LYDGATE STEET.
Letty's whole life was now gathered about her boy, and she thought
little, comparatively, about Tom. And Tom thought so little about her
that he did not perceive the difference. When he came home, he was
always in a hurry to be gone again. He had always something important
to do, but it never showed itself to Letty in the shape of money. He
gave her a little now and then, of course, and she made it go
incredibly far, but it was ever with more of a grudge that he gave it.
The influence over him of Sepia was scarcely less now that she was
gone; but, if she cared for him at all, it was mainly that, being now
not a little stale-hearted, his devotion reminded her pleasurably of a
time when other passions than those of self-preservation were strongest
in her; and her favor even now tended only to the increase of Tom's
growing disappointment, for, like Macbeth, he had begun already to
consider life but a poor affair. Across the cloud of this death
gleamed, certainly, the flashing of Sepia's eyes, or the softly
infolding dawn of her smile, but only, the next hour, nay, the next
moment, to leave all darker than before. Precious is the favor of any
true, good woman, be she what else she may; but what is the favor of
one without heart or faith or self-giving? Yet is there testimony only
too strong and terrible to the demoniacal power, enslaving and
absorbing as the arms of the kraken, of an evil woman over an
imaginative youth. Possibly, did he know beforehand her nature, he
would not love her, but, knowing it only too late, he loves and curses;
calls her the worst of names, yet can not or will not tear himself
free; after a fashion he still calls love, he loves the demon, and
hates her thralldom. Happily Tom had not reached this depth of
perdition; Sepia was prudent for herself, and knew, none better, what
she was about, so far as the near future was concerned, therefore held
him at arm's length, where Tom basked in a light that was of hell--for
what is a hell, or a woman like Sepia, but an inverted creation? His
nature, in consequence, was in all directions dissolving. He drank more
and more strong drink, fitting fuel to such his passion, and Sepia
liked to see him approach with his eyes blazing. There are not many
women like her; she is a rare type--but not, therefore, to be passed
over in silence. It is little consolation that the man-eating tiger is
a rare animal, if one of them be actually on the path; and to the
philosopher a possibility is a fact. But the true value of the study of
abnormal development is that, in the deepest sense, such development is
not abnormal at all, but the perfected result of the laws that avenge
law-breach. It is in and through such that we get glimpses, down the
gulf of a moral volcano, to the infernal possibilities of the
human--the lawless rot of that which, in its _attainable_ idea, is
nothing less than divine, imagined, foreseen, cherished, and labored
for, by the Father of the human. Such inverted possibility, the
infernal possibility, I mean, lies latent in every one of us, and,
except we stir ourselves up to the right, will gradually, from a
possibility, become an energy. The wise man dares not yield to a
temptation, were it only for the terror that, if he do, he will yield
the more readily again. The commonplace critic, who recognizes life
solely upon his own conscious level, mocks equally at the ideal and its
antipode, incapable of recognizing the art of Shakespeare himself as
true to the human nature that will not be human.
I have said that Letty did her best with what money Tom gave her; but
when she came to find that he had not paid the lodging for two months;
that the payment of various things he had told her to order and he
would see to had been neglected, and that the tradespeople were getting
persistent in their applications; that, when she told him anything of
the sort, he treated it at one time as a matter of no consequence which
he would speedily set right, at another as behavior of the creditor
hugely impertinent, which he would punish by making him wait his
time--her heart at length sank within her, and she felt there was no
bulwark between her and a sea of troubles; she felt as if she lay
already in the depths of a debtor's jail. Therefore, sparing as she had
been from the first, she was more sparing than ever. Not only would she
buy nothing for which she could not pay down, having often in
consequence to go without proper food, but, even when she had a little
in hand, would live like an anchorite. She grew very thin; and,
in-deed, if she had not been of the healthiest, could not have stood
her own treatment many weeks.
Her baby soon began to show suffering, but this did not make her alter
her way, or drive her to appeal to Tom. She was ignorant of the
simplest things a mother needs to know, and never imagined her
abstinence could hurt her baby. So long as she went on nursing him, it
was all the same, she thought. He cried so much, that Tom made it a
reason with himself, and indeed gave it as one to Letty, for not coming
home at night: the child would not let him sleep; and how was he to do
his work if he had not his night's rest? It mattered little with
semi-mechanical professions like medicine or the law, but how was a man
to write articles such as he wrote, not to mention poetry, except he
had the repose necessary to the redintegration of his exhausted brain?
The baby went on crying, and the mother's heart was torn. The woman of
the house said he must be already cutting his teeth, and recommended
some devilish sirup. Letty bought a bottle with the next money she got,
and thought it did him good-because, lessening his appetite, it
lessened his crying, and also made him sleep more than he ought.
At last one night Tom came home very much the worse of drink, and in
maudlin affection insisted on taking the baby from its cradle. The baby
shrieked. Tom was angry with the weakling, rated him soundly for
ingratitude to "the author of his being," and shook him roughly to
teach him the good manners of the world he had come to.
