I.
"Guard! What place is this?"
"Mugby Junction, sir."
"A windy place!"
"Yes, it mostly is, sir."
"And looks comfortless indeed!"
"Yes, it generally does, sir."
"Is it a rainy night still?"
"Pours, sir."
"Open the door. I'll get out."
"You'll have, sir," said the guard, glistening with drops of wet, and
looking at the tearful face of his watch by the light of his lantern as
the traveller descended, "three minutes here."
"More, I think.--For I am not going on."
"Thought you had a through ticket, sir?"
"So I have, but I shall sacrifice the rest of it. I want my luggage."
"Please to come to the van and point it out, sir. Be good enough to look
very sharp, sir. Not a moment to spare."
The guard hurried to the luggage van, and the traveller hurried after
him. The guard got into it, and the traveller looked into it.
"Those two large black portmanteaus in the corner where your light
shines. Those are mine."
"Name upon 'em, sir?"
"Barbox Brothers."
"Stand clear, sir, if you please. One. Two. Right!"
Lamp waved. Signal lights ahead already changing. Shriek from engine.
Train gone.
"Mugby Junction!" said the traveller, pulling up the woollen muffler
round his throat with both hands. "At past three o'clock of a
tempestuous morning! So!"
He spoke to himself. There was no one else to speak to. Perhaps, though
there had been any one else to speak to, he would have preferred to speak
to himself. Speaking to himself he spoke to a man within five years of
fifty either way, who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire; a
man of pondering habit, brooding carriage of the head, and suppressed
internal voice; a man with many indications on him of having been much
alone.
He stood unnoticed on the dreary platform, except by the rain and by the
wind. Those two vigilant assailants made a rush at him. "Very well,"
said he, yielding. "It signifies nothing to me to what quarter I turn my
face."
Thus, at Mugby Junction, at past three o'clock of a tempestuous morning,
the traveller went where the weather drove him.
Not but what he could make a stand when he was so minded, for, coming to
the end of the roofed shelter (it is of considerable extent at Mugby
Junction), and looking out upon the dark night, with a yet darker spirit-
wing of storm beating its wild way through it, he faced about, and held
his own as ruggedly in the difficult direction as he had held it in the
easier one. Thus, with a steady step, the traveller went up and down, up
and down, up and down, seeking nothing and finding it.
A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the black
hours of the four-and-twenty. Mysterious goods trains, covered with
palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves
guiltily away from the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if their
freight had come to a secret and unlawful end. Half-miles of coal
pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping when
they stop, backing when they back. Red-hot embers showering out upon the
ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturing fires
were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds
invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their
suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the
drooping beasts with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths
too: at least they have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from their
lips. Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white
characters. An earthquake, accompanied with thunder and lightning, going
up express to London. Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in
possession, lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with
its robe drawn over its head, like Caesar.
Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train
went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life.
From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here
it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him, and passing away
into obscurity. Here mournfully went by a child who had never had a
childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense
of his namelessness, coupled to a man the enforced business of whose best
years had been distasteful and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful
friend, dragging after him a woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a
clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim
disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of
a solitary and unhappy existence.
"--Yours, sir?"
The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had been
staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhaps the
chance appropriateness, of the question.
"Oh! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those two
portmanteaus are mine. Are you a Porter?"
"On Porter's wages, sir. But I am Lamps."
The traveller looked a little confused.
"Who did you say you are?"
"Lamps, sir," showing an oily cloth in his hand, as farther explanation.
"Surely, surely. Is there any hotel or tavern here?"
"Not exactly here, sir. There is a Refreshment Room here, but--" Lamps,
with a mighty serious look, gave his head a warning roll that plainly
added--"but it's a blessed circumstance for you that it's not open."
"You couldn't recommend it, I see, if it was available?"
"Ask your pardon, sir. If it was--?"
"Open?"
"It ain't my place, as a paid servant of the company, to give my opinion
on any of the company's toepics,"--he pronounced it more like
toothpicks,--"beyond lamp-ile and cottons," returned Lamps in a
confidential tone; "but, speaking as a man, I wouldn't recommend my
father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he'd be
treated at the Refreshment Room. Not speaking as a man, no, I would
_not_."
The traveller nodded conviction. "I suppose I can put up in the town?
There is a town here?" For the traveller (though a stay-at-home compared
with most travellers) had been, like many others, carried on the steam
winds and the iron tides through that Junction before, without having
ever, as one might say, gone ashore there.
"Oh yes, there's a town, sir! Anyways, there's town enough to put up in.
But," following the glance of the other at his luggage, "this is a very
dead time of the night with us, sir. The deadest time. I might a'most
call it our deadest and buriedest time."
"No porters about?"
"Well, sir, you see," returned Lamps, confidential again, "they in
general goes off with the gas. That's how it is. And they seem to have
overlooked you, through your walking to the furder end of the platform.
But, in about twelve minutes or so, she may be up."
"Who may be up?"
"The three forty-two, sir. She goes off in a sidin' till the Up X
passes, and then she"--here an air of hopeful vagueness pervaded
Lamps--"does all as lays in her power."
"I doubt if I comprehend the arrangement."
"I doubt if anybody do, sir. She's a Parliamentary, sir. And, you see,
a Parliamentary, or a Skirmishun--"
"Do you mean an Excursion?"
"That's it, sir.--A Parliamentary or a Skirmishun, she mostly _does_ go
off into a sidin'. But, when she _can_ get a chance, she's whistled out
of it, and she's whistled up into doin' all as,"--Lamps again wore the
air of a highly sanguine man who hoped for the best,--"all as lays in her
power."
He then explained that the porters on duty, being required to be in
attendance on the Parliamentary matron in question, would doubtless turn
up with the gas. In the meantime, if the gentleman would not very much
object to the smell of lamp-oil, and would accept the warmth of his
little room--The gentleman, being by this time very cold, instantly
closed with the proposal.
A greasy little cabin it was, suggestive, to the sense of smell, of a
cabin in a Whaler. But there was a bright fire burning in its rusty
grate, and on the floor there stood a wooden stand of newly trimmed and
lighted lamps, ready for carriage service. They made a bright show, and
their light, and the warmth, accounted for the popularity of the room, as
borne witness to by many impressions of velveteen trousers on a form by
the fire, and many rounded smears and smudges of stooping velveteen
shoulders on the adjacent wall. Various untidy shelves accommodated a
quantity of lamps and oil-cans, and also a fragrant collection of what
looked like the pocket-handkerchiefs of the whole lamp family.
As Barbox Brothers (so to call the traveller on the warranty of his
luggage) took his seat upon the form, and warmed his now ungloved hands
at the fire, he glanced aside at a little deal desk, much blotched with
ink, which his elbow touched. Upon it were some scraps of coarse paper,
and a superannuated steel pen in very reduced and gritty circumstances.
From glancing at the scraps of paper, he turned involuntarily to his
host, and said, with some roughness:
"Why, you are never a poet, man?"
Lamps had certainly not the conventional appearance of one, as he stood
modestly rubbing his squab nose with a handkerchief so exceedingly oily,
that he might have been in the act of mistaking himself for one of his
charges. He was a spare man of about the Barbox Brothers time of life,
with his features whimsically drawn upward as if they were attracted by
the roots of his hair. He had a peculiarly shining transparent
complexion, probably occasioned by constant oleaginous application; and
his attractive hair, being cut short, and being grizzled, and standing
straight up on end as if it in its turn were attracted by some invisible
magnet above it, the top of his head was not very unlike a lamp-wick.
"But, to be sure, it's no business of mine," said Barbox Brothers. "That
was an impertinent observation on my part. Be what you like."
"Some people, sir," remarked Lamps in a tone of apology, "are sometimes
what they don't like."
"Nobody knows that better than I do," sighed the other. "I have been
what I don't like, all my life."
"When I first took, sir," resumed Lamps, "to composing little
Comic-Songs--like--"
Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour.
"--To composing little Comic-Songs-like--and what was more hard--to
singing 'em afterwards," said Lamps, "it went against the grain at that
time, it did indeed."
Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps's eye, Barbox
Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and
put a foot on the top bar. "Why did you do it, then?" he asked after a
short pause; abruptly enough, but in a softer tone. "If you didn't want
to do it, why did you do it? Where did you sing them? Public-house?"
To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: "Bedside."
At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby
Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes.
"She's got up!" Lamps announced, excited. "What lays in her power is
sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it's laid in her power to get up
to-night, by George!"
The legend "Barbox Brothers," in large white letters on two black
surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent
street, and, when the owner of the legend had shivered on the pavement
half an hour, what time the porter's knocks at the Inn Door knocked up
the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the close
air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed
that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.
II.
"You remember me, Young Jackson?"
"What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was
you who told me that was my name. It was you who told me that on every
twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called
a birthday. I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!"
"What am I like, Young Jackson?"
"You are like a blight all through the year to me. You hard-lined, thin-
lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on. You are like
the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things, for you
make me abhor them."
"You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In another voice from another
quarter.
"Most gratefully, sir. You were the ray of hope and prospering ambition
in my life. When I attended your course, I believed that I should come
to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy--even though I was still
the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate and drank
in silence and constraint with the mask before me, every day. As I had
done every, every, every day, through my school-time and from my earliest
recollection."
"What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
"You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to
reveal herself to me. I hear you again, as one of the hushed crowd of
young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and
you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in them."
"You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In a grating voice from quite
another quarter.
"Too well. You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and
announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed. You
showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox Brothers.
(When _they_ were, if they ever were, is unknown to me; there was nothing
of them but the name when I bent to the oar.) You told me what I was to
do, and what to be paid; you told me afterwards, at intervals of years,
when I was to sign for the Firm, when I became a partner, when I became
the Firm. I know no more of it, or of myself."
"What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
"You are like my father, I sometimes think. You are hard enough and cold
enough so to have brought up an acknowledged son. I see your scanty
figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but you, too,
wear a wax mask to your death. You never by a chance remove it--it never
by a chance falls off--and I know no more of you."
Throughout this dialogue, the traveller spoke to himself at his window in
the morning, as he had spoken to himself at the Junction overnight. And
as he had then looked in the darkness, a man who had turned grey too
soon, like a neglected fire: so he now looked in the sun-light, an ashier
grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out.
The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of
the Public Notary and bill-broking tree. It had gained for itself a
griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and the reputation
had stuck to it and to him. As he had imperceptibly come into possession
of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard Street, on whose
grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years
daily interposed itself between him and the sky, so he had insensibly
found himself a personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential
to screw tight to every transaction in which he engaged, whose word was
never to be taken without his attested bond, whom all dealers with openly
set up guards and wards against. This character had come upon him
through no act of his own. It was as if the original Barbox had
stretched himself down upon the office floor, and had thither caused to
be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a
metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him. The discovery--aided in
its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the
deceit of the only friend he had ever made: who eloped from him to be
married together--the discovery, so followed up, completed what his
earliest rearing had begun. He shrank, abashed, within the form of
Barbox, and lifted up his head and heart no more.
But he did at last effect one great release in his condition. He broke
the oar he had plied so long, and he scuttled and sank the galley. He
prevented the gradual retirement of an old conventional business from
him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it. With enough to live
on (though, after all, with not too much), he obliterated the firm of
Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-Office Directory and the face
of the earth, leaving nothing of it but its name on two portmanteaus.
"For one must have some name in going about, for people to pick up," he
explained to Mugby High Street, through the Inn window, "and that name at
least was real once. Whereas, Young Jackson!--Not to mention its being a
sadly satirical misnomer for Old Jackson."
He took up his hat and walked out, just in time to see, passing along on
the opposite side of the way, a velveteen man, carrying his day's dinner
in a small bundle that might have been larger without suspicion of
gluttony, and pelting away towards the Junction at a great pace.
"There's Lamps!" said Barbox Brothers. "And by the bye--"
Ridiculous, surely, that a man so serious, so self-contained, and not yet
three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should stand rubbing
his chin in the street, in a brown study about Comic Songs.
"Bedside?" said Barbox Brothers testily. "Sings them at the bedside? Why
at the bedside, unless he goes to bed drunk? Does, I shouldn't wonder.
But it's no business of mine. Let me see. Mugby Junction, Mugby
Junction. Where shall I go next? As it came into my head last night
when I woke from an uneasy sleep in the carriage and found myself here, I
can go anywhere from here. Where shall I go? I'll go and look at the
Junction by daylight. There's no hurry, and I may like the look of one
Line better than another."
But there were so many Lines. Gazing down upon them from a bridge at the
Junction, it was as if the concentrating Companies formed a great
Industrial Exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spiders that
spun iron. And then so many of the Lines went such wonderful ways, so
crossing and curving among one another, that the eye lost them. And then
some of them appeared to start with the fixed intention of going five
hundred miles, and all of a sudden gave it up at an insignificant
barrier, or turned off into a workshop. And then others, like
intoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and surprisingly slued
round and came back again. And then others were so chock-full of trucks
of coal, others were so blocked with trucks of casks, others were so
gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart for wheeled
objects like immense iron cotton-reels: while others were so bright and
clear, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashes and idle
wheelbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air (looking much like
their masters on strike), that there was no beginning, middle, or end to
the bewilderment.
Barbox Brothers stood puzzled on the bridge, passing his right hand
across the lines on his forehead, which multiplied while he looked down,
as if the railway Lines were getting themselves photographed on that
sensitive plate. Then was heard a distant ringing of bells and blowing
of whistles. Then, puppet-looking heads of men popped out of boxes in
perspective, and popped in again. Then, prodigious wooden razors, set up
on end, began shaving the atmosphere. Then, several locomotive engines
in several directions began to scream and be agitated. Then, along one
avenue a train came in. Then, along another two trains appeared that
didn't come in, but stopped without. Then, bits of trains broke off.
Then, a struggling horse became involved with them. Then, the
locomotives shared the bits of trains, and ran away with the whole.
"I have not made my next move much clearer by this. No hurry. No need
to make up my mind to-day, or to-morrow, nor yet the day after. I'll
take a walk."
It fell out somehow (perhaps he meant it should) that the walk tended to
the platform at which he had alighted, and to Lamps's room. But Lamps
was not in his room. A pair of velveteen shoulders were adapting
themselves to one of the impressions on the wall by Lamps's fireplace,
but otherwise the room was void. In passing back to get out of the
station again, he learnt the cause of this vacancy, by catching sight of
Lamps on the opposite line of railway, skipping along the top of a train,
from carriage to carriage, and catching lighted namesakes thrown up to
him by a coadjutor.
"He is busy. He has not much time for composing or singing Comic Songs
this morning, I take it."
The direction he pursued now was into the country, keeping very near to
the side of one great Line of railway, and within easy view of others. "I
have half a mind,"' he said, glancing around, "to settle the question
from this point, by saying, 'I'll take this set of rails, or that, or
t'other, and stick to it.' They separate themselves from the confusion,
out here, and go their ways."
Ascending a gentle hill of some extent, he came to a few cottages. There,
looking about him as a very reserved man might who had never looked about
him in his life before, he saw some six or eight young children come
merrily trooping and whooping from one of the cottages, and disperse. But
not until they had all turned at the little garden-gate, and kissed their
hands to a face at the upper window: a low window enough, although the
upper, for the cottage had but a story of one room above the ground.
Now, that the children should do this was nothing; but that they should
do this to a face lying on the sill of the open window, turned towards
them in a horizontal position, and apparently only a face, was something
noticeable. He looked up at the window again. Could only see a very
fragile, though a very bright face, lying on one cheek on the
window-sill. The delicate smiling face of a girl or woman. Framed in
long bright brown hair, round which was tied a light blue band or fillet,
passing under the chin.
He walked on, turned back, passed the window again, shyly glanced up
again. No change. He struck off by a winding branch-road at the top of
the hill--which he must otherwise have descended--kept the cottages in
view, worked his way round at a distance so as to come out once more into
the main road, and be obliged to pass the cottages again. The face still
lay on the window-sill, but not so much inclined towards him. And now
there were a pair of delicate hands too. They had the action of
performing on some musical instrument, and yet it produced no sound that
reached his ears.
"Mugby Junction must be the maddest place in England," said Barbox
Brothers, pursuing his way down the hill. "The first thing I find here
is a Railway Porter who composes comic songs to sing at his bedside. The
second thing I find here is a face, and a pair of hands playing a musical
instrument that _don't_ play!"
The day was a fine bright day in the early beginning of November, the air
was clear and inspiriting, and the landscape was rich in beautiful
colours. The prevailing colours in the court off Lombard Street, London
city, had been few and sombre. Sometimes, when the weather elsewhere was
very bright indeed, the dwellers in those tents enjoyed a pepper-and-salt-
coloured day or two, but their atmosphere's usual wear was slate or snuff
coloured.
He relished his walk so well that he repeated it next day. He was a
little earlier at the cottage than on the day before, and he could hear
the children upstairs singing to a regular measure, and clapping out the
time with their hands.
"Still, there is no sound of any musical instrument," he said, listening
at the corner, "and yet I saw the performing hands again as I came by.
What are the children singing? Why, good Lord, they can never be singing
the multiplication table?"
They were, though, and with infinite enjoyment. The mysterious face had
a voice attached to it, which occasionally led or set the children right.
Its musical cheerfulness was delightful. The measure at length stopped,
and was succeeded by a murmuring of young voices, and then by a short
song which he made out to be about the current month of the year, and
about what work it yielded to the labourers in the fields and farmyards.
Then there was a stir of little feet, and the children came trooping and
whooping out, as on the previous day. And again, as on the previous day,
they all turned at the garden-gate, and kissed their hands--evidently to
the face on the window-sill, though Barbox Brothers from his retired post
of disadvantage at the corner could not see it.
But, as the children dispersed, he cut off one small straggler--a brown-
faced boy with flaxen hair--and said to him:
"Come here, little one. Tell me, whose house is that?"
The child, with one swarthy arm held up across his eyes, half in shyness,
and half ready for defence, said from behind the inside of his elbow:
"Phoebe's."
"And who," said Barbox Brothers, quite as much embarrassed by his part in
the dialogue as the child could possibly be by his, "is Phoebe?"
To which the child made answer: "Why, Phoebe, of course."
The small but sharp observer had eyed his questioner closely, and had
taken his moral measure. He lowered his guard, and rather assumed a tone
with him: as having discovered him to be an unaccustomed person in the
art of polite conversation.
"Phoebe," said the child, "can't be anybobby else but Phoebe. Can she?"
"No, I suppose not."
"Well," returned the child, "then why did you ask me?"
Deeming it prudent to shift his ground, Barbox Brothers took up a new
position.
"What do you do there? Up there in that room where the open window is.
What do you do there?"
"Cool," said the child.
"Eh?"
"Co-o-ol," the child repeated in a louder voice, lengthening out the word
with a fixed look and great emphasis, as much as to say: "What's the use
of your having grown up, if you're such a donkey as not to understand
me?"
"Ah! School, school," said Barbox Brothers. "Yes, yes, yes. And Phoebe
teaches you?"
The child nodded.
"Good boy."
"Tound it out, have you?" said the child.
"Yes, I have found it out. What would you do with twopence, if I gave it
you?"
"Pend it."
The knock-down promptitude of this reply leaving him not a leg to stand
upon, Barbox Brothers produced the twopence with great lameness, and
withdrew in a state of humiliation.
But, seeing the face on the window-sill as he passed the cottage, he
acknowledged its presence there with a gesture, which was not a nod, not
a bow, not a removal of his hat from his head, but was a diffident
compromise between or struggle with all three. The eyes in the face
seemed amused, or cheered, or both, and the lips modestly said: "Good-day
to you, sir."
