Amongst the minor grievances reckoned up by the deceased dowager as
accruing from Augustus's unfortunate marriage was the fact that his wife
had borne the plebeian name of Dobbs. One of her most frequent
complaints against poor little May was that the child was "a thorough
Dobbs." And when she was out of temper--which was very often--she would
prefer this charge as indignantly as though Dobbs were synonymous with
the most disgraceful epithets in the English language.
And yet the sound of it awoke very different associations in the city of
Oldchester, where Augustus's mother-in-law had lived all her life. Mrs.
Dobbs was the widow of a tradesman. The ironmonger's business, which her
husband had carried on, had long passed into other hands; but his name
still met the eyes of his fellow-townsmen in the inscription, "J. Brown,
late Dobbs," painted over the shop.
Oldchester is a city in which two streams of life run side by side,
mingling but little with each other. At a certain point in the existence
of Oldchester, its ancient course of civil and ecclesiastical history
had received a new tributary--a strong and ever-growing current of
commerce. Commerce built wide suburbs, with villa residences in various
stages of "detachment" and "semi-detachment" from one another. Commerce
strewed the pleasant country paths and lanes with coal-dust, and
blackened the air with smoke. Commerce set up Art schools, founded
hospitals (and furnished patients for them), multiplied railways for
miles round, and scored all the new streets, and some of the old, with
tramway lines. Commerce bought estates in the neighbourhood, was
conveyed to public worship in splendid equipages, sent its sons to Eton,
and married its daughters into the Peerage. But, for all that, the fame
of Oldchester continued to rest on its character as a cathedral city.
The old current surpassed the new one in length and dignity, if in
nothing else. The gray cathedral towers rose up majestically above the
din and turmoil of forge and loom and factory, with a noble aspiration
towards something above and beyond these; while the vibrations of their
mellow chimes shed down sweet suggestions of peace and goodwill among
the homes of the toilers.
Mrs. Dobbs particularly loved the sounds of the cathedral chimes; and
she sat with closed eyes listening to them in the twilight of a certain
autumn evening. Her house was in a narrow street, called Friar's Row,
which turned out of the High Street. A monastery had once stood on the
site of it, but all trace of the ancient conventual buildings had long
since disappeared. The houses were solid brick dwellings, from one to
two hundred years old. Mrs. Dobbs's husband had bequeathed her a long
lease of that which she occupied. Most of the other houses in Friar's
Row were used as offices or warehouses, the wealthier kind of
tradespeople who once lived in them having migrated to the suburbs. On
her husband's death some of Mrs. Dobbs's friends had urged her to remove
to a newer and more cheerful part of the town, but she had resisted the
suggestion with some contempt.
"I know what suits me," she would say. "And that's a knowledge the Lord
doesn't bestow on all and sundry. This house suits me. It's
weather-proof for one thing. And you needn't be afraid of putting your
foot through the floor if you walk a little heavy, as I do. When I go to
see the Simpsons in that bandbox they call Laurel Villa, I daren't lean
my umbrella against the wall, for fear of bringing the whole concern
down like a pack of cards."
She might easily have increased her income by letting her house and
removing to one in the suburbs; for its position was central, and the
tenements in Friar's Row were in great request for business purposes.
But she resisted this temptation. There were reasons of a more
impalpable kind than the solidity of its floors and roofs, which made
Mrs. Dobbs constant to her old home. She had lived there all the days of
her married life. Her daughter had been born there. Her husband had died
there. The somewhat narrow and dingy street had in her eyes the familiar
aspect of a friendly face. She loved to hear the rattle and bustle of
the High Street, slightly softened by distance. Those common sounds were
full of voices from the past: the common sights around were associated
with all the joys and sorrows of her life. Mrs. Dobbs never said
anything to this effect, but she felt it. And so she stayed in Friar's
Row.
