TOO MUCH ALONE.
Brown Molly's fetlocks were neatly trimmed by Mr. Jeffson's patient
hands. I fancy the old mare would have gone long without a clipping, had
it not been George's special pleasure that the animal should be
smartened up before he rode her to Conventford. Clipping is not a very
pleasant labour: but there is no task so difficult that William Jeffson
would have shrunk from it, if its achievement could give George Gilbert
happiness.
Brown Molly looked a magnificent creature when George came home, after a
hurried round of professional visits, and found her saddled and bridled,
at eleven o'clock, on the bright March morning which he had chosen for
his journey to Conventford. But though, the mare was ready, and had been
ready for a quarter of an hour, there was some slight delay while George
ran up to his room,--the room which he had slept in from his earliest
boyhood (there were some of his toys, dusty and forgotten, amongst the
portmanteaus and hat-boxes at the top of the painted deal
wardrobe),--and was for some little time engaged in changing his
neckcloth, brushing his hair and hat, and making other little
improvements in his personal appearance.
William Jeffson declared that his young master looked as if he was going
straight off to be married, as he rode away out of the stable-yard, with
a bright eager smile upon his face and the spring breezes blowing
amongst his hair. He looked the very incarnation of homely, healthy
comeliness, the archetype of honest youth and simple English manhood,
radiant with the fresh brightness of an unsullied nature, untainted by
an evil memory, pure as a new-polished mirror on which no foul breath
has ever rested.
He rode away to his fate, self-deluded, and happy in the idea that his
journey was a wise blending of the duties of friendship and the cares of
his surgery.
I do not think there can be a more beautiful road in all England than
that between Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne and Conventford, and I can
scarcely believe that in all England there is an uglier town than
Conventford itself. I envy George Gilbert his long ride on that bright
March morning, when the pale primroses glimmered among the underwood,
and the odour of early violets mingled faintly with the air. The country
roads were long avenues, which might have made the glory of a ducal
park; and every here and there, between a gap in the budding hedge, a
white-walled country villa or grave old red-brick mansion peeped out of
some nook of rustic beauty, with shining windows winking in the noontide
sun.
Midway between Graybridge and Conventford there is the village of
Waverly; the straggling village street over whose quaint Elizabethan
roofs the ruined towers of a grand old castle cast their protecting
shadows. John of Gaunt was master and founder of the grandest of those
old towers, and Henry the Eighth's wonderful daughter has feasted in the
great banqueting-hall, where the ivy hangs its natural garlands round
the stone mullions of the Tudor window. The surgeon gave his steed a
mouthful of hay and a drink of water before the Waverly Arms, and then
sauntered at a foot-pace into the long unbroken arcade which stretches
from the quiet village to the very outskirts of the bustling
Conventford. George urged Brown Molly into a ponderous kind of canter
by-and-by, and went at a dashing rate till he came to the little
turnpike at the end of the avenue, and left fair Elizabethan
Midlandshire behind him. Before him there was only the smoky, noisy,
poverty-stricken town, with hideous factory chimneys blackening the air,
and three tall spires rising from amongst the crowded roofs high up into
the clearer sky.
Mr. Gilbert drew rein on the green, which was quiet enough to-day,
though such an uproarious spot in fair-time; he drew rein, and began to
wonder what he should do. Should he go to the chemist's in the
market-place and get his drugs, and thence to Mr. Raymond's house, which
was at the other end of the town, or rather on the outskirts of the
country and beyond the town; or should he go first to Mr. Raymond's by
quiet back lanes, which were clear of the bustle and riot of the
market-people? To go to the chemist's first would be the wiser course,
perhaps; but then it wouldn't be very agreeable to have drugs in his
pocket, and to smell of rhubarb and camomile-flowers when he made his
appearance before Miss Sleaford. After a good deal of deliberation,
George decided on going by the back way to Mr. Raymond's house; and
then, as he rode along the lanes and back slums, he began to think that
Mr. Raymond would wonder why he called, and would think his interest in
the nursery-governess odd, or even intrusive; and from that a natural
transition of thought brought him to wonder whether it would not be
better to abandon all idea of seeing Miss Sleaford, and to content
himself with the purchase of the drugs. While he was thinking of this,
Brown Molly brought him into the lane at the end of which Mr. Raymond's
house stood, on a gentle eminence, looking over a wide expanse of grassy
fields, a railway cutting, and a white high-road, dotted here and there
by little knots of stunted trees. The country upon this side of
Conventford was bleak and bare of aspect as compared to that fair
park-like region which I venture to call Elizabethan Midlandshire.
