Christmas Stories. Чарльз Диккенс

took his seat again, with native dignity.

      The ragged visitor—for he was miserably dressed—looked round upon the company, and made his homage to them with a humble bow.

      “Gentlefolks!” he said. “You’ve drunk the Labourer. Look at me!”

      “Just come from jail,” said Mr. Fish.

      “Just come from jail,” said Will. “And neither for the first time, nor the second, nor the third, nor yet the fourth.”

      Mr. Filer was heard to remark testily, that four times was over the average; and he ought to be ashamed of himself.

      “Gentlefolks!” repeated Will Fern. “Look at me! You see I’m at the worst. Beyond all hurt or harm; beyond your help; for the time when your kind words or kind actions could have done me good,”—he struck his hand upon his breast, and shook his head, “is gone, with the scent of last year’s beans or clover on the air. Let me say a word for these,” pointing to the labouring people in the Hall; “and when you’re met together, hear the real Truth spoke out for once.”

      “There’s not a man here,” said the host, “who would have him for a spokesman.”

      “Like enough, Sir Joseph. I believe it. Not the less true, perhaps, is what I say. Perhaps that’s a proof on it. Gentlefolks, I’ve lived many a year in this place. You may see the cottage from the sunk fence over yonder. I’ve seen the ladies draw it in their books, a hundred times. It looks well in a picter, I’ve heerd say; but there an’t weather in picters, and maybe ’tis fitter for that, than for a place to live in. Well! I lived there. How hard—how bitter hard, I lived there, I won’t say. Any day in the year, and every day, you can judge for your own selves.”

      He spoke as he had spoken on the night when Trotty found him in the street. His voice was deeper and more husky, and had a trembling in it now and then; but he never raised it passionately, and seldom lifted it above the firm stern level of the homely facts he stated.

      “’Tis harder than you think for, gentlefolks, to grow up decent, commonly decent, in such a place. That I growed up a man and not a brute, says something for me—as I was then. As I am now, there’s nothing can be said for me or done for me. I’m past it.”

      “I am glad this man has entered,” observed Sir Joseph, looking round serenely. “Don’t disturb him. It appears to be Ordained. He is an example: a living example. I hope and trust, and confidently expect, that it will not be lost upon my Friends here.”

      “I dragged on,” said Fern, after a moment’s silence, “somehow. Neither me nor any other man knows how; but so heavy, that I couldn’t put a cheerful face upon it, or make believe that I was anything but what I was. Now, gentlemen—you gentlemen that sits at Sessions—when you see a man with discontent writ on his face, you says to one another, ‘He’s suspicious. I has my doubts,’ says you, ‘about Will Fern. Watch that fellow!’ I don’t say, gentlemen, it ain’t quite nat’ral, but I say ’tis so; and from that hour, whatever Will Fern does, or lets alone—all one—it goes against him.”

      Alderman Cute stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets, and leaning back in his chair, and smiling, winked at a neighbouring chandelier. As much as to say, “Of course! I told you so. The common cry! Lord bless you, we are up to all this sort of thing—myself and human nature.”

      “Now, gentlemen,” said Will Fern, holding out his hands, and flushing for an instant in his haggard face, “see how your laws are made to trap and hunt us when we’re brought to this. I tries to live elsewhere. And I’m a vagabond. To jail with him! I comes back here. I goes a-nutting in your woods, and breaks—who don’t?—a limber branch or two. To jail with him! One of your keepers sees me in the broad day, near my own patch of garden, with a gun. To jail with him! I has a nat’ral angry word with that man, when I’m free again. To jail with him! I cuts a stick. To jail with him! I eats a rotten apple or a turnip. To jail with him! It’s twenty mile away; and coming back I begs a trifle on the road. To jail with him! At last, the constable, the keeper—anybody—finds me anywhere, a-doing anything. To jail with him, for he’s a vagrant, and a jail-bird known; and jail’s the only home he’s got.”