But the clown! After all, he could have turned even Jenny"s house into one long surprise. He summed up all Jenny"s ideas of enjoyment. She heard Ruby behind her commenting upon his action as "owdacious." The same unsympathetic tyrant had often called her "owdacious," and here, before her dancing deep eyes, was audacity made manifest. How she longed to be actually of this merriment, not merely a spectator at the back of whose mind bed loomed as the dull but inevitable climax of all delight.
Then came the episode of the hangman, and the quavering note of fear in Punch"s voice found a responsive echo in her own.
"He"s going to be hanged," said Ruby gloatingly.
Jenny began to feel uneasy. Even in this irresponsible world, there was unpleasantness in the background.
Then came the ghost--a terrifying figure. And then came a green dragon, with cruel, snapping jaws--even more terrifying--but most terrifying of all was Ruby"s answer to her whispered inquiry:
"Why was all that?"
"Because Punch was a bad, wicked man."
The street so crudely painted on the back of the puppet-show took on suddenly a strange and uninviting emptiness, seemed to stand out behind the figures with a horrid likeness to Hagworth Street, to Hagworth Street in a bad dream devoid of friendly faces. Was a green dragon the end of pleasure? It was all very disconcerting.
The play was over; the halfpennies had been gathered in. The lamplighter was coming round, and through the dusk the noise of pipe and drums slowly grew faint in the distance with a melancholy foreboding of finality.
Jenny"s brain was buzzing with a mult.i.tude of self-contradictory impressions. For once, in a way, she was glad to hold tightly on to Ruby"s rough, red hand. But the conversation between Ruby and another big girl on the way home was not encouraging.
"And she was found in an area with her throat cut open in a stream of blood, and the man as did it got away and ain"t been caught yet."
"There"s been a lot of these murders lately," said Ruby.
"Hundreds," corroborated her friend.
"Every night," added Ruby, "sometimes two."
"I"ve been afraid to sleep alone. You can hear the paper boys calling of "em out."
True enough, that very night, Jenny, lying awake, heard down the street cries gradually coming nearer in colloquial announcement of sudden death, in hoa.r.s.e revelations of blood and disaster.
"Could I be murdered?" she asked next day.
"Of course you could," was Ruby"s cheerful reply. "Especially if you isn"t a good girl."
Jenny went over in her mind the drama of Punch and Judy. Murder meant being knocked on the head with a stick and thrown out of the window.
That night again the cries went surging up and down the street. Details of mutilation floated in through the foggy air till the flickering night-light showed peeping hangmen in every dim corner. Jenny covered herself with the blankets and pressed hot, sleepless eyelids close to her eyes, hoping to distract herself from the contemplation of horror by the gay wheels of dazzling colors which such an action always produces.
The wheels appeared, but presently turned to the similitude of blood-red spots. She opened her eyes again. The room seemed monstrously large.
Edie was beside her. She shook her sleeping sister.
"Wake up; oh, Edie, do wake up!"
"Whatever is it, you great nuisance?"
In the far distance, "Another Horrible Murder in Whitechapel," answered Edie"s question, and Jenny began to scream.
Chapter IV: _The Ancient Mischief_
There was nothing to counterbalance the terrors of childhood in Hagworth Street. Outside the hope of one day being able to do as she liked, Jenny had no ideals. Worse, she had no fairyland. Soon she would be given at school a bald narrative of Cinderella or Red Riding Hood, where every word above a monosyllable would be divided in such a way that hyphens would always seem of greater importance than elves.
About this time Jenny"s greatest joy was music, and in connection with this an incident occurred which, though she never remembered it herself, had yet such a tremendous importance in some of its side-issues as to deserve record.
It was a fine day in early summer. All the morning, Jenny, on account of household duties, had been kept indoors, and, some impulse of freedom stirring in her young heart, she slipped out alone into the sunlit street. Somewhere close at hand a piano-organ was playing the intermezzo from "Cavalleria," and the child tripped towards the sound. Soon she came upon the player, and stood, finger in mouth, abashed for a moment, but the Italian beamed at her--an honest smile of welcome, for she was obviously no bringer of pence. Wooed by his friendliness, Jenny began to dance in perfect time, marking with little feet the slow rhythm of the tune.
In scarlet serge dress and cap of scarlet stockinette, she danced to the tinsel melody. Unhampered by anything save the need for self-expression, she expressed the joyousness of a London morning as her feet took the paving-stones all dappled and flecked with shadows of the tall plane tree at the end of Hagworth Street. She was a dainty child, with silvery curls and almond eyes where laughter rippled in a blue so deep you would have vowed they were brown. The scarlet of her dress, through long use, had taken on the soft texture of a pastel.
Picture her, then, dancing alone in the quiet Islington street to this faded tune of Italy, as presently down the street that seemed stained with the warmth of alien suns shuffled an old man. He stopped to regard the dancing child over the crook of his ebony walking-stick.
"Aren"t you Mrs. Raeburn"s little girl?" he asked.
Jenny melted into shyness, lost nearly all her beauty, and became bunched and ordinary for a moment.
"Yes," she whispered.
"Humph!" grunted the old man, and solemnly presented the organ grinder with a halfpenny.
Ruby O"Connor"s voice rang out down the street.
"Come back directly, you limb!" she called. Jenny looked irresolute, but presently decided to obey.
That same evening the old man tapped at the kitchen door.
"Come in," said Mrs. Raeburn. "Is that you, Mr. Vergoe? Something gone wrong with your gas again? I do wish Charlie would remember to mend it."
"No, there"s nothing the matter with the gas," explained the lodger.
(For Mr. Vergoe was the lodger of Number Seventeen.) "Only I think that child of yours"ll make a dancer some day."
"Make a what?" said the mother.
"A dancer. I was watching her this morning. Wonderful notion of time.
You ought to have her trained, so to speak."
"My good gracious, whatever for?"
"The stage, of course."
"No, thank _you_. I don"t want none of my children gadding round theaters."
"But you like a good play yourself?"
"That"s quite another kettle of fish. Thank you all the same, Mr.
Vergoe, Jenny"ll not go on to the stage."
"You"re making a great mistake," he insisted. "And I suppose I know something about dancing, or ought to, as it were."