If Mr. Raymond had resembled other people, I dare say he would have been
considerably surprised--or, it may be, outraged--by a young gentleman in
the medical profession venturing to make a morning call upon his
nursery-governess; but as Mr. Charles Raymond was the very opposite of
everybody else in the world, and as he was a most faithful disciple of
Mr. George Combe, and could discover by a glance at the surgeon's head
that the young man was neither a profligate nor a scoundrel, he received
George as cordially as it was his habit to receive every living creature
who had need of his friendliness; and sent Brown Molly away to his
stable, and set her master at his ease, before George had quite left off
blushing in his first paroxysm of shyness.
"Come into my room," cried Mr. Raymond, in a voice that had more
vibration in it than any other voice that ever rang out upon the air;
"come into my room. You've had a letter from Sigismund,--the idea of the
absurd young dog calling himself Sigismund!--and he's told you all about
Miss Sleaford. Very nice girl, but wants to be educated before she can
teach; keeps the little ones amused, however, and takes them out in the
meadows; a very nice, conscientious little thing; cautiousness very
large; can't get anything out of her about her past life; turns pale and
begins to cry when I ask her questions; has seen a good deal of trouble,
I'm afraid. Never mind; we'll try and make her happy. What does her past
life matter to us if her head's well balanced? Let me have my pick of
the young people in Field Lane, and I'll find you an undeveloped
Archbishop of Canterbury; take me into places where the crimes of
mankind are only known by their names in the Decalogue, and I'll find
you an embryo Greenacre. Miss Sleaford's a very good little girl; but
she's got too much Wonder and exaggerated Ideality. She opens her big
eyes when she talks of her favourite books, and looks up all scared and
startled if you speak to her while she's reading."
Mr. Raymond's room was a comfortable little apartment, lined with books
from the ceiling to the floor. There were books everywhere in Mr.
Raymond's house; and the master of the house read at all manner of
abnormal hours, and kept a candle burning by his bedside in the dead of
the night, when every other citizen of Conventford was asleep. He was a
bachelor, and the children whom it was Miss Sleaford's duty to educate
were a couple of sickly orphans, left by a pale-faced niece of Charles
Raymond's,--an unhappy young lady, who seemed only born to be
unfortunate, and who had married badly, and lost her husband, and died
of consumption, running through all the troubles common to womankind
before her twenty-fifth birthday. Of course Mr. Raymond took the
children; he would have taken an accidental chimney-sweep's children, if
it could have been demonstrated to him that there was no one else to
take them. He buried the pale-faced niece in a quiet suburban cemetery,
and took the orphans home to his pretty house at Conventford, and bought
black frocks for them, and engaged Miss Sleaford for their education,
and made less fuss about the transaction than many men would have done
concerning the donation of a ten-pound note.
It was Charles Raymond's nature to help his fellow-creatures. He had
been very rich once, the Conventford people said, in those far-off
golden days when there were neither strikes nor starvation in the grim
old town; and he had lost a great deal of money in the carrying out of
sundry philanthropic schemes for the benefit of his fellow-creatures,
and was comparatively poor in these latter days. But he was never so
poor as to be unable to help other people, or to hold his hand when a
mechanics' institution, or a working-men's club, or an evening-school,
or a cooking-dépôt, was wanted for the benefit and improvement of
Conventford.
And all this time,--while he was the moving spirit of half-a-dozen
committees, while he distributed cast-off clothing, and coals, and
tickets for soup, and orders for flannel, and debated the solemn
question as to whether Betsy Scrubbs or Maria Tomkins was most in want
of a wadded petticoat, or gave due investigation to the rival claims of
Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Green to the largess of the soup kitchen,--he was an
author, a philosopher, a phrenologist, a metaphysician, writing grave
books, and publishing them for the instruction of mankind. He was fifty
years of age; but, except that his hair was grey, he had no single
attribute of age. That grey hair framed the brightest face that ever
smiled upon mankind, and with the liberal sunshine smiled alike on all.
George Gilbert had seen Mr. Raymond several times before to-day.
