#http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7735/pg7735.txt
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at
occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind
which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies),
rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame
of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Through one of the
obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the
gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of the lowest orders, was
wending his solitary way. He stopped twice or thrice at different shops
and houses of a description correspondent with the appearance of the
quartier in which they were situated, and tended inquiry for some
article or another which did not seem easily to be met with. All the
answers he received were couched in the negative; and as he turned from
each door he muttered to himself, in no very elegant phraseology, his
disappointment and discontent. At length, at one house, the landlord, a
sturdy butcher, after rendering the same reply the inquirer had hitherto
received, added, "But if this vill do as vell, Dummie, it is quite at
your sarvice!" Pausing reflectively for a moment, Dummie responded that
he thought the thing proffered might do as well; and thrusting it into
his ample pocket, he strode away with as rapid a motion as the wind and
the rain would allow. He soon came to a nest of low and dingy buildings,
at the entrance to which, in half-effaced characters, was written
"Thames Court." Halting at the most conspicuous of these buildings, an
inn or alehouse, through the half-closed windows of which blazed out in
ruddy comfort the beams of the hospitable hearth, he knocked hastily at
the door. He was admitted by a lady of a certain age, and endowed with a
comely rotundity of face and person.

So saying, Dummie ascended a doorless staircase, across the entrance
of which a blanket, stretched angularly from the wall to the chimney,
afforded a kind of screen; and presently he stood within a chamber which
the dark and painful genius of Crabbe might have delighted to portray.
The walls were whitewashed, and at sundry places strange figures and
grotesque characters had been traced by some mirthful inmate, in such
sable outline as the end of a smoked stick or the edge of a piece of
charcoal is wont to produce. The wan and flickering light afforded by a
farthing candle gave a sort of grimness and menace to these achievements
of pictorial art, especially as they more than once received
embellishments from portraits of Satan such as he is accustomed to be
drawn. A low fire burned gloomily in the sooty grate, and on the hob
hissed "the still small voice" of an iron kettle. On a round deal table
were two vials, a cracked cup, a broken spoon of some dull metal, and
upon two or three mutilated chairs were scattered various articles
of female attire. On another table, placed below a high, narrow,
shutterless casement (athwart which, instead of a curtain, a checked
apron had been loosely hung, and now waved fitfully to and fro in the
gusts of wind that made easy ingress through many a chink and cranny),
were a looking-glass, sundry appliances of the toilet, a box of coarse
rouge, a few ornaments of more show than value, and a watch, the regular
and calm click of which produced that indescribably painful feeling
which, we fear, many of our readers who have heard the sound in a
sick-chamber can easily recall. A large tester-bed stood opposite to
this table, and the looking-glass partially reflected curtains of
a faded stripe, and ever and anon (as the position of the sufferer
followed the restless emotion of a disordered mind) glimpses of the face
of one on whom Death was rapidly hastening. Beside this bed now stood
Dummie, a small, thin man dressed in a tattered plush jerkin, from
which the rain-drops slowly dripped, and with a thin, yellow, cunning
physiognomy grotesquely hideous in feature, but not positively villanous
in expression. On the other side of the bed stood a little boy of about
three years old, dressed as if belonging to the better classes, although
the garb was somewhat tattered and discoloured. The poor child trembled
violently, and evidently looked with a feeling of relief on the entrance
of Dummie. And now there slowly, and with many a phthisical sigh,
heaved towards the foot of the bed the heavy frame of the woman who had
accosted Dummie below, and had followed him, haud passibus aequis, to
the room of the sufferer; she stood with a bottle of medicine in her
hand, shaking its contents up and down, and with a kindly yet timid
compassion spread over a countenance crimsoned with habitual libations.
This made the scene,--save that on a chair by the bedside lay a
profusion of long, glossy, golden ringlets, which had been cut from
the head of the sufferer when the fever had begun to mount upwards, but
which, with a jealousy that portrayed the darling littleness of a vain
heart, she had seized and insisted on retaining near her; and save that,
by the fire, perfectly inattentive to the event about to take place
within the chamber, and to which we of the biped race attach so awful
an importance, lay a large gray cat, curled in a ball, and dozing
with half-shut eyes, and ears that now and then denoted, by a gentle
inflection, the jar of a louder or nearer sound than usual upon her
lethargic senses. The dying woman did not at first attend to the
entrance either of Dummie or the female at the foot of the bed, but she
turned herself round towards the child, and grasping his arm fiercely,
she drew him towards her, and gazed on his terrified features with a
look in which exhaustion and an exceeding wanness of complexion were
even horribly contrasted by the glare and energy of delirium.

Dummie's face grew pale, for he was superstitiously affected by the
vehemence and the language of the dying woman, and he answered, as he
kissed the pretended Bible, that he swore to keep the secret, as much as
he knew of it, which, she must be sensible, he said, was very little. As
he spoke, the wind swept with a loud and sudden gust down the chimney,
and shook the roof above them so violently as to loosen many of the
crumbling tiles, which fell one after the other, with a crashing noise,
on the pavement below. Dummie started in affright; and perhaps his
conscience smote him for the trick he had played with regard to the
false Bible. But the woman, whose excited and unstrung nerves led her
astray from one subject to another with preternatural celerity, said,
with an hysterical laugh.

Dummie obeyed; and the woman, as she in a low tone uttered something
about the unbecoming colour of the ribbons, adjusted the cap on her
head, and then, saying in a regretful and petulant voice.

Left alone with her child, the face of the wretched mother softened as
she regarded him, and all the levities and all the vehemences--if we
may use the word--which, in the turbulent commotion of her delirium, had
been stirred upward to the surface of her mind, gradually now sank as
death increased upon her, and a mother's anxiety rose to the natural
level from which it had been disturbed and abased. She took the child
to her bosom, and clasping him in her arms, which grew weaker with every
instant, she soothed him with the sort of chant which nurses sing over
their untoward infants; but her voice was cracked and hollow, and as she
felt it was so, the mother's eyes filled with tears. Mrs. Margery now
reentered; and turning towards the hostess with an impressive calmness
of manner which astonished and awed the person she addressed, the dying
woman pointed to the child and said,--
Poor Mrs. Margery, fairly sobbing, vowed she would be a mother to the
child, and that she would endeavour to rear him honestly; though a
public-house was not, she confessed, the best place for good examples.

The hostess, alarmed, hastened to comply; but before she returned to the
bedside, the sufferer was insensible,--nor did she again recover speech
or motion. A low and rare moan only testified continued life, and within
two hours that ceased, and the spirit was gone. At that time our good
hostess was herself beyond the things of this outer world, having
supported her spirits during the vigils of the night with so many
little liquid stimulants that they finally sank into that torpor
which generally succeeds excitement. Taking, perhaps, advantage of the
opportunity which the insensibility of the hostess afforded him, Dummie,
by the expiring ray of the candle that burned in the death-chamber,
hastily opened a huge box (which was generally concealed under the bed,
and contained the wardrobe of the deceased), and turned with irreverent
hand over the linens and the silks, until quite at the bottom of the
trunk he discovered some packets of letters; these he seized, and buried
in the conveniences of his dress. He then, rising and replacing the box,
cast a longing eye towards the watch on the toilet-table, which was of
gold; but he withdrew his gaze, and with a querulous sigh observed to
himself: