THE WATCHER.—A SKETCH FROM REAL LIFE.
In a dark room, in a ruined and wretched house, in one of the most filthy districts of a great city, a mother sat watching her sleeping babe. The infant was lying on a hard pallet on the floor, and the mother was sitting beside it on a broken chair, plying her needle with eager haste, and occasionally pausing to look down at her babe or to kiss it as it lay asleep. The child was pale and sickly, and in the close offensive air of the room it seemed to breathe painfully and to inhale, with every pulse of its tender heart, the insidious principles of death and dissolution. But not less pale and wan was the mother, who sat there watching; her features wore that blanched, unearthly hue, and that strange upward light was playing in her eyes, which spoke but too plainly that death was breathing on her. The room was lonely—very lonely—for there were no pictures to adorn its walls, scarcely any articles of common domestic use within it; it was bare, almost unfurnished, dismal, and cold. The mother was engaged in making shirts, and the price which she received for them averaged two-pence-halfpenny each; and it is said that by extraordinary exertions, for twenty hours out of twenty-four, the sum of three shillings may be earned weekly at such labor. Well, the pale, care-worn, suffering mother continued to stitch, stitch, anxiously from hour to hour, leaving off now and then to take her dying baby in her arms and to press it fondly to her breast, until the tide of her heart's affection came stealing forth in tears; and recollecting that the next meal for herself and child must be earned by the continued labor of her jaded hands, she placed the infant on its bed, and again resumed her work.
Thus many hours had passed in a silence broken only by the low moaning of the child, as it turned to and fro in the feeble expression of long-continued anguish, and the deep sighs of the mother as she gazed anxiously upon its fevered face, and saw the stamp of want and misery there in an expression akin to the imbecility of years. At length the babe awoke, and the mother took it tenderly into her arms; she pressed it to her breast and kissed the cold dew from its forehead. And now she began to prepare her humble meal, she placed a few sticks of wood in the stove and lighted them, and placed an old broken kettle half filled with water upon them; and then arranged two cups and saucers on a small tray, and took a portion of a loaf from a shelf above. While waiting for the water to boil she gave her child some food; and she had scarcely begun to do this when a heavy and unsteady step was heard upon the threshold; her heart leaped with fear, and she trembled like a moonlight shadow. A creature somewhat in the semblance of a man staggered into the room, and threw himself down upon the pallet where the child had just been sleeping.
"Charles, Charles, do not, for God's sake, treat me thus," said the mother of the child, and she sobbed loudly, and was steeped in tears.
The man scowled upon her from beneath the broken brim of a slouched hat, and in a low fiendish growl, cursed her. His clothes had been respectable in their time, but now were tattered and slovenly, and his face wore the savage wildness and vacancy of long-continued dissipation.
"I came home to ask you for money, so give me what you've got, and let me go, for I haven't done drinking yet," said he, while the devil-like glare of his eyes seemed to pierce the poor mother to the soul.
"I spent my last penny to buy my child some food, I know not where to get another; you have never wanted a meal while I could work, and my poor fingers are wasted to the bone by midnight labor and the want of bread, and my poor child is wasting away before my face, while you, forgetting all the ties that bind a father to his offspring, or a husband to his wife, take the very bread from me and my babe, to waste it in drunkenness; oh, Charles, you loved me once, but you are killing me now, and my poor dear child."
"You howling, canting hypocrite, give me some money and let me go," bawled the intoxicated brute, and with a sweep of his hand, as he sat upon the child's bed, he overturned the table and scattered the miserable meal upon the floor. The heart-broken wife rushed with her babe to the opposite end of the room, and cowered down in fear. "Do you hear, or do you want me to murder you?" and he rose from where he sat and reeled toward her; shrinking and shivering as she bent over her babe, she pressed its almost lifeless body to her heart, and when he stood above her, she looked up in his face in the agony of despair, and implored, in the mute utterance of her tear-worn eyes, for mercy. But he did not strike her, although she was indeed well used to that, but he put out his hand and taking from her bosom a locket, which had been a dear sister's gift, and the last thing left her but her babe and death, staggered to the door, and, after looking back with a menacing and brutal expression of his savage features, left her. Although he was gone she moved not, but sat wailing like a dove whose nest has been bereft of that which made life dear, and sobbing loudly in her grief she looked upon her child, and saw the tokens of pain and want upon its meagre face, and could feel the throbbing of its little heart becoming more and more feeble, from hour to hour, as the shadow of its life was waning.
And night came, and she laid her child down to rest, and again sat working and watching. She kissed it when its low cry startled her in the midnight silence, and hushed it again to sleep, for it wanted food and that she had not. The morning came, but it was still night to her, and the darkness of her woe sat hovering over her frail soul like the shadow of a great but silent misery. She hurried on in the delirium of extreme weakness that she might complete the wretched work she had, and get food for her famished child. Intense suffering, long watching, hunger, cold, and cruelty had blanched a cheek which had been more fair than snow, and had carved wrinkles, like those of age, upon a youthful brow; death hovered over her like a ghastly shadow, not to her—as to those in comfort—terrible, but welcome. And thus from hour to hour, and from day to day, that mother labored for her lonely child, while he, whose heart should have beat with the devotion of love for her whom he had sworn to cherish, and whose hand should have been ever ready to defend her, deeming nothing too severe, nothing too difficult, which could bring food and comfort to a woman's constant heart, came only to rob her of her last morsel, and to add fresh agonies to her almost withered soul by imprecations and curses.
One morning, after she had been toiling long in cold and hunger, she became too weak to labor more, and nature faltered. She stooped to kiss her babe and to ask a blessing on its head from Him whose benedictions come even to the sorrowful and needy, and as she bent down above its little shadowy form, her sorrows overwhelmed her, and she fell down beside her child and fainted. With none to aid and soothe her—with none to nourish her in her distress of heart, and no kind hand to minister to the poor watcher in that hour of affliction, she lay in that sweet peace which comes to the aching heart when it can for a time forget its sorrows; and better too, perhaps, for her, for her babe was dying, and in the unconsciousness of temporary death, she knew it not.