The divers emotions excited by very unexpected occurrence may be better
evidenced by the manner in which the evening of that day was spent in
various houses in Carlingford than by any other means.
First, in the little house of the Christians. It was a cottage on the
other side of Grove Street--a homely little box of two stories, with a
morsel of garden in front, and some vegetables behind. There, on that
spring afternoon, matters did not look cheerful. The little
sitting-room was deserted--the fire had died out--the hearth was
unswept--the room in a litter. Bessie’s pupils had not come to-day. They
had got holiday three days ago, in happy anticipation of being dismissed
for ever; and only their young teacher’s prudential remonstrances had
prevented poor Mrs Christian from making a little speech to them, and
telling them all that henceforward Miss Christian would have other
occupations, but would always be fond of them, and glad to see her
little friends in their new house. To make that speech would have
delighted Mrs Christian’s heart. She had managed, however, to convey the
meaning of it by many a fatal hint and allusion. In this work of
self-destruction the poor woman had been only too successful; for
already the mothers of the little girls had begun to inquire into the
terms and capabilities of other teachers, and the foundations of
Bessie’s little empire were shaken and tottering, though fortunately
they did not know of it to-day. Everything was very cold, dismal, and
deserted in that little parlour. Faint sounds overhead were the only
sounds audible in the house; sometimes a foot moving over the creaky
boards: now and then a groan. Upstairs there were two rooms; one a
close, curtained, fire-lighted, stifling, invalid’s room. There was
Bessie sitting listlessly by a table, upon which were the familiar
tea-things, which conveyed no comfort to-night; and there was her
paralytic father sitting helpless, sometimes shaking his head, sometimes
grumbling out faint half-articulate words, sighs, and exclamations.
“Dear, dear! ah! well! that’s what it has come to!” said the sick man,
hushed by long habit into a sort of spectatorship, and feeling even so
great a disappointment rather by way of sympathy than personal emotion.
Bessie sat listless by, feeling a vague exasperation at this languid
running accompaniment to her thoughts. The future had been blotted out
suddenly, and at a blow, from Bessie’s eyes. She could see nothing
before her--nothing but this dark, monotonous, aching present moment,
pervaded by the dropping sounds of that faint, half-articulate voice.
Other scene was not to dawn upon her youth. It was hard for poor Bessie.
She sat silent in the stifling room, with the bed and its hangings
between her and the window, and the fire scorching her cheek. She could
neither cry, nor scold, nor blame anybody. None of the resources of
despair were possible to her. She knew it would have to go on again all
the same, and that now things never would be any better. She could not
run away from the prospect before her. It was not so much the
continuance of poverty, of labour, of all the dreadful pinches of
thrift; it was the end of possibility--the knowledge that now there was
no longer anything to expect.
On the other side of the passage Bessie’s own sleeping-room was
inhabited by a restless fever of disappointment and despair and hope.
There was Mrs Christian lying on her daughter’s bed. The poor woman was
half-crazed with the whirl of passion in her brain. That intolerable
sense of having been duped and deceived, of actually having a hand in
the overthrow of all her own hopes, aggravated her natural
disappointment into frenzy. When she recollected her state of exultation
that morning, her confident intentions--when they were to remove, what
changes were to be in their manner of life, even what house they were to
occupy--it is not wonderful if the veins swelled in her poor head, and
all her pulses throbbed with the misery of the contrast. But with all
this there mingled a vindictive personal feeling still more exciting.
