Thus we got established in our new quarters; and many a long ramble I took with Harry along those strange superannuated walls.—To think how they once stood up desperate, in defence, round the brave little town! to think of the wild Welsh raging outside on that tranquil turf, where the races were now-a-days; to think of those secure streets down there, that lengthened themselves out presumptuously beyond the ramparts, and even cut passages through them, once cowering in alarm below their shadow! The place quite captivated me; and then the streets themselves, the strange dark covered pathways, steps up from the street, with the shops lurking in their shadow! like some of the German towns, Harry told me. Looking into them from the street, and seeing the stream of passengers coming and going, through the openings and heavy wooden beams of the railing; or looking out of one of those openings upon a kind of street-scenes and life that had nothing in the world to do with the strange old-world arcade, from which one looked out as from a balcony, was as good as reading a book about ancient times. It was not like my dear Edinburgh, to be sure, but it was very captivating; and Harry and I enjoyed exploring together. It was all new and fresh to us—and it was spring; and when you have nothing to trouble you much, it is delightful to see new places, and get new pictures into the mind. Chester was quite as novel, and fresh, and captivating, though it was only in our own country, as that German Munich which Harry told me of—Harry had been a great traveller before he joined, while his father was so long ill—could have been.
Lizzie, however, was not nearly so much at her ease as I was. When she felt herself laughed at, and looked at, and misunderstood, Lizzie fell back into her chronic state of awkwardness. Her national pride was driven to enthusiasm by her contact with “thae English.” Lizzie entertained a steady disbelief that the tongue in which she heard everybody speak—which was far enough from being a refined one, however,—was their native and natural speech. “They were a’ speaking grand for a purpose o’ their ain, to make folk believe they were lords and leddies,” Lizzie said; and with a still higher pitch of indignation, “Mem, you aye understood me, though you’re an English leddy; and think o’ the like o’ them setting up no’ to understand what your lass means when she’s speaking! I dinna understand them, I’m sure,—no half a dozen words. To hear that clippit English, and the sharp tongues they have, deaves me. The very weans in the street they’ve nae innocence in them. They’re a’ making a fashion of speaking as fine as you.”
“Never mind, Lizzie; you’ll soon get accustomed to them, and make friends,” said I, with an attempt at consolation.
“Friends! I never had anybody belonging to me but a faither,” said Lizzie, who understood relations to be signified by that word: “but I’m no heeding now; and I’ll soon learn to nip the ends off the words like the rest o’ them. There’s a grand green for drying, that Mrs. Goldsworthy calls the back ga’den; and, if you’ll no’ be angry, I can do the ironing grand mysel’.”
“You! but I dare not trust you, Lizzie,” said I, shaking my head. “Mr. Langham would find it out—I mean he would find me out—if they were not quite so well done; and you don’t consider what quantities of things you will have to do—to keep the drawing-room nice, and get tea and breakfast, and wash, and I don’t know what; and yet always to be tidy, and keep baby all day long. You don’t know what you have on your hands already, you unlucky girl.”
“Eh, I’m glad!” cried Lizzie, clapping her hands together with fervour; and her brown eyes sparkled, and her uncouth figure grew steady with the delight of conscious energy and power. If she had been eighteen she would not have been so simple-minded. Never anybody was so fortunate as I had been in my little maid.
Chapter II.
VERY soon we began to get interested in the people round about us; for we were not here, as we had been in Mrs. Saltoun’s little house, the only strangers. By means of Lizzie, who was much annoyed at the discovery, I found out that the house was quite full of lodgers. On the ground floor there was a foreign gentleman and his servant. The gentleman was absent at first; but the man, a very fat, good-humoured-looking fellow, who adopted us all into his friendship immediately, and expanded into smiles through the railings of the stair when any of us went up or down, was in full possession. The way that Lizzie avoided this smiling ogre, and the way in which he appreciated her panic, and was amused by it, and conciliated and coaxed her, was the most amusing thing I ever saw. And the way he opened the door for me, and took off his hat, and laid his hand on his heart and bowed! The good fellow quite kept us in amusement. When baby, who was getting on famously and noticing everything, crowed at him, in spite of his great beard, as children will do to men (it is very odd; but babies do take to strange men sooner than to strange women, I believe), the fat foreigner burst into great shouts of delighted laughter, and snapped his fat fingers, and made the funniest grimaces to please the child. None of us could speak a single word of his language; we did not even know at first what countryman he was; but we all got to have the most friendly, kind feeling for the stranger,—all except Lizzie, who stumbled up and flew downstairs in her anxiety to avoid his eyes. One bad habit he certainly had; he smoked perpetually. He smoked cigars—shocking bad ones, Harry said: he did not even put them down when he sprang out of his parlour to open the door for me; but only withdrew the one he was smoking from his full red lips, and held it somehow concealed in his hand. As he was constantly about in the house, or lingering close at hand with his great-coat buttoned on round his throat like a cloak, and the empty sleeves waving from his shoulders, stamping his feet on the ground, and whistling like a bird, this smell of bad cigars was perpetually about the house. Poor Mrs. Goldsworthy went up and down with the most grieved look upon her face. If any one made the least sign of having smelt anything disagreeable, she held up her hands in the most imploring way, and said, “What can a poor body do? He’s the obligingest creatur as ever was! and he don’t know a word of Christian language; and the gentleman—which is a real gentleman, and none o’ your make-believes—as good as left him in my charge; and, bless you, if he will smoke them cigars, and don’t understand a word a body says to him, what am I to do?” Indeed, for my own part, I had not only a great sympathy for him, but I could not help liking the fat fellow; and after a few days it was astonishing how we got used to the cigars.
