‘Will you tell me? What are they doing all staring at each other.’
‘It’s a trial, my poor dear little gentleman. They are trying a man for his life.’
‘No, no, not for his life: though it would have been for his life a little time ago,’ said the other.
Johnnie did not know what it meant to try a man for his life; but he accepted the description, as a child often does, without further inquiry, and stood and looked at it wondering. But it did not seem to him the extraordinary thing that Betty had said it was, and presently he began to pull at her skirts, and asked to go home.
That was a very dismal night for Johnnie. They got home, and his things were taken off, and he returned to his toys. To see him playing in his forlorn way, all alone, with his little serious face was too much for Betty. But he got very tired of her caresses and attempts at consolation. The night passed on, and bed-time came, but his mother never came home. He sat and listened for the steps coming along the street, and dozed and woke up again, and felt as if all the world was empty round him, and only he and Betty left. He began to cry, but he felt as if he dared not make a noise, and sat with his little head in his hands trying to keep quiet, though now and then breaking out into sobs. ‘Oh, where was mamma? Why didn’t she come? Where was Susie? What had happened that they did not come home?’ And then the picture-books in the shop windows, and the great place full of people, who sat all silent under the light in those rows and rows of seats, and the little sugar-plums upon the bread and butter, all circled confusedly in his mind. And in the end he fell asleep, and was carried up to bed by Betty, and undressed without knowing it; but yet even in his sleep seemed to know and feel that there was nobody in the house but Betty and him. Nobody but the servant and the little boy! What a strange, miserable thing in a house that it should be left alone with only the servant and the little boy.
Johnnie woke up suddenly out of his confused and broken sleep. His little bed was in the dressing-room that opened into his mother’s bedroom. He woke to hear a sound of crying and miserable voices, low and interrupted with tears. There was a light in his mother’s room, and he could see Susie moving about, taking off her outdoor dress, while mamma lay back in the easy-chair before the little fire, as if she had been taken ill. She lay there as if she could not move, till a sudden quick pang sprang up in the little boy’s heart, and a coldness as of ice crept over him, even in the warmth of his little bed. Could mamma, too, be going to die? Mamma too? He did not know at all what he meant, and yet he knew that something had happened which was more miserable than anything that ever had been before. He lay still, and gazed out from between the bars of his crib, and listened to the crying. That grown-up people should cry was dreadful to him. He wanted to get up and creep to his mother’s knee, and so at least belong to them, rather than be left out in this dreadful solitude: but he knew that if he did this they would immediately stop their talking, and tell each other that nothing must be said before the boy. So all that he could do was to lie still, and cry too, the silent tears dropping upon his little pillow, the sound of the low voices, too low to be intelligible, but not to betray the wretchedness that was in them, coming to him like sounds in a dream. Oh what a different scene from the other awakings, when, half peevish, half frightened out of his sleep, he had opened his eyes to the dazzling of the candle, and seen papa’s laughing face bending over his; and then to be carried off, with his little bare feet in papa’s hands to keep them warm, even though there might be a lurching like the steamboat, which frightened yet made him laugh. And then the cakes, the oranges, the sip of papa’s wine, and, best of all, papa’s laugh, and his merry face. That little vision out of the past got confused by-and-by with the crying and the low talk in the next room, and then with the people sitting in the court, and the sugar-plums on the bread and butter, till Johnnie, in a great bewilderment of images, not knowing which was which, at last out of that chaos once more fell asleep.
CHAPTER II.
WHEN HE WAS A CHILD (CONTINUED).
It was not very long after this, but how long his memory could not clearly make out, when Johnnie was sent to the country to his grandfather and grandmother, who lived in a village some twenty miles away. He did not recollect being told about it, or at all prepared for his journey, but only that one morning the old people came in, driving in an old-fashioned little light cart, called a shandry in the neighbourhood, and took him away. They were old people who were ‘retired,’ living in the village in a nice little house of their own, without any particular occupation. The old lady kept poultry, and the old gentleman read the newspapers, and they were very comfortable and happy, with fresh country complexions, and kind country ways. Grandmamma wore a little brown front with little curls under her cap, which had been the fashion in her day. But her husband looked much handsomer in his own white hair. They were neither of them very like Johnnie’s mother, who was tall and quiet and very serious, while the old people were full of cheerfulness and jokes. But there were no jokes on the day when they came to carry off Johnnie. They came in, and kissed their daughter with scarcely a word, and then the old gentleman sat down in a chair by the fire, with a great many curves about his eyes, and wrinkles in his forehead—which had never been seen there before—while his wife dropped down upon the sofa and began to cry, saying,
‘Oh that we should have lived to see this day!’ rocking herself backwards and forwards in dreadful distress.
‘Don’t cry, grandmamma,’ said Johnnie, stealing to her side, and stroking with his hands to console her the skirts of her thick silk gown. Susie went to the other side, and put her arm round the old lady, and said the same thing.
‘Don’t cry, grandmamma!’ but Susie knew all about the trouble, whatever it was. She was not like her little brother, only unhappy and perplexed to see the grown-up people cry.
‘Run away, dear, and play,’ his mother said; and the poor little boy obeyed, very forlorn and miserable to be always sent away. But he only went to the back parlour, where his box of bricks was standing on the floor, and where he began to build a house, oh, so seriously, as if it were a matter of life and death. The folding-doors were half open, and he still could see grandmamma crying and the wrinkles on grandpapa’s face, and hear the murmur of the talk, very serious, and broken now and then with a sob. They were in great trouble—that Johnnie could easily make out: and by this time he was as sure, as if some one had told him all about it, that their trouble had something to do with his father—his merry laughing father, who spoilt him so—who was never now to be seen even in the middle of the night through half shut eyes. The conversation that went on was not much. Grandpapa for his part only sat and stared before him, and occasionally shook his head, and drew his brows together, as if it was somebody’s fault; while grandmamma cried and sometimes exclaimed,
‘Oh, how could he do it? Had he no thought of you or the children, or how dreadfully you would feel it?’
‘If he did not think of himself, mother, how should he think of me,’ said Johnnie’s mother, with a sort of stern smile. ‘He knew better than anyone what the penalty was.’
‘He was a fool, always a fool,’ said grandpapa, hastily.
‘Oh,’ said grandmamma, ‘when he was young, he was very dear! There never was anyone nicer than he was—instead of thinking harm of his mother-in-law, as so many foolish fellows do——’
‘Hush, mother! don’t speak so that the child can understand. I don’t want him to know.’
‘How can you keep it from him? It isn’t possible. Why, everybody knows, even the people at the turnpike. They looked at your father and me so pitifully as we came through.’
‘That for their pity!’ said grandpapa, with an angry snap of his fingers, and the colour mounted up to the very edge of his white hair. Johnnie, peeping timidly out between the legs of the table, thought his mother, too, was very angry with grandmamma. She was standing in the middle of the room, looking very tall and grand,