After a while, and when Master Hinchford was scratching away with his pen, the father said--

"You don't say anything about Mattie."

"I think it was very kind of you," said the youth; "and I think--somehow--that Mattie will be grateful."

"Pooh! pooh!" remarked the father, "you'll never make a first-rate city man, if you believe in grat.i.tude. Look at the world sternly, boy. Put not your trust in anything turning out the real and genuine article--work everything by figures."

Master Hinchford looked at his sire, as though he scarcely understood him.

"I must bring you up to understand human nature, Sid--what a bad article it is--plated with a material that soon wears off, if rubbed smartly.

Human nature is everywhere the same, and if you be only on your guard, you may take advantage of it, instead of letting it take advantage of you. Now, this girl is a specimen, which, at my own expense, we will experimentalize upon. In that stray, my boy, you shall see the natural baseness of mankind--or girl-kind."

"Don't you think that she'll come again?"

"For the sixpence, to be sure! Every Sat.u.r.day night, with a long story of how honest she has been all the week. Here we shall see a girl, who, by her own statement, and with a struggle, can keep honest now--note the effect of indiscriminate alms-giving."

"Of rewarding a girl for stealing my brooch, pa."

"Ah!--exactly. Some people who didn't understand me, would set me down for a weak-minded old fool. In studying human nature, one must act oddly with odd specimens. And this girl--who came to tell us she had not brought the brooch back--I am just a little--curious--concerning!"

CHAPTER V.

SET UP IN BUSINESS.

I am afraid that the reader will be very much disgusted with us as story-tellers, when we inform him that all these details are but preliminary to our story proper--a kind of prologue in six chapters to the comedy, melodrama or tragedy--which?--that the curtain will rise upon in our next book. Still they are details, without which our characters, and their true positions on our stage, would not have been clearly defined; and in the uphill struggles of our stray, perhaps some student of human nature, like Mr. Hinchford, may take some little interest.

For they were real uphill struggles to better herself, and, therefore, worthy of notice. Remarking them, and knowing their genuineness, it has struck us that even from these crude materials a kind of heroine might be fashioned--not the heroine of a high-cla.s.s book--that is, a "book for the Boudoir"--but of a book that will at least attempt to draw a certain phase of life as plainly as it pa.s.sed the writer's eyes once.

Let us, ere we _begin_ our story, then, speak of this Mattie a little more--this girl, who was not a "reg'lar"--who had never been brought up to "the profession"--who was merely a Stray! Let us even watch her in her new vocation--set up in life with Mr. Hinchford's sixpence--and note by what strange accident it changed the tenor of _her_ life; and at least set her above the angry dash of those waves which, day after day, engulph so many.

All that we know of Mattie, all that Mattie knew of herself, the reader is fully acquainted with. Mattie's mother, a beggar, a tramp, occasionally a thief, died in a low lodging-house, and, with some flash of the better instincts at the last, begged her child to keep good, _if she could_. And the girl, by nature impressionable, only by the force of circ.u.mstance callous and cunning, tried to subsist on the streets without filching her neighbours' goods--wavered in her best intentions, as well she might, when the world was extra vigorous with her--grew more worldly with the world's hardness, and stole now and then for bread, when there was no bread offered her; made friends with young thieves--"reg'lars"--of both s.e.xes; const.i.tuted them her playmates, and rehea.r.s.ed with them little dramas of successful peculation; fell into bad hands--receivers of stolen goods, and owners of dens where thieves nightly congregated; regarded the police as natural enemies, the streets as home, and those who filled them as men and women to be imposed upon, to be whined out of money by a beggar's plaint, amused out of it by a song in a shrill falsetto, tricked out of it by a quick hand in the depths of their pockets. Still Mattie never became a "reg'lar;" she earned money enough "to keep life in her"--she had become inured to the streets, and had a fear, a very uncommon one in girls of her age and mode of living, of the police-station and the magistrate. Possibly her voice saved her; she had sung duets with her mother before death had stepped between them, and she sold ballads on her own account when the world was all before her where to choose. She was a girl, too, whom a little contented; one who could live on a little, and make shift--terrible shift--when luck run against her; above all, her tempters, the Watts, Simes', and others, festering amongst the Kent Street courts, were cruel and hard with her, and she kept out of their way so long as it was possible.

