“For men have marble, women waxen minds,
And therefore are they formed as marble will;
The weak oppress’d, the impression of change kinds,
Is formed in them by force, by fraud, or skill;
Then call them not the authors of their ill.”
Inclination would have taken Theodore Dalbrook to Dorsetshire before
the Christmas holidays gave him an excuse for going home; but he
wrestled with that haunting desire to revisit the Priory, and to be
again _tête-à-tête_ with his cousin in the dimly lighted room where
she had talked to him of her own sorrows and of his ambitions. The
memory of that last evening was the most vivid element in his life.
It stood out like a spot of light against the dull grey of monotonous
days, and the burden of dry-as-dust reading. But he had told her
that he should not see her until Christmas time, and he was not weak
enough to indulge that insane longing for the society of a woman
whose heart was in the grave of her husband.
November and the greater part of December stretched before him like
a long dark road which had to be trodden somehow before he came to
the inn at which there would be light and comfort, cheerful voices,
and friendly greetings. He set his face resolutely towards that dark
prospect, and tramped along, doing the work he had to do, living the
life of a hermit in those chambers in Ferret Court, which had already
taken the stamp of his own character, and looked as if he had lived
in them for years.
He had no need to sit alone at night with his books and his lamp, for
there were plenty of houses in which he would have been welcome. His
name was a passport in legal circles. Old friends of James Dalbrook’s
were ready to welcome his kinsman to their tables, eager to be of
service to him. He had his college friends, too, in the great city,
and need not have gone companionless. But he was not in the mood for
society of any kind, old or young, except the society of Blackstone,
Coke, and Justinian, and divers other sages who out of the dim past
shed their light upon the legal wilderness of the present. He sat
by his fire and read law, and laid down his book only to smoke his
meditative pipe and indulge in foolish waking dreams about that grave
old house in Dorsetshire and the young widow who lived there.
He had followed two of those three children of the old Squire, two
out of the three faces in the picture in the hall at Cheriton, to
the end of their story. No man could discover any postscript to that
story, which in each case was closed by a grave.
There remained only one last unfinished record—the history of the
runaway wife, the end whereof was open to doubt. That unlucky lady’s
fate had been accepted upon hearsay. It had been said that she had
died at Boulogne, within a year or so after the Vicar met her there.
Upon his return from Jersey, Theodore wrote to his father’s oldest
and most experienced clerk, begging him to hunt up the evidence of
Mrs. Darcy’s death, so far as it was obtainable at Cheriton or in the
neighbourhood.
The clerk replied as follows, after an interval of ten days:—
“DEAR SIR,
“I have been twice to Cheriton, and have made inquiries, cautiously
as you wished, with respect to the report of Mrs. Darcy’s death,
some fifteen years ago, and saw Mr. Dolby, the doctor, and Gaster
at the general shop, who, as you are no doubt aware, is a gentleman
who busies himself a good deal about other people’s affairs, and
sets himself up for being an authority upon most things.
“Mr. Dolby I found very vague in his ideas. He remembered the late
Vicar telling him about having met Mrs. Darcy in the market-place
at Boulogne, and being shocked at the change in her. He told Mr.
Dolby that he did not think she was long for this world; but it was
some time after when Dolby heard some one—he could not remember who
it was—assert that Mrs. Darcy was dead.
“Gaster had much more to say upon the subject. He pretends to be
interested in all reminiscences of the Strangways, and boasts of
having served Cheriton House for nearly forty years. He remembers
Evelyn Strangway when she was a little girl, handsome and
high-spirited. He remembered the report of her death at Boulogne
getting about the village, and he remembered mentioning the fact
to Lord Cheriton at the time. There was an election going on just
then, and his lordship had looked in to consult him, Joseph Gaster,
about certain business details: and his lordship seemed shocked to
hear of the poor lady’s death. ‘I suppose that is the end of the
family, my Lord?’ Gaster said, and his lordship replied, ‘Yes, that
is the end of the Strangways.’
“Gaster believes that he must have read of the death in the
newspapers; perhaps copied from the _Times_ into a local paper; at
any rate, the fact had implanted itself in his mind, and it had
never occurred to him to doubt it.
“I asked him if he knew what had become of the lady’s husband, but
here his mind is a blank. He had heard that the man was a scamp,
and that was all he knew about him.
“Since making these inquiries I have spent a long evening at the
Literary Institute, where, as you know, there is a set of the
_Times_, in volumes, extending over a period of forty years. I have
looked through the deaths for three years, taking the year in which
Gaster _thinks_ he heard of Mrs. Darcy’s death, as the middle year
out of three, but without result. It is, of course, unlikely that
the death would be advertised if the poor lady died friendless and
in poverty in a foreign town; but I thought it my duty to make this
investigation.
