Out again, for all was silent; first one peering into the room, with its black, bead-like eyes scanning the place, then darting back at some false alarm, but out again directly, followed by its fellows, till there was a swarm once more, now running a few feet, now darting back to the hole; and still Septimus Hardon knelt, as he had knelt for hours, motionless beside his father’s coffin.
The golden bar shone into and across the room, a bar-sinister no longer, for it played upon the features of the dead, seeming to illumine them with a smile; the sparrows twittered in the eaves, the faint whistle of a carter, cheering his way with some old minor strain, was heard from the road; the blind still tapped softly and shuddered from top to bottom; but the gnawing sounds from the skirting-board had ceased, and the kneeling man remained motionless by the bedside.
Tap, tap, tap, in a strange warning way, as the shuddering motion of the old blind continued. Warning taps, as if softly made by unseen watchers—signals to rouse the kneeling figure whose face was buried in his hands, and whose worn, lean fingers touched the black-cloth of the coffin; taps that now grew louder, for there was a faint, scratching noise, as of little vicious claws passing over a counterpane.
Volume Two—Chapter Two.
Meetings.
With something like the wondering pleasure that must have been felt by the first photographer who applied his developing liquid to a sensitised plate and then saw spring out by magic, as it were, first faint, then stronger lines, feature by feature, the lineaments of a beautiful face, gazed old Matt Space upon Lucy Grey as Time, that wonderful developer, caused her day by day to take more and more the aspect of a beautiful woman. Yesterday almost it seemed to him that she was a mere girl, a child; but the transition had been rapid. True, hers was a time of life when the bud is seen to expand rapidly; but here there had been forcing powers at work. In fact, in quiet self-dependence, thought, and her managing ways, Lucy had been for years a woman, and the friend and counsellor of her mother in many a sore trial. Familiarity with sorrow, poverty, her step-father’s struggles, and their life in the busy streets of London, had all tended to develop the mind of Lucy Grey, who might truly be said never to have known a girlhood: nurse to her little sister and brother in sickness and health, attendant of her ailing mother, housekeeper, cheerer of Septimus Hardon’s misery, and now busy worker for the family’s support, it were strange indeed if she had not stepped as it were from child to woman, for in such cases as hers years seem secondary.
But the years had not been stationary, for Lucy Grey was now seventeen, and the old printer used to gaze with pride upon the fair girl, who chose him gladly for her companion to and from the warehouse for which she worked.
But Matt was angry and annoyed, for he had been made the half confidant of a secret which galled and worried him. Twenty times a day he vowed that he would have no more of it; and at such times the consumption of his snuff was terrible. There was hardly a lamp-post in Carey-street to which he had not fiercely declared that he would “split,” nodding mysteriously the whole while; but night after night, when he met the appealing look of Lucy, all his resolutions faded like mist in the sun, and he would whisper the next post he passed that he was getting to be a fool in his old age.