LITTLE MARY.
Poor John Marchmont had given his address unwillingly enough to his old
pupil. The lodging in Oakley Street was a wretched back-room upon the
second-floor of a house whose lower regions were devoted to that
species of establishment commonly called a "ladies' wardrobe." The poor
gentleman, the teacher of mathematics, the law-writer, the Drury-Lane
supernumerary, had shrunk from any exposure of his poverty; but his
pupil's imperious good-nature had overridden every objection, and John
Marchmont awoke upon the morning after the meeting at Drury-Lane to the
rather embarrassing recollection that he was to expect a visitor to
breakfast with him.
How was he to entertain this dashing, high-spirited young schoolboy,
whose lot was cast in the pleasant pathways of life, and who was no
doubt accustomed to see at his matutinal meal such luxuries as John
Marchmont had only beheld in the fairy-like realms of comestible beauty
exhibited to hungry foot-passengers behind the plate-glass windows of
Italian warehouses?
"He has hams stewed in Madeira, and Perigord pies, I dare say, at his
Aunt Mostyn's," John thought, despairingly. "What can I give him to
eat?"
But John Marchmont, after the manner of the poor, was apt to
over-estimate the extravagance of the rich. If he could have seen the
Mostyn breakfast then preparing in the lower regions of Montague
Square, he might have been considerably relieved; for he would have
only beheld mild infusions of tea and coffee--in silver vessels,
certainly--four French rolls hidden under a glistening damask napkin,
six triangular fragments of dry toast, cut from a stale half-quartern,
four new-laid eggs, and about half a pound of bacon cut into rashers of
transcendental delicacy. Widow ladies who have daughters to marry do
not plunge very deep into the books of Messrs. Fortnum and Mason.
"He used to like hot rolls when I was at Vernon's," John thought,
rather more hopefully; "I wonder whether he likes hot rolls still?"
Pondering thus, Mr. Marchmont dressed himself,--very neatly, very
carefully; for he was one of those men whom even poverty cannot rob of
man's proudest attribute, his individuality. He made no noisy protest
against the humiliations to which he was compelled to submit; he
uttered no boisterous assertions of his own merit; he urged no
clamorous demand to be treated as a gentleman in his day of misfortune;
but in his own mild, undemonstrative way he did assert himself, quite
as effectually as if he had raved all day upon the hardship of his lot,
and drunk himself mad and blind under the pressure of his calamities.
He never abandoned the habits which had been peculiar to him from his
childhood. He was as neat and orderly in his second-floor-back as he
had been seven or eight years before in his simple apartments at
Cambridge. He did not recognise that association which most men
perceive between poverty and shirt-sleeves, or poverty and beer. He was
content to wear threadbare cloth, but adhered most obstinately to a
prejudice in favour of clean linen. He never acquired those lounging
vagabond habits peculiar to some men in the day of trouble. Even
amongst the supernumeraries of Drury Lane, he contrived to preserve his
self-respect; if they nicknamed him Barking Jeremiah, they took care
only to pronounce that playful sobriquet when the gentleman-super was
safely out of hearing. He was so polite in the midst of his reserve,
that the person who could wilfully have offended him must have been
more unkindly than any of her Majesty's servants. It is true, that the
great tragedian, on more than one occasion, apostrophised the
weak-kneed banner-holder as "BEAST" when the super's cough had
peculiarly disturbed his composure; but the same great man gave poor
John Marchmont a letter to a distinguished physician, compassionately
desiring the relief of the same pulmonary affection. If John Marchmont
had not been prompted by his own instincts to struggle against the evil
influences of poverty, he would have done battle sturdily for the sake
of one who was ten times dearer to him than himself.
If he _could_ have become a swindler or a reprobate,--it would have
been about as easy for him to become either as to have burst at once,
and without an hour's practice, into a full-blown Leotard or
Olmar,--his daughter's influence would have held him back as securely
as if the slender arms twined tenderly about him had been chains of
adamant forged by an enchanter's power.
How could he be false to his little one, this helpless child, who had
been confided to him in the darkest hour of his existence; the hour in
which his wife had yielded to the many forces arrayed against her in
life's battle, and had left him alone in the world to fight for his
little girl?
"If I were to die, I think Arundel's mother would be kind to her," John
Marchmont thought, as he finished his careful toilet. "Heaven knows, I
have no right to ask or expect such a thing; but Polly will be rich
by-and-by, perhaps, and will be able to repay them."
