The Old Curiosity Shop

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They were now in the open country; the houses were very few and
scattered at long intervals, often miles apart. Occasionally they
came upon a cluster of poor cottages, some with a chair or low
board put across the open door to keep the scrambling children from
the road, others shut up close while all the family were working in
the fields. These were often the commencement of a little village:
and after an interval came a wheelwright's shed or perhaps a
blacksmith's forge; then a thriving farm with sleepy cows lying
about the yard, and horses peering over the low wall and scampering
away when harnessed horses passed upon the road, as though in
triumph at their freedom. There were dull pigs too, turning up the
ground in search of dainty food, and grunting their monotonous
grumblings as they prowled about, or crossed each other in their
quest; plump pigeons skimming round the roof or strutting on the
eaves; and ducks and geese, far more graceful in their own conceit,
waddling awkwardly about the edges of the pond or sailing glibly on
its surface. The farm-yard passed, then came the little inn; the
humbler beer-shop; and the village tradesman's; then the lawyer's
and the parson's, at whose dread names the beer-shop trembled; the
church then peeped out modestly from a clump of trees; then there
were a few more cottages; then the cage, and pound, and not
unfrequently, on a bank by the way-side, a deep old dusty well.
Then came the trim-hedged fields on either hand, and the open road
again.

They walked all day, and slept that night at a small cottage where
beds were let to travellers. Next morning they were afoot again,
and though jaded at first, and very tired, recovered before long
and proceeded briskly forward.

They often stopped to rest, but only for a short space at a time,
and still kept on, having had but slight refreshment since the
morning. It was nearly five o'clock in the afternoon, when drawing
near another cluster of labourers' huts, the child looked wistfully
in each, doubtful at which to ask for permission to rest awhile,
and buy a draught of milk.

It was not easy to determine, for she was timid and fearful of
being repulsed. Here was a crying child, and there a noisy wife. In
this, the people seemed too poor; in that, too many. At length she
stopped at one where the family were seated round the table--
chiefly because there was an old man sitting in a cushioned chair
beside the hearth, and she thought he was a grandfather and would
feel for hers.

There were besides, the cottager and his wife, and three young
sturdy children, brown as berries. The request was no sooner
preferred, than granted. The eldest boy ran out to fetch some milk,
the second dragged two stools towards the door, and the youngest
crept to his mother's gown, and looked at the strangers from
beneath his sunburnt hand.

'God save you, master,' said the old cottager in a thin piping
voice; 'are you travelling far?'

'Yes, Sir, a long way'--replied the child; for her grandfather
appealed to her.

'From London?' inquired the old man.

The child said yes.

Ah! He had been in London many a time--used to go there often
once, with waggons. It was nigh two-and-thirty year since he had
been there last, and he did hear say there were great changes. Like
enough! He had changed, himself, since then. Two-and-thirty year
was a long time and eighty-four a great age, though there was some
he had known that had lived to very hard upon a hundred--and not
so hearty as he, neither--no, nothing like it.

'Sit thee down, master, in the elbow chair,' said the old man,
knocking his stick upon the brick floor, and trying to do so
sharply. 'Take a pinch out o' that box; I don't take much myself,
for it comes dear, but I find it wakes me up sometimes, and ye're
but a boy to me. I should have a son pretty nigh as old as you if
he'd lived, but they listed him for a so'ger--he come back home
though, for all he had but one poor leg. He always said he'd be
buried near the sun-dial he used to climb upon when he was a baby,
did my poor boy, and his words come true--you can see the place
with your own eyes; we've kept the turf up, ever since.'

He shook his head, and looking at his daughter with watery eyes,
said she needn't be afraid that he was going to talk about that,
any more. He didn't wish to trouble nobody, and if he had troubled
anybody by what he said, he asked pardon, that was all.

The milk arrived, and the child producing her little basket, and
selecting its best fragments for her grandfather, they made a
hearty meal. The furniture of the room was very homely of course--
a few rough chairs and a table, a corner cupboard with their little
stock of crockery and delf, a gaudy tea-tray, representing a lady
in bright red, walking out with a very blue parasol, a few common,
coloured scripture subjects in frames upon the wall and chimney, an
old dwarf clothes-press and an eight-day clock, with a few bright
saucepans and a kettle, comprised the whole. But everything was
clean and neat, and as the child glanced round, she felt a tranquil
air of comfort and content to which she had long been unaccustomed.

