THE RUINS.
The morning following Hanbury's visit to Grimsby Street saw the order
of arrival of the ladies in the sitting-room reversed. Mrs. Grace was
there first. Edith had been too excited when she went to bed after the
young man's disclosures to sleep, and it was not until the small hours
were growing big that the girl could close her eyes. As a consequence,
she was late.
But when at last she did awake, how different were her feelings from
the day before! She could scarcely believe she was the same being, or
it was the same world. That letter from Mr. Coutch, of Castleton, had
plunged her into a depth of leaden hopelessness she had never known
before. Now all was changed. Then she was the last of a race of
shopkeepers; now she had for cousin a man whose ancestor had been a
king. Whatever fate might do against her in the future, it could never
take away that consoling consciousness. At Miss Graham's in Streatham
the girls used to say she ought to be a queen. Well, a not very remote
relative of hers would have sat on a throne if she had lived and come
into her rights! Prodigious.
She found her grandmother waiting for her. The old lady was seated in
the window, spectacles on nose, reading the morning paper. All the
papers of that morning had not an account of the disaster at Chelsea,
because of the late hour at which it occurred. Mrs. Grace's paper was
one that did not get the news in time for insertion that morning, so
that the old lady and Edith were spared the pain of believing that a
man who sat in this room yesterday had met with a sudden and horrible
death.
But Mrs. Grace's eye had caught a paragraph headed "The Last of the
Poles." Without a word or comment she handed the paper to the girl and
said merely, "Read that. It ought to interest you."
Edith looked at the heading, flushed, and then read the paragraph. It
ran:
"The last survivor of one of the great historical families of Europe
was buried at Chone, near Geneva, four days before Christmas. The
venerable Mathilde Poniatowski, the widow of Count Szymanowski, had
just passed her ninetieth year. Her family gave to Poland its last
king, Stanislaus Augustus, under whose reign the death-struggle of the
Polish nation began, and its last hero, Prince Joseph Poniatowski, who
fell as one of Napoleon's generals when bravely attempting to cover
the retreat of the French at the battle of Leipzig. The Tzar
Alexander, with a generosity which did him credit, allowed his corpse
to be buried in the church at Cracow amongst the old Kings and heroes
of Poland. Count Szymanowski, the husband of the deceased lady, took a
prominent part in the rising of the Poles in 1831, since which time
she has lived a quiet and uneventful life in the hospitable republic
of Geneva."
"And think," said Mrs. Grace, "that she who is just dead represented
only the younger branch of Mr. Hanbury's family. It is all more like
an Eastern romance than anything which could take place in Europe!"
Edith could not say much. She felt choking, and merely said it was
wonderful, and that Mr. Hanbury would no doubt know all about the
countess.
"I don't think so. You know he said he did not know much of the
family. I must cut out this paragraph and keep it for him."
The notion of cutting a paragraph out of a penny paper and giving it
to the head of the house here referred to, was grotesque. Besides, he
had not said that he should come again. He said his mother would call,
and he expressed a vague hope that they might be better friends. Edith
knew no practical importance was to be attached to this man's
parentage, as far as honours went; but still it could not be that he
would move about as freely now as of yore, or mingle with the people
he had formerly considered his equals. He could no more destroy the
stream of noble and kingly blood in his veins than a costermonger
could carry the arms of a Howard or a Percy.
Edith broke bread that morning, but made little more than a formal
meal. Mrs. Hanbury would of course call. When? And what would she be
like? The son had been much too condescending and familiar for one in
his position. Would his mother make up in stateliness what he left
aside? She would drive up between three and five with powdered
footmen. The arrival of the carriage, and the footmen, and Mrs.
Hanbury, mother of the well-known Mr. Hanbury, would be an event in
Grimsby Street. Her old resolution of not knowing rich people must be
waived in this case. There was no remedy for it; for he had said his
mother would come.
Neither grandmother nor grand-daughter was in humour for talk. Edith
was occupied with her own thoughts. They had nothing to do that day,
for Edith had made up her mind to do nothing about a new situation
until Monday. It being now Saturday, there was no time to take any
steps that week.
They had not sat down to breakfast until half-past nine, and by ten
they had not finished. As the little clock on the mantelpiece struck
the hour the landlady's daughter entered to say a lady was below who
desired to see Mrs. and Miss Grace.
Both rose. Whom could it be?
Mrs. Hanbury.
"I have taken the liberty of coming up without permission," said a
voice at the door, and a tall, stately lady, with white hair and
dressed in black, appeared at the threshold of the door left open by
the attendant.
Mrs. Grace invited her to enter and be seated.
"I need not introduce myself further," the visitor said with a smile,
as she sat down, after shaking hands with the two, "than to say I am
the mother of Mr. Hanbury, who had the pleasure of calling upon you
yesterday evening. I am afraid my visit this morning is as
inconveniently early as his last night was late. But the discovery of
the relationship between us is so extraordinary, and so pleasant to
me, that I could not deny myself the happiness of calling at the very
earliest moment I could get away. You have not even finished
breakfast. I fear you will find it hard to forgive me." Her words, and
smile, and manner were so friendly and unassuming, that grandmother
and grand-daughter felt at ease immediately.
