True Tilda

E-text prepared by Lionel G. Sear—A Lifetime Enthusiast of the British
Inland Waterway System
Transcriber's note: This was one of the most enjoyable e-texts that I have prepared but also one of the most difficult. Many of the characters use the working class slang and dialect of 100 years ago and the author sticks to this consistently throughout the book. At times there seems to be as many apostrophes as characters! The printers have spaced these out and I hope that I have joined them up acceptably for our purpose.
By Q (A.T. QUILLER-COUCH)
That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or by water . . . all sick persons, and young children. —THE LITANY.
I love my love with a H'aitch, because he's 'andsome—
Tilda turned over on her right side—she could do so now without pain— and lifting herself a little, eyed the occupant of the next bed. The other six beds in the ward were empty.
I 'ate 'im, because—look 'ere, I don't believe you're listenin'?
The figure in the next bed stirred feebly; the figure of a woman, straight and gaunt under the hospital bedclothes. A tress of her hair had come uncoiled and looped itself across the pillow—reddish auburn hair, streaked with grey. She had been brought in, three nights ago, drenched, bedraggled, chattering in a high fever; a case of acute pneumonia. Her delirium had kept Tilda—who was preternaturally sharp for her nine years—awake and curious during the better part of two night-watches. Thereafter, for a day and a night and half a day, the patient had lain somnolent, breathing hard, at intervals feebly conscious. In one of these intervals her eyes had wandered and found the child; and since then had painfully sought her a dozen times, and found her again and rested on her.
Tilda, meeting that look, had done her best. The code of the show-folk, to whom she belonged, ruled that persons in trouble were to be helped. Moreover, the long whitewashed ward, with its seven oblong windows set high in the wall—the smell of it, the solitude, the silence—bored her inexpressibly. She had lain here three weeks with a hurt thigh-bone bruised, but luckily not splintered, by the kick of a performing pony.