A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant′s, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man′s. A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life. Bright eyes, but not youthful. Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy,—ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.
Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow.
"I′ll bite," he said, "if you hit me!"
The time had been, and not many minutes since, when such a sight as this would have wrung the Chemist′s heart. He looked upon it now, coldly; but with a heavy effort to remember something—he did not know what—he asked the boy what he did there, and whence he came.
"Where′s the woman?" he replied. "I want to find the woman."
"Who?"
"The woman. Her that brought me here, and set me by the large fire. She was so long gone, that I went to look for her, and lost myself. I don′t want you. I want the woman."
He made a spring, so suddenly, to get away, that the dull sound of his naked feet upon the floor was near the curtain, when Redlaw caught him by his rags.
"Come! you let me go!" muttered the boy, struggling, and clenching his teeth. "I′ve done nothing to you. Let me go, will you, to the woman!"
"That is not the way. There is a nearer one," said Redlaw, detaining him, in the same blank effort to remember some association that ought, of right, to bear upon this monstrous object. "What is your name?"
"Got none."
"Where do you live?
"Live! What′s that?"
The boy shook his hair from his eyes to look at him for a moment, and then, twisting round his legs and wrestling with him, broke again into his repetition of "You let me go, will you? I want to find the woman."
The Chemist led him to the door. "This way," he said, looking at him still confusedly, but with repugnance and avoidance, growing out of his coldness. "I′ll take you to her."
The sharp eyes in the child′s head, wandering round the room, lighted on the table where the remnants of the dinner were.
"Give me some of that!" he said, covetously.
"Has she not fed you?"
"I shall be hungry again to-morrow, sha′n′t I? Ain′t I hungry every day?"
Finding himself released, he bounded at the table like some small animal of prey, and hugging to his breast bread and meat, and his own rags, all together, said:
"There! Now take me to the woman!"
As the Chemist, with a new-born dislike to touch him, sternly motioned him to follow, and was going out of the door, he trembled and stopped.
"The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!"
The Phantom′s words were blowing in the wind, and the wind blew chill upon him.
"I′ll not go there, to-night," he murmured faintly. "I′ll go nowhere to-night. Boy! straight down this long-arched passage, and past the great dark door into the yard,—you see the fire shining on the window there."
"The woman′s fire?" inquired the boy.
He nodded, and the naked feet had sprung away.
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