OPENS TO THE INWARD EYE THE CHASTENED JOY THAT GLOWS, WHEN THE LOST ONE IS FOUND, IN THE SOUL OF HIM "WHOSE GRIEF WAS CALM, WHOSE HOPE WAS DEAD."
A great additional strain had been put upon the spirit of Thomas Wanless, by the death of Adelaide Codling, and he was becoming too weak in body to hold to his purpose. There were nights when he returned to his lonely lodging wishing that he might die, so great was his physical and mental exhaustion. At other times he felt an impulse strong upon him to go home—to "abandon his search for a time," as his inward tempter whispered. But his will was strong, if strength of body or hope might be weak, and he only prayed the more and clung the more to his purpose, the more he felt tempted to turn aside. "How could I face her mother again," he would answer himself, "if I had not found her."
In this conflict of mind, though not of purpose, another month rolled by, and Thomas was threatened with want of work. Fewer men were required in the coal yards as summer came on, and already several had been discharged. It was a dreary prospect enough, but what made it more so to Thomas, were the unbidden flashes of almost gladness that rose in his breast now and then, as the voice of the tempter then said—"Thomas, you will be forced to go home." He felt himself a traitor, and inexpressibly wicked at such moments, and would clench his hand and mutter—"Not yet anyhow, not yet," as he strode mechanically through the streets.
At last he found her. "When hope was calm, and grief was dead" almost, he lighted on his lost child unexpectedly, in a place where he would never have dreamed of looking for her, had it not been for the friendly advice of the police.
All over London there are coffee-houses, tobacco-shops, and confectioner-looking shops, whose real use is to be haunts of vice. Thomas had learned to know this, and his eye was always upon such as he wandered through the streets. Perchance he might see his Sally in one of them some night. He was crawling rather than walking along one of the dingy lanes behind Leicester Square one evening, about eleven o'clock, when, through the open door of a low eating-house, he heard the voice of a woman singing. His heart gave a leap within him. Surely that was Sally's voice. She had been a great singer in her girlhood, and the song he heard the notes of had once been a great favourite with her. What was it, think you? None other than that sweet sentimental ditty, "Be kind to the loved ones at home." Strange melody to be heard in such a place.
The leap of hope in Thomas's heart was followed by a thrill of anguish as he drew near to listen, more assured each moment that here, indeed, he had found his daughter. And was she thinking of home then—here, at the gate of hell. He would go and see. No one was in the outer shop, and the door of the back room stood ajar, so that Thomas walked straight through unchallenged. Pushing open the half-closed inner door, he paused in amazement at the scene disclosed to him. There might have been a score of people in that low-roofed, dingy, smoke-filled room—men and women seated at small tables, and on one or two dilapidated benches against the wall, some were busy eating, all had drink before them—ale, spirits, and even wine—stuff labelled "champagne." Through the haze of tobacco smoke, he saw several of the women with cigarettes in their mouths. All had a reckless, more or less debauched air, and the women in particular struck Thomas—a transitory flash though his glance was—as wearing a look of defiance towards all that the world deemed propriety. Men had women on their knees, or sat on the knees of women, and none seemed to heed the song. One poor outcast woman lay huddled up on the floor by the fire, too drunk to sit, but not too drunk to blaspheme. No one heeded her either.
All these things Thomas saw in the first moment of vision, but he hardly noted them then. His thoughts and his eyes were for his lost child alone. The song did not stop at his entrance, for the singer's face was not towards the door. So the voice guided his eye and—yes, it was she. There she sat in the middle of the room, nearer the fire than a youthful debauchee who sat by her with his arm round her waist. Thomas gazed a moment, and then his whole soul went out in a cry—
"Sally, Sally, oh my pet, my child, I've found you at last," and he advanced towards her, holding out his hands.
The song died instantly, but in its place rose a Babel of tongues. Thomas's cry drew all eyes upon him. Involuntarily some of the less hardened assumed airs of propriety, but the majority of the men started in anger, and a few of the women began to laugh and jeer.
"Damn your impudence, what do you want here?" shouted a copper-faced little wretch, who had been lying half asleep in a woman's lap near the door.
"Get out of this," roared another, and as Thomas made no sign the abuse grew general. The wits of the party cracked jokes over the "heavy father doing the pathetic business," and so on, but amid the din the peasant got close to the table, where his child sat. The instant his call reached her ears, Sally turned a terror-struck gaze upon him, and then buried her face in her hands. He could see she wept, for the sobs shook her, but to his further entreaty to come away she made no response, and he was trying to pull the table aside so as to reach her, when he was roughly seized by the brothel keeper, who had rushed up from the kitchen to see what the noise was about. With an oath he pulled Thomas back.
"What the devil do you want here?" he screeched. "Clear out, or d—n you, I'll give you in custody." The peasant's garb and appearance had enabled the experienced scoundrel to guess at once what was up.
Thomas turned sharp on his assailant, who was a fat, flabby-looking wretch, whose face indicated a vicious career in every line and pimple. At the moment it was lit up by an expression of elfish rage. But when in his turn the peasant seized him with a grip of iron and flung him away as if he had been a street cur barking at his heels, the man's face grew nearly pale with an expression of mingled wrath and fear. The fear kept him near the door, where he stood yelling for help, calling on "Jim" to come and turn this intruder out, volleying oaths and blasphemies, and finally beseeching the intruder not to ruin him, but taking good care all the while not to summon the police.
