James Greenwood - The True History of a Little Ragamuffin

At that unlucky moment, however, Mrs. Burke’s cat came out of the back-room, and smelling out where her mistress was, gave a mew, and, butting the door wide open, walked in. Mrs. Burke paused in her droning, and looking round to see who had opened the door, spied me before I could shrink back.

“Ah, thin! is it yourself, Jimmy, jewel?” said she, in a kinder voice than I had ever yet heard her use. “Come in, thin, darlint, and take your place on your little shtool by the fire.”

“I don’t want. I’m warm out here.”

“Come in now, like a dear, and sit ye down, and take your tay like a little gintleman,” urged Mrs. Burke, coaxing me forward with her forefinger.

There was no use in refusing; so in I went, sulky enough.

But, wrong-headed boy that I was! I had scarcely taken six steps in at the doorway before I was filled with remorse for my ungrateful behaviour. The good Irishwoman had made our place bright as a new pin. Anyone might have taken his tea there like a gentleman. Never in my life had I seen our room looking so beautiful. The stove was as black and almost as shiny as Mr. Crowl’s hat, and the hearth—even that part of it on which the ashes dropped—was as white as a cut turnip. Ours was not a very nice set of fire-irons—indeed, we only possessed a bent poker and a cinder shovel; but now resting against the fireplace was a magnificent set, bright as silver. They were Mrs. Burke’s fire-irons, as I knew instantly from the crinkly pattern of their stems, and the shape of their knobs. The ornaments on the mantel-shelf were polished up, the floor scrubbed white and finely sanded, and before the fireplace a clean bit of carpet was spread. It was Mrs. Burke’s tea-tray on which our crockery stood, and the tea-spoons, genteelly placed in the cups, belonged also to Mrs. Burke. I was accustomed to take my tea out of a tin pot, but now, standing in the old place, by the side of my father’s cup and saucer, was a china mug, with gold letters on it—“A present from Tunbridge.” There was a spoon in the mug, as in the cups. And this was not all. Being a woman without children, and natty in her ways, Mrs. Burke had fixed up a sideboard in her room, and on it were arranged all sorts of odd bits of china and glass. The centre ornament of the lot, and one that she prized before all the others, (as was evident from its having a fancifully-cut piece of yellow satin to stand on,) was a china butter-boat—very old-fashioned, but of gorgeous design, and coloured green and blue, and scarlet—with the heads of the rivets that fastened on the cracked spout, bright as spangles. Well, there was the china butter-boat on the hob, with baby’s pap in it, and very beautiful it looked with the light of the fire glowing on its crimson and green side.

“Where’s daddy, Jimmy?” asked Mrs. Burke, taking off my cap, and tidily hanging it on a nail behind the door. “Did you leave him in the churchyard, Jimmy?”

“Close by there, ma’am.”

“Where’s close by, sonny?”

“At the public-house, ma’am.”

“Waitin’ to take a shmall dhrop at the bar to put him in life a little, poor man,” observed Mrs. Burke, raising a corner of her clean apron to her eye. “Never mind. Don’t cry, Jimmy,” (I wasn’t crying nor thinking about it;) “he’ll be here directly, I’ll be bound.”

“He wasn’t at the bar, ma’am; he was inside the room, sitting down with the burying-men.”

“Sitting down, was he?” said she, chirping to the baby, and tickling its little fat chin kindly.

“Cryin’, Jimmy, was he?”

“He was smoking his pipe, and having some gin, ma’am.”

“Oh! it’s a darlin’!” cried Mrs. Burke, with a sudden gush of affection for my little sister.

“Did he sind you off, Jim? What did he say?”

“I heard him tell the man that ‘them that growed sparrow grass and sold it, ought to know now to spell it better than them who now and then got a sniff of it passing a cook-shop.’ He was a good mind to have a row with the man, I think. I heard him say that he always wanted to pull a man’s nose when he called things by flash names.”

“Was the man callin’ him flash names? Did he keep callin’ yer daddy ‘sir,’ and ‘Mr. Ballisat,’ and he didn’t like it? Course he wouldn’t. That’s Jim all over. I know him.”

“Oh no, ma’am! he didn’t call father names; he only would have it that sparrowgrass was something else,—that was all the talk.”

Mrs. Burke made no answer, but began laughing and chirping to the baby in a more cheerful way than ever. By and by she laid the baby down on the bed, and, fetching a broom from her own room, swept up some ashes that had fallen, and rearranged the fire-irons. Then she took the china butter-boat off the hob, gave it a polish with her apron, and stood it back again. After giving several other things a finishing touch, she retired outside the door, and then put in her head as a visitor might, and took a rapid glance round; then she crossed over to the fireplace, and altered the butter-boat slightly, so that a looker-in at the door might obtain at a glance a broadside view of its splendour. Convincing herself by a second glance that her arrangements were perfect, she took the baby up and went to the window with it in her arms, and there remained looking towards Turnmill Street till it grew quite dark; then she neatly closed the curtains, and set up a candle in a brass candlestick, that was so bright that you could see your face in it I think she must have observed the admiring gaze with which I regarded the bright candlestick, for said she—

“We must give the dirty thing a rub, Jimmy; it isn’t so clane as you’ve been used to see it, my man!”

“It is ten times cleaner, ma’am,” returned I, honestly; “it’s beautiful.”

“Well, maybe it ’ll pass; but your daddy’s so perticlar, you know; he’ll be grumblin’ about that dirthy ould butther-boat, don’t ye think, Jimmy?”

“What dirty butter-boat, ma’am?”

“That on the hob with the baby’s pap in it, Jimmy.”

“Dirty! it isn’t dirty; nothing’s dirty, except”—

“Except what? out with it! except what, now?”

Mrs. Burke flushed red as she said this, and spoke very quick and sharp; perhaps it was lucky for me that she did, for in my ignorant eyes the only exception to the prevailing cleanliness was her freckled face and hands, and that was what I was about to tell her. Seeing, however, how she was likely to take it, like the little hypocrite I was, I replied to her impatient demand for an explanation—

“Except me, ma’am. Here’s dirty hands!”

My sin carried its sting. Uttering an exclamation as though never in the course of her life she had seen hands so hideously dirty (though, in truth, they were more than usually clean,) she laid the baby down, and taking me into her own room, there gave my face as well as my hands such a scrubbing with yellow soap and the corner of a rough towel as brought the tears to my eyes. Then with her own comb she combed my hair, and with her own oil oiled it; and somehow or another, contrived a curl on either temple. Then she turned my pinafore, and brought the brass buckle of my belt well to the front, and gave it a rub to brighten it.

“Will you have your tea now, Jimmy; or will you wait a little till daddy comes home?” asked she, when she had set me on my stool by the fire. For a considerable time before this I had been contemplating the pile of toast inside the fender, my increasing hunger doing battle against my deep-seated prejudice against Mrs. Burke’s freckles. The latter lost ground rapidly. To be sure, she had taken the bread in her hands to cut; but everything objectionable must have departed from it in the process of toasting. But then, she had to butter it! True again; but the butter on the top round was by this time nearly all frizzled in. Thought I, “If she should ask me to have a piece of toast, I will say yes, and take that top piece.” But, unfortunately, just as she asked me, “Would I have my tea now, or wait until my father came home?” she stooped to blow off a “black” that had settled on the side of the butter-boat, and her freckled arm actually touched the crust of that very top round.