Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/610

180 little devil was I, that I took no thought who would bury father and mother, or where they would be buried, or when. The question whether the eating or drinking by day, and the covering by night, would be as good at the farm-house as at the ward superseded those questions.

The jolting of the carton a loose stony road awoke me; and I found that we were mounting a steep hill, where the road was a rutty by-road through a field. And so, by fragments of an ancient terrace, and by some rugged out-buildings that had once been fortified, and passing under a ruined gateway, we came to the old farm-house in the thick stone wall outside the old quadrangle of Hoghton Towers, which I looked at like a stupid savage, seeing no specialty in, seeing no antiquity in; assuming all farm-houses to resemble it; assigning the decay I noticed to the one potent cause of all ruin that I knew—poverty; eying the pigeons in their flights, the cattle in their stalls, the ducks in the pond, and the fowls pecking about the yard, with a hungry hope that plenty of them might be killed for dinner while I staid there; wondering whether the scrubbed dairy vessels, drying in the sunlight, could be goodly porringers out of which the master ate his belly-filling food, and which he polished when he had done, according to my ward experience; shrinkingly doubtful whether the shadows passing over that airy height on the bright spring day, were not something in the nature of frowns—sordid, afraid, unadmiring—a small brute to shudder at.

To that time I had never had the faintest impression of duty. I had had no knowledge whatever that there was any thing lovely in this life. When I had occasionally slunk up the cellar-steps into the street, and glared in at shop windows, I had done so with no higher feelings than we may suppose to animate a mangy young dog or wolf-cub. It is equally the fact that I had never been alone, in the sense of holding unselfish converse with myself. I had been solitary often enough, but nothing better.

Such was my condition when I sat down to my dinner that day, in the kitchen of the old farm-house. Such was my condition when I lay on my bed in the old farm-house that night, stretched out opposite the narrow mullioned window, in the cold light of the moon, like a young vampire.