MISS LEROY
DURING the great French war there were many French prisoners in my native
town. They led a strange isolated life, for they knew nothing of our
language, nor, in those days, did three people in the town understand
theirs. The common soldiers amused themselves by making little trifles
and selling them. I have now before me a box of coloured straw with the
date 1799 on the bottom, which was bought by my grandfather. One of
these prisoners was an officer named Leroy. Why he did not go back to
France I never heard, but I know that before I was born he was living
near our house on a small income; that he tried to teach French, and that
he had as his companion a handsome daughter who grew up speaking English.
What she was like when she was young I cannot say, but I have had her
described to me over and over again. She had rather darkish brown hair,
and she was tall and straight as an arrow. This she was, by the way,
even into old age. She surprised, shocked, and attracted all the sober
persons in our circle. Her ways were not their ways. She would walk out
by herself on a starry night without a single companion, and cause
thereby infinite talk, which would have converged to a single focus if it
had not happened that she was also in the habit of walking out at four
o’clock on a summer’s morning, and that in the church porch of a little
village not far from us, which was her favourite resting-place, a copy of
the _De Imitatione Christi_ was found which belonged to her. So the talk
was scattered again and its convergence prevented. She used to say
doubtful things about love. One of them struck my mother with horror.
Miss Leroy told a male person once, and told him to his face, that if she
loved him and he loved her, and they agreed to sign one another’s
foreheads with a cross as a ceremony, it would be as good to her as
marriage. This may seem a trifle, but nobody now can imagine what was
thought of it at the time it was spoken. My mother repeated it every now
and then for fifty years. It may be conjectured how easily any other
girls of our acquaintance would have been classified, and justly
classified, if they had uttered such barefaced Continental immorality.
Miss Leroy’s neighbours were remarkably apt at classifying their
fellow-creatures. They had a few, a very few holes, into which they
dropped their neighbours, and they must go into one or the other.
Nothing was more distressing than a specimen which, notwithstanding all
the violence which might be used to it, would not fit into a hole, but
remained an exception. Some lout, I believe, reckoning on the legitimacy
of his generalisation, and having heard of this and other observations
accredited to Miss Leroy, ventured to be slightly rude to her. What she
said to him was never known, but he was always shy afterwards of
mentioning her name, and when he did he was wont to declare that she was
“a rum un.” She was not particular, I have heard, about personal
tidiness, and this I can well believe, for she was certainly not
distinguished when I knew her for this virtue. She cared nothing for the
linen-closet, the spotless bed-hangings, and the bright poker, which were
the true household gods of the respectable women of those days. She
would have been instantly set down as “slut,” and as having “nasty dirty
forrin ways,” if a peculiar habit of hers had not unfortunately presented
itself, most irritating to her critics, so anxious promptly to gratify
their philosophic tendency towards scientific grouping. Mrs. Mobbs, who
lived next door to her, averred that she always slept with the window
open. Mrs. Mobbs, like everybody else, never opened her window except to
“air the room.” Mrs. Mobbs’ best bedroom was carpeted all over, and
contained a great four-post bedstead, hung round with heavy hangings, and
protected at the top from draughts by a kind of firmament of white
dimity. Mrs. Mobbs stuffed a sack of straw up the chimney of the
fireplace, to prevent the fall of the “sutt,” as she called it. Mrs.
Mobbs, if she had a visitor, gave her a hot supper, and expected her
immediately afterwards to go upstairs, draw the window curtains, get into
this bed, draw the bed curtains also, and wake up the next morning
“bilious.” This was the proper thing to do. Miss Leroy’s sitting-room
was decidedly disorderly; the chairs were dusty; “yer might write yer
name on the table,” Mrs. Mobbs declared; but, nevertheless, the casement
was never closed night nor day; and, moreover, Miss Leroy was believed by
the strongest circumstantial evidence to wash herself all over every
morning, a habit which Mrs. Mobbs thought “weakening,” and somehow
connected with ethical impropriety. When Miss Leroy was married, and
first as an elderly woman became known to me, she was very
inconsequential in her opinions, or at least appeared so to our eyes.
