Читать книгу Blade-O'-Grass. Golden Grain. and Bread and Cheese and Kisses - B. L. Farjeon - Страница 9

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At a very early age indeed was Blade-o'-Grass compelled to begin the battle of life. Her greatest misfortune was that, as she grew in years, she grew strong. Had she been a weakly little thing, some one might have taken pity on her, and assumed the responsibility of maintaining her. The contingency was a remote one; but all chance of benefiting by it was utterly destroyed, because she was strong and hardy. She may be said to have had some sort of a home up to the time that she attained the age of nine years; for a corner for her to sleep in was always found in the house in which she was born. But about that time certain important changes took place, which materially affected her, although she had no hand in them. The landlady gave up the house, and some one else took it, and turned it into a shop. The lodgers all received notice to leave, and went elsewhere to live. A great slice of luck fell to the share of Mr. Manning. An uncle whom he had never seen died in a distant land, and left his money to his relatives; and a shrewd lawyer made good pickings by hunting up nephews and nieces of the deceased. Among the rest, he hunted up Mr. Manning, and one day he handed his client a small sum of money. Mr. Manning put his suddenly acquired wealth to a good purpose--he got passage in a government emigrant ship, and with his wife and large family, bade good-bye for ever to Stoney-alley. He left the country, as hundreds and thousands of others have done, with a bitter feeling in his heart because he was not able to stop in it, and earn a decent livelihood; but, as hundreds and thousands of others have done, he lived this feeling down, and in his new home, with better prospects and better surroundings, talked of his native land--meaning Stoney-alley--as the 'old country,' in terms of affection and as if he had been treated well in it. It will be easily understood that when Blade-o'-Grass lost Mrs. Manning, she lost her best friend.

To say that she passed an easy life up to this point of her career would be to state what is false. The child was in continual disgrace, and scarcely a day passed that was not watered with her tears. Blows, smacks, and harsh words were administered to her freely, until she grew accustomed to them, and they lost their moral force. She deserved them, for she was the very reverse of a good little girl. In a great measure her necessities made her what she was, and no counteracting influence for good approached her. If she were sent for beer, she would stop at corners, and taste and sip, and bring home short measure. There was something fearful in her enjoyment; but she had no power nor desire to resist the temptation. No tragedy queen, before the consummation of the final horror, ever looked round with more watchful, wary, fearsome gaze than did Blade-o'-Grass, when, having nerved her soul to take a sip of beer, she stopped at a convenient corner, or in the shadow of a dark doorway, to put her desire into execution. And then she was always breaking things. The mugs she let fall would have paved Stoney-alley. But there was a greater temptation than beer: Bread. If she were sent for a half-quartern loaf, she would not fail to dig out with liberal fingers the soft portions between the crusts, and eagerly devour them. Even if she had not been hungry--which would have been a white-letter day in her existence--she would have done from habit what she almost invariably was urged to do by the cravings of her stomach. And about that unfortunate stomach of hers, calumnies were circulated and believed in. So persistent an eater was Blade-o'-Grass, so conscientious a devourer of anything that, legitimately or otherwise, came in her way--quality being not of the slightest object--that a story got about that she had 'something' in her inside, some living creature of a ravenous nature, that waited for the food as she swallowed it, and instantly devoured it for its own sustenance. Such things had been known of. At some remote period a girl in the neighbourhood--whose personality was never traced, but whom everybody believed in--had had such an animal--a few called it a 'wolf,' but the majority insisted that it was a 'tiger'--growing inside of her, and this animal, so the story went, grew and grew, and fed upon the girl's life till it killed her. The 'tiger' had been found alive after the girl's death, and having been purchased of some one for a fabulous price, was embalmed in a bottle in a great museum, of which nobody knew the name or the whereabouts. As an allegory, this 'tiger' might have served to illustrate the mournful story of the lives of Blade-o'-Grass and thousands of her comrades--it might have served, indeed, to point a bitter moral; but there was nothing allegorical about the inhabitants of Stoney-alley. They only dealt in hard matter-of-fact, and the mythical story was fully believed in; and being applied to the case of Blade-o'-Grass, became a great terror to her. Many persons found delight in tormenting the helpless child about her 'tiger,' and for a long time the slightest allusion to it was sufficient to cause her the most exquisite anguish, in consequence of certain malevolent declarations, that she ought to be cut open and have the tiger taken out of her. Indeed, one miserable old fellow, who kept a rag-shop, and who had in his window two or three dust-coated bottles containing common-place reptiles preserved in spirits-of-wine, took a malicious pleasure in declaring that the operation ought to be really performed upon Blade-o'-Grass, and that, in the interests of science, she ought not to be allowed to live. It was the cruelest of sport thus to torture the poor child; for the simple fact was, that Blade-o'-Grass was nearly always hungry. It was nature tugging at her stomach--not a tiger.

The very first night of Mrs. Manning's departure, Blade-o'-Grass found herself without a bed. With a weary wretched sense of desolation upon her, she lingered about the old spot where she used to sleep, and even ventured to enter at the back of the house, when the sharp 'Come, get out o' this!' of the new proprietor sent her flying away. She belonged to nobody, and nobody cared for her; so she wandered and lingered about until all the lights in the shops and houses were out. She had gleaned some small pleasure in watching these lights; she had found comfort in them; and when they were all extinguished and she was in darkness, she trembled under the impulse of a vague terror. She did not cry; it was not often now that she called upon the well of tender feeling where tears lay; but she was terrified. There was not a star in the sky to comfort her. She was in deep darkness, body and soul. How many others are there at this present moment in the same terrible condition?

Too full of fear to stand upright, she crept along the ground slowly, feeling her way by the walls, stopping every now and then to gather fresh courage, at which time she tried to shut out her fears by cowering close to the flagstones and hiding her face in her ragged frock. She had a purpose in view. She had thought of a refuge where she would find some relief from the terrible shadows. Towards that refuge she was creeping now. It was a long, long time before she reached her haven--a crazy old lamp-post, the dim light of which was in keeping with the general poverty of its surroundings. At the foot of this lamp-post, clasping it as if it were the symbol of a sacred refuge, Blade-o'-Grass looked up at the light in agony of speechless gratitude, and then, wearied almost to a state of unconsciousness, coiled herself up into a ball, like a hedgehog, and soon was fast asleep.