Julia Kavanagh (1824-1877), Rachel Gray (1855), 1856 Tauchnitz edition
Produced by Daniel FROMONT
COLLECTION
OF
BRITISH AUTHORS.
VOL. CCCXLIV.
RACHEL GRAY BY JULIA KAVANAGH.
IN ONE VOLUME.
RACHEL GRAY.
A TALE
FOUNDED ON FACT.
BY JULIA KAVANAGH,
AUTHOR or "NATHALIE," "DAISY BURNS," "GRACE LEE."
_COPYRIGHT EDITION_.
LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1856
PREFACE.
This tale, as the title-page implies, is founded on fact. Its truth is
its chief merit, and the Author claims no other share in it, than that of
telling it to the best of her power.
I do not mean to aver that every word is a positive and literal truth,
that every incident occurred exactly as I have related it, and in no
other fashion, but this I mean to say: that I have invented nothing in
the character of Rachel Gray, and that the sorrows of Richard Jones are
not imaginary sorrows.
My purpose in giving this story to the world is twofold. I have found
that my first, and in many respects, most imperfect work "Madeleine," is
nevertheless that which has won the greatest share of interest and
sympathy; a result which I may, I think, safely attribute to its truth,
and which has induced me to believe that on similar grounds, a similar
distinction might be awarded to a heroine very different indeed from
"Madeleine," but whose silent virtues have perhaps as strong a claim to
admiration and respect.
I had also another purpose, and though I mention it last, it was that
which mainly contributed to make me intrude on public attention; I wished
to show the intellectual, the educated, the fortunate, that minds which
they are apt to slight as narrow, that lives which they pity as moving in
the straight and gloomy paths of mediocrity, are often blessed and graced
beyond the usual lot, with those lovely aspirations towards better deeds
and immortal things, without which life is indeed a thing of little
worth; cold and dull as a sunless day.
JULIA KAVANAGH.
LONDON:
DECEMBER 1855.
RACHEL GRAY.
CHAPTER I.
In one of the many little suburbs which cling to the outskirts of London,
there is a silent and grass-grown street, of aspect both quiet and
quaint. The houses are crazy, old, and brown, of every height and every
size; many are untenanted. Some years ago one was internally destroyed by
fire. It was not thought worth rebuilding. There it still stands, gaunt
and grim, looking for all the world, with its broken or dust-stained
windows, like a town deserted after a sacking.
This street is surrounded by populous courts and alleys, by stirring
thoroughfares, by roads full of activity and commerce; yet somehow or
other, all the noise of life, all its tumult and agitation, here seem to
die away to silence and repose. Few people, even amongst the poor, and
the neighbourhood is a poor one, care to reside in it, while they can be
lodged as cheaply close by, and more to their taste. Some think that the
old square at the end, with its ancient, nodding trees, is close and
gloomy; others have heard strange noises in the house that has suffered
from fire, and are sure it is haunted; and some again do not like the
silent, deserted look of the place, and cannot get over the fancy that,
if no one will live in it, it must be because it is unlucky. And thus it
daily decays more and more, and daily seems to grow more silent.
The appearance of the few houses that are inhabited, says little in
favour of this unfortunate street. In one, a tailor has taken up his
abode. He is a pale, serious man, who stitches at his board in the
window the whole day long, cheered by the occasional song of a thrush,
hopping in its osier cage. This tailor, Samuel Hopkins yclept, lives by
repairing damaged vestments. He once made a coat, and boasts--with how
much truth is known to his own heart--that he likewise cut out,
fashioned, and fitted, a pair of blue nether garments. Further on, at the
corner of the square, stands the house of Mrs. Adams, an aged widow, who
keeps a small school, which, on her brass board, she emphatically
denominates her "Establishment for Young Ladies." This house has an
unmistakeable air of literary dirt and neglect; the area and kitchen
windows are encumbered with the accumulated mud and dust of years; from
the attic casement, a little red-haired servant-girl is ever gaping; and
on hot summer afternoons, when the parlour windows are left open, there
is a glimpse within of a dingy school-mistress, and still more dingy
school-room, with a few pupils who sit straggling on half-a-dozen
benches, conning their lessons with a murmuring hum.
