The boy said, "I can't clean they dratted top-boots. I cleaned a groom's boots a Toosday, and he punched my block because I blacked the tops.
Where did that button go?"
And Charles said, "You can clean the lower part of my boots, and do no harm. Your button is here against the lamp-post."
The boy picked it up, and got his apparatus ready. But, before he began, he looked up in Charles's face, as if he was going to speak; then he began vigorously, but in half a minute looked up again, and stopped.
Charles saw that the boy liked him, and wanted to talk to him; so he began, severely--
"How came you to be playing fives with a brass button, eh?"
The boy struck work at once, and answered, "I ain't got no ball."
"If you begin knocking stamped pieces of metal about in the street,"
continued Charles, "you will come to chuck-farthing, and from chuck-farthing to the gallows is a very short step indeed, I can assure you."
The boy did not seem to know whether Charles was joking or not. He cast a quick glance up at his face; but, seeing no sign of a smile there, he spat on one of his brushes, and said--
"Not if you don't cheat, it aint."
Charles suffered the penalty, which usually follows on talking nonsense, of finding himself in a dilemma; so he said imperiously--
"I shall buy you a ball to-morrow; I am not going to have you knocking buttons about against people's walls in broad daylight, like that."
It was the first time that the boy had ever heard nonsense talked in his life. It was a new sensation. He gave a sharp look up into Charles's face again, and then went on with his work.
"Where do you live, my little manikin?" said Charles directly, in that quiet pleasant voice I know so well.
The boy did not look up this time. It was not very often, possibly, that he got spoken to so kindly by his patrons; he worked away, and answered that he lived in Marquis Court, in Southwark.
"Why do you come so far, then?" asked Charles.
The boy told him why he plodded so wearily, day after day, over here in the West-end. It was for family reasons, into which I must not go too closely. Somebody, it appeared, still came home, now and then, just once in a way, to see her mother, and to visit the den where she was bred; and there was still left one who would wait for her, week after week--still one pair of childish feet, bare and dirty, that would patter back beside her--still one childish voice that would prattle with her, on her way to her hideous home, and call her sister.
"Have you any brothers?"
Five altogether. Jim was gone for a sojer, it appeared, and Nipper was sent over the water. Harry was on the cross--
"On the cross?" said Charles.
"Ah!" the boy said, "he goes out cly-faking, and such. He's a prig, and a smart one, too. He's fly, is Harry."
"But what is cly-faking?" said Charles.
"Why a-prigging of wipes, and sneeze-boxes, and ridicules, and such."
Charles was not so ignorant of slang as not to understand what his little friend meant now. He said--
"But _you_ are not a thief, are you?"
The boy looked up at him frankly and honestly, and said--
"Lord bless you, no! I shouldn't make no hand of that. I ain't brave enough for that!"
He gave the boy twopence, and gave orders that one penny was to be spent in a ball. And then he sauntered listlessly away--every day more listless, and not three weeks gone yet.
His mind returned to this child very often. He found himself thinking more about the little rogue than he could explain. The strange babble of the child, prattling so innocently, and, as he thought, so prettily, about vice, and crime, and misery; about one brother transported, one a thief--and you see he could love his sister even to the very end of it all. Strange babble indeed from a child's lips.
He thought of it again and again, and then, dressing himself plainly, he went up to Grosvenor Square, where Mary would be walking with Lord Charles Herries's children. He wanted to hear _them_ talk.
He was right in his calculations; the children were there. All three of them this time; and Mary was there too. They were close to the rails, and he leant his back on them, and heard every word.
"Miss Corby," said Gus, "if Lady Ascot is such a good woman, she will go to heaven when she dies?"
"Yes, indeed, my dear," said Mary.
"And, when grandma dies, will she go to heaven, too?" said the artful Gus, knowing as well as possible that old Lady Hainault and Lady Ascot were deadly enemies.
"I hope so, my dear," said Mary.
"But does Lady Ascot hope so? Do you think grandma would be happy if----"
It became high time to stop master Gus, who was getting on too fast.
Mary having bowled him out, Miss Flora had an innings.
"When I grow up," said Flora, "I shall wear knee-breeches and top-boots, and a white bull-dog, and a long clay pipe, and I shall drive into Henley on a market-day and put up at the Catherine Wheel."
Mary had breath enough left to ask why.
"Because Farmer Thompson at Casterton dresses like that, and he is such a dear old darling. He gives us strawberries and cream; and in his garden are gooseberries and peacocks; and the peacock's wives don't spread out their tails like their husbands do--the foolish things. Now, when I am married----"
Gus was rude enough to interrupt her here. He remarked--
"When Archy goes to heaven, he'll want the cat to come to bed with him; and, if he can't get her, there'll be a pretty noise."
"My dears," said Mary, "you must not talk anymore nonsense; I can't permit it."
"But, my dear Miss Corby," said Flora, "we haven't been talking nonsense, have we? I told you the truth about Farmer Thompson."
"I know what she means," said Gus; "we have been saying what came into our heads, and it vexes her. It is all nonsense, you know, about your wearing breeches and spreading out your tail like a peacock; we mustn't vex her."
Flora didn't answer Gus, but answered Mary by climbing on her knee and kissing her. "Tell us a story, dear," said Gus.
"What shall I tell?" said Mary.
"Tell us about Ravenshoe," said Flora; "tell us about the fishermen, and the priest that walked about like a ghost in the dark passages; and about Cuthbert Ravenshoe, who was always saying his prayers; and about the other one who won the boat race."
"Which one?" said silly Mary.
"Why, the other; the one you like best. What was his name?"