Given the same monotony of existence for a few more years, and Mattie would have become a tramp perhaps, oscillating from fair to fair, race-course to race-course, losing true feeling, modesty, heart and soul, at every step. She had already tried the fairs within ten miles--the races at Hampton and Epsom, &c., and had earned money at them--she was seeing her way to business next summer, at the time she was interested in one particular house in Great Suffolk Street, Borough.

Mattie was fond of pictures, and therefore partial to Mr. Wesden's shop, where the cheap periodicals and tinsel portraits of celebrated stage-ranters, in impossible positions, were displayed--fond, too, of watching Mr. Wesden's daughter in her perambulations backwards and forwards to a day-school in Trinity Street, and critically surveying her bright dresses, her neat shoes and boots, her hats for week days, and drawn bonnets for Sundays, with a far-off longing, such as a dest.i.tute child entertains for one in a comfortable position--such a feeling as we envious children of a larger growth may experience when our big friends flaunt their wealth in our eyes, and talk of their hounds, their horses, and their princely estates.

"Oh! to be only Harriet Wesden," was Mattie's secret wish--to dress like her, look like her, be followed by a mother's anxious eyes down the street; to have a father to see her safely across the broad thoroughfare lying between Great Suffolk Street and school; to go to school, and be taught to read and write and grow up good--what happiness, unattainable and intangible to dream of!

Eugene Sue, I think, tried to show the bright side of Envy, and the good it might effect; and I suppose there are many species of Envy, or else that we do not call things invariably by their right names. Mattie at least envied the stationer's daughter; Miss Wesden was a princess to her, and lived in fairy-land; and in seeing how happy she was, and what good spirits she had, Mattie's own life seemed dark enough; but that other life which Mattie tried to keep aloof from, denser and viler still. Harriet Wesden was the heroine of her story, and in a far-off distant way--never guessed at by its object--Harriet Wesden was loved, especially after she had begun to notice Mattie's attention to the pictures in the window, and to change them for her sole edification more often than was absolutely necessary.

Mattie was well known in Great Suffolk Street; they knew her at Wesden's--nearly every shopkeeper knew her, and exchanged a word or two with her occasionally--Great Suffolk Street was her _beat_. In health Mattie was a good-tempered, sharp-witted girl--bearing the ills of her life with composure--selling lucifers and singing for a living.

They trusted her in Great Suffolk Street; the poor folk living at the back thereof bought lucifers of her of a Sat.u.r.day night, and asked how she was getting on--the boys guarding their masters' shop-boards nodded in a patronizing way at her--now and then, a plate of broken victuals was tendered her from some well-to-do shopkeeper, who could afford to part with it, and not miss it either--before her fever, she had had a little "c'nexion," and she set to work to get it up again, when the Hinchford sixpence heaped her basket with onions.

That was the turning-point of Mattie's life; after that, a little woman with an eye to business; a small female costermonger with a large basket before her suspended by a strap--troubled and kept moving on by policemen--but earning her fair modic.u.m of profit; quick with her eyes, ready with her answers, happy as a queen whose business was brisk, and lodging away from Mother Watts and old Simes, whose acquaintance she had quietly dropped.