Mrs. Grace said that if the visitor would forgive the disorder of the
table, they should have no reason to feel anything but extremely
grateful to Mrs. Hanbury for coming so soon.
Mrs. Hanbury bowed and said, "I saw my son on his return from
Derbyshire yesterday and when he came back from you last night. But he
had not come down when I was leaving home just now. I am a very
positive, self-willed old woman, and I have to ask you as a favour to
make allowances for these infirmities. I have made up my mind that the
best thing for us to do is to hold a little family council, and I have
grown so used to my own room I never can feel equal to discussing
family matters anywhere else. I have therefore come to ask you a
favour to begin with. Do humour me, please, and come with me to my
place. John will be down and done breakfast by the time we get there,
and we four can talk over all this wonderful story at our leisure."
There were objections and demurs to this, but Mrs. Hanbury's
insistent, good-humoured determination prevailed, and the end was that
the three ladies set out together on foot for Chester Square. "And
now," said Mrs. Hanbury, as they walked along, "that I have tasted the
delights of conquest, I mean to turn from a mild and seemingly
reasonable supplicant into a rigid tyrant. Back into that dreadful
Grimsby Street neither of you shall ever go again. It is quite enough
to destroy one's zest for life merely to look down it!"
The protests and demurs were more vehement than before.
"We shall not argue the point now. In my capacity of tyrant, I decline
to argue anything. But we shall see--we shall see."
When they reached Mrs. Hanbury's, they went straight, to her own room.
She left word that she was most particularly engaged, and could see no
one. On enquiring for her son, she heard with surprise that he had
come down shortly after she left and gone out without leaving any
message for her.
That morning John Hanbury awoke to the most unpleasant thoughts
about Dora. What ought he to do in the matter? Had he not acted
badly to her in not writing the next morning after the scene in the
drawing-room?--the very night?
Unquestionably it would have been much better if he had written at
once. But then at the time he reached home, he was in no state of mind
to write to any one, and when he read his father's letter, the
contents of it drove all other matters into the background, and made
it seem that they could easily wait. Now he had been to Derbyshire,
and knew all that was to be learned at Castleton, and had seen Mrs.
Grace and Miss Grace and told them of the discovery he had made. His
mother had undertaken to go see them, and for the present there was
nothing to press in front of his thought of Dora.
He had behaved very badly indeed to her. At the interview he had acted
more like a lunatic brute than a sane gentleman, and afterwards his
conduct had been--yes, cowardly. Curse it! was he always to behave
like a coward in her eyes? She had reproached him with cowardice the
other day, and he fully deserved her reproach. That is, he fully
deserved the reproach of an impartial and passionless judge. But was
the attitude of an impartial and passionless judge exactly the one a
man expected from his sweetheart? Surely the ways of life would be
very dusty and dreary if a man found his severest critics always
closest to his side, if any deficiencies in the public indictment of
his character or conduct were to be supplied by a voice from his own
hearth, by his other self, by his wife?
John Hanbury had from his first thinking of Dora more than of any
other girl he had met, looked on her as a possible wife. When he went
further and made up his mind to ask her to marry him, he had regarded
her as a future wife more than a present sweetheart. He had felt that
she would be a credit and an ornament to him and that they should get
on well together. He had never for an hour been carried away by his
feelings towards her. He had never lost his head. He told himself he
had lost his heart, because he was more happy in her society than in
the society of any other young woman he had met.
He was an imaginative man, of good education, strong impulse, and
skilful in the use of words. Yet he had not addressed a single piece
of verse to her. She had not moved him to adopt that unfamiliar form
of expression. He had nothing in his mind about her that he could not
express in prose. This alone was a suspicious circumstance. He knew he
was not a poet, and he felt it would be absurd to try to be a poet,
because he was going to marry a woman he liked very much.
This was ample evidence she had not touched the inner springs of love
in him. The young man who keeps his reason always about him, and won't
make a fool of himself for the woman he wants to marry, isn't in love
at all. There may be fifty words describing beautifully the excellence
of his intentions towards the young woman, but love is not one of
those words. He had felt all along that they were about to enter into
a delicious partnership; not that he was going to drink the wine of a
heavenly dream.
This morning he was wrestling and groaning in spirit when the servant
brought the letters to his door. He recognised her writing at once,
and tore the envelope open hastily.
He read the letter slowly and with decaying spirit. When he had
finished he folded it up deliberately and put it back into the
envelope. His face was pale, his lips were apart, his eyes dull,
expressionless.
"Be it so," he said at length. "She is right," he added bitterly. "She
is always right. She would always be right, and I when I differed from
her always wrong. That is not the position a husband should occupy in
a wife's esteem."
Then he sat down in the easy chair he had occupied two nights before,
and fell into a reverie. He did not heed how time went. When he roused
himself he learned that his mother had gone out. He did not want to
meet her now. He did not want to meet anyone. He wished to be alone
with his thoughts. Where can man be more alone than in the streets of
a great city?
He went out with no definite object except to be free of interruption.