A little hand knocked lightly at the door of his room while he was
thinking this, and a childish voice said,
"May I come in, papa?"
The little girl slept with one of the landlady's children, in a room
above her father's. John opened the door, and let her in. The pale
wintry sunshine, creeping in at the curtainless window near which Mr.
Marchmont sat, shone full upon the child's face as she came towards
him. It was a small, pale face, with singularly delicate features, a
tiny straight nose, a pensive mouth, and large thoughtful hazel eyes.
The child's hair fell loosely upon her shoulders; not in those
corkscrew curls so much affected by mothers in the humbler walks of
life, nor yet in those crisp undulations lately adopted in Belgravian
nurseries; but in soft silken masses, only curling at the extreme end
of each tress. Miss Marchmont--she was always called Miss Marchmont in
that Oakley Street household--wore her brown-stuff frock and scanty
diaper pinafore as neatly as her father wore his threadbare coat and
darned linen. She was very pretty, very lady-like, very interesting;
but it was impossible to look at her without a vague feeling of pain,
that was difficult to understand. You knew, by-and-by, why you were
sorry for this little girl. She had never been a child. That divine
period of perfect innocence,--innocence of all sorrow and trouble,
falsehood and wrong,--that bright holiday-time of the soul, had never
been hers. The ruthless hand of poverty had snatched away from her the
gift which God had given her in her cradle; and at eight years old she
was a woman,--a woman invested with all that is most beautiful amongst
womanly attributes--love, tenderness, compassion, carefulness for
others, unselfish devotion, uncomplaining patience, heroic endurance.
She was a woman by reason of all these virtues; but she was no longer a
child. At three years old she had bidden farewell for ever to the
ignorant selfishness, the animal enjoyment of childhood, and had
learned what it was to be sorry for poor papa and mamma; and from that
first time of awakening to the sense of pity and love, she had never
ceased to be the comforter of the helpless young husband who was so
soon to be left wifeless.
John had been compelled to leave his child, in order to get a living
for her and for himself in the hard service of Mr. Laurence Vernon, the
principal of the highly select and expensive academy at which Edward
Arundel and Martin Mostyn had been educated. But he had left her in
good hands; and when the bitter day of his dismissal came, he was
scarcely as sorry as he ought to have been for the calamity which
brought him back to his little Mary. It is impossible for any words of
mine to tell how much he loved the child; but take into consideration
his hopeless poverty, his sensitive and reserved nature, his utter
loneliness, the bereavement that had cast a shadow upon his youth, and
you will perhaps understand an affection that was almost morbid in its
intensity, and which was reciprocated most fully by its object. The
little girl loved her father _too much_. When he was with her, she was
content to sit by his side, watching him as he wrote; proud to help
him, if even by so much as wiping his pens or handing him his
blotting-paper; happy to wait upon him, to go out marketing for him, to
prepare his scanty meals, to make his tea, and arrange and re-arrange
every object in the slenderly furnished second-floor back-room. They
talked sometimes of the Lincolnshire fortune,--the fortune which
_might_ come to Mr. Marchmont, if three people, whose lives when Mary's
father had last heard of them, were each worth three times his own
feeble existence, would be so obliging as to clear the way for the
heir-at-law, by taking an early departure to the churchyard. A more
practical man than John Marchmont would have kept a sharp eye upon
these three lives, and by some means or other contrived to find out
whether number one was consumptive, or number two dropsical, or number
three apoplectic; but John was utterly incapable of any such
Machiavellian proceeding. I think he sometimes beguiled his weary walks
between Oakley Street and Drury Lane by the dreaming of such childish
day-dreams as I should be almost ashamed to set down upon this sober
page. The three lives might all happen to be riding in the same express
upon the occasion of a terrible collision; but the poor fellow's gentle
nature shrank appalled before the vision he had invoked. He could not
sacrifice a whole train-full of victims, even for little Mary. He
contented himself with borrowing a "Times" newspaper now and then, and
looking at the top of the second column, with the faint hope that he
should see his own name in large capitals, coupled with the
announcement that by applying somewhere he might hear of something to
his advantage. He contented himself with this, and with talking about
the future to little Mary in the dim firelight. They spent long hours
in the shadowy room, only lighted by the faint flicker of a pitiful
handful of coals; for the commonest dip-candles are
sevenpence-halfpenny a pound, and were dearer, I dare say, in the year
'38. Heaven knows what splendid castles in the air these two
simple-hearted creatures built for each other's pleasure by that
comfortless hearth. I believe that, though the father made a pretence
of talking of these things only for the amusement of his child, he was
actually the more childish of the two. It was only when he left that
fire-lit room, and went back into the hard, reasonable, commonplace
world, that he remembered how foolish the talk was, and how it was
impossible--yes, impossible--that he, the law-writer and supernumerary,
could ever come to be master of Marchmont Towers.
