Poor Zeph, and other tales

Chapter I. John Dax

nnHE fancy repository in Gibbon Street, -*- Lambeth, was no ephemeral affair — none of your fly-away businesses, subject to strange accidents, defalcant tenants, and missing keys, at those embarrassing quarters of the year when the landlord wants his rent. Meagre and poor to look at, " Mori son's Repository" had evidently been a good one to go, if the board between the first floor windows could be relied on for vera city, the business having been established in b the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight. No one doubt ed the fact in Gibbon Street ; the oldest in habitant had no recollection of any name save Morison over the little square windows of the shop, where business was far from brisk, despite the date of its first start, and the claims of old associations which it as serted over all new-comers to the neigh bourhood.

There were three Morisons left to man age the shop at the date our story opens — ■ two pale-faced young women, who would have been pretty in another sphere, with a fancy repository off their minds, and a struggle to keep afloat in the world less perceptibly manifest, and a third woman, paler and more wan, who was the mother of the other two. These three took care of the shop and of Mr. Morison, a clerk in the Customs with a scanty salary that helped towards paying the rent, and kept him every evening in fours of whisky and water, hot, at the " George " over the way. It scarcely seemed possible that Morison's Repository could be doing very well down that shadowy back street, where grim facts were more patent to the locality than fancy goods. There was little in the window to attract the at tention of passers-by making their short-cuts to Waterloo Road and Kennington, and the regular customers were always few and far between.

The stock did not change much from year's end to year's end. There were wooden and leather dolls that seemed as old and time-stained as the bricks of the establishment ; there was a superior wax doll under a cracked glass shade, which had been once the glory of the firm, but which had let in the flies of late days, and spotted irretrievably the image of youthful beauty still simpering beneath it. In their proper seasons there were a few new halfpenny balls, shuttlecocks, marbles, and kites, but they went off slowly, and there was always a heavy percentage of them lying in odd corners of the window long after the de mand for them had subsided. It was in the depth of one of the fiercest winters which Gibbon Street had known for years that a certain John Dax took it into his head to make a strong effort to die upon the Morisons' door-step, after the fancy repository had been closed for the night, and Mr. Morison, following his invariable custom, had gone over to the " George," and to those cronies of his whom he always found in the bar-parlour.

John Dax had been wandering about the London streets all day in search of the em ployment that was not ready to his hands, or to be found on that occasion at any price — times being bad, and people with spare cash in their pockets being strongly disposed to keep it there. He was seventeen years of age then, a lank, ill-proportioned, haggard-looking youth with "how to live" eternally impressed upon the little mind of which he stood possessed. He had left Glander's Court early that day in search of food ; he had been hustled out of home by a lame old father with a heavy crutch, and told to get food for himself, or starve in the search of it — the father was not particular which — and at all events to keep clear of him till he could support himself, and bring home a shilling or two to pay for board and lodging, and help his afflicted parent in this world of woe.

" Gort's truth — ain't there any hanker chers hanging out of back pockets now ?" he had screamed forth in his rage ; but this might have been in a moment of excitement, and not intended as a hint to his son and heir, standing by the doorway, and keep ing a watchful eye upon the crutch. At all events, John Dax had not brought home pocket-handkerchiefs, but had loitered about the streets where there was no work for casual hands to be found that day, and no costers' barrows to wheel in the Cut and Lower Marsh, and no horses to hold, and no luck anywhere — luck being dead against the youth at this period of his career. So John Dax had given up about ten o'clock at night, and had sunk down upon the step of the repository and gone quickly off into a swoon, with the snow falling upon him and wrapping him round in its prema ture shroud.

It was Mrs. Morison, coming to the door to see if her lord and husband were on his way home from the " George," who was the first to discover John Dax, and to scream loudly as he flopped backwards into the shop when the support to his back was suddenly withdrawn from him. " Oh, my gracious ! look here, Ellen — look here, Mary, " Mrs. Morison called to her daughters in the back parlour ; " here's your father come home again in such a state! Here's — Oh, no ! it isn't Morison, it's another one. Come and help me get him off the premises." When her daughters were by her side, the truth dawned upon them more clearly. " It's not anyone intoxicated," said Ellen. "It's a poor fellow in a fit," said Mary Morison. Then the three women, all with gentle hearts enough and easily touched, though life had been hard with them in Gibbon Street, set to work to bring John Dax to himself, and were busily employed in that laudable purpose, when Mr. Morison sham bled back from the "George," and added himself to the general company in the shop.

