A PREPOSTEROUS AUNT
No doubt it has been surmised from what has gone before, that when Henry
said to himself that he would go and see Aunt Tipping, he did not
propose to himself a visit to the country seat of some quaint old lady
of quality. Baronial towers and stately avenues of ancestral elm did not
make a picturesque background for his thoughts as he recalled
Aunt Tipping.
Poor kind Aunt Tipping, it is a shame to banter her memory even in so
obvious a fashion; for if ever there was a kind heart, it was hers. In
fact she possessed, in a degree that amounted to genius, one of the
rarest of human qualities,--unconditional pity for the unhappy human
creature. Within her narrow and squalid sphere, she was never known to
fail of such succour as was hers to give to misfortune, however
well-merited, or misery however self-made.
No religion or philosophy has ever yet been merciful enough to human
weakness. Matilda Tipping repaired the lack so far as she went. In fact,
she had unconsciously realised that weakness _is_ human nature. It would
be difficult to fix upon an offence that would disqualify you for Aunt
Tipping's pity. To the prodigalities of the passions, and the appetites
disastrously indulged, she was accustomed by a long succession of those
sad and shady lodgers to whom it was part of her precarious livelihood
to let her rooms, and, not infrequently, to forgive them their rent.
That men and women should drink too much, and love too many, was, her
experience told her, one of those laws of nature that seemed to make a
good deal of unnecessary inconvenience in mortal affairs, but against
which mere preaching or punishment availed nothing. All that was to be
done was, so far as possible, to repair their ravages in particular
instances, and heal the wounds of human passion with simple
human kindness.
Of two vessels, one for honour and the other for dishonour, surely
nature never made so complete a contrast as Matilda Tipping and her
sister, Mary Mesurier. Both country girls, born in a humble, though
defiantly respectable, stratum of society, the ways of the two sisters
had already parted in childhood. Mary was studious, neat, and religious;
Matilda was tomboyish, impatient of restraint, and fond of unedifying
associates.
"Your aunt never aspired," Mrs. Mesurier would say of Aunt Tipping
sometimes to her children; and, while still a child, she had often
reproached her with her fondness for gossiping with companions "beneath
her." Matilda could never be persuaded to care for books. She was
naturally illiterate, and even late in life had a fixed aversion to
writing her own letters; whereas, at the age of seven, Mary had been
public scrivener for the whole village. But with these regrettable
instincts, from the first Matilda had also manifested a whimsical
liveliness, an unconquerable lightheartedness which made you forgive her
anything, and for which, poor soul, she had use enough before she was
done with life. At seventeen, added to good looks, of which at fifty
there was scarcely a trace in the thin and meanly worn face, this
vivacity had proved a tragic snare. A certain young capitalist--known as
a great gentleman--of that countryside had pounced down on the gay and
careless young Matilda, and had at once provided her life with its
formative tragedy and its deathless romance. Even at fifty, hopelessly
buried among the back streets and pawnshops of life, heaven still opened
in the heart of Matilda Tipping at the mention of the name of William
Allsopp. For several years she had lived with the Mesuriers, as general
help to her sister, between whom and her, in spite of surface
disparities, there was an indissoluble bond of affection; till, at
thirty-five or so, she had suddenly won the heart of a sad old widower
of fifty-five, named Samuel Tipping.
Samuel Tipping was no ordinary widower. As you looked at his severe,
thoughtful face, surmounted by a shock of beautiful white hair, you
instinctively respected him; and when you heard that he lived by
cobbling shoes by day and playing a violin in the Theatre Royal
orchestra by night, occasionally putting off his leather apron to give a
music lesson in the front parlour of an afternoon, you respected him
all the more. There had been but one thing against Mr. Tipping's
eligibility for marriage, Matilda Tipping would tell you, even years
after, with a lowering of her voice: he was said to be an "atheist," and
a reader of strange books. Yet he seemed a quiet, manageable man, and
likely--again in Mrs. Tipping's phrase--to prove a "good provider;" so
she had risked his heterodoxy, which indeed was a somewhat fanciful
objection on her part, and made him, as he declared with his dying
breath, the best of wives.
