All But Lost: A Novel. Vol. 1 of 3

by G. A. Henty

There is a large chest of drawers, black with age, which serves also the purpose of a sideboard; many queer little mugs and ornaments of various sorts and colours stand upon it, and behind them is a large japanned waiter with gaudy flowers.

The irons and tins and candlesticks suspended from nails in the wall, or standing on the chimney-piece, shine till one can see one’s face in them; so do the dark arm-chair and table, and so does the old oak settle, in which Evan is sitting by the fire.

Before Evan commenced his story, Mr. Holl came in, and in the pleasure which his advent occasions all thought of Evan is for a time lost, and he gives up the post of honour by the fire to his father. John Holl is a dustman, and is a sober and industrious man. He has his peculiarities—as who has not?—but he is a good husband and father, as it is easy to see by the pleasure with which his return is greeted. He is a short, stoutly built man, with shoulders rounded from carrying heavy baskets up area stairs, and his legs are bowed and clumsy. John Holl earns good wages, for he has many a sixpence given him in the course of the day, and he has no need to spend money on beer, for he gets plenty of that in the discharge of his avocation.

Mother is hurrying about now, laying the cloth for supper, and taking the pot containing potatoes, which form the staple of that repast, off the fire, where they have been for some time boiling and bubbling.

Mrs. Holl goes out charing; she is a large woman with a hoarse voice, and her hand is clumsy and hard, from washing and scrubbing and polishing. She has a heavy tread, and is considered by the servants generally at the houses where she works to be a low person. Perhaps she is, but her heart is in the right place. She is a true, kind-hearted, tender woman; a very rough diamond truly, badly cut and displayed to the worst possible advantage, but a real stone of the first water for all that. She is a foolish person too, for as if her own children were not enough for her to love and work for, she has adopted and brought up an orphan, who had none else to care for it, and must have otherwise been taken to the workhouse. But, in spite of her folly, her neighbours like her for it, and in their little ways assist her, take the young ones between them when she goes out charing, and help her a bit with her washing.

Mrs. Holl can neither read nor write herself, but she wants all her children to be able to do so. She has managed to pay for their schooling at the national schools, and has quite a respect for their learning. She listens with breathless delight and interest of an evening while they read aloud by turns from that exciting periodical, the Red Handed Robber of the Black Forest, published weekly at one penny, and to be completed in one hundred and twenty numbers.

Until Mrs. Holl had placed the large dish of steaming potatoes on the table, she was too much absorbed in her occupation to give a thought to any other subject. But just as she had done so, John Holl, who had several times taken his pipe from his mouth, and looked round in a puzzled way, said, “It is very strange, Sairey, but it seems to me just as if some one had been a drinking of spiced beer. Don’t take it amiss, old woman, I don’t mean to say that I think you have been a drinking of it, for you’re not that sort. Still there is something that smells uncommon like spiced beer.”

“Bless me,” Mrs. Holl said, “what a head I have got, to be sure! I do declare I have not told you a word about it, for it slipped clean out of my mind. You are quite right, John, you do smell spiced beer, for Evan has been drinking it. The boy has been in the Serpentine, and came home that wet you could have squeezed the water out of him by the pailful.”

“In the Serpentine!” John Holl exclaimed; “I heard that the ice was too thin to think of going on it. Why, Evan, that was not like you, not a bit, you are generally steady enough. How did you get in? Some foolery, I’ll wager a pot of beer.”

In answer to this appeal from his father, Evan related what had happened; the others gathering round him, and the young ones even leaving off eating their supper to listen, and breaking in with many exclamations of astonishment as he proceeded.