LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER I.

       WHEN HE WAS A CHILD.

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      ‘Don’t say anything before the boy.’

      This was one of the first things he remembered. In the confused recollections of that early age, he seemed to have been always hearing it: said between his mother and his sister, afterwards between his grandparents, even by strangers one to another, always, ‘Don’t say anything before the boy.’ What it was, about which nothing was to be said, he had very little idea, and, indeed, grew up to be a man before, in the light of sudden revelations, he began to put these scattered gleams together, and see what they meant. They confused his little soul from the beginning, throwing strange lights and stranger shadows across his path, keeping around him a sort of unreality, a sense that things were not as they seemed.

      His name was John in those days: certainly John—of that there was no doubt: called Johnnie, when people were kind, sometimes Jack—but John he always was. He had a faint sort of notion that it had not always been John Sandford. But this was not clear in his mind. It was all confused with the rest of the broken reminiscences which concerned the time in which everybody was so anxious that nothing should be said before the boy.

      In those days his recollection was of a little common-place house—a house in a street—with two parlours, one behind the other, kitchens below, bed-rooms above, the most ordinary little house. There was a little garden behind, in which he played; and in which sometimes he was vaguely conscious of being shut out on purpose to play, and doing so in an abortive, unwilling way which took all the pleasure out of it. Sometimes he only sat down and wondered, not even pretending to amuse himself, until a butterfly flew past and roused him, or his little spade showed itself temptingly at hand. At seven one is easily beguiled, whatever weight there may be on one’s spirit. But now and then he would stop and look up at the windows, and see some one moving indoors, and wonder again what it was that the boy was not intended to know.

      At this period of John’s career, his father was alive—and he was fond of his father. Sometimes papa would be very late, and would go up to John’s little bed, and bring him down in his night-gown only half awake, seeing the candles like stars through a mist of sleep and wonder, till he was roused to the fullest wakefulness by cakes and sweetmeats, and every kind of dainty which papa had brought. John became quite used to all the varying experiences of this mid-night incident—the reluctance to be roused up, the glory of going downstairs, the delight of the feast. He sat on his father’s knee, with his little bare feet wrapped in a shawl, and his eyes shining as brightly as the candles, munching and chattering. He got quite used to it. He used to feel uncomfortable sometimes in the morning, and heard it said that something was very bad for him, and that the child’s stomach, as well as his morals, would be spoiled. Johnnie knew as little about his stomach as about his morals. And he had a way of being well which greatly interfered with all these prognostications. He was a very sturdy little boy.

      He had a consciousness through all these scenes of his mother’s face, very pale, without any smile in it, showing serious, like the moon, among those lights. She gave him no cake or oranges, but it was she who wrapped up his feet in the shawl, and took care of him in the morning when his little head sometimes ached. Papa was never visible in the morning. Johnnie was sometimes a little afraid of him, though he was so jolly in these mid-night visits. The boy was frightened when he was being carried downstairs, and clung very close, though he did not say anything about his fears. Papa would lurch sometimes on those occasions, like the steamboat on which John once had gone to sea. The memory of the lighted table, the father who always made a noise, laughing, talking, sometimes singing, always so fond of his little boy; but mamma dreadfully quiet, scarcely saying anything, and the lights of the candles, not at all like the candles we have now-a-days, but big, and shining like stars, never faded from his memory, even when he had grown a man.

      In the day-time, it was rather dull. Susie was five years older than he, going on for twelve, and knowing everything. She got to saying, ‘Go away, child,’ when he

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