'How far is it to any town or village?' she asked of the husband.

'A matter of good five mile, my dear,' was the reply, 'but you're
not going on to-night?'

'Yes, yes, Nell,' said the old man hastily, urging her too by
signs. 'Further on, further on, darling, further away if we walk
till midnight.'

'There's a good barn hard by, master,' said the man, 'or there's
travellers' lodging, I know, at the Plow an' Harrer. Excuse me, but
you do seem a little tired, and unless you're very anxious to get
on--'

'Yes, yes, we are,' returned the old man fretfully. 'Further away,
dear Nell, pray further away.'

'We must go on, indeed,' said the child, yielding to his restless
wish. 'We thank you very much, but we cannot stop so soon. I'm
quite ready, grandfather.'

But the woman had observed, from the young wanderer's gait, that
one of her little feet was blistered and sore, and being a woman
and a mother too, she would not suffer her to go until she had
washed the place and applied some simple remedy, which she did so
carefully and with such a gentle hand--rough-grained and hard
though it was, with work--that the child's heart was too full to
admit of her saying more than a fervent 'God bless you!' nor could
she look back nor trust herself to speak, until they had left the
cottage some distance behind. When she turned her head, she saw
that the whole family, even the old grandfather, were standing in
the road watching them as they went, and so, with many waves of the
hand, and cheering nods, and on one side at least not without
tears, they parted company.

They trudged forward, more slowly and painfully than they had done
yet, for another mile or thereabouts, when they heard the sound of
wheels behind them, and looking round observed an empty cart
approaching pretty briskly. The driver on coming up to them stopped
his horse and looked earnestly at Nell.

'Didn't you stop to rest at a cottage yonder?' he said.

'Yes, sir,' replied the child.

'Ah! They asked me to look out for you,' said the man. 'I'm going
your way. Give me your hand--jump up, master.'

This was a great relief, for they were very much fatigued and could
scarcely crawl along. To them the jolting cart was a luxurious
carriage, and the ride the most delicious in the world. Nell had
scarcely settled herself on a little heap of straw in one corner,
when she fell asleep, for the first time that day.

She was awakened by the stopping of the cart, which was about to
turn up a bye-lane. The driver kindly got down to help her out, and
pointing to some trees at a very short distance before them, said
that the town lay there, and that they had better take the path
which they would see leading through the churchyard. Accordingly,
towards this spot, they directed their weary steps.

CHAPTER 16

The sun was setting when they reached the wicket-gate at which the
path began, and, as the rain falls upon the just and unjust alike,
it shed its warm tint even upon the resting-places of the dead, and
bade them be of good hope for its rising on the morrow. The church
was old and grey, with ivy clinging to the walls, and round the
porch. Shunning the tombs, it crept about the mounds, beneath which
slept poor humble men: twining for them the first wreaths they had
ever won, but wreaths less liable to wither and far more lasting in
their kind, than some which were graven deep in stone and marble,
and told in pompous terms of virtues meekly hidden for many a year,
and only revealed at last to executors and mourning legatees.

The clergyman's horse, stumbling with a dull blunt sound among the
graves, was cropping the grass; at once deriving orthodox
consolation from the dead parishioners, and enforcing last Sunday's
text that this was what all flesh came to; a lean ass who had
sought to expound it also, without being qualified and ordained,
was pricking his ears in an empty pound hard by, and looking with
hungry eyes upon his priestly neighbour.

The old man and the child quitted the gravel path, and strayed
among the tombs; for there the ground was soft, and easy to their
tired feet. As they passed behind the church, they heard voices
near at hand, and presently came on those who had spoken.

They were two men who were seated in easy attitudes upon the grass,
and so busily engaged as to be at first unconscious of intruders.
It was not difficult to divine that they were of a class of
itinerant showmen--exhibitors of the freaks of Punch--for,
perched cross-legged upon a tombstone behind them, was a figure of
that hero himself, his nose and chin as hooked and his face as
beaming as usual. Perhaps his imperturbable character was never
more strikingly developed, for he preserved his usual equable smile
notwithstanding that his body was dangling in a most uncomfortable
position, all loose and limp and shapeless, while his long peaked
cap, unequally balanced against his exceedingly slight legs,
threatened every instant to bring him toppling down.