Everybody in Conventford, or within a certain radius of Conventford,
knew Mr. Charles Raymond; and Mr. Charles Raymond knew everybody. He
looked through the transparent screen which shrouded the young surgeon's
thoughts: he looked down into the young man's heart, through depths that
were as clear as limpid water, and saw nothing there but truth and
purity. When I say that Mr. Raymond looked into George Gilbert's heart,
I use a figure of speech, for it was from the outside of the surgeon's
head he drew his deductions; but I like the old romantic fancy, that a
good man's heart is a temple of courage, love, and piety--an earthly
shrine of all the virtues.
Mr. Raymond's house was a pretty Gothic building, half villa, half
cottage, with bay windows opening into a small garden, which was very
different from the garden at Camberwell, inasmuch as here all was trimly
kept by an indefatigable gardener and factotum. Beyond the garden there
were the meadows, only separated from Mr. Raymond's lawn by a low privet
hedge; and beyond the meadows the roofs and chimneys of Conventford
loomed darkly in the distance.
Charles Raymond took George into the drawing-room by-and-by, and from
the bay window the young man saw Isabel Sleaford once more, as he had
seen her first, in a garden. But the scene had a different aspect from
that other scene, which still lingered in his mind, like a picture seen
briefly in a crowded gallery. Instead of the pear-trees on the low
disorderly grass-plat, the straggling branches green against the yellow
sunshine of July, George saw a close-cropped lawn and trim flower-beds,
stiff groups of laurel, amid bare bleak fields unsheltered from the
chill March winds. Against the cold blue sky he saw Isabel's slight
figure, not lolling in a garden-chair reading a novel, but walking
primly with two pale-faced children dressed in black. A chill sense of
pain crept through the surgeon's breast as he looked at the girlish
figure, the pale joyless face, the sad dreaming eyes. He felt that some
inexplicable change had come to Isabel Sleaford since that July day on
which she had talked of her pet authors, and glowed and trembled with
childish love for the dear books out of whose pages she took the joys
and sorrows of her life.
The three pale faces, the three black dresses, had a desolate look in
the cold sunlight. Mr. Raymond tapped at the glass, and beckoned to the
nursery-governess.
"Melancholy-looking objects, are they not?" he said to George, as the
three girls came towards the window. "I've told my housekeeper to give
them plenty of roast meat, not too much done; meat's the best antidote
for melancholy."
He opened the window and admitted Isabel and her two pupils.
"Here's a friend come to see you, Miss Sleaford," he said; "a friend of
Sigismund's; a gentleman who knew you in London."
George held out his hand, but he saw something like terror in the girl's
face as she recognized him; and he fell straightway into a profound gulf
of confusion and embarrassment.
"Sigismund asked me to call," he stammered. "Sigismund told me to write
and tell him how you were."
Miss Sleaford's eyes filled with tears. The tears came unbidden to her
eyes now with the smallest provocation.
"You are all very good to me," she said.
"There, you children, go out into the garden and walk about," cried Mr.
Raymond. "You go with them, Gilbert, and then come in and have some
stilton cheese and bottled beer, and tell us all about your Graybridge
patients."
Mr. Gilbert obeyed his kindly host. He went out on to the lawn, where
the brown shrubs were putting forth their feeble leaflets to be blighted
by the chill air of March. He walked by Isabel's side, while the two
orphans prowled mournfully here and there amongst the evergreens, and
picked the lonely daisies that had escaped the gardener's scythe. George
and Isabel talked a little; but the young man was fain to confine
himself to a few commonplace remarks about Conventford, and Mr. Raymond,
and Miss Sleaford's new duties; for he saw that the least allusion to
the old Camberwell life distressed and agitated her. There was not much
that these two could talk about as yet. With Sigismund Smith, Isabel
would have had plenty to say; indeed, it would have been a struggle
between the two as to which should do all the talking; but in George
Gilbert's company Isabel Sleaford's fancies folded themselves like
delicate buds whose fragile petals are shrivelled by a bracing northern
breeze. She knew that Mr. Gilbert was a good young man kindly disposed
towards her, and, after his simple fashion, eager to please her; but she
felt rather than knew that he did not understand her, and that in that
cloudy region where her thoughts for ever dwelt he could never be her
companion. So, after a little of that deliciously original conversation
which forms the staple talk of a morning call amongst people who have
never acquired the supreme accomplishment called small-talk, George and
Isabel returned to the drawing-room, where Mr. Raymond was ready to
preside over a banquet of bread-and-cheese and bottled ale; after which
refection the surgeon's steed was brought to the door.
