“OH, MY AMY! MINE NO MORE!”
Francis Tredethlyn drove his friend down to Richmond at a rattling pace,
but he scarcely spoke half-a-dozen words throughout the journey; and
Harcourt Lowther, keeping the watchful eye of the master upon his pupil,
saw that something was amiss.
Now although the Cornishman’s guide and Mentor had his plans, very
definite plans, as clearly drawn out as the great Duke’s arrangements
for Waterloo,--which wondrous victory was _not_ quite the lucky accident
our neighbours imagine it to have been; yet he was far too wise a
diplomatist to ignore the sublime opportunities which chance sometimes
throws in the way of a schemer, shattering the complicated machinery so
dexterously and patiently put together, and opening a new and easy way
to success over the ruins of the old road.
Mr. Lowther was quite prepared to make good use of any accident which
seemed likely to help him. He was like a chess-player who takes his
place before the board with a perfect plan of action mapped out in his
mind, and who may see his entire scheme overthrown, his most brilliant
arrangements stultified by the first move of his adversary, but who will
win the game nevertheless, after his enemy’s fashion, if not after his
own, being no enthusiastic advocate of pet theories, but only a man of
the world, resolutely bent on success. Upon this particular afternoon
Harcourt saw that something had gone amiss with his friend, and he was
bent on discovering what the something was. With this view he had resort
to that imaginary instrument which his companions of Bohemia called the
“pump-handle;” but on letting down a moral plummet into the depths of
Mr. Tredethlyn’s mind, he found himself in much deeper water than usual,
and quite unable to reach the bottom.
“If he has secrets from me, he’ll throw all my machinery out of gear,”
mused Mr. Lowther; “and yet I don’t quite know that--a secret might be
worked into something _with her_. What a wonderful creature that Iago
was, by the bye! especially when one considers that he took all that
trouble for no better motive than jealous twinges about a wife whom he
treated like a dog, and an envious grudge of Cassio’s advancement. Aha,
my divine Williams, that’s the only flaw in your _magnum opus_; your
motive power isn’t equal to your ponderous machinery! Now if Othello had
been the owner of thirty thousand a year and a beautiful wife whom Iago
loved, there might have been some reason for the exhibition of a little
Italian diplomacy. But revenge! Bah! The luxury of a maniac. The pet
wickedness of a woman. Your novelist cannot write a story, your
playwright cannot devise a drama, but he must have recourse to revenge
to keep the action going. Yet, in the history of men how small and
pitiful a part the heroic passion plays! A Cromwell condemns a Charles
Stuart to the scaffold. For revenge? No; simply because Charles is in
his way. A Robespierre drowns his country in the blood of her sons; and
yet I doubt if he bore a hearty grudge against one of his victims--a
little political jealousy, perhaps, at the worst. A Richelieu
extinguishes the haughty _noblesse_ of France--out of revenge? No; but
the _noblesse_ interfere with the schemes of my Lord Cardinal. A
Countess of Essex connives at the poisoning of her husband: revenge? not
a bit of it, but because she wants to marry some one else; and poor Sir
Thomas Overbury must die, not that any one hates the man, but the
creature is so tiresome. And Arabella Stuart pines in prison; and the
heads of the regicides rot on Temple Bar; and Charles, the merry
monarch, the pet of the painters and romancers, the man whose sins have
been dealt with so lightly that we are apt to mistake them for
virtues--can be as hard as a Nero when it suits him that the patriots
Russell and Sidney shall perish in their prime; and James II. sends
young Monmouth to the block. Why? Is revenge the impulse that stirs
these men’s hearts? Not at all. Not man’s passionate hatred of his
neighbour, but man’s devoted love of himself is the motive power that
moves the headsman’s arms, and bids the swooping axe descend upon fair
young necks from which the lovelocks have been newly shorn. Revenge?
Pshaw! Has it a feather’s weight in the balance of history? In all the
story of our land, what has revenge to answer for? A semi-mythical
Rosamond poisoned in her bower--an Essex condemned in passionate haste,
and lamented in dreary leisure by the Queen who loved him--a
Konigsmark’s handsome face trampled upon by a German tigress.”