"I find I must stick for a time to Mugby Junction," said Barbox Brothers
with much gravity, after once more stopping on his return road to look at
the Lines where they went their several ways so quietly. "I can't make
up my mind yet which iron road to take. In fact, I must get a little
accustomed to the Junction before I can decide."
So, he announced at the Inn that he was "going to stay on for the
present," and improved his acquaintance with the Junction that night, and
again next morning, and again next night and morning: going down to the
station, mingling with the people there, looking about him down all the
avenues of railway, and beginning to take an interest in the incomings
and outgoings of the trains. At first, he often put his head into
Lamps's little room, but he never found Lamps there. A pair or two of
velveteen shoulders he usually found there, stooping over the fire,
sometimes in connection with a clasped knife and a piece of bread and
meat; but the answer to his inquiry, "Where's Lamps?" was, either that he
was "t'other side the line," or, that it was his off-time, or (in the
latter case) his own personal introduction to another Lamps who was not
his Lamps. However, he was not so desperately set upon seeing Lamps now,
but he bore the disappointment. Nor did he so wholly devote himself to
his severe application to the study of Mugby Junction as to neglect
exercise. On the contrary, he took a walk every day, and always the same
walk. But the weather turned cold and wet again, and the window was
never open.
III.
At length, after a lapse of some days, there came another streak of fine
bright hardy autumn weather. It was a Saturday. The window was open,
and the children were gone. Not surprising, this, for he had patiently
watched and waited at the corner until they _were_ gone.
"Good-day," he said to the face; absolutely getting his hat clear off his
head this time.
"Good-day to you, sir."
"I am glad you have a fine sky again to look at."
"Thank you, sir. It is kind if you."
"You are an invalid, I fear?"
"No, sir. I have very good health."
"But are you not always lying down?"
"Oh yes, I am always lying down, because I cannot sit up! But I am not
an invalid."
The laughing eyes seemed highly to enjoy his great mistake.
"Would you mind taking the trouble to come in, sir? There is a beautiful
view from this window. And you would see that I am not at all ill--being
so good as to care."
It was said to help him, as he stood irresolute, but evidently desiring
to enter, with his diffident hand on the latch of the garden-gate. It
did help him, and he went in.
The room upstairs was a very clean white room with a low roof. Its only
inmate lay on a couch that brought her face to a level with the window.
The couch was white too; and her simple dress or wrapper being light
blue, like the band around her hair, she had an ethereal look, and a
fanciful appearance of lying among clouds. He felt that she
instinctively perceived him to be by habit a downcast taciturn man; it
was another help to him to have established that understanding so easily,
and got it over.
There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touched her
hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch.
"I see now," he began, not at all fluently, "how you occupy your hand.
Only seeing you from the path outside, I thought you were playing upon
something."
She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace. A
lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changes of
her hands upon it, as she worked, had given them the action he had
misinterpreted.
"That is curious," she answered with a bright smile. "For I often fancy,
myself, that I play tunes while I am at work."
"Have you any musical knowledge?"
She shook her head.
"I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, which could be
made as handy to me as my lace-pillow. But I dare say I deceive myself.
At all events, I shall never know."
"You have a musical voice. Excuse me; I have heard you sing."
"With the children?" she answered, slightly colouring. "Oh yes. I sing
with the dear children, if it can be called singing."
Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazarded
the speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learned
in new systems of teaching them?
"Very fond of them," she said, shaking her head again; "but I know
nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure
it gives me when they learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars
sing some of their lessons has led you so far astray as to think me a
grand teacher? Ah! I thought so! No, I have only read and been told
about that system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them
so like the merry Robins they are, that I took up with it in my little
way. You don't need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir," she
added with a glance at the small forms and round the room.
All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow. As they still
continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in
the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of
observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her
transparent face and large bright brown eyes was, not that they were
passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful.
Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have
besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere
compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an
impertinence.
He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directed his
towards the prospect, saying: "Beautiful, indeed!"
"Most beautiful, sir. I have sometimes had a fancy that I would like to
sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erect head. But what a
foolish fancy that would be to encourage! It cannot look more lovely to
any one than it does to me."
Her eyes were turned to it, as she spoke, with most delighted admiration
and enjoyment. There was not a trace in it of any sense of deprivation.
"And those threads of railway, with their puffs of smoke and steam
changing places so fast, make it so lively for me," she went on. "I
think of the number of people who can go where they wish, on their
business, or their pleasure; I remember that the puffs make signs to me
that they are actually going while I look; and that enlivens the prospect
with abundance of company, if I want company. There is the great
Junction, too. I don't see it under the foot of the hill, but I can very
often hear it, and I always know it is there. It seems to join me, in a
way, to I don't know how many places and things that I shall never see."
With an abashed kind of idea that it might have already joined himself to
something he had never seen, he said constrainedly: "Just so."
"And so you see, sir," pursued Phoebe, "I am not the invalid you thought
me, and I am very well off indeed."
"You have a happy disposition," said Barbox Brothers: perhaps with a
slight excusatory touch for his own disposition.