Nancy, whom she knew more of than any one else did--her close, secret,
unwavering enemy; and even the innocent lawyer, whom, in her present
condition of mind, she could not believe not to have known of this
dreadful cheat practised upon her, or not to care for that prize which,
now that it was lost, seemed to her worth everything that was precious
in life. The poor creature lay goading herself into madness with
thoughts of how she would be revenged upon these enemies; how she would
watch, and track out, and reveal their hidden plots against her; how she
would triumph over and crush them. All these half-frenzied cogitations
were secretly pervaded--a still more maddening exasperation--by a
consciousness of her own impotence. The evening came creeping in,
growing dark around her--silence fell over the little house, where
nobody moved or spoke, and where all the world, the heavens, and the
earth, seemed changed since this morning; but the wonder was how that
silence could contain her--all palpitating with pangs and plans, a
bleeding, infuriated, wounded creature show no sign of the frenzy it
covered. She had lain down to rest, as the saying is. How many women are
there who go thus to a voluntary crucifixion and torture by lying down
to rest! Mrs Christian lay with her dry eyes blazing through the
darkness, no more able to sleep than she was to do all that her burning
fancy described to her. She was a hot-blooded Celtic woman, of that
primitive island which has preserved her name. If she could have sought
sympathy, here was nobody to bestow it. Not the heart which that poor
ghost of manhood in the next room had lost out of his chilled bewildered
bosom; not Bessie’s steadfast, unexcited spirit. The poor soul saved
herself from going wild by thinking of her boy; holding out her
passionate arms to him thousands of miles away; setting him forth as the
deliverer, with all the absolute folly of love and passion. He would
come home and have justice done to his mother. Never fancy was more
madly unreasonable; but it saved her from some of the effects of the
agitation in her heart.
* * * * *
On the other side of the road, at the same hour, Nancy prepared her tea
in the house of which she was temporary mistress. There could not be any
doubt, to look at her now, that this tall, dry, withered figure, and
face full of characteristic wrinkles, was like Mrs Christian. The
resemblance had been noticed by many. And as old Mrs Thomson had not
hesitated to avow that her faithful servant was connected with her by
some distant bond of relationship, it was not difficult to imagine that
these two were really related, though both denied it strenuously. Nancy
had a friend with her to tea. They were in the cheerful kitchen, which
had a window to the garden, and a window in the side wall of the house,
by which a glimpse of the street might be obtained through the garden
gate. The firelight shone pleasantly through the cheerful apartment. All
the peculiar ornaments of a kitchen--the covers, the crockery, the
polished sparkles of shining pewter and brass--adorned the walls.
Through it all went Nancy in her new black dress and ample snowy-white
apron. She carried her head high, and moved with a certain rhythmical
elation. It is surely an unphilosophical conclusion that there is no
real enjoyment in wickedness. Nancy had no uneasiness in her triumph.
The more she realised what her victory must have cost her opponent, the
more entire grew her satisfaction. Remorse might have mixed with her
exultation had she had any pity in her, but she had not; and, in
consequence, it was with unalloyed pleasure that she contemplated the
overthrow of her adversary. Perhaps the very satisfaction of a good man
in a good action is inferior to the absolute satisfaction with which, by
times, a bad man is permitted to contemplate the issue of his
wickedness. Nancy marched about her kitchen, preparing her tea with an
enjoyment which possibly would not have attended a benevolent exercise
of her powers. Possibly she could almost have painted to herself, line
by line, the dark tableau of that twilight room where Mrs Christian lay,
driving herself crazy with wild thoughts. She did the gloom of the
picture full justice. If she have peeped into the window and seen it
with her own eyes, she would have enjoyed the sight.
“I’ll make Mr Brown keep me in the house,” said Nancy, sitting down at a
table piled with good things, and which looked an embodiment of kitchen
luxury and comfort, “and get me a girl. It was what missis always meant
to do. I’ll show it to him out of the will that I was left in trust to
be made commforable. And in course of nature her things all comes to me.
It’s a deal easier to deal with a single gentleman than if there was a
lady poking her nose about into everything. Thank my stars, upstarts
such like as them Christians shall never lord it over me; and now I have
more of my own way, I’ll be glad to see you of an evening whenever you
can commforable. Bring a bit of work, and we’ll have a quiet chat. I
consider myself settled for life.”