With such random reflections as these Mr. Lowther beguiled the silence
of the drive to Richmond. During dinner and throughout the evening he
watched his friend closely; but all the fascinations of Bohemia were
powerless to arouse Francis Tredethlyn from the thoughtful mood. Indeed,
the Bohemians had a charming faculty for enjoying themselves amongst
themselves without any reference to the host and paymaster, who was
generally looked at rather in the light of a bore and an intruder--the
death’s head at the banquet. Some of Mr. Tredethlyn’s new friends had
christened him the Necessary Evil; and to-night, while he sat moodily
brooding over the story of his cousin, pretty lips made faces at the
company over his shoulder; and one lovely Bohemian, more playful than
the rest, amused herself and her acquaintances by filling the pockets of
his dress-coat with the empty shells of the lobsters, and the corks of
the champagne.
For the rest, what did it matter in what dreary regions his mind
wandered, so long as he was there to write a cheque for the bill? Only
one pair of eyes looked at him with any show of interest; and those eyes
watched him as the serpent watches the bird; with as deadly a purpose,
with as quiet a gaze. But, watch him as closely as he would to-night,
there was something in Francis Tredethlyn’s mind which Harcourt Lowther
could not read quite as easily as a page in an open book, and as it was
his habit to read most things relating to the Cornishman.
“What does it matter?” thought Mr. Lowther, abandoning himself to
reflection again during the homeward drive; “let him keep his secret
from me if he likes, and I’ll use it for my own benefit when he plays
against me. He is my dummy, and he plays _my_ game. When he leads a suit
of his own choosing, I am ready on his right hand with a cluster of
small trumps. Play as he will, he can scarcely throw me out. What does
it matter _how_ the game is won, so long as one scores the odd trick?”
The day after this Richmond dinner was Sunday; but even that
circumstance did not prevent Francis Tredethlyn from taking preliminary
steps towards finding the missing girl whom he fancied quite within his
reach now; since it seemed certain that the face he had seen on the
stage of Drury Lane was the face of his uncle Oliver’s daughter, and no
other. It had been his habit until very lately to accompany Maude every
Sunday morning to a certain fashionable place of worship not very far
from Sloane Street, where miserable sinners lamented their iniquities
and their wretchedness amid the subdued rustling of silk at a guinea a
yard, and in an atmosphere that was odorous with Jockey Club and Ess
Bouquet. But Star-and-Garter dinners, and evenings “finished” in
mysterious localities at the West-end, are by no means conducive to
early rising; and now the Sabbath bells that Mr. Tredethlyn had been
wont to hear ringing blithely in the morning air while he breakfasted
with his wife, were apt to mingle with his feverish morning dreams, and
to transform themselves into the shrill peal of an alarm-bell summoning
the fireman’s succour for perishing wretches in some blazing habitation,
or the bell on board a boat leaving a pier--a boat which the dreamer
was--oh, so eagerly--striving to reach, but never, never could; for just
as his foot was going to step upon the deck, the plank on which he trod
would give way and tilt him into the waking world; with a raging
headache, perhaps, and a dull ceaseless pain in his breast, which he
scarcely cared to acknowledge by its ugly name of Remorse.
So now Mr. Tredethlyn was apt to spend the earlier part of his Sunday
morning in fitful slumbers, and the later portion of his day in the
society of his devoted friends. Unhappily Mephistopheles has such a
knack of making himself useful, that after once enjoying his society,
Faust is apt to find life very dreary without that fatal companionship.
Drifted away from the simple life that was natural to him, Francis was
only a helpless creature, with all the dismal blank of existence to be
filled up somehow or other.
But upon this particular Sunday he had a purpose of his own, and the
honest energy with which he set about the achievement of that purpose
transformed him into a new being.
Harcourt Lowther might have felt a little twinge of alarm had he seen
his pupil, as he walked away from the stuccoed district, with the old
light in his eyes, the old lightness in his firm tread. Francis forgot
that he had an empty life to drag out, and an idolized wife who did
_not_ love him. He forgot everything, except that he had to redeem his
half-forgotten vow, to fulfil a long-neglected duty.
“My uncle Oliver’s money brought _her_ peace of mind, and prosperity for
the father she loves so dearly,” thought Mr. Tredethlyn. “Let me
remember that, when I think of his disinherited daughter.”