She must have been much more so when she was younger. In our town we
were all formed upon recognised patterns, and those who possessed any one
mark of the pattern, had all. The wine-merchant, for example, who went
to church, eminently respectable, Tory, by no means associating with the
tradesfolk who displayed their goods in the windows, knowing no
“experience,” and who had never felt the outpouring of the Spirit, was a
specimen of a class like him. Another class was represented by the
dissenting ironmonger, deacon, presiding at prayer-meetings, strict
Sabbatarian, and believer in eternal punishments; while a third was set
forth by “Guffy,” whose real name was unknown, who got drunk, unloaded
barges, assisted at the municipal elections, and was never once seen
inside a place of worship. These patterns had existed amongst us from
the dimmest antiquity, and were accepted as part of the eternal order of
things; so much so, that the deacon, although he professed to be sure
that nobody who had not been converted would escape the fire—and the
wine-merchant certainly had not been converted—was very far from
admitting to himself that the wine-merchant ought to be converted, or
that it would be proper to try and convert him. I doubt, indeed, whether
our congregation would have been happy, or would have thought any the
better of him, if he had left the church. Such an event, however, could
no more come within the reach of our vision than a reversal of the
current of our river. It would have broken up our foundations and
party-walls, and would have been considered as ominous, and anything but
a subject for thankfulness. But Miss Leroy was not the wine-merchant,
nor the ironmonger, nor Guffy, and even now I cannot trace the hidden
centre of union from which sprang so much that was apparently
irreconcilable. She was a person whom nobody could have created in
writing a novel, because she was so inconsistent. As I have said before,
she studied Thomas à Kempis, and her little French Bible was brown with
constant use. But then she read much fiction in which there were scenes
which would have made our hair stand on end. The only thing she
constantly abhorred in books was what was dull and opaque. Yet, as we
shall see presently, her dislike to dulness, once at least in her life,
notably failed her. She was not Catholic, and professed herself
Protestant, but such a Protestantism! She had no sceptical doubts. She
believed implicitly that the Bible was the Word of God, and that
everything in it was true, but her interpretation of it was of the
strangest kind. Almost all our great doctrines seemed shrunk to nothing
in her eyes, while others, which were nothing to us, were all-important
to her. The atonement, for instance, I never heard her mention, but
Unitarianism was hateful to her, and Jesus was her God in every sense of
the word. On the other hand, she was partly Pagan, for she knew very
little of that consideration for the feeble, and even for the foolish,
which is the glory of Christianity. She was rude to foolish people, and
she instinctively kept out of the way of all disease and weakness, so
that in this respect she was far below the commonplace tradesman’s wife,
who visited the sick, sat up with them, and, in fact, never seemed so
completely in her element as when she could be with anybody who was ill
in bed.
Miss Leroy’s father was republican, and so was my grandfather. My
grandfather and old Leroy were the only people in our town who refused to
illuminate when a victory was gained over the French. Leroy’s windows
were spared on the ground that he was not a Briton, but the mob
endeavoured to show my grandfather the folly of his belief in democracy
by smashing every pane of glass in front of his house with stones. This
drew him and Leroy together, and the result was, that although Leroy
himself never set foot inside any chapel or church, Miss Leroy was often
induced to attend our meeting-house in company with a maiden aunt of
mine, who rather “took to her.” Now comes the for ever mysterious
passage in history. There was amongst the attendants at that
meeting-house a young man who was apprentice to a miller. He was a big,
soft, quiet, plump-faced, awkward youth, very good, but nothing more. He
wore on Sunday a complete suit of light pepper-and-salt clothes, and
continued to wear pepper-and-salt on Sunday all his life. He taught in
the Sunday-school, and afterwards, as he got older, he was encouraged to
open his lips at a prayer-meeting, and to “take the service” in the
village chapels on Sunday evening. He was the most singularly placid,
even-tempered person I ever knew. I first became acquainted with him
when I was a child and he was past middle life. What he was then, I am
told, he always was; and I certainly never heard one single violent word
escape his lips. His habits, even when young, had a tendency to harden.