* * * * *
The young surgeon’s house was at the other end of the town; it was close
to a region of half-built streets--for Carlingford was a prosperous
town--where successive colonies were settling, where houses were damp
and drainage incomplete, and a good practice to be had with pains. The
house had a genteel front to the road, a lamp over the door, and a
little surgery round the corner, where it gave forth the sheen of its
red and blue bottles across a whole half-finished district. Mr Rider had
come home tired, unaccountably tired. He had kicked off one boot, and
taken a cigar from his case and forgotten to light it. He sat plunged in
his easy-chair in a drear brown study--a brown study inaccessible to the
solaces which generally make such states of mind endurable. His cigar
went astray among the confused properties of his writing-table; the book
he had been reading last night lay rejected in the farthest corner of
the room. He was insensible to the charms of dressing-gown and slippers.
On the whole, he was in a very melancholy, sullen, not to say savage
mood. He sat and gazed fiercely into the fire, chewing the cud of
fancies, in which very little of the sweet seemed to mingle with the
bitter. He had been the medical attendant of Mrs Thomson of Grove
Street, and had assisted this afternoon at her funeral, and you might
have supposed he had hastened the advent of that melancholy day, had you
seen his face.
On the whole, it was a hard dilemma in which the poor young man found
himself. He, too, like Nancy, kept realising the interior of that other
little house in Grove Street. Both of them, by dint of that acquaintance
with their neighbours which everybody has in a small community, came to
a moderately correct guess at what was going on there. Young Mr Rider
sat in heavy thought, sometimes bursting out into violent gestures which
fortunately nobody witnessed; sometimes uttering sighs which all but
blew out his lights--impatient, urgent sighs, not of melancholy but of
anger and resistance--the sighs of a young man who found circumstances
intolerable, and yet was obliged to confess, with sore mortification and
humbling, that he could not mend them, and behoved to endure. The
visions that kept gliding across his eyes drove him half as wild as poor
Mrs Christian: one moment a pretty young wife, all the new house wanted
to make it fully tenable; but he had scarcely brought her across the
threshold when a ghastly figure in a chair was carried over it after
her, upstairs into the bridal apartments, and another woman, soured and
drawn awry by pressure of poverty, constitutionally shabby, vehement,
and high-tempered, pervaded the new habitation. No use saying pshaw! and
pah!--no use swearing bigger oaths,--no use pitching unoffending books
into the corners, or breathing out those short deep breaths of
desperation. This was in reality the state of affairs. Midnight did not
change the aspect it had worn in the morning. Pondering all the night
through would bring no light on the subject. Nothing could change those
intolerable circumstances. The poor young surgeon threw his coat off in
the heat and urgency of his thoughts, and pitched it from him like the
books. There was no comfort or solace to be found in all that world of
fancy. Only this morning sweeter dreams had filled this disordered
apartment. In imagination, he had helped his Bessie to minister to the
comfort of the poor old sick parents in Mrs Thomson’s house. Now he
knitted his brows desperately over it, but could find no outlet. Unless
some good fairy sent him a patient in the middle of the night, the
chances were that the morning would find him pursuing that same
interminable brown study of which nothing could come.
* * * * *
Mr Brown’s house was an old house in the middle of the town. The offices
were in the lower floor, occupying one side of the building. On the
other side of the wide old-fashioned hall was his dining-room. There he
sat all by himself upon this agitating night. It was a large, lofty,
barely-furnished room, with wainscoted walls, and curious stiff
panelling, and a high mantel-shelf which he, though a tall man, could
scarcely reach with his arm. It was dimly lighted, as well as barely
furnished--altogether an inhuman, desert place--the poorest though the
grandest of all we have yet looked into in Carlingford. Mr Brown was not
sensible of its inhospitable aspect; he was used to it, and that was
enough. It occurred to him as little to criticise his house as to
criticise his manners. Thus they _were_, and thus they would continue;
at least he had always believed so till to-night.
He sat in his easy-chair with his feet on the fender, and a little table
at his elbow with his wine. As long as there was anything in his glass
he sipped it by habit, without being aware of what he was doing; but
when the glass was empty, though he had two or three times raised it
empty to his lips, he was too much absorbed in his thoughts to replenish
it. He was not by any means a handsome man; and he was five-and-forty or
thereabouts, and had a habit of making portentous faces, when anyway
specially engaged in thought; so that, on the whole, it was not a highly
attractive or interesting figure which reclined back in the crimson
chair, and stretched its slippered feet to the fire, sole inmate of the
dim, spacious, vacant room. He was thinking over his new position with
profound disgust and perplexity. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that
the subject lured him on, and drew out into stretches of imagination far
beyond his wont;--hunting all the world over after Phœbe Thomson! But,
after all, that was only a preliminary step; he was required only to use
reasonable means, and for three years. If she turned up, there was an
end of it; if she did not turn up---- Here Mr Brown sprang up hurriedly
and assumed the favourite position of Englishmen in front of his fire.
