The Strand Magazine/Volume 3/Issue 13/Jack Middleton's Mother

by Charles S. Cheltnam

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Jack Middleton's Mother.

By Charles S. Cheltnam.

"C-HO! Special edition!"

"Yer yar, sir! Take mine, sir! I see yer fust, sit!"

"No, sir; I was first, please, sir."

Two young ragamuffins, with seemingly not a pin's choice between them, were the speakers, and probably I should not have noticed either of them specially but for the occurrence of a momentary episode, in which they played very strongly contrasting parts.

In taking a halfpenny out of my pocket to pay for the paper which the more active of the two boys had thrust into my hand by the summary process of shouldering his competitor aside, I had, without being aware of the fact, let fall a shilling, which had rolled a yard or two away.

The boy who had served me with the paper had seen the coin fall, and scarcely stayed to take his half-penny before darting after it; but the boy he had distanced by his bit of sharp practice had also seen the coin fall and had picked it up by the time the other reached him. A moment later I came upon them, and overheard this significant scrap of dialogue:

"Yah! Yer ain't a-goin' ter be such a juggins as ter giv' it 'im back, are yer?"

"Yes, I am," said the other.

"You just gi' me 'arves."

"Git out! Don't be a fool! Cop it now yer got it. He do' know as he's lost it, an' nobody but me see yer pick it up. Look 'ere, you just gi' me 'arves, that's wot yer got ter do, if ye're goin' ter be one o' my pals; an' if yer ain't—well, don't yer come 'ere agin, tryin' ter sell no Ekkers, 'cos I won' let yer. So look out!"

Though as yet I was in the dark as to the meaning of all this, I had heard enough to satisfy me that the boy to whom these threats were addressed was being bullied by the other, a boy about twelve years of age, as well as I could guess, and not bigger than himself, but with a hardened look of the streets in his face—a horrible look when one pauses to examine it and to think how it has come to be stamped upon the face of a boy but little past the years of his infancy, suggesting a doubt, indeed, whether he can ever have known such a time of life.

The second boy, equally tattered as he was as to clothing, I could see at a glance exhibited, distinctly, points of advantage over him. He was cleaner, both as to flesh and dress; and the stamp or stain of precocious experience was not recognisable in his face. It also occurred to my mind that the few words I had heard him speak were better spoken, and in themselves, more correct than those which had issued from the other's lips.

My observation of the two boys, which was only that of a moment, was cut short by the one who had picked up my shilling raising his eyes and seeing me. Without the least sign of hesitancy, he held out the coin to me, saying:

"Please, sir, you dropped this."

The other boy turned away in angry disgust.

"Did I?" I asked.

"Yes, sir, when you took out the ha'penny to pay the other boy."

Here I must make remark which is personal to myself—enunciate a principle, while confessing that I have not always commanded sufficient firmness of mind, or rigidity of moral purpose, to put it into execution. I hold honesty to be a normal condition, and so, rarely if ever to be dealt with as if it were exceptional and extraordinary. The custom of rewarding poor people for doing something which all persons, whether rich or poor, are under primary obligation to do, has always appeared to me calculated to do harm to character, to confound simple moral obligation with virtue, never attainable except by effort, and mostly by sacrifice.

My first impulse was to say to this honest lad, "You are a good boy, keep the shilling"; but the thought crossed my mind, that the good which this small sum might do him might be a hundred times weighed down by the evil done to him, by linking, in his young mind, the idea of honesty with that of reward.

I closely watched his face as I took the piece of money from his hand; I could not detect in it the slightest expression of disappointment or regret. The fact struck me, I admit. I knew nothing about this poor boy, or of his companionships, more than I had just seen; there would have been nothing surprising, then—nothing, indeed, more than I might have expected to see if he had parted with this shilling with some small show of reluctance. But he did nothing of the sort—evidently looked for no return beyond the thanks I gave him.

He was turning quietly away, to sell his papers if he could, but I delayed him.

"How long have you been at this trade?"

The blood, I remarked, rushed into his face, and the next moment deserted it; and he half stammered as he answered:

"Only a few weeks, sir."

