AUGUSTA’S LITTLE SISTER.
When Augusta left Meeson’s she was in a very sad condition of mind, to
explain which it will be necessary to say a word or two about that
young lady’s previous history. Her father had been a clergyman, and,
like most clergymen, not overburdened with the good things of this
world. When Mr. Smithers—or, rather, the Rev. James Smithers—had died,
he left behind him a widow and two children—Augusta, aged fourteen, and
Jeannie, aged two. There had been two others, both boys, who had come
into the world between Augusta and Jeannie, but they had both preceded
their father to the land of shadows. Mrs. Smithers, had, fortunately
for herself, a life interest in a sum of £7000, which, being well
invested, brought her in £350 a year: and, in order to turn this little
income to the best possible account and give her two girls the best
educational opportunities possible under the circumstances, she, on her
husband’s death, moved from the village where he had for many years
been curate, into the city of Birmingham. Here she lived in absolute
retirement for some seven years and then suddenly died, leaving the two
girls, then respectively nineteen and eight years of age, to mourn her
loss, and, friendless as they were, to fight their way in the hard
world.
Mrs. Smithers had been a saving woman, and, on her death, it was found
that, after paying all debts, there remained a sum of £600 for the two
girls to live on, and nothing else; for their mother’s fortune died
with her. Now, it will be obvious that the interest arising from six
hundred pounds is not sufficient to support two young people, and
therefore Augusta was forced to live upon the principal. From an early
age, however, she (Augusta) had shown a strong literary tendency, and
shortly after her mother’s death she published her first book at her
own expense. It was a dead failure and cost her fifty-two pounds, the
balance between the profit and loss account. After awhile, however, she
recovered from this blow, and wrote “Jemima’s Vow,” which was taken up
by Meeson’s; and, strange as it may seem, proved the success of the
year. Of the nature of the agreement into which she entered with
Meeson’s, the reader is already acquainted, and he will not therefore
be surprised to learn that under its cruel provisions Augusta,
notwithstanding her name and fame, was absolutely prohibited from
reaping the fruits of her success. She could only publish with
Meesons’s, and at the fixed pay of seven per cent on the advertised
price of her work. Now, something over three years had elapsed since
the death of Mrs. Smithers, and it will therefore be obvious that there
was not much remaining of the six hundred pounds which she had left
behind her. The two girls had, indeed, lived economically enough in a
couple of small rooms in a back street; but their expenses had been
enormously increased by the serious illness, from a pulmonary
complaint, of the little girl Jeannie, now a child between twelve and
thirteen years of age. On that morning, Augusta had seen the doctor and
been crushed into the dust by the expression of his conviction, that,
unless her little sister was moved to a warmer climate, for a period of
at least a year, she would not live through the winter, and _might_ die
at any moment.
Take Jeannie to a warmer climate! He might as well have told Augusta to
take her to the moon. Alas, she had not the money and did not know
where to turn to get it! Oh! reader, pray to Heaven that it may never
be your lot to see your best beloved die for the want of a few hundred
pounds wherewith to save her life!
It was in this terrible emergency that she had—driven thereto by her
agony of mind—tried to get something beyond her strict and legal due
out of Meeson’s—Meeson’s that had made hundreds and hundreds out of her
book and paid her fifty pounds. We know how she fared in that attempt.
On leaving their office, Augusta bethought her of her banker. Perhaps
he might be willing to advance something. It was a horrible task, but
she determined to undertake it; so she walked to the bank and asked to
see the manager. He was out, but would be in at three o’clock. She went
to a shop near and got a bun and glass of milk, and waited till she was
ashamed to wait any longer, and then she walked about the streets till
three o’clock. At the stroke of the hour she returned, and was shown
into the manager’s private room, where a dry, unsympathetic looking
little man was sitting before a big book. It was not the same man whom
Augusta had met before, and her heart sank proportionately.
What followed need not be repeated here. The manager listened to her
faltering tale with a few stereotyped expressions of sympathy, and,
when she had done, “regretted” that speculative loans were contrary to
the custom of the bank, and politely bowed her out.
It was nearly four o’clock upon a damp, drizzling afternoon—a November
afternoon—that hung like a living misery over the black slush of the
Birmingham streets, and would in itself have sufficed to bring the
lightest hearted, happiest mortal to the very gates of despair, when
Augusta, wet, wearied, and almost crying, at last entered the door of
their little sitting-room. She entered very quietly, for the
maid-of-all-work had met her in the passage and told her that Miss
Jeannie was asleep. She had been coughing very much about dinner-time,
but now she was asleep.
