IN LONDON.
Ellinor was thinking of Redmond Sleath--when was she not thinking of
him!--during all that long, long journey from the North to London,
and Mary had been painfully struck by her alternate nervous anxiety
and dull, mechanical acceptance of her own attentions and care during
its progress. She seemed at times like a somnambulist--one moving in
her sleep rather than one to whom the journey should have been an
excitement and a novelty after the long years of quiet and seclusion
at Birkwoodbrae, hence the strain upon her overwrought nerves was ere
long to bring a serious illness upon her.
A cab--a genuine London cab, one of those clumsy four-wheeled
'growlers,' peculiar to the modern Babylon and to no other
place--cramped, damp, frowsy, far from sweet-smelling, and sorely
perilous for ladies' dresses--had conveyed the sisters, both feeling
somewhat scared and disconsolate, from the Northern Railway to the
classic region of Paddington by day, and luckily for them not by
night.
The long drive westward by the Euston and Mary-le-Bone Roads had
seemed apparently interminable, and most weary after a long journey
by rail; and then the architecture, construction, and material of the
houses--brick, always and for ever brick--looked strange and foreign
to their eyes, and so ere long they reached the Terrace, which
adjoins Paddington Church. They had read of and heard a deal about
the famous old Court suburb of Kensington, and thought the locality
to which a chance had taken them might prove something like it.
Mrs. Fubsby, their landlady, whose address had been given to them by
her nephew, Joe Fubsby, guard of the northern train (the chance above
referred to), and hence their selection of such a singular place,
received the weary travellers kindly enough. She seemed a motherly,
well-disposed woman, but soured in disposition by past wrongs or
sorrows.
She was about forty years of age, had some remains of beauty, and had
seen better days and had other hopes (as usual with her class), all
of which she was not long in hinting.
The sitting-room into which she ushered them, though scrupulously
clean, had a mouldy odour, suggestive of the adjacent hideous
churchyard; it looked small, poor, and shabby. Gaudy artificial
flowers in vases of Derby spar were on the little mantelpiece, and
some highly-coloured prints in Oxford frames were hung upon the walls.
The air felt close and heavy--oh, so heavy, the girls thought, after
the fresh, pure breezes of Invermay! In fact, there seemed to be no
air at all.
Their sweetness and gentleness of manner, together with their
undeniable beauty, attracted and won the--at first
suspicious--landlady, who bustled about and prepared tea for them.
She, however, put great weight upon an introduction coming through
her nephew Joe; and her confidence grew apace when she found Mary
scrupulously correct in her weekly payments, and others of every
kind, and thus she complacently tolerated the presence of Jack in her
household. To have parted with him would have stricken Mary's heart.
Ere the first day of their residence with her was past, they were in
full possession of Mrs. Fubsby's personal history, which she thrust
upon them with that loquacious communicativeness peculiar to the
English lower orders--at least so much of it as she cared to
tell--how her maiden name was Seraphina-Mary-Ann--how she had married
a gentleman, who, however, did not behave as such in the end, as he
had left her years ago, and she was now reduced to have lodgers or
boarders, and so forth.
Coming from a secluded country place like their Perthshire parish,
Mary and Ellinor had no real idea of the world or of life, as it is
called--more than all, the bustling, busy, tearing, selfish, and
suspicious life of London, or the mighty and close race for existence
there. They knew not yet that without friends and introductions
employments in teaching music or drawing were all but unattainable.
A few days passed on. Advertisements were studied daily and replied
to sedulously; but no answer came. They could not know that for each
of these employments there might be two thousand applicants! So
their poor hearts grew hopeless and weary--often sick with alarm as
money dwindled away; and day by day they looked out, either on the
frowsy churchyard, where not a blade of grass grew between the
closely packed tombstones, or the equally frowsy canal, with its
barges cleaving the muddy water and oozy slime; and as they were
totally ignorant of London, for a time, the poor girls supposed it
must be _all_ like their then sordid surroundings.
Paddington, where Francois Thurot, the famous corsair, won the bride
in whose arms he died in battle, and where in the last century the
Guards coming from Hounslow were wont to halt for the night, prior to
marching for the little London of George II., was, some fifty years
ago, a kind of suburban village, a rural and pretty place, with its
grassy green and the old 'Wheatsheaf' Tavern, where Ben Jonson drank
his beer, even after its quaint Gothic church, where the Sheldons
were entombed by its solemn yew-tree, was replaced by the present
hideous square edifice, with its pillared portico and trumpery cupola
starting from amid that veritable stoneyard of graveslabs, among
which lie the remains of the beautiful Mrs. Siddons and of the
luckless painter Haydon--an odious and festering place, where, Dr.
Ashburner tells us in his work on 'The Dynamics,' his nervous
patients were wont to see nightly the pale and lambent dead-lights
rising from the corrupted soil.
Whether it was the result of all she had undergone of late, or that
the atmosphere of the place affected Ellinor, Mary never knew; but
her colour faded out--the ruddy tint left her lips, and her dark
hazel eyes grew dull as she became prostrated by a nervous illness,
which added sorely to the cares, the troubles, and expenses of the
latter, for Ellinor required wine and many little luxuries.
Energy seemed to have left her. Ellinor was but twenty, but already
her life seemed over and done with!
And now that her secret love affair was apparently a thing completely
of the past, Ellinor showed Mary the gift of Sir Redmond, and
bursting into a flood of hysterical tears told her all--of the
baffled elopement; and then Mary, catching up Jack, covered the dog
with kisses.
There were at least two reasons why no letters ever reached Dr.
