THE STORY OF A BOOKWORM.
YES, she is dead, and on her snow-strewn grave I left a bunch of winter
flowers but yesterday. Ah, me! I never go and wander in that dingy
churchyard, where the sound of the great roaring city is hushed to a
sleepy murmur, but I seem to leave half my poor life there; would that I
could leave it all, I sometimes think, and that when the sexton comes to
bring the keys of the church on a Sunday morning he should find the mere
body of me lying there, my head leaning on the stone that bears her
name--not _his_ name--_her_ name, her one dear name by which I called
her last of all.
But these are ill thoughts, and as the poet says "this way madness
lies." Let me get to my books, there is comfort and companionship in
them; and yet I have held my finger in this page till the light is gone
and it's too dark to read.
I suppose I was meant for a bookworm, and yet I didn't like school. At
all events I didn't like the Free Grammar School of St. Bothwyn
By-Church, to which I had the privilege of being elected when my poor
father was clerk of the Company, and lived in the old hall till he
bought this little house in Hoxton. Ah me! how I seem to see the old
black oaken wainscot of the court room, and the little parlour where the
firelight danced in deep crimson flecks and pools in the polished floor,
and the shadowy panels! How I can remember going in after dark in winter
evenings and sitting there, a lonely motherless boy, and seeming to be
lost in some mysterious way to the outside world, as I pored over tales
of old romance, or when I grew older traced the origin of some quaint
custom in one of the heavy leather-bound volumes that filled the narrow
cramped bookcase of the clerk's office!
In the midst of my dreaming one thing was real to me, and I suppose it
was a part of my queer character, that what was said to be fancy in
other young men was the one fact of my life. I mean love. Apart from the
daily routine of the office, which often became mechanical, so that I
could pursue it and think of other things even while it was going on, I
had no true life in the present--that is to say no strongly conscious
life of my own, apart from the region of imagination--except when I was
sitting in the deep old escutcheoned bay-window of the Hall, looking out
upon the old shaded courtyard, where the sunlight, darting amidst the
spreading plane-trees, flecked and chequered the marble pavement, and
the little carved fountain trilled and rippled till it incited the
canary hanging in its gilded cage to break into song that drowned its
splashing murmur, and silenced the sparrows twittering about the heavy
woodwork of the old porch. That was my real world, because there was one
figure, one face, that held me to it, as though by a spell that I could
not, and never sought to break. I scarcely remember the time I did not
love her.
Mary never suspected, as I sat watching her at work, or reading to her
on those summer evenings, that my heart was ready to break out into
words of passionate entreaty. She had been so used to see me sitting
there, or to run with me round the little paved courtyard, or the old
dingy grass plot in the midst of its prim gravel walks at the side of
the hall that I had become an ordinary association of her life. I had
left school while she was still learning of a governess, who came four
times a week to teach her, for her father was a man of more
consideration than mine. But Mary was motherless as I was. Our mothers
had been dear friends in their school-girl days and afterwards; and our
fathers were old acquaintances; and so it came about that I was often at
the Hall for the week round after office hours, and that I seemed to
belong as much to the place as the old, fat, wheezy, brown spaniel that
stood upon the broad stone step and welcomed me with tail and tongue.
But while I remained, as it were, stationary--an old-fashioned boy, an
older-fashioned youth, an antiquated man--she altered. Occasionally when
I went to see her she had gone out visiting, and I was left to dream
away the evening in the old window waiting for her return, or, if I knew
which way she came, loitering in the street in case she should be
unattended by the maid who was usually sent to meet or to fetch her when
her father did not go himself.
It was on one of these evenings that I suddenly understood what was the
cause of the undefinable change that I had noticed in her manner some
time before. In the previous week the company had held a court dinner,
and that was the evening when the alderman introduced his son--"My son,
the captain," as he called him--a captain by purchase, and with the
right to wear a brilliant uniform and long moustachios. A chuckle-pated
fellow, for all his scarlet coat and clanking heels, but with a
bullying, insolent air. When the feast was over, and the guests were
preparing to go, it was time for me to go too, for I had been late
helping to make up some of the accounts in the office; and, after taking
my hat off the hook in the passage, turned to the old sitting-room to
look for Mary, that I might say, "Good-night."
