DIRECTLY as I closed the door, I saw laid on the table two letters; my
thought was, that they were notes of invitation from the friends of some
of my pupils; I had received such marks of attention occasionally, and
with me, who had no friends, correspondence of more interest was out
of the question; the postman’s arrival had never yet been an event of
interest to me since I came to Brussels. I laid my hand carelessly on
the documents, and coldly and slowly glancing at them, I prepared to
break the seals; my eye was arrested and my hand too; I saw what excited
me, as if I had found a vivid picture where I expected only to discover
a blank page: on one cover was an English postmark; on the other, a
lady’s clear, fine autograph; the last I opened first:--
“MONSIEUR,
“I FOUND out what you had done the very morning after your visit to me;
you might be sure I should dust the china, every day; and, as no one but
you had been in my room for a week, and as fairy-money is not current
in Brussels, I could not doubt who left the twenty francs on the
chimney-piece. I thought I heard you stir the vase when I was stooping
to look for your glove under the table, and I wondered you should
imagine it had got into such a little cup. Now, monsieur, the money
is not mine, and I shall not keep it; I will not send it in this note
because it might be lost--besides, it is heavy; but I will restore it
to you the first time I see you, and you must make no difficulties about
taking it; because, in the first place, I am sure, monsieur, you can
understand that one likes to pay one’s debts; that it is satisfactory
to owe no man anything; and, in the second place, I can now very well
afford to be honest, as I am provided with a situation. This last
circumstance is, indeed, the reason of my writing to you, for it is
pleasant to communicate good news; and, in these days, I have only my
master to whom I can tell anything.
“A week ago, monsieur, I was sent for by a Mrs. Wharton, an English
lady; her eldest daughter was going to be married, and some rich
relation having made her a present of a veil and dress in costly old
lace, as precious, they said, almost as jewels, but a little damaged by
time, I was commissioned to put them in repair. I had to do it at the
house; they gave me, besides, some embroidery to complete, and nearly
a week elapsed before I had finished everything. While I worked, Miss
Wharton often came into the room and sat with me, and so did Mrs.
Wharton; they made me talk English; asked how I had learned to speak it
so well; then they inquired what I knew besides--what books I had read;
soon they seemed to make a sort of wonder of me, considering me no doubt
as a learned grisette. One afternoon, Mrs. Wharton brought in a Parisian
lady to test the accuracy of my knowledge of French; the result of
it was that, owing probably in a great degree to the mother’s and
daughter’s good humour about the marriage, which inclined them to
do beneficent deeds, and partly, I think, because they are naturally
benevolent people, they decided that the wish I had expressed to do
something more than mend lace was a very legitimate one; and the same
day they took me in their carriage to Mrs. D.’s, who is the directress
of the first English school at Brussels. It seems she happened to be in
want of a French lady to give lessons in geography, history, grammar,
and composition, in the French language. Mrs. Wharton recommended me
very warmly; and, as two of her younger daughters are pupils in the
house, her patronage availed to get me the place. It was settled that I
am to attend six hours daily (for, happily, it was not required that
I should live in the house; I should have been sorry to leave my
lodgings), and, for this, Mrs. D. will give me twelve hundred francs per
annum.
“You see, therefore, monsieur, that I am now rich; richer almost than
I ever hoped to be: I feel thankful for it, especially as my sight was
beginning to be injured by constant working at fine lace; and I was
getting, too, very weary of sitting up late at nights, and yet not being
able to find time for reading or study. I began to fear that I should
fall ill, and be unable to pay my way; this fear is now, in a great
measure, removed; and, in truth, monsieur, I am very grateful to God for
the relief; and I feel it necessary, almost, to speak of my happiness
to some one who is kind-hearted enough to derive joy from seeing others
joyful. I could not, therefore, resist the temptation of writing to you;
I argued with myself it is very pleasant for me to write, and it will
not be exactly painful, though it may be tiresome to monsieur to
read. Do not be too angry with my circumlocution and inelegancies of
expression, and, believe me
“Your attached pupil,
“F. E. HENRI.”