"Come and see us again, Gilbert, whenever you've a day in Conventford,"
Mr. Raymond said, as he shook hands with the surgeon.
George thanked him for his cordial invitation, but he rode away from the
house rather depressed in spirit, notwithstanding. How stupid he had
been during that brief walk on Mr. Raymond's lawn; how little he had
said to Isabel, or she to him! How dismally the conversation had died
away into silence every now and then, only to be revived by some lame
question, some miserable remark apropos to nothing,--the idiotic
emanation of despair!
Mr. Gilbert rode to an inn near the market-place, where his father had
been wont to take his dinner whenever he went to Conventford. George
gave Brown Molly into the ostler's custody, and then walked away to the
crowded pavement, where the country people were jostling each other in
front of shop-windows and open stalls; the broad stony market-place,
where the voices of the hawkers were loud and shrill, where the brazen
boastings of quack-medicine vendors rang out upon the afternoon air. He
walked through the crowd, and rambled away into a narrow back street
leading to an old square, where the great church of Conventford stood
amidst a stony waste of tombstones, and where the bells that played a
hymn tune when they chimed the hour were booming up in the grand old
steeple. The young man went into the stony churchyard, which was lonely
enough even on a market-day, and walked about among the tombs, whiling
away the time--for the benefit of Brown Molly, who required considerable
rest and refreshment before she set out on the return journey--and
thinking of Isabel Sleaford.
He had only seen her twice, and yet already her image had fastened
itself with a fatal grip upon his mind, and was planted there--an
enduring picture, never again to be blotted out.
That evening at Camberwell had been the one romantic episode of this
young man's eventless life; Isabel Sleaford the one stranger who had
come across his pathway. There were pretty girls, and amiable girls, in
Graybridge: but then he had known them all his life. Isabel came to him
in her pale young beauty, and all the latent sentimentality--without
which youth is hideous--kindled and thrilled into life at the magic
spell of her presence. The mystic Venus rises a full-blown beauty from
the sea, and man the captive bows down before his divine enslaver. Who
would care for a Venus whose cradle he had rocked, whose gradual growth
he had watched, the divinity of whose beauty had perished beneath the
withering influence of familiarity?
It was dusk when George Gilbert went to the chemist and received his
parcels of drugs. He would not stop to dine at the White Lion, but paid
his eighteenpence for Brown Molly's accommodation, and took a hasty
glass of ale at the bar before he sprang into the saddle. He rode
homeward through the solemn avenue, the dusky cathedral aisle, the
infinite temple, fashioned by the great architect Nature. He rode
through the long ghostly avenue, until the twinkling lights at Waverly
glimmered on him faintly between the bare branches of the trees.
Isabel Sleaford's new life was a very pleasant one. There was no butter
to be fetched, no mysterious errands to the Walworth Road. Everything
was bright and smooth and trim in Mr. Raymond's household. There was a
middle-aged housekeeper who reigned supreme, and an industrious
maidservant under her sway. Isabel and her sickly charges had two
cheerful rooms over the drawing-room, and took their meals together, and
enjoyed the delight of one another's society all day long. The children
were rather stupid, but they were very good. They too had known the
sharp ills of poverty, the butter-fetching, the blank days in which
there was no bright oasis of dinner, the scraps of cold meat and
melancholy cups of tea. They told Isabel their troubles of an evening;
how poor mamma had cried when the sheriff's officer came in, and said he
was very sorry for her, but must take an inventory, and wouldn't leave
even papa's picture or the silver spoons that had been grandmamma's.
Miss Sleaford put her shoulder to the wheel very honestly, and went
through Pinnock's pleasant abridgments of modern and ancient history
with her patient pupils. She let them off with a very slight dose of the
Heptarchy and the Normans, and even the early Plantagenet monarchs; but
she gave them plenty of Anne Boleyn and Mary Queen of Scots,--fair
Princess Mary, Queen of France, and wife of Thomas Brandon,--Marie
Antoinette and Charlotte Corday.
