Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished: A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure

“No, but, papa—dear papa, we must go. The city missionary could never say how very, very sorry I am that he should have broken his leg while helping me. And then I should so like to sit by him and tell him stories, and give him his soup and gruel, and read to him. Poor, poor boy, we must go, papa, won’t you?”

“Not to-day, dear. It is impossible to go to-day. There, now, don’t begin to cry. Perhaps—perhaps to-morrow—but think, my love; you have no idea how dirty—how very nasty—the places are in which our lower orders live.”

“Oh! yes I have,” said Di eagerly. “Haven’t I seen our nursery on cleaning days?”

A faint flicker of a smile passed over the knight’s countenance.

“True, darling, but the places are far, far dirtier than that. Then the smells. Oh! they are very dreadful—”

“What—worse than we have when there’s cabbage for dinner?”

“Yes, much worse than that.”

“I don’t care, papa. We must go to see the boy—the poor, poor boy, in spite of dirt and smells. And then, you know—let me up on your knee and I’ll tell you all about it. There! Well, then, you know, I’d tidy the room up, and even wash it a little. Oh, you can’t think how nicely I washed up my doll’s room—her corner, you know,—that day when I spilt all her soup in trying to feed her, and then, while trying to wipe it up, I accidentally burst her, and all her inside came out—the sawdust, I mean. It was the worst mess I ever made, but I cleaned it up as well as Jessie herself could have done—so nurse said.”

“But the messes down in Whitechapel are much worse than you have described, dear,” expostulated the parent, who felt that his powers of resistance were going.

“So much the better, papa,” replied Di, kissing her sire’s lethargic visage. “I should like so much to try if I could clean up something worse than my doll’s room. And you’ve promised, you know.”

“No—only said ‘perhaps,’” returned Sir Richard quickly.

“Well, that’s the same thing; and now that it’s all nicely settled, I’ll go and see nurse. Good-bye, papa.”

“Good-bye, dear,” returned the knight, resigning himself to his fate and the newspaper.

Chapter Three.

Poverty Manages to Board out her Infant for Nothing

On the night of the day about which we have been writing, a woman, dressed in “unwomanly rags” crept out of the shadow of the houses near London Bridge. She was a thin, middle-aged woman, with a countenance from which sorrow, suffering, and sin had not been able to obliterate entirely the traces of beauty. She carried a bundle in her arms which was easily recognisable as a baby, from the careful and affectionate manner in which the woman’s thin, out-spread fingers grasped it.

Hurrying on to the bridge till she reached the middle of one of the arches, she paused and looked over. The Thames was black and gurgling, for it was intensely dark, and the tide half ebb at the time. The turbid waters chafed noisily on the stone piers as if the sins and sorrows of the great city had been somehow communicated to them.

But the distance from the parapet to the surface of the stream was great. It seemed awful in the woman’s eyes. She shuddered and drew back.

“Oh! for courage—only for one minute!” she murmured, clasping the bundle closer to her breast.

The action drew off a corner of the scanty rag which she called a shawl, and revealed a small and round, yet exceedingly thin face, the black eyes of which seemed to gaze in solemn wonder at the scene of darkness visible which was revealed. The woman stood between two lamps in the darkest place she could find, but enough of light reached her to glitter in the baby’s solemn eyes as they met her gaze, and it made a pitiful attempt to smile as it recognised its mother.

“God help me! I can’t,” muttered the woman with a shiver, as if an ice-block had touched her heart.

She drew the rag hastily over the baby’s head again, pressed it closer to her breast, retraced her steps, and dived into the shadows from which she had emerged.

This was one of the “lower orders” to whom Sir Richard Brandon had such an objection, whom he found it, he said, so difficult to deal with, (no wonder, for he never tried to deal with them at all, in any sense worthy of the name), and whom it was, he said, useless to assist, because all he could do in such a vast accumulation of poverty would be a mere drop in the bucket. Hence Sir Richard thought it best to keep the drop in his pocket where it could be felt and do good—at least to himself, rather than dissipate it in an almost empty bucket. The bucket, however, was not quite empty—thanks to a few thousands of people who differed from the knight upon that point.

The thin woman hastened through the streets as regardless of passers-by as they were of her, until she reached the neighbourhood of Commercial Street, Spitalfields.

