“They tell me I must not even mention your name to him for a long, long time,” rejoined the child, “I dare not; and even if I might, what good would a kind word do you, Kit? We shall be very poor. We shall scarcely have bread to eat.”
“It’s not that I may be taken back,” said the boy, “that I ask the favour of you. It isn’t for the sake of food and wages that I’ve been waiting about so long in hopes to see you. Don’t think that I’d come in a time of trouble to talk of such things as them.”
The child looked gratefully and kindly at him, but waited that he might speak again.
“No, it’s not that,” said Kit hesitating, “it’s something very different from that. I haven’t got much sense I know, but if he could be brought to believe that I’d been a faithful servant to him, doing the best I could, and never meaning harm, perhaps he mightn’t”—
Here Kit faltered so long that the child entreated him to speak out, and quickly, for it was very late, and time to shut the window.
“Perhaps he mightn’t think it over venturesome of me to say—well then, to say this,”—cried Kit with sudden boldness. “This home is gone from you and him. Mother and I have got a poor one, but that’s better than this with all these people here, and why not come there, till he’s had time to look about and find a better!”
The child did not speak. Kit, in the relief of having made his proposition, found his tongue loosened, and spoke out in its favour with his utmost eloquence.
“You think,” said the boy, “that it’s very small and inconvenient. So it is, but it’s very clean. Perhaps you think it would be noisy, but there’s not a quieter court than ours in all the town. Don’t be afraid of the children; the baby hardly ever cries, and the other one is very good—besides, I’d mind ’em. They wouldn’t vex you much I’m sure. Do try Miss Nell, do try. The little front room upstairs is very pleasant. You can see a piece of the church-clock through the chimneys and almost tell the time; mother says it would be just the thing for you, and so it would, and you’d have her to wait upon you both, and me to run of errands. We don’t mean money, bless you; you’re not to think of that. Will you try him Miss Nell? Only say you’ll try him. Do try to make old master come, and ask him first what I have done—will you only promise that, Miss Nell?”
Before the child could reply to this earnest solicitation, the street-door opened, and Mr. Brass thrusting out his nightcapped head called in a surly voice, “Who’s there!” Kit immediately glided away, and Nell closing the window softly, drew back into the room.
Before Mr. Brass had repeated his inquiry many times, Mr. Quilp, also embellished with a nightcap, emerged from the same door and looked carefully up and down the street, and up at all the windows of the house from the opposite side. Finding that there was nobody in sight he presently returned into the house with his legal friend, protesting (as the child heard from the staircase), that there was a league and plot against him, that he was in danger of being robbed and plundered by a band of conspirators who prowled about the house at all seasons, and that he would delay no longer but take immediate steps for disposing of the property and returning to his own peaceful roof. Having growled forth these and a great many other threats of the same nature, he coiled himself once more in the child’s little bed, and Nell crept softly up the stairs.
It was natural enough that her short and unfinished dialogue with Kit should leave a strong impression on her mind, and influence her dreams that night and her recollections for a long, long time. Surrounded by unfeeling creditors, and mercenary attendants upon the sick, and meeting in the height of her anxiety and sorrow with little regard or sympathy even from the women about her, it is not surprising that the affectionate heart of the child should have been touched to the quick by one kind and generous spirit, however uncouth the temple in which it dwelt. Thank Heaven that the temples of such spirits are not made with hands, and that they may be more worthily hung with poor patchwork than with purple and fine linen.
XII
At length the crisis of the old man’s disorder was past, and he began to mend. By very slow and feeble degrees his consciousness came back, but the mind was weakened and its functions were impaired. He was patient, and quiet; often sat brooding, but not despondently, for a long space; was easily amused even by a sunbeam on the wall or ceiling; made no complaint that the days were long or the nights tedious; and appeared indeed to have lost all count of time and every sense of care or weariness. He would sit for hours together with Nell’s small hand in his, playing with the fingers and stopping sometimes to smooth her hair or kiss her brow, and when he saw that tears were glistening in her eyes would look, amazed, about him for the cause, and forget his wonder even while he looked.
The child and he rode out: the old man propped up with pillows, and the child beside him. They were hand in hand as usual. The noise and motion in the streets fatigued his brain at first, but he was not surprised, or curious, or pleased, or irritated. He was asked if he remembered this, or that. “Oh yes,”
