A RETROSPECTIVE SURVEY.
FROM the mediæval tranquillity of Villebrumeuse to the dreary
desolation of Tilbury Crescent is a sorry change. Instead of the
quaint peaked roofs and grand old churches, the verdant avenues and
placid water, there are unfinished streets and terraces of raw-looking
brick, half-built railway-arches, chasm-like cuttings newly made in
the damp clay soil, and patches of rank greensward that mark the site
of desolated fields. The sulphurous odours of a brickfield pervade the
atmosphere about and around Tilbury Crescent. The din of a distant
high-road, the roar of many wheels, and the clamour of excited
costermongers, float in occasional gusts of sound upon the dismal
stillness of the neighbourhood, where the shrill voices of children,
playing hopscotch in an adjacent street, are painfully audible.
Decent poverty has set a seal upon this little labyrinth of streets
and squares and crescents and terraces, before the builder’s men
have left the newest of the houses, while there are still roofless
skeletons at every corner, waiting till the speculator who began them
shall have raised enough money to finish them. The neighbourhood lies
northward, and the rents of those yellow-brick tenements are cheap. So
decent poverty, in all its many guises, comes hitherward for shelter.
Newly-married lawyers’ clerks take up their abode in the eight-roomed
dwellings, and you shall divine, by the fashion of blinds and curtains,
the trim propriety of doorsteps and tiny front gardens, whether the
young householders have drawn prizes in the matrimonial lottery. Small
tradesmen bring their wares to the little shops, which break out here
and there at the corners of the streets, and struggle feebly for a
livelihood. Patient young dressmakers exhibit fly-blown fashion-plates
in parlour windows, and wait hopefully or despairingly, as the case
may be, for custom and patronage. And in more windows than the chance
pedestrian would care to count hangs the pasteboard announcement of
apartments to let.
Eustace Thorburn came to Tilbury Crescent in the blazing July noontide.
He had landed at St. Katherine’s Wharf, and had made his way to this
northern suburb on foot. He was rich enough to have ridden in an
omnibus, or to have enjoyed the luxury of a hansom, had he been so
minded; but he was an ambitious young man, and had cultivated the
nobler Spartan virtues from his earliest boyhood. The few pounds in his
possession would have to serve him until he returned to the Parthenée,
or obtained some new employment; so he had much need to be careful of
shillings, and chary even of pence. The walk through the dirty bustling
London streets seemed long and weary to him; but his thoughts were more
weary than that pedestrian journey under the meridian sun, and the
sad memories of his youth were a heavier burden than the carpet-bag he
carried slung across his shoulder.
He knocked at the door of one of the shabbiest houses in the crescent,
and was admitted by an elderly woman, who was slipshod and slovenly,
but who had a good-natured face, which brightened as she recognized
the traveller. In the next moment she remembered the sad occasion of
his coming, and put on that conventional expression of profound sorrow
which people assume so easily for the affliction of others.
“Ah, dear, dear, Mr. Thorburn!” she cried, “I never thought to see you
come back like this, and she not here to bid you welcome, poor sweet
lamb!”
The young man held up his hand to stay the torrent of sympathy.
“Please, don’t talk to me about my mother,” he said, quietly; “I can’t
bear it--yet.”
The honest woman looked at him wonderingly. She had been accustomed to
deal with people who liked to talk of their griefs, and she did not
understand this quiet way of putting aside a sorrow. The mourners whom
she had encountered had worn their sackcloth and covered themselves
with ashes in the face of the world, and here was a young man who had
not so much as a band upon his hat, and who rejected her friendly
sympathy!
“I can have my--the old rooms, for a week or so, I suppose, Mrs. Bane?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve took the liberty to put a bill up, thinking as perhaps
you might not return from abroad; and if it’s for a week only, perhaps
you’d allow the bill to remain? There are so many apartments about this
neighbourhood, you see, sir, and people are that pushing now-a-days,
that a poor widow-woman has scarcely a chance. It’s a hard thing to be
left alone in the world, Mr. Thorburn.”
There was an open wound in the heart of Eustace Thorburn which ignorant
hands were always striking.
