady, ‘but the child goes with me.’ The child seemed to nestle under her wing, as it were. He was frightened by the others.
‘You don’t mean that!’ ‘It is impossible!’ ‘What an idea!’ were the respective utterances of Mayor, Vicar, and Town Clerk, who simultaneously stepped back a step or two, as if doubting whether the lady were in full possession of her senses and were desirous to settle that question by a fuller survey a little further off. It is astonishing how great a sensation is produced in this Christian country when anyone tries to reduce Christianity to practice, to get it to talk modern English, to bring it down from the clouds, and to make it walk the streets. Just then the station bell rang.
‘Now, my little man, won’t you come along with me?’ said the actress to the lad. The little fellow opened his eyes – they were fine ones, and testified to the beating of a clear, undefiled, honest heart within – and joyfully assented.
‘Please get him a glass of milk, and some sandwiches and biscuits; put them on a tray,’ said the actress to the stolidly staring policeman, who was so overcome that, quite unconsciously, he found himself holding the ragged boy by the hand, and administering to him what little refreshment there was to take, and putting him in a first-class carriage, having first carefully covered him over with one of the actress’s shawl’s, that the shame of his nakedness might not appear, as if he were a young nobleman’s son.
‘They are rum critters, them actresses,’ said the policeman on recovering his dazed senses, as the train moved off, leaving the local dignitaries rather crestfallen, as they stood on the platform bidding adieux with their hats in their hands, and their uncovered, bald heads glistening in the summer sun.
‘They are indeed, Jenkins,’ said the Mayor, wiping his hot face with his pocket-handkerchief, evidently pleased that the actress had gone and relieved the town of one juvenile difficulty.
‘At any rate, to whom does this boy belong?’
‘Why, to Widow Brown, who is off on the tramp; but I don’t believe it is her boy, after all.’
‘Very likely not; but we are well rid of the lad and his mother, I think I know her.’
‘Of course you do. There has been scarcely a Monday all this summer but she has been brought up as drunk and disorderly. I believe she is perfectly incorrigible; and yet she was a tidy, decent sort of woman when she first came to live here,’ said the Town Clerk. ‘She took to drinking when her husband died, and she has been going from bad to worse ever since.’
Ah, when one is low, and wants to forget one’s wickedness, and poverty, and misery, there’s nothing like a drop of drink. It may be rather cowardly to take it, but we are not all heroes; and as long as the drink lasts, you are in a world of sunshine and good fellowship. There is a magic power in drink to make the old young, the sick whole, the poor rich. No wonder the homeless and destitute take to it. Till the people are better lodged and better fed, intemperance must be the curse of Great Britain.
CHAPTER III.
GOING UP TO TOWN
In these degenerate days a first-class carriage in an express may be considered as the perfection of travelling, the balloon at present being unmanageable, and the sea as wilful and variable as woman. Time was when we rattled cheerily over the land on the top of a coach-and-four, but that was when men drank brandy-and-water, and wore many-caped coats, and were far more horsey than this smug and mild black-coated generation. Rarely now does the scarlet-clad guard tootle the much-resounding horn as the four corn-fed steeds trot steadily up hill and down, wakening the far-away echoes, while open-mouthed rustics stop and stare, and rosy-cheeked landladies smile wickedly at the jovial outsiders, who, not having the fear of their own lawful-wedded wives before their eyes, seem to regard their day’s journey as a frolic, as, indeed, it was in the good old coaching days, when the driver, an inborn aristocrat, was hail-fellow-well-met with all on his bit of road, and when every passenger had his story to tell or his joke, which, if not brilliant, at any rate helped to pass the time away, and to keep everyone in