"Ah! But you should know my father," she replied. "His is the happy
disposition!--Don't mind, sir!" For his reserve took the alarm at a step
upon the stairs, and he distrusted that he would be set down for a
troublesome intruder. "This is my father coming."
The door opened, and the father paused there.
"Why, Lamps!" exclaimed Barbox Brothers, starting from his chair. "How
do you do, Lamps?"
To which Lamps responded: "The gentleman for Nowhere! How do you DO,
sir?"
And they shook hands, to the greatest admiration and surprise of Lamp's
daughter.
"I have looked you up half-a-dozen times since that night," said Barbox
Brothers, "but have never found you."
"So I've heerd on, sir, so I've heerd on," returned Lamps. "It's your
being noticed so often down at the Junction, without taking any train,
that has begun to get you the name among us of the gentleman for Nowhere.
No offence in my having called you by it when took by surprise, I hope,
sir?"
"None at all. It's as good a name for me as any other you could call me
by. But may I ask you a question in the corner here?"
Lamps suffered himself to be led aside from his daughter's couch by one
of the buttons of his velveteen jacket.
"Is this the bedside where you sing your songs?"
Lamps nodded.
The gentleman for Nowhere clapped him on the shoulder, and they faced
about again.
"Upon my word, my dear," said Lamps then to his daughter, looking from
her to her visitor, "it is such an amaze to me, to find you brought
acquainted with this gentleman, that I must (if this gentleman will
excuse me) take a rounder."
Mr. Lamps demonstrated in action what this meant, by pulling out his oily
handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, and giving himself an
elaborate smear, from behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the
forehead, and down the other cheek to behind his left ear. After this
operation he shone exceedingly.
"It's according to my custom when particular warmed up by any agitation,
sir," he offered by way of apology. "And really, I am throwed into that
state of amaze by finding you brought acquainted with Phoebe, that I--that
I think I will, if you'll excuse me, take another rounder." Which he
did, seeming to be greatly restored by it.
They were now both standing by the side of her couch, and she was working
at her lace-pillow. "Your daughter tells me," said Barbox Brothers,
still in a half-reluctant shamefaced way, "that she never sits up."
"No, sir, nor never has done. You see, her mother (who died when she was
a year and two months old) was subject to very bad fits, and as she had
never mentioned to me that she _was_ subject to fits, they couldn't be
guarded against. Consequently, she dropped the baby when took, and this
happened."
"It was very wrong of her," said Barbox Brothers with a knitted brow, "to
marry you, making a secret of her infirmity.'
"Well, sir!" pleaded Lamps in behalf of the long-deceased. "You see,
Phoebe and me, we have talked that over too. And Lord bless us! Such a
number on us has our infirmities, what with fits, and what with misfits,
of one sort and another, that if we confessed to 'em all before we got
married, most of us might never get married."
"Might not that be for the better?"
"Not in this case, sir," said Phoebe, giving her hand to her father.
"No, not in this case, sir," said her father, patting it between his own.
"You correct me," returned Barbox Brothers with a blush; "and I must look
so like a Brute, that at all events it would be superfluous in me to
confess to _that_ infirmity. I wish you would tell me a little more
about yourselves. I hardly knew how to ask it of you, for I am conscious
that I have a bad stiff manner, a dull discouraging way with me, but I
wish you would."
"With all our hearts, sir," returned Lamps gaily for both. "And first of
all, that you may know my name--"
"Stay!" interposed the visitor with a slight flush. "What signifies your
name? Lamps is name enough for me. I like it. It is bright and
expressive. What do I want more?"
"Why, to be sure, sir," returned Lamps. "I have in general no other name
down at the Junction; but I thought, on account of your being here as a
first-class single, in a private character, that you might--"
The visitor waved the thought away with his hand, and Lamps acknowledged
the mark of confidence by taking another rounder.
"You are hard-worked, I take for granted?" said Barbox Brothers, when the
subject of the rounder came out of it much dirtier than be went into it.
Lamps was beginning, "Not particular so"--when his daughter took him up.
"Oh yes, sir, he is very hard-worked. Fourteen, fifteen, eighteen hours
a day. Sometimes twenty-four hours at a time."
"And you," said Barbox Brothers, "what with your school, Phoebe, and what
with your lace-making--"
"But my school is a pleasure to me," she interrupted, opening her brown
eyes wider, as if surprised to find him so obtuse. "I began it when I
was but a child, because it brought me and other children into company,
don't you see? _That_ was not work. I carry it on still, because it
keeps children about me. _That_ is not work. I do it as love, not as
work. Then my lace-pillow;" her busy hands had stopped, as if her
argument required all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at
the name; "it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my
tunes when I hum any, and _that's_ not work. Why, you yourself thought
it was music, you know, sir. And so it is to me."
"Everything is!" cried Lamps radiantly. "Everything is music to her,
sir."
"My father is, at any rate," said Phoebe, exultingly pointing her thin
forefinger at him. "There is more music in my father than there is in a
brass band."
"I say! My dear! It's very fillyillially done, you know; but you are
flattering your father," he protested, sparkling.
