A Rough Shaking - George MacDonald (bearly read books TXT) 📗

shaver, you are!" said the blacksmith. "You'll come to the gallows yet, if you're a good boy! Them Sunday-schools is doin' a heap for the gallows!-That ain't your brother?"

By this time Tommy had begun to feel at home with the blacksmith, from whose face the cloud had lifted a little, so that he looked less dangerous. He had edged nearer to the fire, and now stood in the light of it.

"No," answered Clare, with an odd doubtfulness in his tone. "I ought to say yes , perhaps, for all men are my brothers; but I mean I haven't any particular one of my very own."

"That ain't no pity; he'd ha' been no better than you. I've a brother I would choke any minute I got a chance."

While they talked, the blacksmith had put his iron in the fire, and again stood blowing the bellows, when his attention was caught by the gestures of the little red-eyed imp, Tommy, who was making rapid signs to him, touching his forehead with one finger, nodding mysteriously, and pointing at Clare with the thumb of his other hand, held close to his side. He sought to indicate thus that his companion was an innocent, whom nobody must mind. In the blacksmith Tommy saw one of his own sort, and the blacksmith saw neither in Tommy nor in Clare any reason to doubt the hint given him. Not the less was he inclined to draw out the idiot.

"Why do you let him follow you about, if he ain't your brother?" he said. "He ain't nice to look at!"

"I want to make him nice," answered Clare, "and then he'll be nice to look at. You mustn't mind him, please, sir. He's a very little boy, and 'ain't been well brought up. His granny ain't a good woman-at least not very, you know, Tommy!" he added apologetically.

"She's a damned old sinner!" said Tommy stoutly.

The man laughed.

"Ha, ha, my chicken! you know a thing or two!" he said, as he took his iron from the fire, and laid it again on the anvil.

But besides the brother he would so gladly strangle, there was an idiot one whom he had loved a little and teazed so much, that, when he died, his conscience was moved. He felt therefore a little tender toward the idiot before him. He bethought himself also that his job would soon be at a stage where the fewer the witnesses the better, for he was executing a commission for certain burglars of his acquaintance. He would do no more that night! He had money in his pocket, and he wanted a drink!

"Look here, cubs!" he said; "if you 'ain't got nowhere to go to, I don't mind if you sleep here. There ain't no bed but the bed of the forge, nor no blankets but this leather apron: you may have them, for you can't do them no sort of harm. I don't mind neither if you put a shovelful of slack and a little water now and then on the fire; and if you give it a blow or two with the bellows now and then, you won't be stone-dead afore the mornin'!-Don't be too free with the coals, now, and don't set the shed on fire, and take the bread out of my poor innocent mouth. Mind what I tell you, and be good boys."

"Thank you, sir," said Clare. "I thought you would be kind to us! I've one friend, a bull, that's very good to me. So is Jonathan. He's a horse. The bull's name is Nimrod. He wants to gore always, but he's never cross with me."

The blacksmith burst into a roar of laughter at the idiotic speech. Then he covered the fire with coal, threw his apron over Clare's head, and departed, locking the door of the smithy behind him.

The boys looked at each other. Neither spoke. Tommy turned to the bellows, and began to blow.

"Ain't you warm yet?" said Clare, who had seen his mother careful over the coals.

"No, I ain't. I want a blaze."

"Leave the fire alone. The coal is the smith's, and he told us not to waste it."

"He ain't no count!" said Tommy, as heartless as any grown man or woman set on pleasure.

"He has given us a place to be warm and sleep in! It would be a shame to do anything he didn't like. Have you no conscience, Tommy?"

"No," said Tommy, who did not know conscience from copper. The germ of it no doubt lay in the God-part of him, but it lay deep. Tommy-no worse than many a boy born of better parents-was like a hill full of precious stones, that grows nothing but a few little dry shrubs, and shoots out cold sharp rocks every here and there.

"If you have no conscience," answered Clare, "one must serve for both-as far as it will reach! Leave go of that bellows, or I'll make you."

Tommy let the lever go, turned his back, and wandered, in such dudgeon as he was capable of, to the other side of the shed.

"Hello!" he cried, "here's a door!-and it ain't locked, it's only bolted! Let's go and see!"

"You may if you like," answered Clare, "but if you touch anything of the blacksmith's, I'll be down on you."

"All right!" said Tommy, and went out to see if there was anything to be picked up.

Clare got on the stone hearth of the forge, and lay down in the hot ashes, too far gone with hunger to care for the clothes that were almost beyond caring for. He was soon fast asleep; and warmth and sleep would do nearly as much for him as food.


Chapter XX.

Tommy reconnoitres.


Tommy, out in the moonlight, found himself in a waste yard, scattered over with bits of iron, mostly old and rusty. It was not an interesting place, for it was not likely to afford him anything to eat. Yet, with the instinct of the human animal, he went shifting and prying and nosing about everywhere. Presently he heard a curious sound, which he recognized as made by a hen. More stealthily yet he went creeping hither and thither, feeling here and feeling there, in the hope of laying his hand on the fowl asleep. Urged by his natural impulse to forage, he had forgotten Clare's warning. His hand did find her, and had it been his grandmother instead of Clare in the smithy, he would at once have broken the bird's neck before she could cry out; but with the touch of her feathers came the thought of Clare, and by this time he understood that what Clare said, Clare would do.

He had some knowledge of fowls; he had heard too much talk about them at his grandmother's not to know something of their habits; and finding she sat so still, he concluded that under her might be eggs. To his delight it was so. The hen belonged to a house at some distance, and had wandered from it, in obedience to the secretive instinct of animal maternity, strong in some hens, to seek a hidden shelter for her offspring. This she had found in the smith's yard, beneath the mould-board of a plough that had lain there for years. Slipping his hand under her, Tommy found five eggs. In greedy haste he took them, every one.

I must do him the justice to say that his first impulse was to dart with them to Clare. But before he had taken a step toward him, again he remembered his threat. With the eggs inside him, he could run the risk; he would not mind a few blows-not much; but if he took them to Clare, the unbearable thing was, that he would assuredly give every one of them back to the hen. He was an idiot, and Tommy was there to look after him; but, in looking after Clare, was Tommy to neglect himself? If Clare would not eat the eggs Tommy carried him, as most certainly he would not, the best thing was for Tommy to eat them himself! What a good thing that it was no use to steal for Clare! The steal would be all for himself! Not a step from the spot did Tommy move till he had sucked every one of the five eggs. But he made one mistake: he threw away the shells.

When he had sucked them, he found himself much lighter-hearted, but, alas, nearly as hungry as before! The spirit of research began again to move him: where were eggs, what might there not be beside?

The moon was nearly at the full; the smith's yard was radiantly illuminated. But even the moon could lend little enchantment to a scene where nothing was visible but rusty, broken, deserted, despairful pieces of old iron. Tommy lifted his eyes and looked further.

The enclosure was of small extent, bounded on one side by the garden wall of the house they had just passed, and at the bottom by a broken fence, dividing it from a piece of waste land that probably belonged to the house. As he roamed about, Tommy spied a great heap of old iron piled up against the wall, and made for it, in the hope of enlarging his horizon. He scrambled to the top, and looked over. His gaze fell right into a big but, full of dark water. Twice that evening he met the same horror! There was a legendary report, though he had not heard it, I fancy, that his mother drowned herself instead of him: she fell in, and he was fished out. Whether this was the origin of his fear or not, so far from getting down by means of the water-but, Tommy dared not cross at that point. With much trembling he got on the top of the wall, turned his back on the but, and ran along like a cat, in search of a place where he could descend into the garden. He went right to the end, round the corner, and half-way along the bottom before he found one. There he came to a doorway that had been solidly walled up on the outside, while the door was left in position on the inside-ready for use when the court of chancery should have decided to whom the house belonged. Its frame was flush with the wall, so that its bolts and lock afforded Tommy foothold enough to descend, and confidence of being able to get up again.

He landed in a moonlit wilderness-such a wilderness as a deserted garden speedily becomes, the wealth in the soil converting it the sooner to a savage chaos. Full of the impulse of discovery, and the hope of presenting himself with importance to Clare as the bringer of good tidings, Tommy forced his way through or crept under the overgrown bushes, until he reached a mossy rather than gravelly walk, where it was more easy to advance. It led him to the house.

Had he been a boy of any imagination, he would have shuddered at the thought of attempting an entrance. All the windows had outside shutters. Those of the ground floor were closed-except one that swung to and fro, and must have swung in many a wind since the house was abandoned. The moon shone with a dull whitish gleam on the dusty windows of the first and second stories, and on the great dormers that shot out from the slope of the roof, and cast strange shadows upon it. The door to the garden had had a porch of trellis-work,