It chanced that when Henry, in pursuance of his over-night resolve, made
his way the following afternoon through a dingy little street, and
knocked on the door of a dingy little house, bearing upon a brass plate
the legend "Boots neatly repaired," Mr. Tipping was engaged in giving
one of those very music lessons. A dingy little maid-of-all-work opened
the door, and said that Mrs. Tipping was out shopping, but would be back
soon. From the front parlour came the lifeless tum-tumming of the piano,
and Mr. Tipping's voice gruffly counting time to the cheerless
five-finger exercises of a very evident beginner.
"One--two--three! One--two--three! One--two--three!" went Mr. Tipping's
voice, with an occasional infusion of savagery.
"But Mr. Tipping is at home?" said Henry. "I will wait till he is
disengaged. I will make myself comfortable in the kitchen," (Henry knew
his way about at Aunt Tipping's, and remembered there was only one front
parlour) adding, with something of pride, "I'm Mrs. Tipping's nephew,
you know."
Presently the torture in the front parlour was at an end; and, as Mr.
Tipping was about to turn upstairs to the little back room where he
mended his shoes, Henry emerged upon him from the kitchen. They had had
some talks on books and the general misgovernment of the universe,--for
Mr. Tipping really was something of an "atheist,"--on Henry's occasional
visits, and were no strangers to each other.
"Why, Henry, lad, whoever expected to see you! Your aunt's out at
present; but she'll be back soon. Come into the parlour."
"If you don't mind, Uncle Tipping, I'd rather come upstairs with you. I
love the smell of the leather and the sight of all those sharp little
knives, and the black, shiny 'dubbin,' do you call it? And we can have a
talk about books till aunt comes home."
"All right, lad. But it's a dusty place, and there's hardly a corner to
sit down in."
So up they went to a little room where, in a chaos of boots mended on
one hand, and boots to mend on the other, sheets of leather lying about,
in one corner a great tubfull of water in which the leather was
soaked,--an old boyish fascination of Henry's,--Mr. Tipping spent the
greater part of his days. He sat on a low bench near a window, along
which ran a broad sill full of tools. On this, too, lay an opened book,
into which Mr. Tipping would dip now and again, when he could safely
leave the boot he was engaged upon to the mechanical skill of his hands.
At one end of the tool-shelf was a small collection of books, a dozen or
so shabby volumes, though these were far from constituting Mr. Tipping's
complete library.
Mr. Tipping belonged to that pathetic army of book-lovers who subsist on
the refuse of the stalls, which he hunted not for rare editions, but for
the sheer bread of life, or rather the stale crusts of knowledge. His
tastes were not literary in the special sense of the word. For
belles-lettres he had no fancy, and fine passages, except in so far as
they were controversial, left him cold. His mind was primarily
scientific, secondarily philosophic, and occasionally historic. Travels
and books of physical science were the finds for which, mainly, he
rummaged the stalls. At the moment his pet study was astronomy; and a
curious apparatus in one of the corners, which Henry had noticed as he
entered, was his sad attempt to rig up a telescope for himself.
"It's not so bad as it looks," he said, pointing it out; "but then," he
added, with a smile half sad and half humorous, "there are not many
stars to be seen from Tichborne Street."
It was a touching characteristic of the type of bookman to which Mr.
Tipping belonged, that the astronomy from which he was reading by no
means embodied the latest discoveries. In fact, it narrowly escaped
being eighteenth-century science, for it was dated very early in the
eighteen hundreds. But an astronomy was an astronomy to Mr. Tipping; and
had Copernicus been born late enough, he would most certainly have
imbibed Ptolemaic doctrines with grateful unsuspicion. Indeed, had it
been put to him: "This astronomy after Copernicus at half-a-crown, and
this after Ptolemy for sixpence," his means alone would have left him no
choice. It is so the old clothes of the mind, like the old clothes of
the body,--superseded science, forgotten philosophy,--find a market, and
a book remains a book, with the power of comforting or diverting some
indigent, poor soul, so long as the stitching holds it together.
Presently there was a knock at the front door.