Crumpled in one of the pockets of his overcoat, Francis had found the
programme of the performances at Drury Lane, and in the long list of
names crowded together at the bottom of the programme, he discovered
half hidden amongst Percies and Vavasours, Vane Tempests and Leveson
Gowers, and such appellations as the _corps de ballet_ modestly chooses
for its own--the vulgar name of Turner. He concluded, therefore, that
his cousin had called herself Turner at the Drury Lane Theatre, as well
as at Coltonslough, and he did not anticipate much difficulty in finding
her. The search after any information upon theatrical matters might have
seemed rather a hopeless thing on a Sunday, but Francis Tredethlyn’s
energy was not to be damped by small difficulties.
“I have wasted too many hours already,” he thought; “where my poor lost
girl is concerned, every moment of delay seems a new wrong.”
He took a hansom and drove straight to the theatre; but Drury Lane on a
Sunday seems an utterly hopeless and impracticable place. The stage-door
was closed. The box-office might have been the tomb of the Pharaohs for
any appearance of life within its portals. Happily Francis was not to be
disheartened. He walked up and down the street until the clocks struck
one, and a dense crowd began to pour out of a chapel in Crown Court, and
disgorge itself into Little Russell Street. Then, when the doors of the
public-houses were opened, he entered a tavern nearly opposite the
stage-door, and made his inquiries.
The barmaid at the tavern was able to tell him where the
stage-doorkeeper lived, but she was not able to give him any information
as to the habitations of the ladies of the _ballet_.
“Most of them live out at Camberwell, or up Islington way; though how
they manage it, poor things, walking backwards and forwards through all
sorts of weather, is more than I can tell. They send over here when
there’s a long rehearsal for their half pint of porter and their
sandwich, and that’s about all the dinner they get on such days, I dare
say.”
Thus, discursively, the barmaid. Francis left her, and made his way to
the adjacent court in which the doorkeeper was to be found in his
private capacity. That gentleman was in the midst of a very greasy
dinner and in the bosom of his family when Mr. Tredethlyn intruded on
him, and was at first inclined to resent the interruption.
“I don’t carry two hundred and forty-nine addresses in my blessed head,”
he remarked, in an injured tone; “which our company at the beginning of
this season was over two hundred and forty-nine; and I don’t care to be
hunted upon Sundays when I’m eating of my dinner, for a pack of
ballet-girls. I don’t get paid for _that_ when I take my salary. If any
young swell wants to find out one of our ladies’ address, to leave ’em a
bokay, or to take a ticket for their benefit or such-like, I should
think they could find it out of a week-day, and not come chivying of a
man over his Sunday wittles.”
But a judiciously-administered half-sovereign had a very soothing effect
upon the mind and manners of the doorkeeper. There are so few things in
a small way which cannot be done with half-a-sovereign. The man laid
down his knife and fork, and applied himself to serious reflection,
while his wife and family suspended their operations to stare admiringly
at the fashionably-dressed intruder.
“Let me see,” said the doorkeeper, scraping his stubbly chin as he
mused, “there’s such a many of ’em, that I may sit here trying to
remember where this here Miss Turner lives till doomsday, and not be no
wiser. I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, sir; I’ve got the addresses
of every member of the company in my book over the way. I’ll slip over
and get Miss Turner’s direction, while you wait here if you like.”
“Over the way” was Drury Lane Theatre. The doorkeeper took some
ponderous keys from a nail over the mantel-piece, and put on his hat.
Francis Tredethlyn went with him.
“Turner,” said the man; “Turner? A pale-faced young woman, ain’t she?
looks as if she’d gone through no end of trouble. She’s only an extra,
took on for this here great piece that’s just done with.”
“An extra?” inquired Francis.
“Yes; a sort of supernume’ry; not a reg’lar ballet-girl,--can’t dance,
or anything of that sort, only fit to go on in crowds, and so on. I
remember her, a very quiet, civil-spoken young person.”
The address was soon found; it was at a house in Brydges Street. Francis
left the doorkeeper with his heart beating tumultuously; his face pale
with emotion that was half joy, half pain--joy at finding her at last,
when hope had almost died out into forgetfulness--pain at finding her
thus. Ah, yes! it was very painful to remember the innocent rosy face
peeping out of a dimity bonnet, and to know that sorrow had set its
undefaceable hand upon that rustic beauty, and that the face he
remembered had no more a place upon this earth.