It was beyond her time for being about, especially on the court nights,
but to my surprise, as I opened the door she was standing there with
the captain, who was holding her hand. He had no business there, and she
knew it. The other diners were already coming down the stairs at the end
of the passage. He must have stolen down quickly, and she must have been
waiting for him. This all passed through my mind in a moment as I stood
looking at him, such an ugly leer upon his face as he bent over her hand
that I had to clench my fingers till the blood started in the nails to
keep down my rising wrath.
"Hallo! who is this?" he said, as he turned with a swagger, but without
dropping her hand.
"Oh! Richard, I thought you'd gone home long ago. It's only a friend of
my father's, and he's so near-sighted I suppose he did not see anybody
here," she replied in a flutter.
"Confounded little manners," said the captain, staring at me.
I was dumb--and my limbs seemed to be rigid.
"Is he deaf too?" asked the captain with a grin. "Confounded little
manners, really."
"You're welcome to the little there are," I blurted out; "you have none
of your own. Mary, shall I take you to your father?"
She pushed away my outstretched hand and hurried from the room; and he
went out also after bestowing upon me an oath which I could hear him
repeat as he sought his hat and cloak in the hall. I stood there without
a word. My heart had seemed to drop within me as a coal fire burnt to
ashes falls together in a grate. The warmth that kept it alive had gone
out suddenly. But it smouldered yet, and when I went to meet her a few
evenings afterwards I had determined to gather courage and speak to her
once for all. I walked mechanically through the streets between the Hall
and Doctors' Commons, where she had gone on a visit, and was just
turning by the old garden beyond the Proctors' College when I heard
voices close to me, and looking up, saw her walking with _him_, clinging
to his arm, looking into his face. I hesitated for a moment, and they
saw me. "Good-night!" said she in a formal voice as she clutched his arm
tighter, and they both passed on.
So all was over. It was many weeks before I went again to see her
father. It might have been many more. I think I should never have gone
again but for my own father saying to me, "Dick, my son, I can see and
feel for you too, but bear up; you are no boy now, you know. And I had
set my heart on it too; so had our old friend. He wants you to go and
see him, Dick, to help him make up his quarterly account, as you used to
do. Perhaps she'll tire of this popinjay--and, when she comes to her
senses--"
"Or when he deserts her," I interrupted bitterly.
The dear old man said no more, but pressed my hand--his other hand upon
my shoulder. "Go and see our old friend," he repeated presently.
I went--taking care to avoid the familiar sitting-room and to go only to
the office. There her father sat, looking strangely worn and anxious,
but he rose to greet me.
He was pleased to see me. I could see that by the smile that brought
something of the old look back upon his face; but his voice shook as he
told me that at the first rumour of active service the pompous alderman
had bought the captain off, and that now he had all his time to dangle
after Mary. It had broken him, he said; he was not the man he had been.
His accounts confused him, and his cash-balance was short. He was going
that very night to see an old cousin, to ask if she would take charge of
Mary for a while; and if I would only once more look through the books
while he was gone, perhaps I might put them right.
It was a cold night, near Christmas, and there was a bright fire in the
office, which seemed to light the room with a ruddy glow that quite
paled the flame of the shaded lamp upon the writing-table. All was so
still that the ticking of the old clock upon a bracket seemed to grow
into an emphatic beat upon my ear quickened with nervous pain; but I sat
down and was soon immersed in my accustomed drudgery of figures, so
that, when I had taken out sundry balances, and checked the totals with
a sum of money in gold and silver that lay upon the table in a leather
bag, I had ceased to note how the night wore on; and after tying up the
cash and placing it inside the secretaire, of which I turned the key, I
sat down before the fire in a high-backed old leather chair and began to
think, or dream, no matter which.