The parlour in which she sat was comfortably and substantially
furnished. A competent observer would have perceived evidences of
permanence and respectability in the solid, old-fashioned chairs and
tables, the prints after Morland on the walls, and the corner cupboard
full of fine old china. The bookshelves which filled one end of the room
contained the accumulations of successive generations. There was a
square pianoforte with a pile of old music-books on the top of it; and a
big family Bible in massive binding had a place of honour all to itself
on a side-table covered with green baize. On this special autumn
evening, owing to the hour, and partly to the narrowness of the street,
which shut out some of the lingering daylight, the parlour was very dim.
A red fire glowed in the grate, a large tabby cat blinked and purred on
the hearthrug, and in a spacious easy-chair at one side of the fireplace
sat Mrs. Dobbs, listening with closed eyes to the cathedral chimes.
Presently the door was softly opened, and there came into the room Mrs.
Dobbs's life-long friend and crony, Mr. Joseph Weatherhead. This person
was her brother-in-law, and a childless widower. He had carried on the
trade of bookseller and stationer in Birmingham for many years; but had
sold his business on the death of his wife, and come to live in
Oldchester, near the Dobbs's. Mr. Weatherhead was a tall, lean man, with
a benevolent, bald forehead, and mild eyes. The only remarkable feature
in his face was the nose, which was large, slightly aquiline, brownish
red in colour, and protruded from his face at a peculiar angle. The
forehead above, and the chin below, sloped away from it rather rapidly.
The nose had thus a singularly inquisitive air of being eagerly in the
van, as though it thrust itself forward in quest of news.
As he closed the door behind him, Mrs. Dobbs opened her eyes.
"I thought you were asleep, Sarah," said Mr. Weatherhead.
"Asleep!" ejaculated Mrs. Dobbs, with all the indignation which that
accusation is so apt mysteriously to excite. "Nothing of the kind! I was
listening to the chimes. They always make me think----"
"Of poor Susy," interrupted Mr. Weatherhead, nodding. "Ah! And so they
do me. Poor Susy! How pretty she was!"
"She had better have been less pretty for her own happiness. The great
misfortune of her life wouldn't have happened but for her pretty face."
Mr. Weatherhead nodded again, and sat down opposite to Mrs. Dobbs in a
corresponding armchair to her own. He then took from his pocket a black
leather case, and from the case a meerschaum pipe, which he proceeded to
fill and light and smoke.
"What an infatuation!" sighed Mrs. Dobbs, pursuing her own meditations.
"To think of Susy throwing herself away on that extravagant, selfish,
good-for-nothing fellow without any principles to speak of, when she
might have had an honest tradesman in a first-rate way of business! She
had only to pick and choose."
"Humph! Honest tradesmen are not as plentiful as blackberries, though,"
observed Mr. Weatherhead, reflectively.
Mrs. Dobbs ignored this parenthesis, and went on: "It was a bad day for
me and mine when he first came swaggering into this house."
From which speech it will be seen that the Dobbs side of the family
coincided with the Cheffingtons in considering Augustus's to have been
an unfortunate marriage; only each party arrived at the same conclusion
by a different road.
"Have you heard from him lately, Sarah?" asked Mr. Weatherhead, after a
pause.
"From my precious son-in-law? Not I!"
"Oh!"
"Not a word from him till he wants something. You may take your oath of
that, Jo Weatherhead."
"Oh, I thought you might have heard from him, because----"
"Well?" (very sharply).
"Well, because I see something has been putting old times into your
head; and I thought it might be that."
"Something been putting old times into my head? I should like to know
when they're out of my head! Much you know about it!"
Mr. Weatherhead apparently did know something about it; for after
another long silence, during which he puffed at his pipe and stared into
the fire, Mrs. Dobbs justified his penetration by saying--
"The truth is, I _have_ been turning things over in my mind a good deal
since yesterday."
Mr. Weatherhead was too wary to expose himself to another snub, so he
merely nodded two or three times in an oracular manner.
"I'm worried out of my mind about that child. She went off yesterday as
bright and happy as possible, and looking so pretty and genteel--fit for
any company in the land."
"Ah! She went off, you say, to----?"
"To the Hadlows'. She is to stay there over Sunday."
"Oh! But I don't quite see----"
"Go on! What is it that you don't quite see?"
