Here she got leave to dwell a little while in the topmost corner of a high tower, which rose so high, so high, that the roof of it seemed almost like the very country itself. It was so still there, and so fresh, and the clouds seemed so near, and the pigeons flew so close about it all day long, and at night so trustfully sought their roost there.
In a nook of it she made her home. It was very old, very desolate, very barren; yet she could bear it better than she could any lower range of dwelling. She could see the sunrise and the sunset; she could see the rain-mists and the planets; she could look down on all the white curl of the smoke; and she could hear the bells ring with a strange, peculiar sweetness, striking straight to her ear across the wilderness of roofs. And then she had the pigeons. They were not much, but they were something of the old, fresh country life; and now and then they brought a head of clover, or a spray of grass, in their beaks; and at sight of it the tears would rush into her eyes, and though it was pain, it was yet a dearer one than any pleasure that she had.
She maintained herself still without alms, buying her right to live there, and the little food that sufficed for her, by one of those offices in which the very poor contrive to employ those still poorer than themselves.
They slept so heavily, those people who had the weight of twenty hours' toil, the pangs of hunger, and the chills of cold upon them, whenever they laid them down, and who would so willingly have slept forever with any night they laid their heads upon their sacks of rags. But, so long as they woke at all, they needed to wake with the first note of the sparrows in the dark.
She, so long used to rise ere ever the first streak of day were seen, roused scores of them; and in payment they gave her the right to warm herself at their stove, a handful of their chestnuts, a fragment of their crust, a little copper piece,—anything that they could afford or she would consent to take. A woman, who had been the réveilleuse of the quarter many years, had died; and they were glad of her:—"Her eyes have no sleep in them," they said; and they found that she never failed.
It was a strange trade—to rise whilst yet for the world it was night, and go to and fro the dreary courts, up and down the gloom of the staircases, and in and out the silent chambers, and call all those sons and daughters of wretchedness from the only peace that their lives knew. So often she felt so loath to wake them; so often she stood beside the bundle of straw on which some dreaming creature, sighing and smiling in her sleep, murmured of her home, and had not the heart rudely to shatter those mercies of the night.
It was a strange, sad office, to go alone among all those sleepers in the stillness that came before the dawn, and move from house to house, from door to door, from bed to bed, with the one little star of her lamp alone burning.
They were all so poor, so poor, it seemed more cruel than murder only to call them from their rest to work, and keep alive in them that faculty of suffering which was all they gained from their humanity.
Her pity for them grew so great that her heart perforce softened to them also. Those strong men gaunt with famine, those white women with their starved children on their breasts, those young maidens worn blind over the needle or the potter's clay, those little children who staggered up in the dark to go to the furnace, or the wheel, or the powder-mill, or the potato-fields outside the walls,—she could neither fear them nor hate them, nor do aught save sorrow for them with a dumb, passionate, wondering grief.
She saw these people despised for no shame, wretched for no sin, suffering eternally, though guilty of no other fault than that of being in too large numbers on an earth too small for the enormous burden of its endless woe. She found that she had companions in her misery, and that she was not alone under that bitter scorn which had been poured on her. In a manner she grew to care for these human creatures, all strangers, yet whose solitude she entered, and whose rest she roused. It was a human interest, a human sympathy. It drew her from the despair that had closed around her.