All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story. Walter Besant

Bunker" – Angela turned upon him with an air of command, and pointed to the door – "you may go now. You have done all I wanted."

      Mr. Bunker turned very red. "He could go!" Was he to be ordered about by every little dressmaker? "He could go!"

      "If the lady engages my daughter, Mr. Bunker," said Captain Sorensen, "I will try to find the five shillings next week."

      "Five shillings!" cried Angela. "Why, I have just given him five shillings for his recommendation."

      Mr. Bunker did not explain that his practice was to get five shillings from both sides, but he retreated with as much dignity as could be expected.

      He asked, outside, with shame, how it was that he allowed himself thus to be sat upon and ordered out of the house by a mere girl. Why had he not stood upon his dignity? To be told he might go, and before an inmate – a common pauper!

      There is one consolation always open, thank Heaven, for the meanest among us poor worms of earth. We are gifted with imaginations; we can make the impossible an actual fact, and can with the eye of the mind make the unreal stand before us in the flesh. Therefore, when we are down-trodden, we may proceed, without the trouble and danger of turning (which has been known to bring total extinction upon a worm), to take revenge upon our enemy in imagination. Mr. Bunker, who was at this moment uncertain whether he hated Miss Kennedy more than he hated his nephew, went home glowing with the thought that but a few short months would elapse before he should be able to set his foot upon the former and crush her. Because, at the rate she was going on, she would not last more than that time. Then would he send in his bills, sue her, sell her up, and drive her out of the place stripped of the last farthing. "He might go!" He, Bunker, was told that he might go! And in the presence of an inmate. Then he thought of his nephew, and while he smote the pavement with the iron end of his umbrella, a cold dew appeared upon his nose, the place where inward agitation is frequently betrayed in this way, and he shivered, looking about him suddenly as if he was frightened. Yet what harm was Harry Goslett likely to do him?

      "What is your name, my dear?" asked Angela softly, and without any inspection of the work on the table. She was wondering how this pretty, fragile flower should be found in Whitechapel. O ignorance of Newnham! For she might have reflected that the rarest and most beautiful plants are found in the most savage places – there is beautiful botanizing, one is told, in the Ural Mountains; and that the sun shines everywhere, even, as Mr. Bunker remarked, in an almshouse; and that she herself had gathered in the ugliest ditches round Cambridge the sweetest flowering mosses, the tenderest campion, the lowliest little herb-robert.

      "My name is Ellen," replied the girl.

      "I call her Nelly," her father answered, "and she is a good girl. Will you sit down, Miss Kennedy?"

      Angela sat down and proceeded to business. She said, addressing the old man, but looking at the child, that she was setting up a dressmaker's shop; that she had hopes of support, even from the West End, where she had friends; that she was prepared to pay the proper wages, with certain other advantages, of which more would be said later on; and that, if Captain Sorensen approved, she would engage his daughter from that day.

      "I have only been out as an improver as yet," said Nelly. "But if you will really try me as a dressmaker – O father, it is sixteen shillings a week!"

      Angela's heart smote her. A poor sixteen shillings a week! And this girl was delighted at the chance of getting so much.

      "What do you say, Captain Sorensen? Do you want references, as Mr. Bunker did? I am the granddaughter of a man who was born here and made – a little – money here, which he left to me. Will you let her come to me?"

      "You are the first person," said Captain Sorensen, "who ever, in this place, where work is not so plentiful as hands, offered work as if taking it was a favor to you."

      "I want good girls – and nice girls," said Angela. "I want a house where we shall all be friends."

      The old sailor shook his head.

      "There is no such house here," he said sadly. "It is 'take it or leave it' – if you won't take it, others will. Make the poor girls your friends, Miss Kennedy? You look and talk like a lady born and bred, and I fear you will be put upon. Make friends of your servants? Why, Mr. Bunker will tell you that Whitechapel does not carry on business that way. But it is good of you to try, and I am sure you will not scold and drive like the rest."

      "You offended Mr. Bunker, I learn, by refusing a place which he offered," said Angela.

      "Yes: God knows if I did right. We are desperately poor, else we should not be here. That you may see for yourself. Yet my blood boiled when I heard the character of the man whom my Nelly was to serve. I could not let her go. She is all I have, Miss Kennedy" – the old man drew the girl toward him and held her, his arm round her waist. "If you will take her and treat her kindly, you will have – it isn't worth anything, perhaps – the gratitude of one old man in this world – soon in the next."

      "Trust your daughter with me, Captain Sorensen," Angela replied, with tears in her eyes.

      "Everybody round here is poor," he went on. "That makes people hard-hearted; there are too many people in trade, and that makes them mean; they are all trying to undersell each other, and that makes them full of tricks and cheating. They treat the work-girls worst because they cannot stand up for themselves. The long hours, and the bad food, and the poisonous air – think a little of your girls, Miss Kennedy. But you will – you will."

      "I will, Captain Sorensen."

      "It seems worse to us old sailors," he went on. "We have had a hardish life, but it has been in open air. Old sailors haven't had to cheat and lie for a living. And we haven't been brought up to think of girls turning night into day, and working sixteen hours on end at twopence an hour. It is hard to think of my poor girl – " He stopped and clinched his fist. "Better to starve than to drive such a mill!" He was thinking of the place which he had refused.

      "Let us try each other, Nelly," she said, kissing her on the forehead.

      The captain took his hat to escort her as far as the gate.

      "A quiet place," he said, looking round the little court, "and a happy place for the last days of improvident old men like me. Yet some of us grumble. Forgive my plain speech about the work."

      "There is nothing to forgive, indeed, Captain Sorensen. Will you let me call upon you sometimes?"

      She gave him her hand. He bowed over it with the courtesy of a captain on his own quarter-deck. When she turned away she saw that a tear was standing in his eyes.

      "Father!" cried Nelly, rushing into his arms, "did you ever see anybody like her? Oh! oh! do you think I really shall do for her?"

      "You will do your best, my dear. It is a long time, I think, since I have seen and spoken with any one like that. In the old days I have had passengers to Calcutta like her; but none more so, Nelly – no, never one more so."

      "You couldn't, father." His daughter wanted no explanation of this mysterious qualification. "You couldn't. She is a lady, father;" she looked up and laughed.

      "It's a funny thing for a real lady to open a dressmaker's shop on Stepney Green, isn't it?"

      Remark, if you please, that this girl had never once before, in all her life, conversed with a lady; using the word in the prejudiced and narrow sense peculiar to the West End. Yet she discovered instantly the truth. Whence this instinct? It is a world full of strange and wonderful things; the more questions we ask, the more we may; and the more things we consider, the more incomprehensible does the sum of things appear. Inquiring reader, I do not know how Nelly divined that her visitor was a lady.

      CHAPTER VIII.

      WHAT HE GOT BY IT

      A dressmaker's shop, without a dressmaker to manage it, would be, Angela considered, in some perplexity, like a ship without a steersman. She therefore waited with some impatience the promised visit of Rebekah Hermitage, whom she was to "get cheap," according to Mr. Bunker, on account of her Sabbatarian views.

      She came in the evening, while Angela was walking on the Green with the sprightly cabinet-maker.