Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished | Page 6

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