He went to sleep after his mid-day dinner with the greatest regularity,
and he never could keep awake if he sat by a fire after dark. I have
seen him, when kneeling at family worship and praying with his family,
lose himself for an instant and nod his head, to the confusion of all who
were around him. He is dead now, but he lived to a good old age, which
crept upon him gradually with no pain, and he passed away from this world
to the next in a peaceful doze. He never read anything, for the simple
reason that whenever he was not at work or at chapel he slumbered. To
the utter amazement of everybody, it was announced one fine day that Miss
Leroy and he—George Butts—were to be married. They were about the last
people in the world, who, it was thought, could be brought together. My
mother was stunned, and never completely recovered. I have seen her,
forty years after George Butts’ wedding-day, lift up her hands, and have
heard her call out with emotion, as fresh as if the event were of
yesterday, “What made that girl have George I can _not_ think—but there!”
What she meant by the last two words we could not comprehend. Many of
her acquaintances interpreted them to mean that she knew more than she
dared communicate, but I think they were mistaken. I am quite certain if
she had known anything she must have told it, and, in the next place, the
phrase “but there” was not uncommon amongst women in our town, and was
supposed to mark the consciousness of a prudently restrained ability to
give an explanation of mysterious phenomena in human relationships. For
my own part, I am just as much in the dark as my mother. My father, who
was a shrewd man, was always puzzled, and could not read the riddle. He
used to say that he never thought George could have “made up” to any
young woman, and it was quite clear that Miss Leroy did not either then
or afterwards display any violent affection for him. I have heard her
criticise and patronise him as a “good soul,” but incapable, as indeed he
was, of all sympathy with her. After marriage she went her way and he
his. She got up early, as she was wont to do, and took her Bible into
the fields while he was snoring. She would then very likely suffer from
a terrible headache during the rest of the day, and lie down for hours,
letting the house manage itself as best it could. What made her
selection of George more obscure was that she was much admired by many
young fellows, some of whom were certainly more akin to her than he was;
and I have heard from one or two reports of encouraging words, and even
something more than words, which she had vouchsafed to them. A solution
is impossible. The affinities, repulsions, reasons in a nature like that
of Miss Leroy’s are so secret and so subtle, working towards such
incalculable and not-to-be-predicted results, that to attempt to make a
major and minor premiss and an inevitable conclusion out of them would be
useless. One thing was clear, that by marrying George she gained great
freedom. If she had married anybody closer to her, she might have jarred
with him; there might have been collision and wreck as complete as if
they had been entirely opposed; for she was not the kind of person to
accommodate herself to others even in the matter of small differences.
But George’s road through space lay entirely apart from hers, and there
was not the slightest chance of interference. She was under the
protection of a husband; she could do things that, as an unmarried woman,
especially in a foreign land, she could not do, and the compensatory
sacrifice to her was small. This is really the only attempt at
elucidation I can give. She went regularly all her life to chapel with
George, but even when he became deacon, and “supplied” the villages
round, she never would join the church as a member. She never agreed
with the minister, and he never could make anything out of her. They did
not quarrel, but she thought nothing of his sermons, and he was perplexed
and uncomfortable in the presence of a nondescript who did not respond to
any dogmatic statement of the articles of religion, and who yet could not
be put aside as “one of those in the gallery”—that is to say, as one of
the ordinary unconverted, for she used to quote hymns with amazing
fervour, and she quoted them to him with a freedom and a certain
superiority which he might have expected from an aged brother minister,
but certainly not from one of his own congregation. He was a preacher of
the Gospel, it was true; and it was his duty, a duty on which he
insisted, to be “instant in season and out of season” in saying spiritual
things to his flock; but then they were things proper, decent,
conventional, uttered with gravity at suitable times—such as were
customary amongst all the ministers of the denomination. It was not
pleasant to be outbid in his own department, especially by one who was
not a communicant, and to be obliged, when he went on a pastoral visit to
a house in which Mrs. Butts happened to be, to sit still and hear her,
regardless of the minister’s presence, conclude a short mystical
monologue with Cowper’s verse—
“Exults our rising soul,
Disburdened of her load,
And swells unutterably full
Of glory and of God.”
