‘HAD THE CHANCE BEEN WITH US THAT HAS NOT BEEN.’
Alexis speeds homeward joyously, elate as if he had conquered
fortune. He has borrowed money from a social inferior, and yet does
not feel humiliated. That interview with Richard Plowden has cheered
him wondrously. The patient, gentle soul working at monotonous
task-work in a gloomy back parlour, with no outlook save blank wall
and cistern, working uncomplainingly, nay, even cheerfully, has read
him a lesson. There must be work for a strong, healthy fellow like
himself when a cripple in a back room can earn his living. Alexis
begins to think he has tried life at the wrong end, that in striving
for some shabby-genteel, reduced-gentleman’s occupation, he has
overlooked those lowlier and less sophisticated avocations which
offer themselves to every honest man.
‘We’ll emigrate as soon as the little woman is strong enough for
a sea voyage,’ he tells himself, ‘and I’ll turn shepherd on the
Australian downs.’
Sibyl receives him with an eager look, full of questioning. She is
sitting on the hearth-rug as he comes into the room, in her favourite
attitude, looking into the fire, her ruffled hair golden in the ruddy
light, her eyes heavy with thought or care.
His elated aspect tells her that he has been successful. She rises
and runs to him, trembling with anxiety.
‘Have you got the money?’
‘Yes, Sibyl. Of all my friends, the one who could least afford to
lose it was the only one to lend it. Here it is, little one. You must
make it go a long way, for it has cost me sore humiliation.’
‘It was lent grudgingly, then?’
‘No; but it was refused heartlessly by the wrong person before I hit
upon the right one. Make the most of it, my love, now you’ve got it.’
His wife takes the little parcel of money from his hand, slowly,
looking downward, and without a word.
‘You are pleased, little woman?’
‘It was very good of you to try so hard,’ she answers in a low voice.
She begins to busy herself about her husband’s dinner without another
word. This evening she gives him half a pound of rump-steak, an
unwonted feast, at which his soul rejoices.
‘I am faring sumptuously to-day,’ he says, as she sits opposite to
him, pouring out the tea with a listless, absent air, which he takes
for physical languor. ‘I have had a superb luncheon already.’
All that evening Sibyl is unwontedly silent, and Alexis, not caring
to describe his interview with Mrs. Gorsuch, has not much to tell her
after he has related Richard Plowden’s generosity. He has recourse
to the tattered leaves of ‘Don Juan,’ and sits sniggering over his
favourite passages, and feeling as if he and the poet were both
outside the human race generally, and could afford to ridicule and
despise it.
He sallies forth early next morning, despite the snow, which now
clothes the land as a garment, and goes straight to Brompton, to have
another cheery talk with Dick Plowden, and to inquire whether that
back parlour philosopher has hit upon any method by which he, Alexis,
may earn his daily bread.
Richard is hopeful. He has an uncle engaged in a large shipping
agent’s office, an uncle who would have obtained employment for
Richard himself, had Richard’s legs been more serviceable in active
life. To this uncle, Mr. Sampson Plowden, Dick writes a long letter,
setting forth his friend’s capacities and desire for employment;
and, armed with this recommendation, Alexis speeds to the offices of
Messrs. Keel and Skrew, in a narrow alley out of Fenchurch Street. He
sees Sampson Plowden, an active little elderly man, who asks him if
he can write a good hand, and if he is quick at accounts. Alexis asks
for a sheet of paper, and writes a few lines in a clerk-like hand,
taking care to dot his i’s this time, and then volunteers to solve
any arithmetical puzzle that Mr. Plowden likes to set him.
‘Well, I’ll take your word and Dick’s as to the book-keeping,’
replies Mr. Plowden. ‘We employ a good many clerks, and sometimes
have to send one to Australia, which makes a vacancy. The next
time this occurs you shall hear of it. The junior clerks are in my
department, and it’s in my province to engage or dismiss them. I’ll
bear you in mind, Mr. Stanmore.’
