Mattie:-A Stray Volume I Part 7

Poverty of an ill aspect set in soon after the frost; crime set in soon after poverty--when the workhouses are besieged by hungry claimants for relief, the prisons are always extra full. Suffolk Street, the streets branching thitherwards to Southwark Bridge, the narrow lanes and turnings round the Queen's Bench, in the Borough Road and verging towards Union Street, were all haunted by those phantoms that had set in with the frost--there was danger in the streets as well as famine, and money was hard to earn, and hold when earned! Small shopkeepers with large families closed their shutters and locked themselves in with desolation; men out of work grew desperate--the streets were empty of the basket women and costermongers, and swarming in lieu thereof with beggars and thieves; even the police, nipped at the heart by the frost, were harder on society that stopped the way, and had little mercy even on old faces. Mattie's was an old face which stopped the way at that time--Mattie, basketless and onionless, and trying lucifers again, and essaying on Sat.u.r.day nights--when workmen's wages were paid--a song or two opposite the public-houses.

In this old fas.h.i.+on, Mattie earned a few pence at times; she was small for her age--very small--and the anxious-looking face touched those who had odd coppers to spare. But it was a task to live notwithstanding, and Mattie fought hard with the rest of the waifs and strays who had a tough battle to wage that winter time. "Luck went dead against her," as she termed it; she was barred from the market by want of capital--one lot of goods that she had speculated in never went off her hands, or rather her basket, on which they withered more and more with the frost, until they became unsaleable products--and there was no demand for lucifers or anything!

Mattie was nearly starving when the old tempter turned up in Great Suffolk Street--at the time when she was weak, and the police had been more than commonly "down on her," and she had not taken a halfpenny that day--at a time when the tempter _does_ turn up as a general pile, that is, when we are waiting very anxiously for an EXCUSE.

"What! Mattie!--Lor! the sight o' time since I set eyes on you!"

"What! Mrs. Watts!"

"What are you doing, girl?--not much for yourself, I should think," with a disparaging glance at the tattered habiliments of our heroine.

"Not much just now, Mrs. Watts--hard lines it is."

"Ah! well, it may be--you allus wanted pluck, Mattie, like your mother.

And hard lines it is just now, for those who stand nice about trifles.

What's that in your hand, gal?"

"Congreve lights."

"What! still at Congreve lights--if I shouldn't hate the werry sight and smell on 'em by this time."

"So I do," said Mattie, sullenly.

"Come home with me, and let's have a bit o' talk together, Mattie--there's a friend or two o' your age a-coming to have a little talk with me to-night."

"Don't you keep a lodging house now?"

"No--a little shop for bones and bottles and such things; and we has a party in the back parler twice a week, and something nice and hot for supper."

"A school--on your own hook?" said Mattie, quickly.

"Oh! how sharp we gets as we grows up!--but you allus was as sharp as any needle, and I was only saying to Simes but yesterday, if I could just drop on little Mattie, she'd be the werry gal to do us credit--she would."

"I've been s.h.i.+fting for myself these last two years and odd, and I got on tidy till the frost set in, and now it's--_all up_!"

"Ah!--all up--precisely so."

Mrs. Watts did not detect the tragic element in Mattie's peroration; she had sallied forth in search of her, and had found her in the streets ragged and penniless and hungry. It was worth while to speculate in Mattie now--to show her some degree of kindness--to lure her back to the old haunts, and something worse than the old life. She began her temptations, and Mattie listened and trembled--the night was cold, and she had not tasted food that day. Mrs. Watts kept her hand upon the girl, and expatiated upon the advantages she had to offer now--even attempted to draw Mattie along with her.

"Wait a bit--don't be in a hurry," said Mattie; "I'll come presently p'raps--not just now."

"Oh! I'm not so sweet on you," said Mrs. Watts, aggrieved; "come if you like--stop away if you like--it's all one to me. I'll go about my rump-steaks for supper, and you can stay here and starve, if you prefer it."

This dialogue occurred only a short distance from Mr. Wesden's shop, when Mr. Wesden was putting up the shutters in his own quiet way, with very little noise, his boy having left him at a moment's notice. Mrs.

Wesden, who had her fears for his back--Mr. W. had had a sensitive back for years--was dragging the shutters out from under the shop-board--thin slips of wood, that required not any degree of strength to manage. There were six shutters--at the third Mr. Wesden said--

"There's Mattie."

"Ah! poor girl!"

At the fifth he added--

"With an old woman that I don't like the style of very much."

Mrs. Wesden went to the door, and looked down the street at the tempter and the tempted--Mattie was under the lamp, and the face was a troubled one, on which the gas jet flickered. When the sixth shutter was up, and the iron band that secured them all firmly screwed into the door-post, the quiet couple stood side by side and watched the conflict to its abrupt conclusion. Both guessed what the subject had been--there was something of the night-bird and the gaol-bird about Mrs. Watts, that was easy of detection.

Mrs. Wesden touched her husband's arm.

"Danger, John."

"Ah!"

"And that girl has been a-going on so quietly for years, and getting her own living, and she without a father and a mother to care for her--not like our Harriet."

"No."

"And the way she brought back the money for that brooch."

"Yes--that was funny."

"I don't see the fun of it, John."

"That was good of her."

"Do you know, I've been thinking, John, we might find room for her--those boys are a great trouble to us, and if we had a girl, it might answer better to take the papers out, and she might serve in the shop."

"Serve in MY shop--good Lord!"

"Some day when we could trust her, I mean--and she could sleep with Ann; and I daresay she would come for her keep in these times. And we might be saving her--G.o.d knows from what!"

"Mrs. Wesden, you're as full of fancies as ever you can stick."

"I've a fancy to help her in these hard times, John; and when helping her won't ruin us--us who have put by now a matter of three thou----"

"Hus.h.!.+"

"And when helping her won't ruin us, but get rid of those plagues of boys, John. Fancy our Harriet in the streets like that!"

She pointed to Mattie standing alone there, still under the gas lamp, deep in thought. Mr. Wesden looked, but his lined face was expressive of little sympathy, his wife thought.

"We're hard pushed for a boy--the bill's no sooner down than up again--try a girl, John!"

"If you'll get in out of the cold, Mrs. W., I'll think of it."

Mrs. Wesden retired, and Mr. Wesden kept his place by the open door, and his quiet eyes on Mattie. He was a man who did nothing in a hurry, and whose actions were ruled by grave deliberation. He did not confess to his wife that of late years he had been interested in Mattie; watched her from under his papers in the shop-window; saw her business-like habits, her method, her briskness over her scanty wares, her cleverness even in dodging her _bete noire_ the policeman. He was a man, moreover, who went to church and read his Bible, and had many good thoughts beneath his occasional brusqueness and invariable immobility. A very quiet man, a man more than ordinarily cautious, hard to please, and still harder to rouse.

In shutting up his shop that night, he had caught one or two fragments of the dialogue, and he knew more certainly than his wife that Mattie was being tempted back to the old life. Of that life he knew everything; he had learned it piece by piece without affecting to take an interest in the matter; he even knew that Mattie had long taken a fancy--an odd fancy--to his daughter, that she often inquired about her, and her boarding-school, of Ann Packet, domestic to the house of Wesden.

He thought of Mattie's temptation, then of Mrs. Wesden's extraordinary suggestion. He was a lord of creation, and if he had a weakness it was in pooh-poohing the suggestions of his helpmate, although he adopted them in nine cases out of ten, disguising them, as he thought, by some little variation, and bringing them forward in due course as original productions of his own teeming brain.