"Can you make a living out of it?" I inquired, not insensible to the grim irony of asking a small boy of twelve years old whether he could "make a living" out of anything in the nature of work.

"Some days, sir," he replied.

"When there happens to be something exciting in the paper—a shocking murder, or a big burglary?"

"If—yes, sir," he stammered. And again I noticed the ebb and flow of blood in his cheeks, but without paying any special heed to the fact.

"Have you tried your hand at anything else?" I asked.

"No, sir."

"Not as an errand-boy?'

"No, sir. I'm not strong enough for most places of that sort, sir—and they don't give wages enough, even if I were to get taken on on trial."

"Ah! your parents are very poor, then?"

"Yes, sir," he replied, with marked hesitation.

I had no particular object in thus catechising the poor boy in this way, but there was something in his manner which drew me on his flushing and now this hesitancy. My interest in him was, almost unconsciously to myself, being aroused.

"If a good boy's place were offered you, have you got a character to give?" I asked. For a moment he paused, and when he answered his eyes were downcast, his face white, and there were tears in his voice as he said, almost in a whisper:

"No, sir."

"Had one and lost it, do you mean?" I said.

"No, sir."

"You have never been in trouble—never done anything wrong?"

"No, sir—never."

Tears burst from his eyes, which were soon made red and swollen by the application of his knuckles. He was a good boy and a frank-minded boy—of that I felt quite sure; but I felt equally certain that he had a secret, and that he was withholding it from me. I had been examining him closely all the time I was speaking, and, little by little, the interest he had awakened within me had increased.

"Well, now—look here," I said, "I want a boy about your size and age to be in my chambers while I am out: have you a mother?"

"Oh, yes, sir!" he replied, almost eagerly.

"Then, as you have no character to give me, I'll see her."

"No, sir!—no! you can't see my mother, sir!" he cried, with unmistakable terror in his voice.

"Why not?" I asked, questioning him as closely with my eyes as with my lips.

"Please, sir," he sobbed, "I can't tell you."

"Please, Sir," he sobbed, "I can't tell you."

I paused, for it was now plain to me that I was torturing this poor boy, even while my desire was to be of service to him.

"Very well," I said; "I'll not ask you any more questions. Think of what I have said to you, and if, after you have done that, you would like to say anything on the subject to me, I often pass this spot, and I daresay you will recognise me—if you do not already know me by sight."

"Oh, yes, sir, I know you very well by sight, and thank you kindly, sir, for what you've said," he replied, still through his tears.

I was turning away, but suddenly remembered that, while I had been holding him in conversation, the brief time in which he could hope to sell his papers had been passing away from him.

"How many papers have you got left to sell?" I asked.

"Two dozen, sir," he answered, after rapidly counting them.

"All right!" I said; "I'll clear you out. Here's a shilling for them. Take them to my chambers over yonder, and give them to the housekeeper for me." And I gave him my card.

On returning late at night, I found the pile of Echos encumbering my writing-table; and my talk with the boy of whom I had bought them returned fully, not to say importunately, to my mind before I could find release from it in sleep. One fact, in particular, kept returning to my mind—that, though I had spoken to the poor lad about his mother, I had not asked him anything about his father—had, in truth, not once thought of that individual, if there was such a person extant.

A week or ten days passed without my seeing my newspaper boy, though I had many times been by the spot which I supposed to be his beat, if that is the right word to use in that connection; but, one morning, on reaching my chambers, I found him there waiting to see me.

He was looking very pale and miserable, as if he had been ill—as if he were still ill, in fact—and I noticed that there were discoloured circles about his eyes. I asked what had been the matter with him, and he told me he had been laid up ever since I saw him last.

This was his story: Nearly as soon as I left him, a few minutes only after he had delivered the papers at my chambers, he was set upon by the boy who had wanted him to share with him the shilling he had seen me drop, and by this young brute and some others of his kidney had been hustled, savagely beaten, and plundered of all the money he had. His eyes were both blackened, his head was cut and otherwise hurt, and he had hardly strength enough left to get from the Strand across Westminster Bridge to Stangate, where his mother lived. Then his mother had bound up his head as well as she could, and for two days he had been unconscious and delirious; and after that he was so weak as not to be able to go out of his mother's room; and at last, when he was strong enough to go out, he had no money to buy any papers, and—and———

"And then you thought of coming to see me?" I suggested.

