Читать книгу The Hillyars and the Burtons - Henry Kingsley - Страница 5

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I AM of the same trade as my father,--a blacksmith,--although I have not had hammer or pincers in my hand this ten years. And although I am not in the most remote degree connected with any aristocratic family, yet I hold the title of Honorable. The Honorable James Burton being a member of the Supreme Council of the Colony of Cooksland.

As early as I can remember, my father carried on his trade in Brown's Row, Chelsea. His business was a very good one,--what we call a good shoeing trade, principally with the omnibus horses. It paid very well, for my father had four men in his shop; though, if he had had his choice, he would have preferred some higher branch of smith's work, for he had considerable mechanical genius, and no small ambition, of a sort.

I think that my father was the ideal of all the blacksmiths who ever lived. He was the blacksmith. A man with a calm, square, honest face; very strong, very good-humored, with plenty of kindly interest in his neighbors' affairs, and a most accurate memory for them. He was not only a most excellent tradesman, but he possessed those social qualities which are so necessary in a blacksmith, to a very high degree; for in our rank in life the blacksmith is a very important person indeed. He is owner of the very best gossip-station, after the bar of the public-house: and, consequently, if he be a good fellow (as he is pretty certain to be, though this may be partiality on my part), he is a man more often referred to, and consulted with, than the publican; for this reason: that the married women are jealous of the publican, and not so of the blacksmith. As for my father, he was umpire of the buildings,--the stopper of fights, and, sometimes, even the healer of matrimonial differences.

More than once I have known a couple come and "have it out" in my father's shop. Sometimes, during my apprenticeship, my father would send me out of the way on these occasions; would say to me, for instance, "Hallo, old man, here's Bob Chittle and his missis a-coming; cut away and help mother a bit." But at other times he would not consider it necessary for me to go, and so I used to stay, and hear it all. The woman invariably began; the man confined himself mostly to sulky contradictions. My father, and I, and the men, went on with our work; my father would throw in a soothing word wherever he could, until the woman began to cry; upon which my father, in a low, confidential growl, addressing the man as "old chap," would persuade him to go and make it up with her. And he and she, having come there for no other purpose, would do so.

My mother never assisted at this sort of scenes, whether serious or trifling. She utterly ignored the shop at such times, and was preternaturally busy in the house among her pots, and pans, and children, ostentatiously singing. When it was all over she used accidentally to catch sight of the couple, and be for one moment stricken dumb with amazement, and then burst into voluble welcome. She was supposed to know nothing at all about what had passed. Sweet mother! thy arts were simple enough.

She was a very tall woman, with square, large features, who had never, I think, been handsome. When I begin my story my mother was already the mother of nine children, and I, the eldest, was fifteen; so, if she had at any time had any beauty, it must have vanished long before; but she was handsome enough for us. When she was dressed for church, in all the colors of the rainbow, in a style which would have driven Jane Clarke out of her mind, she was always inspected by the whole family before she started, and pronounced satisfactory. And at dinner my sister Emma would perhaps say, "Law! mother did look so beautiful in church this morning; you never!"

She had a hard time of it with us. The family specialities were health, good humor, and vivacity; somewhat too much of the last among the junior members. I, Joe, and Emma, might be trusted, but all the rest were terrible pickles; the most unluckly children I ever saw. Whenever I was at work with father, and we saw a crowd coming round the corner, he would say, "Cut away, old chap, and see who it is"; for we knew it must either be one of our own little ones, or a young Chittle. If it was one of the young Chittles, I used to hold up my hand and whistle, and father used to go on with his work. But if I was silent, and in that way let father know that it was one of our own little ones, he would begin to roar out, and want to know which it was, and what he'd been up to. To which I would have to roar in return (I give you an instance only, out of many such) that it was Fred. That he had fallen off a barge under Battersea Bridge. Had been picked out by young Tom Cole. Said he liked it. Or that it was Eliza. Had wedged her head into a gas-pipe. Been took out black in the face. Said Billy Chittle had told her she wasn't game to it. These were the sort of things I had to roar out to my father, while I had the delinquent in my arms, and was carrying him or her indoors to mother; the delinquent being in a triumphant frame of mind, evidently under the impression that he had distinguished himself, and added another flower to the chaplet of the family honor.

I never saw my mother out of temper. On these, and other occasions, she would say that, Lord 'a mercy! no woman ever was teased and plagued with her children as she was (and there was a degree of truth in that). That she didn't know what would become of them (which was to a certain extent true also); that she hoped none of them would come to a bad end (in which hope I sincerely joined); and that finally, she thought that if some of them were well shook, and put to bed, it would do 'em a deal of good, and that their Emma would never love them any more. But they never cared for this sort of thing. They were not a bit afraid of mother. They were never shook; their Emma continued to love them; and, as for being put to bed, they never thought of such a thing happening to them, until they heard the rattle of brother Joe's crutch on the floor, when he came home from the night--school.

Brother Joe's crutch. Yes; our Joe was a cripple. With poor Joe, that restless vivacity to which I have called your attention above, had ended very sadly. He was one of the finest children ever seen; but, when only three years old, poor Joe stole away, and climbed up a ladder,--he slipped, when some seven or eight feet from the ground, and fell on his back, doubling one of his legs under him. The little soul fluttered between earth and heaven for some time, but at last determined to stay with us. All that science, skill, and devotion could do, was done for him at St. George's Hospital; but poor Joe was a hunchback, with one leg longer than the other, but with the limbs of a giant, and the face of a Byron.

