“Yet I live on,” said Caleb, as day after day he took his stand by the sunshiny wall, Mattie by his side and Jack on his haunches a little in front. Mattie’s clothes were very thin now, and her shoes almost dropping from her feet. One by one the little odd comforts the dead mother had bought her were taken to the pawnshop, and a few coppers, or at most a sixpence, brought back in return. As winter crept on, she began to grow white and shiver as the mother had done, and then cough and draw her breath in as though to let it out gave her pain. The neighbours began to shake their heads again as they had done over the mother. “She’s going the same way,” they said, whispering together, “and God help the old man then!” Going the same way, was she? Before the first winter snow had settled on the mother’s grave, she was gone. And Caleb? Well, he had his dog left him, and his old clothes, and his sunshiny wall, and what would you more? Poor people can’t have everything they want, you know, in this life.
When little Mattie lay stretched white and cold on the mattress on the floor (the bedstead had long since disappeared) on which her mother had died, the poor people came in and did the best they could for her—poor people are not always thrashing horses and kicking dogs to death, as some think; they sometimes do little kindnesses one for the other, and show a refinement which people in higher ranks occasionally forget. So one brought a clean white sheet and wrapt the little girl in it, another combed out her long fair hair, and a third (a flower-girl) put a spray of fern and geranium into her small thin hand.
“She’s looking that lovely, Caleb, she is,” said a brown old woman of sixty with a handkerchief tied over her head.
“Lord, for this once!” pleaded Caleb, lifting his hands high above his head. “For one moment only let my eyes be opened, that they may see the face I have loved and never known.” The poor people stood back, as they heard his prayer, with their breath drawn in. Almost they expected a miracle to be performed—had they not heard of such things in the churches?—and for a moment the film to be lifted from Caleb’s eyes, that they might rest on the face he had loved so well before the cold earth shut it in forevermore.
All in vain. No answering Ephphatha was breathed down from the silent everlasting heavens. Caleb’s hands fell down helplessly to his side, and Jack crept from out of a corner and licked them, and then the parish people sent their undertakers to carry Mattie away to the same big cemetery where her mother was sleeping.
All gone but Jack! Well, a dog is something, after all, to have left one; and when one is old and blind and poor, one doesn’t expect a great deal in life, you know, but is just thankful for a crust of bread to eat, some straw or old clothes to lie down on at night, and a sunshiny wall to lean against in the daytime; so the dog was altogether something extra in the way of mercies. “How he do live on is a marvel,” one to another would wonder, watching the old man creeping down the stairs day after day to take his stand in the streets; and “the dog is like a child to him now,” they would say, as they noted Jack sitting on his stump of a tail, waiting for a gap in the crush of carts and carriages before he would venture to lead his master across the busy high-road.
It was in those days that Jack first began to “fend for himself.” As long as the two Matties lived, there was always a plate of odds and ends of some sort—scrape it together how they might—waiting for him inside the door when he came in from his morning’s work; but after they were gone, things were different. It was hard work enough for Caleb to get his own daily bread and collect the eighteen pennies which paid for his miserable little cupboard (attic it was supposed to be), at the top of the house; so when he came in at four o’clock in the winter’s twilight with a loaf of bread and a few pence, the cord was unknotted from Jack’s neck and the poor animal let free to forage for himself in the alleys and gutters. Jack in this way became very punctual in his habits. At four o’clock he was released from duty; it took him about an hour to find his dinner in the streets; and punctually at five he might be seen sneaking along some by-street with a bone in his mouth or the remnants of some fish, dodging skilfully between the passersby till he reached home, where at his master’s feet he would finish in calm enjoyment his hardly earned meal—to which, be it noted, Caleb never failed to add some portion of his own, however scanty it had been.
The winter that year tried Jack and Caleb sorely. In the summer things had been a little better with them; people had a little more money to spend, and a few more halfpence would find their way into Caleb’s hat, and Jack also would sometimes get a pat on the head and a biscuit or two thrown to him; but in the winter things began to go very hardly with them. Not that the people of the house were ever unkind to them. Poor souls! they were kind enough,