"There's your aunt," said Mr. Tipping; and, as the door opened, the
little maid-of-all-work was to be heard whispering her mistress that a
young gentleman who said he was her nephew had come and was upstairs
with "the master."
"Well, I never!" exclaimed Mrs. Tipping, immediately starting upstairs
towards the open door of the cobblery.
Henry was standing on the threshold, and the warm-hearted little woman
gave him a hearty hug of welcome.
"Well, I _am_ glad to see you! And how are they all at home?" and she
ran over the list, name for name. "We mustn't forget your father. But
he's a hard 'un and no mistake," said the aunt, putting on a mimic
expression of severity.
"He's an upright man, is James Mesurier," said Mr. Tipping, rather
severely.
"Oh, yes, yes; we know that, crosspatch. I'm saying nothing against
him. He's good at heart, I know; but he's a little hard on the
surface--like some other folks I know," making a face at her husband.
"But you must come down and talk to me a bit, lad; you'll have had
enough of him and his old books. You never saw the like of him! Here he
sits day after day over his musty books, and you can hardly get him away
for his meals. He's no company for any one."
"Talk of something you can understand, lass," retorted the husband, in a
voice that took any unkindness from the words, rather like a father than
a husband. "You don't ail much for lack of company, I'm sure."
"Now if it was only a good novel," his wife persisted; "but nothing but
travels, geographies, and such like. Last thing he's taken up with is
the stars. I suppose he's been telling you about them--" and she said
this half as though it were a new form of lunacy Mr. Tipping had
developed, and half as though he had been opening up new realms of
knowledge--original but useless. She was far indeed from understanding
that lonely mind and its tragedy, thirsting so hopelessly for
knowledge, and to die athirst. She heard him knock, knock all day
upstairs; but the knocking told her nothing of his loneliness. He was
just a good, hard-working, rather cross old man, unaccountably fond of
printed matter, whom she liked to be good to, and if in her time that
knocking upstairs should stop for ever--well! she wasn't one to meet
trouble half way, but she would miss it a good deal, old man as he was.
She was herself nearing fifty; but her slim little wiry body and her
elfish, wrinkled face, never still, but ever alive with the same
vivacity that years ago had attracted William Allsopp, made her seem
younger than her years; and her husband treated her as though she were
still a child, a wilful child.
"Eh, Matilda," he said, "you're just a child. No more nor less,--just a
child. The years haven't tamed you one bit--"
"Get out with you and your old stars!" she said, laughing. "Henry, come
along and have a talk with your old aunt."
Though invincibly cheerful through it all, Aunt Tipping was always in
trouble, if not for herself, for somebody else. To-day, it was for
herself, though it was but a minor reverse in the guerilla warfare of
her life. A distressed lodger who had just left had begged her to
accept, in lieu of rent, the pawn-ticket of a handsome clock which had
been hers in happier days; and Mrs. Tipping, moved as she always was by
any tale of woe, however elaborate, had consented. Nor in her world was
such a way of settling accounts very exceptional, for pawn-tickets were
there looked upon as legitimately negotiable securities. Indeed, Aunt
Tipping was seldom without a selection of such securities upon her
hands; and, if a neighbour should chance to be in need, say, of a new
set of chimney ornaments, as likely as not Aunt Tipping had in her purse
a pledge for the very thing. This she would sell at a reasonable profit,
which would probably amount to but a small proportion of the original
debt for which she had accepted it. It was not a lucrative business,
though there were occasional "bargains" in it.
In that word "bargains," all the active romance of Aunt Tipping's life
was now centred. In all departments of the cast-off and the second-hand
she was a daring speculator; and a spirited "auction" now and again
exhilarated her as much as a fortnight by the sea. That house which she
fought so desperately to keep tidy and respectable, had been furnished
almost entirely in this way. There was hardly an article in it that had
not already lived other lives in other houses, before it had been picked
up, "dirt cheap," by Aunt Tipping.
But this afternoon her confidence in human nature had received a cruel
wound. When, after an hour's weary drag to a remote end of the town, she
had arrived at the pawnshop where was preserved the handsome clock of
the distressed lady, and had confidently presented the ticket and the
necessary money, the man had looked awhile perplexed. They had no such
clock, he said. And then, as he further examined the ticket, a light
broke in upon him.