‘If you could send me to Australia,’ hazards Alexis, glowing with
hope, ‘it would suit me admirably.’
‘Well, well, that would be a matter involving much consideration.
However, you shall hear from me at the first opportunity.’
This is not much, but it is something; for Mr. Plowden looks like a
man who means what he says, and Dick has given him a high character
for integrity and kindness of heart. Alexis plods homewards, cheered
and sustained by sorrow’s pole-star, Hope.
He lets himself in at number eleven, Dixon Street, the door being on
the latch, and goes upstairs, prepared to find Sibyl in a brighter
frame of mind than usual, busy at her needlework most likely, the
lamp burning, the hearth swept, the evening meal set out, with
neatness which lends its charm even to poverty.
The room looks curiously blank and dreary as he enters it. The fire
has gone out; cheerless sight, with that white world outside, and
the thermometer below freezing-point. There is no tea-tray, no white
cloth on the table, no lamp burning. The dusk is just light enough
to show him that the room is empty, and that no preparation has been
made for his refreshment.
He goes back to the landing and calls over the balusters to his
landlady: ‘Has my wife been out long, Mrs. Bonny?’
‘She went out just before dinner-time,’ screams a voice from below.
Dinner-time with Mrs. Bonny means one o’clock.
‘She has gone to buy things, I dare say,’ thinks Alexis, ‘gone to
London most likely. She ought to have been home by half-past four,
though, if she went as early as one. Did she leave any message, Mrs.
Bonny?’ he asks, calling over the balusters again.
‘No,’ replies the landlady, curtly, ‘she didn’t leave no message, but
she took a carpet bag.’
‘A carpet bag,’ repeats Alexis, with a puzzled air, as he goes back
to the blank, cold room. ‘What could she want with a carpet bag? To
bring the things home, perhaps,--foolish little thing! As if a parcel
wasn’t lighter to carry than a carpet bag.’
He gropes for wood and coals in the bottom of the roomy cupboard,
and lights a fire, patiently, toilfully, not unskilfully, with hands
which have learned many offices unknown to the elegant Captain
Secretan.
He is dispirited by his wife’s absence, but not angry. That placid,
easy temper of his is full of tenderness and indulgence for the
‘little woman’ whose brief married life has been so full of care, who
approaches the mystery of maternity under such sorrowful conditions.
He lights his fire, brings out a loaf, a starveling slice of cheese,
and some small-beer in a bottle, and sits by the hearth to eat
his meal in the firelight. As he eats and drinks his eyes wander
thoughtfully round the firelit room, jets of flame flashing and
twinkling on the wainscot.
‘Not a bad old room by any means,’ he thinks, ‘if one had just enough
money to live in it comfortably.’
He fancies that in Sampson Plowden’s friendship he has found the clue
that shall extricate him from the maze of adversity. How happy Sibyl
and he might be in this humble old room were he but employed as clerk
at Messrs. Keel and Skrew’s with a salary of say thirty shillings a
week! Not an ambitious desire, surely, in a young man whose family
history is set forth with some flourish in Burke’s ‘Landed Gentry.’
‘I shall have something pleasant to tell the little woman when
she comes home, at any rate,’ thinks Alexis, as he sips the flat
fourpenny ale, put carefully away after last night’s supper.
A pert little flame spurts out of a knob of coal just at this moment,
brightening the whole room, and Secretan’s eye, wandering idly as he
muses, is attracted by a spot of white upon the sideboard.
‘A letter, by Jove!’ he exclaims. ‘Who the deuce can have written to
me, when not a mortal knows my address?’
He rises--listlessly--apprehending no advantage from the letter,
lights the lamp, and goes over to the sideboard. The letter is from
his wife.