" What's the matter?" he asked, in a thick voice; "whateverth ith the matter?" " It's a poor lad taken ill ; we've brought him in-doors for a moment." " I wouldn't have put him on the top of the Noah's arks," said Mr. Morison, in mild reproof; " he's damaging the property." " He's coming round," said Mary, as John Dax opened his eyes and stared at the faces looking down upon him. "Where's this — wot'sthis?" asked John. "This is Morison's Repository, Gibbon Street, young man," said Mr. Morison. "Oh! is it?" " And I hope you haven't been drinking to account for this state ?" "No," answered John, faintly, " nor eatin' either — wus luck !" "Starving!" cried Ellen Morison; "oh! see, he looks like it, poor fellow." " When did you have anything to eat last ?" asked Mary, who was young and curious.

"Or drink last?" added Mr. Morison, also sympathetic, and knowing what an utter misery absence from drink was to him at any period of his existence. "Can't remember; yesterday, I think "Not to-day— at all?" asked Ellen, anxiously. " Not to-day— blest if I have." " See to him, let us do something," said Mary Morison, and then there was much bustle in Gibbon Street, and some bread and cheese and ale found by these poor people for John Dax. When John Dax was getting rapidly better he condescended to impart some general information as to his mode of living, or rather his method of attempting to live under the difficulties which oppressed him, and it was not altogether a pleasant con fession. Still, they wished to know, and he was grateful and communicative. After all, it was a common-place history enough.

He had been for some weeks out of work, and times were generally bad. His father was a vocalist, that is, a gentleman whose especial mission it was to howl nautical ballads in the streets, and to depend upon the patronage of those who stopped to hear him. It had been hard work that winter with John's father too, whose voice gave way about the same period as his legs, which were taken suddenly with paralysis, and spoiled business, and so John Dax from that time forth had done his best to work for his father and himself, not always with success, and not at any time to the satisfaction of his parent, who was an exacting man, a mercen ary man, and hard to please. When John Dax came home with less than one and six pence, John Dax's father swore profanely ; and when John brought no money home at all — which was occasionally the case — the father would fling his crutches at him, and bid him keep away until he was of service to him, and money could be had in some fashion, as we have already inti mated.

This night was the beginning of the real life of John Dax, and brought about more than any of them dreamed. John had become an object of interest to the Morisons, and he was touched by the first kindness which he had encountered in his gutter-bred existence. He went away muttering many thanks; he returned the next morning to volunteer his services in any fashion, "free and gratis," to show that he was not un mindful of the past charity that had been extended to him. He departed somewhat crestfallen at no work being found for him on those terms ; if he could have taken a parcel home, or run on an errand, he would have been happier in his mind. He turned up once more in the evening, and was fortu nately of service on that occasion. Mr. Morison was late ; there was a debate on Political Economy at the " George," and the proprietor of the repository had a great deal to say upon the question, and was not at home to put the shutters up.

The next night Mr. Morison was at home, and put one of the shutters through the window, being generally shaky about the hands, and John Dax proved to be of use again, as an amateur glazier who could save expense for the Morisons by buying putty and glass for them and doing the job right off, but with a lavish consumption of putty, some of which he left on the dolls and shuttlecocks. He would take nothing for himself on this occasion ; he slunk away at once when they [offered him a few pence, and muttered, " No, thankee — for nuffink, please, if you'll let me, jest this time !" He was of use once again that week in helping Mr. Morison home. The second debate on Political Economv, combined with two extra "fours" of whisky, had over powered the toy-man, and John guided his steps reverently to the emporium, and land ed him in the front shop in safety and with dignity.

After this, John was an irregular attendant and servitor, and came in handy now and then, till the decease of Mr. Morison, who went off suddenly, to the intense grief of a family that thought a great deal more of him than anybody else had done. It was a great grief and a great loss, for Mr. Morison's salary went off with him, and the three women were left to struggle against the world together. Such struggling as it always is too in streets like this of Gibbon. There came a change in the affairs of the Morisons — an alteration of the tactics by which this hard world was to be confronted. Toys would not keep the wolf from the door. Toys were never in great demand in that neighbourhood ; the children made dolls for themselves out of their own rags, fancy chains from the cherry stones that were picked out of the gutter, and little go carts from the crab shells unearthed in the dust-contractors' yards.

Real toys were for the happy and prosperous youth of other places. There appeared suddenly at the back of the shop window a written announcement in Italian hand, framed and glazed, that told the old story of hard work and small pay. "Dress-making done here," was formally announced three months after old Morison had died, leaving a second wife and two daughters to the mercies of Gibbon Street ; and then this dress-making killed the widow off-hand, and made of the daughters two sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked, sad-looking young women, whom the neighbours respect ed and pitied, and helped with orders when they were able. Time was when the Mori son girls had been considered " stuck up," and inclined to stand aloof from the people next door and over the way ; but this was in the old times, when Morison was under Government.

Gibbon Street fancied that Morison was well off in the world, and said, till his death, that he had made a pretty penny by the business ; but, after his wife and daughters had half ruined themselves with the expenses of his funeral, it began to be whispered abroad that they were " down on their luck," even for the residents of Gibbon Street. Still they never gave way, never acknowledged that they were poor or hard pressed, even when the mother died ; and three years afterwards they were still the Misses Morison, of the repository, with a smile and nod — the former forced at times — to those who gave each in her turn good day at the front-door or in the murky re cesses of the shop. They were young women, seldom, if ever, seen together — work would not allow it, or the shop stopped the way to the society of each other ; for, if there were no pressure of business, there were many questions as to the price of goods, from penniless children of an inquiring turn of mind and with much time upon their hands.

One week Mary Morison, the younger sister, worked at dress-making behind the counter, and Ellen, the elder by two years, was to be seen, over the wire blind of the parlour-door, stitching quickly and steadily, and thinking of old times, perhaps ; and next week the position would be reversed, and Mary would be in doors, and Ellen waiting for the customers. VOL. II. C They went to church twice every Sunday, and were good young women who did not run after the chaps on Sabbath evenings, as was the fashion among the girls of Gibbon Street, take them in the aggregate. It was remarked presently by curious folk that they did not go to church together, but that each went her own way and to her own particular place of worship, as though their religions differed, or a week's work in the same house had rendered them weary of each other's company.

And Sundays or week-days, they always looked gravely at the world before them, and took life as a serious undertaking, which it was to them. They kept no company, and they never called upon their neighbours save in the way of "measuring," and "fitting," and taking home their work ; want of time was their excuse, when an excuse was necessary, to those who would have liked to call them friends. Mary and Ellen Morison had no friends, unless we except John Dax, who was always their " humble and obedient servant to command," and who came every morning at seven and every evening at ten to take down and put up the shutters before the windows of the establishment, on which he considered himself now permanently engaged. So time went on, and John Dax grew up to manhood, and there were five years and some odd months lying between the present time and the far-away epoch when he was discovered on the door-step.

John Dax had not been a strong youth, and hard work and indifferent living had told against him, till the night of his col lapse, as they were telling against him even more forcibly now. He was the mere shadow of a young man, a patient and un complaining being, whom the wise folk down his court where his father lived con sidered " half a fool," he was so awfully quiet, and took his troubles with such c2 strange philosophy. The life of the boy was the life of the man, with very little difference, contrary winds having been dead against John Dax from the unfortunate day of his birth — factory life, street-barrow life, shoe-black life, life from hand to mouth, which means the mouth wide open and nothing for the hand to put into it. Patience and perseverance in this weak, old-fashioned young man ought to have accomplished something for John Dax, if there be any truth in aphorisms ; but there were certain obstacles in his way, and he was only surmounting them by degrees.

Five years ago he had been unable to read and write, and Mary Morison had told him she was ashamed of him for that, and he began in odd moments afterwards, and under terrible difficulties, his father's grave objec tion being one of them. He had succeeded partly in his efforts — that is, he could write his own name, and spell a few facts out of the columns of a newspaper. Mary Morison, unwittingly, was another obstacle to his advancement, for we may say at once that John Dax was over head and ears in love with her, and would have declined any situation under the sun that would have prevented his opening and shutting the repository, and catching a glimpse of Mary's face, and of being warmed to the heart's core by Mary's sad but pleasant smile. Mary was a princess to this ill clad, ill-fed young man — a divinity in rusty black — and as far above his dreams or his ambitions as the other goddesses.

