OPENS TO THE INWARD EYE THE CHASTENED JOY THAT GLOWS, WHEN THE LOST ONE
IS FOUND, IN THE SOUL OF HIM "WHOSE GRIEF WAS CALM, WHOSE HOPE WAS
DEAD."
A great additional strain had been put upon the spirit of Thomas
Wanless, by the death of Adelaide Codling, and he was becoming too weak
in body to hold to his purpose. There were nights when he returned to
his lonely lodging wishing that he might die, so great was his physical
and mental exhaustion. At other times he felt an impulse strong upon him
to go home--to "abandon his search for a time," as his inward tempter
whispered. But his will was strong, if strength of body or hope might be
weak, and he only prayed the more and clung the more to his purpose, the
more he felt tempted to turn aside. "How could I face her mother again,"
he would answer himself, "if I had not found her."
In this conflict of mind, though not of purpose, another month rolled
by, and Thomas was threatened with want of work. Fewer men were required
in the coal yards as summer came on, and already several had been
discharged. It was a dreary prospect enough, but what made it more so to
Thomas, were the unbidden flashes of almost gladness that rose in his
breast now and then, as the voice of the tempter then said--"Thomas, you
will be forced to go home." He felt himself a traitor, and inexpressibly
wicked at such moments, and would clench his hand and mutter--"Not yet
anyhow, not yet," as he strode mechanically through the streets.
At last he found her. "When hope was calm, and grief was dead" almost,
he lighted on his lost child unexpectedly, in a place where he would
never have dreamed of looking for her, had it not been for the friendly
advice of the police.
All over London there are coffee-houses, tobacco-shops, and
confectioner-looking shops, whose real use is to be haunts of vice.
Thomas had learned to know this, and his eye was always upon such as he
wandered through the streets. Perchance he might see his Sally in one of
them some night. He was crawling rather than walking along one of the
dingy lanes behind Leicester Square one evening, about eleven o'clock,
when, through the open door of a low eating-house, he heard the voice of
a woman singing. His heart gave a leap within him. Surely that was
Sally's voice. She had been a great singer in her girlhood, and the song
he heard the notes of had once been a great favourite with her. What was
it, think you? None other than that sweet sentimental ditty, "Be kind to
the loved ones at home." Strange melody to be heard in such a place.
The leap of hope in Thomas's heart was followed by a thrill of anguish
as he drew near to listen, more assured each moment that here, indeed,
he had found his daughter. And was she thinking of home then--here, at
the gate of hell. He would go and see. No one was in the outer shop, and
the door of the back room stood ajar, so that Thomas walked straight
through unchallenged. Pushing open the half-closed inner door, he paused
in amazement at the scene disclosed to him. There might have been a
score of people in that low-roofed, dingy, smoke-filled room--men and
women seated at small tables, and on one or two dilapidated benches
against the wall, some were busy eating, all had drink before them--ale,
spirits, and even wine--stuff labelled "champagne." Through the haze of
tobacco smoke, he saw several of the women with cigarettes in their
mouths. All had a reckless, more or less debauched air, and the women in
particular struck Thomas--a transitory flash though his glance was--as
wearing a look of defiance towards all that the world deemed propriety.
Men had women on their knees, or sat on the knees of women, and none
seemed to heed the song. One poor outcast woman lay huddled up on the
floor by the fire, too drunk to sit, but not too drunk to blaspheme. No
one heeded her either.
All these things Thomas saw in the first moment of vision, but he hardly
noted them then. His thoughts and his eyes were for his lost child
alone. The song did not stop at his entrance, for the singer's face was
not towards the door. So the voice guided his eye and--yes, it was she.
There she sat in the middle of the room, nearer the fire than a youthful
debauchee who sat by her with his arm round her waist. Thomas gazed a
moment, and then his whole soul went out in a cry--
"Sally, Sally, oh my pet, my child, I've found you at last," and he
advanced towards her, holding out his hands.
The song died instantly, but in its place rose a Babel of tongues.
Thomas's cry drew all eyes upon him. Involuntarily some of the less
hardened assumed airs of propriety, but the majority of the men started
in anger, and a few of the women began to laugh and jeer.
"Damn your impudence, what do you want here?" shouted a copper-faced
little wretch, who had been lying half asleep in a woman's lap near the
door.
"Get out of this," roared another, and as Thomas made no sign the abuse
grew general. The wits of the party cracked jokes over the "heavy father
doing the pathetic business," and so on, but amid the din the peasant
got close to the table, where his child sat. The instant his call
reached her ears, Sally turned a terror-struck gaze upon him, and then
buried her face in her hands. He could see she wept, for the sobs shook
her, but to his further entreaty to come away she made no response, and
he was trying to pull the table aside so as to reach her, when he was
roughly seized by the brothel keeper, who had rushed up from the kitchen
to see what the noise was about. With an oath he pulled Thomas back.
"What the devil do you want here?" he screeched. "Clear out, or d--n
you, I'll give you in custody." The peasant's garb and appearance had
enabled the experienced scoundrel to guess at once what was up.
Thomas turned sharp on his assailant, who was a fat, flabby-looking
wretch, whose face indicated a vicious career in every line and pimple.
At the moment it was lit up by an expression of elfish rage. But when
in his turn the peasant seized him with a grip of iron and flung him
away as if he had been a street cur barking at his heels, the man's face
grew nearly pale with an expression of mingled wrath and fear. The fear
kept him near the door, where he stood yelling for help, calling on
"Jim" to come and turn this intruder out, volleying oaths and
blasphemies, and finally beseeching the intruder not to ruin him, but
taking good care all the while not to summon the police.