The children only said "Lor'!" when they heard of Mademoiselle Corday's
heroic adventure; but they were very much interested in the fate of the
young princes of the House of York, and amused themselves by a
representation of the smothering business with the pillows on the
school-room sofa.
It was not to be supposed that Mr. Charles Raymond, who had all the
interests of Conventford to claim his attention, could give much time or
trouble to the two pupils or the nursery-governess. He was quite
satisfied with Miss Sleaford's head, and was content to entrust his
orphan nieces to her care.
"If they were clever children, I should be afraid of her exaggerated
ideality," he said; "but they're too stupid to be damaged by any
influence of that kind. She's got a very decent moral region--not equal
to that young doctor at Graybridge, certainly--and she'll do her duty to
the little ones very well, I dare say."
So no one interfered with Isabel or her pupils. The education of
association, which would have been invaluable to her, was as much
wanting at Conventford as it had been at Camberwell. She lived alone
with her books and the dreams which were born of them, and waited for
the prince, the Ernest Maltravers, the Henry Esmond, the Steerforth--it
was Steerforth's proud image, and not simple-hearted David's gentle
shadow, which lingered in the girl's mind when she shut the book. She
was young and sentimental, and it was not the good people upon whom her
fancy fixed itself. To be handsome and proud and miserable, was to
possess an indisputable claim to Miss Sleaford's worship. She sighed to
sit at the feet of a Byron, grand and gloomy and discontented, baring
his white brow to the midnight blast, and raving against the baseness
and ingratitude of mankind. She pined to be the chosen slave of some
scornful creature, who should perhaps ill-treat and neglect her. I think
she would have worshipped an aristocratic Bill Sykes, and would have
been content to die under his cruel hand, only in the ruined chamber of
some Gothic castle, by moonlight, with the distant Alps shimmering
whitely before her glazing eyes, instead of in poor Nancy's unromantic
garret. And then the Count Guilliaume de Syques would be sorry, and put
up a wooden cross on the mountain pathway, to the memory of--, ÂNÁTKH;
and he would be found some morning stretched at the foot of that
mysterious memorial, with a long black mantle trailing over his
king-like form, and an important blood-vessel broken.
There is no dream so foolish, there is no fancy however childish, that
did not find a lodgment in Isabel Sleaford's mind during the long idle
evenings in which she sat alone in her quiet school-room, watching the
stars kindle faintly in the dusk, and the darkening shadows gathering in
the meadows, while feeble lights began to twinkle in the distant streets
of Conventford. Sometimes, when her pupils were fast asleep in their
white-curtained beds, Izzie stole softly down, and went out into the
garden to walk up and down in the fair moonlight; the beautiful
moonlight in which Juliet had looked more lovely than the light of day
to Romeo's enraptured eyes; in which Hamlet had trembled before his
father's ghostly face. She walked up and down in the moonlight, and
thought of all her dreams; and wondered when her life was going to
begin. She was getting quite old; yes--she thought of it with a thrill
of horror--she was nearly eighteen! Juliet was buried in the tomb of the
Capulets before this age, and haughty Beatrix had lived her life, and
Florence Dombey was married and settled, and the story all over.
A dull despair crept over this foolish girl as she thought that perhaps
her life was to be only a commonplace kind of existence, after all; a
blank flat level, along which she was to creep to a nameless grave. She
was so eager to be _something_. Oh, why was not there a revolution, that
she might take a knife in her hand and go forth to seek the tyrant in
his lodging, and then die; so that people might talk of her, and
remember her name when she was dead?
I think Isabel Sleaford was just in that frame of mind in which a
respectable, and otherwise harmless, young person aims a bullet at some
virtuous sovereign, in a paroxysm of insensate yearning for distinction.
Miss Sleaford wanted to be famous. She wanted the drama of her life to
begin, and the hero to appear.
Vague, and grand, and shadowy, there floated before her the image of the
prince; but, oh, how slow he was to come! Would he ever come? Were there
any princes in the world? Were there any of those Beings whose manners
and customs her books described to her, but whose mortal semblances she
had never seen? The Sleeping Beauty in the woods slumbered a century
before the appointed hero came to awaken her. Beauty must wait, and wait
patiently, for the coming of her fate. But poor Isabel thought she had
waited so long, and as yet there was not even the distant shimmer of the
prince's plumes dimly visible on the horizon.
