TURNING A NEW LEAF.
My mistress being dead, and I once more alone, I had to look out for a
new place. About this time I might be a little—a very little—shaken in
nerves. I grant I was not looking well, but, on the contrary, thin,
haggard, and hollow-eyed; like a sitter-up at night, like an
overwrought servant, or a placeless person in debt. In debt, however, I
was not; nor quite poor; for though Miss Marchmont had not had time to
benefit me, as, on that last night, she said she intended, yet, after
the funeral, my wages were duly paid by her second cousin, the heir, an
avaricious-looking man, with pinched nose and narrow temples, who,
indeed, I heard long afterwards, turned out a thorough miser: a direct
contrast to his generous kinswoman, and a foil to her memory, blessed
to this day by the poor and needy. The possessor, then, of fifteen
pounds; of health, though worn, not broken, and of a spirit in similar
condition; I might still; in comparison with many people, be regarded
as occupying an enviable position. An embarrassing one it was, however,
at the same time; as I felt with some acuteness on a certain day, of
which the corresponding one in the next week was to see my departure
from my present abode, while with another I was not provided.
In this dilemma I went, as a last and sole resource, to see and consult
an old servant of our family; once my nurse, now housekeeper at a grand
mansion not far from Miss Marchmont’s. I spent some hours with her; she
comforted, but knew not how to advise me. Still all inward darkness, I
left her about twilight; a walk of two miles lay before me; it was a
clear, frosty night. In spite of my solitude, my poverty, and my
perplexity, my heart, nourished and nerved with the vigour of a youth
that had not yet counted twenty-three summers, beat light and not
feebly. Not feebly, I am sure, or I should have trembled in that lonely
walk, which lay through still fields, and passed neither village nor
farmhouse, nor cottage: I should have quailed in the absence of
moonlight, for it was by the leading of stars only I traced the dim
path; I should have quailed still more in the unwonted presence of that
which to-night shone in the north, a moving mystery—the Aurora
Borealis. But this solemn stranger influenced me otherwise than through
my fears. Some new power it seemed to bring. I drew in energy with the
keen, low breeze that blew on its path. A bold thought was sent to my
mind; my mind was made strong to receive it.
“Leave this wilderness,” it was said to me, “and go out hence.”
“Where?” was the query.
I had not very far to look; gazing from this country parish in that
flat, rich middle of England—I mentally saw within reach what I had
never yet beheld with my bodily eyes: I saw London.
The next day I returned to the hall, and asking once more to see the
housekeeper, I communicated to her my plan.
Mrs. Barrett was a grave, judicious woman, though she knew little more
of the world than myself; but grave and judicious as she was, she did
not charge me with being out of my senses; and, indeed, I had a staid
manner of my own which ere now had been as good to me as cloak and hood
of hodden grey, since under its favour I had been enabled to achieve
with impunity, and even approbation, deeds that, if attempted with an
excited and unsettled air, would in some minds have stamped me as a
dreamer and zealot.
The housekeeper was slowly propounding some difficulties, while she
prepared orange-rind for marmalade, when a child ran past the window
and came bounding into the room. It was a pretty child, and as it
danced, laughing, up to me—for we were not strangers (nor, indeed, was
its mother—a young married daughter of the house—a stranger)—I took it
on my knee.
Different as were our social positions now, this child’s mother and I
had been schoolfellows, when I was a girl of ten and she a young lady
of sixteen; and I remembered her, good-looking, but dull, in a lower
class than mine.
I was admiring the boy’s handsome dark eyes, when the mother, young
Mrs. Leigh, entered. What a beautiful and kind-looking woman was the
good-natured and comely, but unintellectual, girl become! Wifehood and
maternity had changed her thus, as I have since seen them change others
even less promising than she. Me she had forgotten. I was changed too,
though not, I fear, for the better. I made no attempt to recall myself
to her memory; why should I? She came for her son to accompany her in a
walk, and behind her followed a nurse, carrying an infant. I only
mention the incident because, in addressing the nurse, Mrs. Leigh spoke
French (very bad French, by the way, and with an incorrigibly bad
accent, again forcibly reminding me of our school-days): and I found
the woman was a foreigner. The little boy chattered volubly in French
too. When the whole party were withdrawn, Mrs. Barrett remarked that
her young lady had brought that foreign nurse home with her two years
ago, on her return from a Continental excursion; that she was treated
almost as well as a governess, and had nothing to do but walk out with
the baby and chatter French with Master Charles; “and,” added Mrs.