“Awaiting your further commands, &c., &c.”
There was nothing conclusive in this; and Theodore felt that the
history of Mrs. Darcy’s later years remained to be unravelled. It was
not to be supposed that the runaway wife, who, if she were yet living
must be an elderly woman, could have had act or part in the murder of
Sir Godfrey Carmichael; but it was not the less a part of his task
to trace her story to its final chapter. Then only could he convince
Juanita of the wildness of that idea which connected the catastrophe
of the 29th of July with the exiled Strangways. When he could say to
her, “You see that long before that fatal night the Squire’s three
children had vanished from this earth,” she would be constrained to
confess that the solution of the mystery was not to be sought here.
He went over to Boulogne, saw the English chaplain, and several of
the hotel-keepers. He explored the cemetery, and examined the record
of the dead. He visited the police, and he made friends with the
elderly editor of an old-established newspaper; but from all his
questioning of various people the result was blank. Nobody remembered
a Mrs. Darcy, an Englishwoman of distinguished appearance but fallen
fortunes, a woman long past youth and yet not old. If she had lived
for any time in Boulogne she had left no trace of her existence; if
she had died and been buried there she had left no record among the
graves.
Boulogne could tell him nothing. He came back to the great wilderness
of London, the rallying point for all wanderers. It was there perhaps
that the end of Evelyn Strangway was to be sought.
He had, as it seemed to him, only one clue, the name of her
governess. The governess was only seven or eight years older than the
pupil, and she might have survived her pupil, and might have been in
communication with her till the end. Jasper Blake had told him that
there was a strong attachment between Sarah Newton and the wayward
girl she taught.
To hunt for a governess among the thousands of portionless
gentlewomen who try to live by teaching might seem more hopeless
than the proverbial search for the lost needle, but Theodore did not
despair. If Miss Newton had remained a spinster and had continued
to exercise her vocation as a teacher she might be traced through
one of those agencies which transact business between governess
and employer; but, on the other hand, if, as was more likely, she
had long ago abandoned the profession of teacher, and had made
some obscure marriage, she would have sunk into the vast ocean of
middle-class life, in whose depths it would be almost impossible to
discover her. The first thing to be done was to make a visitation of
the agencies, and this task Theodore began two days after his return
from Boulogne.
He had methodized his life by this time, devoting a certain portion
of his days to his cousin’s interests, but in no wise neglecting the
work he had to do for his own advancement. He had known too many
instances of men who had made reading law an excuse for an idle
and desultory life, and he was resolved that his own course should
be steady and persistent even to doggedness. He had been told that
success at the Bar was nowadays almost unattainable; that the men of
the day who had conquered fame and were making great fortunes, were
in a manner miraculous men, and that it was futile for any young man
to hope to follow in their steps. The road _they_ had trodden was
barred against the new comer. Theodore listened to these pessimists,
yet was not discouraged. He had told himself that he would emerge
somehow from the obscurity of a country solicitor’s practice—would
bring himself in some wise nearer the social level of the woman he
loved, so that if in the days to come one gleam of hope should ever
shine upon that love he might be able to say to her, “My place in
life is the place your father held when he offered himself to your
mother; my determination to conquer fortune is not less than his.”
He seldom passed the dingy door of the ground-floor chambers—on which
the several names of three briefless ones were painted in dirty
letters that had once been white—without thinking of his fortunate
kinsman, without wondering what his life had been like in those
darksome rooms, and in what shape fortune had first appeared to him.
He had not married until he was forty. Long and lonely years had gone
before that golden summertide of his life, when a young and lovely
woman had given him happiness and fortune. How had he lived in those
lonely years? Tradition accused him of miserly habits, of shabby
raiment, of patient grinding and scraping to accumulate wealth.
Theodore knew that if he had hoarded his earnings it had been for a
worthy end. He had set himself to win a place among the lords of the
soil. The land he loved had been to him as a mistress, and for that
he had been content to live poorly and spend his nights in toil.
For such miserliness Theodore had nothing but admiration; for he
had seen how liberally the man who had scraped and hoarded was able
to administer a large income—how generous as a master, friend, and
patron the sometime miser had shown himself.