"Jim" came at last--the "waiter" or bully of the place. He was of
stronger build than his master, and at once grabbed Thomas by the
collar, purposing to turn him out. But Thomas was endowed with heroic
strength in that hour, and three such men would not have driven him from
the place. Wrenching himself round, he took his new assailant by the
throat, and dashed him back against his master with such force that they
both rolled over in the narrow doorway. This feat tickled the company
immensely, and they fell to clattering with pewter pots and glasses, and
to shouting in derision as encouragement.
Probably Thomas in the end might have been badly beaten by the fiends
among whom he had fallen, but from that his daughter saved him. Roused,
perhaps, at the sight of the unholy hands laid upon her father, and
sickened by the foul jibes of men and women around her, she sprang to
her feet, and, pushing round the end of the table where she sat, rushed
between the combatants, and flung herself on her father's bosom, in a
passion of weeping.
"Do not get yourself hurt for me," she sobbed, "go away and leave me.
I'm not worth caring for any more."
Thomas answered by clasping her closer to his bosom, and then putting
his arm in hers, he led her from the house, none daring to say him nay.
Oaths, shrieks of hysterical laughter, and obscenities followed them as
they went, but the look on the peasant's face, and the remembrance of
his strength of arm, were enough to protect his daughter and him from
further ill-usage.
"Thanks be to God I've found ye, my lass; found ye, never to let ye out
o' my sight again in this world," Thomas murmured when he found himself
alone in the street with his long-lost one, and there welled up in him a
holy joy which was unutterable.
His daughter hung her head, and answered not, but she suffered him to
lead her to his lodging. A 'bus took them to the head of Portland Road,
and thence they walked. It was past midnight before they got home, and
all the house was silent; but Thomas gave his daughter his bedroom, and
groped his way to the parlour, where he hoped to get a sleep in an easy
chair--first prudently turning the key in Sarah's door, to give her no
room for untimely repentance.
There was no sleep for his eyelids that night. The cold alone might have
kept him awake in any case; but he was too excited to feel it as other
than a stimulus to his thoughts. Past and future rolled before him--his
daughter lost, joy at her discovery, pain at the life she had led. The
grey dawn found him fevered with his thoughts, shivering in body,
burning at the heart. Nevertheless, he had resolved to go home that day
by the early train; and with that view he roused the landlady to beg an
early breakfast for himself and his child. "I have found my lass," was
all he ventured to explain, and the woman answered she was glad to hear
it. In his eagerness to go home he forgot to tell the coal agent for
whom he worked, and forgot also to draw four days' wages due to him--did
not remember till the day after he and his daughter reached Ashbrook.
When Sarah, in answer to her father's summons, came down to breakfast in
the front kitchen, it was easy to see that she also had slept little.
Her eyes were swollen and red, and she could not eat anything. A cup of
hot tea she swallowed, and that was all. Her father spoke to her in the
old familiar Warwickshire dialect, and urged her to "eat summat, as she
had a long day's journey afoore her," but Sally could not, and to all he
spoke answered only in monosyllables. Not until he began to talk
directly of going "home" did she wake to anything like animation. The
very sound of the word made her weep, and her father led her away to his
own room to reason with her.
"Oh, don't ask me to go back," she cried; "I cannot, I cannot; I'm fit
only to die."
But her father soothed her, talked to her of her lonely mother watching
for her coming, praying to see her child's face again before she died;
and when that did not move her, he bade her think of her little babe she
had left last year. "How could ye like her to grow up a-lookin' for a
mother, Sally, lass, an' not findin' one?" That seemed to touch her
more than all his assurances that no one would ever reproach her or cry
shame upon her in her own father's house. Still she yielded not, but
cried out that she was lost to them all, to every good in this world.
"You might not blame me openly," she said, "but I would have the feelin'
in my heart all the time that I was a shame an' disgrace to you, and
that pity alone kept you from telling me so. No, no, no, I will not go
back to Ashbrook."
"Look here, then, Sally," said her father at last, "if you wonnot go
back, I'll stay by you. My mind's made up. I'll never lose sight of ye
again, not while I'm alive; and if you wonnot go home wi' me, I must
bide wi' you. There is no other way. It will kill your mother, and it
will kill me, an' leave your child an outcast orphan, but ye are
determined, an' it must e'en be so."
This staggered her, but still she yielded not, thinking, doubtless, that
her father meant not what he said, till at last, in despair, he told her
the story of Adelaide Codling. He spoke of her despairing looks, her
rapid descent from wild gaiety to death, of her last farewell to this
world, of her lonely grave, and her poor, old, broken-hearted father,
and wound up by asking--"Will you face an end like that, Sally? Dare you
do it, my child? When I saw her jump on the bridge I thought it was
you," he added, with a look that went straight to his daughter's heart.
The story had at first been listened to in dogged silence. Then the
girl's tears began to flow, at first silently, at last with convulsive
sobs. Her father held out his hand as he ceased speaking, and she, moved
so deeply as to be lifted out of herself, laid both her hands in his,
and said--
"Father, I'll do as ye wish. I'll go home wi' ye." He drew her down on
her knees beside him, and prayed fervently for mercy and forgiveness for
them both. "But my heart was too full to beg," he afterwards said to me.
"I could only give God thanks for his infinite mercy in restoring my
lost child."
They missed the morning train, and had to wait till the evening. In the
interval Sarah had stripped off the tawdry ornaments she wore, and
plucked a gaudy feather from her hat--pleasant incidents which her
father noted. In the middle of the night almost they reached the old
cottage in Ashbrook, and both were glad that the darkness hid them from
every eye save God's.