"No, sir—it wasn't in that way, sir. When I told my mother how it was the boys set upon me, I told her of what you said to me, and of your kind offer to give me a place, if—if——"

"If I were satisfied with your mother's account of you; I remember. Well—what did she say to that?"

"Please, sir, it made her cry for days together, and nearly broke her heart."

These words were simple enough, and, heaven knows, the boy's way of speaking them was as simple as the words; but they distressed me. A mystery—a tragic mystery, I divined—underlay them.

"Did your mother blame you for not letting me see her?" I asked.

"Oh, no, sir! She said I had done quite right in that. But all the time I was ill she thought about it; and when I was able to get out, and she couldn't give me any money to buy some papers with—even half a quire—she cried worse than ever, and at last she told me to come and tell you that, if you would kindly take the trouble to go so far as Stangate, she would gratefully see you."

It seemed to me, as I listened, that this poor boy's story might, as the saying is, "move a heart of stone;" it moved mine—whence, if I needed the assurance, I think I might safely conclude that my heart is made of a more sensitive material.

"Go and fetch me a hansom," I said, without debating the matter. There are things which it is better to do on the spur of the moment, and this, I instinctively felt, was one of that sort.

From the longitude of the Law Courts to that of Stangate is not a long journey in a hansom with a good horse in front of it. In a quarter of an hour I was talking with my little newspaper-boy's mother.

The room into which I was conducted—it was a back room on the third floor, entered from a dirt-begrimed landing-place, lit by a window that had certainly not been cleaned for many years, and had two or three panes of broken glass in it—the room into which I was conducted was as poor in aspect as a dwelling-place of poverty could be; but, bare as it was—a bed in probably the least draughty corner, a small deal table, two wooden chairs, and a box something like a middling-sized sea-chest, was all that met the eye in the shape of furniture and effects—it was kept with a manifest effort at cleanliness.

But, from the moment of entering it, I took very little heed of the room and its furniture; my whole attention was given to its mistress, who rose to receive me. As my eyes fell upon her worn and almost bloodless face, my heart felt as if seized and spasmodically pressed by a nervous hand.

Mrs. Middleton, worn by sorrow and lack of sufficient food, and with hair becoming prematurely grey, was, I could see, yet but little over thirty years of age. To my eyes, she was still a beautiful woman; to eyes that had looked upon her face ten or a dozen years earlier, she must have appeared strikingly beautiful. There was a stamp of grace upon her bearing which neither bodily weakness nor poorness of attire could conceal. She was above rather than below the middle height. She wore a black gown of some material, frayed and threadbare, but to which—heaven knows how—she contrived to give an air of unstudied neatness. But it was her eyes—her large, soft, sad blue eyes (made larger by the paleness and thinness of her face) that riveted my gaze, in which I seemed to read the history of a beautiful woman's wreck, before a word had been uttered by her white lips.

"It is very kind of you, sir, to take so much trouble on account of my poor boy," she said, inviting me to be seated.

If I had had any doubt before, I could have none now. I was being addressed by a woman who had been reared in the midst of refinement, the spirit of which remained with her indelibly. She seated herself, after I had taken the chair she had offered me, and continued—

"My boy is a very good boy, or I do not think I should be speaking with you now." She paused; then, after a moment's thought, said, "Jack, dear, go out and walk about for a few minutes; I shall be better able to tell this gentleman what he wants to know about you.

"Go and see whether there is anything startling in the newspaper bills—and bring me back a paper, if there is," I said cheerfully, handing him a shilling. It was on the tip of my tongue to add, "and bring back something for you and your mother to eat;" but a look at the beautiful pale face before me imposed, I knew not why, silence upon my lips.

As soon as we were alone, Mrs. Middleton—who had followed her boy out of the room with looks of almost anguished tenderness in her great, sad eyes, said:

"It was not in consequence of any instruction from me that my boy hesitated to accept your kind offer to befriend him, but from fear of giving me pain."

