Miss Grantley's Girls, and the Stories She Told Them

by Thomas Archer

It was cold dull wintry weather, and the old man looked so solitary, that one or two tried to rally him, and even asked him to come and dine or spend the evening with them, to which he responded by his old harsh laugh, and putting on his worsted gloves, trudged home through the snow.

MR. DRYCE'S PETITION ANSWERED.

One morning he awoke early, almost before daylight had penetrated the dull rooms where he lived, and had a sudden fancy to walk into the church. It was already daylight in the streets, but the interior of St. Simon Swynherde was dim with mist and with the obscurity of the high windows. He could only just see the pillars and the organ, where his own name had been painted in gilt letters since the time that he had been churchwarden and helped to restore it. Even as he looked up at it, the notes of the Christmas hymn came trembling into the chill morning air, for the organist had come there to practise, and expected the parish school children to come in to sing at a morning service. To most people there might have been nothing in the place or its associations to evoke much gentle feeling; but as the tones of the organ swelled and the music grew louder, old Richard Dryce sat down in the corner of his own pew and leaned his head upon the book-board, with his hands clasped before his face. Not till the warm tears had trickled from between his fingers did he raise his head, and then it was to look round him to the cushion at the other end of the pew, for from some place near him he thought he had heard a sound that was out of all harmony with the organ, but not altogether apart from the associations of the Christmas hymn—the wailing of a child. Another moment and he was bending over a bundle seemingly composed of a coarse blue cloak, but from which there presently came out a baby hand and, the covering once pulled aside, a little round rosy face in which a pair of large blue eyes were wide awake in utter astonishment. Who can tell what had been the thoughts busy in old Dryce's mind? Was it prayer? Was it that yearning which finds no words of entreaty, but yet ardently and dumbly implores—all vaguely—that the crooked paths of former error may be made straight at last—that the rough places of a mistaken course may become divinely plain? He could not tell; and yet in some way he accepted this child as a visible answer to a petition that he had meant to frame. When the organist and the sextoness came down presently, and with indignant virtue advised the removal of the child to the workhouse, he regarded their suggestion as little less than impious, and expressed his determination of taking the little one home with him.

His old housekeeper and the younger servants were not a little surprised to see the merchant come home with such a companion; but Mr. Dryce was master in his own house, and the little guest was fed. Then Doctor Banks was sent for, and he declared that it would be necessary to provide a nurse, while, as luck would have it, he had that very morning been sent for to see a casual applicant for relief at the Union workhouse—a woman who had just lost a child. Temporarily she might do well enough, and Doctor Banks wanted to get home to dinner; so away went the housekeeper in a cab with a letter from the doctor, and in two hours came back bringing with her a pale pretty young woman whose name was Jane Harris, and who, her husband having gone abroad and left her with a child which she had just lost, was reduced to apply at the workhouse. She was so timid, and had at first such a scared look, that Mr. Dryce had much trouble to induce her to stay; but it was quite wonderful the way in which the child took to her, and so a room was got ready for them both, and she was comfortably settled, almost, as the housekeeper said, "as if she was a lady, though for the matter of that, Doctor Banks knew more about her than he said." At any rate Doctor Banks said the next day, after he had had a little conversation with the new nurse, that she was thoroughly trustworthy, and that he himself had known her father, who once held a very respectable position in the city. So Mrs. Harris became an inmate at the dim old house, and her charge throve under her care.

He was a bonny boy, and every day his little baby ways became of so great interest to the lonely old man, that he was never happy after business hours until he had the little fellow in the room. He never stayed at his old tavern now for more than half an hour beyond the time it took him to eat his dinner, and even went so far as to tell two or three of his friends what he had done, and invite them home to see the child, in whom—they being themselves fathers of families—they could see nothing extraordinary, and wondered amongst themselves at old Dryce's strange infatuation.

When the boy at last grew able to crawl about, and even to walk from chair to chair, he seemed to have so grown to the old man's heart that Dryce became subject to a kind of transformation. His laugh grew more mellow, as though the violin had been laid near the fire, and played upon gently; a dozen old and forgotten picture-books were disinterred from some box, and toys strewed the floor of the dingy sitting-room. At about this time Mrs. Harris was for a week or more strangely agitated by a letter which was brought to her one morning, and came as she said from her husband, who had been for some time in Australia. Upon her recovery Mr. Dryce inquired a little into her husband's circumstances, and hearing that he was endeavouring to establish an agency in Sydney, wrote a letter requesting him to make some inquiries about a house to which Dryce & Co. had made large consignments, but whose promised remittance had not duly arrived. The old man had other matters to occupy him, however, for with something like a resumption of his old vigour and his business habits he had called for his books, for he had had some serious losses lately, and began to think it necessary to give more personal attention to the current accounts. Still every day he had his little pet into the room to play about his knees, and indeed refused to part with him even when nurse Harris came to put him to bed, often making her stay and take some wine, or consulting her as to some future provisions, for her little charge, for whom she seemed to have even more affection than the old gentleman himself.

It was late one evening that he sat talking to her in this way, but still with a rather absent manner, for his heavy ledgers and cash-books lay beside him on the table. She would have taken the child away, but Mr. Dryce told her to let him remain, and at the same time asked her to step down into the counting-house, and if Mr. Jaggers had not left for the night, to ask him to come up.

Now Mr. Jaggers had so seldom been invited to come upstairs, that, although he of course knew of the adoption of the little foundling, he had never seen the nurse; but that was scarcely any reason for her stopping on her way downstairs and pressing her hand to her side with a sudden spasm of fear.

She got down at last, however, and opening the two doors which led to the passage, at the end of which was the private counting-house, stood there in the shadow and looked in.