anything more. That's your idea of a day's pleasure, is it? I call it
a day's disgrace, a day's miserable giving-up. There, go in, go in;
I'm ashamed of you all. Don't let the neighbors see you, for pity's
sake.--We keep him in the kitchen,” she continues, recurring to Frank's
long-unanswered question concerning the lost child, “because he prefers
it as being the room nearest to the closet where the cookies are. He's
taken advantage of our sympathies to refuse everything but cookies.”
“I suppose that's one of the rights of lost childhood,” comments Frank,
languidly; “there's no law that can compel him to touch even cracker.”
“Well, you'd better go down and see what _you_ can make of him. He's
driven _us_ all wild.”
So Frank descends to the region now redolent of the preparing tea, and
finds upon a chair, in the middle of the kitchen floor, a very forlorn
little figure of a boy, mutely munching a sweet-cake, while now and then
a tear steals down his cheeks and moistens the grimy traces of former
tears. He and baby are, in the mean time regarding each other with a
steadfast glare, the cook and the nurse supporting baby in this rite of
hospitality.
“Well, my little man,” says his host, “how did you get here?”
The little man, perhaps because he is heartily sick of the question, is
somewhat slow to answer that there was a fire; and that he ran after the
steamer; and a girl found him and brought him up here.
“And that's all the blessed thing you can get out of him,” says cook;
and the lost boy looks as if he felt cook to be perfectly right.
In spite of the well-meant endeavors of the household to wash him and
brush him, he is still a dreadfully travel-stained little boy, and he
is powdered in every secret crease and wrinkle by that dust of old
Charlesbridge, of which we always speak with an air of affected disgust,
and a feeling of ill-concealed pride in an abomination so strikingly
and peculiarly our own. He looks very much as if he had been following
fire-engines about the streets of our learned and pulverous suburb ever
since he could walk, and he certainly seems to feel himself in trouble
to a certain degree; but there is easily imaginable in his bearing
a conviction that after all the chief care is with others, and that,
though unhappy, he is not responsible. The principal victim of his
sorrows is also penetrated by this opinion, and after gazing forlornly
upon him for a while, asks mechanically, “What's your name?”
“Freddy,” is the laconic answer.
“Freddy--?” trying with an artful inflection to lead him on to his
surname.
“Freddy,” decidedly and conclusively.
“O, bless me! What's the name of the street your papa lives on?”
This problem is far too deep for Freddy, and he takes a bite of
sweet-cake in sign that he does not think of solving it. Frank looks at
him gloomily for a moment, and then determines that he can grapple with
the difficulty more successfully after he has had tea. “Send up the
supper, Bridget. I think, my dear,” he says, after they have sat down,
“we'd better all question our lost child when we've finished.”
So, when they have finished, they have him up in the sitting-room, and
the inquisition begins.
“Now, Freddy,” his host says, with a cheerful air of lifelong friendship
and confidence, “you know that everybody has got two names. Of course
your first name is Freddy, and it's a very pretty name. Well, I want you
to think real hard, and then tell me what your other name is, so I can
take you back to your mamma.”
At this allusion the child looks round on the circle of eager and
compassionate faces, and begins to shed tears and to wring all hearts.
“What's your name?” asks Frank, cheerfully,--“your _other_ name, you
know?”
“Freddy,” sobbed the forlorn creature.
“O good heaven! this'll never do,” groaned the chief inquisitor. “Now,
Freddy, try not to cry. What is your papa's name,--Mr.--?” with the
leading inflection as before.
“Papa,” says Freddy.
[Illustration: “They skirmish about him with every sort of query.”]
“O, that'll never do! Not Mr. Papa?”
“Yes,” persists Freddy.
“But, Freddy,” interposes Mrs. Sallie, as her husband falls back
baffled, “when ladies come to see your mamma, what do they call her?
Mrs.--?” adopting Frank's alluring inflection.
