“Which shows that nation to be a wasteful nation, Mrs. Cheevers, which takes three letters to spell a word which we can spell with two.”
And he bid good afternoon and a Merry Christmas, and walked off rattling the money in his pockets, as his way was, leaving me with the tears in my eyes at the thought of my own baby that was coming, and its ever being left, poor helpless innocent! as Them Two, and O how many others! are left, in this cruel world, under the Eye of Heaven.
And that night, after Cheevers had had his supper, and a poor one at best, though he was as cheerful over it, as if it had been venison with turtle-sauce, I took the candle and said: “Jem, I am a-going on a voyage of discovery.”
And Cheevers followed me up the stairs, till we got to the attic ladder, as was that rotten and crumbly, that he went up first, trying every step for fear of me a-falling, and presently nods back at me through the square hole in the lath and plaster, with cobwebs in his hair like a Bedlamite, and up I comes, him lighting me with the candle, which dripped and flared in the draught that came through the holes in the attic roof.
And there we see Them Two a-lying in each other’s arms.
“And there we see Them Two a-lying in each others arms.”
It was a fine, frosty night, and the stars shone, through the big hole in the roof above the fireplace, bigger and brighter than ever I remember to have seen them. And now and then a stray flake of snow would flutter down like a feather.
Where the roof sloped down to the rotten floor-boards was, being more sheltered, the place where they had laid themselves down to rest in each other’s arms.
Babes in the Wood couldn’t ’a been more sorrowful nor more innocent than Them Two, and one could hear their teeth chattering with cold as they slept.