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Chapter IX
The child, in her confidence with Mrs Quilp, had but feebly described
the sadness and sorrow of her thoughts, or the heaviness of the cloud
which overhung her home, and cast dark shadows on its hearth.
Besides that it was very difficult to impart to any person not
intimately acquainted with the life she led, an adequate sense of its
gloom and loneliness, a constant fear of in some way committing or
injuring the old man to whom she was so tenderly attached, had
restrained her, even in the midst of her heart's overflowing, and made
her timid of allusion to the main cause of her anxiety and distress.
For, it was not the monotonous days unchequered by variety and
uncheered by pleasant companionship, it was not the dark dreary
evenings or the long solitary nights, it was not the absence of every
slight and easy pleasure for which young hearts beat high, or the
knowing nothing of childhood but its weakness and its easily
wounded spirit, that had wrung such tears from Nell. To see the old
man struck down beneath the pressure of some hidden grief, to mark
his wavering and unsettled state, to be agitated at times with a
dreadful fear that his mind was wandering, and to trace in his words
and looks the dawning of despondent madness; to watch and wait and
listen for confirmation of these things day after day, and to feel and
know that, come what might, they were alone in the world with no one
to help or advise or care about them - these were causes of depression
and anxiety that might have sat heavily on an older breast with many
influences at work to cheer and gladden it, but how heavily on the
mind of a young child to whom they were ever present, and who was
constantly surrounded by all that could keep such thoughts in
restless action!
And yet, to the old man's vision, Nell was still the same. When he
could, for a moment, disengage his mind from the phantom that
haunted and brooded on it always, there was his young companion
with the same smile for him, the same earnest words, the same merry
laugh, the same love and care that, sinking deep into his soul, seemed
to have been present to him through his whole life. And so he went on,
content to read the book of her heart from the page first presented to
him, little dreaming of the story that lay hidden in its other leaves,
and murmuring within himself that at least the child was happy.
She had been once. She had gone singing through the dim rooms, and
moving with gay and lightsome step among their dusty treasures,
making them older by her young life, and sterner and more grim by
her gay and cheerful presence. But, now, the chambers were cold and
gloomy, and when she left her own little room to while away the
tedious hours, and sat in one of them, she was still and motionless as
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