Children -- Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction; Children's stories; Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction
On and on went the woman through the town, past the railway-station, and
at last reached a lonely country road; by that time, lulled by the
rapid, even movement and the darkness, baby had forgotten her troubles,
and was fast asleep. She slept almost without stirring for a whole
hour, and then, feeling the light on her eyes, she blinked her long
lashes, rubbed them with her fists, and stretched out her fat legs.
Next she looked up into mammy's face, as she thought, expecting the
smile which always waited for her there; but it was not mammy's face, or
anything like it. They were sharp black eyes which were looking down at
her, and instead of the familiar checked shawl, there was a bright
yellow handkerchief over the woman's head, and dangling ornaments in her
ears. Baby turned up her lip in disgust, and looked round for someone
she knew, but everything was strange to her. The woman, in whose lap
she was lying, sat in a small donkey-cart, with two brown children and
some bundles tightly packed in round her; a dark man walked by the side
of it, and a dirty-white poodle ran at his heels. Discovering this
state of things baby lost no time, but burst at once into loud wailing
sobs and cries of "Mammy, mammy; me want mammy."
She cried so long and so bitterly that the woman, who had tried at first
to soothe her by coaxing and petting, lost patience, and shook her
roughly.
"Be still, little torment," she said, "or I'll throw you into the pond."
They were the first angry words baby had ever heard, and the experience
was so new and surprising that she checked her sobs, staring up at the
woman with frightened tear-filled eyes. She soon began to cry again,
but it was with much less violence, only a little distressed whimper
which no one noticed. This went on all day, and by the evening, having
refused to touch food, she fell into an exhausted slumber, broken by
plaintive moans. It was now dark, and being some miles from Keighley,
the tramps thought it safe to stop for the night; they turned off the
main road, therefore, tethered the donkey in a grassy lane, and crept
into an old disused barn for shelter. The two children, boys of eight
or nine years old, curled themselves up in a corner, with Mossoo, the
poodle, tucked in between them, and all three covered with an old
horse-cloth. The gypsy and his wife sat talking in the entrance over a
small fire of dry wood they had lighted.
"You've bin a fool, Seraminta," said the man, looking down at the baby
as she lay flushed with sleep on the woman's lap, her cheeks still wet
with tears. "The child'll git us into trouble. That's no common child.
Anyone 'ud know it agen, and then where are we? In quod, sure as my
name's Perrin."
"You're the fool," replied the woman, looking at the man scornfully.
"Think I'm goin' to take her about with a lily-white skin like that? A
little walnut-juice'll make her as brown as Bennie yonder, so as her own
mother wouldn't know her."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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