This was _not_ pleasant to our minister, nor was it pleasant to the
minister’s wife. But George Butts held a responsible position in our
community, and the minister’s wife held also a responsible position, so
that she taxed all her ingenuity to let her friends understand at
tea-parties what she thought of Mrs. Butts without saying anything which
could be the ground of formal remonstrance. Thus did Mrs. Butts live
among us, as an Arabian bird with its peculiar habits, cries, and plumage
might live in one of our barn-yards with the ordinary barn-door fowls.
I was never happier when I was a boy than when I was with Mrs. Butts at
the mill, which George had inherited. There was a grand freedom in her
house. The front door leading into the garden was always open. There
was no precise separation between the house and the mill. The business
and the dwelling-place were mixed up together, and covered with flour.
Mr. Butts was in the habit of walking out of his mill into the
living-room every now and then, and never dreamed when one o’clock came
that it was necessary for him to change his floury coat before he had his
dinner. His cap he also often retained, and in any weather, not
extraordinarily cold, he sat in his shirtsleeves. The garden was large
and half-wild. A man from the mill, if work was slack, gave a day to it
now and then, but it was not trimmed and raked and combed like the other
gardens in the town. It was full of gooseberry trees, and I was
permitted to eat the gooseberries without stint. The mill-life, too, was
inexpressibly attractive—the dark chamber with the great, green, dripping
wheel in it, so awfully mysterious as the central life of the whole
structure; the machinery connected with the wheel—I knew not how; the
hole where the roach lay by the side of the mill-tail in the eddy; the
haunts of the water-rats which we used to hunt with Spot, the black and
tan terrier, and the still more exciting sport with the ferrets—all this
drew me down the lane perpetually. I liked, and even loved Mrs. Butts,
too, for her own sake. Her kindness to me was unlimited, and she was
never overcome with the fear of “spoiling me,” which seemed the constant
dread of most of my hostesses. I never lost my love for her. It grew as
I grew, despite my mother’s scarcely suppressed hostility to her, and
when I heard she was ill, and was likely to die, I went to be with her.
She was eighty years old then. I sat by her bedside with her hand in
mine. I was there when she passed away, and—but I have no mind and no
power to say any more, for all the memories of her affection and of the
sunny days by the water come over me and prevent the calmness necessary
for a chronicle. She with all her faults and eccentricities will always
have in my heart a little chapel with an ever-burning light. She was one
of the very very few whom I have ever seen who knew how to love a child.
Mrs. Butts and George had one son who was named Clement. He was exactly
my own age, and naturally we were constant companions. We went to the
same school. He never distinguished himself at his books, but he was
chief among us. He had a versatile talent for almost every
accomplishment in which we delighted, but he was not supreme in any one
of them. There were better cricketers, better football players, better
hands at setting a night-line, better swimmers than Clem, but he could do
something, and do it well, in all these departments. He generally took
up a thing with much eagerness for a time, and then let it drop. He was
foremost in introducing new games and new fashions, which he permitted to
flourish for a time, and then superseded. As he grew up he displayed a
taste for drawing and music. He was soon able to copy little paintings
of flowers, or even little country scenes, and to play a piece of no very
great difficulty with tolerable effect. But as he never was taught by a
master, and never practised elementary exercises and studies, he was
deficient in accuracy. When the question came what was to be done with
him after he left school, his father naturally wished him to go into the
mill. Clem, however, set his face steadily against this project, and his
mother, who was a believer in his genius, supported him. He actually
wanted to go to the University, a thing unheard of in those days amongst
our people; but this was not possible, and after dangling about for some
time at home, he obtained the post of usher in a school, an occupation
which he considered more congenial and intellectual than that of grinding
flour. Strange to say, although he knew less than any of his colleagues,
he succeeded better than any of them. He managed to impress a sense of
his own importance upon everybody, including the headmaster. He slid
into a position of superiority above three or four colleagues who would
have shamed him at an examination, and who uttered many a curse because
they saw themselves surpassed and put in the shade by a stranger, who,
they were confident, could hardly construct a hexameter. He never
quarrelled with them nor did he grossly patronise them, but he always let
them know that he considered himself above them. His reading was
desultory; in fact, everything he did was desultory. He was not selfish
in the ordinary sense of the word. Rather was he distinguished by a
large and liberal open-handedness; but he was liberal also to himself to
a remarkable degree, dressing himself expensively, and spending a good
deal of money in luxuries. He was specially fond of insisting on his
half French origin, made a great deal of his mother, was silent as to his
father, and always signed himself C. Leroy Butts, although I don’t
believe the second Christian name was given him in baptism.