He spent more than a week in visiting the numerous agencies which
are employed by the great governess-class, and the result of that
painstaking exploration was not altogether barren. He succeeded
in finding an elderly personage at the head of an old-established
Agency, who kept her book with praiseworthy regularity, and who
remembered Sarah Newton. She had had no less than four Miss Newtons
on her register at different times, but there was only one Sarah
Newton among them, and for this lady she had obtained a situation in
the Lake Country so lately as July 20, 1873—that is to say, about
eleven years before the period of Theodore’s investigation.
On that date Miss Newton had entered the family of a Mr. Craven—the
vicar of a small parish between Ambleside and Bowness. She was living
in that family four years afterwards, when Miss Palmer, the Principal
in the Agency, last heard of her.
“And in all probability she is living there still,” said Miss Palmer.
“At her time of life people are not fond of change. I remember her
when she was a young woman, full of energy, and very impatient of
control. I used to see her much oftener then. She seldom kept a
situation over a twelvemonth.”
“Except at Cheriton Chase. She was more than a year in that
situation, I think.”
“Cheriton Chase! I don’t remember the name. Some one else may have
got her the situation. How long ago was she there, do you suppose?”
asked Miss Palmer, turning over one of her neat basil-bound registers.
“It was in the year ’47 she left Cheriton.”
“Ah, then, it was not we who got her the situation. My first entry
about her is on the 11th December, ’48. She paid her entrance fee of
one guinea on that date. It is higher than that of inferior agencies;
but we take real trouble for our clients, and we make it our business
to be safe upon the point of CHARACTER. We are as careful about the
families into which we send governesses as about the governesses we
introduce into families.”
* * * * *
The next day was Sunday, and Theodore employed that day of rest in
travelling by a very slow train to Bowness; where he arrived at five
o’clock in the evening, to find mountain and lake hidden in densest
grey, and an innkeeper who seemed neither to desire nor deserve
visitors. Happily the traveller was of the age at which dinner is
not a vital question, and he was hardly aware of the toughness of
the steak, or the inferior quality of the codfish set before him in
the desolate coffee-room. He had a diamond Virgil in his pocket, and
he sat by the fire reading the sixth book by the paraffin lamp till
ten o’clock, and then went contentedly to a bedroom which suggested
ghosts, or at least nightmare.
No deadly visions troubled him, however, for the slow train had
brought about a condition of abject weariness which resulted in
dreamless slumber. The sun shone into his bleak bed-chamber when
he awoke next morning, and the lake stretched beneath his windows,
silver-shining, melting dimly into the grey of the opposite shore.
The mountains were sulking still, and only showed their ragged crests
above dark rolling clouds; but the scene was an improvement upon the
avenue of chimney-pots and distant glimpse of a murky Thames as seen
from Ferret Court.
His landlord greeted him in a more cheerful spirit upon Monday
morning than he had evinced on Sunday evening when his after-dinner
lethargy was rudely disturbed by a guest whose business-like air
and small Gladstone bag did not promise much profit; a visitor who
would want a dinner off the joint, most likely, and a half-crown
breakfast; a visitor whose libations would be limited to bitter beer
and an occasional whisky and soda. Such a guest in a house that was
beginning to hibernate was a burden rather than a boon.
This morning, however, the landlord was reconciled to his solitary
customer, having told his wife that after all, “little fish are
sweet,” and he went blithely to order the dog-cart—his own cart and
own man—ostler in the season, coachman or anything you please out of
the season—to drive Mr. Dalbrook to Kettisford Vicarage, a nine-mile
journey.
It was a pretty, out-of-the-way nook—half hidden in a cleft of the
hills—at which Theodore arrived a few minutes after noon; a little,
old-fashioned, world-forgotten village, and a sprawling old greystone
house, covered with Virginia creeper, passion-flower, and the
feathery leafage of the trumpet ash; a long, low house, with heavily
thatched roof, projecting over its upper casements; a sleepy-looking
old house in a still sleepier garden, so remote and so sheltered
that winter had forgotten to come there; and the great yellow roses
were still blooming on the wall, fattened by the misty atmosphere of
the adjacent lake, glorified by the untainted air. November was half
over, yet here the only signs of autumn were the grey sky, and the
crimson of the Virginia creeper.
The Vicar of Kettisford was one of those privileged persons who
can speak with their enemies at the gate, assured of being backed
up in their speech by a family contingent. The Vicarage seemed
overflowing with young life, from the very threshold of the hall,
where cricket-bats, a tricycle, a row of well-used tennis rackets,
a stupendous array of hats, overcoats, and comforters, testified to
that quiverful so esteemed in the patriarchal age.