‘DEAR ALEXIS,
‘Our misery of the last few months has opened my eyes to the sad
truth that it would have been far better for both of us had we
never met, or had we been wise enough to defer our marriage till
we had some settled means of living. What am I but a burden to
you? How many situations there are in which you could get your
living were you alone and unfettered! while I could at least
return to the dull drudgery of teaching, and escape the pinch
of absolute poverty. Do not think me cold-hearted, dear Alexis,
when I tell you that I am weary of our continual struggle, and
that I have resolved to end it by an act which may provoke your
indignation, but which, I feel assured, will result in your
advantage. I set you free from the burden of a wife whom you have
found it too bitter a task to support. You have rarely uttered a
complaint, but I have seen despair in your face often enough to
learn that it has settled in your heart. Without me you may begin
the world afresh. Apart from you I shall have opportunities of
prosperity as Miss Faunthorpe, which I could never have as Mrs.
Secretan. If my lot changes, and fortune smiles, as I dare to
hope it will, you shall hear of me; and even if you blame me for
a separation which your anger may call a desertion, believe at
least that in severance, as in union, I shall be ever your true
and loyal wife,
‘SIBYL.’
Alexis reads and re-reads this letter like a man who hast lost
the power of understanding his mother tongue, and pores over
familiar words as though they were the hieroglyphics of an Assyrian
inscription.
So cold, so heartless, so deliberate. His heart sickens at the
thought of such cruelty. In all his adversity, with starvation
staring him in the face, he has thought of his wife as part of
himself; has never considered the responsibility of providing for
her as doubling the difficulty of existence; has never for a moment
remembered that life might be easier to him without her. He has
been sorry for her, has thought of her deprivations, her endurance,
but of the burden upon himself--never. All hopes and dreams of a
happier future have centred themselves in her. To win a brighter home
for her, to surround her with comfort, has been his one ambition.
Reckless as his marriage was, he has never repented it. Fettered hand
and foot as he has found himself by that ill-considered act, he has
never wished the tie loosened.
He stands with the letter in his hand, repeating the words to himself
incredulously. It must be a jest--a trick to test his love--anything
but the base and bitter truth.
He puts the letter in his pocket at last, goes downstairs, and
penetrates the sacred domain of Mrs. Bonny; namely, the front
kitchen, which is at once the parlour or living-room, where Mr.
Bonny, employed as a railway porter, tastes the sweets of domestic
leisure, and the apartment in which Mrs. Bonny cooks for her lodgers.
The back kitchen makes a cheerful bedroom, and in summer-time, when
Mr. Bonny trains scarlet runners over the window, enjoys a rustic
outlook.
Alexis is received somewhat coldly by Mrs. Bonny, that lady being
intent upon frying sausages for the railway porter’s evening repast,
and resenting all intrusion upon her private domain on principle.
He questions her closely as to the mode and manner of his wife’s
departure, but she can tell him no more than she has told him
already. Mrs. Stanmore went out between twelve and one o’clock,
carrying a small carpet bag.
‘I shouldn’t have known anything about it if I hadn’t happened to
meet her as I was fetching of the dinner beer, our Mary Ann being
washing, and no one else to fetch it.’
‘Did she say nothing to you?’
‘Not a word; she just gives me a nod, in her off-hand way, and walks
on.’
That is all. Alexis goes upstairs again, heavily, slowly, and paces
the deserted room. By-and-bye he pauses before a rickety old chest of
drawers with brass handles and locks, opens a drawer, and finds it
empty. It is the drawer that contained his wife’s poor remains of a
wardrobe that had never been richly furnished, a few under garments,
a collar or two, and so on. These she has evidently taken with her.
Nothing could have been more deliberate than her departure.
Presently a curious idea occurs to him, improbable, but it takes a
strong hold upon him nevertheless.
Has she gone to make away with herself? and is this heartless letter
of hers a tender device to save him the pain of knowing that she had
been driven by despair to suicide?
This seems to him more likely, more natural than that the wife he
loves can desert him; can, with coldest calculation, barter love and
truth against the chances of prosperity.
What those chances are he knows not. He is so ignorant of his wife’s
family and surroundings as not to know that Sibyl Faunthorpe is the
niece of Stephen Trenchard.
Why he is thus unenlightened is a question that can be only answered
by a retrospect, and will be best answered in Sibyl’s own words.