Chapter 43

The Old Curiosity Shop

by Charles Dickens

Her momentary weakness past, the child again summoned the
resolution which had until now sustained her, and, endeavouring to
keep steadily in her view the one idea that they were flying from
disgrace and crime, and that her grandfather's preservation must
depend solely on her firmness, unaided by one word of advice or any
helping hand, urged him onward and looked back no more.

While he, subdued and abashed, seemed to crouch before her, and
to shrink and cower down, as if in the presence of some superior
creature, the child herself was sensible of a new feeling within her,
which elevated her nature, and inspired her with an energy and
confidence she had never known. There was no divided responsibility
now; the whole burden of their two lives had fallen upon her, and
henceforth she must think and act for both. 'I have saved him,' she
thought. 'In all dangers and distresses, I will remember that.'

At any other time, the recollection of having deserted the
friend who had shown them so much homely kindness, without a word of
justification--the thought that they were guilty, in appearance, of
treachery and ingratitude--even the having parted from the two
sisters--would have filled her with sorrow and regret. But now, all
other considerations were lost in the new uncertainties and anxieties
of their wild and wandering life; and the very desperation of their
condition roused and stimulated her.

In the pale moonlight, which lent a wanness of its own to the
delicate face where thoughtful care already mingled with the winning
grace and loveliness of youth, the too bright eye, the spiritual
head, the lips that pressed each other with such high resolve and
courage of the heart, the slight figure firm in its bearing and yet
so very weak, told their silent tale; but told it only to the wind
that rustled by, which, taking up its burden, carried, perhaps to
some mother's pillow, faint dreams of childhood fading in its bloom,
and resting in the sleep that knows no waking.

The night crept on apace, the moon went down, the stars grew
pale and dim, and morning, cold as they, slowly approached. Then,
from behind a distant hill, the noble sun rose up, driving the mists
in phantom shapes before it, and clearing the earth of their ghostly
forms till darkness came again. When it had climbed higher into the
sky, and there was warmth in its cheerful beams, they laid them down
to sleep, upon a bank, hard by some water.

But Nell retained her grasp upon the old man's arm, and long
after he was slumbering soundly, watched him with untiring eyes.
Fatigue stole over her at last; her grasp relaxed, tightened, relaxed
again, and they slept side by side.

A confused sound of voices, mingling with her dreams, awoke her.
A man of very uncouth and rough appearance was standing over them,
and two of his companions were looking on, from a long heavy boat
which had come close to the bank while they were sleeping. The boat
had neither oar nor sail, but was towed by a couple of horses, who,
with the rope to which they were harnessed slack and dripping in the
water, were resting on the path.

'Holloa!' said the man roughly. 'What's the matter here?'

'We were only asleep, Sir,' said Nell. 'We have been walking
all night.'

'A pair of queer travellers to be walking all night,' observed
the man who had first accosted them. 'One of you is a trifle too old
for that sort of work, and the other a trifle too young. Where are
you going?'

Nell faltered, and pointed at hazard towards the West, upon
which the man inquired if she meant a certain town which he named.
Nell, to avoid more questioning, said 'Yes, that was the place.'

'Where have you come from?' was the next question; and this
being an easier one to answer, Nell mentioned the name of the village
in which their friend the schoolmaster dwelt, as being less likely to
be known to the men or to provoke further inquiry.

'I thought somebody had been robbing and ill-using you, might
be,' said the man. 'That's all. Good day.'

Returning his salute and feeling greatly relieved by his
departure, Nell looked after him as he mounted one of the horses, and
the boat went on. It had not gone very far, when it stopped again,
and she saw the men beckoning to her.

'Did you call to me?' said Nell, running up to them.

'You may go with us if you like,' replied one of those in the
boat. 'We're going to the same place.'

The child hesitated for a moment. Thinking, as she had thought
with great trepidation more than once before, that the men whom she
had seen with her grandfather might, perhaps, in their eagerness for
the booty, follow them, and regaining their influence over him, set
hers at nought; and that if they went with these men, all traces of
them must surely be lost at that spot; determined to accept the
offer. The boat came close to the bank again, and before she had had
any more time for consideration, she and her grandfather were on
board, and gliding smoothly down the canal.

The sun shone pleasantly on the bright water, which was
sometimes shaded by trees, and sometimes open to a wide extent of
country, intersected by running streams, and rich with wooded hills,
cultivated land, and sheltered farms. Now and then, a village with
its modest spire, thatched roofs, and gable-ends, would peep out from
among the trees; and, more than once, a distant town, with great
church towers looming through its smoke, and high factories or
workshops rising above the mass of houses, would come in view, and,
by the length of time it lingered in the distance, show them how
slowly they travelled. Their way lay, for the most part, through the
low grounds, and open plains; and except these distant places, and
occasionally some men working in the fields, or lounging on the
bridges under which they passed, to see them creep along, nothing
encroached on their monotonous and secluded track.

Nell was rather disheartened, when they stopped at a kind of
wharf late in the afternoon, to learn from one of the men that they
would not reach their place of destination until next day, and that,
if she had no provision with her, she had better buy it there. She
had but a few pence, having already bargained with them for some
bread, but even of these it was necessary to be very careful, as they
were on their way to an utterly strange place, with no resource
whatever. A small loaf and a morsel of cheese, therefore, were all
she could afford, and with these she took her place in the boat
again, and, after half an hour's delay during which the men were
drinking at the public-house, proceeded on the journey.