"Jim" came at last—the "waiter" or bully of the place. He was of stronger build than his master, and at once grabbed Thomas by the collar, purposing to turn him out. But Thomas was endowed with heroic strength in that hour, and three such men would not have driven him from the place. Wrenching himself round, he took his new assailant by the throat, and dashed him back against his master with such force that they both rolled over in the narrow doorway. This feat tickled the company immensely, and they fell to clattering with pewter pots and glasses, and to shouting in derision as encouragement.
Probably Thomas in the end might have been badly beaten by the fiends among whom he had fallen, but from that his daughter saved him. Roused, perhaps, at the sight of the unholy hands laid upon her father, and sickened by the foul jibes of men and women around her, she sprang to her feet, and, pushing round the end of the table where she sat, rushed between the combatants, and flung herself on her father's bosom, in a passion of weeping.
"Do not get yourself hurt for me," she sobbed, "go away and leave me. I'm not worth caring for any more."
Thomas answered by clasping her closer to his bosom, and then putting his arm in hers, he led her from the house, none daring to say him nay. Oaths, shrieks of hysterical laughter, and obscenities followed them as they went, but the look on the peasant's face, and the remembrance of his strength of arm, were enough to protect his daughter and him from further ill-usage.
"Thanks be to God I've found ye, my lass; found ye, never to let ye out o' my sight again in this world," Thomas murmured when he found himself alone in the street with his long-lost one, and there welled up in him a holy joy which was unutterable.
His daughter hung her head, and answered not, but she suffered him to lead her to his lodging. A 'bus took them to the head of Portland Road, and thence they walked. It was past midnight before they got home, and all the house was silent; but Thomas gave his daughter his bedroom, and groped his way to the parlour, where he hoped to get a sleep in an easy chair—first prudently turning the key in Sarah's door, to give her no room for untimely repentance.
There was no sleep for his eyelids that night. The cold alone might have kept him awake in any case; but he was too excited to feel it as other than a stimulus to his thoughts. Past and future rolled before him—his daughter lost, joy at her discovery, pain at the life she had led. The grey dawn found him fevered with his thoughts, shivering in body, burning at the heart. Nevertheless, he had resolved to go home that day by the early train; and with that view he roused the landlady to beg an early breakfast for himself and his child. "I have found my lass," was all he ventured to explain, and the woman answered she was glad to hear it. In his eagerness to go home he forgot to tell the coal agent for whom he worked, and forgot also to draw four days' wages due to him—did not remember till the day after he and his daughter reached Ashbrook.
When Sarah, in answer to her father's summons, came down to breakfast in the front kitchen, it was easy to see that she also had slept little. Her eyes were swollen and red, and she could not eat anything. A cup of hot tea she swallowed, and that was all. Her father spoke to her in the old familiar Warwickshire dialect, and urged her to "eat summat, as she had a long day's journey afoore her," but Sally could not, and to all he spoke answered only in monosyllables. Not until he began to talk directly of going "home" did she wake to anything like animation. The very sound of the word made her weep, and her father led her away to his own room to reason with her.
"Oh, don't ask me to go back," she cried; "I cannot, I cannot; I'm fit only to die."
But her father soothed her, talked to her of her lonely mother watching for her coming, praying to see her child's face again before she died; and when that did not move her, he bade her think of her little babe she had left last year. "How could ye like her to grow up a-lookin' for a mother, Sally, lass, an' not findin' one?" That seemed to touch her more than all his assurances that no one would ever reproach her or cry shame upon her in her own father's house. Still she yielded not, but cried out that she was lost to them all, to every good in this world. "You might not blame me openly," she said, "but I would have the feelin' in my heart all the time that I was a shame an' disgrace to you, and that pity alone kept you from telling me so. No, no, no, I will not go back to Ashbrook."
"Look here, then, Sally," said her father at last, "if you wonnot go back, I'll stay by you. My mind's made up. I'll never lose sight of ye again, not while I'm alive; and if you wonnot go home wi' me, I must bide wi' you. There is no other way. It will kill your mother, and it will kill me, an' leave your child an outcast orphan, but ye are determined, an' it must e'en be so."
This staggered her, but still she yielded not, thinking, doubtless, that her father meant not what he said, till at last, in despair, he told her the story of Adelaide Codling. He spoke of her despairing looks, her rapid descent from wild gaiety to death, of her last farewell to this world, of her lonely grave, and her poor, old, broken-hearted father, and wound up by asking—"Will you face an end like that, Sally? Dare you do it, my child? When I saw her jump on the bridge I thought it was you," he added, with a look that went straight to his daughter's heart. The story had at first been listened to in dogged silence. Then the girl's tears began to flow, at first silently, at last with convulsive sobs. Her father held out his hand as he ceased speaking, and she, moved so deeply as to be lifted out of herself, laid both her hands in his, and said—
"Father, I'll do as ye wish. I'll go home wi' ye." He drew her down on her knees beside him, and prayed fervently for mercy and forgiveness for them both. "But my heart was too full to beg," he afterwards said to me. "I could only give God thanks for his infinite mercy in restoring my lost child."
They missed the morning train, and had to wait till the evening. In the interval Sarah had stripped off the tawdry ornaments she wore, and plucked a gaudy feather from her hat—pleasant incidents which her father noted. In the middle of the night almost they reached the old cottage in Ashbrook, and both were glad that the darkness hid them from every eye save God's.