“Poor old Dickey: got his ’art in his work, he had; and somehow as he went off, and I knew as we shouldn’t never see him again at work, if we ever see him at all, my nose wanted blowing to that degree that nothing couldn’t be like it; and it’s my belief, Sarah, if I hadn’t been roused up by a call for the next lot, that I should have turned soft; for you see, says I to myself, I says, suppose as that had been me.
“But he told me to tell Jenny gently, and I did.”
Story 2--Chapter IV.
Old Dick went no more to porter at the rooms when he came out of the hospital; his smoothly-shaven face did not peer out of windows where he was hanging out hearthrugs with, pinned upon them, the bills announcing the capital modern household furniture for sale; but when he returned to Gutter-alley, Dick would always be clean-shaven of a morning, spending an hour over the process, pulling out wrinkles to get at the silver stubble lurking in the bottoms of the furrows, and stopping at times, when his hands grew tremulous, to rest. Many was the time that his grandchild, Jenny, would have to run down in haste to fetch a bit of cobweb from the cellar to stay the bleeding when that tremulous old hand did make a slip, for the nap upon Dick’s Sunday hat was too scarce to be used up in so wanton a way.
But at last Dick would strop and put away his razor and shaving-brush, hang up the little glass, and then tie on a clean white apron, take his round carpet-cap down from a nail and carefully put it on so as not to disarrange his grey locks, and then sit patiently nursing his porter’s knot and waiting, as he used to tell Jenny, for a job.
“Strong, my little lass? Strong as ever,” he’d say. “If I could only get this leg right;” and then Jenny would drop her work, take his old face between her plump little hands, kiss him tenderly, and tell him to wait a little.
So old Dick Bradds used to wait on, day after day, waiting for the jobs that never came, and the injured leg did not get right. The old man’s strength sufficed to carry him down to the front door and back again. Down he would go slowly, holding tightly by the balustrade, one leg always first, till he reached the bottom, where the mat should have been, only they could not afford mats in Gutter-alley, and then as regularly as possible the old man, in his thankfulness at being able to walk so far, would take off the old carpet-cap and say softly, when there was no one by, “Thank God!” and the same again when, after a visit to the front door and a glance up and down the court, he had slowly and painfully made his way up to his own room.
Jenny would have helped him; but no: the old man could not shake off the belief that he was in a state to do heavy work and to help his child. There was too much determination left yet in the old piece of steel, and heedless of rust and weakness Dick struggled up and down.