His mind ran on Dora. Now he thought of her with anger, now with
affection, now with sorrow. He had no thought of trying to undo her
resolve. He acquiesced in it. He was glad it came from her and not
from him.
Now that all was over between them, and they were by-and-by to be good
friends, and no more, he became sentimental.
He passed in review the pleasant hours they had spent together. He
took a melancholy delight in conjuring up the things they had said,
the places they had gone to, the balls, and theatres, and galleries
and meetings they had been at with one another. He thought of the last
walk they took, the walk which led to the present breach between them.
It was in this neighbourhood somewhere. Ah, he remembered. He would go
and see the place once more.
Once more! Why it was only two days since they had come this way, she
leaning on his arm. What a wonderful lot of things had been crowded
into those two days!
This was the street. What was the meaning of the crowd? When she and
he were here last, there had been a crowd too. Was there always a
crowd here? By Jove! there had been a fire. And, by Jove! the house
burned was the one against the end wall of which she and he had stood
to watch the nigger.
Policemen were keeping people back from the front of Forbes's bakery,
which was completely gutted, standing a mere shell, with its bare,
roofless walls open to the light of Heaven. All the floors had fallen,
and a fireman with a hose was playing on the smoking rubbish within.
"An unlucky place," thought Hanbury, as he stood to look at the ruins.
"First that unfortunate nigger meets with an accident there, and now
this house is burned quite out. An unlucky corner."
At that moment there was a cry of dismay from the crowd. Hanbury drew
back. He thought the walls were falling. Presently the cry of dismay
changed to a cheer, and the crowd at the corner of the Hanover swayed
and opened, and through it, from a cab which had just drawn up, walked
hastily towards the smoking pile, Oscar Leigh.
Where Hanbury stood was the nearest point from which the dwarf could
command a view of the bakery. When he reached Hanbury's side, he
stopped, looked up, dropped his stick, flung his hands aloft and
uttered an awful yell of despair.
The people drew back from him.
No trace of even the floor of the clock-room remained in position,
beyond a few charred fragments of joists. Everything was gone, wheels
and pulleys, and levers, and shafts, and chains, and drums, and bands.
Even the very frame itself, with its four strong pillars and thick
cross-bars, left not a trace aloft, and its very position was not
indicated in the heap of steaming rubbish.
"All gone! All gone! The work of seven years. The result of a
lifetime. Gone! gone! gone!"
He reeled and would have fallen but that Hanbury caught him and
supported him.
Williams appeared and between Williams and Hanbury the dwarf was led
into the private bar in which his learning and occult knowledge had
brought him distinction and respect.
A chair was fetched by Binns the potman and Leigh was set upon it with
his back to the window, so that his eyes might not look upon the grave
of his labour.
"All gone! All gone! Nothing left! Nothing left! The work of seven
years day and night! Day and night! Day and night! Gone, all gone!"
"But, Mr. Leigh," said the pale-faced Williams, in a low and very
kindly voice, "it might have been ever so much worse."
"Worse! How could it be worse? There is nothing saved."
"Why, thank God, Mr. Leigh, you are saved. It was said in some of the
papers and we all believed you were burned in the fire."
"And what if I was? I wish I was."
"You oughtn't say that, Mr. Leigh. It is not right to say that. You
ought to be grateful for being saved."
"Grateful for being saved! Who? I! Who should be grateful that I am
saved? Not I, for one."
"Well, your friends are very glad, any way. Didn't you hear how the
people cried out with fear first, for they thought you were a ghost,
and didn't you hear how they cheered then when they saw it was you
yourself, alive and well?"
"I! Who am I? What am I? My clock, sir, was all I had in this whole
world. It was the savings bank of my heart, of my soul, and now the
bank is broken and I am beggared."
"But, Mr. Leigh, you are not beggared indeed. You have plenty of money
still," said Williams in the soft tone one uses to a reasonable child.
"Money, sir, what is money to me? I am not a pauper, but what good is
mere money to me? Can I dance at balls, or ride fine horses or shoot?
What good is money to me more than to get me food and drink for my
body? and what a body! Who will feed my soul? What will feed my soul?
How am I who am but a joke of nature to live with no spiritual food?
My clock was my life, and my soul, and my fame, my immortal part and
now--! Gone! gone! gone!"
"But how did you escape, Mr. Leigh? We saw you winding up after you
left this, and you nodded to us as usual, when the easy part of the
winding came, half-way through."
"I did. Curse my mandarin neck. If I had minded nothing but my clock
it would be safe now, or I should be dead with it."
"But how did you escape, Mr. Leigh?"
"The devil takes care of his own, Mr. Hanbury," he said, speaking for
the first time to the young man. "Whatever way you are going I should
like to go, if you would have no objection? I have no way of my own
now except the way common to us all."
"I shall be very glad to have your company," said Hanbury, who was
sincerely moved at the loss and grief of the little clockmaker.
"Shall we walk or would you prefer to drive?"
"Let us drive, please. I have lost my stick. Ay, I have lost my
crutch, my stick, my prop. You are very kind to let me go with you."
"Indeed I am very glad to be of any use I can."
And leaning on the arm of John Hanbury, Oscar Leigh limped out of the
private bar of the Hanover.