Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/61

 boys set upon me, I told her of what you said to me, and of your kind offer to give me a place, if—if"

"If I were satisfied with your mother's account of you; I remember. Well—what did she say to that?"

"Please, sir, it made her cry for days together, and nearly broke her heart."

These words were simple enough, and, heaven knows, the boy's way of speaking them was as simple as the words; but they distressed me. A mystery—a tragic mystery, I divined—underlay them.

"Did your mother blame you for not letting me see her?" I asked.

"Oh, no, sir! She said I had done quite right in that. But all the time I was ill she thought about it; and when I was able to get out, and she couldn't give me any money to buy some papers with—even half a quire—she cried worse than ever, and at last she told me to come and tell you that, if you would kindly take the trouble to go so far as Stangate, she would gratefully see you."

It seemed to me, as I listened, that this poor boy's story might, as the saying is, "move a heart of stone;" it moved mine—whence, if I needed the assurance, I think I might safely conclude that my heart is made of a more sensitive material.

"Go and fetch me a hansom," I said, without debating the matter. There are things which it is better to do on the spur of the moment, and this, I instinctively felt, was one of that sort.

From the longitude of the Law Courts to that of Stangate is not a long journey in a hansom with a good horse in front of it. In a quarter of an hour I was talking with my little newspaper-boy's mother.

The room into which I was conducted—it was a back room on the third floor, entered from a dirt-begrimed landing-place, lit by a window that had certainly not been cleaned for many years, and had two or three panes of broken glass in it—the room into which I was conducted was as poor in aspect as a dwelling-place of poverty could be; but, bare as it was—a bed in probably the least draughty corner, a small deal table, two wooden chairs, and a box something like a middling-sized sea-chest, was all that met the eye in the shape of furniture and effects—it was kept with a manifest effort at cleanliness.

But, from the moment of entering it, I took very little heed of the room and its furniture; my whole attention was given to its mistress, who rose to receive me. As my eyes fell upon her worn and almost bloodless face, my heart felt as if seized and spasmodically pressed by a nervous hand.

Mrs. Middleton, worn by sorrow and lack of sufficient food, and with hair becoming prematurely grey, was, I could see, yet but little over thirty years of age. To my eyes, she was still a beautiful woman; to eyes that had looked upon her face ten or a dozen years earlier, she must have appeared strikingly beautiful. There was a stamp of grace upon her bearing which neither bodily weakness nor poorness of attire could conceal. She was above rather than below the middle height. She wore a black gown of some material, frayed and threadbare, but to which—heaven knows how—she contrived to give an air of unstudied neatness. But it was her eyes—her large, soft, sad blue eyes (made larger by the paleness and thinness of her face) that riveted my gaze, in which I seemed to read the history of a beautiful woman's wreck, before a word had been uttered by her white lips.

"It is very kind of you, sir, to take so much trouble on account of my poor boy," she said, inviting me to be seated.

If I had had any doubt before, I could have none now. I was being addressed by a woman who had been reared in the midst of refinement, the spirit of which remained with her indelibly. She seated herself, after I had taken the chair she had offered me, and continued—

"My boy is a very good boy, or I do not think I should be speaking with you now." She paused; then, after a moment's thought, said, "Jack, dear, go out and walk about for a few minutes; I shall be better able to tell this gentleman what he wants to know about you.

"Go and see whether there is anything startling in the newspaper bills—and bring me back a paper, if there is," I said cheerfully, handing him a shilling. It was on the tip of my tongue to add, "and bring back something for you and your mother to eat;" but a look at the beautiful pale face before me imposed, I knew not why, silence upon my lips.

As soon as we were alone, Mrs. Middleton—who had followed her boy out of the room with looks of almost anguished tenderness in her great, sad eyes, said:

"It was not in consequence of any instruction from me that my boy hesitated to accept your kind offer to befriend him, but from fear of giving me pain."