I hastened to interrupt her. I was agitated. It seemed to me that I owed her an apology.

"I'm afraid I acted very thoughtlessly in all that," I stammered. "Pray forgive me, madam; I had I need say it?—no idea—"

She started. A shiver ran through her enfeebled frame, and on the breath of an irrepressible sob she cried:

"Oh, sir! for pity's sake do not speak to me like that!"

She had fallen into a passionate fit of weeping, and I could find no words to soothe her. For a moment, I wished myself anywhere away from that wretched lodging in Stangate; but I was fascinated, held by the unseeable bonds of an unmasterable sympathy.

"Pray forgive me, sir; I am in a highly nervous condition, and unable at moments to put a proper restraint upon my feelings," she said, as soon as she had recovered a certain degree of calmness. "I have gone through great troubles—have great troubles still before me, in which my poor boy has had, and must still have, his share. For your kindness of intention towards him, no gratitude can be greater than ours; but, for that reason, I wish you know who and to what are the persons you are willing to benefit."

"For pity's sake do not speak to me like that!"

She dried her eyes, and her resolution seemed to take courage as she spoke:

"You already know—a word which you have spoken has told me—that I and my boy have known better days; before you think further of befriending us, it is right that you should know why you find us in the state in which you now see us: it is right, on every account, that you should be thoroughly informed how our present misery has come upon us, and what it really is. My boy is the son of a convict, now undergoing penal servitude at Dartmoor; he knows this, God help him! and it is this which he had not the courage to tell you, when you asked him what reference as to character he could give you."

I was startled by this wholly unlooked-for revelation, and I was conscious of being quite unable to conceal from her the painful surprise it had caused me.

"That my poor boy has no share in his father's guilt I need not say," she went on; "but the world, in its wisdom, or in its heedlessness of strict right, includes him in his father's punishment by branding him with the stigma of 'convict's son,' so warning all men to be specially on their guard against trusting him. That it should be so is unjust, cruel; but the unhappy ones on whom this injustice falls only add a misery the more to their load by denunciations that can bring them no remedy."

I confess—to my shame, perhaps—that in my agitation I did not know what reply to make to what she had said; not that I for an instant disagreed with her view of the hardship of her son's case.

"Oh, sir!" she continued, "if I could tell you the whole story, you would see that the position of my poor boy is a specially hard one. When he was born, the life before him was as fair and promising as that of any child could be. I was married at twenty, out of a family not rich but abundantly well-to-do, to a man of my own sphere—a man well educated, and with talents, as a painter, that might have secured to him a name and ample means, a fortune even. Ours was a love match, we thought; and I, at least, was happy for the first two years of our wedded life. Then there came a change in him; he made fresh acquaintances, out of his own circle, and, step by step, wandered away into what is called the world of pleasure. He ceased to paint, he took to drink, he passed most of his time away from home, he squandered my little fortune in dissipation, and, next, he reduced me and my child to homelessness."

She told me all this without a taint of bitterness in her voice, only a heavy sadness, as of a misfortune that must be borne with patience, because it is irremediable.

"Then," she continued, "there followed a time when I saw him only at lengthened intervals. How he lived I knew not; I and my boy would have starved but for the money I raised on the few rings and trinkets I had saved out of the home-wreck. My parents would have taken me back to them, but only on condition that I sought a divorce from my husband; and, for the good of my boy, I thought, I decisively refused to accept that condition. Oh, that I could have foreseen!"

Here a flood of tears choked her utterance for a minute or more, and I debated with myself whether I was not acting a cruel part by suffering her to put herself to this pain; but I was deeply—much more deeply than I could at the moment account for interested in the story of her trials, and could not bring myself to check her confidences.

"Could I have foreseen at that time, all the misery and shame that now weigh upon me and my poor boy would have been averted," she went on. "I have said I did not know how my husband lived. Perhaps, even disgraced as he was, he might have retrieved himself by returning to his profession as a painter; but he never made the least effort in that direction. Later, I learned that his sole means of subsistence were the precarious gains of an outside book-maker and, later still—oh, my God!—what it was I then learned!—that he had become one of a daring gang of burglars; that he had been captured, convicted, sentenced to five years' penal servitude!"