Thereat in Letty sprang up the mother, erect and fierce. She darted to
Tom, snatched the child from his arms, and turned to carry him to the
inner room. But, as the mother rose in Letty, the devil rose in Tom. If
what followed was not the doing of the real Tom, it was the doing of
the devil to whom the real Tom had opened the door. With one stride he
overtook his wife, and mother and child lay together on the floor. I
must say for him that, even in his drunkenness, he did not strike his
wife as he would have struck a man; it was an open-handed blow he gave
her, what, in familiar language, is called a box on the ear, but for
days she carried the record of it on her cheek in five red finger-marks.
When he saw her on the floor, Tom's bedazed mind came to itself; he
knew what he had done, and was sobered. But, alas! even then he thought
more of the wrong he had done to himself as a gentleman than of the
grievous wound he had given his wife's heart. He took the baby, who had
ceased to cry as soon as he was in his mother's arms, and laid him on
the rug, then lifted the bitterly weeping Letty, placed her on the
sofa, and knelt beside her--not humbly to entreat her pardon, but, as
was his wont, to justify himself by proving that all the blame was
hers, and that she had wronged him greatly in driving him to do such a
thing. This for apology poor Letty, never having had from him fuller
acknowledgment of wrong, was fain to accept. She turned on the sofa,
threw her arms about his neck, kissed him, and clung to him with an
utter forgiveness. But all it did for Tom was to restore him his good
opinion of himself, and enable him to go on feeling as much of a
gentleman as before.
Reconciled, they turned to the baby. He was pale, his eyes were closed,
and they could not tell whether he breathed. In a horrible fright, Tom
ran for the doctor. Before he returned with him, the child had come to,
and the doctor could discover no injury from the fall they told him he
had had. At the same time, he said he was not properly nourished, and
must have better food.
This was a fresh difficulty to Letty; it was a call for more outlay.
And now their landlady, who had throughout been very kind, was in
trouble about her own rent, and began to press for part at least of
theirs. Letty's heart seemed to labor under a stone. She forgot that
there was a thing called joy. So sad she looked that the good woman,
full of pity, assured her that, come what might, she should not be
turned out, but at the worst would only have to go a story higher, to
inferior rooms. The rent should wait, she said, until better days. But
this kindness relieved Letty only a little, for the rent past and the
rent to come hung upon her like a cloak of lead.
Nor was even debt the worst that now oppressed her. For, possibly from
the fall, but more from the prolonged want of suitable nourishment and
wise treatment, after that terrible night, the baby grew worse. Many
were the tears the sleepless mother shed over the sallow face and
wasted limbs of her slumbering treasure--her one antidote to countless
sorrows; and many were the foolish means she tried to restore his
sinking vitality.
Mary had written to her, and she had written to Mary; but she had said
nothing of the straits to which she was reduced; that would have been
to bring blame upon Tom. But Mary, with her fine human instinct, felt
that things must be going worse with her than before; and, when she
found that her return was indefinitely postponed by Mr. Redmain's
illness, she ventured at last in her anxiety upon a daring measure: she
wrote to Mr. Wardour, telling him she had reason to fear things were
not going well with Letty Helmer, and suggesting, in the gentlest way,
whether it might not now be time to let bygones be bygones, and make
some inquiry concerning her.
To this letter Godfrey returned no answer. For all her denial, he had
never ceased to believe that Mary had been Letty's accomplice
throughout that miserable affair; and the very name--the Letty and the
Helmer--stung him to the quick. He took it, therefore, as a piece of
utter presumption in Mary to write to him about Letty, and that in the
tone, as he interpreted it, of one reading him a lesson of duty. But,
while he was thus indignant with Mary, he was also vexed with Letty
that she should not herself have written to him if she was in any need,
forgetting that he had never hinted at any door of communication open
between him and her. His heart quivered at the thought that she might
be in distress; he had known for certain, he said, the fool would bring
her to misery! For himself, the thought of Letty was an ever-open
wound--with an ever-present pain, now dull and aching, now keen and
stinging. The agony of her desertion, he said, would never cease
gnawing at his heart until it was laid in the grave; like most heathen
Christians, he thought of death as the end of all the joys, sorrows,
and interests generally of this life. But, while thus he brooded, a
fierce and evil joy awoke in him at the thought that now at last the
expected hour had come when he would heap coals of fire on her head. He
was still fool enough to think of her as having forsaken him, although
he had never given her ground for believing, and she had never had
conceit enough to imagine, that he cared the least for her person. If
he could but let her have a glimmer of what she had lost in losing him!
She knew what she had gained in Tom Helmer.
He passed a troubled night, dreamed painfully, and started awake to
renewed pain. Before morning he had made up his mind to take the first
train to London. But he thought far more of being her deliverer than of
bringing her deliverance.