There, all glittering in the distance, rose up, solid and splendid, an
appearance which few men could see without emotion--twenty thousand
pounds! It was not life and death to him, as it was to poor Mrs
Christian. It did not make all the difference between sordid want and
comfortable existence; but you may well believe it did not appear before
the lawyer’s eyes without moving him into a considerable degree of
excitement. Such a fairy apparition had never appeared before in that
cold, spacious, uninhabited room. Involuntarily to himself, Mr Brown saw
his house expand, his life open out, his condition change. Roseate
lights dropped into the warming atmosphere which had received that
vision; the fairy wand waved through the dim air before him in spite of
all his sobriety. The wiles of the enchantress lured John Brown as
effectually as if he had not been five-and-forty, an old bachelor, and
an attorney; and after half an hour of these slowly-growing,
half-conscious, half-resisted thoughts, any chance that had brought the
name of the dead woman’s lost daughter to his memory, would have called
forth a very different “confound Phœbe Thomson!” from that which burst
from his troubled lips in the house in Grove Street. Possibly it was
some such feeling which roused him up a moment after, when the great cat
came softly purring to his feet and rubbed against his slippers. Mr
Brown started violently, thrust puss away, flung himself back into his
chair, grew very red, and murmured something about “an ass!” ashamed to
detect himself in his own vain imaginations. But that sudden waking up
did not last. After he had filled his glass and emptied it--after he had
stirred his fire, and made a little noise, with some vague idea of
dispelling the spell he was under--the fairy returned and retook
possession under a less agreeable aspect. Suppose _he_ were to be
enriched, what was to become of the poor Christians? They were not very
near relations, and the old woman had a right to leave her money where
she liked. Still there was a human heart in John Brown’s bosom. Somehow
that little episode in the street returned to his recollection; Bessie
running across, light and noiseless, with her message. How young the
creature must be after all, to have so much to do. Poor little Bessie!
she had not only lost her chance of being a great fortune, and one of
the genteel young ladies of Carlingford, but she had lost her chance of
the doctor, and his new house and rising practice. Shabby fellow! to
leave the pretty girl he was fond off, because she was a good girl, and
was everything to her old father and mother. “I wonder will they say
that’s my fault too?” said John Brown to himself; and stumbled up to his
feet again on the stimulus of that thought, with a kind of sheepish, not
unpleasant embarrassment, and a foolish half-smile upon his face.
Somehow at that moment, looking before him, as he had done so many
hundred times standing on his own hearthrug, it occurred to him all at
once what a bare room this was that he spent his evenings in--what an
inhuman, chilly, penurious place! scarcely more homelike than that bit
of open street, across which Bessie came tripping this afternoon,
wanting to speak to him. Nobody wanted to speak to him here. No wonder
he had a threatening of rheumatism last winter. What a cold, wretched
barn of a room! He could not help wondering to himself whether the
drawing-room was any better. In the new start his long-dormant
imagination had taken, John Brown actually shivered in the moral
coldness of his spacious, lonely apartment. In his mind he daresaid that
the Christians looked a great deal more comfortable in that little box
of theirs, with that poor little girl working, and teaching, and keeping
all straight. What a fool that young doctor was! what if he did work a
little harder to make the old people an allowance? However, it was no
business of his. With a sigh of general discontent Mr Brown pulled his
bell violently, and had the fire made up, and asked for his tea. His
tea! he never touched it when it came, but sat pshawing and humphing at
it, making himself indignant over that fool of a young doctor. And what
if these poor people, sour and sore after their misfortune, should think
that this too was _his_ fault