They brought some beer and spirits into the boat with them, and
what with drinking freely before, and again now, were soon in a fair
way of being quarrelsome and intoxicated. Avoiding the small cabin,
therefore, which was very dark and filthy, and to which they often
invited both her and her grandfather, Nell sat in the open air with
the old man by her side: listening to their boisterous hosts with a
palpitating heart, and almost wishing herself safe on shore again
though she should have to walk all night.

They were, in truth, very rugged, noisy fellows, and quite
brutal among themselves, though civil enough to their two passengers.
Thus, when a quarrel arose between the man who was steering and his
friend in the cabin, upon the question who had first suggested the
propriety of offering Nell some beer, and when the quarrel led to a
scuffle in which they beat each other fearfully, to her inexpressible
terror, neither visited his displeasure upon her, but each contented
himself with venting it on his adversary, on whom, in addition to
blows, he bestowed a variety of compliments, which, happily for the
child, were conveyed in terms, to her quite unintelligible. The
difference was finally adjusted, by the man who had come out of the
cabin knocking the other into it head first, and taking the helm into
his own hands, without evincing the least discomposure himself, or
causing any in his friend, who, being of a tolerably strong
constitution and perfectly inured to such trifles, went to sleep as
he was, with his heels upwards, and in a couple of minutes or so was
snoring comfortably.

By this time it was night again, and though the child felt cold,
being but poorly clad, her anxious thoughts were far removed from her
own suffering or uneasiness, and busily engaged in endeavouring to
devise some scheme for their joint subsistence. The same spirit
which had supported her on the previous night, upheld and sustained
her now. Her grandfather lay sleeping safely at her side, and the
crime to which his madness urged him, was not committed. That was
her comfort.

How every circumstance of her short, eventful life, came
thronging into her mind, as they travelled on! Slight incidents,
never thought of or remembered until now; faces, seen once and ever
since forgotten; words scarcely heeded at the time; scenes, of a year
ago and those of yesterday, mixing up and linking themselves
together; familiar places shaping themselves out in the darkness from
things which, when approached, were, of all others, the most remote
and most unlike them; sometimes, a strange confusion in her mind
relative to the occasion of her being there, and the place to which
she was going, and the people she was with; and imagination
suggesting remarks and questions which sounded so plainly in her
ears, that she would start, and turn, and be almost tempted to
reply;--all the fancies and contradictions common in watching and
excitement and restless change of place, beset the child.

She happened, while she was thus engaged, to encounter the face
of the man on deck, in whom the sentimental stage of drunkenness had
now succeeded to the boisterous, and who, taking from his mouth a
short pipe, quilted over with string for its longer preservation,
requested that she would oblige him with a song.

'You've got a very pretty voice, a very soft eye, and a very
strong memory,' said this gentleman; 'the voice and eye I've got
evidence for, and the memory's an opinion of my own. And I'm never
wrong. Let me hear a song this minute.'

'I don't think I know one, sir,' returned Nell.

'You know forty-seven songs,' said the man, with a gravity which
admitted of no altercation on the subject. 'Forty-seven's your
number. Let me hear one of 'em--the best. Give me a song this
minute.'

Not knowing what might be the consequences of irritating her
friend, and trembling with the fear of doing so, poor Nell sang him
some little ditty which she had learned in happier times, and which
was so agreeable to his ear, that on its conclusion he in the same
peremptory manner requested to be favoured with another, to which he
was so obliging as to roar a chorus to no particular tune, and with
no words at all, but which amply made up in its amazing energy for
its deficiency in other respects. The noise of this vocal
performance awakened the other man, who, staggering upon deck and
shaking his late opponent by the hand, swore that singing was his
pride and joy and chief delight, and that he desired no better
entertainment. With a third call, more imperative than either of the
two former, Nell felt obliged to comply, and this time a chorus was
maintained not only by the two men together, but also by the third
man on horseback, who being by his position debarred from a nearer
participation in the revels of the night, roared when his companions
roared, and rent the very air. In this way, with little cessation,
and singing the same songs again and again, the tired and exhausted
child kept them in good humour all that night; and many a cottager,
who was roused from his soundest sleep by the discordant chorus as it
floated away upon the wind, hid his head beneath the bed-clothes and
trembled at the sounds.

At length the morning dawned. It was no sooner light than it
began to rain heavily. As the child could not endure the intolerable
vapours of the cabin, they covered her, in return for her exertions,
with some pieces of sail-cloth and ends of tarpaulin, which sufficed
to keep her tolerably dry and to shelter her grandfather besides. As
the day advanced the rain increased. At noon it poured down more
hopelessly and heavily than ever without the faintest promise of
abatement.

They had, for some time, been gradually approaching the place
for which they were bound. The water had become thicker and dirtier;
other barges, coming from it, passed them frequently; the paths of
coal-ash and huts of staring brick, marked the vicinity of some great
manufacturing town; while scattered streets and houses, and smoke
from distant furnaces, indicated that they were already in the
outskirts. Now, the clustered roofs, and piles of buildings,
trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with
their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a
black vapour, which hung in a dense ill-favoured cloud above the
housetops and filled the air with gloom; the clank of hammers beating
upon iron, the roar of busy streets and noisy crowds, gradually
augmenting until all the various sounds blended into one and none was
distinguishable for itself, announced the termination of their
journey.

The boat floated into the wharf to which it belonged. The men
were occupied directly. The child and her grandfather, after waiting
in vain to thank them or ask them whither they should go, passed
through a dirty lane into a crowded street, and stood, amid its din
and tumult, and in the pouring rain, as strange, bewildered, and
confused, as if they had lived a thousand years before, and were
raised from the dead and placed there by a miracle.