Poor little Mary was in this less practical than her father. She
carried her day-dreams into the street, until all Lambeth was made
glorious by their supernal radiance. Her imagination ran riot in a
vision of a happy future, in which her father would be rich and
powerful. I am sorry to say that she derived most of her ideas of
grandeur from the New Cut. She furnished the drawing-room at Marchmont
Towers from the splendid stores of an upholsterer in that thoroughfare.
She laid flaming Brussels carpets upon the polished oaken floors which
her father had described to her, and hung cheap satin damask of
gorgeous colours before the great oriel windows. She put gilded vases
of gaudy artificial flowers on the high carved mantel-pieces in the old
rooms, and hung a disreputable gray parrot--for sale at a
greengrocer's, and given to the use of bad language--under the stone
colonnnade at the end of the western wing. She appointed the
tradespeople who should serve the far-away Lincolnshire household; the
small matter of distance would, of course, never stand in the way of
her gratitude and benevolence. Her papa would employ the civil
greengrocer who gave such excellent halfpennyworths of watercresses;
the kind butterman who took such pains to wrap up a quarter of a pound
of the best eighteenpenny fresh butter for the customer whom he always
called "little lady;" the considerate butcher who never cut _more_ than
the three-quarters of a pound of rump-steak, which made an excellent
dinner for Mr. Marchmont and his little girl. Yes, all these people
should be rewarded when the Lincolnshire property came to Mary's papa.
Miss Marchmont had some thoughts of building a shop close to Marchmont
Towers for the accommodating butcher, and of adopting the greengrocer's
eldest daughter for her confidante and companion. Heaven knows how many
times the little girl narrowly escaped being run over while walking the
material streets in some ecstatic reverie such as this; but Providence
was very careful of the motherless girl, and she always returned safely
to Oakley Street with her pitiful little purchases of tea and sugar,
butter and meat. You will say, perhaps, that at least these foolish
day-dreams were childish; but I maintain still, that Mary's soul had
long ago bade adieu to infancy, and that even in these visions she was
womanly; for she was always thoughtful of others rather than of
herself, and there was a great deal more of the practical business of
life mingled with the silvery web of her fancies than there should have
been so soon after her eighth birthday. At times, too, an awful horror
would quicken the pulses of her loving heart as she heard the hacking
sound of her father's cough; and a terrible dread would seize her,--the
fear that John Marchmont might never live to inherit the Lincolnshire
fortune. The child never said her prayers without adding a little
extempore supplication, that she might die when her father died. It was
a wicked prayer, perhaps; and a clergyman might have taught her that
her life was in the hands of Providence; and that it might please Him
who had created her to doom her to many desolate years of loneliness;
and that it was not for her, in her wretched and helpless ignorance, to
rebel against His divine will. I think if the Archbishop of Canterbury
had driven from Lambeth Palace to Oakley Street to tell little Mary
this, he would have taught her in vain; and that she would have fallen
asleep that night with the old prayer upon her lips, the fond foolish
prayer that the bonds which love had woven so firmly might never be
roughly broken by death.
Miss Marchmont heard the story of last night's meeting with great
pleasure, though it must be owned she looked a little grave when she
was told that the generous-hearted school-boy was coming to breakfast;
but her gravity was only that of a thoughtful housekeeper, who ponders
ways and means, and even while you are telling her the number and
quality of your guests, sketches out a rough ground-plan of her dishes,
considers the fish in season, and the soups most fitting to precede
them, and balances the contending advantages of Palestine and Julienne
or Hare and Italian.
"A 'nice' breakfast you say, papa," she said, when her father had
finished speaking; "then we must have watercresses, _of course_."
"And hot rolls, Polly dear. Arundel was always fond of hot rolls."
"And hot rolls, four for threepence-halfpenny in the Cut."--(I am
ashamed to say that this benighted child talked as deliberately of the
"Cut" as she might have done of the "Row.")--"There'll be one left for
tea, papa; for we could never eat four rolls. They'll take _such_ a lot
of butter, though."