“Mrs. Mamma,” answers Freddy, confirmed in his error by this course; and
a secret dismay possesses his questioners. They skirmish about him with
every sort of query; they try to entrap him into some kind of revelation
by apparently irrelevant remarks; they plan ambuscades and surprises;
but Freddy looks vigilantly round upon them, and guards his personal
history from every approach, and seems in every way so to have the best
of it, that it is almost exasperating.
“Kindness has proved futile,” observes Frank, “and I think we ought as a
last resort, before yielding ourselves to despair, to use intimidation.
Now, Fred,” he says, with sudden and terrible severity, “what's your
father's name?”
The hapless little soul is really moved to an effort of memory by this,
and blubbers out something that proves in the end to resemble the family
name, though for the present it is merely a puzzle of unintelligible
sounds.”
“Blackman?” cries Aunt Melissa, catching desperately at these sounds.
On this, all the man and brother is roused in Freddy's bosom, and he
roars fiercely, “No! he ain't a black man! He's white!”
“I give it up,” says Frank, who has been looking for his hat. “I'm
afraid we can't make anything out of him; and I'll have to go and report
the case to the police. But, put him to bed, do, Sallie; he's dropping
with sleep.”
So he went out, of course supported morally by a sense of duty, but I am
afraid also by a sense of adventure in some degree. It is not every day
that, in so quiet a place as Charlesbridge, you can have a lost child
cast upon your sympathies; and I believe that when an appeal is not
really agonizing, we like so well to have our sympathies touched, we
favorites of the prosperous commonplace, that most of us would enter
eagerly into a pathetic case of this kind, even after a day's pleasure.
Such was certainly the mood of my friend, and he unconsciously prepared
himself for an equal interest on the part of the police; but this was
an error. The police heard his statement with all proper attention,
and wrote it in full upon the station-slate, but they showed no feeling
whatever, and behaved as if they valued a lost child no more than a
child snug at home in his own crib. They said that no doubt his parents
would be asking at the police-stations for him during the night, and,
as if my friend would otherwise have thought of putting him into the
street, they suggested that he should just keep the lost child till he
was sent for. Modestly enough Frank proposed that they should make some
inquiry for his parents, and was answered by the question whether they
could take a man off his beat for that purpose; and remembering that
beats in Charlesbridge were of such vastness that during his whole
residence there he had never yet seen a policeman on his street, he was
obliged to own to himself that his proposal was absurd. He felt the need
of reinstating himself by something more sensible, and so he said he
thought he would go down to the Port and leave word at the station
there; and the police tacitly assenting to this he went.
I who have sometimes hinted that the Square is not a centre of gayety,
or a scene of the greatest activity by day, feel it right to say that
it has some modest charms of its own on a summer's night, about the hour
when Frank passed through it, when the post-office has just been shut,
and when the different groups that haunt the place in front of the
closing shops have dwindled to the loungers fit though few who will keep
it well into the night, and may there be found, by the passenger on the
last horse-car out from Boston, wrapt in a kind of social silence,
and honorably attended by the policeman whose favored beat is in
that neighborhood. They seem a feature of the bygone village life of
Charlesbridge, and accord pleasantly with the town-pump and the public
horse-trough, and the noble elm that by night droops its boughs so
pensively, and probably dreams of its happy younger days when there were
no canker-worms in the world. Sometimes this choice company sits on the
curbing that goes round the terrace at the elm-tree's foot, and then I
envy every soul in it,--so tranquil it seems, so cool, so careless, so
morrowless. I cannot see the faces of that luxurious society, but there
I imagine is the local albino, and a certain blind man, who resorts
thither much by day, and makes a strange kind of jest of his own, with
a flicker of humor upon his sightless face, and a faith that others less
unkindly treated by nature will be able to see the point apparently not
always discernible to himself. Late at night I have a fancy that the
darkness puts him on an equality with other wits, and that he enjoys his
own brilliancy as well as any one.
At the Port station Frank was pleased and soothed by the tranquil air of
the policeman, who sat in his shirt-sleeves outside the door, and seemed
to announce, by his attitude of final disoccupation, that crimes and
misdemeanors were no more. This officer at once showed a desirable
interest in the case. He put on his blue coat that he might listen
to the whole story in a proper figure, and then he took down the main
points on the slate, and said that they would send word round to the
other stations in the city, and the boy's parents could hardly help
hearing of him that night.