She was a fair obstacle in the way of his advance ment, but she never guessed it, and, as for imagining that he loved her, she would as soon have dreamed of love from the fly-blown doll under the glass case in the window. He was no hero to her — only a poor sickly mortal, who put the shutters up for ninepence a week, and went cowering home afterwards in the shadows of the narrow streets beyond, where crime was rife and penury was plentiful. Still John Dax had his romance, and that is why the history of it, and all that came of it, may be worth the telling in these pages.

Chapter II. Mr

DAX'S DECEASE. TTTHEN it was Ellen Morison's turn to ' ' keep watch and ward behind the counter of the little shop in Gibbon Street, John Dax saw but little of the younger sister. Ellen was equally kind in her quiet way, equally gentle and sympathetic in her patronage, but the kindness and the patron age were not Mary's. One evening in Ellen's week, John Dax became suddenly more absent and confused than ordinary, and Ellen, an observant young woman, even when work was pressing, detected a change in his demeanour before he had put up the third shutter of the shop, and nearly succeeded in driving the corner of it through the upper glass window. When he came in for shutter No. 4, she said, without looking up from her work, " Is anything the matter, John ?" " Yes — there is — a little the matter," he said, in a hesitating manner.

" Are you ill ?" asked Ellen Morison. " No, I ain't ill," answered John Dax, " but the old un is." " Your father ?" " Yes ; he's going off the hooks at last." John was not refined in his discourse — even in his grief the poor fellow was slangy ; and there was real grief at the bottom of his heart for the man who had brought him up badly, and been never grateful for a son's attention. Ellen Morison said a few words of com fort to him, quoted one or two texts applicable to his condition, and stitched on in her usual swift and silent manner. John listened, nodded gravely, and went away, returned a moment afterwards, and leaned across the counter to say, in a husky voice, " Tell her." " Tell whom ?" asked Ellen Morison, surprised. " Miss Mary : she was asking after the guv'nor last week." Ellen moved her head slightly, as if in acquiescence.

" She is well, I suppose ?" asked John, glancing askance at the wire blind. "She is quite well, thank you," answered the elder sister. " She was looking very pale last week, I fancied," said John. Miss Morison did not reply to this, and John, after waiting a minute, as if for his answer, took himself off the premises. He went straight to the squalid home where Mr. John Dax, senior, was getting " off the hooks " as rapidly as possible, and in a manner as uncomfortable to himself and to those concerned in his decease as it was possible for him to select. Mr. Dax, senior, could not lie composedly in his bed, but in sisted upon sitting in a half-upright con dition in the very centre of it, with a lean claw clutching at each side of the sheets, with his crutch across his knees, and two small red eyes blinking furtively at his son.

He had not loved his son John in a bad lifetime; in his dying moments he was equally consistent, and he swore at him hard and fast when the death-rattle in his throat ceased sufficiently to allow of a clear expression of opinion. He told John as well as his failing breath would permit that he was not going to die ; that he had no intention of making himself such an infernal fool as that to please any body ; that the parish doctor was a howl ing idiot, and didn't know his business; and that John had been the worst fool and idiot of the whole kit of 'em in Glander's Court to fetch a doctor to see what was the matter with him, when there wasn't any blarmed blooming thing the matter, as anyone could see. He could sit up ; he was as strong aud jolly as ever, and meant to sit up too ; and if they tried to make him lie down and go to sleep — when he didn't want to go to sleep — s'elp every think he knew, he'd brain them with his crutch.

John Dax remained his meek and uncomplaining son to the last ; his father's objur gations did not affect him ; his wish to be of service to the dying man was only the more strikingly apparent as the hours drew on apace, carrying this harsh life along with them to the outer gates. The lodgers in the same house, in the same court, crept in one by one to look at the old man, almost choking up the little dirty room at times, so curious were they about him, and so interested in the future of poor John. They were of all shades of poverty, of honesty and dishonesty, but they were all interested in the decease of Mr. Dax, and were, a few of them, so disregard ed of Mr. Dax's feelings as to congratulate the son aloud on getting rid of the old brute. Meanwhile the old brute raved and shrieked and blasphemed, and told them again that he was not going to die, and cursed them for coming in to contradict him.