Above the high carved mantel was a little round old-fashioned mirror,
and as I lay back in the chair my purblind eyes were fixed upon it as it
reflected the mingled gleams of lamp and fire that touched the shining
surfaces of the oaken wall or the furniture of the room. My back was to
the door, and yet by the sudden passing of a shadow across the glass I
saw that it was being opened stealthily--and all the doors were too
heavy and well hung to make a sound, if only the locks were noiselessly
turned. I was so concealed by the great chair, and by the darkness of
the corner where I sat beyond the radius of the lamp, that the intruder
advanced quickly. He evidently expected to find nobody there, and, with
scarcely a glance round, went to the table, peered amongst the books,
and then, as though not finding what he sought, turned to the
secretaire, and with a sudden wrench of the key opened it. I had had
time to think what I should do, and as his hand closed on the bag of
money I sprang to the bell beside the fireplace and rang it furiously;
then darted across the room and stood with my back to the door. The
captain--for it was he, and I had known him by his height and
figure--gave a sort of shriek and turned livid as he dropped the bag and
came towards me.
"You here!" he said. "It's well that I happened to come in and catch
you."
"Stand back!" I cried, "or I'll raise the neighbourhood to see the noble
captain who has turned thief. You don't go till the servants at least
know who and what you are."
"You fool!" he retorted, his face working. "It's only your word against
mine; and who has the most right here, I'd like to know?"
All this time some one was pushing heavily against the door from the
outside, and a woman was whimpering there. I stepped back, still facing
him, and flung it open. It was Mary, looking white and wild, and holding
a sealed letter in her hand.
"What is this? Why are you here, Algernon?" she asked, turning to the
captain.
"He was here to rob your father of another treasure besides yourself," I
said. "He is a thief, and I will proclaim him as such."
"A thief! How dare you?" she said, her face all aflame. "Do you know you
are speaking of my husband?"
"Husband!" I cried--"Husband!" And I leaned on a chair for support.
"Richard," she said, placing the letter on the table, "I brought this
that I might leave it for my father when he came in. You will see that
he has it, will you?--or if you go before his return, let him find it
when he comes."
Married! The room swam round; and as I stood there, dumb and sick, they
seemed to swim with it out at the door.
When I came to myself the place was still as death, save for the ticking
of the clock and the click of the failing fire. But there lay the
letter. Another moment, as it seemed to me, and her father had let
himself in and I had placed it in his hand. He read it half through
before he quite understood what had been inclosed in it--a narrow
printed slip of paper. Suddenly he unfolded that and carried it nearer
the light.
"Married!" he said. "Well, thank God for that! But--but--married, and to
him!"--and he fell forward on the table.
He didn't die. People don't mostly die of these shocks. The months went
on; the years went on; and though he'd never seen his daughter, nor
rightly knew where she was, he heard that her husband had an allowance
made him by his father after his gambling debts had been paid; but the
alderman had taken his head clerk into partnership, and there was an end
of the captain's going into the business.
My dear old father died and left me this house and his small savings. I
seldom went to the Hall, though I should have been welcome there. Four
times a year I lent a hand with the accounts for the sake of old
routine, and stayed to eat a little supper and drink a glass of the
famous claret, or to smoke a pipe with the old gentleman, who was
failing greatly. His daughter was never mentioned between us, and I
supposed he had lost sight of her altogether, when, one night, he said
quite suddenly: "Dick, I wish you'd take a letter and a message to Mary
for me."
He hadn't called me Dick for years, and I thought he was drivelling, but
he held an open letter into which he was folding some banknotes.
"You may read it, Dick. They are in London, but she has not been to see
me, and she writes for help to tide over some difficulties, she says,
till her husband can see his father. She evidently doesn't know that the
alderman's in the bankruptcy court. Poor dear, poor dear, she's reaping
the fruits of her disobedience, and yet she will not come to see me. To
her own hand, Dick, to her own hand only, must this letter go. It tells
her how, in the last resort, she may seek my cousin, if she will not
come to me before I die. My poor savings--they are but little,
Dick--will be in trust for her with my cousin, but she sha'n't know that
from me. Could you take this to-morrow morning, Dick?"
I could do no less than promise to convey it to her, and the next
morning set off to find the house, in a rather mean neighbourhood, where
I found that she and her husband had taken furnished lodgings. A servant
girl took up my name, and I was asked to walk upstairs. There, upon the
landing, stood the woman I had not seen since the night she left her
father's home, but changed, as years should not have changed her, and
with a pleading anxious look in her scared eyes that was grievous to
see.