“Miss Turner and Miss Willoughby live together over an eating-house in
Brydges Street,” the doorkeeper had told Francis, with the further
information that he was to pull the top bell twice. Mr. Tredethlyn found
the eating-house, which was ostensibly closed; but the door of the shop
was ajar, and the atmosphere about and around it seemed greasy with the
steam of suet-pudding and boiled meat. The bell which Francis rang was
answered by a careworn-looking woman of doubtful age, who had an air of
faded gentility, a flimsy smartness of apparel, which was more plainly
demonstrative of poverty than the shabbiest garments that ever hung
together loosely upon the figure of a slattern.
“Miss Turner lives here, I believe?” Francis said eagerly; “I wish to
see her, if you please.”
“Miss Turner _did_ live here,” the woman answered, “but she has left.”
“Left? Why I saw her at the theatre only the night before last, and the
doorkeeper has just directed me here.”
“Miss Turner’s engagement expired last night, sir, and she left London
this morning.”
“This morning, only this morning! But of course you can tell me where
she has gone? I am her first-cousin, her only surviving relative. If I
had known that there was the least chance of her leaving London, I
should have tried to find her last night. Will you be good enough to
direct me to her?”
The woman shook her head.
“I don’t know where Miss Turner has gone,” she said.
Francis Tredethlyn’s face whitened to the very lips.
“My God!” he exclaimed, “is there a fatality in this business? am I
never to find her?”
Then addressing himself to the woman with sudden earnestness, he said,--
“For pity’s sake, if you can help me in my difficulty, do so with all
your might. You do not know how much depends on my finding her. I
scarcely think I should say too much, if I were to tell you that it is a
matter of life and death; for I saw my cousin’s face the night before
last, and it looked to me like a face that is fading away from this
earth. You have been told, perhaps, to give no one her address; but she
did not think her cousin Francis would come to ask for it. Pray trust me
and believe in me; I am the only friend that poor girl has in all this
world.”
“I have told you the truth, sir,” answered the woman, quietly; “I do not
know where Miss Turner has gone. Anything I can tell you about her, I
shall be happy to tell,” she added, as if answering the look of blank
despair in Francis Tredethlyn’s face; “but it is very little. Will you
step upstairs to my room? It is only a humble place, but it will be
quieter there than here.”
This could scarcely fail to be true; for during the very brief interview
which had just taken place, Francis had been brushed against and flouted
some half-dozen times by young persons with jugs and door-keys, going to
and from a neighbouring public-house. It was the popular dinner-hour in
Drury Lane, and four separate floors, with their minor divisions of
backs and fronts, were more or less engaged in the business of dining.
Francis followed his cousin’s late associate, Miss Willoughby, up three
steps of rather dingy stairs, upon which little colonies of children had
established themselves here and there with their toys. One young
gentleman of tender years was trying to fly a kite in the well of the
staircase, with a persevering disregard of atmospheric difficulties and
the heads of the passers below; while a young lady, belonging to an
adjacent tribe of settlers, took her doll for an airing in a
lobster-shell, drawn by a string which wound itself about Mr.
Tredethlyn’s legs, and had to be unwound like a bandage. Occasional
skirmishers from distant settlements came sliding down the
banisters--which, compared to the stairs, were as the modern railroad to
the ancient highway--assailing peaceable families with the war-whoop of
defiance: and the cries of “Shan’t,”--“Do it again, then,
there!”--“Wouldn’t you just like to, now?”--“Won’t I tell my mother,
that’s all?”--“Tell-tale-tit, yah!”--resounded in a delightful confusion
of voices from the first floor to the attics.
Miss Willoughby conducted Francis to a back room upon the third floor--a
dark gloomy little room, hung with chocolate-and-drab paper, but
enlivened by a little gallery of theatrical photographs, and some
engraved portraits cut out of Tallis’s “Shakespeare,” neatly arranged
over the mantel-piece.
