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A couple of flower-girls with loose hair, shawls, and trays of flowers, suggestive of streetfaring, came in and ordered four ale. They spoke to the vagrant, who collected his match-boxes in preparation for a last search for charity.
Susan, while Mary considered her moves to-night, studied the room idly, the thousand crowded, useless little possessions so dear to the sick; the china statuettes, the picture post-cards, the photographs and match-boxes and old calendars, the dried "whispering-grass" and the penwipers. Her eyes reached an old photograph; Susan knew it by heart.
And there was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender from the garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps.
So we are going to Girgenti just to buy match-boxes. Dimitri has been a collector of all sorts of things; but the only kind of collection which can now interest him is a collection of match-boxes. He has already got five thousand two hundred and fourteen different kinds. Some of them gave us frightful trouble to find.
As if I could be anything else," said Falbe, laughing. "We are the only nation which makes a science of experimentalism; we try everything, just as a puppy tries everything. It tries mutton bones, and match-boxes, and soap and boots; it tries to find out what its tail is for, and bites it till it hurts, on which it draws the conclusion that it is not meant to eat.
The miserable wretches who toil sixteen or eighteen hours a day father, mother and even the little children making match-boxes, or shirts or blouses, have "plenty of work", but I for one don't envy them. Perhaps you think that if there was no machinery and we all had to work thirteen or fourteen hours a day in order to obtain a bare living, we should not be in a condition of poverty?
He reminds me, in the disturbed midnight of our actual literature, of one of those lucent match-boxes which you place, on going to bed, near the candle, to show you, in the darkness, where you can strike a light: he shines in the uneasy gloom vaguely, and has a phosphorescence, not a flame. But I quite agree with you that he is not of the little day but of the longer time.
We no more know where all the growths of our mind came from than where the lichens which eat the names off from the gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them birth. The two match-boxes were just alike, but neither was a plagiarism.
"Well," he said, "I suppose so far as that goes we are about even, Lizzie: though I, for one, should be sorry to hear any harm of you. Do you ever hear anything of your mistress that was?" She gave him a keen look. All the time her hands were busy with a little pile of match-boxes, the pretence which was to explain his presence had any one appeared.
And without an atlas of the Hall, showing the location of match-boxes, he saw no hope of finding a match. The fire was as good as gone. A few cinders burnt red under the ash, showing the form of the chimney-piece, but no more. "An ye got a match?" he asked her. "No," she said, drily, "I don't carry matches. But I can tell you I don't like being in the dark at all."
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