“They were as like,” said the old woman, without looking up, “as you could see two brothers, so near an age—there wasn’t much more than a year between them, as I recollect—and if you could have seen my gal, as I have seen her once, side by side with the other’s daughter, you’d have seen, for all the difference of dress and life, that they were like each other. Oh! is the likeness gone, and is it my gal—only my gal—that’s to change so!”
“We shall all change, mother, in our turn,” said Alice.
“Turn!” cried the old woman, “but why not hers as soon as my gal’s! The mother must have changed—she looked as old as me, and full as wrinkled through her paint—but she was handsome. What have I done, I, what have I done worse than her, that only my gal is to lie there fading!”
With another of those wild cries, she went running out into the room from which she had come; but immediately, in her uncertain mood, returned, and creeping up to Harriet, said:
“That’s what Alice bade me tell you, deary. That’s all. I found it out when I began to ask who she was, and all about her, away in Warwickshire there, one summertime. Such relations was no good to me, then. They wouldn’t have owned me, and had nothing to give me. I should have asked ’em, maybe, for a little money, afterwards, if it hadn’t been for my Alice; she’d a’most have killed me, if I had, I think. She was as proud as t’other in her way,” said the old woman, touching the face of her daughter fearfully, and withdrawing her hand, “for all she’s so quiet now; but she’ll shame ’em with her good looks yet. Ha, ha! She’ll shame ’em, will my handsome daughter!”
Her laugh, as she retreated, was worse than her cry; worse than the burst of imbecile lamentation in which it ended; worse than the doting air with which she sat down in her old seat, and stared out at the darkness.
The eyes of Alice had all this time been fixed on Harriet, whose hand she had never released. She said now:
“I have felt, lying here, that I should like you to know this. It might explain, I have thought, something that used to help to harden me. I had heard so much, in my wrongdoing, of my neglected duty, that I took up with the belief that duty had not been done to me, and that as the seed was sown, the harvest grew. I somehow made it out that when ladies had bad homes and mothers, they went wrong in their way, too; but that their way was not so foul a one as mine, and they had need to bless God for it. That is all past. It is like a dream, now, which I cannot quite remember or understand. It has been more and more like a dream, every day, since you began to sit here, and to read to me. I only tell it you, as I can recollect it. Will you read to me a little more?”
Harriet was withdrawing her hand to open the book, when Alice detained it for a moment.
“You will not forget my mother? I forgive her, if I have any cause. I know that she forgives me, and is sorry in her heart. You will not forget her?”
“Never, Alice!”
“A moment yet. Lay your head so, dear, that as you read I may see the words in your kind face.”
Harriet complied and read—read the eternal book for all the weary, and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of this earth—read the blessed history, in which the blind lame palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned of all our dainty clay, has each a portion, that no human pride, indifference, or sophistry, through all the ages that this world shall last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain reduce—read the ministry of Him who, through the round of human life, and all its hopes and griefs, from birth to death, from infancy to age, had sweet compassion for, and interest in, its every scene and stage, its every suffering and sorrow.
“I shall come,” said Harriet, when she shut the book, “very early in the morning.”
The lustrous eyes, yet fixed upon her face, closed for a moment, then opened; and Alice kissed and blest her.
The same eyes followed her to the door; and in their light, and on the tranquil face, there was a smile when it was closed.
They never turned away. She laid her hand upon her breast, murmuring the sacred name that had been read to her; and life passed from her face, like light removed.
Nothing lay there, any longer, but the ruin of the mortal house on which the rain had beaten, and the black hair that had fluttered in the wintry wind.
LIX
Retribution
Changes have come again upon the great house in the long dull street, once the scene of Florence’s childhood and loneliness. It is a great house still, proof against wind and weather, without breaches in the roof, or shattered windows, or dilapidated walls; but it is a ruin none the less, and the rats fly from it.
Mr. Towlinson and company are, at first, incredulous in respect of the shapeless rumours that they hear. Cook says our people’s credit ain’t so easy shook as that comes to, thank God; and Mr. Towlinson expects to hear it reported next, that the Bank of England’s a-going to break, or the jewels in the Tower to be sold up. But, next come the Gazette, and Mr. Perch; and Mr. Perch brings Mrs. Perch
