CHAPTER III.

Maggie's Second Visit to the Old Curiosity Shop.

ON the following day the china-dealer looked in vain for the plates which the widow had promised to send him. On the morrow, too, they were not forthcoming, and it vexed him to have to own the fact to his wife, when she asked about them.

"Oh, you'll not get them now," she said, in a tone of undoubted assurance.

"Oh, I don't give them up yet," replied the dealer; "maybe the lady's ill, or something else has happened to prevent her sending them before."

"Well, I shall be very much surprised, if they come," returned his wife, provokingly.

Griffin did not in the least care about having the plates. He was satisfied to have secured the old Worcester jug. But he did desire to have it proved that his strange customer was what he had judged her to be—a real lady, who would deal honourably with him. When we are interested in persons, and inclined to think highly of them, it is painful to discover that they are not all we have imagined them.

Griffin was none the less disposed to resent the widow's betrayal of his trust because he was conscious that he had not acted fairly by her. We are always ready to claim that others shall regulate their actions towards us by the golden rule, however often we ourselves may have failed to do unto others as we would they should do unto us.

As the hours of the second day passed, and the plates did not appear, Griffin felt himself to be an injured man. He grew so cross and irritable that his wife wondered what could ail him. Surely he must have something more on his mind than the absence of those plates. But watching him with wifely anxiety, she soon saw that his irritability arose from a physical rather than a mental cause. She feared that the cold, which he had caught two days before by getting wet through, and then standing in his wet clothes during the course of a long sale, had laid sharp hold on him. Mrs. Griffin soon knew that her fear was not unfounded. In a few hours her husband became so ill that he was obliged to go to bed; and in bed he lay for many days, smitten with an acute attack of inflammation of the lungs.

Great was Mrs. Griffin's distress when the doctor told her that her husband was dangerously ill. She was a small, slight, sickly-looking woman, with the expression of one inclined to take a dark view of human affairs. Such had indeed come to be the habitual attitude of her mind. There was much excuse for her melancholy, poor woman. Constant ill-health, and the bitterest grief and disappointment a woman can know, had made her the soured-looking mortal she was. She had had seven children, and not one of them had lived. Most of them had passed away in infancy ere they had learned to call her mother; but one—a pretty, delicate little girl—had struggled through her infantile ailments, and lived for nine years the darling of her home, only to fall a victim to scarlet fever, just as the parents hoped that she was beginning to grow strong and healthy.

It was a sore grief to Griffin and his wife when the little one was taken away. Griffin got over it in time as men do, by losing thought of his trouble in the absorbing interest of his daily pursuits. As his trade grew, he gradually ceased to miss the sound of little feet moving so lightly amidst his treasures, and the accents of the soft voice which had called him father. He forgot his little daughter, and gave more and more of his heart to his rare old china and costly curiosities.

But the wound in the mother's heart had never healed. Though twenty years had passed since her child died, the memory of little Polly was fresh as ever to her. She could still recall the sweet tones of her darling's voice, and fancy she heard again the patter of the restless feet which used to trot to and fro in the old house. The sight of a child brought her an aching sense of loss. In night visions she saw again the little face that she loved, and often would she murmur in her sleep the name of the child. As growing years added to her weakness the infirmities of age, making the burden of life heavier, Mrs. Griffin felt a deeper and deeper yearning for a child's love and aid.

Never had she felt her desolation more keenly than now, when she saw her husband laid low by alarming illness, and the thought thrust itself on her, that he would be taken first, and she left alone in the world. Her heart sank within her at the first hint of danger. It was easy for her to believe the worst. Her hopes had always been disappointed.

Mrs. Griffin made a sorry attempt to hide her distress from her husband. She did not want to frighten him; but he knew his wife's nature too well to be deceived by her assumption of cheerfulness. He knew that her smiles were forced, for what could be more mournful than her gaze as it rested upon him? Whilst her eyelids were red, and she sighed each time that she turned away from the bedside. He tried to cheer her.

"Don't ee take on, old wife," he said, speaking with difficulty, "I'm not going to die just yet. I shall be up and about again in a few days."

"I hope you may be, John, I'm sure," said his wife, lugubriously.

And, unable to keep back her tears; she slipped out of the room and went downstairs, where she could indulge her emotion without restraint. The deserted look of the shop and the little room behind, where lay Griffin's cement pot, his tools, and the piece of china he had been trying to mend when the attack of pain came on, gave fresh intensity to her grief. Sitting down on the first chair, Mrs. Griffin covered her face with her apron and sobbed aloud.

She had been crying thus for some minutes when she became aware of a dull, monotonous sound, which seemed as if it might have been going on for a considerable time. She raised her head and listened. Some one was tapping on the door of the shop. Hurriedly wiping her eyes with her apron, Mrs. Griffin went out to attend to the customer.

