Mugby Junction

She shook her head.

“I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, which could be made as handy to me as my lace-pillow. But I dare say I deceive myself. At all events, I shall never know.”

“You have a musical voice. Excuse me; I have heard you sing.”

“With the children?” she answered, slightly colouring. “O yes. I sing with the dear children, if it can be called singing.”

Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazarded the speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learned in new systems of teaching them? “Very fond of them,” she said, shaking her head again; “but I know nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their lessons, has led you so far astray as to think me a grand teacher? Ah! I thought so! No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry Robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way. You don’t need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir,” she added, with a glance at the small forms and round the room.

All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow. As they still continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes, was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful. Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an impertinence.

He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directed his towards the prospect, saying: “Beautiful indeed!”

“Most beautiful, sir. I have sometimes had a fancy that I would like to sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erect head. But what a foolish fancy that would be to encourage! It cannot look more lovely to any one than it does to me.”

Her eyes were turned to it as she spoke, with most delighted admiration and enjoyment. There was not a trace in it of any sense of deprivation.

“And those threads of railway, with their puffs of smoke and steam changing places so fast, make it so lively for me,” she went on. “I think of the number of people who can go where they wish, on their business, or their pleasure; I remember that the puffs make signs to me that they are actually going while I look; and that enlivens the prospect with abundance of company, if I want company. There is the great Junction, too. I don’t see it under the foot of the hill, but I can very often hear it, and I always know it is there. It seems to join me, in a way, to I don’t know how many places and things that I shall never see.”

With an abashed kind of idea that it might have already joined himself to something he had never seen, he said constrainedly: “Just so.”

“And so you see, sir,” pursued Phœbe, “I am not the invalid you thought me, and I am very well off indeed.”

“You have a happy disposition,” said Barbox Brothers: perhaps with a slight excusatory touch for his own disposition.

“Ah! But you should know my father,” she replied. “His is the happy disposition! – Don’t mind, sir!” For his reserve took the alarm at a step upon the stairs, and he distrusted that he would be set down for a troublesome intruder. “This is my father coming.”

The door opened, and the father paused there.

“Why, Lamps!” exclaimed Barbox Brothers, starting from his chair. “How do you do, Lamps?”

To which, Lamps responded: “The gentleman for Nowhere! How do you do, sir?”

And they shook hands, to the greatest admiration and surprise of Lamps’s daughter.

“I have looked you up, half a dozen times since that night,” said Barbox Brothers, “but have never found you.”

“So I’ve heerd on, sir, so I’ve heerd on,” returned Lamps. “It’s your being noticed so often down at the Junction, without taking any train, that has begun to get you the name among us of the gentleman for Nowhere. No offence in my having called you by it when took by surprise, I hope, sir?”

“None at all. It’s as good a name for me as any other you could call me by. But may I ask you a question in the corner here?”

Lamps suffered himself to be led aside from his daughter’s couch, by one of the buttons of his velveteen jacket.

“Is this the bedside where you sing your songs?”

Lamps nodded.

The gentleman for Nowhere clapped him on the shoulder; and they faced about again.

“Upon my word, my dear,” said Lamps then to his daughter, looking from her to her visitor, “it is such an amaze to me, to find you brought acquainted with this gentleman, that I must (if this gentleman will excuse me) take a rounder.”

Mr. Lamps demonstrated in action what this meant, by pulling out his oily handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, and giving himself an elaborate smear, from behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the forehead, and down the other cheek to behind his left ear. After this operation he shone exceedingly.

“It’s according to my custom when particular warmed up by any agitation, sir,” he offered by way of apology. “And really, I am throwed into that state of amaze by finding you brought acquainted with Phœbe, that I – that I think I will, if you’ll excuse me, take another rounder.” Which he did, seeming to be greatly restored by it.

They were now both standing by the side of her couch, and she was working at her lace-pillow. “Your daughter tells me,” said Barbox Brothers, still in a half reluctant shamefaced way, “that she never sits up.”

“No, sir, nor never has done. You see, her mother (who died when she was a year and two months old) was subject to very bad fits, and as she had never mentioned to me that she was subject to fits, they couldn’t be guarded against. Consequently, she dropped the baby when took, and this happened.”

“It was very wrong of her,” said Barbox Brothers, with a knitted brow, “to marry you, making a secret of her infirmity.”

“Well, sir,” pleaded Lamps, in behalf of the long-deceased. “You see, Phœbe and me, we have talked that over too. And Lord bless us! Such a number on us has our infirmities, what with fits, and what with misfits, of one sort and another, that if we confessed to ’em all before we got married, most of us might never get married.”

“Might not that be for the better?”

“Not in this case, sir,” said Phœbe, giving her hand to her father.

“No, not in this case, sir,” said her father, patting it between his own.

“You correct me,” returned Barbox Brothers, with a blush; “and I must look so like a Brute, that at all events it would be superfluous in me to confess to that infirmity. I wish you would tell me a little more about yourselves. I hardly know how to ask it of you, for I am conscious that I have a bad stiff manner, a dull discouraging way with me, but I wish you would.”

“With all our hearts, sir,” returned Lamps, gaily, for both. “And first of all, that you may know my name – ”

“Stay!” interposed the visitor, with a slight flush. “What signifies your name! Lamps is name enough for me. I like it. It is bright and expressive. What do I want more!”

“Why to be sure, sir,” returned Lamps. “I have in general no other name down at the Junction; but I thought, on account of your being here as a first-class single, in a private character, that you might – ”

The visitor waved the thought away with his hand, and Lamps acknowledged the mark of confidence by taking another rounder.

“You are hard-worked, I take for granted?” said Barbox Brothers, when the subject of the rounder came out of it much dirtier than he went into it.

Lamps was beginning, “Not particular so” – when his daughter took him up.

“O yes, sir, he is very hard-worked. Fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, hours a day. Sometimes twenty-four hours at a time.”

“And you,” said Barbox Brothers, “what with your school, Phœbe, and what with your lace-making – ”

“But my school is a pleasure to me,” she interrupted, opening her brown eyes wider, as if surprised to find him so obtuse. “I began it when I was but a child, because it brought me and other children into company, don’t you see? That was not work. I carry it on still, because it keeps children about me. That is not work. I do it as love, not as work. Then my lace-pillow;” her busy hands had stopped, as if her argument required all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at the name; “it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my tunes when I hum any, and that’s not work. Why, you yourself thought it was music, you know, sir. And so it is, to me.”

“Everything is!” cried Lamps, radiantly. “Everything is music to her, sir.”

“My father is, at any rate,” said Phœbe, exultingly pointing her thin forefinger at him. “There is more music in my father than there is in a brass band.”

“I say! My dear! It’s very fillyillially done, you know; but you are flattering your father,” he protested, sparkling.

“No I am not, sir, I assure you. No I am not. If you could hear my father sing, you would know I am not. But you never will hear him sing, because he never sings to any one but me. However tired he is, he always sings to me when he comes home. When I lay here long ago, quite a poor little broken doll, he used to sing to me. More than that, he used to make songs, bringing in whatever little jokes we had between us. More than that, he often does so to this day. O! I’ll tell of you, father, as the gentleman has asked about you. He is a poet, sir.”

“I shouldn’t wish the gentleman, my dear,” observed Lamps, for the moment turning grave, “to carry away that opinion of your father, because it might look as if I was given to asking the stars in a molloncolly manner what they was up to. Which I wouldn’t at once waste the time, and take the liberty, my dear.”