It is a great cause of thankfulness to me, when I think that Joe inherited the gentle, patient temper of his father and mother. Even when a mere boy, I began dimly to understand that it was fortunate that Joe was good--tempered. When I and the other boys would be at rounders, and he would be looking intently and eagerly on, with his fingers twitching with nervous anxiety to get hold of the stick, shouting now to one, and now to another, by name, and now making short runs, in his excitement, on his crutch; at such times, I say, it used to come into my boy's head, that it was as well that Joe was a good-tempered fellow; and this conviction grew on me year by year, as I watched with pride and awe the great intellect unfolding, and the mighty restless ambition soaring higher and higher. Yes, it was well that Joe had learned to love in his childhood.

Joe's unfailing good humor, combined with his affliction, had a wonderful influence on us for good. His misfortune being so fearfully greater than any of our petty vexations, and his good temper being so much more unfailing than ours, he was there continually among us as an example,--an example which it was impossible not to follow to some extent; even if one had not had an angel to point to it for us.

For, in the sense of being a messenger of good, certainly my sister Emma was an angel. She was a year younger than me. She was very handsome, not very pretty, made on a large model like my mother, but with fewer angles. Perhaps the most noticeable thing about her was her voice. Whether the tone of it was natural, or whether it had acquired that tone from being used almost exclusively in cooing to, and soothing, children, I cannot say; but there was no shrillness in it: it was perfectly, nay singularly clear; but there was not a sharp note in the whole of sweet Emma's gamut.

She was very much devoted to all of us; but towards Joe her devotion was intensified. I do not assert--because I do not believe--that she loved him better than the rest of us, but from an early age she simply devoted herself to him. I did not see it at first. The first hint of it which I got was in the first year of my apprenticeship. I had come in to tea, and father had relieved me in the shop, and all our little ones had done tea and were talking nonsense, at which I began to assist. We were talking about who each of us was to marry, and what we would have for dinner on the auspicious occasion. It was arranged that I was to marry Miss de Bracy, from the Victoria Theatre, and we were to have sprats and gin-and-water; and that such a one was to marry such a one; but on one thing the little ones were agreed, that Emma was to marry Joe. When they cried out this, she raised her eyes to mine for an instant, and dropped them again with a smile. I wondered why then, but I know now.

On my fifteenth birthday I was bound to my father. I think that was nearly the happiest day of my life. The whole family was in a state of rampant pride about it. I am sure I don't know what there was to be proud of, but proud we were. Joe sat staring at me with his bright eyes, every now and then giving a sniff of profound satisfaction, or pegging out in a restless manner for a short expedition into the court. Emma remarked several times, "Lawk, only just to think about Jim!" And my younger brothers and sisters kept on saying to all their acquaintances in the street, "Our Jim is bound to father," with such a very triumphant air, that the other children resented it, and Sally Agar said something so disparaging of the blacksmith-trade in general, that our Eliza gave her a good shove; upon which Jane Agar, the elder sister, shook our Eliza, and, when Emma came out to the rescue, put her tongue out at her; which had such an effect on Emma's gentle spirit that she gave up the contest at once, and went in--doors in tears, and for the rest of the day told every friend she met, "Lawk, there, if that Jane Agar did n't take and put her tongue out at me, because their Sally shoved our Eliza, and I took and told her she had n't ought to do it": and they retailed it to other girls again; and at last it was known all over the buildings that Jane had gone and put her tongue out at Emma Burton; and it was unanimously voted that she ought to be ashamed of herself.

We were simple folk, easily made happy, even by seeing that the other girls were fond of our sister. But there was another source of happiness to us on that auspicious fifteenth birthday of mine. That day week we were to move into the great house.

Our present home was a very poor place, only a six-roomed house; and that, with nine children and another apprentice besides myself, was intolerable. Any time this year past we had seen that it was necessary to move: but there had been one hitch to our doing so,--there was no house to move into, except into a very large house which stood by itself, as it were fronting the buildings opposite our forge; which contained twenty--five rooms, some of them very large, and which was called by us, indifferently, Church Place, or Queen Elizabeth's Palace.

It had been in reality the palace of the young Earl of Essex, a very large three-storied house of old brick, with stone-mullioned windows and door--ways. Many of the windows were blind, bricked up at different times as the house descended in the social scale. The roof was singularly high, hanging somewhat far over a rich cornice, and in that roof there was a single large dormer-window at the north end.

The house had now been empty for some time, and it had always had a great attraction for us children. In the first place it was empty; in the second place, it had been inhabited by real princesses; and in the third, there was a ghost, who used to show a light in the aforementioned dormer--window the first Friday in every month.

On the summer's evenings we had been used to see it towering aloft between us and the setting sun, which filled the great room on the first floor with light, some rays of which came through into our narrow street. Mother had actually once been up in that room, and had looked out of the window westward, and seen the trees of Chelsea farm (now Cremorne Gardens). What a room that would be to play in! Joe pegged down the back-yard and back again with excitement, when he thought of it. We were going to live there, and father was going to let all the upper part in lodgings, and Cousin Reuben--