It was not very difficult to perceive that the anomalous piece of
furniture, which was too vividly brown for mahogany, too elaborately
grained for nature, and which was not quite a chest of drawers, nor
altogether a wardrobe, was neither more nor less than a member of the
mysterious family of press-bedsteads. It was not difficult to perceive
that industrious poverty and simple independence reigned in that
three-pair back, whose pitiful goods and chattels, and worthless scraps
of ornament, were arranged with as exquisite a neatness as might pervade
the chambers of a bachelor in the Albany, or a gandin of the Faubourg
St. Honoré.
“I shall miss your cousin very much,” said Miss Willoughby; “we got on
so nicely together.”
“She lived with you? Here?” asked Francis.
“Yes; we shared this apartment. It made the rent come lighter for both
of us, and apartments are so dear in London; and of course it was the
same advantage in coals--not that we wanted many for our little bit of
cooking, but one can’t even boil a kettle without a fire; and saveloys
and sandwiches are apt to pall upon one after a long continuance; so,
having Miss Turner to live with me made it altogether come much
pleasanter; besides which, we were always the best of friends.”
Mr. Tredethlyn was slow to answer. He was looking round the room, and
out at the leaden ball floating on the surface of a dingy leaden cistern
visible athwart some scarecrow geraniums, which seemed as if they had
been put upon a short allowance of mould. Everything in the place, from
the scrimped morsel of worn carpet, which only made an oasis of
Kidderminster in a dreary desert of boards, to the handful of red coals
that burned brightly between massive embankments of brick, bore mute
evidence to the poverty which struggles and endures. An open cupboard
stared Francis in the face, and he saw, oh, such a pitiful morsel of
sickly-complexioned ham lying cheek by jowl with the fag-end of a stale
half-quartern loaf. He looked at these things, and remembered the house
in which he lived, the reckless extravagance that pervaded all his life.
“Does a curse cling to the gold of a miser?” he thought; “and is my
uncle Oliver’s child never to derive any advantage from the wealth her
father scraped and pinched together, at the cost of everything that
makes life endurable?”
He roused himself from his brief reverie to appeal once more to the
elderly ballet-girl, who had seated herself by the little Pembroke
table, on which lay a newspaper evidently borrowed from the
establishment below, and transformed into a kind of parchment by the
action of grease.
“Give me what information you can about my cousin,” he said,
imploringly; “and if you will accept any little present from me in
acknowledgment of your kindness, I will send you a cheque to-morrow
morning, and you shall purchase what you please as a memorial of your
friendship for my poor little Susy.”
A faint flush kindled in Miss Willoughby’s pale cheeks. A cheque! Oh,
bright representative of an El Dorado, only to be thought of in some
happy dream. Clara Willoughby--otherwise Mary Anne Jones--had not seen
such a thing as a cheque since the happy time in which she had been
columbine at the tumble-down little theatre in a garrison town, and the
colonel himself had taken five pounds’ worth of tickets for her benefit.
“You are very kind,” she said; “but I don’t want any payment for the
little help I can give you. Miss Turner is a very quiet young person;
and, though we were so friendly together, she never told me anything of
her history; and when she went away this morning, having only been taken
on as an extra, and her engagement expiring last night, she said,
‘You’ve been very good to me, Clara, and I shall always remember you
kindly; and if things go well with me, I’ll write and tell you where I
am. You mustn’t be offended because I don’t tell you where I am going. I
don’t quite know myself. I have not made up my mind yet; there’s a place
I want to go to, and friends I want to see; but I don’t think I shall
ever bring my mind to go there, or to see them.’”
“I think I understand her,” said Francis. “I think the place she means
is her old home. If she goes there, I shall hear of her immediately; but
if--if she should not be wise enough to return to the friends who would
be so glad to shelter her----. Did she ever speak of her home, or of her
cousin Francis Tredethlyn?”
“Never! She seemed to have some settled grief upon her mind; and having
known trouble myself, I know how hard it is to be worried by strangers’
questions and strangers’ pity, even when it’s meant ever so kindly; so I
never asked her to tell me so much as one word about her former life.”
“But how did she come to be at the theatre with you? I should think of
all ways of earning a living, that must be the very last that would
occur to my cousin Susan.”
“That’s very true,” answered Miss Willoughby; “but it doesn’t take a
woman long to come to the last way by which she can earn her bread--the
ways are not so many. I can tell you how your cousin came to be at Drury
Lane, for I was the means of getting her engaged; and it all came about,
as one may say, quite promiscuously. I suppose you know that Susan
Turner is a married woman?”