With one exception, there is no other sign of commerce, trade, or
profession in the whole street. For all an outward glance can reveal to
the contrary, the people who live there are so very rich that they do not
need to work at all, or so very genteel in their decay, that if they do
work, they must do it in a hidden, skulking, invisible sort of fashion,
or else be irretrievably disgraced.
The solitary exception to which we have alluded, exists, or rather
existed, for though we speak in the present, we write in the past by some
years, in one of the smallest houses in the street. A little six-roomed
house it was, exactly facing the dreary haunted mansion, and exposed to
all the noises aforesaid. It was, also, to say the truth, an abode of
poor and mean aspect. In the window hung a dress-maker's board, on which
was modestly inscribed, with a list of prices, the name of--
"RACHEL GRAY."
It was accompanied with patterns of yellow paper sleeves, trimmed in
every colour, an old book of fashions, and beautiful and bright, as if
reared in wood or meadow, a pot of yellow crocuses in bloom. They were
closing now, for evening was drawing in, and they knew the hour.
They had opened to light in the dingy parlour within, and which we will
now enter. It was but a little room, and the soft gloom of a spring
twilight half-filled it. The furniture though poor and old-fashioned, was
scrupulously clean; and it shone again in the flickering fire-light. A
few discoloured prints in black frames hung against the walls; two or
three broken china ornaments adorned the wooden mantel-shelf, which was,
moreover, decorated with a little dark-looking mirror in a rim of
tarnished gold.
By the fire an elderly woman of grave and stern aspect, but who had once
been handsome, sat reading the newspaper. Near the window, two
apprentices sewed, under the superintendence of Rachel Gray.
A mild ray of light fell on her pale face, and bending figure. She sewed
on, serious and still, and the calm gravity of her aspect harmonized with
the silence of the little parlour which nothing disturbed, save the
ticking of an old clock behind the door, the occasional rustling of Mrs.
Gray's newspaper, and the continuous and monotonous sound of stitching.
Rachel Gray looked upwards of thirty, yet she was younger by some years.
She was a tall, thin, and awkward woman, sallow and faded before her
time. She was not, and had never been handsome, yet there was a patient
seriousness in the lines of her face, which, when it caught the eye,
arrested it at once, and kept it long. Her brow, too, was broad and
intellectual; her eyes were very fine, though their look was dreamy and
abstracted; and her smile, when she did smile, which was not often, for
she was slightly deaf and spoke little, was pleasant and very sweet.
She sewed on, as we have said, abstracted and serious, when gradually,
for even in observation she was slow, the yellow crocuses attracted her
attention. She looked at them meditatively, and watched them closing,
with the decline of day. And, at length, as if she had not understood,
until then, what was going on before her, she smiled and admiringly
exclaimed:
"Now do look at the creatures, mother!"
Mrs. Gray glanced up from her newspaper, and snuffed rather disdainfully.
"Lawk, Rachel!" she said, "you don't mean to call crocuses creatures--do
you? I'll tell you what though," she added, with a doleful shake of the
head, "I don't know what Her Majesty thinks; but I say the country can't
stand it much longer."
Mrs. Gray had been cook in a Prime Minister's household, and this had
naturally given her a political turn.
"The Lord has taught you," murmured Rachel, bending over the flowers with
something like awe, and a glow spread over her sallow cheek, and there
came a light to her large brown eyes.
Of the two apprentices--one a sickly, fretful girl of sixteen, heard her
not; she went on sewing, and the very way in which she drew her needle
and thread was peevish. The other apprentice did hear Rachel, and she
looked, or rather stared at the dress-maker, with grim wonder. Indeed,
there was something particularly grim about this young maiden--a drear
stolidity that defies describing. A pure Saxon she was--no infusion of
Celtic, or Danish, or Norman blood had lightened the native weight of her
nature. She was young, yet she already went through life settling
everything, and living in a moral tower of most uninviting aspect. But
though Jane settled everything, she did not profess to understand
everything; and when, as happened every now and then, Rachel Gray came
out with such remarks as that above recorded, Jane felt confounded. "She
couldn't make out Miss Gray--that she couldn't."
"I'm so tired!" peevishly said Mary, the fretful apprentice.