A conscientious performer was pounding at the “Harmonious Blacksmith”
upon a wiry piano near at hand, having left the door wide open,
with the indecent disregard of other people peculiar to juvenile
performers upon all kinds of instruments. From the other side of the
hall came the twanging of an equally wiry guitar, upon which girlish
fingers began, and for ever recommenced a Spanish melody, which the
performer was striving to attain by that agonizing process known
among young ladies as “picking up” an air. Mark, gentle reader, what
the learned and reverend Haweis has to say upon this art of playing
by ear!
From a remoter room came young voices and young laughter; and amidst
all these sounds it was hardly surprising that Mr. Dalbrook had to
ring three times, and to wait in front of the open hall door for
at least ten minutes, before an elderly housemaid responded to his
summons and ushered him into the Vicar’s study, the one room in the
Vicarage which was ever fit to receive a visitor.
The Vicar was reading a newspaper in front of a comfortable fire. He
was an elderly man, of genial and even jovial aspect, and he received
Mr. Dalbrook’s apologetic account of himself and his business with
perfect good humour.
“You want to see Miss Newton, my dear sir. I am sorry to tell you she
left us nearly two years ago—heartily sorry, for Sarah Newton is a
very worthy woman, and a jewel of price in a motherless family like
mine,” said the Vicar. “I regret that you should have come such a
long way to find her when, had you written to me, I could have told
you where to look for her in London.”
“Yes, it was a mistake to come so far without making preliminary
inquiries—only, as she had not applied to her usual agent for a new
situation, I concluded that she was still under your roof.”
“She has not gone into a new situation, Mr. Dalbrook. She was too
much valued in this house to wish to change to another employment,
although she might have lived more luxuriously and done less work
elsewhere. She was a mother to my girls—ay, and to my boys as
well—while she was with us; and she only left us when she made up her
mind to live an independent life.”
“She has left off teaching, then, I conclude?”
“Yes. She had a little bit of money left her by a bachelor uncle,
safely invested in railway stock, and yielding about two hundred a
year. This, with her own savings, made her an independent woman, and
she made up her mind to realize her own ideal of a useful life—an
ideal which had been developing in her mind for a good many years—a
life which was to be serviceable to others, and yet pleasant to
herself.”
“Do you mean that she joined some sisterhood?”
“No, no, Mr. Dalbrook; Sarah Newton is much too fond of her own
way, much too independent and fiery a spirit, to place herself in a
position where other people would think for her, and where she would
be obliged to obey. She told me her plan of life very frankly. ‘I
have about two hundred and sixty pounds a year,’ she said; ‘I can
live comfortably upon half that money, if I live after a plan of my
own; and I can do a great deal of good with the other half if I do
it in my own way. I am elderly and plain. If I were to live amongst
small gentilities I should be a nobody, and in all probability
I should be considered a bore. I shall take a lodging in a poor
neighbourhood, furnish my rooms with the utmost comfort, treat myself
to a good piano, and collect my little library book by book from
the second-hand booksellers. I shall spend half my days in going
quietly about among the poor young women of the district—I ought to
know what girls are after nearly forty years’ teaching and managing
the species—and I shall spend half my income in doing as much good to
them as I can, in my own unorthodox way.’ I knew the good that brave
little soul had done in this parish, in her quiet, unpretentious
fashion, and I felt no doubt she would carry out her plan.”
“Have you seen her since she left you?”
“Yes, I went to see her last June when I had a fortnight’s holiday in
London. I found her in a shabby old house in Lambeth, not very far
from St. Thomas’s Hospital; but dingy as the house looked outside,
our good Sally’s apartments were the picture of comfort. I found
her as happy as a bird. Her plan of life had answered her highest
expectations. ‘My friends are legion,’ she said, ‘but I haven’t a
single gentility among them.’ Sally is a desperate Radical, you must
know.”
“Will you give me her address, that I may write and ask her
permission to call upon her?”
“You shall have the address, but I doubt if she will feel disposed to
receive you. She will count you among the gentilities.”
“I must try my chance at any rate. I want her to throw some light
upon the history of one of her earliest pupils. Did you ever hear her
talk of Cheriton Chase and the Strangway family?”
“My dear sir, I have heard her talk of any number of places, and
any number of people. I used to tell her she must be a female
Methuselah to have passed through so many experiences. She was very
fond of telling stories of the families in which she had lived, but
though I used to listen I remember very little about them. My girls
would remember better, I have no doubt. They can give you chapter
and verse, I dare say; so the best thing you can do is to eat your
luncheon with us, and then you can ask them as many questions as you
like.”
