Chapter Eight.
Another migration—From the ruralities of Cut-throat Lane to the Groves of Academus—I am forced into good clothes and the paths of learning in spite of my teeth, though I use them spitefully.
Misfortunes never come single. I don’t know why they should. They are but scarecrow, lean-visaged, miserable associates, and so they arrive in a body to keep each other in countenance. I had been but a few weeks in our present miserable abode, and had fully recovered my health, though I think that I was a little crazed with the prints, and the subjects of them, over which I daily pored in the large Bible, when the greatest misfortune of all came upon the poor Brandons—and that was, to add to their other losses, the loss of my invaluable self.
The misery was unexpected—it was sudden—it was overwhelming. Brandon was toeing a chalked line on a heavy log of mahogany, unconscious of the mischief that was working at home. He afterwards told me, and I believe him, that he would have opposed the proceeding by force, if force had been requisite. A plain private or hired carriage drove up to the door, and, after ascertaining that the Brandons lived at the house, a business-like looking, elderly gentleman stepped out, paid every demand immediately, and ordered my best clothes on. When I was thus equipped, my nurse was told that she was perfectly welcome to the remainder of my effects, and that I must get into the carriage.
The good woman was thunderstruck. There was a scene. She raved, and I cried, and the four little Brandons, at least three of them, joined in the chorus of lamentation, because the naughty man was going to take brother Ralph away. I had been too well taught by old Ford, not to visit my indignation upon the shins and hands of the carrier away of captives, in well-applied kicks, and almost rabid bites. There was a great disturbance. The neighbours thought it very odd that the mother should allow her eldest son to be, carried off by force, by a stranger, before her eyes, in the middle of the day; but then it was suggested that “nothing could be well termed odd that concerned little Ralph Brandon, for hadn’t he been bit last year by a mad dog, and, when so and so had all died raving, he had never nothing at all happen to him.” When the stranger heard this story of the mad dog (which, by-the-by, was fact, and I have the scars to this day), he shook me off, pale with consternation, and was, no doubt, extremely happy to find that my little teeth had not penetrated the skin. I believe that he heartily repented him of his office. At length he lost all patience. “Woman,” said he, “send these people out of the room.” When they had departed, marvelling, he resumed: “I cannot lose my time in altercation; I am commissioned to tell you, that if you keep the boy in one sense, you’ll have to keep him in all. You may be sure that I would not trouble myself about such a little ill-bred wretch for a moment, if I did not act with authority, and by orders. Give up the child directly (I was now sobbing in her arms), take your last look at him, for you will never see him again. Come, hand the young gentleman into the carriage.”
“I won’t go,” I screamed out.
“We shall soon see that, Master Rattlin,” said he, dragging me along, resisting. I bawled out, “My name’s not Master Rattlin—you’re a liar—and when father comes from the pit he’ll wop you.”
This threat seemed to have an effect the very reverse of what I had intended. Perhaps he thought that he had already enough to contend with, without the addition of the brawny arm of the sawyer. I was forcibly lifted up, placed in the coach, and, as it drove rapidly away, I heard, amidst the rattling of the wheels, the cries of her whom I loved as a mother, exclaiming, “My Ralph—my dear Ralph!”
Behold me, then, “hot with the fray, and weeping from the fight,” confined in a locomotive prison with my sullen captor. I blubbered in one corner of the coach, and he surveyed me with stern indifference from the other. I had now fairly commenced my journey through life, but this beginning was anything but auspicious. At length, the carriage stopped at a place I have since ascertained to be near Hatton Garden, on Holborn Hill. We alighted, and walked into a house, between two motionless pages, excessively well dressed. At first, they startled me, but I soon discovered they were immense waxen dolls. It was a ready-made clothes warehouse into which we had entered. We went upstairs, and I was soon equipped with three excellent suits. My grief had now settled down into a sullen resentment, agreeably relieved, at due intervals, by breath-catching sobs. The violence of the storm had passed, but its gloom still remained. Seeing the little gladness that the possession of clothes, the finest I had yet had, communicated to me, my director could not avoid giving himself the pleasurable relief of saying, “Sulky little brute!” A trunk being sent for, and my wardrobe placed in it, we then drove to three or four other shops, not forgetting a hatter’s, and in a very short space of time I had a very tolerable fit-out. During all this time, not a word did my silent companion address to me.