At once Rachel kindly observed: "Put by your work, dear."
Again Mrs. Gray snuffed, and came out with: "Lawk! she's always grummy!"
Mary tossed away her work, folded her arms, and looked sullen. Jane, the
grim apprentice, drew her needle and thread twice as fast as before.
"Thank Heaven!" she piously thought, "I am not lazy, nor sickly, and I
can't see much difference between the two--that I can't."
Rachel's work lay in her lap; she sat looking at the crocuses until she
fell in a dream far in the past.
For the past is our realm, free to all, high or low, who wish to dwell in
it. There we may set aside the bitterness and the sorrow; there we may
choose none but the pleasing visions, the bright, sunny spots where it is
sweet to linger. The Future, fair as Hope may make it, is a dream, we
claim it in vain. The Present, harsh or delightful, must be endured, yet
it flies from us before we can say "it is gone." But the Past is ours to
call up at our will. It is vivid and distinct as truth. In good and in
evil, it is irrevocable; the divine seal has been set upon it for
evermore.
In that Book--a pure and holy one was hers--though not without a few
dark and sad pages--Rachel Gray often read. And now, the sight of the
yellow flower of spring took her back, to a happy day of her childhood.
She saw herself a little girl again, with her younger sister Jane, and
the whole school to which they belonged, out on a holiday treat in a
green forest. Near that forest there was a breezy field; and there it was
that Rachel first saw the yellow crocuses bloom. She remembered her joy,
her delight at the wonderful beauty of the wild field flowers--how she
and Jane heaped their laps with them, and sat down at the task; and how,
when tired with the pleasant labour, they rested, as many yellow crocuses
as before seemed to blow and play in the breeze around them. And she
remembered, too, how, even then, there passed across her childish mind, a
silent wonder at their multitude, an undefined awe for the power of the
Almighty Hand who made the little flower, and bade it bloom in the green
fields, beneath the misty azure of a soft spring sky.
And then swiftly followed other thoughts. Where was little, blue-eyed
Jane, her younger sister, her little companion and friend? Sleeping in a
London grave, far from the pleasant and sunny spots where God's wild
flowers bloom. And she--why she was pursuing her path in life, doing the
will of God Almighty.
"And what more," thought Rachel, "can I hope or wish for?"
"Now, Rachel, what are you moping about?" tartly asked her mother, who,
though half blind, had a quick eye for her daughter's meditative fits.
Abruptly fled the dream. The childish memories, the holy remembrance of
the dead, sank back once more to their quiet resting-place in Rachel's
heart. Wakening up with a half-lightened start, she hastily resumed her
work.
"I don't think there ever was such a moper as that girl," grumbled Mrs.
Gray to herself.
Rachel smiled cheerfully in her mother's face. But as to telling her that
she had been thinking of the yellow crocuses, and of the spots they grew
in, and of the power and greatness and glory of Him who made them, Rachel
did not dream of it.
"There's Mrs. Brown," said Mrs. Gray, as a dark figure passed by the
window. "Go, and open the door, Mary."
Mary did not stir, upon which Jane officiously rose and said, "I'll go."
She went, and in came, or rather bounced, Mrs. Brown--a short, stout,
vulgar-looking woman of fifty or so, who at once filled the room with
noise.
"La, Mrs. Gray!" she began breathlessly, "What do you think? There's a
new one. I have brought you the paper; third column, second page, first
article, 'The Church in a Mess.' I thought you'd like to see it. Well,
Rachel, and how are you getting on? Mrs. James's dress don't fit her a
bit, and she says she'll not give you another stitch of work: but la! you
don't care--do you? Why, Mary, how yellow you look to day. I declare
you're as yellow as the crocuses in the pot. Ain't she now, Jane? And so
you're not married yet--are you, my girl?" she added, giving the grim
apprentice a slap on the back.
Jane eyed her quietly.
"You'd better not do that again, Mrs. Brown," she said, with some
sternness, "and as to getting married: why, s'pose you mind your own
business!"
Mrs. Brown threw herself back in her chair, and laughed until the tears
ran down her face. When she recovered, it was to address Mrs. Gray.
