HER MEMORIES
I missed my father out of my life as though the sun had gone out of the
heavens. I had been far more of a companion to him than my mother. I
had venerated him as something superior to all created beings; which,
I dare say, was not a little owing to his stories of the sea, to the
various wonders he was able to recount, and to his descriptions of
distant lands, as remote as the stars to my young imagination. The
company he kept was nearly wholly composed of sailors, sea captains,
either retired or actively employed. My mother would often be out
visiting, passing an evening at a card party, or at a dance at some
neighbour’s when our parlour, which was long and wide, but low-ceiled,
like a ship’s cabin, would be half-full of father’s nautical friends.
I’d sit and listen then to their talk; for mother being absent there’d
be nobody to bid me go to bed--as to father, he would have let me sit
until he went to bed himself. Thus it was I heard so much talk of the
sea, that I was able to discourse on ships and rigging, on high seas
and gales of wind, on icebergs, whales and uncharted shoals, as though
I had never lived out of a forecastle. Indeed, I knew too much. I
was often pert, lifted up my shrill voice in correction of some old
captain, and so would raise a very thunder of laughter and applause in
the room.
Again, I was often my father’s companion in the trips he made in his
own coasters down the river. Those excursions were the golden hours of
my childhood. We’d row on board a little brig weighing from the Pool,
and stay in the ship till we were off Gravesend, where we’d land.
Mother never joined us. When the wind caused the vessel to lay over she
said it made her sick. I dare say it did.
Father’s little fleet was mainly composed of coasters, as I have said,
grimy of deck for the most part, with a strong smell of the bilge in
the atmosphere of their darksome cabins, wagons in shape and staggerers
in their gait, with a lean and coaly look aloft as they heeled, black
and gaunt, from bank to bank of the river over the smooth stream of
ebb or flood. But those trips made choice hours to me, and are sweeter
than the memories of sport in the summer grass and of hunts in the rank
growths of ditches and the country hedge.
I remember that during one of these trips we nearly ran down a large
boat when we were not very far from Woolwich, lying over with the wind
ahead and the water spitting briskly at our forefoot. I went to the
side to look; she was a big boat with soldiers in her, and full of
strange-looking men in gray clothes and a sort of Scotch cap. I saw the
irons upon those men as the boat swept close past and heard the clank
of the chains as the wretches shrank or started in terror at the sight
of the mass of our bare, black hull, rolling like a storm-cloud almost
right over them. Father was below. I asked Mr. Smears, the master of
the brig, who stood close alongside of me in a tall, rusty hat and a
stout coat that descended to within a foot of his heels, what boat that
was.
‘A convict boat, missy,’ he answered.
‘What are those people in her?’
‘Rogues all, missy--rogues all.’
‘Where are they going to?’ said I.
He pointed to a great wooden hulk that lay off Woolwich, the hull of a
man-of-war, made hideous by a variety of deck erections, and by rows of
linen fluttering betwixt the poles which rose out of her decks.
‘That’s where they’re going to,’ said Mr. Smears. ‘And shall I tell ’ee
who’s the skipper of that craft? ’Taint no Government bloke--let ne’er
a man believe it! The skipper’s name begins with a D and ends with a
h-L. I’m not going to say more, missy. Father’ll supply ye with the
missing letters. Yond skipper’s name begins with a D and ends with a
h-L, and them livelies in gray,’ said he, nodding toward the boat we
had nearly run down, ‘are his young ’uns, and they do credit to their
parient, if looks ain’t lies.’
Then, starting up, he cried: ‘Ready about, lads!’ and a moment later
the helm was put down and our canvas was wildly shaking, and then
the brig heeled over and with steady sails ripped through the yellow
lustrous surface of the river’s breast on her slanting course down
Woolwich Reach.
I did not long look at the great hull of the old man-of-war and her
hideous deck erections and her flapping prison linen. I was a child,
with a child’s eye for beauty, and my gaze would quickly wander from
the prison-ship which I was altogether too young to quicken and inform
with the loathsome fascination one finds in all such abodes of human
crime and miserable mortal distress; I say my eye would quickly turn
from that horrible floating jail to the fifty sights of movement and
colour round about; to the hoy with its cargo of passengers from
Margate and a fiddle and a harp making music in the bows lazily
stemming Londonward; to the barge going away with the tide, sending a
scent of rich country across the wind from its lofty cargo of hay on
whose summit lies a man on his back, sound asleep; to the large ship
fresh from the other side of the world with sailors dangling aloft,
and a merry echo of capstanpawls timing a little crowd of men running
round and round her forecastle; the wife of the captain aft talking to
a waterman in a wherry over the side, and the captain himself, baked
brown by the suns of three or four great oceans, excitedly stepping
from rail to rail in a walk of impassioned anxiety and impatience.
I have the words, you see! Does the language of the deep sound strange
in the mouth of a woman? The wives and daughters of military men may
deliver themselves in the speech of the barracks and nobody thinks
anything of it. Why should not the daughter of a sailor and the wife
of a sailor possess the language of her father and of her husband’s
profession, and talk it whenever the need arises without raising wonder?
