A Rough Shaking
Home - George MacDonald - A Rough ShakingChapter XXXVIII.
The workhouse.
He went into the street with a white face and a dazed look--not from
any hardship he had experienced during his confinement, for he had
been in what to him was clover, but because he had lost the baby and
Abdiel, and because his mind had been all the time in perplexity with
regard to the proceedings of justice: he did not and could not see
that he had done anything wrong. Throughout his life it never mattered
much to Clare to be accused of anything wrong, but it did trouble him,
this time at least, to be punished for doing what was right. He took
it very quietly, however.
Indignation may be a sign of innocence, but it is no necessary consequence of innocence any more than it is a proof of righteousness. A man will be fiercely indignant at an accusation that happens to be false, who did the very thing last week, and is ready to do it again. Indignation against wrong to another even, is no proof of a genuine love of fair play. Clare hardly resented anything done to himself. His inward unconscious purity held him up, and made him look events in the face with an eye that was single and therefore at once forgiving and fearless. The man who has no mote in his own eye cannot be knocked down by the beam in his neighbour's; while he who is busy with the mote in his neighbour's may stumble to destruction over the beam in his own.
White and dazed as he came out, the moment he stepped across the threshold, Clare met the comfort of God waiting for him. His eyes blinded with the great light, for it was a glorious morning in the beginning of June, he found himself assailed in unknightly fashion below the knee: there, to his unspeakable delight, was Abdiel, clinging to him with his fore-legs, and wagging his tail as if, like the lizards for terror, he would shake it off for gladness! What a blessed little pendulum was Abdiel's tail! It went by that weight of the clock of the universe called devotion. It was the escapement of that delight which is of the essence of existence, and which, when God has set right "our disordered clocks," will be its very consciousness.
Clare stood for a moment and looked about him. The needle of his compass went round and round. It had no north. He could not go back to the shop; he could not go back to the house; baby was in the workhouse, but he could not stay there even if they would let him! Neither could he stop in the town; the policeman said he must go away! Where was he to go? There was not in the world one place for him better than another! But they would let him see baby before he went!--and off he set to find the workhouse.
Abdiel followed quietly at his heel, for his master walked lost in thought, and Abdiel was too hungry to make merry without his notice. Clare, fresh to the world, had been a great reader for one so young, and could encounter new experience with old knowledge. In his mind stood a pile of fir-cones, and dried sticks, and old olive wood, which the merest touch of experience would set in a blaze of practical conclusion. But the workhouse was so near that his reflections before he reached it amounted only to this--that there are worse places than a prison when you have done nothing to deserve being put in it. A palace may be one of them. You get enough to eat in a prison; in a palace you do not; you get too much!
The porter at the workhouse informed him it was not the day for seeing the inmates; but the tall policeman had given Clare a hint, and he requested to see the matron. After much demur and much entreaty, the man went and told the matron. She, knowing the story of the baby, wanted to see Clare, and was so much pleased with his manners and looks, that his sad clothes pleaded for and not against him. She took him at once to the room where the baby was with many more, telling him he must prove she was his by picking her out. It was not wonderful that Clare, who knew the faces of animals so well, should know his own baby the moment he saw her, notwithstanding that she was decently clothed, and had already improved in appearance. But the nurses declared they had never before seen a man, not to say a boy, who could tell one baby from another.
"Why," rejoined Clare, "my dog Abdiel could pick out the baby he was nurse to!"
"Ah, but he's a dog!"
"And I'm a boy!" said Clare.
He descried her on the lap of an old woman, seeming to him very old, who was at the head of the nursery-department. Old as she was, however, she had a keen eye, and a handsome countenance, with a quantity of white hair. Unlike the rest of the women, though not far removed from them socially, she knew several languages, so far as to read and enjoy books in them. Now and then a great woman may be found in a workhouse, like a first folio of Shakspere on a bookstall, among--oh, such companions!
"Let me take her," said Clare modestly, holding out his hands for the baby.
"Are you sure you will not let her drop?"
"Why, ma'am," answered Clare, "she's my own baby! It was I took her out of the water-but! I washed and fed her every day!--not that I could do it so well as you, ma'am!"
She gave him the baby, and watched him with the eye of a seeress, for she had a wonderful insight into character, and that is one of the roots of prophecy.
"You are a good and true lad," she said at length, "and a hard success lies before you. I don't know what you will come to, but, with those eyes, and that forehead, and those hands, if you come to anything but good, you will be terribly to blame."
"I will try to be good, ma'am," said Clare simply. "But I wish I knew what they put me in prison for!"
"What, indeed, my lamb!" she returned; and her eyes flashed with indignation under the cornice of her white hair. "They'll be put in prison one day themselves that did it!"
"Oh, I don't mind!" said Clare. "I don't want them to be punished. You see I'm only waiting!"
"What are you waiting for, sonny?" asked the old woman.
"I don't exactly know--though I know better than what I was put in prison for. Nobody ever told me anything, but I'm always waiting for something."
"The something will come, child. You will have what you want! Only go on as you're doing, and you'll be a great man one day."
"I don't want to be a great man," answered Clare; "I'm only waiting till what is coming does come."
The woman cast down her eyes, and seemed lost in thought. Clare dandled the baby gently in his arms, and talked loving nonsense to her.
"Well," said the old woman, raising at length her eyes, with a look of reverence in them, to Clare's, "I can't help you, and you want no help of mine. I've got no money, but--"
"I've got plenty of money, ma'am," interrupted Clare. "I've got a whole shilling in my pocket!"
"Bless the holy innocent!" murmured the woman. "--Well, I can only promise you this--that as long as I live, the baby sha'n't forget you; and I ain't so old as I look."
Here the matron came up, and said he had better be going now; but if he came back any day after a month, he should see the baby again.
"Thank you, ma'am," replied Clare. "Keep her a good baby, please. I will come for her one day."
"Please God I live to see that day!" said the old woman. "I think I shall."
She did live to see it, though I cannot tell that part of the story now.