“Oh, you do call some things by their right names (here, let that woman pass out). I suppose you’re glad enough the rascals have got their deserts?”
A dubious change came over the boy’s face. He did not answer at once; he hardly knew his own feelings on the subject. The question was repeated.
“Well, sir, I’m glad they won’t be there to torment me any more, but it must be a very dreadful thing for a young gentleman to be turned out of school in disgrace, and I don’t think I ought to be glad of that. I should never get over it, if it was me.”
“Here, take your basket, and be off with you!” said Joshua Brookes, hurrying him out of the shop, that he might stay and rate the old woman for “spoiling young Cheat-the-fishes,” conscious all the while that he had been doing his best to get the lad a good home in the future.
Bess and Simon received him with open arms, glad not only to see him well again, but thankful he had been placed where he was secure from the bitter want which pinched both their stomachs and their faces. To them Mrs. Clowes’ basket brought what they had not seen for months—a white loaf and a good lump of cold meat, to say nothing of a tiny paper of tea, and some sugar—those luxuries of the rich—and half-a-crown in another paper.
How those half-famishing hard-workers, whose home had been denuded of their goods to keep life within them, thanked cross old Mrs. Clowes! She had made it a festival to them indeed, and all for the sake of the boy they had kept.
There were no pigeons—these had been sold long ago to pay for provisions, though much against Simon’s will. The cat was there, lean and gaunt; it managed to pick up a subsistence somehow; and the big Bible was there—Simon had not parted with that, though the bright bureau was gone, ay, and the cradle which had been an ark to the orphan.
The change touched Jabez sorely. Snugly housed and fed within the College, rumours of outer poverty made no lasting impression; but here he saw its grim reality, and sitting down on the three-legged stool, he covered his face with his hands to hide the tears called up by that insight into their impoverished condition. Yet had they some alleviation of their pain. Poverty appeared to have lost half its bitterness for Bess. She had had a letter from her long-mourned Tom, and the joyful news served to brighten up the visit for Jabez and all.
It was a long and deeply repentant letter, of course written by a comrade. It was dated from Badajoz, and had been a weary while in reaching them. He had been wounded in that brilliant assault, and while in hospital had fallen in with another Lancashire lad, also wounded—no other than the boy who had lent a hand to rescue the infant Jabez, and who had been driven to enlist by the sharp pangs of hunger, only two years before. From this young fellow, Private John Smith (Tom was himself a Corporal), he had learned how grievously his Bess had been slandered; but with that knowledge had come the conviction that he had condemned her hastily and harshly on mere hearsay, and the letter was incoherent in its remorseful contrition. In his soldier-life he had been tossed hither and thither—known pain, and thirst, and famine; and said he owed it all to his own jealous credulity, when he ought to have known so much better. He told of marchings and counter-marchings, battles and bloodshed; but of never one wound to himself, though he had not “cared a cast of the shuttle” for his life until that bayonet-thrust which had laid him side by side with John Smith, who had lost an eye. But he wound up with a prayer for Bess and himself, and a hope for their reunion, if the war would ever end. He “was sick of it.”
All that letter was to Bess and Simon, Jabez could not comprehend; but he took Mrs. Clowes her empty basket, and went back to the College satisfied that one ray of sunshine lit up the poor home of his friends.