Rachel Gray Part 23

"Don't think of it, my pet. Do you wish for anything?"

"Nothing, father, but that you would take down the shutters."

He tried to speak--he could not; only a few broken sounds gasped on his lips for utterance.

"Because you see," she continued with strange earnestness, "the customers will all be coming and wondering if they see the shop shut; and they will think me worse, and so--and so--"

She could not finish the sentence, but she tried to do so.

"And so you see, father." Again the words died away. Her father raised his head; he looked at her; he saw her growing very white. Again he bent, and softly whispered: "My darling, did you say your prayers this morning?"

An expression of surprise stole over the child's wan face.

"I had forgotten," she replied, faintly, "I shall say them now." She folded her thin hands, her lips moved. "Our father who art in heaven,"

she said, and she began a prayer that was never finished upon earth.

The dread moment had come. The angel of death stood in that hushed room; swiftly and gently he fulfilled his errand, then departed, leaving all in silence, breathless and deep.

He knew it was all over. He rose; he closed the eyes, composed the slender limbs, then he sat down by his dead child, a desolate man--a heart-broken father. How long he sat thus he knew not; a knock at the door at length roused him. Mechanically he rose and went and opened. He saw a man who at once stepped in and closed the door, and before the man spoke, Jones knew his errand.

"It's all right," he said, "I know, the landlord could scarcely help it; come in."

The bailiff was a bluff, hearty-looking man; he gave Jones a sound slap on the shoulder.

"You are a trump! that's what you are," he said, with a big oath.

Jones did not answer, but showed his guest into the back parlour.

"Halloo! what's that?" cried the bailiff, attempting to raise the bed-curtain.

"Don't," said Jones, in a husky voice.

Then the man saw what it was, and he exclaimed quite ruefully: "I am very sorry--I am very sorry."

"You can't help it," meekly said Jones, "you must do your duty."

"Why that's what I always say," cried the bailiff with a second oath, rather bigger than the first, "a man must do his duty, mustn't he?" and a third oath slipped out.

"Don't swear, pray don't!" said Jones.

"And if I do, may I be--" here the swearing bailiff paused aghast at what he was going to add. "I can't help myself like," he said, rather ruefully, "it's second natur, you see, second natur. But I'll try and not do it--I'll try."

And speaking quite softly, spite of his swearing propensities, he looked wistfully at Jones; but the childless father's face remained a blank.

"Make yourself at home," he said in a subdued voice. "I think you'll find all you want in that cupboard, at least 'tis all I have."

And he resumed his place by the dead.

"All I want, and all you have," muttered the bailiff with his head in the cupboard. "Then faith, my poor fellow, 'tain't much."

The day was chill and very dreary; the bailiff smoked his pipe by the low smouldering fire, and yawned over a dirty old newspaper. Two hours had pa.s.sed thus when Jones said to him: "You don't want for anything, do you?"

"Why no," musingly replied the bailiff, taking out his pipe, and looking up from his paper, "thank you, I can't say I want for anything, but what have you to say to a gla.s.s of grog, eh?"

He rather brightened himself at the idea.

"I'll send for anything you like," drearily replied Jones, and it was plain he had not understood as relating to himself the kindly meant proposal.

The bailiff rather stiffly said, he wanted nothing.

"Well then," resumed Jones, slipping off his shoes, "I'll leave you for awhile."

"Why, where are you going?" cried the other staring.

"There," said Jones, and raising the curtain, he crept in to his dead darling.

The curtain shrouded him in; he was alone--alone with his child and his grief. A little child he had cradled her in his arms; many a time had she slept in that fond embrace, to her both a protection and a caress. And now! He looked at the little pale face that had fallen asleep in prayer; he saw it lying on its pillow in death-like stillness; and if he repressed the groan that rose to his lips the deeper was his anguish.

Oh, pa.s.sion! eloquent pages have been wasted on thy woes; volumes have been written to tell mankind of thy delights and thy torments. To no other tale will youth bend its greedy ear, of no other feelings will man acknowledge the power to charm his spirit and his heart. And here was one who knew thee not in name or in truth, and yet who drank to the dregs, and to the last bitterness his cup of sorrow. Oh! miserable and unpoetic griefs of the prosaic poor. Where are ye, elements of power and pathos of our modern epic: the novel? A wretched shop that will not take, a sickly child that dies! Ay, and were the picture but drawn by an abler hand, know proud reader, if proud thou art, that thy very heart could bleed, that thy very soul would be wrung to read this page from a poor man's story.

And so he lay by his dead, swelling with a tearless agony, a nameless and twofold desolation. Gaze not on that grief--eye of man: thou art powerless to pity, for thou art powerless to understand.

"Only think!" said a neighbour to Mrs. Smith, "Mr. Jones's shutters have been closed the whole day. I can't think what the matter is."

"Can't you," replied Mrs. Smith laughing, "why, woman, the shop is shut."

Ay, the shop was shut. The shop which Richard Jones had opened with so much pride--the shop which he had ever linked with his child, closed on the day of her death, and never reopened. He did not care. His little ambition was wrecked; his little pride was broken; his little cruise of love had been poured forth upon the earth by G.o.d's own hand; it was empty and dry; arid sand and dust had drunk up its once sweet waters.

What a man without ambition, pride, and lore may be, he had become in the one day that bereaved him.

Pity not him, reader; his tale is told; pity him whose bitter story of hope and disappointment but begins as I write, and as you read. For mortal hand has not sounded the bitter depth of such woes. In them live the true tragic pa.s.sions that else seem to have pa.s.sed from the earth; pa.s.sions that could rouse the meekest to revenge and wrath, if daily dew from heaven fell not on poor parched hearts, as nightly it comes down from the skies above, on thirsting earth.

CHAPTER XXI.

A time may come when the London churchyard shall be remembered as a thing that has been and is no more; but now who knows it not? Who need describe the serried gravestones that mark the resting places in this sad field of death; who need tell how they stare at busy pa.s.sers by through their iron grating--how they look ghastly, like the guest of the Egyptian feast, dead in the midst of tumult and riotous life.

Dreary are they when the sun s.h.i.+nes on them, and their rank weeds, the sun which those beneath feel not, but more dreary by far when the drizzling rain pours down the dark church walls and filters into the sodden earth. And in such a place, and on such a day did they make the grave of Mary Jones.

Two mourners stood by: a woman and a man. When all was over, when earth had closed over the grave and its contents, the man sat down on a neighbouring gravestone, and looked at that red mound which held his all, with a dreary stolid gaze of misery and woe.

Rachel bent over him, and gently laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Mr. Jones, you must come!" she said.

He made no reply, he did not rise, and when she took his hand to lead him away, he yielded without resistance. She took him to her own house.

Kindly and tenderly she led him, like a little child, and a child he seemed to have become, helpless, inert--without will, without power.