When he got very weak, and all the pillows and bundles in the room were at the back of him to sustain him in the position which he had assumed, he called John to him and asked how much money he had earned that day. John told him that he had earned nothing, upon which his father began to whimper, seeing, as he said, nothing but the work house ahead of him, with such a beastly, lazy son upon his hands. Presently he wandered in his mind, and talked about his mattress being uncomfortable for him, and then of bequeathing his mattress to some hospital, so that his son should not have the enjoyment of it after him, but lie like a dog in the streets and on the stones. After which he let himself completely free of " the hooks," protesting to the last that he was never better in his life, and that he should go out to-morrow, if it was fine, and sing " Poor Tom Bowling " down the Borough.

The next morning John Dax knocked at the door of the repository, and was agree ably surprised to find it was Mary Morison who admitted him. He had arrived a quarter of an hour earlier than usual, and Mary was the first downstairs. " You are before your time, John," she said, as he began to unscrew the inner bolt of the shutters. "Yes, I thought I'd come earlier — I couldn't rest." "What is the matter, then?" " The guv'nor died in the night. I said he would." "Your father dead!" exclaimed Mary. " I'm very sorry for you." " Thank you," answered John ; " It's kind to say so. You've been expecting it, mayhap." " No, I've not." "Didn't Miss Ellen tell you last night I thought it would be soon ?" "No." " Oh ! she forgot, I s'pose." "Very likely," answered Mary; "she is busy just now." John thought of this reply after he had taken the shutters down, and was disposed to believe that there was a lack of sympathy with his orphanage, until Mary said, "Is there anything I can do to help you in this distress, John ?"

" God bless yer, miss, nothink," he blurted forth. " I'm afraid you cannot do much for yourself, my poor fellow !" "I must leave it to the parish," said John ; " they won't do it werry neat — but I ain't going in for style !" When John Dax got home, he found that the parish officials had been extra diligent in the matter of his father's decease, and had already deposited the defunct gentleman in a long and high-shouldered watchbox, which was smeared with slate-coloured paint to give it a mourning aspect. They had numbered the box 6, and scrawled Dax in chalk on the lid, and had left notice with a downstairs lodger that the funeral would take place to-morrow, with five more ladies and gentlemen in a similar unpleasant con dition, at the parish cemetery at three in the afternoon, and that Mr. John Dax had better be there to the minute if he thought it worth his while to attend.

Meanwhile, Mr. Dax, senior, was left in a corner of the room to be fetched as soon as the registration of death was effected, and two other little jobs in the same court had been finished with extraordinary punctuality and dispatch, the weather being warm, an epidemic raging in the Lambeth slums, and one or two vestrymen living too close at hand to be comfortable. John Dax sat down on the corner of the old brown mattress, from which they had taken his father, and tried to think it all out as well as his poor faculties would allow, mixing up the death in Glanders Court with the life that went on in Gibbon Street in a strange fashion, and feeling the loss of his father, and of his father's tyranny, in a strange fashion too. He did not shed any tears — he would have been puzzled to know what he should cry for, the absence of Mr. Dax in the flesh was even then a relief to him— but he was dull and dispirited, and the old room did not seem the same to him.

He sat and picked with his thin fingers at the rough canvas of the mattress in a meditative fashion, and with his eyes fixed on the slate-coloured box in which they had nailed down his father ; time and place were lost to him, and the present was as misty and indistinct as his own uncertain suture, until a strange and startling incident brought him back to life. He had worried the casing of the mattress into a hole with his nervous fingers ; he had plucked out fragments of a dirty greasy flock with which the mattress was stuffed, when he suddenly touched something round and smooth and cold — a small disk of metal, another and another, a heap of them lying closely pack ed together, a half-dozen heaps, by all that was remarkable ! John Dax held his breath and opened his mouth without the power to turn round and look at what he had discovered ; he would have made a fine study for Cruikshank at that moment, sitting there spell-bound and transfixed, with one wasted hand upon the treasure trove.

He was sure it was money, a lot of money, which his father had secreted — the VOL. II. D savings of a life — the explanation of his father's anxiety about his mattress, the meaning of his wish to leave it to anyone save the son whom he had never loved. Money ! found by and belonging to him, who had never known what the sole pos session of five shillings was like before that day. All lawfully belonging to him, how much in farthings, or sixpences, or even shillings, to constitute such a heap as this, he wondered. He swung himself round at last, and tore open the sacking with both hands. Great God ! sovereigns and half sovereigns, and some small packets of bank notes tied round with little bits of twine ! Was it all a dream, and had he fallen asleep after a night's long watching ? Was somebody playing him a trick?