Scamp and I: A Story of City By-Ways

by L. T. Meade

Even the night before, she had been in great need, she had longed much for a drink, her pain had brought on intense thirst, she had meant to ask Janey to put a cup, and a jug of cold water, by her side before she left, but the sweetness of Janey’s song had caused her to fall asleep before she had made known her request, and the lame girl had gone away unconscious that anything was the matter with her. It was highly probable that she might not pay Flo a visit for days; unless her father gave her another beating, or some quite unexpected event occurred, the chances were that she would not come.

And now Flo needed meat and drink, and nursing, as she had never needed them in all her life before. Though pale and delicate-looking, she had hitherto been possessed of a certain wiry strength, which those little withered city children, with every one of health’s necessaries apparently denied them, in some strange way seem to have.

She had never gone through severe pain before; and never, with all her privations, had she known the hunger and thirst which now tormented her.

Scamp, seeing that she had changed her mind about going out, fixed on her one or two reproachful glances, and then in a very discontented manner resigned himself to his fate, and to a few more hours’ sleep.

And Flo lay and wondered what was going to become of her. She was very ill, she knew. She was alternately hot and then cold, she was alternately tortured by pangs of the most acute hunger, and then deadly sickness seemed to make the bare thought of food insupportable.

She wondered what was to be her fate. Was she to lie there, a little more sick, a little more weak, a little more hungry and thirsty, in a little more pain, until at last she died, as mother had died? Well, what then?

Only last night she had thought dying a good thing, the best thing. It was bidding good-bye to all that now troubled her, it was beginning at once the good time God had put by so carefully for little outcast children like her. If only it would come at once, this kind, beautiful Death—if only she had not to walk the dark bit of road between now and then, between now and the blessed moment when God would take her in His arms to Heaven.

But Flo had been too long with the poor, with the very, very poor, had seen too many such die, not to know well that dying was often a very long business, a business so long, and so sad, that, though the dying were suffering just as much as she now suffered, yet many weary hours, sometimes many weary days, had to be passed before relief and succour came to them; before kind Death came and took away all their sorrows and gave them rest, and sleep, and a good time. And this long period of waiting, even though the end was such brightness, felt very terrible to the lonely child. Then, suddenly, words Mrs Jenks had said to her yesterday came into her head.

“When you want food, or anything else very bad, and you don’t know how to get it, then is the time to ask God for it. All you have to do is to say up your want, whatever it be, in as few, and small, and simple words as you like, and though you speaks down in your dark cellar, God will hear you up in Heaven, and if ’tis any way possible He’ll give you what you want.”

Flo remembered these words of Mrs Jenks’ now with great and sudden gladness. If ever a time of need and sore want had come to any one it had come to her now.