Theodore accepted the offer with gratitude, and ten minutes
afterwards followed the Vicar into the dining-room, where three
tall, good-looking girls and two straggling youths were assembled,
and where a fourth girl and another boy dropped in after the rest
were seated. The board was spread with a plenteous but homely meal.
A large dish of Irish stew smoked at one end of the table, and the
remains of yesterday’s roast ribs of beef appeared at the other.
The girls were evidently accustomed to droppers in, and received
Theodore with perfect equanimity.
Alicia, the eldest, carved the beef with a commanding wrist, and the
third daughter, Laura, administered to his appetite with pickled
walnuts and mashed potatoes. The girls were all keenly interested
directly he spoke of Miss Newton. They pronounced her a dear old
thing, not a bit like a governess.
“We all loved her,” said Alicia: “and we are not the easiest girls
to get on with, I can assure you. We have had two poor things since
Sally deserted us, and we have driven them both away. And now we are
enjoying an interregnum, and we hope the dear father will make it a
long one.”
“Did you ever hear your governess talk of the Strangways, Miss
Craven?”
“What, Evelyn Strangway, of Cheriton Chase? I should think we did,
indeed,” cried Laura. “She had a good many prosy stories—chestnuts,
we used to call them—but the Cheriton Chase stories were the most
chestnutty. It was her first situation, and she was never tired of
talking about it.”
“Do you know if she kept up her acquaintance with Miss Strangway in
after life?” asked Theodore.
“I think not; at any rate, she never talked about that. She knew
something about the poor girl’s later life—something very bad, I
think—for she would never tell us. She used to sigh and look very
unhappy if the subject was touched upon; and she used to warn us
against runaway matches. As if any of us would be likely to run
away from this dear old father?” protested Laura, leaning over the
table to pat the Vicar’s coat-sleeve. “Why, he would let us marry
chimney-sweeps rather than see us unhappy.”
There was a good deal more talk about Sarah Newton, her virtues
and her little peculiarities, but nothing bearing upon Theodore’s
business, so he only stayed till luncheon was finished, and then
wished the amiable Vicar and his family a friendly good-bye, offering
to be of use to them in London at any time they might want some small
business transacted there, and begging the Vicar to look him up at
his chambers when he took his next holiday.
“You may rely upon it I shall take you at your word,” said the parson
cheerily. “You’ve no idea what a gay old dog I am when I am in
town—the theatre every night, and a little bit of supper afterwards.
I generally take one of my lads with me, though, to keep me out
of mischief. Good-bye, and mind you don’t fall in love with Sally
Newton. She’s old and ugly, but she’s one of the most fascinating
women I know.”
Theodore drove off in the dog-cart with all the Vicarage family at
the gate waving their hands to him, as if he had been an old friend,
and with four Vicarage dogs barking at him.
He went back to London that night, and wrote to Miss Newton, asking
leave to call upon her upon a matter relating to one of her old
pupils on the following day. He should take silence to mean consent,
and would be with her at four in the afternoon, if he did not receive
a telegram to forbid him.
He worked in his chambers all the morning, and at a little after
three set out to walk to Lambeth. The address was 51, Wedgewood
Street, near the Lambeth Road. It was not a long walk, and it was not
a pleasant one, for a seasonable fog was gathering when Theodore
left the Temple, and it thickened as he crossed Westminster Bridge,
where the newly-lighted lamps made faint yellow patches in the dense
brown atmosphere. Under these conditions it took him some time to
find Wedgewood Street, and that particular house which had the honour
of sheltering Sarah Newton.
It was a very shabby old street. The shops were of the meanest order,
and the houses which were not shops looked as if they were mostly
let off to the struggling class of lodgers; but it was a street
that had evidently seen better days, for the houses were large and
substantially built, and the doorways had once been handsome and
architectural—houses which had been the homes of prosperous citizens
when Lambeth was out of town, and when the perfume of bean blossom
and new-mown hay found its way into Wedgewood Street.
The ground-floor of Number 51 was occupied by a shoemaker, a
shoemaker who had turned his parlour into a shop, who made to
measure, but was not above executing repairs neatly. The front door
being open, Theodore walked straight upstairs to the first-floor
landing, where there was a neat little Doulton ware oil-lamp burning
on a carved oak bracket, and where he saw Miss Newton’s name painted
in bold black letters upon a terra-cotta coloured door. The stairs
were cleaner than they generally are in such a house, and the landing
was spotless.
