A Rough Shaking Part 36

"Who's we?" asked the man. "Be there a hundred of you?"

"No; only two. Only me and Abdiel here!"

"Oh, that beast of a mongrel?"

The gardener made a stride as if to seize the dog. Clare bounded from him. The man burst into a mocking laugh.

"He's a good dog, indeed, sir!" said Clare.

"You'll give him the sack before I give you a job."

"We're old friends, sir; we can't be parted!"

"I thought as much!" cried the gardener. "They're always ready to work, an' so hungry! But will they part with the mangy dog? Not they!

Hard work and good wages ain't nowhere beside a mongrel pup! Get out!

Don't I know the whole ugly bilin' of ye!"

Clare turned away with a gentle good-morning, which the man did not get out of his heart for a matter of two days, and departed, hugging Abdiel.

He was often cold and always hungry, but his life was anything but dull. The man who does not know where his next meal is to come from, is seldom afflicted with ennui. That is the monopoly of the enviable with nothing to do, and everything money can get them. A foolish west-end life has immeasurably more discomfort in it than that of a street Arab. The ordinary beggar, while in tolerable health, finds far more enjoyment than most fashionable ladies.

Thus Clare went wandering long, seeking work, and finding next to none--all the time upheld by the feeling that something was waiting for him somewhere, that he was every day drawing nearer to it. Not once yet had he lost heart. In very virtue of unselfishness and lack of resentment, he was strong. Not once had he shed a tear for himself, not once had he pitied his own condition.

Chapter LII.

Miss Tempest.

Without knowing it, he was approaching the sea. Walking along a chain of downs, he saw suddenly from the top of one of them, for the first time in his memory though not in his life, the sea--a pale blue cloud, as it appeared, far on the horizon, between two low hills. The sight of it, although he did not at first know what it was, brought with it a strange inexplicable feeling of dolorous pleasure. For this he could not account. It was the faintest revival of an all but obliterated impression of something familiar to his childhood, lying somewhere deeper than the memory, which was a blank in regard to it. But that feeling was not all that the sight awoke in him. The pale blue cloud bore to him such a look of the eternal, that it seemed the very place for G.o.d to live in--the solemn, stirless region of calm in which the being to whom now of late he had first begun in reality to pray, kept his abode. The hungry, worn, tattered boy, with nothing to call his own but a great hope and a little dog, fell down on his bare knees on the hard road, and stretched out his hands in an ecstasy toward the low cloud.

The far-off ringing tramp of a horse's feet aroused him. He rose light as an athlete, the great hope grown twice its former size, and hunger forgotten.

The blue cloud kept in sight, and by and by he knew it was the sea he saw, though how or at what moment the knowledge came to him he could not have told. The track was leading him toward one of the princ.i.p.al southern ports.

By this time he was again very thin; but he had brown cheeks and clear eyes, and, save when suffering immediately from hunger, felt perfectly well. Hunger is a sad thing notwithstanding its deep wholesomeness; but there is immeasurably more suffering in the world from eating too much than from eating too little.

Well able by this time to read the signs of the road, he perceived at length he must be drawing near a town. He had already pa.s.sed a house or two with a little lawn in front, and indications of a garden behind; and he hoped yet again that here, after all, he might get work. To door after door he carried his modest request: some doors were shut in his face almost before he could speak; at others he had a civil word from maid, or a rough word from man; from none came sound of a.s.sent. It had become harder too to find shelter. Ever as he went, s.p.a.ce was more and more appropriated and enclosed; less and less room was left for the man for whom had been made no special cubic provision of earth and air, and who had no money--the most disreputable of conditions in the eyes of such as would be helpless if they had none. A rare philosopher for eyes capable of understanding him, he was a despicable being in the eyes of the common man. To know a human being one must be human--that is, the divine must be strong in him.

For some days now, neither Clare nor Abdiel had come even within sight of food enough to make a meal. The dog was rather thinner than his master.