"No, I am not, sir, I assure you. No, I am not. If you could hear my
father sing, you would know I am not. But you never will hear him sing,
because he never sings to any one but me. However tired he is, he always
sings to me when he comes home. When I lay here long ago, quite a poor
little broken doll, he used to sing to me. More than that, he used to
make songs, bringing in whatever little jokes we had between us. More
than that, he often does so to this day. Oh! I'll tell of you, father,
as the gentleman has asked about you. He is a poet, sir."
"I shouldn't wish the gentleman, my dear," observed Lamps, for the moment
turning grave, "to carry away that opinion of your father, because it
might look as if I was given to asking the stars in a molloncolly manner
what they was up to. Which I wouldn't at once waste the time, and take
the liberty, my dear."
"My father," resumed Phoebe, amending her text, "is always on the bright
side, and the good side. You told me, just now, I had a happy
disposition. How can I help it?"
"Well; but, my dear," returned Lamps argumentatively, "how can I help it?
Put it to yourself sir. Look at her. Always as you see her now. Always
working--and after all, sir, for but a very few shillings a week--always
contented, always lively, always interested in others, of all sorts. I
said, this moment, she was always as you see her now. So she is, with a
difference that comes to much the same. For, when it is my Sunday off
and the morning bells have done ringing, I hear the prayers and thanks
read in the touchingest way, and I have the hymns sung to me--so soft,
sir, that you couldn't hear 'em out of this room--in notes that seem to
me, I am sure, to come from Heaven and go back to it."
It might have been merely through the association of these words with
their sacredly quiet time, or it might have been through the larger
association of the words with the Redeemer's presence beside the
bedridden; but here her dexterous fingers came to a stop on the
lace-pillow, and clasped themselves around his neck as he bent down.
There was great natural sensibility in both father and daughter, the
visitor could easily see; but each made it, for the other's sake,
retiring, not demonstrative; and perfect cheerfulness, intuitive or
acquired, was either the first or second nature of both. In a very few
moments Lamps was taking another rounder with his comical features
beaming, while Phoebe's laughing eyes (just a glistening speck or so upon
their lashes) were again directed by turns to him, and to her work, and
to Barbox Brothers.
"When my father, sir," she said brightly, "tells you about my being
interested in other people, even though they know nothing about me--which,
by the bye, I told you myself--you ought to know how that comes about.
That's my father's doing."
"No, it isn't!" he protested.
"Don't you believe him, sir; yes, it is. He tells me of everything he
sees down at his work. You would be surprised what a quantity he gets
together for me every day. He looks into the carriages, and tells me how
the ladies are dressed--so that I know all the fashions! He looks into
the carriages, and tells me what pairs of lovers he sees, and what new-
married couples on their wedding trip--so that I know all about that! He
collects chance newspapers and books--so that I have plenty to read! He
tells me about the sick people who are travelling to try to get better--so
that I know all about them! In short, as I began by saying, he tells me
everything he sees and makes out down at his work, and you can't think
what a quantity he does see and make out."
"As to collecting newspapers and books, my dear," said Lamps, "it's clear
I can have no merit in that, because they're not my perquisites. You
see, sir, it's this way: A Guard, he'll say to me, 'Hallo, here you are,
Lamps. I've saved this paper for your daughter. How is she a-going on?'
A Head-Porter, he'll say to me, 'Here! Catch hold, Lamps. Here's a
couple of wollumes for your daughter. Is she pretty much where she
were?' And that's what makes it double welcome, you see. If she had a
thousand pound in a box, they wouldn't trouble themselves about her; but
being what she is--that is, you understand," Lamps added, somewhat
hurriedly, "not having a thousand pound in a box--they take thought for
her. And as concerning the young pairs, married and unmarried, it's only
natural I should bring home what little I can about _them_, seeing that
there's not a Couple of either sort in the neighbourhood that don't come
of their own accord to confide in Phoebe."
She raised her eyes triumphantly to Barbox Brothers as she said:
"Indeed, sir, that is true. If I could have got up and gone to church, I
don't know how often I should have been a bridesmaid. But, if I could
have done that, some girls in love might have been jealous of me, and, as
it is, no girl is jealous of me. And my pillow would not have been half
as ready to put the piece of cake under, as I always find it," she added,
turning her face on it with a light sigh, and a smile at her father.
The arrival of a little girl, the biggest of the scholars, now led to an
understanding on the part of Barbox Brothers, that she was the domestic
of the cottage, and had come to take active measures in it, attended by a
pail that might have extinguished her, and a broom three times her
height. He therefore rose to take his leave, and took it; saying that,
if Phoebe had no objection, he would come again.
He had muttered that he would come "in the course of his walks." The
course of his walks must have been highly favourable to his return, for
he returned after an interval of a single day.
"You thought you would never see me any more, I suppose?" he said to
Phoebe as he touched her hand, and sat down by her couch.
"Why should I think so?" was her surprised rejoinder.
"I took it for granted you would mistrust me."
"For granted, sir? Have you been so much mistrusted?"
"I think I am justified in answering yes. But I may have mistrusted,
too, on my part. No matter just now. We were speaking of the Junction
last time. I have passed hours there since the day before yesterday."