Having read this letter, I mused on its contents for a few
moments--whether with sentiments pleasurable or otherwise I will
hereafter note--and then took up the other. It was directed in a hand
to me unknown--small, and rather neat; neither masculine nor exactly
feminine; the seal bore a coat of arms, concerning which I could only
decipher that it was not that of the Seacombe family, consequently the
epistle could be from none of my almost forgotten, and certainly quite
forgetting patrician relations. From whom, then, was it? I removed the
envelope; the note folded within ran as follows:
“I have no doubt in the world that you are doing well in that greasy
Flanders; living probably on the fat of the unctuous land; sitting like
a black-haired, tawny-skinned, long-nosed Israelite by the flesh-pots
of Egypt; or like a rascally son of Levi near the brass cauldrons of the
sanctuary, and every now and then plunging in a consecrated hook, and
drawing out of the sea of broth the fattest of heave-shoulders and the
fleshiest of wave-breasts. I know this, because you never write to any
one in England. Thankless dog that you are! I, by the sovereign efficacy
of my recommendation, got you the place where you are now living in
clover, and yet not a word of gratitude, or even acknowledgment, have
you ever offered in return; but I am coming to see you, and small
conception can you, with your addled aristocratic brains, form of the
sort of moral kicking I have, ready packed in my carpet-bag, destined to
be presented to you immediately on my arrival.
“Meantime I know all about your affairs, and have just got information,
by Brown’s last letter, that you are said to be on the point of forming
an advantageous match with a pursy, little Belgian schoolmistress--a
Mdlle. Zenobie, or some such name. Won’t I have a look at her when I
come over! And this you may rely on: if she pleases my taste, or if I
think it worth while in a pecuniary point of view, I’ll pounce on your
prize and bear her away triumphant in spite of your teeth. Yet I don’t
like dumpies either, and Brown says she is little and stout--the better
fitted for a wiry, starved-looking chap like you. “Be on the look-out,
for you know neither the day nor hour when your ----” (I don’t wish to
blaspheme, so I’ll leave a blank)--cometh.
“Yours truly,
“HUNSDEN YORKE HUNSDEN.”
“Humph!” said I; and ere I laid the letter down, I again glanced at the
small, neat handwriting, not a bit like that of a mercantile man, nor,
indeed, of any man except Hunsden himself. They talk of affinities
between the autograph and the character: what affinity was there here?
I recalled the writer’s peculiar face and certain traits I suspected,
rather than knew, to appertain to his nature, and I answered, “A great
deal.”
Hunsden, then, was coming to Brussels, and coming I knew not when;
coming charged with the expectation of finding me on the summit of
prosperity, about to be married, to step into a warm nest, to lie
comfortably down by the side of a snug, well-fed little mate.
“I wish him joy of the fidelity of the picture he has painted,” thought
I. “What will he say when, instead of a pair of plump turtle doves,
billing and cooing in a bower of roses, he finds a single lean
cormorant, standing mateless and shelterless on poverty’s bleak cliff?
Oh, confound him! Let him come, and let him laugh at the contrast
between rumour and fact. Were he the devil himself, instead of being
merely very like him, I’d not condescend to get out of his way, or to
forge a smile or a cheerful word wherewith to avert his sarcasm.”
Then I recurred to the other letter: that struck a chord whose sound I
could not deaden by thrusting my fingers into my ears, for it vibrated
within; and though its swell might be exquisite music, its cadence was a
groan.
That Frances was relieved from the pressure of want, that the curse of
excessive labour was taken off her, filled me with happiness; that her
first thought in prosperity should be to augment her joy by sharing
it with me, met and satisfied the wish of my heart. Two results of her
letter were then pleasant, sweet as two draughts of nectar; but applying
my lips for the third time to the cup, and they were excoriated as with
vinegar and gall.
Two persons whose desires are moderate may live well enough in Brussels
on an income which would scarcely afford a respectable maintenance for
one in London: and that, not because the necessaries of life are so
much dearer in the latter capital, or taxes so much higher than in the
former, but because the English surpass in folly all the nations on
God’s earth, and are more abject slaves to custom, to opinion, to
the desire to keep up a certain appearance, than the Italians are to
priestcraft, the French to vain-glory, the Russians to their Czar, or
the Germans to black beer. I have seen a degree of sense in the modest
arrangement of one homely Belgian household, that might put to shame the
elegance, the superfluities, the luxuries, the strained refinements of
a hundred genteel English mansions. In Belgium, provided you can
make money, you may save it; this is scarcely possible in England;
ostentation there lavishes in a month what industry has earned in a
year. More shame to all classes in that most bountiful and beggarly
country for their servile following of Fashion; I could write a chapter
or two on this subject, but must forbear, at least for the present. Had
I retained my 60l. per annum I could, now that Frances was in possession
of 50l., have gone straight to her this very evening, and spoken out the
words which, repressed, kept fretting my heart with fever; our united
income would, as we should have managed it, have sufficed well for
our mutual support; since we lived in a country where economy was not
confounded with meanness, where frugality in dress, food, and furniture,
was not synonymous with vulgarity in these various points. But the
placeless usher, bare of resource, and unsupported by connections, must
not think of this; such a sentiment as love, such a word as marriage,
were misplaced in his heart, and on his lips. Now for the first time did
I truly feel what it was to be poor; now did the sacrifice I had made
in casting from me the means of living put on a new aspect; instead of
a correct, just, honourable act, it seemed a deed at once light and
fanatical; I took several turns in my room, under the goading influence
of most poignant remorse; I walked a quarter of an hour from the wall to
the window; and at the window, self-reproach seemed to face me; at the
wall, self-disdain: all at once out spoke Conscience:--
“Down, stupid tormenters!” cried she; “the man has done his duty;
you shall not bait him thus by thoughts of what might have been; he
relinquished a temporary and contingent good to avoid a permanent and
certain evil he did well. Let him reflect now, and when your blinding
dust and deafening hum subside, he will discover a path.”