"La, Mrs. Gray! can't you find it?" she said. "Why, I told you, third
column, second page, 'The Church in a Mess.' You can't miss. I have put a
pin in it."
Spite of this kind attention, Mrs. Gray had not found "The Church in a
Mess."
"Lawk, Mrs. Brown!" she said, impatiently, "where's the use of always
raking up them sort of things! The badness of others don't make us good--
does it? It's the taxes I think of, Mrs. Brown; it's the taxes! Now,
Rachel, where are you going?"
"I am going to take home this work, mother."
Unable to find fault with this, Mrs. Gray muttered to herself. She was
not ill-natured, but fault-finding was with her an inveterate habit.
"La! what a muff that girl of yours is, Mrs. Gray!" charitably observed
Mrs. Brown, as Rachel left the room. For Mrs. Brown being Mrs. Gray's
cousin, landlady, and neighbour, took the right to say everything she
pleased.
"She ain't particlerly bright," confessed Mrs. Gray, poking the fire,
"but you see, Mrs. Brown--"
Rachel closed the door, and heard no more. Whilst Mrs. Brown was talking,
she had been tying up her parcel. She now put on her bonnet and cloak,
and went out.
It is sweet, after the toil of a day, to breathe fresh air, London air
even though it should be. It is sweet, after the long closeness of the
work-room, to walk out and feel the sense of life and liberty. A new
being seemed poured into Rachel as she went on.
"I wonder people do not like this street," she thought, pausing at the
corner to look back on the grey, quiet line she was leaving behind. "They
call it dull, and to me it is so calm and sweet." And she sighed to enter
the noisy and populous world before her. She hastily crossed it, and only
slackened her pace when she reached the wide streets, the mansions with
gardens to them, the broad and silent squares of the west end. She
stopped before a handsome house, the abode of a rich lady who
occasionally employed her, because she worked cheaper than a fashionable
dress-maker, and as well.
Mrs. Moxton was engaged--visitors were with her--Rachel had to wait--
she sat in the hall. A stylish footman, who quickly detected that she was
shy and nervous, entertained himself and his companions, by making her
ten times more so. His speech was rude--his jests were insolent. Rachel
was meek and humble; but she could feel insult; and that pride, from
which few of God's creatures are free, rose within her, and flushed her
pale cheek with involuntary displeasure.
At length, the infliction ceased. Mrs. Moxton's visitors left; Rachel was
called in. Her first impulse had been to complain of the footman to his
mistress; but mercy checked the temptation; it might make him lose his
place. Poor Rachel! she little knew that this footman could have been
insolent to his mistress herself, had he so chosen. He was six foot
three, and, in his livery of brown and gold, looked splendid. In short,
he was invaluable, and not to be parted with on any account.
Mrs. Moxton was habitually a well-bred, good-natured woman; but every
rule has its exceptions. Rachel found her very much out of temper. To say
the truth, one of her recent visitors was in the Mrs. Brown style; Mrs.
Moxton had been provoked and irritated; and Rachel paid for it.
"Now, Miss Gray," she said, with solemn indignation, "what do you mean by
bringing back work in this style? That flounce is at least an inch too
high! I thought you an intelligent young person--but really, really!"
"It's very easily altered, ma'am," said Rachel, submissively.
"You need, not trouble," gravely replied Mrs. Moxton. "I owe you
something; you may call with your bill to-morrow."
"I shall not be able to call to-morrow, ma'am; and if it were convenient
now--"
"It is not convenient now!" said Mrs. Morton, rather haughtily. She
thought Rachel the most impertinent creature she had ever met with--that
is to say, next to that irritating Mrs. Maberly, who had repeated that
provoking thing about Mr. So-and-So. Rachel sighed and left the house
like all shy persons, she was easily depressed. It was night when she
stood once more in the street. Above the pale outline of the houses
spread a sky of dark azure. A star shone in it, a little star; but it
burned with as brilliant a light as any great planet. Rachel gazed at it
earnestly, and the shadow passed away. "What matter!" she thought, "even
though a man in livery made a jest of me--even though a lady in silk was
scornful. What matter! God made that star for me as well as for her!
Besides," she added, checking a thought which might, she feared, be too
proud, "besides, who, and what am I, that I should repine?"