Mattie still watched Harriet Wesden from a distance; still felt the same strange interest in that girl, one year her senior, growing up so pretty whilst she became so plain and weather-beaten; experiencing still the same attraction for that house in particular; knowing each of its inmates by heart, and feeling, since the brooch defalcation, a part of the history attached to the establishment. When the Wesdens made up their minds to send Harriet to boarding-school, by way of a finish to her education, Mattie learned the news, and was there to see the cab drive off; Mattie even told Ann Packet, servant to the Wesdens, and regular purchaser of Mattie's "green stuff," that she should miss her werry much, and Suffolk Street wouldn't be half Suffolk Street after she was gone--which observation being reported to Mrs. Wesden, directed more attention to the stray from that quarter, and made one more friend at least.

_One more_--for Mattie had found a friend in the tall, stiff-backed, stern-looking old gentleman of the name of Hinchford. The lodger's philosophy had all gone wrong; his knowledge of human nature had been at fault; his prophecies concerning Mattie's ingrat.i.tude had proved fallacious, and her steady application to business had greatly interested him. He was a sterling character, this old gentleman, for he confessed that he had been wrong; and he now held forth Mattie's industry as an example of perseverance in the world to his son, just as in the past he had intended her as a striking proof of the world's ingrat.i.tude.

The climax was reached two years after his dialogue with Mattie on the stairs--when Mattie was thirteen years of age, and Master Hinchford sixteen--when Mattie still hawked goods in Suffolk Street--quite a woman of the world, and deeply versed in market prices--one who had not even at that time attained to the dignity of shoes and stockings.

Mr. Wesden, the quiet man of business, was in his shop as usual, when Mattie walked in, basket and all.

Mr. Wesden regarded her gravely, and shook his head. Onions and some sweet herbs had been speculated in that morning, and no further articles were required at that establishment.

"If you please, I don't want you to buy, Mr. Wesden--" said she, "but will you be good enough to send that up to Master Hinchford?"

Mr. Wesden looked at the small, dirty piece of paper in which something was wrapped, and then at Mattie.

"It's honestly come by, sir," said Mattie.

"I never said it wasn't," he responded.

Mattie retired into the street--it was a Sat.u.r.day night, and there were many customers abroad--she was doing a flourishing trade, when a tall youth caught her by the arm, and dragged her round the corner of the first street.

"Oh! don't pinch my arm so, Master Hinchford."

"What's the twelve and sixpence for, Mattie--not for the--not for the----"

"Yes, the _broach_! I've been a-saving up, and keeping myself down for it, and now it's easy on my mind."

"I won't have it. I've been thinking about it, and I won't have it, Mattie."

"Please do. I've been trying so hard to wipe _that_ off. I'm quite well now. I've got the c'nexion all right, and shall save it all up agin, and the winter's arf over, and when Miss Wesden comes back, you can buy her another brooch with it, and n.o.body disapinted."

The youth laughed, and coloured, and shook his head.

"I won't take twelve and sixpence from you, I tell you. Why, Mattie, you don't know the value of money, or you'd never fling it away like this.

Why, it's a fortune to you."

"No--it's been a _weight_--that twelve and six, somehow. I've been a thief until to-night--now it's wiped clean. Don't try to make me a thief agin by giving it on me back. Oh! don't please stop my trade like this!"

"Well, I shall make you out in time, Mattie--_perhaps_."

Master Hinchford pocketed the money, and walked away slowly. Mattie returned to her "c'nexion." Mr. Hinchford sat and philosophized to himself all the evening on the impracticability of arriving at a thorough understanding of human nature, as exemplified in "girl-kind."

CHAPTER VI.

THE END OF THE PROLOGUE.

Hard times set in after that night. The winter was half over, Mattie had said; but the worst half was yet to come, and for that she, with many thousands like her, had made but little preparation. The worst half of the frost of that year set in like a blight upon the London streets, froze the gutters, raised the price of coals, sent provisions up to famine figures, cut off all the garden stuff, and threw such fugitive traders as Mattie completely out of work. Hers became a calling that required capital now; even the greengrocers' shops, Borough way, were scantily stocked--the market itself was not what it used to be when things were flourishing, and oh! the prices that were asked in those times!