“Yes, I do know of her unhappy marriage.”
“She called herself Miss Turner in the bills, because, you see, in the
theatrical profession a single female is always considered more
attractive; though why it should be so,--unless with regard to boys in
jackets, in the Christmas holidays, who, being apt to fall in love with
the columbine, might find it damping to their spirits to know she was
the mother of a family,--I really can’t imagine. However, Susan was Miss
Turner in the bills, and I am Miss Willoughby for the same reason,
although I’ve been thirteen years a widow come next boxing-night.
Perhaps you may remember the sprite who was killed by a fall off a
flying bridge in ‘Harlequin Buttercup, or the Maiden all Forlorn; the
Fairy Queen of the Daisies, and the Cow with the Crumpled Horn,’ twelve
years ago last Christmas? Not being professional yourself, you mayn’t
happen to remember the circumstance; but Signor Wilsonio was my husband.
He was _not_ an Italian, and his name in private life was Wilson. We had
been married two years, and he left me with a little boy just six months
old.”
Francis listened very respectfully to this fragment of family history,
but he chafed under its infliction nevertheless.
“If you will tell me how you came to----” he began.
“I am just coming to that,” answered Miss Willoughby, with dignity. “My
poor husband, not having anything to leave me except a complimentary
benefit, which the manager of the theatre allowed me on account of my
bereavement, I was obliged, of course, to continue in the profession;
and oh, sir! nobody that hasn’t gone through it can tell the pain of
having to change your widow’s weeds for white muslin and spangles, and
put away your baby from your breast to go and slap cheesemongers’ shops
into furnished lodgings with a harlequin’s wand. As soon as I got over
the dreadful kind of numbness that came upon me in the first of my
troubles, I looked out for some one who would take care of the child;
for I need not tell you that you can’t leave an infant-in-arms in
unfurnished lodgings _without_ attendance, when you get black looks from
your landlady if you so much as ask for your fire to be poked once in an
evening in a friendly way, and much less to look after a child, which is
apt to be trying to the best of tempers. Well, sir, inquiring of one and
another, I heard of a very respectable elderly person who had seen
better days--and it does seem odd, but people connected with bringing up
children by hand always have seen better days. The elderly person lived
down Chelsea way, close to the water, which was considered healthy, and
next door but one to a cowkeeper--also considered healthy, especially if
predisposed to consumption.”
“If you would only----” murmured Francis, despondently.
“Which I am just coming to,” answered the _ci-devant_ columbine, again
with dignity. “The long and short of it is, I took my baby to the
respectable elderly person at Chelsea, and there he’s been ever since,
at seven shillings a week, which is a hard struggle sometimes now,
though light enough when I was engaged as columbine; but dancing has
made such progress, and unless you can take flying leaps from one side
of the stage to the other, a manager won’t look at you.”
“But with regard to----”
“Which I am about to explain,” continued Miss Willoughby, with unshaken
calmness. “It was at the respectable elderly person’s that I first met
Miss Turner; for my darling baby having learnt to call his nurse Nungey,
and taking so to her, and not taking to anybody else, and she so
attached to him, that she froze my very blood by talking of Battersea
Bridge in quite a meaning way, when I spoke of taking him away. Owing to
this and one circumstance and another, Harry has stopped at Chelsea till
he’s quite a big boy. So, of course, I very often go to see him--not
that he takes to me so much as he ought to do, being so wrapped up in
his Nungey. And one day, about three years ago, I went there quite
promiscuous, and found Harry walking up and down before the door with a
baby in his arms; and the nurse told me that she’d put an advertisement
in the paper, and the very day it was inserted a lady came to her--a
sweet-looking young creature, she said--and left this baby, which might
be going on for twelve months old. Well, the long and the short of it
is, that this was your cousin Susan’s baby; and going there off and on,
I saw a good deal of your cousin. But see her as much as you would, she
was so quiet and so reserved, that you never got anything like intimate
with her. At first she was dressed like a lady, and she had a pretty
little gold watch and chain, and many things that had cost money; but,
little by little, all these disappeared, and she seemed to get very
poor. One day, when I was there, it came out somehow that she was doing
plain needlework for one of the great cheap outfitters’ houses in the
City, and what a hard life it was, and, worse than hard--uncertain; so
then, knowing there were ‘extras’ wanted for the new piece, I proposed
to her that with my help she should try and get engaged. It would be
much lighter work than the plain sewing, and better pay. Well, at first
she was very much against it, but after a deal of persuasion she gave
way, and I got her the engagement. That was full five months ago; for
the piece had a long run. She had been lodging in one room at Chelsea
until then, for the sake of being near her boy, and she left that
lodging to come and share mine.”