In part scattered upon the ground at the feet of the two men, and
in part jumbled together in a long flat box, were the other persons
of the Drama. The hero's wife and one child, the hobby-horse, the
doctor, the foreign gentleman who not being familiar with the
language is unable in the representation to express his ideas
otherwise than by the utterance of the word 'Shallabalah' three
distinct times, the radical neighbour who will by no means admit
that a tin bell is an organ, the executioner, and the devil, were
all here. Their owners had evidently come to that spot to make some
needful repairs in the stage arrangements, for one of them was
engaged in binding together a small gallows with thread, while the
other was intent upon fixing a new black wig, with the aid of a
small hammer and some tacks, upon the head of the radical
neighbour, who had been beaten bald.

They raised their eyes when the old man and his young companion
were close upon them, and pausing in their work, returned their
looks of curiosity. One of them, the actual exhibitor no doubt, was
a little merry-faced man with a twinkling eye and a red nose, who
seemed to have unconsciously imbibed something of his hero's
character. The other--that was he who took the money--had rather
a careful and cautious look, which was perhaps inseparable from his
occupation also.

The merry man was the first to greet the strangers with a nod; and
following the old man's eyes, he observed that perhaps that was the
first time he had ever seen a Punch off the stage. (Punch, it may
be remarked, seemed to be pointing with the tip of his cap to a
most flourishing epitaph, and to be chuckling over it with all his
heart.)

'Why do you come here to do this?' said the old man, sitting down
beside them, and looking at the figures with extreme delight.

'Why you see,' rejoined the little man, 'we're putting up for
to-night at the public-house yonder, and it wouldn't do to let 'em
see the present company undergoing repair.'

'No!' cried the old man, making signs to Nell to listen, 'why not,
eh? why not?'

'Because it would destroy all the delusion, and take away all the
interest, wouldn't it?' replied the little man. 'Would you care a
ha'penny for the Lord Chancellor if you know'd him in private and
without his wig?---certainly not.'

'Good!' said the old man, venturing to touch one of the puppets,
and drawing away his hand with a shrill laugh. 'Are you going to
show 'em to-night? are you?'

'That is the intention, governor,' replied the other, 'and unless
I'm much mistaken, Tommy Codlin is a calculating at this minute
what we've lost through your coming upon us. Cheer up, Tommy, it
can't be much.'

The little man accompanied these latter words with a wink,
expressive of the estimate he had formed of the travellers'
finances.

To this Mr Codlin, who had a surly, grumbling manner, replied, as
he twitched Punch off the tombstone and flung him into the box,
'I don't care if we haven't lost a farden, but you're too free. If
you stood in front of the curtain and see the public's faces as I
do, you'd know human natur' better.'

'Ah! it's been the spoiling of you, Tommy, your taking to that
branch,' rejoined his companion. 'When you played the ghost in the
reg'lar drama in the fairs, you believed in everything--except
ghosts. But now you're a universal mistruster. I never see a man so
changed.'

'Never mind,' said Mr Codlin, with the air of a discontented
philosopher. 'I know better now, and p'raps I'm sorry for it.'

Turning over the figures in the box like one who knew and despised
them, Mr Codlin drew one forth and held it up for the inspection of
his friend:

'Look here; here's all this judy's clothes falling to pieces again.
You haven't got a needle and thread I suppose?'

The little man shook his head, and scratched it ruefully as he
contemplated this severe indisposition of a principal performer.
Seeing that they were at a loss, the child said timidly:

'I have a needle, Sir, in my basket, and thread too. Will you let
me try to mend it for you? I think I could do it neater than you
could.'

Even Mr Codlin had nothing to urge against a proposal so
seasonable. Nelly, kneeling down beside the box, was soon busily
engaged in her task, and accomplishing it to a miracle.

While she was thus engaged, the merry little man looked at her with
an interest which did not appear to be diminished when he glanced
at her helpless companion. When she had finished her work he
thanked her, and inquired whither they were travelling.

'N--no further to-night, I think,' said the child, looking towards
her grandfather.

'If you're wanting a place to stop at,' the man remarked, 'I should
advise you to take up at the same house with us. That's it. The
long, low, white house there. It's very cheap.'