“It’s a hard thing to be left alone in the world,” he thought, echoing
the landlady’s lamentation. “_She_ was left alone in the world
before I was born.”
The landlady repeated her question.
“Oh yes, you can leave the bill; but don’t let any one come to look at
the rooms to-day. I am not likely to be here more than a week. Can I go
upstairs at once?”
Mrs. Bane plunged her hand into a capacious pocket, and, after much
searching the depths of that receptacle, produced a door-key, which she
handed to Eustace.
“Mr. Mayfield told me to lock the door, sir, because of papers and
such-like. The bedroom door is fastened on the inside.”
The young man nodded, and went upstairs with a brisk, rapid footstep,
and not with that ponderous, solemn tread which Mrs. Bane would have
considered appropriate to his bereaved condition.
“And I thought he would have took on dreadful!” she ejaculated, as she
went back to her underground kitchen, where there was generally an
atmosphere laden with the steam of boiling soap-suds, or an odour of
singed ironing-blanket.
Eustace Thorburn unlocked the door, and went into the room which
had so lately been inhabited by his mother. It was a dingy little
sitting-room, opening into a bedroom that was still smaller. It was a
lodging of the same pattern as a thousand other lodgings in newly-built
suburbs. The personalty of the woman who had left it for a still
narrower lodging would scarcely have realized twenty shillings under
the auctioneer’s hammer; and yet to Eustace Thorburn the shabby room
was eloquent of the dead. That dilapidated rosewood workbox--for which
the auctioneer would have been ashamed to propose a starting bid of a
shilling--conjured up the vision of a patient creature bending over her
work. The little stand of books--cheap editions of the poets, in worn
cloth binding--recalled _her_ sweet face, illumined by a transient
splendour, as the inspired verses of her favourites lifted her above
this earth and all her earthly sorrows. The valueless china inkstand,
and worn blotting-book, had been used by her for more than four years.
Eustace Thorburn took the things up one by one, and put them to his
lips. There was something almost passionate in the kiss which he
imprinted upon those lifeless objects--it was the kiss which he would
have pressed upon her pale lips, had he been recalled in time to bid
her farewell. He kissed the books which she had been wont to read, the
pen with which she had written, and then cast himself suddenly into the
low chair where he had so often seen her seated, and abandoned himself
to his grief. Had Mrs. Bane, the landlady, heard these convulsive
sobs, and seen the tears streaming between the fingers which the young
man clasped before his eyes, she would have had no need to complain
of Mr. Thorburn’s want of emotion. For a long time he sat in the same
attitude, still weeping. But the passionate grief wore itself out at
last. He dashed the tears from his eyes with an impatient gesture, and
rose, pale and calm, to begin the work which he had set himself to do.
His love for his mother had been the ruling passion of his life. She
was at rest now, and he could face the future calmly. He could go forth
to meet his destiny with a spirit at once superior to hope and fear. It
was for _her_ he had hoped; it was for her he had feared. He stood
alone now; his breast was no longer a rampart to shield her from “the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The arrows might come thick
and fast now; they could only wound him; and he already had suffered
the deepest wound that evil fortune could inflict upon him. He had lost
_her_.
The bitterest sting of all lay in the knowledge that she had never
been happy. Her son had loved her with unspeakable tenderness. He had
protected her and worked for her, and admired and adored her; but he
had never been able to make her happy. That gentle, womanly heart had
been too deeply wounded in the past. Eustace Thorburn had known this;
and knowing this had been patient, because he would not trouble her
mild spirit by any show of impatience. He had known that she had been
wronged, and yet had never asked her the name of the wrong-doer. He,
her natural champion and avenger, had never sought for vengeance upon
the man whose treachery or unkindness had blighted her life. He had
held his peace, because to question her would have been to pain her;
and how could he give her pain? So he had been patient, in spite of
a passionate desire for ever smouldering in his heart--the desire to
avenge his mother’s wrongs.
She was at rest; and the time for vengeance had arrived. The same fatal
influence which had destroyed her happiness had shortened her life. In
the prime of womanhood, before a wrinkle had lined her forehead, or a
silver thread appeared amidst her soft brown hair, she had gone to her
grave, unutterably patient to the last, but broken-hearted from the
very first.