"I don't quite see what there is to worry you in that. The Hadlows are
very good sort of people."
"I should think they _were_ very good sort of people! Canon Hadlow is
one of the best men in Oldchester; or in all England, for the matter of
that. And he's a gentleman to the marrow of his bones. But what sort of
a position has my grand-daughter among the Hadlows and their
belongings?"
"A very nice position, I should say."
"A very nice position!" exclaimed Mrs. Dobbs, who seemed determined to
repeat all poor Mr. Weatherhead's speeches in a tone of disdainful
irony. "That's so like you, Jo! _She_ thinks it a very nice position,
too, poor lamb. She knows nothing of the world, bless her innocent
heart. And, for all her seventeen years, she is the merest child in some
things. But you might know better. You are not seventeen years old, Jo
Weatherhead."
"Certainly not," assented he emphatically.
"The fact of the matter is that, whether by good luck or bad luck, May
does not belong to my sphere or my class. She's a Cheffington. She has
the ways of a lady, and the education of a lady, and she has a right to
the position of a lady. If that father of hers gives her nothing else he
might give her that; and he shall, if I can make him."
"Perhaps it might have been better, after all, if you had not sent the
child back to her old school, but just brought her up here, under your
own eye, in a plain sort of way. It would have been better for _you_,
anyhow."
"I don't know that."
"Why, you'd have been spared a good many sacrifices. There's not another
woman in England would have done what you've done, Sarah."
"Nonsense; there are plenty of women in England as big fools as me. Even
that wooden old figurehead of a dowager--Lord forgive me, she's dead and
gone!--had the grace to pay the child's schooling as long as she lived."
"She!" exclaimed Jo Weatherhead, firing up suddenly, and tapping his
meerschaum sharply against the hob. "That's a very different pair of
shoes. She could afford it a precious sight better than you. What did
_she_ ever deprive herself of? I say there's not another woman in
England would have done what you've done, and it's no good your
contradicting."
"There, bless the man! Don't let us quarrel about it."
"But I shall quarrel about it, unless you give in. Here's the case
fairly put:--A young spark runs away with your only daughter, and pretty
well breaks your heart. He takes her wandering about into foreign parts,
and you only get news of her now and then, and never good news. He's too
fine a gentleman to do a stroke of work for his family, but as soon as
he has run through his bit of money he's not too fine a gentleman to
fall into disreputable ways of life, nor yet to let who will look after
his motherless little girl, and feed, and clothe, and educate her. When
his own mother dies--leaving two quarters' school-bills unpaid, which
you have to settle, by-the-by--the rest of the family, including his own
sister, refuse to advance a sixpence to save the child from the
workhouse."
"I say, Jo, that's putting it a little too strong, my friend! There was
no talk of the workhouse."
"Let me finish summing up the case. I say they wouldn't spend sixpence
to save that child from _starvation_--there, now! When the dowager is
dead, and the rest of them button up their breeches' pockets, and the
schoolmistress sends away the poor little girl because she can't afford
to keep her and teach her for nothing, what does my gentleman do? Does
he try in any one way to do his duty by his only child? Not he. He
coolly shuffles off all trouble and responsibility on other folks'
shoulders. He hasn't taken any notice of you for years, except writing
once to borrow fifty pounds----"
"Which he didn't get, Jo."
"Which he didn't get because an over-ruling Providence had ordained that
you shouldn't have it to lend him. Well, after years of silence and
neglect, he turns up in Oldchester one fine morning, and walks into your
house bringing his little girl 'on a visit to her dear grandmother.'
Talk of brass! What sort of a material do you suppose that man's
features are composed of?"
"Gutta percha, very likely," returned Mrs. Dobbs, who now sat resting
her head against the cushions of her chair, and listening to Mr.
Weatherhead's eloquence with a half-humorous resignation; "that's a
good, tough, elastic kind of stuff."