He rang a bell, and the door was promptly opened by a lady, whom he
took to be Miss Newton. She was rather below middle height, strongly
built, but of a neat, compact figure. She was decidedly plain, and
her iron grey hair was coarse and wiry; but she had large bright eyes
which beamed with good nature and intelligence. Her black stuff gown
and narrow linen collar, the knot of scarlet ribbon at her throat,
and the linen cuffs turned back over perfectly-fitting sleeves, were
all the pink of neatness, and suited her as no other kind of dress
would have done. The trim figure, the bright eyes, and the small
white hands made a favourable impression upon Theodore, in spite of
the lady’s homeliness of feature and complexion.
“Walk in, Mr. Dalbrook,” she said cheerily. “Pray come and sit by
the fire; you must be chilled to the bone after coming through that
horrid fog. Ah, how I hate fog! It is the scourge of the London poor,
and it sometimes kills even the rich. And now we are only at the
beginning of the evil, and there is the long winter before us.”
“Yes, it is very bad, no doubt; but you do not look as if the fog
could do you much harm, Miss Newton.”
“No, it won’t hurt _me_. I’m a hardy old plant, and I contrive to
make myself comfortable at all seasons.”
“You do, indeed,” he answered, glancing round the room. “I had no
idea——”
“That anybody could be so comfortable in Lambeth,” she said,
interpreting his thoughts. “No, people think they must pay for
what they call ‘a good situation.’ Poor pinched widows and shabby
spinsters spend more than half their income on rent and taxes, and
starve on the other half, in order to live in a genteel locality—some
dingy little street in Pimlico perhaps, or a stucco terrace in
Kensington. Here am I with two fine large rooms in a forgotten old
street, which was built before the age of shoddy. I live among poor
people, and am not obliged to sacrifice a sixpence for the sake
of appearances. I buy everything in the cheapest market, and my
neighbours look up to me, instead of looking down upon me, as they
might if I lived among gentilities. You will say, perhaps, that I
live in the midst of dirt and squalor. If I do I take care that none
of it ever comes near me, and I do all that one woman’s voice and one
woman’s pen can do to lessen the evils that I see about me.”
“It would be a good thing for poor neighbourhoods if there were many
ladies of your mind, Miss Newton,” said Theodore, basking in the
glow of the fire, and looking lazily round the room, with its two
well-filled book-cases, occupying the recesses on each side of the
fireplace, its brackets and shelves, and hanging pockets, its large
old-fashioned sofa, and substantial claw-footed table, its wicker
chairs, cushioned with bright colour—its lamps and candlesticks on
shelf and bracket, ready to the hand when extra light should be
wanted, its contrivances and handinesses of all kinds, which denoted
the womanly inventiveness of the tenant.
“Well, I believe it would. If only a small percentage of the lonely
spinsters of England would make their abode among the poor, things
would have to be mended somehow. There could not be such crying evils
as there are if there were more eyes to see them, and more voices
to protest against them. You like this old room of mine, I see, Mr.
Dalbrook,” added Sarah Newton, following his eyes as they surveyed
the dark red wall against which the brackets and shelves, and books
and photographs, and bits of old china stood out in bright relief.
“I am full of admiration and surprise!”
“It is all my own work. I had lived in other people’s houses so
long that I was charmed to have a home of my own, even in Lambeth.
I was determined to spend very little money, and yet to make myself
comfortable; so I just squatted in the next room for the first three
months, with only a bedstead, a table, and a chair or two, while I
prowled all over London to find the exact furniture I wanted. There’s
not an article in the room that did not take me weeks to find and to
buy, and there’s not an article that wasn’t a tremendous bargain.
But what an egotistical old prattler I am! Women who live much alone
get to be dreadful prosers. I won’t say another word about myself—at
any rate, not till after I’ve made you a cup of tea after your cold
walk.”
She had seen the mud upon his boots, and guessed that he had walked
from the Temple.
“Pray do not take any trouble——”
“Nonsense; it is never trouble to a woman to make tea. I give a
tea-party twice a week. I hope you like tea?”
“I adore it. But pray go on with your account of how you settled down
here. I am warmly interested.”
“That’s very good of you—but there’s not much to tell about myself,”
said Miss Newton, producing some pretty old china out of an antique
cupboard with glass doors, and setting out a little brass tea-tray
while she talked.
There was a small copper kettle singing on the old-fashioned hob,
and there was a covered dish of toast in the capacious fender. Miss
Newton’s dinners were ever of the slightest, but she was a sybarite
as to her tea and toast. No cheap and powdery mixture; no “inferior
Dosset” for her. She made her brew with a dainty precision which
Theodore admired, while she went on talking.