There was a fire in the grate, a small one, for the coal was economised
by means of two large fire-bricks, and on a table (Augusta’s writing
table), placed at the further side of the room, was a paraffin-lamp
turned low. Drawn up in front, but a little to one side of the fire,
was a sofa, covered with red rep, and on the sofa lay a fair-haired
little form, so thin and fragile that it looked like the ghost or
outline of a girl, rather than a girl herself. It was Jeannie, her sick
sister, and she was asleep. Augusta stole softly up to look at her. It
was a sweet little face that her eyes fell on, although it was so
shockingly thin, with long, curved lashes, delicate nostrils, and a
mouth shaped like a bow. All the lines and grooves which the chisel of
Pain knows so well how to carve were smoothed out of it now, and in
their place lay the shadow of a smile.
Augusta looked at her and clenched her fists, while a lump rose in her
throat, and her grey eyes filled with tears. How could she get the
money to save her? The year before a rich man, a man who was detestable
to her, had wanted to marry her, and she would have nothing to say to
him. He had gone abroad, else she would have gone back to him and
married him—at a price. Marry him? yes she would marry him: she would
do anything for money to take her sister away! What did she care for
herself when her darling was dying—dying for the want of two hundred
pounds!
Just then Jeannie woke up, and stretched her arms out to her.
“So you are back at last, dear,” she said in her sweet childish voice.
“It has been so lonely without you. Why, how wet you are! Take off your
jacket at once, Gussie, or you will soon be as ill as”—and here she
broke out into a terrible fit of coughing, that seemed to shake her
tender frame as the wind shakes a reed.
Her sister turned and obeyed, and then came and sat by the sofa and
took the thin little hand in hers.
“Well, Gussie, and how did you get on with the Printer-devil” (this was
her impolite name for the great Meeson); “will he give you any more
money?”
“No, dear; we quarrelled, that was all, and I came away.”
“Then I suppose that we can’t go abroad?”
Augusta was too moved to answer; she only shook her head. The child
buried her face in the pillow and gave a sob or two. Presently she was
quiet, and lifted it again. “Gussie, love,” she said, “don’t be angry,
but I want to speak to you. Listen, my sweet Gussie, my angel. Oh,
Gussie, you don’t know how I love you! It is all no good, it is useless
struggling against it, I must die sooner or later; though I am only
twelve, and you think me such a child, I am old enough to understand
that. I think,” she added, after pausing to cough, “that pain makes one
old: I feel as though I were fifty. Well, so you see I may as well give
up fighting against it and die at once. I am only a burden and anxiety
to you—I may as well die at once and go to sleep.”
“Don’t, Jeannie! don’t!” said her sister, in a sort of cry; “you are
killing me!”
Jeannie laid her hot hand upon Augusta’s arm, “Try and listen to me,
dear,” she said, “even if it hurts, because I do so want to say
something. Why should you be so frightened about me? Can any place that
I can go be worse than this place? Can I suffer more pain anywhere, or
be more hurt when I see you crying? Think how wretched it has all been.
There has only been one beautiful thing in our lives for years and
years, and that was your book. Even when I am feeling worst—when my
chest aches, you know—I grow quite happy when I think of what the
papers wrote about you: the _Times_ and the _Saturday Review_, and the
_Spectator_, and the rest of them. They said that you had genius—true
genius, you remember, and that they expected one day to see you at the
head of the literature of the time, or near it. The Printer-devil can’t
take away that, Gussie. He can take the money; but he can’t say that he
wrote the book; though,” she added, with a touch of childish spite and
vivacity, “I have no doubt that he would if he could. And then there
were those letters from the great authors up in London; yes, I often
think of them too. Well, dearest old girl, the best of it is that I
know it is all true. I _know_, I can’t tell you how, that you will be a
great woman in spite of all the Meesons in creation; for somehow you
will get out of his power, and, if you don’t, five years is not all
one’s life—at least, not if people have a life. At the worst, he can
only take all the money. And then, when you are great and rich and
famous, and more beautiful than ever, and when the people turn their
heads as you come into the room, like we used to at school when the
missionary came to lecture, I know that you will think of me (because
you won’t forget me as some sisters do), and of how, years and years
before, so long ago that the time looks quite small when you think of
it, I told you that it would be so just before I died.”
Here the girl, who had been speaking with a curious air of certainty
and with a gravity and deliberation extraordinary for one so young,
suddenly broke off to cough. Her sister threw herself on her knees
beside her, and, clasping her in her arms, implored her in broken
accents not to talk of dying. Jeannie drew Augusta’s golden head down
on her breast and stroked it.