Then we ourselves occupied the two next floors. It was a strange little house; two rooms, back and front, piled on the top of each other four stories high; the top-story rooms were attics; and there was actually a lodger in each of those attics! Where Mrs. Goldsworthy and her daughter slept themselves was more than either Lizzie or I could make out. One of the attic lodgers was a thin, wistful man, whom I could not help looking at. He worked at something in his own room, and used to go out to dine. He was always very neat and clean; but very threadbare, and with a hungry look that went to one’s heart. Perhaps it was not want; maybe he was hungry for something else than mere money or nourishment; but sometimes I am sure I should not have been surprised to hear that he was starving too. Sometimes he looked at me or at baby in his wistful way, just as he vanished past us. I can’t say he ever smiled, even at little Harry; but still we drew his eyes when he chanced to meet us going out or in. I felt a great compassion for this poor solitary man. He was a man that might have been found starved, but never would have asked any charity; at least so I thought of him. I used to fancy him sitting in his solitary room upstairs by the window, and not by the fire,—for we never heard him poking any fire, and often saw him at the window,—and wondered how people could get so isolated, and chilled, and solitary; how they lived at all when they came to that condition—benumbed of all comfort, and still not frozen to death. How strange to think of keeping on living, years and years after one’s heart is dead! Harry said I was fanciful and continually made stories about people; but I did not tell Harry one half of my fancies; I don’t know what he would have done to me if I had; but I did so wish I could have some chance of doing something to please that old man.
One day Harry came downstairs with a smile on his face. “There is the most ludicrous scene going on below; come and look, Milly,” he said, drawing me to the stairs. I peeped down, and there, to be sure, I saw a reason for the sound of talking I had heard for a few minutes past. Lizzie was sitting on the stair, pondering deeply, with a perplexed face, over a large book spread out on the step above her. She was holding baby fast in one arm, and staving off his attempts to snatch at the leaves of the book. Leaning on the bannisters regarding her, and holding forth most volubly in an unknown tongue, was our fat friend; and between every two or three words he pointed to the book, making a sort of appeal to it. The contrast between the two—she silent and bewildered, confused by her efforts to restrain baby and comprehend the book—he, the vast full figure of him, so voluble, so good-humoured, so complacent, talking with his fat arms and fingers, his gestures, and every movement he made—talking with such confidence that language which nobody understood—was almost as irresistible to me as to Harry. We stood looking down at them, extremely amused and wondering. Then Lizzie, failing to comprehend the book, and hearing herself addressed so energetically, raised her round eyes, round with amazement, to the speaker’s face. The unknown tongue awed Lizzie; she contemplated him with speechless wonder and dismay; until at last, when the speaker made an evident close appeal to her, with a natural oratory which she could not mistake, unintelligible as was its meaning, her amazement burst forth in words. “Eh, man, what div ye mean?” cried Lizzie, in the extremity of her puzzled wonder. It was the climax of the scene. Though I thrust Harry back into the room instantly, that his laughter might not be heard, and smothered my own as best I could, the sound caught Lizzie’s watchful ears. In another moment she had reached the top of the stairs, breathless, with her charge in her arms. The puzzled look had not left Lizzie’s eyes, but she was deeply abashed and ashamed of herself. Harry’s laughter did not mend the matter, of course. She dropped baby in my arms, and twisted herself into all her old awkward contortions. I had to send her away and dismiss Harry into the other room. Poor Lizzie had never possessed sufficient courage to permit herself to be accosted by the dreadful foreigner before.