“Do you like the colour of the walls? Yes, I painted them. And you
like that paper on the ceiling? I papered it. I am rather a dab at
carpentering, too, and I put up all those shelves and brackets, and
I covered the chairs, and stained the boards round that old Turkey
carpet; and then, after a day’s hard work, it was very pleasant to
go and stroll about among the bookshops of an evening and pick up a
volume here and there till I got all my old friends about me. I felt
like Elia; only I had no Bridget to share my pleasure.”
She seated herself opposite to him with a wicker table in front of
her, and began to pour out the tea. He wondered to find himself as
much at home with her as if he had known her all his life.
“It is very good of you to receive me so cordially,” he said,
presently. “I feel that I come to you as an unauthorized intruder.”
“Can you guess why I was willing to receive you?” she asked, looking
at him intently and with a sudden gravity. “Can you guess why I
didn’t telegraph to forbid your coming?”
“Indeed, no, except because you are naturally kind.”
“My kindness had nothing to do with it. I was willing to see you
because of your name. It is a very familiar name to me—Dalbrook, the
name of the man who bought the house in which she was born. Poor
soul, how she must have hated him, in her desolate after years. How
she must have hated the race that ousted her from the home she loved.”
“You are talking of Evelyn Strangway?”
“Yes, she was my first pupil, and I was very fond of her—all the
fonder of her, perhaps, because she was wayward and difficult to
manage: and because I was much too young and inexperienced to
exercise any authority over her.”
“It is of her I want to talk to you, if you will allow me.”
“Certainly. I like talking of those old days when I was a girl. I
don’t suppose I was particularly happy at Cheriton Chase; but I was
young, and we most of us hug the delusion that we were happy in our
youth. Poor Evelyn—so often in disgrace—so often unhappy, from the
very dawn of girlhood! What reason can _you_ have for being curious
about her?”
“I have a very strong reason, though I cannot explain it yet awhile.
I have set myself to discover the history of that banished race.”
“After the angel with the flaming sword stood at the gate—that is to
say, after Mr. Dalbrook bought the property. By-the-by, what are you
to Lord Cheriton? His son perhaps?”
“No, I am only a distant cousin.”
“Is it on his account you are making these inquiries?”
“He is not even aware that I am making them.”
“Indeed; and pray how did you find me out? My tea-parties are
not recorded in the Society papers; I have never figured among
‘Celebrities at Home.’”
“I took some pains to find you,” said Theodore, and then he told her
of his visits to the agencies, and his journey to the Vicarage in
Lakeland.
“You have taken infinite trouble, and for a small result. I can give
you very little information about Evelyn Strangway—afterwards Mrs.
Darcy.”
“Did you lose sight of her after you left Cheriton?”
“Yes, for a long time. It was years before we met again; but she
wrote to me several times from Lausanne, during the first year of her
banishment; doleful letters, complaining bitterly of her father’s
cruelty in keeping her away from her beloved Cheriton, the horses
and dogs, the life she loved. School she detested. She was clever,
but she had no taste for intellectual pursuits. She soon wearied of
the lake and the mountains, and the humdrum society of a small town.
She wrote of herself as a galley-slave. Then came a sudden change,
and she began to write about _him_. You don’t know the way a girl
writes about _him_; the first him she has ever thought worthy to be
written about. Her tone was light enough at the beginning. She had
met a young Irishman at a little evening party, and they had laughed
together at Lausanne society. He was an officer, on furlough, full of
wit and fun. I need not go into details. I saw her danger, and warned
her; I reminded her that her father would never allow her to marry a
subaltern in a marching regiment, and that such a marriage would mean
starvation. Her father could give her nothing; it was incumbent on
her to marry well, and with her attractions she had only to wait for
a good offer. It would inevitably come in due time.”
“She was handsome, I suppose? I know her face in the picture at
Cheriton. My cousin bought all the old portraits.”
“She was much handsomer than the picture. That was painted when she
was only fifteen, but at seventeen her beauty had developed, and she
was one of the most brilliant blondes I ever saw. Well, I suppose you
know how useless my advice was. She ran away with her Irish admirer,
and I heard no more of her for nearly four years, when I met her one
afternoon in the Strand, and she took me home to her lodging in Cecil
Street, and gave me some tea. It was in October, and I stayed with
her till dark, and then she insisted on seeing me off in the omnibus
to Haverstock Hill, where I was then living in an artist’s family.
The lodgings were shabby, and she was shabbily dressed. She was as
handsome as ever, but she looked worried and unhappy. Her husband had
sold out of the army, and had a position as secretary to a West End
club.
