The Cricket on the Hearth | Page 6

has seemed to tell me of another little voice, so sweet, so very
dear to me, before whose coming sound my trouble vanished like a
dream. And when I used to fear--I did fear once, John, I was very
young you know--that ours might prove to be an ill-assorted marriage, I
being such a child, and you more like my guardian than my husband;
and that you might not, however hard you tried, be able to learn to love
me, as you hoped and prayed you might; its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp has
cheered me up again, and filled me with new trust and confidence. I
was thinking of these things to-night, dear, when I sat expecting you;
and I love the Cricket for their sake!'
'And so do I,' repeated John. 'But, Dot? I hope and pray that I might
learn to love you? How you talk! I had learnt that, long before I brought
you here, to be the Cricket's little mistress, Dot!'
She laid her hand, an instant, on his arm, and looked up at him with an
agitated face, as if she would have told him something. Next moment
she was down upon her knees before the basket, speaking in a sprightly
voice, and busy with the parcels.
'There are not many of them to-night, John, but I saw some goods
behind the cart, just now; and though they give more trouble, perhaps,
still they pay as well; so we have no reason to grumble, have we?
Besides, you have been delivering, I dare say, as you came along?'
'Oh yes,' John said. 'A good many.'
'Why what's this round box? Heart alive, John, it's a wedding- cake!'
'Leave a woman alone to find out that,' said John, admiringly. 'Now a
man would never have thought of it. Whereas, it's my belief that if you
was to pack a wedding-cake up in a tea-chest, or a turn-up bedstead, or
a pickled salmon keg, or any unlikely thing, a woman would be sure to

find it out directly. Yes; I called for it at the pastry-cook's.'
'And it weighs I don't know what--whole hundredweights!' cried Dot,
making a great demonstration of trying to lift it.
'Whose is it, John? Where is it going?'
'Read the writing on the other side,' said John.
'Why, John! My Goodness, John!'
'Ah! who'd have thought it!' John returned.
'You never mean to say,' pursued Dot, sitting on the floor and shaking
her head at him, 'that it's Gruff and Tackleton the toymaker!'
John nodded.
Mrs. Peerybingle nodded also, fifty times at least. Not in assent- -in
dumb and pitying amazement; screwing up her lips the while with all
their little force (they were never made for screwing up; I am clear of
that), and looking the good Carrier through and through, in her
abstraction. Miss Slowboy, in the mean time, who had a mechanical
power of reproducing scraps of current conversation for the delectation
of the baby, with all the sense struck out of them, and all the nouns
changed into the plural number, inquired aloud of that young creature,
Was it Gruffs and Tackletons the toymakers then, and Would it call at
Pastry-cooks for wedding-cakes, and Did its mothers know the boxes
when its fathers brought them homes; and so on.
'And that is really to come about!' said Dot. 'Why, she and I were girls
at school together, John.'
He might have been thinking of her, or nearly thinking of her, perhaps,
as she was in that same school time. He looked upon her with a
thoughtful pleasure, but he made no answer.
'And he's as old! As unlike her!--Why, how many years older than you,
is Gruff and Tackleton, John?'
'How many more cups of tea shall I drink to-night at one sitting, than
Gruff and Tackleton ever took in four, I wonder!' replied John,
good-humouredly, as he drew a chair to the round table, and began at
the cold ham. 'As to eating, I eat but little; but that little I enjoy, Dot.'
Even this, his usual sentiment at meal times, one of his innocent
delusions (for his appetite was always obstinate, and flatly contradicted
him), awoke no smile in the face of his little wife, who stood among the
parcels, pushing the cake-box slowly from her with her foot, and never
once looked, though her eyes were cast down too, upon the dainty shoe

she generally was so mindful of. Absorbed in thought, she stood there,
heedless alike of the tea and John (although he called to her, and rapped
the table with his knife to startle her), until he rose and touched her on
the arm; when she looked at him for a moment, and hurried to her place
behind the teaboard, laughing at her negligence. But, not