Wodrow, and that, to him, the movements of the sisters seemed
involved in painful mystery.
Two letters that Mary wrote to him had miscarried, and, as no answers
came to them, with over-sensitiveness and doubt, she misconstrued the
silence of her good old friend, and, believing that he resented
Ellinor's treatment of his son, would now ignore their existence.
'I shall write no more,' said Mary. 'Can it be that Lady Dunkeld has
ruined us among those who knew us? If so, there is one use in
adversity--we can tell our friends from our enemies.'
So in sorrowful doubt she did not write again; seeking for employment
and nursing Ellinor occupied all the thoughts of Mary, who became
almost distracted with a fear that the former might be sent by Mrs.
Fubsby to a common hospital. Nothing, perhaps, was further from the
good woman's thoughts; but Mary had heard, or read, of such things.
Thus, fully occupied, she wrote no more; and, as time went past, the
mystery grew at the manse of Kirktoun-Mailler, and in the mind of
Colville also. Everything painful, horrible, and disastrous was
fancied, and advertisements put by the latter in the _Times_, however
carefully yet pointedly worded, were never seen by Mary. So in these
our days of penny post and cheap telegrams, they remained lost,
untraced, and undiscovered by those who loved them best.
She had both confidence and patience; and patience is mental strength
concentrated. Her religious education had also taught her
resignation, and she felt that 'let the sands drop through the glass
ever so slowly, there is a time when they end; there is a time for us
all; no matter the hour, for God thinks it the best.'
Yet often as she sat, busy with crewel work for sale, by Ellinor's
bedside, the notes of the passing bell in the cupola of the adjacent
church--a toll unknown in Scotland--smote a gloom upon her heart with
every measured stroke.
No pessimist was Mary Wellwood in temper or heart, and no
manufacturer of artificial sorrow; yet the idea occurred to her with
terror--what if she should lose Ellinor, and be left alone in this
bitter world?
As petty trifles, like airs and scraps of frivolous songs, will haunt
the mind in times of dire calamity, even of death, Mary's thoughts
would run persistently on the feathered pets and flowers she had once
at home--even on the sparrows for which she was daily wont to spread
crumbs, where they would find none now; and she actually envied her
old owl; he, at least, was at home in his ivied ruin, that looked
down on Invermay.
Thinking thus, Mary would sit in the evening twilight by the open
window, through which came the roar of mighty London; but not the
flower-scented air that hovered over their lost home; and while the
stars, dimly seen in the smoke-laden sky of London, stole into sight,
she thought of the green Ochil peaks, over which the same stars were
shining brightly, like vast diamonds set in azure.
Ellinor recovered and gained strength, but still able to do little
with her pencil.
Evening walks, as among the green lanes and shady paths in the glen
where the May flows, they could have no more now. They seldom saw
the sun set; and when evening fell the streets in their vicinity
became filled by people whose appearance appalled them. There were
vicious-looking men and more vicious-looking women from the adjacent
Edgware Road; vendors of carrion on wooden skewers, known as
'cat's-meat;' vendors of roasted potatoes and chestnuts; boiled
oranges; of plums, the bloom of which was due to clothes-blue;
vendors of milk, the component parts of which made one shudder; of
queerly-painted pugs and yellow-painted sparrows; of red pots of
earth, with rootless twigs of flowers stuck in them--another London
dodge--yet declared by the vendors to be 'all a-growing--all
a-blowing.'
With such plants as these Mrs. Fubsby was not to be 'took in,' and so
preferred paper flowers.
Ellinor contrived to finish one of her best landscapes--a view on the
May--and 'room' was given it by a kind of picture-dealer close by,
but it remained in his window unsold, and apparently unnoticed by
all--save the flies, who did not improve it.
Mary's confidence at times began to desert her when she felt how hard
it would be for them, all unaided as they were, to win their daily
bread and add to the little pittance they had, among that vast human
tide of busy, cold, careless, and apparently unsympathising people
who poured past her in the streets.
Her sweet face began to look anxious, sorrowful, and pale under the
ripples of golden brown hair that fell softly over her broad low
forehead; and ere long the two sisters began to want many things to
which they had been accustomed.
'What is to be the end of it all?' Mary would think, as she came
slowly back to tell Ellinor of some fresh disappointment, or that her
picture was still unsold. Mary was growing paler, Ellinor could
see--yes, she looked older; her figure seemed less round, though
graceful as ever. Her street dress was beginning to look poor and
even shabby. Oh, how sad and horrible it was!
Mrs. Fubsby pitied the girls for their want of success, while she
admired their perseverance. A well-meaning woman, she had some
suggestions to 'hoffer,' as she said, which made Mary's blood run
cold.
Among these were two--that, as she was 'so 'andsome,' she might get a
situation in the mantle department of some great shop, or as a
species of lay-figure to show off the goods, and who knew but one of
the 'walkers' might take a fancy to her? or to work a sewing-machine
in the window in the gaze of all those men and boys who would be
certain to crowd thereat, and flatten their noses against the glass
while critically surveying her. Another suggestion was to sell poor
Jack, whom Joe Fubsby said was well worth 'a ten pun' note;' but Mary
would rather have starved than parted with her dog.
With a burning cheek and a beating heart, and feeling certain that
she would be viewed with suspicion, and perhaps insulted, she
ventured into a shop in the Edgware Road, where an 'honest' dealer
gave her less than the third of the value for Sir Redmond's chain and
locket. This sum helped them on a little; but again finances began
to fall, and, clasping her slim white hands, Mary began to think it
was useless attempting to struggle any more.