“She told me that they would have been pretty well off but for
his extravagance. He was getting four hundred a year, and they
had no children. She complained that it was her fate to be allied
with spendthrifts. Her father had squandered his fortune; and
her husband’s improvident habits kept her in continual debt
and difficulty. It grieved me to see the shabbiness of her
surroundings—the squalid lodging-house parlour, without so much as
a bunch of flowers or a stand of books to show that it was in the
occupation of a lady. There was a cigarbox on the mantelpiece, and
there was a heap of newspapers on the sofa, and a pair of shabby
slippers inside the fender. It was a room to make one shudder. I
asked her if she was reconciled to her father, and she said no; she
had heard nothing of him since her marriage. I felt very unhappy
about her after we parted at Hungerford Market. I saw her standing
on the pavement as the omnibus drove away, a tall, slim figure,
distinguished-looking in spite of her shabby mantle and rusty black
silk gown. I had promised to go and see her again, though I was very
seldom at liberty at that time, and I went to Cecil Street two or
three times in the course of the winter, but she was always out, and
there was something in the tone of her letters that made me think
she did not wish to see me again, though I believe she was fond of
me always, poor soul. I saw nothing more of her, and heard nothing
until nearly four years afterwards, when I was spending an afternoon
at Richmond with my pupils—two girls of fourteen and sixteen—and I
came face to face with her in front of Thomson’s Seat. She was with
a tall, handsome man, whom at first I took to be her husband: but
there was something in the manner of both of them that impressed me
uncomfortably, and I began to fear that this was not her husband. She
looked much brighter than when I saw her in Cecil Street, and she
was better dressed—very plainly, but in excellent taste. She took me
aside a little way while her companion stood and talked to the two
girls. She put her arm through mine in her old caressing way, and
then she said, abruptly, ‘I almost wonder that you will speak to me.
I thought you would cut me dead.’ I looked puzzled, no doubt; so she
said, ‘Perhaps you don’t know what a lost creature I am. Perhaps
you have not heard.’ I told her I had heard nothing about her since
we parted at Hungerford Market, and then she gave a deep sigh, and
said, ‘Well, I am not going to deceive you. That,’ with a jerk of
her head towards the man who was standing with his back to us, ‘is
not my husband, but he and I are bound together for the rest of our
lives, and we are perfectly happy together. Society would scorn us
and trample upon us no doubt if we gave it a chance; but we don’t.
We live out of the world, and we live for one another. Now, aren’t
you shocked with me? Don’t you want to run away?’ she asked, with a
little laugh, which sounded as if she was very nearly crying. I told
her that I was very sorry for her. I could say no more than that.
‘You would be sorrier still if you could picture to yourself the
miserable life I led before I left my husband,’ she said. ‘I bore
it for five years, years that seemed an eternity. He cared for me
no more than for the flower-girls in the street. He left me to pine
in my dingy lodging, left me to be dunned and worried all day long,
left me out-at-elbows, ashamed of my own shabbiness, while he amused
himself at his club; and then he considered himself cruelly used when
he found out there was another man in the world who thought me worth
caring for, and when I told him I loved that man with all my heart.
My leaving him was the impulse of a moment. The moment came when his
brutality turned the scale, and I ran out of the house in my despair,
and jumped into the first cab I could hail, and drove away to _him_,’
pointing to the man in the distance, strolling beside my two gawky
girls, ‘and to happiness. I am a wicked wretch, no doubt, to be happy
under such circumstances, but I am, or, at any rate, as happy as
anybody can hope to be in this world. There is always a thorn among
the flowers,’ she sighed, as if the thorn was a big one, I thought.
‘I suppose I shall never see you again,’ she said. ‘When we say
good-bye presently, it will be farewell for ever.’ I told her that
was not inevitable. I was my own mistress, free to choose my friends.
I told her that if ever she had need of a friend I would go to her.
I felt that I was in some wise answerable for the bad turn her life
had taken, for had I been a more judicious counsellor, I might have
guided her better, might have prevented her coming into collision
with her father. I asked her for her address, but she told me she had
promised to tell nobody where she lived. ‘We are living out of the
world,’ she said, ‘we have no visitors, no friends or acquaintance.’
She clasped my hands, kissed me, and hurried away to rejoin the man
whose name I never learned. He lifted his hat to me and the girls,
and they walked away together towards the Star and Garter, leaving
us standing by Thomson’s Seat, staring idly at the landscape in the
summer sunlight. I felt dazed as I stood there, looking down into
that lovely valley. It had been a terrible shock to me to meet her
again under such circumstances.”