Returned home, Frank gave his news, and then he and Mrs. Sallie went up
to look at the lost child as he slept. The sumptuous diet to which he
had confined himself from the first seemed to agree with him perfectly,
for he slept unbrokenly, and apparently without a consciousness of his
woes. On a chair lay his clothes, in a dusty little pathetic heap; they
were well-kept clothes, except for the wrong his wanderings had done
them, and they showed a motherly care here and there, which it was not
easy to look at with composure. The spectators of his sleep both thought
of the curious chance that had thrown this little one into their charge,
and considered that he was almost as completely a gift of the Unknown
as if he had been following a steamer in another planet, and had thence
dropped into their yard. His helplessness in accounting for himself was
as affecting as that of the sublimest metaphysician; and no learned man,
no superior intellect, no subtle inquirer among us lost children of the
divine, forgotten home, could have been less able to say how or whence
he came to be just where he found himself. We wander away and away; the
dust of the road-side gathers upon us; and when some strange shelter
receives us, we lie down to our sleep, inarticulate, and haunted with
dreams of memory, or the memory of dreams, knowing scarcely more of the
past than of the future.
“What a strange world!” sighed Mrs. Sallie; and then, as this was a
mood far too speculative for her, she recalled herself to practical life
suddenly. “If we should have to adopt this child, Frank”--“Why, bless
my soul, we're not obliged to adopt him! Even a lost child can't demand
that.”
“We shall adopt him, if they don't come for him. And now, I want to
know” (Mrs. Sallie spoke as if the adoption had been effected) “whether
we shall give him our name, or some other?”
“Well, I don't know. It's the first child I've ever adopted,” said Frank
“and upon my word, I can't say whether you have to give him a new name
or not. In fact, if I'd thought of this affair of a name, I'd never have
adopted him. It's the greatest part of the burden, and if his father
will only come for him, I'll give him up without a murmur.”
In the interval that followed the proposal of this alarming difficulty,
and while he sat and waited vaguely for whatever should be going
to happen next, Frank was not able to repress a sense of personal
resentment towards the little vagrant sleeping so carelessly there,
though at the bottom of his heart there was all imaginable tenderness
for him. In the fantastic character which, to his weariness, the day's
pleasure took on, it seemed an extraordinary unkindness of fate that
this lost child should have been kept in reserve for him after all
the rest; and he had so small consciousness of bestowing shelter and
charity, and so profound a feeling of having himself been turned out of
house and home by some surprising and potent agency, that if the lost
child had been a regiment of Fenians billeted upon him, it could not
have oppressed him more. While he remained perplexed in this perverse
sentiment of invasion and dispossession, “Hark!” said Mrs. Sallie,
“what's that?”
It was a noise of dragging and shuffling on the walk in front of the
house, and a low, hoarse whispering.
“I don't know,” said Frank, “but from the kind of pleasure I've got
out of it so far, I should say that this holiday was capable of an
earthquake before midnight.”
“Listen!”
They listened, as they must, and heard the outer darkness rehearse
a raucous dialogue between an unseen Bill and Jim, who were the more
terrible to the imagination from being so realistically named, and who
seemed to have in charge some nameless third person, a mute actor in the
invisible scene. There was doubt, which he uttered, in the mind of Jim,
whether they could get this silent comrade along much farther without
carrying him; and there was a growling assent from Bill that he _was_
pretty far gone, that was a fact, and that maybe Jim _had_ better go for
the wagon; then there were quick, retreating steps; and then there was
a profound silence, in which the audience of this strange drama sat
thrilled and speechless. The effect was not less dreadful when there
rose a dull sound, as of a helpless body rubbing against the fence, and
at last lowered heavily to the ground.
“O!” cried Mrs. Sallie. “Do go out and help. He's dying!”
