But he could not forget the water-butt—proximate mother of the child. Its idea came sliding into Tommy’s range, grew and grew upon Tommy, came nearer and nearer, until the baby was nowhere, and nothing in the world but the water-butt. His consciousness was possessed with it. It was preparing to swallow him in its loathsome deep! All at once it jumped back from him, and stood motionless by the side of the wall. Now was his chance! Now he must mizzle! Not a moment longer would he stop in the same place with the horrible thing!
But the baby! Clare would bring him back and put him in the butt! No, he wouldn’t! What harm would come to the brat? She was not able to roll herself off the bed! She could do nothing but go to sleep again! Out he must and would go! He wanted something to eat! He would be in again long before Clare could get back!
He left the room and the house, ran down the garden, scrambled up the door, got on the top of the wall, and dropped into the waste land behind it—nor once thought that the only way back was by the very jaws of the water-butt.
Chapter XXIX.
The Baker.
Clare went over the wall and the well without a notion of what he was going to do, except look for work. He had eaten half a loaf, and now drew in his cap some water from the well and drank. He felt better than any moment since leaving the farm. He was full of hope.
All his life he had never been other than hopeful. To the human being hope is as natural as hunger; yet how few there are that hope as they hunger! Men are so proud of being small, that one wonders to what pitch their conceit will have arrived by the time they are nothing at all. They are proud that they love but a little, believe less, and hope for nothing. Every fool prides himself on not being such a fool as believe what would make a man of him. For dread of being taken in, he takes himself in ridiculously. The man who keeps on trying to do his duty, finds a brighter and brighter gleam issue, as he walks, from the lantern of his hope.
Clare was just breaking into a song he had heard his mother sing to his sister, when he was checked by the sight of a long skinny mongrel like a hairy worm, that lay cowering and shivering beside a heap of ashes put down for the dust-cart—such a dry hopeless heap that the famished little dog did not care to search it: some little warmth in it, I presume, had kept him near it. Clare’s own indigence made him the more sorry for the indigent, and he felt very sorry for this member of the family; but he had neither work nor alms to give him, therefore strode on. The dog looked wistfully after him, as if recognizing one of his own sort, one that would help him if he could, but did not follow him.
A hundred yards further, Clare came to a baker’s shop. It was the first he felt inclined to enter, and he went in. He did not know it was the shop from whose cart Tommy had pilfered. A thin-faced, bilious-looking, elderly man stood behind the counter.
“Well, boy, what do you want?” he said in a low, sad, severe, but not unkindly voice.
“Please, sir,” answered Clare, “I want something to do, and I thought perhaps you could help me.”