"My dear lady," he said, "look here. The year on this ticket has been
changed."
So indeed it had, and poor Aunt Tipping was at least a year too late.
"Did you ever hear of such treatment?" she said to Henry; "and such a
nice lady she was. 'I shall never forget your goodness to me, Mrs.
Tipping,' she said as she went away, 'never, if I live to be a hundred.'
I'll 'goodness' her, if ever I catch her. Cheating honest folks like
that! Such people oughtn't to be allowed. I don't know how people can
behave so!"
Aunt Tipping's indignation seldom outlived a few plaintive words of this
sort; and had the offending lady of the clock appeared next moment, and
given some Arabian Nights' explanation, there is little doubt that Aunt
Tipping would have forgiven her on the spot. A tendency to do so was
already active in her next remark,--
"Well, poor soul, we mustn't be too hard on her. We never know what we
may be brought to ourselves." For it was Aunt Tipping's unformulated
axiom that, whatever cock-and-bull stories misfortune may tell, there is
always some truth in human misery.
When Henry had told Aunt Tipping his story, and ventured to hint a
suggestion that, if it should not be inconvenient for her, he would like
to take sanctuary with her for a month or two, till he got his hopes
into working order, her little sharp face fairly gleamed with delight.
You would have thought that he was bringing her some great benefit,
instead of proposing to take something from her. That he should have
thought of _her_, such a little humble aunt; that, added to the love
she had for any one with any tincture of her family's blood running in
their veins, plus her general weakness for any one in trouble, brought
tears to her eyes that made her look quite young again.
"I should think so indeed!" she said. "The best your poor old auntie's
got is yours with all her heart--Ah, your father never understood you.
You've got too much of our side of the family in you. You're a bit wild,
you know, lad; but you're none the worse for that, eh?"
There is no need to say that Aunt Tipping's understanding of the tastes
and ambitions which had driven Henry momentarily to take refuge with her
was of the vaguest; but all she needed to know of such a situation was
that: here on the one hand was something somebody very much wanted to
do, and here on the other were certain stern powers ranked against his
doing it. That was enough for her. Her sympathy with all forms of revolt
was instantaneous. For law and order, as such, she had an instinctive
antipathy, as in all contests whatsoever her one general rule was: "Side
with the weaker." And it cannot but have been perceived that so much
sympathy with weakness could hardly have been in the gift of weakness.
No; Aunt Tipping was entirely impersonal in these charities of feeling,
and it was because there was so much sterling honesty and strength
hidden in her little wiry frame, that she could afford so much succour
to those who were neither honest nor strong.
"Well, it was nice of you to think of your poor old aunt," she repeated
again and again; and then she remarked on the good fortune which had
caused the vacation of the front room over the parlour, her grievance
against the lady of the handsome clock quite forgotten.
"It's a nice airy room," she said; and then she began planning how she
might best arrange it for his comfort.
"Dear little aunt," said Henry, taking the little wisp of a woman into
his arms, "you're the salt of the earth."
* * * * *
"Why ever didn't I think of it before!" exclaimed Aunt Tipping,
presently. "I've got the very gentleman to help you with your writing."
"Indeed," said Henry, somewhat sceptical.
"Yes; he's down there in the back parlour. They say he's a great
writer," continued Aunt Tipping; "but he's not very well the last day or
two, and doesn't see anybody. To tell the truth, poor gentleman," she
confided, lowering her voice, "he's just a little too fond of his glass.
But he's as good and kind a gentleman as ever stepped, and always
regular with his rent every Monday morning."
There was usually something mysterious about Aunt Tipping's lodgers. At
their best, she had known them as elaborately wronged bye-products of
aristocracy. Many of them were lawful expectants of illegally delayed
fortunes, and at the very least they always drank romantically.
Thus it was that to the somewhat amused surprise of his family, Henry
came to take up his abode for a while with Aunt Tipping, and that his
books and the cast of Dante, and the sketch of the young Dante done in
sepia by Myrtilla Williamson's own fair hand, came to find themselves in
the incongruous environment of Tichborne Street.