But even as she spoke the noise of wheels was heard. A wagon stopped
before the door; there came a tugging and lifting, with a sound as of
crunching gravel, and then a “There!” of great relief.
“Frank!” said Mrs. Sallie very solemnly, “if you don't go out and help
those men, I'll never forgive you.”
Really, the drama had grown very impressive; it was a mystery, to say
the least; and so it must remain forever, for when Frank, infected at
last by Mrs. Sallie's faith in tragedy, opened the door and offered his
tardy services, the wagon was driven rapidly away without reply. They
never learned what it had all been; and I think that if one actually
honors mysteries, it is best not to look into them. How much finer,
after all, if you have such a thing as this happen before your door at
midnight, not to throw any light upon it! Then your probable tipsy man
cannot be proved other than a tragical presence, which you can match
with any inscrutable creation of fiction; and if you should ever come to
write a romance, as one is very liable to do in this age, there is your
unknown, a figure of strange and fearful interest, made to your hand,
and capable of being used, in or out of the body, with a very gloomy
effect.
While our friends yet trembled with this sensation, quick steps ascended
to their door, and then followed a sharp, anxious tug at the bell.
“Ah!” cried Frank, prophetically, “here's the father of our adopted
son;” and he opened the door.
The gentleman who appeared there could scarcely frame the question to
which Frank replied so cheerfully: “O yes; he's here, and snug in bed,
and fast asleep. Come up-stairs and look at him. Better let him be
till morning, and then come after him,” he added, as they looked down a
moment on the little sleeper.
“O no, I couldn't,” said the father, _con expressione_; and then he told
how he had heard of this child's whereabouts at the Port station, and
had hurried to get him, and how his mother did not know he was found
yet, and was almost wild about him. They had no idea how he had got
lost, and his own blind story was the only tale of his adventure that
ever became known.
By this time his father had got the child partly awake, and the two men
were dressing him in men's clumsy fashion; and finally they gave it up,
and rolled him in a shawl. The father lifted the slight burden, and two
small arms fell about his neck. The weary child slept again.
“How has he behaved?” asked the father.
“Like a little hero,” said Frank, “but he's been a cormorant for
cookies. I think it right to tell you, in case he shouldn't be very
brilliant to-morrow, that he wouldn't eat a bit of anything else.”
The father said he was the life of their house; and Frank said he knew
how that was,--that he had a life of the house of his own; and then the
father thanked him very simply and touchingly, and with the decent New
England self-restraint, which is doubtless so much better than any sort
of effusion. “Say good-night to the gentleman, Freddy,” he said at the
door; and Freddy with closed eyes murmured a good-night from far within
the land of dreams, and then was borne away to the house out of which
the life had wandered with his little feet.
“I don't know, Sallie,” said Frank, when he had given all the eagerly
demanded particulars about the child's father,--“I don't know whether I
should want many such holidays as this, in the course of the summer.
On the whole, I think I'd better overwork myself and not take any
relaxation, if I mean to live long. And yet I'm not sure that the day's
been altogether a failure, though all our purposes of enjoyment have
miscarried. I didn't plan to find a lost child here, when I got home,
and I'm afraid I haven't had always the most Christian feeling towards
him; but he's really the saving grace of the affair; and if this were a
little comedy I had been playing, I should turn him to account with the
jaded audience, and advancing to the foot-lights, should say, with my
hand on my waistcoat, and a neat bow, that although every hope of the
day had been disappointed, and nothing I had meant to do had been done,
yet the man who had ended at midnight by restoring a lost child to the
arms of its father, must own that, in spite of adverse fortune, he had
enjoyed A Day's Pleasure.”
[Illustration: “A gaunt figure of forlorn and curious smartness.”]
A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE
It was long past the twilight hour, which has been already mentioned as
so oppressive in suburban places, and it was even too late for visitors,
when a resident, whom I shall briefly describe as a Contributor to the
magazines, was startled by a ring at his door. As any thoughtful person
would have done upon the like occasion, he ran over his acquaintance in
his mind, speculating whether it were such or such a one, and dismissing
the whole list of improbabilities, before he laid down the book he
was reading, and answered the bell. When at last he did this, he was
rewarded by the apparition of an utter stranger on his threshold,--a
gaunt figure of forlorn and curious smartness towering far above him,
that jerked him a nod of the head, and asked if Mr. Hapford lived there.
