Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished | Page 6

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