The Turnpike House

It stood where four roads met--a square building of two storeys, with white-washed walls and a high slate roof. The fence, and the once trim garden, had vanished with the turnpike gate; and a jungle of gooseberry bushes, interspersed with brambles, shut off the house from the roads. And only by courtesy could these be so-called, for time and neglect had almost obliterated them. On all sides stretched a flat expanse of reaped fields, bleak-looking and barren in the waning November twilight. Mists gathered thickly over ditch and hedge and stubbled furrow a constant dripping could be heard in the clumps of trees looming here and there in the fog. Through the kitchen-garden jungle a narrow, crooked path led up to the door where two rough stones ascended to a broken threshold. Indeed, the whole house appeared ragged in its poverty. Many of the windows were stuffed up with rags; walls, cracked and askew, exuded green slime; moss interspersed with lichen, filled in the crevices of the slates upon the roof. A dog would scarcely have sought such a kennel, yet a dim light in the left-hand window of the lower storey shewed that this kennel was inhabited. There sat within--a woman and a child. The outer decay but typified the poverty of the interior. Plaster had fallen from walls and ceiling, and both were cracked in all directions. No carpet covered the warped floor, and the pinched fire in the rusty grate gave but scanty warmth to the small apartment. A deal table, without a cloth, two deal chairs, and a three-legged stool--these formed the sole furniture. On the blistered black mantelshelf a few cups and saucers of thick delf ranged themselves, and their gay pinks and blues were the only cheerful note in the prevailing misery. The elder of these two outcasts sat by the bare table; a tallow candle of the cheapest description stuck in a bottle shed a feeble tight, by which she sewed furiously at a flannel shirt. Stab, click, click, stab, she toiled in mad haste as though working for a wager. Intent on her labour, she had no looks to spare for the ten-year-old boy who crouched by the fire; not that he heeded her neglect, for a brown toy horse took up all his attention, and he was perfectly happy in managing what was, to him, an unruly steed. From the likeness between these two, the most casual observer would have pronounced them mother and son. She had once been beautiful, this slender woman, with her fair hair and blue eyes, but trouble and destitution had robbed her of a delicate loveliness which could have thriven only under congenial circumstances. In those faded eyes, now feverishly glittering, there lurked and expression of dread telling of a mind ill at ease. Dainty garments would have well become her fairness, but she was clothed, rather than dressed, in a black stuff gown without even a linen collar to relieve its lustreless aspect. Poverty had made her careless of her appearance, heedless of the respect due to herself, and her sole aim, apparently, was the speedy completion of the shirt at which she incessantly wrought. The boy was a small copy of his mother, with the same fair hair and blue eyes but his face had more colour, his figure was more rounded, and he was clothed with a care which shewed the forethought and the love of a mother even in the direst poverty. After some twenty minutes of silence, broken only by the clicking of the needle and the low chatter of the child, signs of exhaustion began to show themselves in the worker. Before long, big, hot tears fell on the grey flannel, and she opened her mouth with an hysterical gasp. Slowly and more slowly did the seamstress ply her needle, until at last, with a strangled sob, she flung back her head. "Oh, Heavens!" was her moan, and it seemed to be wrung from the very depths of her suffering heart. The child, with a nervous cry, looked up, trembling violently.