Here she paused and looked anxiously round her. She had left the main thoroughfare, and the spot on which she stood was dimly lighted. Whatever she looked or waited for, did not, however, soon appear, for she stood under a lamp-post, muttering to herself, “I must git rid of it. Better to do so than see it starved to death before my eyes.”

Presently a foot-fall was heard, and a man drew near. The woman gazed intently into his face. It was not a pleasant face. There was a scowl on it. She drew back and let him pass. Then several women passed, but she took no notice of them. Then another man appeared. His face seemed a jolly one. The woman stepped forward at once and confronted him.

“Please, sir,” she began, but the man was too sharp for her.

“Come now—you’ve brought out that baby on purpose to humbug people with it. Don’t fancy you’ll throw dust in my eyes. I’m too old a cock for that. Don’t you know that you’re breaking the law by begging?”

“I’m not begging,” retorted the woman, almost fiercely.

“Oh! indeed. Why do you stop me, then?”

“I merely wished to ask if your name is Thompson.”

“Ah hem!” ejaculated the man with a broad grin, “well no, madam, my name is not Thompson.”

“Well, then,” rejoined the woman, still indignantly, “you may move on.”

She had used an expression all too familiar to herself, and the man, obeying the order with a bow and a mocking laugh, disappeared like those who had gone before him.

For some time no one else appeared save a policeman. When he approached, the woman went past him down the street, as if bent on some business, but when he was out of sight she returned to the old spot, which was near the entrance to an alley.

At last the woman’s patience was rewarded by the sight of a burly little elderly man, whose face of benignity was unmistakably genuine. Remembering the previous man’s reference to the baby, she covered it up carefully, and held it more like a bundle.

Stepping up to the newcomer at once, she put the same question as to name, and also asked if he lived in Russell Square.

“No, my good woman,” replied the burly little man, with a look of mingled surprise and pity, “my name is not Thompson. It is Twitter—Samuel Twitter, of Twitter, Slime and—, but,” he added, checking himself, under a sudden and rare impulse of prudence, “why do you ask my name and address?”

The woman gave an almost hysterical laugh at having been so successful in her somewhat clumsy scheme, and, without uttering another word, darted down the alley. She passed rapidly round by a back way to another point of the same street she had left—well ahead of the spot where she had stood so long and so patiently that night. Here she suddenly uncovered the baby’s face and kissed it passionately for a few moments. Then, wrapping it in the ragged shawl, with its little head out, she laid it on the middle of the footpath full in the light of a lamp, and retired to await the result.

When the woman rushed away, as above related, Mr Samuel Twitter stood for some minutes rooted to the spot, lost in amazement. He was found in that condition by the returning policeman.

“Constable,” said he, cocking his hat to one side the better to scratch his bald head, “there are strange people in this region.”

“Indeed there are, sir.”

“Yes, but I mean very strange people.”

“Well, sir, if you insist on it, I won’t deny that some of them are very strange.”

“Yes, well—good-night, constable,” said Mr Twitter, moving slowly forward in a mystified state of mind, while the guardian of the night continued his rounds, thinking to himself that he had just parted from one of the very strangest of the people.

Suddenly Samuel Twitter came to a full stop, for there lay the small baby gazing at him with its solemn eyes, apparently quite indifferent to the hardness and coldness of its bed of stone.

“Abandoned!” gasped the burly little man.

Whether Mr Twitter referred to the infant’s moral character, or to its being shamefully forsaken, we cannot now prove, but he instantly caught the bundle in his arms and gazed at it. Possibly his gaze may have been too intense, for the mild little creature opened a small mouth that bore no proportion whatever to the eyes, and attempted to cry, but the attempt was a failure. It had not strength to cry.

The burly little man’s soul was touched to the centre by the sight. He kissed the baby’s forehead, pressed it to his ample breast, and hurried away. If he had taken time to think he might have gone to a police-office, or a night refuge, or some such haven of rest for the weary, but when Twitter’s feelings were touched he became a man of impulse. He did not take time to think—except to the extent that, on reaching the main thoroughfare, he hailed a cab and was driven home.

The poor mother had followed him with the intention of seeing him home. Of course the cab put an end to that. She felt comparatively easy, however, knowing, as she did, that her child was in the keeping of “Twitter, Slime and —.” That was quite enough to enable her to trace Mr Twitter out. Comforting herself as well as she could with this reflection, she sat down in a dark corner on a cold door-step, and, covering her face with both hands, wept as though her heart would break.