‘Oh! I don’t care,’ I answered, listlessly.
‘Don’t care about seeing your father and mother again?’
‘I haven’t got a mother,’ I rejoined, quickly.
‘Is your mother dead, like mine? Oh, I am sorry! But your father loves you for them both, perhaps.’
‘No, he doesn’t! He doesn’t care a bit about me. He never asks to see me when I do go home; and he frightens me. I wish I might stay all the holidays with Mrs Murray, like you do.’
‘That is bad,’ quoth the lame child. ‘Well, maybe they’ll forget to send for you, Charlie, and then we’ll have fine times together, you and I.’
I had not the same hope, however. I knew that if by any oversight my father forgot to send the servant for me, that my schoolmaster would take the initiative and despatch me home himself.
How I dreaded it. The gloomy, half-closed house, the garden paths, green with damp and thick with weeds, the servants acting entirely upon their own authority, and the master querulous, impatient, and unjust, either shut up in his own room brooding over the past and present, or freely distributing oaths, complaints, and sometimes even blows, amongst the unfortunate inmates of his household. As for myself, I seldom came within the range of his arm without being terrified away, and it had been a great relief to me when I returned home for the previous Christmas holidays to find that he was absent, and the term of my penance passed peacefully, if nothing else. But now he was at home again, so my master informed me, my father had never dreamt of writing to me, and I looked forward to the coming visit with dread. A strange, unnatural state of things for a child of eight years old, who had never known a mother’s love nor care, had never even heard her name mentioned by any one with whom he was connected.
‘What was your mother like?’ continued Jemmy, after a few minutes’ pause, during which we two unfortunates had been ruminating upon our lot. ‘Had she light-coloured hair, like Mrs Murray, or dark, like the cook?’