There were reasons why Isabel Sleaford should shut away the memory of
her past life, and solace herself with visions of a brighter existence.
A little wholesome drudgery might have been good for her, as a homely
antidote against the sentimentalism of her nature; but in Mr. Raymond's
house she had ample leisure to sit dreaming over her books, weaving
wonderful romances in which she was to be the heroine, and the hero--?
The hero was the veriest chameleon, inasmuch as he took his colour from
the last book Miss Sleaford had been reading. Sometimes he was Ernest
Maltravers, the exquisite young aristocrat, with violet eyes and silken
hair. Sometimes he was Eugene Aram, dark, gloomy, and intellectual, with
that awkward little matter of Mr. Clarke's murder preying upon his mind.
At another time he was Steerforth, selfish and haughty and elegant,
Sometimes, when the orphans were asleep. Miss Sleaford let down her long
black hair before the little looking-glass, and acted to herself in a
whisper. She saw her pale face, awful in the dusky glass, her lifted
arms, her great black eyes, and she fancied herself dominating a
terror-stricken pit. Sometimes she thought of leaving friendly Mr.
Raymond, and going up to London with a five-pound note in her pocket,
and coming out at one of the theatres as a tragic actress. She would go
to the manager, and tell him that she wanted to act. There might be a
little difficulty at first, perhaps, and he would be rather inclined to
be doubtful of her powers; but then she would take off her bonnet, and
let down her hair, and would draw the long tresses wildly through her
thin white fingers--so; she stopped to look at herself in the glass as
she did it,--and would cry, "I am not mad; this hair I tear is mine!"
and the thing would be done. The manager would exclaim, "Indeed, my dear
young lady, I was not prepared for such acting as this. Excuse my
emotion; but really, since the days of Miss O'Neil, I don't remember to
have witnessed anything to equal your delivery of that speech. Come
to-morrow evening and play Constance. You don't want a rehearsal?--no,
of course not; you know every syllable of the part. I shall take the
liberty of offering you fifty pounds a night to begin with, and I shall
place one of my carriages at your disposal." Isabel had read a good many
novels in which timid young heroines essay their histrionic powers, but
she had never read of a dramatically-disposed heroine who had not burst
forth a full-blown Mrs. Siddons without so much as the ordeal of a
rehearsal.
Sometimes Miss Sleaford thought that her Destiny--she clung to the idea
that she had a destiny--designed her to be a poet, an L.E.L.; oh, above
all she would have chosen to be L.E.L.; and in the evening, when she had
looked over the children's copy-books, and practised a new style of
capital B, in order to infuse a dash of variety into the next day's
studies, she drew the candles nearer to her, and posed herself, and
dipped her pen into the ink, and began to pour forth some melancholy
plaint upon the lonely blankness of her life, or some vague invocation
of the unknown prince. She rarely finished either the plaint or the
invocation, for there was generally some rhythmical difficulty that
brought her poetic musings to a dead lock; but she began a great many
verses, and spoiled several quires of paper with abortive sonnets, in
which "stars" and "streamlets," "dreams" and "fountains," recurred with
a frequency which was inimical to originality or variety of style.
The poor lonely untaught child looked right and left for some anchorage
on the blank sea of life, and could find nothing but floating masses of
ocean verdure, that drifted her here and there at the wild will of all
the winds of heaven. Behind her there was a past that she dared not look
back upon or remember; before her lay the unknown future, wrapped in
mysterious shadow, grand by reason of its obscurity. She was eager to
push onward, to pierce the solemn veil, to tear aside the misty curtain,
to penetrate the innermost chamber of the temple.
Late in the night, when the lights of Conventford had died out under the
starlit sky, the girl lay awake, sometimes looking up at those mystical
stars, and thinking of the future; but never once, in any dream or
reverie, in any fantastic vision built out of the stories she loved, did
the homely image of the Graybridge surgeon find a place.
George Gilbert thought of her, and wondered about her, as he rode Brown
Molly in the winding Midlandshire lanes, where the brown hedge-rows were
budding, and the whitethorn bursting into blossom. He thought of her by
day and by night, and was angry with himself for so thinking; and then
began straightway to consider when he could, with any show of grace,
present himself once more before Mr. Raymond's Gothic porch at
Conventford.