"Are you now the gentleman for Somewhere?" she asked with a smile.
"Certainly for Somewhere; but I don't yet know Where. You would never
guess what I am travelling from. Shall I tell you? I am travelling from
my birthday."
Her hands stopped in her work, and she looked at him with incredulous
astonishment.
"Yes," said Barbox Brothers, not quite easy in his chair, "from my
birthday. I am, to myself, an unintelligible book with the earlier
chapters all torn out, and thrown away. My childhood had no grace of
childhood, my youth had no charm of youth, and what can be expected from
such a lost beginning?" His eyes meeting hers as they were addressed
intently to him, something seemed to stir within his breast, whispering:
"Was this bed a place for the graces of childhood and the charms of youth
to take to kindly? Oh, shame, shame!"
"It is a disease with me," said Barbox Brothers, checking himself, and
making as though he had a difficulty in swallowing something, "to go
wrong about that. I don't know how I came to speak of that. I hope it
is because of an old misplaced confidence in one of your sex involving an
old bitter treachery. I don't know. I am all wrong together."
Her hands quietly and slowly resumed their work. Glancing at her, he saw
that her eyes were thoughtfully following them.
"I am travelling from my birthday," he resumed, "because it has always
been a dreary day to me. My first free birthday coming round some five
or six weeks hence, I am travelling to put its predecessors far behind
me, and to try to crush the day--or, at all events, put it out of my
sight--by heaping new objects on it."
As he paused, she looked at him; but only shook her head as being quite
at a loss.
"This is unintelligible to your happy disposition," he pursued, abiding
by his former phrase as if there were some lingering virtue of
self-defence in it. "I knew it would be, and am glad it is. However, on
this travel of mine (in which I mean to pass the rest of my days, having
abandoned all thought of a fixed home), I stopped, as you have heard from
your father, at the Junction here. The extent of its ramifications quite
confused me as to whither I should go, _from_ here. I have not yet
settled, being still perplexed among so many roads. What do you think I
mean to do? How many of the branching roads can you see from your
window?"
Looking out, full of interest, she answered, "Seven."
"Seven," said Barbox Brothers, watching her with a grave smile. "Well! I
propose to myself at once to reduce the gross number to those very seven,
and gradually to fine them down to one--the most promising for me--and to
take that."
"But how will you know, sir, which _is_ the most promising?" she asked,
with her brightened eyes roving over the view.
"Ah!" said Barbox Brothers with another grave smile, and considerably
improving in his ease of speech. "To be sure. In this way. Where your
father can pick up so much every day for a good purpose, I may once and
again pick up a little for an indifferent purpose. The gentleman for
Nowhere must become still better known at the Junction. He shall
continue to explore it, until he attaches something that he has seen,
heard, or found out, at the head of each of the seven roads, to the road
itself. And so his choice of a road shall be determined by his choice
among his discoveries."
Her hands still busy, she again glanced at the prospect, as if it
comprehended something that had not been in it before, and laughed as if
it yielded her new pleasure.
"But I must not forget," said Barbox Brothers, "(having got so far) to
ask a favour. I want your help in this expedient of mine. I want to
bring you what I pick up at the heads of the seven roads that you lie
here looking out at, and to compare notes with you about it. May I? They
say two heads are better than one. I should say myself that probably
depends upon the heads concerned. But I am quite sure, though we are so
newly acquainted, that your head and your father's have found out better
things, Phoebe, than ever mine of itself discovered."
She gave him her sympathetic right hand, in perfect rapture with his
proposal, and eagerly and gratefully thanked him.
"That's well!" said Barbox Brothers. "Again I must not forget (having
got so far) to ask a favour. Will you shut your eyes?"
Laughing playfully at the strange nature of the request, she did so.
"Keep them shut," said Barbox Brothers, going softly to the door, and
coming back. "You are on your honour, mind, not to open you eyes until I
tell you that you may?"
"Yes! On my honour."
"Good. May I take your lace-pillow from you for a minute?"
Still laughing and wondering, she removed her hands from it, and he put
it aside.
"Tell me. Did you see the puffs of smoke and steam made by the morning
fast-train yesterday on road number seven from here?"
"Behind the elm-trees and the spire?"
"That's the road," said Barbox Brothers, directing his eyes towards it.
"Yes. I watched them melt away."
"Anything unusual in what they expressed?"
"No!" she answered merrily.
"Not complimentary to me, for I was in that train. I went--don't open
your eyes--to fetch you this, from the great ingenious town. It is not
half so large as your lace-pillow, and lies easily and lightly in its
place. These little keys are like the keys of a miniature piano, and you
supply the air required with your left hand. May you pick out delightful
music from it, my dear! For the present--you can open your eyes now--good-
bye!"
In his embarrassed way, he closed the door upon himself, and only saw, in
doing so, that she ecstatically took the present to her bosom and
caressed it. The glimpse gladdened his heart, and yet saddened it; for
so might she, if her youth had flourished in its natural course, having
taken to her breast that day the slumbering music of her own child's
voice.