"Richard," she said with a faint smile, and holding out her hand, "is it
you?"
"I come as the bearer of a written message," I replied; "but if I can
ever do you real service you know well enough that I should gladly aid
you."
"Thank you, Richard," she said gently, "I know it; but my father, he is
well? His writing has changed though, it trembles so," and she burst
into tears as she went to the landing window to read the letter. She had
but just finished, and was slipping it into the bosom of her dress,
when, with a sudden gesture, she said, "I dare not stay. I hear him
coming up the street. Good-bye, good-bye, and take my love to papa, my
dear, dear love. Say I'll write again or see him; but now go, and take
no notice."
I went down, and should have passed quietly from the house, but a
latch-key turned in the street door, and, as I tried to go out, the
"Captain" stood in the way. I knew him, bloated, shabby, and broken down
as he looked, but should have said nothing had he not also recognized
me, and turned upon me with an oath, wanting to know what I did there.
I had heard of their address, I said, and that misfortune had overtaken
his father, and had come to see whether I could do anything to help
them.
Could I lend him a ten-pound note there and then? he asked, with an ugly
laugh; and when I said, I had no such sum, he broke out again in a
torrent of abuse.
I would have pushed past him, but he seized me by the arm, and swung me
round facing him. I still strove to get away, when I heard his wife's
imploring voice upon the stairs; and he spoke words that made the little
blood that was in me surge swift and hot to my face. In a moment I had
wrenched myself free, and struck him full on the mouth with my clenched
hand. He was cowed for a moment, and turned white, but there were two or
three people looking on by that time.
"You miserable old pantaloon," he screamed, as he made a rush at me.
But I had one hand on the knob of the door, and, swinging round as
though I worked on a pivot, I caught him full between the eyes, and sent
him sprawling among the hats and umbrellas that he had knocked down in
his fall. Then I closed the door, and walked away. The page is turned
for ever now, I muttered to myself. I cannot even meet her father again.
Poor old gentleman!--he died--he died too soon; but not before I'd seen
him and held his hand in mine. But she had never been to the old home;
and on inquiring at the place where they had lodged, it was believed
that they had gone abroad after the death of their two children.
So that was the bitter ending, I thought. And all that dead past was to
be closed like a page in a book that is read and clasped.
Yes; but the book is reopened sometimes, where a sprig of rue has been
placed to mark between the leaves.
I didn't change. I was long past changing. And I followed my old
pursuits; went to my old haunts; wore my old clothes, as I do now, from
day to day.
So years went on, until one dreary afternoon in November--one bright and
sunny afternoon it might have been for its influence on my dim
calendar--I was rummaging one of the boxes of a bookstall in Holborn,
when the keeper of it came out and put two or three battered volumes
among the rest. Instinctively I took one of them up and opened it. A
great throb came into my heart and made me reel; for it was a
prayer-book, and there on the title-page was _her_ name--_hers_, and in
_my_ handwriting of years and years ago. The prayer-book that I had
given her.
"Dear me, sir, you look faint-like," says the dealer; "let me fetch you
a stool, or come in and sit down a bit."
"Can you--tell--me," I gasped, "where you bought this book? Where and
when?"
"Where? Why here. When? Why five minutes ago, along with two or three
more, of no particular value, of a poor little thing that said it was
all her mother had to part with--Stop, sir, stop; why, there she is
coming out of the grocer's shop this very minute. Run after the old
gentleman, James; he'll do himself a mischief, or be run over, or
something."
For I had dashed after the child like a madman, my hat off, the open
book in my hand. James had outrun me though, and was now coming back
with a child--a young girl--poorly clad; oh! so poorly clad; but yet
like Mary--my Mary--on the day I wrote that name in the book still open
in my hand.
"Mary!" I gasped.
"Yes, sir," said the child; "I must make haste home, or my mother will
have no tea."
* * * * *
No, no, I will not dwell on the recollection of that poor room, with its
evidences of want, its signs of suffering; nor of all that might have
been said and was not. By the bedside of the woman whom I had loved and
lost, and who was now passing from the world into the great reality of
life, I had few words to speak. The only witness of the promise I
made--except the Lord and His angels--was the silently weeping girl,
_his_ only remaining child. Almost the only words were:--
"Mary."
