James Greenwood - The True History of a Little Ragamuffin

“Don’t you fear, mum; I won’t tell him. I ain’t the sort of boy to get anybody into a row what spoke up for my good.”

“I do speak for your good,” answered she, raising her tearful face from the table; “I don’t speak it out of goodness, for there is none left in me, Lord help me; but may I never live to see daylight if all I have told you is not true, every word, every letter of it.”

“So I b’lieve, mum; I can tell that from your ways of sayin’ on it; but, look here, mum, what’s a cove to do?”

“Go back to bed and think what you had better do,” replied she, “I know nothing more about you than what you have told me; and, indeed, I don’t want to know. You’re awfully young to be a thief; go to bed and think a bit about it, think about where you may go and what you may do if you run away from this.”

“But if I was to run away, don’t you think he’d run arter me, mum? He said as much.”

“Then you must think of a place to run to where he dare not follow you. Don’t say any more. Go back to bed and think about it; you’ll do better there than talking with me. Good night.”

And so I was dismissed, and retired once more to bed in as pretty a state of bewilderment as can be imagined. It was very well for Mrs. Hopkins (or whatever else her name might be; it was clearly not Mrs. Hopkins, however) to say “Go to bed and think.” How could I think with anything like a purpose? How could my thoughts be other than cross-grained, and at variance, after such an evening of blowing hot and then cold, and then hot again? From what point could I start for a good steady “think?” From the time of my meeting with Long George—from the time of my falling in with Rip—from my reconciliation with the thief-trainer? Should I go no farther back than my extraordinary conversation with his housekeeper, from which I had just returned with my heart nearly melted? It was all of no use; all was jumble and confusion.

Through all, however, stood out the plain conviction that the woman down-stairs had told me the truth to the best of her knowledge. I had not the least doubt that Long George Hopkins was just as black as his housekeeper had painted him; and that, if I stayed in his service, my fate would be just what she said it would be. What served to convince me of this more than anything else, more than her extravagant denunciations of him as a spider, and a vampire, and a bloodsucker, was her betrayal of his favourite and oft-repeated maxim—”Never take up with a fresh hand till you’ve shopped your scarecrow.” They were the words of his own mouth, without doubt. I knew the meaning of the slang term “shopped” well enough. I had heard it under the dark arches any number of times in the course of the conversations that took place among the thieves lodging there, while relating the misfortunes of their brethren. What a “scarecrow” was the woman had sufficiently explained. I could think enough of all this, and could arrive at the conclusion that, after being warned, I should be nothing but a fool to remain at Keate Street. I would run away—but where? To somewhere where he dare not follow me. Where was that? Here I stuck; and, in order to shirk the difficulty, at least for the present, I encouraged a growing inclination to go to sleep. “I will have some more talk with her about it to-morrow, and I’ve no doubt that she will put me in the way of managing how to get away all right,” thought I; and that was the last of anything I thought of that night.

It was eight o’clock by the splendid watch Mr. Hopkins had presented me with, before I woke next morning, having slept through the night perfectly tranquil and undisturbed by dreams. I had not heard Mr. Hopkins come home, but it was the creaking of his boots going downstairs that woke me, so that it was clear that he had come home. He came out of the front room that adjoined mine, which, it seemed, was their bedroom. He went down in a hurry, without calling me as I expected he would, and walked quickly along the passage, and went out, shutting the door after him; and while I lay, still wondering whether I should get up just yet, I heard the street-door open again, and the sound of another pair of boots besides Long George’s. Both men came up the stairs and went into the front room, and shortly afterwards Long George came into my room.

“Now, Jim, get up,” said he; “you’ll have to be housemaid and cook and the devil knows what to-day, I reckon; the missus is ill.”

“Not very ill, sir, is she?” I asked, with a sudden and forcible remembrance of her strangely excited face last night.

“Ill enough to make me fetch the doctor in a hurry; she’s got a fever, or going to have one, or something or the other, so he says; there’s always some infernal bother or other.”

The “fever or something,” that attacked Long George Hopkins’s housekeeper turned out to be no slight matter; it kept her a prisoner in her room for full three weeks.

During all this time I never once set eyes on her. An old woman of the neighbourhood came to wait on her, and do the housework and the cooking, at both of which domestic employments I assisted to the best of my ability. It was all I had to do. As for the trade my master had engaged to teach me, I was no wiser concerning it at the expiration of the three weeks, than when I first crossed his threshold; on the contrary, being an occupation at which one’s hand very speedily gets out for want of practice, it is likely that I was a more indifferent sort of thief than on the evening when I picked my last pocket The fact was, my master was never at home, the fever drove him away almost entirely. He took his meals with me in the parlour—with the window open, and the place smelling of vinegar like a pickling warehouse—and then he walked off and was seen no more all day, and, in general, through part of the night, it being my duty to sit up until he came home. He had a bed made up on the sofa in the parlour, and there he slept, and so on day after day.

I had nothing to complain of. My meals were regular and first-rate. I could always have a shilling by asking for it, and was allowed to go out of evenings from six or seven till ten. So far from encouraging me in dishonest courses, Long George never went out in the morning without warning me against them. “Don’t you go making yourself busy, you know,” he would say, and I knew perfectly well what he meant; “and don’t go to low and blackguardly places to amuse yourself; go to the theatre,—to the pit, mind, not to the gallery, or to some respectable concert-room; if you ain’t got enough money, say so; I’d rather give you a pound than you should go helping yourself.” So that, although there was never a day passed that I did not think over the advice Mr. Hopkins’s housekeeper had given me, to have have run away under such circumstances appeared to me to be in the last degree foolish.

Besides, although I never saw the sick housekeeper, I frequently heard from her through the old woman that nursed her, and was of service to her in the way of going errands, and many other ways, and it would have been nothing short of ungrateful to have run away from her.

At the expiration of three weeks (a fortnight out of which Long George had never once seen his sick housekeeper; nor even, as far as my knowledge went, asked after her) she came downstairs, looking woefully thin and pale, and scarcely to be recognized on account of all her long hair having been shorn off, and wearing a cap. I was quite astonished to see how plain she had grown; as was Mr. Hopkins, to judge from the remark he made when, for the first time, he came in and found her sitting in the easy-chair, with a pillow behind her, by the fire.