The face which the lamp-light revealed was remarkable for a harsh
two days' growth of beard, and a single bloodshot eye; yet it was not
otherwise a sinister countenance, and there was something in the strange
presence that appealed and touched. The contributor, revolving the facts
vaguely in his mind, was not sure, after all, that it was not the man's
clothes rather than his expression that softened him toward the rugged
visage: they were so tragically cheap, and the misery of helpless
needlewomen, and the poverty and ignorance of the purchaser, were so
apparent in their shabby newness, of which they appeared still conscious
enough to have led the way to the very window, in the Semitic quarter of
the city, where they had lain ticketed, “This nobby suit for $15.”
But the stranger's manner put both his face and his clothes out of mind,
and claimed a deeper interest when, being answered that the person
for whom he asked did not live there, he set his bristling lips hard
together, and sighed heavily.
“They told me,” he said, in a hopeless way, “that he lived on this
street, and I've been to every other house. I'm very anxious to find
him, Cap'n,”--the contributor, of course, had no claim to the title with
which he was thus decorated,--“for I've a daughter living with him,
and I want to see her; I've just got home from a two years' voyage,
and”--there was a struggle of the Adam's-apple in the man's gaunt
throat--“I find she's about all there is left of my family.”
How complex is every human motive! This contributor had been lately
thinking, whenever he turned the pages of some foolish traveller,--some
empty prattler of Southern or Eastern lands, where all sensation was
long ago exhausted, and the oxygen has perished from every sentiment,
so has it been breathed and breathed again,--that nowadays the wise
adventurer sat down beside his own register and waited for incidents
to seek him out. It seemed to him that the cultivation of a patient and
receptive spirit was the sole condition needed to insure the occurrence
of all manner of surprising facts within the range of one's own personal
knowledge; that not only the Greeks were at our doors, but the fairies
and the genii, and all the people of romance, who had but to be
hospitably treated in order to develop the deepest interest of fiction,
and to become the characters of plots so ingenious that the most cunning
invention were poor beside them. I myself am not so confident of this,
and would rather trust Mr. Charles Reade, say, for my amusement than any
chance combination of events. But I should be afraid to say how much
his pride in the character of the stranger's sorrows, as proof of the
correctness of his theory, prevailed with the contributor to ask him
to come in and sit down; though I hope that some abstract impulse
of humanity, some compassionate and unselfish care for the man's
misfortunes as misfortunes, was not wholly wanting. Indeed, the helpless
simplicity with which he had confided his case might have touched
a harder heart. “Thank you,” said the poor fellow, after a moment's
hesitation. “I believe I will come in. I've been on foot all day, and
after such a long voyage it makes a man dreadfully sore to walk about
so much. Perhaps you can think of a Mr. Hapford living somewhere in the
neighborhood.”
He sat down, and, after a pondering silence, in which he had remained
with his head fallen upon his breast, “My name is Jonathan Tinker,”
he said, with the unaffected air which had already impressed the
contributor, and as if he felt that some form of introduction was
necessary, “and the girl that I want to find is Julia Tinker.” Then
he added, resuming the eventful personal history which the listener
exulted, while he regretted, to hear: “You see, I shipped first to
Liverpool, and there I heard from my family; and then I shipped again
for Hong-Kong, and after that I never heard a word: I seemed to miss
the letters everywhere. This morning, at four o'clock, I left my ship as
soon as she had hauled into the dock, and hurried up home. The house was
shut, and not a soul in it; and I didn't know what to do, and I sat down
on the doorstep to wait till the neighbors woke up, to ask them what had
become of my family. And the first one come out he told me my wife had
been dead a year and a half, and the baby I'd never seen, with her;
and one of my boys was dead; and he didn't know where the rest of the
children was, but he'd heard two of the little ones was with a family in
the city.”