Barrett, “she says there are many Englishwomen in foreign families as
well placed as she.”
I stored up this piece of casual information, as careful housewives
store seemingly worthless shreds and fragments for which their
prescient minds anticipate a possible use some day. Before I left my
old friend, she gave me the address of a respectable old-fashioned inn
in the City, which, she said, my uncles used to frequent in former
days.
In going to London, I ran less risk and evinced less enterprise than
the reader may think. In fact, the distance was only fifty miles. My
means would suffice both to take me there, to keep me a few days, and
also to bring me back if I found no inducement to stay. I regarded it
as a brief holiday, permitted for once to work-weary faculties, rather
than as an adventure of life and death. There is nothing like taking
all you do at a moderate estimate: it keeps mind and body tranquil;
whereas grandiloquent notions are apt to hurry both into fever.
Fifty miles were then a day’s journey (for I speak of a time gone by:
my hair, which, till a late period, withstood the frosts of time, lies
now, at last white, under a white cap, like snow beneath snow). About
nine o’clock of a wet February night I reached London.
My reader, I know, is one who would not thank me for an elaborate
reproduction of poetic first impressions; and it is well, inasmuch as I
had neither time nor mood to cherish such; arriving as I did late, on a
dark, raw, and rainy evening, in a Babylon and a wilderness, of which
the vastness and the strangeness tried to the utmost any powers of
clear thought and steady self-possession with which, in the absence of
more brilliant faculties, Nature might have gifted me.
When I left the coach, the strange speech of the cabmen and others
waiting round, seemed to me odd as a foreign tongue. I had never before
heard the English language chopped up in that way. However, I managed
to understand and to be understood, so far as to get myself and trunk
safely conveyed to the old inn whereof I had the address. How
difficult, how oppressive, how puzzling seemed my flight! In London for
the first time; at an inn for the first time; tired with travelling;
confused with darkness; palsied with cold; unfurnished with either
experience or advice to tell me how to act, and yet—to act obliged.
Into the hands of common sense I confided the matter. Common sense,
however, was as chilled and bewildered as all my other faculties, and
it was only under the spur of an inexorable necessity that she
spasmodically executed her trust. Thus urged, she paid the porter:
considering the crisis, I did not blame her too much that she was
hugely cheated; she asked the waiter for a room; she timorously called
for the chambermaid; what is far more, she bore, without being wholly
overcome, a highly supercilious style of demeanour from that young
lady, when she appeared.
I recollect this same chambermaid was a pattern of town prettiness and
smartness. So trim her waist, her cap, her dress—I wondered how they
had all been manufactured. Her speech had an accent which in its
mincing glibness seemed to rebuke mine as by authority; her spruce
attire flaunted an easy scorn to my plain country garb.
“Well, it can’t be helped,” I thought, “and then the scene is new, and
the circumstances; I shall gain good.”
Maintaining a very quiet manner towards this arrogant little maid, and
subsequently observing the same towards the parsonic-looking,
black-coated, white-neckclothed waiter, I got civility from them ere
long. I believe at first they thought I was a servant; but in a little
while they changed their minds, and hovered in a doubtful state between
patronage and politeness.
I kept up well till I had partaken of some refreshment, warmed myself
by a fire, and was fairly shut into my own room; but, as I sat down by
the bed and rested my head and arms on the pillow, a terrible
oppression overcame me. All at once my position rose on me like a
ghost. Anomalous, desolate, almost blank of hope it stood. What was I
doing here alone in great London? What should I do on the morrow? What
prospects had I in life? What friends had I on earth? Whence did I
come? Whither should I go? What should I do?
I wet the pillow, my arms, and my hair, with rushing tears. A dark
interval of most bitter thought followed this burst; but I did not
regret the step taken, nor wish to retract it. A strong, vague
persuasion that it was better to go forward than backward, and that I
_could_ go forward—that a way, however narrow and difficult, would in
time open—predominated over other feelings: its influence hushed them
so far, that at last I became sufficiently tranquil to be able to say
my prayers and seek my couch. I had just extinguished my candle and
lain down, when a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At
first I knew it not; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the
twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said: “I lie in the shadow
of St. Paul’s.”