Notwithstanding his generosity he was egotistical and hollow at heart.
He knew nothing of friendship in the best sense of the word, but had a
multitude of acquaintances, whom he invariably sought amongst those who
were better off than himself. He was popular with them, for no man knew
better than he how to get up an entertainment, or to make a success of an
evening party. He had not been at his school for two years before he
conceived the notion of setting up for himself. He had not a penny, but
he borrowed easily what was wanted from somebody he knew, and in a
twelvemonth more he had a dozen pupils. He took care to get the ablest
subordinates he could find, and he succeeded in passing a boy for an open
scholarship at Oxford, against two competitors prepared by the very man
whom he had formerly served. After this he prospered greatly, and would
have prospered still more, if his love of show and extravagance had not
increased with his income. His talents were sometimes taxed when people
who came to place their sons with him supposed ignorantly that his origin
and attainments were what might be expected from his position; and poor
Chalmers, a Glasgow M.A., who still taught, for £80 a year, the third
class in the establishment in which Butts began life, had some bitter
stories on that subject. Chalmers was a perfect scholar, but he was not
agreeable. He had black finger-nails, and wore dirty collars. Having a
lively remembrance of his friend’s “general acquaintance” with Latin
prosody, Chalmers’ opinion of Providence was much modified when he
discovered what Providence was doing for Butts. Clem took to the Church
when he started for himself. It would have been madness in him to remain
a Dissenter. But in private, if it suited his purpose, he could always
be airily sceptical, and he had a superficial acquaintance, second-hand,
with a multitude of books, many of them of an infidel turn. I once
rebuked him for his hypocrisy, and his defence was that religious
disputes were indifferent to him, and that at any rate a man associates
with gentlemen if he is a churchman. Cultivation and manners he thought
to be of more importance than Calvinism. I believe that he partly meant
what he said. He went to church because the school would have failed if
he had gone to chapel; but he was sufficiently keen-sighted and clever to
be beyond the petty quarrels of the sects, and a song well sung was of
much greater moment to him than an essay on pædo-baptism. It was all
very well of Chalmers to revile him for his shallowness. He was shallow,
and yet he possessed in some mysterious way a talent which I greatly
coveted, and which in this world is inestimably precious—the talent of
making people give way before him—a capacity of self-impression.
Chalmers could never have commanded anybody. He had no power whatever,
even when he was right, to put his will against the wills of others, but
yielded first this way and then the other. Clem, on the contrary,
without any difficulty or any effort, could conquer all opposition, and
smilingly force everybody to do his bidding.
Clem had a peculiar theory with regard to his own rights and those of the
class to which he considered that he belonged. He always held implicitly
and sometimes explicitly that gifted people live under a kind of
dispensation of grace; the law existing solely for dull souls. What in a
clown is a crime punishable by the laws of the land might in a man of
genius be a necessary development, or at any rate an excusable offence.
He had nothing to say for the servant-girl who had sinned with the
shopman, but if artist or poet were to carry off another man’s wife, it
might not be wrong.