After my father’s death, his little fleet of ships were sold, in
accordance with the direction of his will. The thing was bungled. My
mother was a poor woman of business. She fell out with my uncle,
William Johnstone, over the sale of the vessels, and put the business
in the hands of a broker, who robbed us. Yet, when the estate was
realised, we were pretty well to do. The freehold in Stepney was to
come to me at the death of my mother. Under my father’s will there was
a settlement that secured me three hundred pounds a year. The trustees
were two sea-captains. My mother was well provided for; but one saw, by
the terms of my father’s will, that he had no confidence in her. Yet he
did not stipulate that she should not marry again; though, had I been
older at the time, I should have looked for some condition of the sort,
for he was very jealous. In fine, and what I have to relate obliges me
to dwell upon these trumpery particulars, my father’s will gave me his
house at my mother’s death, and secured three hundred pounds a year
to me in any case when I should become of age or on my marriage, the
interest meanwhile to grow and be mine; and then, at my mother’s death,
a portion of what had been willed to her was to revert to me, and the
remainder was to be distributed amongst two or three poor and distant
relations and a few charities, all of them maritime.
Thus, at my father’s death, I might fairly have been described by a
forward-looking eye as what you would call a tolerably fair match;
and at the age of seventeen I deserved to be thought so, not only
because of my money and the pleasant old house that would be mine, but
because of my good looks. At seventy-seven there can be no vanity in
retrospect. Moreover, since this story is to be told, you shall have
the whole truth. At seventeen, then, I was a tall, strong, well-made
girl, broad, but in proportion, and they used to tell me that I carried
my figure with the grace of a professional dancer. I was exactly
opposite to my mother in colour. My hair was black as the wing of
a raven; my eyes very black and filled with a strong light, which
brightened to a look of fever in times of excitement; my complexion
was pale but clear; my teeth large, white, and regular, and I showed
them much in talking and laughing. I’ll not deny that my charms--and
handsome I truly was--inclined to coarseness; by which I mean that they
leaned toward the manly rather than the womanly side. My voice was a
contralto, and when I sang I would sink to a note that was reckoned
uncommonly deep for a girl.
My father had been dead about five years, when, one afternoon, my
mother came to me in my bedroom. She was in her bonnet and outdoor
clothes, and I instantly noticed an agitation in her manner as she sat
down beside the dressing-table and looked at me. I forget what I was
about, but I recollect ceasing in it and standing up with my hands
clasped, whilst I viewed her anxiously and with misgivings.
‘Marian,’ said she, with a forced smile, ‘I have come to give you a bit
of news.’
‘What, mother?’
‘My hand has been asked in marriage, dear, and I have accepted.’
I felt the blood rush to my face, and then I turned cold, and, pulling
a chair to me, sat down, but I did not speak.
‘Do you hear me, child?’
‘Your hand has been asked in marriage?’ said I. ‘By whom, mother?’
‘By Mr. Stanford,’ she answered, lowering her voice and sinking her
eyes.
‘Mr. Stanford?’ I cried. ‘The doctor?’
‘Whom else?’ she replied, looking at me again and forcing another smile.
I was thunderstruck. Never for an instant had I suspected that there
was more between them than such commonplace, matter-of-fact friendship
as may exist between a medical man and those whom he attends. Mr.
Stanford was the doctor one of the servants had run for when my
father died. He had attended us during the preceding year, and he had
prescribed for mother and me since, so that at this date we had known
him six years. He was a widower and childless, and lived within ten
minutes’ walk of our house. Occasionally he had looked in upon us, and
sat during an evening for an hour or so; sometimes he had dined with us
and we with him; but never had I observed any sort of behaviour in him
or mother to hint at what was coming--at what, indeed, had now come.
I should be needlessly detaining you from my own story to repeat all
that passed between my mother and me on this occasion. I was beside
myself with anger, mortification, jealousy--for I was jealous of my
father’s memory, abhorred the thought of his place being taken in his
own house and in the affection of the wife whom he had loved, by such a
man as Mr. Stanford. Nay, but it would have been all the same had Mr.
Stanford been the greatest nobleman or the first character in Europe.
I should have abominated him as an intruder, and have yearned for the
hands of a man to toss him out o’ window should he dare to occupy a
house in which my father was as real a presence to my heart as though
he were still alive and could kiss me and make me presents and carry
me away out of the gloomy streets into the shining holiday road of the
river.
My mother reproached me, and pleaded and wept. The weakness of her poor
heart, God rest her, was very visible at this time. She clung to me
and held me to her, imploring me, as her only child, to consider how
lonely she was, how sadly she stood in need of a protector, how good
it would be for us both to have Mr. Stanford to watch over us! I broke
away from her with a wet scarlet face and heaving bosom, and told her
that if Mr. Stanford took my father’s place I would cease to love or
even to think of her as my mother. We both cried bitterly, and raised
our voices and talked together as most women would at such a moment,
not knowing what each other said. I do not condemn myself. I look back
and hold that I was right to stand up for the memory of my beloved
father, even to rage as I did against my mother’s resolution to marry
Mr. Stanford. I wondered at her; indeed, I was shocked. I was young and
ardent and romantic, had a girl’s notions of the loyalty of love and
the obligations of keeping sacred the memory and the place of one who
had been faithful and tender, who had nobly done his duty to his wife
and child.