I sat down; I propped my forehead on both my hands; I thought and
thought an hour--two hours; vainly. I seemed like one sealed in a
subterranean vault, who gazes at utter blackness; at blackness ensured
by yard-thick stone walls around, and by piles of building above,
expecting light to penetrate through granite, and through cement firm
as granite. But there are chinks, or there may be chinks, in the
best adjusted masonry; there was a chink in my cavernous cell; for,
eventually, I saw, or seemed to see, a ray--pallid, indeed, and cold,
and doubtful, but still a ray, for it showed that narrow path which
conscience had promised after two, three hours’ torturing research in
brain and memory, I disinterred certain remains of circumstances, and
conceived a hope that by putting them together an expedient might be
framed, and a resource discovered. The circumstances were briefly these:
Some three months ago M. Pelet had, on the occasion of his fete, given
the boys a treat, which treat consisted in a party of pleasure to a
certain place of public resort in the outskirts of Brussels, of which
I do not at this moment remember the name, but near it were several of
those lakelets called etangs; and there was one etang, larger than the
rest, where on holidays people were accustomed to amuse themselves by
rowing round it in little boats. The boys having eaten an unlimited
quantity of “gaufres,” and drank several bottles of Louvain beer, amid
the shades of a garden made and provided for such crams, petitioned
the director for leave to take a row on the etang. Half a dozen of the
eldest succeeded in obtaining leave, and I was commissioned to accompany
them as surveillant. Among the half dozen happened to be a certain Jean
Baptiste Vandenhuten, a most ponderous young Flamand, not tall, but
even now, at the early age of sixteen, possessing a breadth and depth of
personal development truly national. It chanced that Jean was the first
lad to step into the boat; he stumbled, rolled to one side, the boat
revolted at his weight and capsized. Vandenhuten sank like lead, rose,
sank again. My coat and waistcoat were off in an instant; I had not been
brought up at Eton and boated and bathed and swam there ten long years
for nothing; it was a natural and easy act for me to leap to the rescue.
The lads and the boatmen yelled; they thought there would be two deaths
by drowning instead of one; but as Jean rose the third time, I clutched
him by one leg and the collar, and in three minutes more both he and I
were safe landed. To speak heaven’s truth, my merit in the action was
small indeed, for I had run no risk, and subsequently did not even catch
cold from the wetting; but when M. and Madame Vandenhuten, of whom Jean
Baptiste was the sole hope, came to hear of the exploit, they seemed
to think I had evinced a bravery and devotion which no thanks could
sufficiently repay. Madame, in particular, was “certain I must have
dearly loved their sweet son, or I would not thus have hazarded my own
life to save his.” Monsieur, an honest-looking, though phlegmatic man,
said very little, but he would not suffer me to leave the room, till
I had promised that in case I ever stood in need of help I would, by
applying to him, give him a chance of discharging the obligation under
which he affirmed I had laid him. These words, then, were my glimmer of
light; it was here I found my sole outlet; and in truth, though the cold
light roused, it did not cheer me; nor did the outlet seem such as I
should like to pass through. Right I had none to M. Vandenhuten’s good
offices; it was not on the ground of merit I could apply to him; no, I
must stand on that of necessity: I had no work; I wanted work; my best
chance of obtaining it lay in securing his recommendation. This I knew
could be had by asking for it; not to ask, because the request revolted
my pride and contradicted my habits, would, I felt, be an indulgence of
false and indolent fastidiousness. I might repent the omission all my
life; I would not then be guilty of it.
That evening I went to M. Vandenhuten’s; but I had bent the bow and
adjusted the shaft in vain; the string broke. I rang the bell at the
great door (it was a large, handsome house in an expensive part of the
town); a manservant opened; I asked for M. Vandenhuten; M. Vandenhuten
and family were all out of town--gone to Ostend--did not know when they
would be back. I left my card, and retraced my steps.