The young man put his grief away from him, and set himself to consider
the new business of his life.
The one desire of his mind was that of vengeance upon his mother’s
nameless enemy; and the thought that this enemy was his own father was
powerless to soften his heart in the smallest measure, or to hinder him
for one single hour from the achievement of his purpose.
“I want to know who he is,” he said to himself. “My first business must
be to discover his name; my next, to make him more ashamed of that name
than I am of my namelessness.”
He went to the chimney-piece, where there was a letter waiting for
him, sealed with a sprawling black seal, and addressed to him in the
inscrutable penmanship of his uncle.
The envelope contained only a few lines, but enclosed in it there was
a little bunch of keys, with every one of which the young man was
familiar. He took them up with a sigh, and looked at them one by one,
almost as tenderly as he had looked at the books. The commonest object
in that chamber had its association for him,--and with every such
association, the grief which he had tried so hard to put away from him
took possession of him anew.
There was a ponderous, old-fashioned mahogany desk on a side-table, and
it was in this desk that the lonely inhabitant of the room had been
accustomed to keep her letters and papers, together with those few
valueless relics--that pitiful jetsam and flotsam from the shipwreck of
hope and happiness which are left to the most desolate creature.
Eustace unlocked and opened the desk as softly as if his mother had
been sleeping near him. He had often seen her seated at this desk; he
had once surprised her in tears, with a little packet of letters in her
hand, but he had never seen the contents of any of those discoloured
papers, tied with faded ribbons, and disfigured by obsolete postmarks.
And now that she was gone, it was his duty to examine those papers,--or
so he considered. Yet there was a shade of compunction in his mind as
he touched the first packet, and he felt as if he had been committing a
sacrilege.
The first packet was labelled “My Mother’s Letters,” and contained the
epistles of some good womanly creature, written to a daughter who was
away at boarding-school. They were full of allusions to a comfortable
middle-class household--a tradesman’s household, as it seemed, for
there were occasional references to events that had occurred in the
shop, and to “my dear husband’s over-exerting himself in the business,”
and to “Daniel’s unsettled ways and indisposition to take to his
father’s occupation.”
Eustace smiled faintly as he read of poor Daniel, whose unsettled ways
had been notorious before Sir Rowland Hill’s post-office amendments,
and who remained unsettled in these latter days of electric telegraphy
and labyrinthine railway cuttings.
The letters were very sweet, by reason of the tender motherly spirit
which pervaded every line,--more or less ill-spelt here and there,
and by no means well written, but over-flowing with affection. Again
and again the writer implored her “dearest Sissy” not to fret, and to
look forward to the holidays, which would come very soon, when Sissy
would see her dear mother and father, whose household love she pined
for in the great middle-class boarding-school, as it was evident by the
tone of maternal letters which replied to lamentations from desolate
home-sick Sissy. There were hampers for dearest Sissy, and little
presents,--a coral necklace from father, a sash from mother, and once,
a tinselled portrait of Mr. Edmund Kean in the character of Othello,
with a tunic of real crimson satin let into the paper,--a tinselled
portrait which had been poor unsettled Daniel’s labour of love in
the long winter evenings, and which the mother dwelt on with evident
pleasure.
Eustace knew that these letters had been written by his
grandmother,--the grandmother who had never held him in her arms,
or taken pride in his baby graces. He lingered lovingly over the
old-fashioned sheets of letter-paper--he gazed fondly upon the
stiffly-formed signature, “Elizabeth Mayfield,” and he dropped some
few tears upon the worn yellow paper, which had been blotted with many
tears before to-day. It was not possible that he could think of his
mother in her innocent school-days without emotion.
