“Then don’t talk in that wrong manner,” says Mr. Bucket, mollified again. “Why do you do it?”
“It’s brought into my head, master,” returns the woman, her eyes filling with tears, “when I look down at the child lying so. If it was never to wake no more, you’d think me mad, I should take on so. I know that very well. I was with Jenny when she lost hers—warn’t I, Jenny?—and I know how she grieved. But look around you at this place. Look at them,” glancing at the sleepers on the ground. “Look at the boy you’re waiting for, who’s gone out to do me a good turn. Think of the children that your business lays with often and often, and that YOU see grow up!”
“Well, well,” says Mr. Bucket, “you train him respectable, and he’ll be a comfort to you, and look after you in your old age, you know.”
“I mean to try hard,” she answers, wiping her eyes. “But I have been a-thinking, being over-tired to-night and not well with the ague, of all the many things that’ll come in his way. My master will be against it, and he’ll be beat, and see me beat, and made to fear his home, and perhaps to stray wild. If I work for him ever so much, and ever so hard, there’s no one to help me; and if he should be turned bad ‘spite of all I could do, and the time should come when I should sit by him in his sleep, made hard and changed, an’t it likely I should think of him as he lies in my lap now and wish he had died as Jenny’s child died!”
“There, there!” says Jenny. “Liz, you’re tired and ill. Let me take him.”
In doing so, she displaces the mother’s dress, but quickly readjusts it over the wounded and bruised bosom where the baby has been lying.
“It’s my dead child,” says Jenny, walking up and down as she nurses, “that makes me love this child so dear, and it’s my dead child that makes her love it so dear too, as even to think of its being taken away from her now. While she thinks that, I think what fortune would I give to have my darling back. But we mean the same thing, if we knew how to say it, us two mothers does in our poor hearts!”
As Mr. Snagsby blows his nose and coughs his cough of sympathy, a step is heard without. Mr. Bucket throws his light into the doorway and says to Mr. Snagsby, “Now, what do you say to Toughy? Will HE do?”
“That’s Jo,” says Mr. Snagsby.
Jo stands amazed in the disk of light, like a ragged figure in a magic-lantern, trembling to think that he has offended against the law in not having moved on far enough. Mr. Snagsby, however, giving him the consolatory assurance, “It’s only a job you will be paid for, Jo,” he recovers; and on being taken outside by Mr. Bucket for a little private confabulation, tells his tale satisfactorily, though out of breath.