The little housekeeper took out an antediluvian bead-purse, and began
to examine her treasury. Her father handed all his money to her, as he
would have done to his wife; and Mary doled him out the little sums he
wanted,--money for half an ounce of tobacco, money for a pint of beer.
There were no penny papers in those days, or what a treat an occasional
"Telegraph" would have been to poor John Marchmont!
Mary had only one personal extravagance. She read novels,--dirty,
bloated, ungainly volumes,--which she borrowed from a snuffy old woman
in a little back street, who charged her the smallest hire ever known
in the circulating-library business, and who admired her as a wonder of
precocious erudition. The only pleasure the child knew in her father's
absence was the perusal of these dingy pages; she neglected no duty,
she forgot no tender office of ministering care for the loved one who
was absent; but when all the little duties had been finished, how
delicious it was to sit down to "Madeleine the Deserted," or "Cosmo the
Pirate," and to lose herself far away in illimitable regions, peopled
by wandering princesses in white satin, and gentlemanly bandits, who
had been stolen from their royal fathers' halls by vengeful hordes of
gipsies. During these early years of poverty and loneliness, John
Marchmont's daughter stored up, in a mind that was morbidly sensitive
rather than strong, a terrible amount of dim poetic sentiment; the
possession of which is scarcely, perhaps, the best or safest dower for
a young lady who has life's journey all before her.
At half-past nine o'clock, all the simple preparations necessary for
the reception of a visitor had been completed by Mr. Marchmont and his
daughter. All vestiges of John's bed had disappeared; leaving, it is
true, rather a suspicious-looking mahogany chest of drawers to mark the
spot where once a bed had been. The window had been opened, the room
aired and dusted, a bright little fire burned in the shining grate, and
the most brilliant of tin tea-kettles hissed upon the hob. The white
table-cloth was darned in several places; but it was a remnant of the
small stock of linen with which John had begun married life; and the
Irish damask asserted its superior quality, in spite of many darns, as
positively as Mr. Marchmont's good blood asserted itself in spite of
his shabby coat. A brown teapot full of strong tea, a plate of French
rolls, a pat of fresh butter, and a broiled haddock, do not compose a
very epicurean repast; but Mary Marchmont looked at the humble
breakfast as a prospective success.
"We could have haddocks every day at Marchmont Towers, couldn't we,
papa?" she said naively.
But the little girl was more than delighted when Edward Arundel dashed
up the narrow staircase, and burst into the room, fresh, radiant,
noisy, splendid, better dressed even than the waxen preparations of
elegant young gentlemen exhibited at the portal of a great outfitter in
the New Cut, and yet not at all like either of those red-lipped types
of fashion. How delighted the boy declared himself with every thing! He
had driven over in a cabriolet, and he was awfully hungry, he informed
his host. The rolls and watercresses disappeared before him as if by
magic; little Mary shivered at the slashing cuts he made at the butter;
the haddock had scarcely left the gridiron before it was no more.
"This is ten times better than Aunt Mostyn's skinny breakfasts," the
young gentleman observed candidly. "You never get enough with her. Why
does she say, 'You won't take another egg, will you, Edward?' if she
wants me to have one? You should see our hunting-breakfasts at
Dangerfield, Marchmont. Four sorts of claret, and no end of Moselle and
champagne. You shall go to Dangerfield some day, to see my mother, Miss
Mary."
He called her "Miss Mary," and seemed rather shy of speaking to her.
Her womanliness impressed him in spite of himself. He had a fancy that
she was old enough to feel the humiliation of her father's position,
and to be sensitive upon the matter of the two-pair back; and he was
sorry the moment after he had spoken of Dangerfield.
"What a snob I am!" he thought; "always bragging of home."
But Mr. Arundel was not able to stop very long in Oakley Street, for
the supernumerary had to attend a rehearsal at twelve o'clock; so at
half-past eleven John Marchmont and his pupil went out together, and
little Mary was left alone to clear away the breakfast, and perform the
rest of her household duties.
She had plenty of time before her, so she did not begin at once, but
sat upon a stool near the fender, gazing dreamily at the low fire.
"How good and kind he is!" she thought; "just like Cosmo,--only Cosmo
was dark; or like Reginald Ravenscroft,--but then he was dark too. I
wonder why the people in novels are always dark? How kind he is to
papa! Shall we ever go to Dangerfield, I wonder, papa and I? Of course
I wouldn't go without papa."