Crying for the Light: or, Fifty Years Ago. Volume 1 of 3

‘Don’t “good man” me,’ was the angry reply.

‘But we come for your good.’

‘That’s what you all say; and I’ll believe it when I see you and the likes of you give up that part of the tithes which was intended for the poor.’

‘I come in the name of the Lord as His messenger,’ said the Vicar in his most commanding tones.

‘The Lord’s receiver, I think,’ said the shoemaker cynically, ‘for you get all you can in His name.’

‘It is no use leaving anything here,’ said the Vicar to his curates.

Nor was it. The shoemaker had been made an infidel, as many are, by hard work and poor pay, by want of human sympathy, by the greatness of his life-long sorrow. Wounded and bruised and fallen among thieves, the Jew and the Levite had passed by, and no Samaritan had come to his aid. The Gospel of glad tidings has been preached for ages by the Churches, chiefly to the rich and the respectable as they are called, and the poor have been sent empty away. Christian ministers of all denominations have hard work to do to make up for the shortcomings of the past.

As the Vicar and his curates were leaving – and they were anxious to get out into the fresh air, as the smell of the place was awful – a door opened, and a thin and worn and weary elderly woman entered, who had to earn her living by needlework, and was one of the many to be met everywhere, who have seen better days, and who, friendless and alone, have to die in a garret, while the rich thoughtlessly array themselves in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day. Surely there is something amiss in our nineteenth-century civilization when such is the case. It is well to tell such suffering ones that there is a better world, and a Father in heaven who shall wipe all tears from every eye, and where sorrow shall be unknown. But surely our rich need not be so very rich nor our poor so very poor, nor the cup of human suffering be, to many, so overflowing. Surely we need not wait till we have entered the golden gates and walked the pearly streets of the new Jerusalem to set such matters right, or till the Saviour, as some Christians tell us, comes to reign as a temporal Prince, in a world He once blessed with His presence and brightened with His smile. Human laws and misgovernment have had a good deal to do with the appalling inequality which meets us on every side, and which jars strongly with the Bible lessons read at our churches on a Sunday and the utterances of our pulpit orators. But let us return to the poor woman, weary with hard work, with disappointed hope; weary of the bitter past and of contemplating the dark future, on the black cloud of which she could see, as she gazed at it steadily from year to year, no silver lining. She makes no complaint, utters no moan, is never visible in the streets; yet her lot is hard – harder than she can bear – harder than that of the improvident and thoughtless and vicious. All the sunshine is gone out of her, and her heart is broken, though mechanically she accomplishes her daily task. She had a husband, but he died, and it was to give him decent burial that she had to part with her little all; her son had been lost at sea; her daughter had married, and had gone to live in a far-off colony, and a voyage thither would kill her, as she had no stamina left in her emaciated body. Look at her shrunken form, her pale cheeks, her lacklustre eye, her hand worn to the bone! Her hold on life is slender indeed. One of the silent ones is she, who accept their sorrow, and never speak of it as of a burden too heavy to be borne.

‘Good-morning, my friend,’ said the Vicar with a benevolent smile. ‘We have just been visiting your poor neighbours and relieving their distress. They seem in a very bad way – nothing in the house. It is sad to think what would have become of them, if we had not called in the very nick of time. It is really shocking, the amount of misery in this unfortunate neighbourhood.’

‘Yes, there is indeed a lot of it here,’ said the poor woman. ‘It is hard work to be happy here.’

‘But you look as if you had employment.’

‘Yes, sir, I have, I am thankful to say, though it brings me in but little; at any rate, I earn enough to keep me off the parish. Perhaps, gentlemen, you would like to walk in.’

They did so.

‘How neat! how clean!’ said the Vicar, as he looked admiringly around. ‘What a view you have! Positively good; quite commands the place.’

‘Yes, sir, but the chimneys give me a little more smoke than I care for. It is rarely I dare open my window, for fear of the blacks.’

‘Ah, my good woman, it is so with all of us! There is always something amiss – something we should like to get rid of – a fly in the ointment,’ as Solomon says. ‘Now, there are my curates: they are happy young men, but I have no doubt they would like to be in my shoes’ – a remark so true that the curates could not contradict it, only by a deprecatory smile and shake of the head. ‘Dear me!’ continued the Vicar, as he turned from the window to the interior. ‘Why, you have a sofa here, with an antimacassar!’

‘Pardon, sir, that is my bed.’

