provincial gentlewomen was extremely talkative, and expressed a
strong desire to attend the service on Sundays, from which she
represented herself to have derived the greatest interest and
consolation when allowed that privilege. She gossiped so well, and
looked altogether so cheery and harmless, that I began to think
this a case for the Eastern magistrate, until I found that on the
last occasion of her attending chapel she had secreted a small
stick, and had caused some confusion in the responses by suddenly
producing it and belabouring the congregation.
So, these two old ladies, separated by the breadth of the grating –
otherwise they would fly at one another’s caps – sat all day long,
suspecting one another, and contemplating a world of fits. For
everybody else in the room had fits, except the wards-woman; an
elderly, able-bodied pauperess, with a large upper lip, and an air
of repressing and saving her strength, as she stood with her hands
folded before her, and her eyes slowly rolling, biding her time for
catching or holding somebody. This civil personage (in whom I
regretted to identify a reduced member of my honourable friend Mrs.
Gamp’s family) said, ‘They has ’em continiwal, sir. They drops
without no more notice than if they was coach-horses dropped from
the moon, sir. And when one drops, another drops, and sometimes
there’ll be as many as four or five on ’em at once, dear me, a
rolling and a tearin’, bless you! – this young woman, now, has ’em
dreadful bad.’
She turned up this young woman’s face with her hand as she said it.
This young woman was seated on the floor, pondering in the
foreground of the afflicted. There was nothing repellent either in
her face or head. Many, apparently worse, varieties of epilepsy
and hysteria were about her, but she was said to be the worst here.
When I had spoken to her a little, she still sat with her face
turned up, pondering, and a gleam of the mid-day sun shone in upon
her.
– Whether this young woman, and the rest of these so sorely
troubled, as they sit or lie pondering in their confused dull way,
ever get mental glimpses among the motes in the sunlight, of
healthy people and healthy things? Whether this young woman,
brooding like this in the summer season, ever thinks that somewhere
there are trees and flowers, even mountains and the great sea?
Whether, not to go so far, this young woman ever has any dim
revelation of that young woman – that young woman who is not here
and never will come here; who is courted, and caressed, and loved,
and has a husband, and bears children, and lives in a home, and who
never knows what it is to have this lashing and tearing coming upon
her? And whether this young woman, God help her, gives herself up
then and drops like a coach-horse from the moon?
I hardly knew whether the voices of infant children, penetrating
into so hopeless a place, made a sound that was pleasant or painful
to me. It was something to be reminded that the weary world was
not all aweary, and was ever renewing itself; but, this young woman
was a child not long ago, and a child not long hence might be such
as she. Howbeit, the active step and eye of the vigilant matron
conducted me past the two provincial gentlewomen (whose dignity was
ruffled by the children), and into the adjacent nursery.
There were many babies here, and more than one handsome young
mother. There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen young
mothers, and callous young mothers. But, the babies had not
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
appropriated to themselves any bad expression yet, and might have
been, for anything that appeared to the contrary in their soft
faces, Princes Imperial, and Princesses Royal. I had the pleasure
of giving a poetical commission to the baker’s man to make a cake
with all despatch and toss it into the oven for one red-headed
young pauper and myself, and felt much the better for it. Without
that refreshment, I doubt if I should have been in a condition for