"Abdiel," said Clare to him one day, "I fear you will soon be a serpent! Your body gets longer and longer, and your legs get shorter and shorter: you'll be crawling presently, rubbing the hair off your useless little belly on the dusty road! Never mind, Abdiel; you'll be a good serpent. Satan was turned into a bad serpent because he was a bad angel; you will be a good serpent, because you are a good dog! I hope, however, we shall yet put a stop to the serpent-business!"

Abdiel wagged his tail, as much as to say, "All right, master!"

The nights were now very cold; winter was coming fast. Had Clare been long enough in one place for people to know him, he would never have been allowed to go so cold and hungry; but he had always to move on, and n.o.body had time to learn to care about him. So the terrible sunless season threatened to wrap him in its winding-sheet, and lay him down.

One evening, just before sunset, grown sleepy in spite of the gathering cold, he sat down on one of the two steep gra.s.sy slopes that bordered the road. His feet were bare now, bare and brown, for his shoes had come to such plight that it was a relief to throw them away; but his soles had grown like leather. They rested in the dry shallow rain-channel, and his body leaned back against the slope. Abdiel, instead of jumping on the bank and lying in the soft gra.s.s, lay down on the leathery feet, and covered them from the night with his long faithful body and its coat of tangled hair.

The sun was shooting his last radiance along the road, and its redness caressed the sleeping companions, when an elderly lady came to her gate at the top of the opposite slope, and looked along the road with the sun. Her reverting glance fell upon the sleepers--the Knight of Hope lying in rags, not marble, his feet not upon his dog, but his dog upon his feet. It was a touching picture, and the old lady's heart was one easily touched. She looked and saw that the face of the boy, whose hunger was as plain as his rags, was calm as the wintry sky. She wondered, but she needed not have wondered; for storm of anger, drought of greed, nor rotting mist of selfishness, had pa.s.sed or rested there, to billow, or score, or waste.

Her mere glance seemed to wake Abdiel, who took advantage of his waking to have a lick at the brown, dusty, brave, uncomplaining feet, so well used to the world's _via dolorosa_. She saw, and was touched yet more by this ministration of the guardian of the feet. Gently opening the gate she descended the slope, crossed the road, and stood silent, regarding the outcasts. No cloudy blanket covered the sky: ere morning the dew would lie frozen on the gra.s.s!

"You shouldn't be sleeping there!" she said.

Abdiel started to his four feet and would have snarled, but with one look at the lady changed his mind. Clare half awoke, half sat up, made an inarticulate murmur, and fell back again.

"Get up, my boy," said the old lady. "You must indeed!"

"Oh, please, ma'am, must I?" answered Clare, slowly rising to his feet. "I had but just lain down, and I'm so tired!--If I mayn't sleep _there_," he continued, "where _am_ I to sleep?--Please, ma'am, why is everybody so set against letting a boy sleep? It don't cost them anything! I can understand not giving him work, if he looks too much in want of it; but why should they count it bad of him to lie down and sleep?"

The lady wisely let him talk; not until he stopped did she answer him.

"It's because of the frost, my boy!" she said. "It would be the death of you to sleep out of doors to-night!"

"It's a nice place for it, ma'am!"

"To sleep in? Certainly not!"

"I didn't mean that, ma'am. I meant a nice place to go away from--to die in, ma'am!"

"That is not ours to choose," answered the old lady severely, but the tone of her severity trembled.

"I sha'n't find anywhere so nice as this bank," said Clare, turning and looking at it sorrowfully.

"There are plenty of places in the town. It's but a mile farther on!"

"But this is so much nicer, ma'am! And I've no money--none at all, ma'am. When I came out of prison,--"

"Came out of _where_?"

"Out of prison, ma'am."

He had never been in prison in a legal sense, never having been convicted of anything; but he did not know the difference between detention and imprisonment.

"Prison!" she exclaimed, holding up her hands in horror. "How dare you mention prison!"

"Because I was in it, ma'am."

"And to say it so coolly too! Are you not ashamed of yourself?"

"No, ma'am."

"It's a shame to have been in prison."

"Not if I didn't do anything wrong."

"n.o.body will believe that, I'm afraid!"