‘Ah, well, it is quite a model – quite a model. Why, we could dine here off the floor. What a nice little bit of carpet! What a nice little looking-glass! Oh, woman, how strong is the ruling passion! And bless me!’ he said, turning, as he made a still longer inspection, ‘why, here are flowers – positively flowers – and flowers cost a deal of money at this season of the year!’

‘Excuse me, sir, they are artificial.’

‘What! ah, yes, I see they are; but artificial flowers cost money.’

‘They cost me but very little. I made them myself, to sell, if possible, but I could not get a customer, and so I kept them to make the room a bit cheerful.’

‘Ah, I see you are one of the better class of workpeople – what I may call the aristocracy. I am awfully sorry. I should really have liked to have helped you, but our funds are small, and the amount of distress in the town is so large that we are obliged to be very particular – very particular indeed. It is a duty we owe to the parish and to the kind friends who have subscribed the money. They have the greatest confidence in us, and we must not abuse that confidence.’

‘Pray, sir, don’t think of it. If there are any poor people much worse off than myself, why, I pity ’em,’ said the poor woman.

‘Worse off, my good woman! Oh, the town is full of such! Look at your poor neighbours in the next room – a most shocking case; yet, in all their poverty, taking charge of a little waif that, somehow or other, came into their hands.’

The woman said nothing. She could have said a good deal, but she knew the family, and she also knew the value of peace and quietness.

‘Perhaps you will like to accept of this little tract,’ said the Vicar, who wished to show his sympathy, but who did not exactly know how. ‘It is prettily got up, and I rejoice to say it has been found greatly useful. You will, perhaps, read it with more interest as it was written by myself. And here is another, by my daughter, “On the Blessings of Poverty.”’

‘On what, sir?’

‘“On the Blessings of Poverty.”’

‘Well, I never heard of them. I am sure I shall like to read that.’

‘Here they are, then,’ said the Vicar, handing them smilingly. ‘And now we must wish you good-morning; our time is precious, and we have a good deal to do yet.’

‘Had you better not give her something to eat?’ said one of the curates in a low voice as they were turning away.

‘Oh dear no!’ said the Vicar; ‘that would be very wrong – very wrong indeed.’ Then in an undervoice he added: ‘Our intrusion here is quite a mistake. This is not a case in which we can interfere. But we wish you a good-morning, with the compliments of the season; and I will get my daughter to call with a few more tracts, and perhaps she might like to buy some of your artificial flowers.’

‘I am sure I should be glad to see her.’

‘Well, well, we shall see. You know me, of course; I am the Vicar of the parish. Of course, you have often seen me at church.’

‘Well, I can’t say that I have.’

‘Why, you don’t mean to say you don’t go to a place of worship? You are not a heathen, are you?’

‘I hope not, sir; but I have to work so hard all the week that I am thankful for a little more rest on a Sunday, and when I go out I go to chapel.’

‘To chapel! How is that?’ said the Vicar, in a by no means pleased tone. ‘Don’t you know all Dissenters are schismatics? My good woman, I am sorry for you.’

‘Well, sir, I go to chapel because I was brought up to it, and it seems more homelike.’

‘Well, then, the chapel people must look after you. You are not in my charge at all. It is a pity, and I am sorry for it. Perhaps, if we saw you at church we could help you a little, if ever you did require any aid. But we can’t discuss that question. It is clear we have no further business here, have we, Mr. Jones?’

The curate with that uncommon name replied to his reverend superior, ‘Certainly not.’

‘Certainly not,’ replied the poor woman, with a shade of disappointment over her pale face, and a little more of pardonable acidity in her tone; ‘certainly not. I am no beggar.’

‘Just so, my good woman,’ said the Vicar, as he tripped with his curate downstairs. ‘Just so; as I have said, we have to exercise the utmost care in the disposal of our funds.’

More of a Samaritan than the Vicar, the poor woman kept the door open till she had heard the last of his steps down the creaking stairs, or he might have had a fall, a not uncommon circumstance on that dilapidated staircase, and then she turned away to her loneliness and misery with her broken heart. The lamp flickered in the socket, the end was very near; life for her had no charm, death no terror.

That night was one of extra jollity as far as the inhabitants of Parker’s Piece were concerned. The police had not had so much trouble in the place for a long while, nor had the publicans and pawnbrokers done such a roaring trade. No one couple in all that squalid district was more drunk that night than Carroty Bill and his better-half.

