The boy thanked the good woman and the gardener, as only those can thank who have felt what it is to be in absolute want. When he was rested, and able to walk, he pursued his way home. His mother was watching for him at the street-door.
“Well, John, my dear, what news? Has he paid us?”
The boy shook his head.
“Then we must bear it as well as we can,” said his mother, wiping the cold dew from her forehead.
“But look, mother, I have this half-crown, which the gentleman, thinking me a beggar, threw to me.”
“Run with it, love, to the baker’s. No—stay, you’re tired—I’ll go myself; and do you step up to your father, and tell him the bread is coming in a minute.”
“Don’t run, for you’re not able, mother; don’t hurry so,” said the boy, calling after her, and holding up his orange: “see, I have this for father whilst you are away.”
He clambered up three flights of dark, narrow, broken stairs, to the room in which his father lay. The door hung by a single hinge, and the child had scarcely strength enough to raise it out of the hollow in the decayed floor into which it had sunk. He pushed it open, with as little noise as possible, just far enough to creep in.
Let those forbear to follow him whose fine feelings can be moved only by romantic, elegant scenes of distress, whose delicate sensibility shrinks from the revolting sight of real misery. Here are no pictures for romance, no stage effect to be seen, no poetic language to be heard; nothing to charm the imagination,—every thing to disgust the senses.
This room was so dark, that upon first going into it, after having been in broad daylight, you could scarcely distinguish any one object it contained; and no one used to breathe a pure atmosphere could probably have endured to remain many minutes in this garret. There were three beds in it: one on which the sick man lay; divided from it by a tattered rug was another, for his wife and daughter; and a third for his little boy in the farthest corner. Underneath the window was fixed a loom, at which the poor weaver had worked hard many a day and year—too hard, indeed—even till the very hour he was taken ill. His shuttle now lay idle upon his frame. A girl of about sixteen—his daughter—was sitting at the foot of his bed, finishing some plain work.