A little girl stood just within the shop, a slight, delicate-looking child, whose pale face and large dark eyes had a scared, nervous look. She was holding something carefully rolled up in her little apron. She started and almost dropped what she held as Mrs. Griffin came quietly upon her.

"What do you want, my dear?" asked the woman, noting with admiration the child's long dark eyelashes, and the pretty rings of hair, which hung over her white forehead.

"I want to see the old man who keeps the shop," said the child, tremulously; "I have brought him the plates mamma said he should have."

"All right, my dear, I know; I will take them for him," said Mrs. Griffin, taking the plates, which the child very reluctantly gave to her.

"Can't I see him?" asked Maggie.

"No, my dear, you can't, for he's in bed; he is very bad," said the wife, looking almost as if she expected sympathy from the child, who gazed at her with such grave, sad eyes; "but I'm his wife, and I'll take care of the plates for him. Have you anything else!" For she saw that the child still held something rolled up in her apron.

"Yes, they're mamma's books," said the child, in a tone of deep sadness; "I wanted to ask him to keep them for me. Mamma said he was a good old man, and I don't want Mrs. Cook to get them."

"Are you living at Mrs. Cook's?" asked Mrs. Griffin, wondering more and more at the child's strange appearance and manner.

Maggie nodded.

"And your mamma, is not she with you?"

"Mamma is dead!" said Maggie, dropping her voice to a whisper. "She died on Monday night, and I've no one belonging to me now, and they say I must go to the workhouse."

Large tears had gathered in the child's eyes; but, with a self-control far beyond her years, she checked the sobs that strove to rise.

"Your mother dead! Oh, my poor dear!" cried Mrs. Griffin, her motherly sympathies stirred into new life. "On Monday night, did you say? Why wasn't that the evening she was here, and brought the jug? Are you sure it was Monday night?"

"Oh yes; it was when we got home," said the child, beginning to sob as she read the kindness and pity in Mrs. Griffin's glance.

"Then 'twas very sudden?" said Mrs. Griffin.

"Yes, she broke a blood-vessel, the doctor said," replied Maggie.

"Poor soul, no wonder with such a cough," sighed Mrs. Griffin; "I remember it made me shudder to hear it, and I asked my man who it was coughing so. Dear, dear! And so she died that very night! How sad, to be sure!" And Mrs. Griffin sighed again as she thought what the mother's anguish must have been at the prospect of leaving this sweet child alone in the world.

"What is your name, my dear?" she asked, putting her arm lovingly around the child.

"Maggie," was the reply.

"Maggie what?" asked Mrs. Griffin.

"Maggie Knight," said the child.

"And have you really no one belonging to you?"

"No one," said the child; "and Mrs. Cook says I must go to the House. What is the House like? Will they be kind to me there?"

"Not very; and it's a dreary place," said Mrs. Griffin; "I would not like any child I cared for to go there."

"Mrs. Cook says that before mamma died she said I was to go to the House," said little Maggie, on whose face the look of distress had deepened.

"Did she? Then it must have been a sore grief to her, poor soul," said Mrs. Griffin, feelingly; "but there's my man knocking for me; I must go. I declare if I hadn't forgotten him for the moment."

"Will you take the books?" said Maggie, unrolling her apron, and showing a Bible and prayer-book, whose handsome bindings and gilt clasps bore signs of age and wear. "They were mamma's, they were all she had left; she sold the others; but she would not sell these because her mother gave them to her. Mrs. Cook has taken all the rest of our things to pay for the rent. She says the money mamma got for the jug won't half pay her for the expense and trouble she's had. I hid these and the plates where she could not find them, for I knew mamma had promised the old man the plates, and I thought he looked kind and good, and perhaps would take care of the books for me, for I was afraid they would not let me take them to the workhouse."

[Illustration: "BE SURE YOU COME AGAIN."]

"Bless you, child, we'll take good care of them for you," said Mrs. Griffin, touched by this mark of childish confidence. "You may trust us to do that. And come and see me again soon, will you? Tell Mrs. Cook she must not send you to the House till she has seen me. Tell her Mrs. Griffin of the Old Curiosity Shop says so."

Maggie nodded, and a more hopeful look came to her white little face.

"Good-bye: you are very kind," she said; and with a sudden movement of gratitude, she held up her face to be kissed.

All the mother in Mrs. Griffin awoke at that moment. She drew the child close to her, and kissed her fondly, uttering gentle words of pity as her hand stroked the soft dark curls. But the renewed sound of knocking overhead reminded her of her wifely duty.

"Good-bye, my darling, I must not stay now," she said; "be sure you come again."

But still she lingered for a moment to watch little Maggie pass down the lane.

"Dear little child," she murmured, "how my heart goes out to her! She's just about the age of my little Polly. To think of such a child being sent to the workhouse! And the poor mother! I must tell Griffin about her."

[Illustration]