He believed, and acted upon the belief, that the inferior ought to render
perpetual incense to the superior, and that the superior should receive
it as a matter of course. When his father was ill he never waited on him
or sat up a single night with him. If duty was disagreeable to him Clem
paid homage to it afar off, but pleaded exemption. He admitted that
waiting on the sick is obligatory on people who are fitted for it, and is
very charming. Nothing was more beautiful to him than tender, filial
care spending itself for a beloved object. But it was not his vocation.
His nerves were more finely ordered than those of mankind generally, and
the sight of disease and suffering distressed him too much. Everything
was surrendered to him in the houses of his friends. If any
inconvenience was to be endured, he was the first person to be protected
from it, and he accepted the greatest sacrifices, with a graceful
acknowledgment, it is true, but with no repulse. To what better purpose
could the best wine be put than in cherishing his imagination. It was
simple waste to allow it to be poured out upon the earth, and to give it
to a fool was no better. After he succeeded so well in the world, Clem,
to a great extent, deserted me, although I was his oldest friend and the
friend of his childhood. I heard that he visited a good many rich
persons, that he made much of them, and they made much of him. He kept
up a kind of acquaintance with me, not by writing to me, but by the very
cheap mode of sending me a newspaper now and then with a marked paragraph
in it announcing the exploits of his school at a cricket-match, or
occasionally with a report of a lecture which he had delivered. He was a
decent orator, and from motives of business if from no other, he not
unfrequently spoke in public. One or two of these lectures wounded me a
good deal. There was one in particular on _As You Like It_, in which he
held up to admiration the fidelity which is so remarkable in Shakespeare,
and lamented that in these days it was so rare to find anything of the
kind, he thought that we were becoming more indifferent to one another.
He maintained, however, that man should be everything to man, and he then
enlarged on the duty of really cultivating affection, of its superiority
to books, and on the pleasure and profit of self-denial. I do not mean
to accuse Clem of downright hypocrisy. I have known many persons come up
from the country and go into raptures over a playhouse sun and moon who
have never bestowed a glance or a thought on the real sun and moon to be
seen from their own doors; and we are all aware it by no means follows
because we are moved to our very depths by the spectacle of unrecognised,
uncomplaining endurance in a novel, that therefore we can step over the
road to waste an hour or a sixpence upon the unrecognised, uncomplaining
endurance of the poor lone woman left a widow in the little villa there.
I was annoyed with myself because Clem’s abandonment of me so much
affected me. I wished I could cut the rope and carelessly cast him
adrift as he had cast me adrift, but I could not. I never could make out
and cannot make out what was the secret of his influence over me; why I
was unable to say, “If you do not care for me I do not care for you.” I
longed sometimes for complete rupture, so that we might know exactly
where we were, but it never came. Gradually our intercourse grew thinner
and thinner, until at last I heard that he had been spending a fortnight
with some semi-aristocratic acquaintance within five miles of me, and
during the whole of that time he never came near me. I met him in a
railway station soon afterwards, when he came up to me effusive and
apparently affectionate. “It was a real grief to me, my dear fellow,” he
said, “that I could not call on you last month, but the truth was I was
so driven: they would make me go here and go there, and I kept putting
off my visit to you till it was too late.” Fortunately my train was just
starting, or I don’t know what might have happened. I said not a word;
shook hands with him; got into the carriage; he waved his hat to me, and
I pretended not to see him, but I did see him, and saw him turn round
immediately to some well-dressed officer-like gentleman with whom he
walked laughing down the platform. The rest of that day was black to me.
I cared for nothing. I passed away from the thought of Clem, and dwelt
upon the conviction which had long possessed me that I was
_insignificant_, that there was _nothing much in me_, and it was this
which destroyed my peace. We may reconcile ourselves to poverty and
suffering, but few of us can endure the conviction that there is _nothing
in us_, and that consequently we cannot expect anybody to gravitate
towards us with any forceful impulse. It is a bitter experience. And
yet there is consolation. The universe is infinite. In the presence of
its celestial magnitudes who is there who is really great or small, and
what is the difference between you and me, my work and yours? I sought
refuge in the idea of GOD, the God of a starry night with its
incomprehensible distances; and I was at peace, content to be the meanest
worm of all the millions that crawl on the earth.