CHAPTER XV
STEPHEN'S TALE
The repeated multiplication of twenty by forty sent me to sleep that night, and I woke with that arithmetical exercise still running in my head. A candle was alight in the room—ours was one of several houses in Wapping Wall without gas—and I peeped sleepily over the bed-clothes. Grandfather Nat was sitting with the cash-box on his knees, and the pocket-book open in his hand. He may just have been counting the notes over again, or not; but now he was staring moodily at the photograph that lay with them. Once or twice he turned his eyes aside, and then back again to the picture, as though searching his memory for some old face; then I thought he would toss it away as something valueless; but when his glance fell on the fireless grate he returned the card to its place and locked the box.
When the cash-box was put away in the little cupboard at his bed-head, he came across and looked down at me. At first I shut my eyes, but peeped. I found him looking on me with a troubled and thoughtful face; so that presently I sat up with a jump and asked him what he was thinking about.
"Fox's sleep, Stevy?" he said, with his hand under my chin. "Well, boy, I was thinking about you. I was thinking it's a good job your father's coming home soon, Stevy; though I don't like parting with you."
Parting with me? I did not understand. Wouldn't father be going away again soon?
"Well, I dunno, Stevy, I dunno. I've been thinking a lot just lately, that's a fact. This place is good enough for me, but it ain't a good place to bring up a boy like you in; not to make him the man I want you to be, Stevy. Somehow it didn't strike me that way at first, though it ought to ha' done. It ought to ha' done, seein' it struck strangers—an' not particular moral strangers at that."
He was thinking of Blind George and Mrs. Grimes. Though at the moment I wondered if his talk with Mr. Viney had set him doubting.
"No, Stevy," he resumed, "it ain't giving you a proper chance, keeping you here. You can't get lavender water out o' the bilge, an' this part's the bilge of all London. I want you to be a better man than me, Stevy."