PAGE 4
Jenny Wren
by
By degrees as she progressed in this remembrance, the hand was raised, the last ecstatic look returned, and she became quite beautiful again. Having so paused for a moment, silent, with a listening smile upon her face, she looked round and recalled herself.
“What poor fun you think me, don’t you,” she said to the visitor. “You may well look tired of me. But it’s Saturday night, and I won’t detain you.”
“That is to say, Miss Wren,” observed the visitor, rather weary of the person of the house, and quite ready to profit by her hint, “you wish me to go?”
“Well, it’s Saturday night,” she returned, “and my child’s coming home. And my child is a troublesome, bad child, and costs me a world of scolding. I would rather you didn’t see my child.”
“A doll?” said the visitor, not understanding, and looking for an explanation.
But Lizzie, with her lips only, shaping the two words, ” Her father,” he took his leave immediately, and presently the weak and shambling figure of the child’s father stumbled in, to be expostulated with, and scolded, and treated as the person of the house always treated him, when he came home in such a pitiable condition.
While they ate their supper, Lizzie tried to bring the child round again to that prettier and better state. But the charm was broken. The dolls’ dressmaker had become a little quaint shrew, of the world, worldly; of the earth, earthy.
Poor dolls’ dressmaker! How often so dragged down by hands that should have raised her up; how often so misdirected when losing her way on the eternal road and asking guidance! Poor, poor little dolls’ dressmaker.
One of Miss Jenny’s firmest friends was an aged Jew, Mr. Riah, by name; of venerable aspect, and a generous and noble nature. He was supposedly the head of the firm of Pubsey and Co., at Saint-Mary-Axe, but really only the agent of one Mr. Fledgeby, a miserly young dandy who directed all the aged Jew’s transactions, and forced him into sharp, unfair dealings with those whom Mr. Riah himself would gladly have befriended; shielding his own meanness and dishonesty behind the venerable figure of the Jew, and keeping his own connection with the firm a profound secret. Mr. Riah suffered himself to remain in such a position only because once when he had had sickness and misfortune, and owed Mr. Fledgeby’s father both principal and interest, the son inheriting, had been merciful and placed him there; and little did the guileless old man realize that he had long since, richly repaid the debt; his age and serene respectability, added to the characteristics ascribed to his race, making a valuable screen to hide his employer’s misdeeds.
The aged Jew often befriended the dolls’ dressmaker, and she called him, in her fanciful way, “godmother.”
On his roof-top garden, Jenny Wren and her friend Lizzie were sitting one day, together, when Mr. Fledgeby came up and joined the party, interrupting their conversation. For the girls, perhaps with some old instinct of his race, the gentle Jew had spread a carpet. Seated on it, against no more romantic object than a blackened chimney-stack, over which some humble creeper had been trained, they both pored over one book, while a basket of common fruit, and another basket of strings of beads and tinsel scraps were lying near.
“This, sir,” explained the old Jew, “is a little dressmaker for little people. Explain to the master, Jenny.”
“Dolls; that’s all,” said Jenny shortly. “Very difficult to fit too, because their figures are so uncertain. You never know where to expect their waists.”
“I made acquaintance with my guests, sir,” pursued the old Jew, with an evident purpose of drawing out the dressmaker, “through their coming here to buy our damage and waste for Miss Jenny’s millinery. They wear it in their hair, and on their ball-dresses, and even (so she tells me) are presented at court with it.”