"Dick."
And the child stood there clasping her mother's hand--_my_ hand; to be
in future my child and the child of the mother in heaven; and who shall
tell but at the resurrection----
Ah! I hear her foot upon the stair, her sweet voice singing as she
comes--that sweet sweet voice that one day, maybe, will sing me to
sleep.
------------------------------
"Ah-h-h!" sighed Mrs. Parmigan, who had listened to the last two stories
without saying a word but with an expression of wonder. "How you can
remember so much about people I can't imagine; but really, my dear,
these love stories never do end except in the saddest way. Now if I
could only write a tale, which I know is, of course, quite impossible,
it should be every word of it true, and everybody should be as happy as
the day is long."
"But then you see, dear Mrs. Parmigan, that wouldn't be every word
true," said Miss Grantley with her grave smile. "I hope, my dear young
friends here are mostly happy with me at school, but there are times
when we don't feel altogether in harmony, and lessons are not learned,
and our tempers get the upper hand, and the sun seems to have gone
behind a cloud and the world turns the wrong way, till the storm lowers
and breaks, and then come regret and forbearance, and the stillness, and
'the gentle shining after rain.' Life is often a rather difficult
school, and our education in this world is not completed without trouble
and the discipline of pain and the finding of strength through weakness
and of truth through error. But come, old lady, I am not to be led into
a lecture, especially to a person of your years and experience, so tell
me what you mean,--where am I to find 'a love story,' as you call it,
that shall be without bitter-sweet, and come to a bright ending without
going through a dark passage?"
"Well, to tell you the truth, my dear, I was first thinking of my own
very happy, but at the same time very commonplace and unromantic married
life with Mr. Parmigan, who, as you know, was in the Bank of England,
and came home as regularly as the clock struck half-past five; but then
I was trying to recall what Mrs. Schwartz the cooper's wife was telling
you that day when we went into her house out of the rain after our long
walk from Fernside."
"What! has that pretty, fair, round rosy-cheeked German woman a romance
in her life?" asked Annie Bowers. "I declare I've often thought there
must have been some kind of sentimental recollection in those great
dreamy blue eyes. What a fine, strong-looking man her husband is too!
Marion and I have often stood looking into the shed while he has been at
work making tubs and casks, and sometimes we have heard him singing some
German song as we walked that way. He speaks English so well too; but
Mrs. Schwartz has a pretty buzzing accent, even the two flaxen-headed
children have caught it, and talk in what seems to be a German idiom."
"Well, would you like me to try and repeat Mrs. Schwartz's story as she
has told it to me?" said our governess. "I must let you know, however,
that she and I are very old friends, for I have been to see her over and
over again, and she and her children have been here to tea several times
in the holidays, her husband fetching them home in the evening. I was
selfish in that, for I wanted to refresh my own ear with the German
accent, and they both speak well, particularly the master cooper, who
like most of his countrymen was a true journeyman, and travelled all
over the country to practise his trade before he was drafted off to the
army to fight in the Franco-German War."
"Oh tell us the Schwartz love story!" said Sarah Jorring, "and try to
tell it just as you heard it; it would be so much more sentimental."
"But not in German," we cried, "that wouldn't be fair, to give us a
German exercise under the pretence of a story; we'll have it in
English."
"Well, you shall have it in something like the original German-English,
which seems to me very much to resemble real old English, and sounds to
my ear more simple and more fit for story-telling than the more modern
tongue. You must try to picture to yourselves Mrs. Schwartz when she was
younger and paler, and wore a round white cap and great silver
ear-rings, and was in fact a slender, rather pale pretty girl with a
plaintive look in her great blue eyes, and a voice soft and low. The
story arose from our talking about the fashion of Christmas-trees having
been adopted in England, and the recollection of the last Christmas-tree
that she had seen at her old home with her former mistress caused her to
say with a deep sigh, 'Ach! _Ich habe gelebt und geliebet_;' so I will
call the story 'I have lived and loved,' and you must try to fancy that
Mrs. Schwartz is speaking."
[Illustration]