One of Lifes Slaves | Page 6

a little practice for
him.
But here, too, she was to have sad experience. She left him by the
cradle went she went out, but when she came home, he would be
standing gazing out of the window or from the top of the cellar stairs at
the children playing in the square. She had even caught him right
outside with the door open behind him--it was all the same to him, as
long as he could get out of the cellar and away from his duty.
Well, the young rogue would have to pay for it, as much as his mortal
back could bear!
And she assured the servant upstairs, who put in her head to hear what
the little imp had done now, as he was screaming so--that all the
punishment she gave him, and all her attempts, both by letting him
have no supper and by locking him in, were equally useless: he was just
as defiant and unreliable as ever!

She had frightened him now by saying that the devil sat in the corner
behind the bed and watched to see if he left the cradle!
He was almost beside himself with terror, and fancied all the time that
he could see the aforesaid sinister personage putting up his head over
Mrs. Holman's pillow. He could not help looking now and again
towards the window--there was some one playing outside in the square.
And, somehow or other, he came to be standing there, and stood until
he once more remembered what was behind him. Then he darted back
like an arrow, and sat staring in mortal fear into the corner.
From being made useful beside the cradle, Nikolai was advanced in
course of time to mind the Holman's daughter Ursula, outside the cellar
steps. To move farther, only as far as the trees over on the other side of
the street, was a capital offence. The idea of what overstepping the
bounds meant, was impressed upon him with full force. How could Mrs.
Holman be sure otherwise that he did not take Silla right up to the basin
round the fountain, where all the naughty boys played with their ships,
and shouted and made a noise? His poor little body had received so
many black and blue marks every time he had fallen into temptation
that at last the limits stood instinctively before his frightened perception
like an invisible iron grating. A foot's breadth beyond was, in his
imagination, the blackest crime, an enormity which would draw down
the fiercest retribution upon him.
That Silla was an uncommon and remarkable being of a higher order,
so to speak, than himself, had been driven into him in so many ways
ever since she came into the world, that he looked upon the assertion as
raised above all doubt.
Notwithstanding everything that he had endured for her sake, or
perhaps, by a strange contradiction, just because of these sufferings, the
feeling that she was under his care was most highly developed. His
admiration of her was unqualified; he thought her more than
remarkable in her blue bow and an old red stuff rose in her hat, and he
submitted to a wilfulness which was quite as despotic as even Mrs.
Holman's. When he had sat long enough and let her fill his hair with
dust, she would order him to pull off her shoes and stockings. If he did

it, he got a beating; if he did not do it, she screamed, and then he got a
beating too.
Insecurity was, so to speak, the soil on which he lived, and the hurried,
shrinking glances he continually cast, as if from habit, towards the
cellar door--even when his often guilt-laden conscience felt itself most
guiltless--were only the fruit of daily experience.
"You could see the bad conscience in his face, a long way off," said
Mrs. Holman; and it was true--the quick, watchful look up with the
grey eyes was to see what sins he was guilty of now.
"Good neighbours and other good things," the catechism says. But in
our times we have no neighbours; you do not know who lives on the
floor above you or on the floor below, or even on the other side of the
passage. And so it was that no one in the house had any ear to speak of
for Nikolai's various untoward fortunes below in the cellar, although
their character often asserted itself with no uncertain sound during their
execution.
The neighbours had become accustomed to the continual screaming and
howling of that naughty boy, just as one accustoms one's self to piano
practising or the din of a factory; perhaps too, they comforted
themselves with the thought that it was most fortunate that such a
morally depraved child had come