That night was one of intense cold – the coldest, in feet, of the year, the coldest of many years – and, as such, noted by distinguished meteorologists. The cold was everywhere; in the palace of the prince, as well as in the hut of the peasant. It crept into Belgravian homes, where the lord and master lined himself with extra good cheer, and warmed himself with extra fires; it made dainty maidens and high-born matrons wrap themselves in extra fur as they drove home from dinner-party or theatre, or concert or ball. In railway carriages there was an extra demand for foot-warmers, and at every refreshment bar there was an incessant demand for a glass of something hot. It was the same in all the publics and gin-palaces; and it was a curious fact, the poorer the people were, the more eager was their consumption of potent fluids; and how they lingered around the places where they were sold, even when their money and their credit were gone, as if loath to do battle with the cold without as it pinched their gloveless hands or shoeless feet, or as it found its way into their cheerless garret or cellar as the case might be! In the homes of the well-to-do how the fires blazed, as the fond mother clasped tightly her babe to her bosom for further warmth. In some of the best constructed conservatories the frost nipped off many a tender plant, and as costly as tender, while out-door gardeners suffered losses bewailed bitterly for many a long year. There were muscular young Christians who enjoyed that cold amazingly, as, well fed and well clad, bearing torches, they skated along the Serpentine, or in Regent’s Park, and laughed hugely when any of their weaker brethren or sisters complained. But, nevertheless, the night’s frost played sad havoc with the old, the feeble, and the tender. It crept into that attic in Parker’s Piece, where that poor needlewoman lived. There was no fire in her empty grate to keep it out, no extra blanket for her bed, no vital warmth in her attenuated frame to withstand its fatal power; and when the early sunbeams made their way through the frosted window with difficulty, they lit up, not the pale face of a living woman, but of a corpse. She had been sorely tried that day. The last straw had broken the camel’s back. Christian charity – while it relieved the undeserving, while it had feasted the reprobate – had passed by her, because, poor as she was, she was a real woman with all a woman’s self-respect and sensitiveness to shame, not a drunken, dissipated wretch of brazen face and fluent tongue. Her heart was broken already, and she fell an easy prey to the cold as it stiffened her withered limbs and stopped her poor heart’s action and dried up the feeble current of her blood. Again the coroner came to Parker’s Piece, and an intelligent jury returned a verdict of ‘Death from the visitation of God.’ Dear reader, you and I know better; she was murdered, and a day will come when some one will have to suffer for that deed – murdered she was, as surely as if her throat had been cut by the assassin’s knife. There are thousands in this land of churches and chapels and abounding charities who die in this way every year, and someone, statesman, or parson, or philanthropist, or master, or neighbour, is to blame. As regards each of us, it is as well that we pray with David, ‘Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God of my salvation.’ It is only as we realize the spirit of that prayer that we can save the perishing. That is the remedy, and not the dream of the Utopian, or the Socialist, or the mad result of anarchy and crime.

CHAPTER II.

THE ACTRESS AND THE WAIF

A lady – a genius, beautiful in face, well formed in person, one of Nature’s nobility if of doubtful pedigree – had been giving a Shakespearian reading or recitation, it matters not which, to a highly respectable audience in a highly respectable county town. The leading county families had, as they were bound to do, put in an appearance on the occasion. Wealthy manufacturers, who did not much care about that sort of thing themselves, had sent their women-folk, always delighted to show that they could dress as well, and look as grand, as the wives and daughters of men whose ancestors had fought at Agincourt or at the Battle of Hastings. Bevies of sweet girl graduates, from the neighbouring female academies, had come to listen and admire; while a few of the superior class of tradesmen and local magnates had kindly condescended to patronize the star that had suddenly appeared in their midst, and whose portrait for some weeks previous had ornamented their walls and shop windows – in the case of the latter by means of photographs, while big lithographs were available for posters. The audience were deeply affected, some with the loveliness of the actress, others, a more select and elderly party, with her dramatic power. According to local journals, the actress was greeted with an ovation as she resumed her seat. All eyes were turned on her as she retired from the scene of her triumphs, fevered with excitement, wearied with her physical exertion, flushed with the applause she had honestly won, her brain still reeking with excitement, her whole figure quivering with emotion, her eyes still glistening with the light that never shone on sea or shore.

By the side of the public hall was a small committee-room, into which our heroine was led, having previously effected a change in her dress and put on her bonnet.