"Tough! He had need have some toughness of countenance to come into this
house as he did. And that's not the end. He swaggers about Oldchester
for a week or two, using your house as an inn, neither more nor
less--except that there's no bill;--and then one day he starts off for
the Continent, leaving little May here, and promising to send for her as
soon as he gets settled. From that day to this, and it's four years ago,
you have had the child on your hands, and her precious father has never
contributed one shilling towards her support. You sent the child back to
school. You pinched, and saved, and denied yourself many little comforts
to keep her there. You have never let her feel or guess that she has
been a burthen on you in your old age. And I say again, Sarah Dobbs,
that, considering all the circumstances of the case, there's not another
woman in England would have done what you've done. No, nor in Europe!"
"Well, having come to that, I hope you've finished, Jo Weatherhead."
"I hope I have," returned Mr. Weatherhead, mopping his flushed face with
a very large red pocket-handkerchief. "I hope I have, for the present.
But if you attempt to contradict a word of what I have been saying, I'll
begin again and go still further!"
"There, there, then that's settled. But I am thinking of the future.
Supposing I died to-morrow, what's to become of May? I have nothing to
leave her. My bit of property goes back to Dobbs's family, and all right
and fair, too. I've nothing to say against my husband's will. But people
like the Hadlows, who invite May, and make much of her, have no idea
that she has no one to look to but me. I don't say they'd give her the
cold shoulder if they did know it; but it would make a difference. As it
is, they talk to her about her aunt, Mrs. Dormer-Smith, and her cousin,
Lord This, and her connection, Lady T'other, and a kind of a--what shall
I say?--a sort of atmosphere of high folks hangs about her. She's Miss
Miranda Cheffington, with fifty relations in the peerage. If she was
known only as the grandchild of Mrs. Dobbs, the ironmonger's widow, she
would seem mightily changed in a good many eyes. Sometimes it comes over
me as if I was letting May go on under false pretences."
"Why, she _has_ got fifty relations in the peerage, hasn't she?"
"A hundred, for all I know. But folks are not aware that her father's
family take no notice of her. She hardly knows it herself."
"But her aunt, Mrs. Dormer-Smith, writes to her, doesn't she?"
"Oh, a line once in a blue moon, to say she's glad to hear May is well,
and to complain of the great expense of living in London."
"The selfish meanness of that woman is beyond belief."
"Well--I don't know, Jo. She's a poor creature, certainly. But I feel
more a sort of pity for her than anything else."
"_Do_ you? It's only out of contradiction, then."
"Not altogether," said Mrs. Dobbs, laughing good-humouredly. "I made her
out pretty well that time I took May up to London before she went back
to school."
"Ah! I remember. You tried if the aunt would do anything to help."
"Yes, I tried. It was right to try. But I very soon saw that there was
nothing to be hoped for from that quarter. Mrs. Dormer-Smith has been
brought up to live for the world and the world's ways. To be sure her
world is a funny, artificial little affair compared with God Almighty's:
pretty much as though one should take a teaspoonful of Epsom salts for
the sea. But, at any rate, I do believe she sincerely thinks it ought to
be worshipped and bowed down to. It's no use to tell such a woman that
she could do without this or that useless finery, and spend the money
better. She'll answer you with tears in her eyes that it's _impossible_;
and, what's more, she'll believe it. Why, if some Tomnoddy or other,
belonging to what she calls "the best people," was to ordain to-morrow
that nobody should eat his dinner unless he was waited on by a man with
a long pigtail, that poor creature would know no peace, nor her meat
would have no relish until a man with a pigtail stood behind her chair.
That's Mrs. Dormer-Smith, Jo Weatherhead."
Mr. Weatherhead drew up his lips into the form of a round O, as his
manner was when considering any matter of interest, and appeared to
meditate a reply. But the reply was never spoken; for a brisk ring at
the street door gave a new turn to his thoughts and those of his
sister-in-law.
"Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Dobbs, putting up her hands to settle her cap,
and stretching out her feet with a sudden movement which made the old
tabby on the hearthrug arch her back indignantly. "Why, that must be the
Simpsons! I didn't think it was so late. Just light the candles, will
you, Jo? I hope Martha has remembered the roasted potatoes."