Scamp and I: A Story of City By-Ways

by L. T. Meade

But no; had they earned the money in that way, they would have told Flo, they would have been proud to tell Flo, whereas the word money had never been mentioned at all between them!

Had Dick got the money rightly he would have been only too glad to speak of it; so it was clear to Flo that in some wrong manner alone had it come into his possession!

Well! why should she care? They were very poor, they were as low down in the world as they well could be; nobody loved them, nobody had ever taught them to do right. Dick and Flo were “horfans,” same as Scamp was an orphan. The world was hard on them, as it is on all defenceless creatures. If Dick could “prig” something from that rich and greedy world that was letting them both starve, would it be so very wrong?

If he could do this without the police finding out, without fear of discovery, would it not be rather a good and easy way of getting breakfasts, and dinners, and suppers? For surely some people had too much; surely it was not fair that all those buns and cakes, all those endless, countless good things in the West End shops should go to the rich people; surely the little hungry boys and girls who lived, and felt, and suffered in the East End should have their share!

And if only by stealing they could taste roast goose, was it very wrong, was it wrong at all to steal?

Flo knew nothing about God, she had never heard of the eighth commandment, but nevertheless, poor ignorant little child, she had a memory that kept her right, a memory that made it impossible for her, even had she really starved, to touch knowingly what was not her own.

The memory was this.

A year ago Flo’s mother had died in this cellar. She was a young woman, not more than thirty, but the damp of the miserable cellar, together with endless troubles and hardships, had fanned the seeds of consumption within her, and before her thirty-first birthday she had passed away. She knew she was dying, and in her poor way had done her best to prepare her children for her loss. She taught them both her trade, that of a translator,—not a literary translator, poor Mrs Darrell could not read,—but a translator of old boots and shoes into new; and Flo and Dick, young as they were, learned the least difficult and lighter parts of the business before her death. She had no money to leave them, no knowledge beyond that of her trade; she knew nothing of God or of heaven, but she had one deeply-instilled principle, and this she endeavoured by every means in her power to impart to the children.

Living in a place, and belonging to a grade of society, where any honesty was rare, she was nevertheless a perfectly honest woman. She had never touched a penny that was not her own, she was just and true in all her dealings. She was proud of saying—and the pride had caused her sunken, dying eyes to brighten even at the last—that none of her belongings, however low they had fallen, had ever seen the inside of a prison, or ever stood in a prisoner’s dock. They were honest people, and Dick and Flo must keep up the family character. Come what might, happen what would, they must ever and always look every man in the face, with the proud consciousness, “I have stolen from none.”

On the night she died, she had called them both to her side, and got them to promise her this. With pathetic and solemn earnestness, she had held their little hands and looked into their little faces, and implored of them, as they loved their dead father and mother, never, never to disgrace the unstained name they had left to them.