"How long back was that?" I asked, hastily, for the horror of this scoundrel's return, with a ticket-of-leave, had flashed upon my mind.

"Three years ago," she replied; adding, "I know why you ask me that. Yes! a few months hence he may be released, and may claim me and his son. God forgive him if he does, for it will be my death, and the destruction of my poor boy!"

This suggestion of the horrors that might be hanging over these two misfortune-stricken beings filled me with mingled alarm and indignation; further mixed, I own, with a feeling of cowardice, which urged me to get away from its contemplation.

"How long have you contrived to live without assistance?" I asked, nervously and inconsequently.

She replied: "I have been able to get an engagement at one or other of the theatres on this side of the water for a few weeks at Christmas-time, as a figurante until last winter, when, to add to my trouble, I fell ill—too ill to encounter the fatigue. It was then that my boy first went into the dreadful streets, and helped to save his mother from starvation by selling newspapers. But he has told you of the peril, that life is beyond his powers; and so it is that, turning to your kind offer, I resolved to tell you the whole truth concerning him before allowing him to accept it."

I was about to say, "Let him come to me at once," when I heard sounds of hurrying footsteps upon the stairs. The room door flew open, and the poor boy, a newspaper in his hand, his face white as ashes, and his eyes seemingly starting from his head, rushed in, almost shrieking—

"Oh, mother! mother!"

"Jack, my darling! my darling! what is the matter?"

The agonised boy had thrown himself wildly at her knees, and, sobbing convulsively, buried his face in her lap.

"My Jack! my darling! don't cry so, but tell me what has happened to you," cried his mother, lovingly soothing him with hands and voice.

"My father! my father!" he sobbed.

"Oh, my God! you have not seen him?—it is not that?" she asked, in a fainting tone.

"Mother, dear mother, I can't tell you: it's in the newspaper!"

I snatched up the paper which had dropped from his trembling hand. My eyes seemed drawn as by a magnet to an article made conspicuous by having three or four headlines in large type: "Desperate attempt to escape from Dartmoor Prison," "Several warders badly wounded," "The prisoner killed."

Yes, there could be no doubt about it: the prisoner who had made so murderous an attempt to regain his forfeited liberty was Gilbert Middleton, the father of my newspaper-boy, the husband of the martyrised woman now trembling before my eyes; and that, in defending themselves, the warders had inflicted injuries upon him that had caused his death.

With a terrified gesture Mrs. Middleton held out her hand for the paper, and, hardly conscious of what I was doing, I gave it up to her. A bare glance sufficed to assure her that she was a widow. Then, with incredible strength, she snatched up her boy, and enveloped him in her embraces, her uncontrollable sobs mingling with his. I did not then pause to analyse, or in any way even to account for my feelings; but I was sensible, on leaving the mother and son to the privacy of their affection and sorrow, that I carried away with me a strange sort of satisfaction, both because Mrs. Middleton was for ever released from further contact with a man who had filled her life so far with misery, and because I knew, as well as if her heart had been my own, that the hour of her girlish désillusion had struck early in the days of her wedded life, and that she had never for a moment loved him afterwards.

By the employment of a little diplomacy, I prevailed upon her to permit me to help her to live until the state of her health enabled her to find employment of some kind. Jack I at once took into my service, as I had at first proposed to do. By good fortune, I was, after a while, enabled to do something better still for both mother and son: by my persuasion, her father (now a widower), who had known but little of her sufferings during the years of their estrangement, welcomed her kindly back to the hearth of her childhood.

Two years have passed since then; the youthful roundness, if not all the girlish rose-hue, has returned to Mrs. Middleton's cheeks. I think she is the most beautiful woman I have ever looked upon; I am sure she is the best; and her Jack and I are as much to each other as any father and son can be; and some day, perhaps———

How strange—how solemn, it may be—such happiness would seem, in the memory of all that had gone before it!