GATHERING A FEW THREADS.
Is there a more melancholy place than the street in which you have
lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew
prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the "banquet-hall
deserted:" than the empty chair; than the bed where Death found the
friend you loved?
The Rue Millevoye is all this to me. I avoid it. If any cabman wants to
make a short cut that way I stop him. Mrs. Rowe rests at last, in the
same churchyard with the Whytes of Battersea: her faults forgiven; that
dark story which troubled all her afterlife and made her son the terror
of every hour, ended and forgotten.
If hers was a sad life, even cheered by the consolations of Mr. Mohun
given over refreshing rounds of buttered toast; what was the gloom upon
the head of Emily Sharp, whom the child of shame (was it in revenge)
brought to shame? I never tread the deck of a Boulogne steamer without
thinking of her sweet, loving face; I never wait for my luggage in the
chilly morning at the Chemin de Fer du Nord terminus, without seeing her
agony as the deserted one.
The Cockayne girls are prospering in all the comfort of maternal dignity
in the genteel suburbs; and yet were they a patch upon forlorn Emmy
Sharp? Miss Sophonisba, with her grand airs, in her critical letters
from Paris--what kind of a heart had she? Miss Theodosia was a flirt of
the vulgarest type who would have thrown up John Catt as she would throw
away a two-button glove for a three-button pair, had not the Vicomte de
Gars given her father to understand that he must have a very substantial
_dot_ with her. Mademoiselle Cockayne without money was not a thing to
be desired, according to "his lordship."
John Catt was a rough diamond, as the reader has perceived, given to
copious draughts of beer, black pipes, short sticks, prodigious
shirt-collars, and music-halls. But he was a brave, honest, chivalrous
lad in his coarse way. He loved Miss Theodosia Cockayne, and was
seriously stricken when he left Paris, although he had tried to throw
off the affair with a careless word or two. He hid his grief behind his
bluntness; but she had no tears to hide. It was only when the Vicomte,
after a visit to Clapham (paid much against Mr. Cockayne's will) had
come to business in the plumpest manner, that the young lady had been
brought to her senses by the father's observation that he was not
prepared to buy a foreign viscount into the family on his own terms,
and that "his lordship" would not take the young lady on her own merits,
aroused Miss Theodosia's pride;--and with it the chances of John Catt
revived. He took her renewed warmth for repentance after a folly. He
said to himself, "She loved me all the time; and even the Vicomte was
not, in the long run, proof against her affection for me." Miss
Theodosia, having lost the new love, was fortunate enough to get on with
the old again, and she is, I hear, reasonably happy--certainly happier
than she deserves to be, as Mrs. John Catt.
I am told she is very severe upon Emma Sharp, and wonders how her sister
Carrie can have the creature's portrait hung up in her morning room. But
there are a few things she no longer wonders at. Carrie speaks to Lucy
Rowe; kisses Lucy Rowe; puts her arm round Lucy Rowe's neck; and tumbles
her baby upon Lucy Rowe's knees; and Mrs. John Catt wonders no longer.
Not, I suspect, because she is fonder of Lucy now than she was in the
Rue Millevoye, but because--well, _I_ married her, as the reader, who is
not a goose, has suspected long ago.
And a little Lucy writes for me, in big round hand, her mother guiding
the pen--
THE END.
LONDON:
SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Cockaynes in Paris, by Blanchard Jerrold