“Very well, Gussie, I won’t say any more about it,” she said; “but it
is no good hiding the truth, dear. I am tired of fighting against it;
it is no good—none at all. Anyhow we have loved each other very much,
dear; and perhaps—somewhere else—we may again.”—And the brave little
heart again broke down, and, overcome by the prescience of approaching
separation, they both sobbed bitterly there upon the sofa. Presently
came a knock at the door, and Augusta sprang up and turned to hide her
tears. It was the maid-of-all-work bringing the tea; and, as she came
blundering in, a sense of the irony of things forced itself into
Augusta’s soul. Here they were plunged into the most terrible sorrow,
weeping at the inevitable approach of that chill end, and still
appearances must be kept up, even before a maid-of-all-work. Society,
even when represented by a maid-of-all-work, cannot do away with the
intrusion of domestic griefs, or any other griefs, and in our hearts we
know it and act up to it. Far gone, indeed, must we be in mental or
physical agony before we abandon the attempt to keep up appearances.
Augusta drank a little tea and ate a very small bit of
bread-and-butter. As in the case of Mr. Meeson, the events of the day
had not tended to increase her appetite. Jeannie drank a little milk
but ate nothing. When this form had been gone through, and the
maid-of-all-work had once more made her appearance and cleared the
table, Jeannie spoke again.
“Gus,” she said, “I want you to put me to bed and then come and read to
me out of ‘Jemima’s Vow’—where poor Jemima dies, you know. It is the
most beautiful thing in the book, and I want to hear it again.”
Her sister did as she wished, and, taking down “Jemima’s Vow,”
Jeannie’s _own_ copy as it was called, being the very first that had
come into the house, she opened it at the part Jeannie had asked for
and read aloud, keeping her voice as steady as she could. As a matter
of fact, however, the scene itself was as powerful as it was pathetic,
and quite sufficient to account for any unseemly exhibitions of feeling
on the part of the reader. However, she struggled through it till the
last sentence was reached. It ran thus:—“And so Jemima stretched out
her hand to him and said ‘Good-bye.’ And presently, knowing that she
had now kept her promise, and being happy because she had done so, she
went to sleep.”
“Ah!” murmured the blue-eyed child who listened. “I wish that I was as
good as Jemima. But though I have no vow to keep I can say ‘Good-bye,’
and I can go to sleep.”
Augusta made no answer, and presently Jeannie dozed off. Her sister
looked at her with eager affection. “She is giving up,” she said to
herself, “and, if she gives up, she will die. I know it, it is because
we are not going away. How can I get the money, now that that horrible
man is gone? how can I get it?” and she buried her head in her hand and
thought. Presently an idea struck her: she might go back to Meeson and
eat her words, and sell him the copyright of her new book for £100, as
the agreement provided. That would not be enough, however; for
travelling with an invalid is expensive; but she might offer to bind
herself over to him for a term of years as a tame author, like those
who worked in the Hutches. She was sure that he would be glad to get
her, if only he could do so at his own price. It would be slavery worse
than any penal servitude, and even now she shudders at the prospect of
prostituting her great abilities to the necessities of such work as
Meeson’s made their thousands out of—work out of which every spark of
originality was stamped into nothingness, as though it were the mark of
the Beast. Yes, it would be dreadful—it would break her heart; but she
was prepared to have her heart broken and her genius wrung out of her
by inches, if only she could get two hundred pounds wherewith to take
Jeannie away to the South of France. Mr. Meeson would, no doubt, make a
hard bargain—the hardest he could; but still, if she would consent to
bind herself for a sufficient number of years at a sufficiently low
salary, he would probably advance her a hundred pounds, besides the
hundred for the copyright of the new book.
And so having made up her mind to the sacrifice, she went to bed, and,
wearied out with misery, to sleep. And even as she slept, a Presence
that she could not see was standing near her bed, and a Voice that she
could not hear was calling through the gloom. Another mortal had bent
low at the feet of that Unknown God whom men name Death, and been borne
away on his rushing pinions into the spaces of the Hid. One more human
item lay still and stiff, one more account was closed for good or evil,
the echo of one more tread had passed from the earth for ever. The old
million-numbered tragedy in which all must take a part had repeated
itself once more down to its last and most awful scene. Yes; the grim
farce was played out, and the little actor Jeannie was white in death!
Just at the dawn, Augusta dreamed that somebody with cold breath was
breathing on her face, and woke up with a start and listened. Jeannie’s
bed was on the other side of the room, and she could generally hear her
movements plainly enough, for the sick child was a restless sleeper.
But now she could hear nothing, not even the faint vibration of her
sister’s breath. The silence was absolute and appalling; it struck
tangibly upon her sense, as the darkness struck upon her eye-balls and
filled her with a numb, unreasoning terror. She slipped out of bed and
struck a match. In another few seconds she was standing by Jeannie’s
white little bed, waiting for the wick of the candle to burn up.
Presently the light grew. Jeannie was lying on her side, her white face
resting on her white arm. Her eyes were wide open; but when Augusta
held the candle near her she did not shut them or flinch. Her hand,
too—oh, Heavens! the fingers were nearly cold.
Then Augusta understood, and lifting up her arms in agony, she shrieked
till the whole house rang.