The old man, notwithstanding his fatigue, would have remained in
the churchyard all night if his new acquaintances had remained
there too. As he yielded to this suggestion a ready and rapturous
assent, they all rose and walked away together; he keeping close to
the box of puppets in which he was quite absorbed, the merry little
man carrying it slung over his arm by a strap attached to it for
the purpose, Nelly having hold of her grandfather's hand, and Mr
Codlin sauntering slowly behind, casting up at the church tower and
neighbouring trees such looks as he was accustomed in town-practice
to direct to drawing-room and nursery windows, when seeking for a
profitable spot on which to plant the show.

The public-house was kept by a fat old landlord and landlady who
made no objection to receiving their new guests, but praised
Nelly's beauty and were at once prepossessed in her behalf. There
was no other company in the kitchen but the two showmen, and the
child felt very thankful that they had fallen upon such good
quarters. The landlady was very much astonished to learn that they
had come all the way from London, and appeared to have no little
curiosity touching their farther destination. The child parried her
inquiries as well as she could, and with no great trouble, for
finding that they appeared to give her pain, the old lady desisted.

'These two gentlemen have ordered supper in an hour's time,' she
said, taking her into the bar; 'and your best plan will be to sup
with them. Meanwhile you shall have a little taste of something
that'll do you good, for I'm sure you must want it after all you've
gone through to-day. Now, don't look after the old gentleman,
because when you've drank that, he shall have some too.'

As nothing could induce the child to leave him alone, however, or
to touch anything in which he was not the first and greatest
sharer, the old lady was obliged to help him first. When they had
been thus refreshed, the whole house hurried away into an empty
stable where the show stood, and where, by the light of a few
flaring candles stuck round a hoop which hung by a line from the
ceiling, it was to be forthwith exhibited.

And now Mr Thomas Codlin, the misanthrope, after blowing away at
the Pan's pipes until he was intensely wretched, took his station
on one side of the checked drapery which concealed the mover of the
figures, and putting his hands in his pockets prepared to reply to
all questions and remarks of Punch, and to make a dismal feint of
being his most intimate private friend, of believing in him to the
fullest and most unlimited extent, of knowing that he enjoyed day
and night a merry and glorious existence in that temple, and that
he was at all times and under every circumstance the same
intelligent and joyful person that the spectators then beheld him.
All this Mr Codlin did with the air of a man who had made up his
mind for the worst and was quite resigned; his eye slowly wandering
about during the briskest repartee to observe the effect upon the
audience, and particularly the impression made upon the landlord
and landlady, which might be productive of very important results
in connexion with the supper.

Upon this head, however, he had no cause for any anxiety, for the
whole performance was applauded to the echo, and voluntary
contributions were showered in with a liberality which testified
yet more strongly to the general delight. Among the laughter none
was more loud and frequent than the old man's. Nell's was unheard,
for she, poor child, with her head drooping on his shoulder, had
fallen asleep, and slept too soundly to be roused by any of his
efforts to awaken her to a participation in his glee.

The supper was very good, but she was too tired to eat, and yet
would not leave the old man until she had kissed him in his bed.
He, happily insensible to every care and anxiety, sat listening
with a vacant smile and admiring face to all that his new friend
said; and it was not until they retired yawning to their room, that
he followed the child up stairs.

It was but a loft partitioned into two compartments, where they
were to rest, but they were well pleased with their lodging and had
hoped for none so good. The old man was uneasy when he had lain
down, and begged that Nell would come and sit at his bedside as she
had done for so many nights. She hastened to him, and sat there
till he slept.

There was a little window, hardly more than a chink in the wall, in
her room, and when she left him, she opened it, quite wondering at
the silence. The sight of the old church, and the graves about it
in the moonlight, and the dark trees whispering among themselves,
made her more thoughtful than before. She closed the window again,
and sitting down upon the bed, thought of the life that was before them.

She had a little money, but it was very little, and when that was
gone, they must begin to beg. There was one piece of gold among it,
and an emergency might come when its worth to them would be
increased a hundred fold. It would be best to hide this coin, and
never produce it unless their case was absolutely desperate, and no
other resource was left them.

Her resolution taken, she sewed the piece of gold into her dress,
and going to bed with a lighter heart sunk into a deep slumber.

CHAPTER 17

Another bright day shining in through the small casement, and
claiming fellowship with the kindred eyes of the child, awoke her.
At sight of the strange room and its unaccustomed objects she
started up in alarm, wondering how she had been moved from the
familiar chamber in which she seemed to have fallen asleep last
night, and whither she had been conveyed. But, another glance
around called to her mind all that had lately passed, and she
sprung from her bed, hoping and trustful.

It was yet early, and the old man being still asleep, she walked
out into the churchyard, brushing the dew from the long grass with
her feet, and often turning aside into places where it grew longer
than in others, that she might not tread upon the graves. She felt
a curious kind of pleasure in lingering among these houses of the
dead, and read the inscriptions on the tombs of the good people (a
great number of good people were buried there), passing on from one
to another with increasing interest.

It was a very quiet place, as such a place should be, save for the
cawing of the rooks who had built their nests among the branches of
some tall old trees, and were calling to one another, high up in
the air. First, one sleek bird, hovering near his ragged house as
it swung and dangled in the wind, uttered his hoarse cry, quite by
chance as it would seem, and in a sober tone as though he were but
talking to himself. Another answered, and he called again, but
louder than before; then another spoke and then another; and each
time the first, aggravated by contradiction, insisted on his case
more strongly. Other voices, silent till now, struck in from boughs
lower down and higher up and midway, and to the right and left, and
from the tree-tops; and others, arriving hastily from the grey
church turrets and old belfry window, joined the clamour which rose
and fell, and swelled and dropped again, and still went on; and all
this noisy contention amidst a skimming to and fro, and lighting on
fresh branches, and frequent change of place, which satirised the
old restlessness of those who lay so still beneath the moss and
turf below, and the strife in which they had worn away their lives.

Frequently raising her eyes to the trees whence these sounds came
down, and feeling as though they made the place more quiet than
perfect silence would have done, the child loitered from grave to
grave, now stopping to replace with careful hands the bramble which
had started from some green mound it helped to keep in shape, and
now peeping through one of the low latticed windows into the
church, with its worm-eaten books upon the desks, and baize of
whitened-green mouldering from the pew sides and leaving the naked
wood to view. There were the seats where the poor old people sat,
worn spare, and yellow like themselves; the rugged font where
children had their names, the homely altar where they knelt in
after life, the plain black tressels that bore their weight on
their last visit to the cool old shady church. Everything told of
long use and quiet slow decay; the very bell-rope in the porch was
frayed into a fringe, and hoary with old age.

She was looking at a humble stone which told of a young man who had
died at twenty-three years old, fifty-five years ago, when she
heard a faltering step approaching, and looking round saw a feeble
woman bent with the weight of years, who tottered to the foot of
that same grave and asked her to read the writing on the stone. The
old woman thanked her when she had done, saying that she had had
the words by heart for many a long, long year, but could not see
them now.

'Were you his mother?' said the child.

'I was his wife, my dear.'

She the wife of a young man of three-and-twenty! Ah, true! It was
fifty-five years ago.

'You wonder to hear me say that,' remarked the old woman, shaking
her head. 'You're not the first. Older folk than you have wondered
at the same thing before now. Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn't
change us more than life, my dear.'

'Do you come here often?' asked the child.

'I sit here very often in the summer time,' she answered, 'I used
to come here once to cry and mourn, but that was a weary while ago,
bless God!'

'I pluck the daisies as they grow, and take them home,' said the
old woman after a short silence. 'I like no flowers so well as
these, and haven't for five-and-fifty years. It's a long time, and
I'm getting very old.'

Then growing garrulous upon a theme which was new to one listener
though it were but a child, she told her how she had wept and
moaned and prayed to die herself, when this happened; and how when
she first came to that place, a young creature strong in love and
grief, she had hoped that her heart was breaking as it seemed to
be. But that time passed by, and although she continued to be sad
when she came there, still she could bear to come, and so went on
until it was pain no longer, but a solemn pleasure, and a duty she
had learned to like. And now that five-and-fifty years were gone,
she spoke of the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson,
with a kind of pity for his youth, growing out of her own old age,
and an exalting of his strength and manly beauty as compared with
her own weakness and decay; and yet she spoke about him as her
husband too, and thinking of herself in connexion with him, as she
used to be and not as she was now, talked of their meeting in
another world, as if he were dead but yesterday, and she, separated
from her former self, were thinking of the happiness of that comely
girl who seemed to have died with him.