The great church clock, in the most crowded part of that congested city, struck eight.
It was a solemn old clock, and it spoke very slowly and distinctly, as if it thought that the people who lived round the church were not able to count quickly, and as if it were afraid they would make a mistake, and would lay the blame on the clock.
One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight!
The children heard it; they left the mud pies they were making in the gutter and ran to their different homes. The bricklayers, who were mending the old church porch, heard it; they threw down their trowels and hurried away to their breakfast. The milkman, who was driving down the street, heard it; he whipped his horse and drove quickly that his customers might be supplied in time. The errand-boy, who was playing marbles at the street corner, heard it, and he hastened back to the shop. All the wives and sisters and mothers, in all the streets and alleys and courts near the old church, heard it; they filled the tea-pots, and buttered the toast, and took the cakes out of the ovens, and set the chairs in their places for the husbands and fathers and sons who were coming in for breakfast.
Old Grumpy heard it as she was raking the ashes out of her little grate.
“One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight!” counted Old Grumpy, and then she went on with what she was doing without taking any further notice of it. It made no difference to her. There was no need for her to hurry or to rake faster. No one was coming in to breakfast; she had no husband, no brother, and no son to care for. Old Grumpy lived alone, and she liked to live alone; she was quite proud of saying that she loved nobody, and nobody loved her. The neighbors never came to see the old woman, and she never went to see the neighbors. If they had come, she would not have opened the door to them. “They are an idle, gossiping lot,” she said.
Old Grumpy was a thin, bony old woman, with a hard and cross face. Even the children ran away from her as she passed through the court, for she never smiled at them, or spoke to them, but stalked on with a determined step, and with her lips tightly pressed together, as if she had made up her mind to be the Ishmael of the court—her hand against every man, every man’s hand against her.
It was a long, straggling court, which may, perhaps, have been the reason why it was called Ivy Court; it certainly was not like the ivy anywhere else, for there was nothing green, pretty, or bright about it. The first part of the court had a double row of houses, but at the end of this there was a narrow passage, which wound round two sides of the graveyard of the old city church, and here the houses were only on one side, and looked upon the high grimy wall of the churchyard. Old Grumpy’s house was the last one; she had lived there so long that every other house in the court had changed tenants since she came there. She only rented the upper room, and it was neither a very large nor a very cheerful place to live in. Still she stuck to it, year after year, and it would have broken her heart to leave it for another. The walls and the ceiling had never been whitewashed since she came there and were almost as black as the inside of the chimney; her old four-post bed was hung with faded chintz, which was more dirty and filthy than the walls. If you had been able to see through the dust and dirt and cobwebs that covered the windowpanes, you would have seen nothing but the bare, black, dismal wall opposite, and the tops of two or three smoky and sooty gravestones that were taller than the rest, which seemed to be peering over the wall at the inhabitants of Ivy Court. It was a dismal prospect, and perhaps old Grumpy thought so, for she never tried to clean the windows but allowed the dust to thicken there, the spiders to spin there, and the dead flies to lie in black and unsightly heaps in the corner of every pane.
No one in the court knew anything about the strange and disagreeable old woman. No one remembered her coming to the court; no one knew when she came, or why she came, or where she came from. They did not even know her name. The children who lived near her had given her the name of “Old Grumpy,” because she always spoke in a surly, unpleasant voice. But the children who had given her the name were children no longer. They had all left Ivy Court: some of them were married, and some of them were dead. Yet, although they had left, Old Grumpy’s name had been passed on to the next generation, and the children, who lived in the court at the time this story begins, still ran away, calling out “Old Grumpy! Old Grumpy!” whenever the old woman came out.
Poor Old Grumpy’s life had been a very cheerless one. She was born in a workhouse, and her mother had died when she was only two days old. She remembered very little about her childhood, except this one thing, that nobody cared for her. And when she was a child, this often troubled her. Other children had mothers, other children had homes, but she had not a relative in the world, and her only home was the workhouse.
There was one evening, when she was about nine years old, that Old Grumpy had never forgotten. She had been sent on an errand for the matron and was coming home through a narrow street full of working people’s houses. It was seven o’clock, and she could see the cheerful firelight in many a happy home as she passed by. It was Christmas Eve, and there was a merry family party gathered round the fire in nearly every house. The child felt a strange, hungry feeling in her heart as she looked at them. Oh, if one of those bright little houses had been her home!
But it was the last house in the street that she remembered best of all. There was a bedroom on the ground floor, and on the table was a candle. The child peeped in and saw four little beds, and in the beds four little fair-haired children. And there was a fair-haired mother, going about amongst the cots, shaking up the little pillows, tucking up the blankets, and kissing the little rosy cheeks. Then she took up the candle and was going away, but the children called her back again and again, for more and more kisses.
The poor child outside, who had no one to love her, turned away with tears in her eyes. She could not remember that any one had ever kissed her; she wondered if her mother had kissed her before she died. Her mother had had fair hair, so the old workhouse nurse had told her, and was very pretty. The child wondered whether, if she had lived, she would have tucked her up, and made her cozy when she went to bed.
Poor Old Grumpy had never forgotten that night; but as the years went by, and she grew older, she grew at the same time harder. Nobody had ever loved her, and so she resolved she would never love anybody. She could do quite well without their love, she said to herself. Nobody had ever been kind to her, so she made up her mind not to be kind to anybody. All the world was against her, and she was against all the world.
Yet, once in a while, that old, hungry feeling, which had come into her heart on that Christmas Eve so long ago, came back to her, in spite of herself.
Unloved and loveless, she still at times yearned both to be loved and to love.