The second packet contained only three letters, addressed to dearest
Sissy at home, when she had ceased to be a school-girl, and these were
in a hand not altogether unfamiliar to Eustace. It was a youthful
modification of Daniel Mayfield’s inscrutable calligraphy; and again
Eustace Thorburn smiled with the same faint smile. The letters were
written from a lawyer’s office where the lad was articled; for Daniel
had persisted in his aversion to his father’s business, and had
declared himself unfitted for anything upon earth except the law, for
which he was assured he had a special vocation. They were pleasant,
boyish letters, and full of the slang of the day--such locutions as
“Flare up!” and “What a shocking bad hat!” and “There you go with your
eye out!” and other conversational embellishments peculiar to the
period. But through all the slang and young-mannish affectations there
was an undercurrent of genuine affection for the writer’s “dear little
dark-eyed Sissy.” He knew no end of pretty girls in London, he told
her, but not one worthy to be compared with his darling Celia. “And
when I am on the Rolls, with slap-up chambers of my own in the Fields,
and a first-rate business, you shall come and keep house for me, Sissy;
and we’ll have a little cottage at Putney, and a wherry, and I’ll row
you up the river every evening after business; and while my sentimental
little sister sits in the stern reading a novel, her faithful Daniel
will get himself into training for a sculling-match.”
The first two letters were full of hopeful allusions to the writer’s
prospects. The young man seemed to fancy he was going to make a royal
progress through the different grades of his profession, and there
was scarcely any limit to the pleasant things which he promised his
only sister. But, in the third letter, written after an interval of
six months, all this was changed. The life of an articled clerk was a
slavery, compared to which the existence of a negro in the West Indian
sugar-plantations must be one perpetual delight. Daniel was tired of
his profession, and informed his dearest Sissy, in strict confidence,
that no power on earth would ever make a lawyer of him.
“It isn’t me, my dear Celia,” he wrote; “your impetuous Dan is not
fashioned out of the stuff which makes an attorney. I’ve tried to take
to the law, just as I tried to take to the circulating-library and
fancy-stationery business, to please poor father and mother; but it’s
no use. You mustn’t say anything to the dear old dad, for he’d begin
to be unhappy about the money he wasted on my articles; and before he
discovers that I don’t take to the law, I shall have taken to something
which will make me a rich man, and I shall be able to give him back
his money three times over.”
And then Daniel Mayfield went on to give a flourishing description
of a very bright and splendid castle-in-the-air which he had lately
erected. He had found a Pactolus in his inkstand, and something better
than a landed estate in a quire of foolscap. He was a genius. The
divine _afflatus_ had descended upon him, and Coke and Blackstone
might go hang. He was a poet, an essayist, an historian, a novelist,
a playwright--anything you like. He had been a scribbler from the
days of his childhood, and of late had scribbled more than ever. And
after the innumerable failures and disappointments which constitute
that Slough of Despond through which every literary aspirant must
pass, he had succeeded in getting an article inserted in one of those
coarsely-written and poorly-illustrated comic periodicals from the
ashes whereof arose that bright Phoenix, _Punch_. And the editor
of the periodical had promised to take further contributions from the
same lively pen, Daniel informed his sister. He had received two
guineas sterling coin of the realm for his lucubration, “thrown off
in half an hour,” he told dear Sissy. And thereupon he entered into a
calculation of his future income, at the rate of four guineas an hour
for all the working-hours in the day. “Messrs. Screwem and Swindleton
don’t get as much for their time, in spite of their genius for running
up the six-and-eightpences,” wrote Daniel.
There was a mournful smile upon Eustace Thorburn’s face as he read
the letters. He knew the writer so well, and knew into what a poor,
imperfect, dilapidated habitation that air-built castle had resolved
itself. The young man had not deceived himself as to his own powers; he
had only wasted them. The talents had been his, and he had scattered
the precious gifts here and there with a reckless hand--too rich
to fear poverty, too strong to apprehend exhaustion. He had thrown
his pearls before swine, and had allowed his diamonds to be set in
worthless crowns of brass and tinsel. The flower of his youth had
faded, while he, who might have achieved greatness--and that which
seems a deal more difficult for genius to achieve, respectability--was
only Dan Mayfield, a newspaper hack, one of a modern Jacob Tonson’s
“clever hands,” a lounger in taverns, a penniless Bohemian, with
flowing hair, which time was beginning to thin, and eyes at whose
corners the crow had set the ineffaceable print of his feet.
Eustace replaced the letters with a respectful hand. Was he not
tampering with the ashes of his mother’s youth, and was not every paper
in that desk sanctified by the tears of the dead?
“Poor Uncle Dan!” he murmured, gently; “poor, kind, sanguine Uncle
Dan!”