“And do you think she will go back to the old lodging?”
“I doubt it. She seemed so uncertain, that I really don’t think she’d
made up her mind where to go.”
“But she is likely to have gone straight to her child!” cried Francis.
“Will you give me the address of the old woman at Chelsea? Oh, I thank
you so much for giving me this clue. I _must_ find my poor girl now!”
The sprite’s widow opened a little portfolio and wrote an address on a
scrap of paper, while Francis stood by eager to take it from her.
“Do you know that there has been an advertisement appealing to my
cousin, in the columns of the “Times” newspaper, a hundred times within
the last two years?”
“Dear! dear!” murmured the ballet-dancer; “and she going through so
much, with rich friends looking for her all the time. But, you see, poor
people can’t afford to take in a newspaper; and there might be only a
threepenny paper standing between a man and a million of money, and he
none the wiser.”
She handed Francis the address, which was a very long one. And then she
gave him divers verbal directions, the gist of which was, that he was to
find a certain public-house called “The Man in the Moon,” and was then
to inquire of anybody for a certain street, and was to go a little way
farther and inquire again, thus accomplishing his journey by easy stages
and frequent inquiries.
But Francis was much too full of hope to be dashed by any small
difficulties. He grasped the dancer’s hand in his heartiest way, and
left Brydges Street in impetuous haste. The hansom cabman, who met him
at the corner of Russell Street, and drove him thence to “The Man in the
Moon,” was a lucky individual, and went home rejoicing to the bosom of
his family. But after dismissing the cabman, Francis had to thread his
way through intricacies which would have been maddening in a hansom cab,
and were only to be overcome by repeated inquiries and frequent
reference to Miss Willoughby’s written direction.
At last, however, while the bells were still ringing for afternoon
service, Francis Tredethlyn found the place, which was a damp little
street without any thoroughfare, called Pollard’s Row. Pollard’s Row,
with the summer sunlight on it, and given up entirely to the occupation
of one mongrel dog, which was lying with his head upon his forepaws,
snapping at imaginary flies, was a dreary place to contemplate; Francis
Tredethlyn troubled himself very little about the aspect of the
neighbourhood. He walked rapidly past the little row of houses until he
came to No. 17, which was occupied by the respectable elderly person,
otherwise Mrs. Clinnock.
The elderly person made some faint show of a commercial character in the
shape of three very green pickle-bottles containing confectionery, all
more or less melted out of its normal mould by long exposure to the sun,
and a few gingerbread figures of weird and ghastly outline, supposed to
represent the human form. A tattered chintz curtain hung upon a limp
string, and made a background to these wares. Looking across this
curtain Francis Tredethlyn saw a woman sitting in the ruddy glow of the
fire, with a child in her lap, and knew by the beating of his heart that
he had found his cousin Susan.
The door of No. 17 stood ajar. Francis pushed it open and went into the
passage. Three steps brought him to the door of the little room, which
was a compound of shop and parlour, with a slight flavour of bedroom. A
woman--a girlish creature still, but pale and worn-looking--was sitting
in a low nursing chair, with a child of four years old in her arms. Alas
for the handiwork of Sorrow, the destroyer! The soft brown hair, the
tender hazel eyes, alone remained of the rustic beauty which Francis
Tredethlyn remembered smiling at him upon the moorlands of his native
county.
Ah, how much of his youth came suddenly back upon the Cornishman in that
moment of recognition! His mother’s face watching him as he left the
dear old homestead in the early summer morning to go to the dame-school;
happy haymakings on his father’s farm in the days when haymaking and
harvest time were two Arcadian festivals, and not nervous crises in the
life of a hardworking farmer, who may or may not be able to pay his
rent. His childhood came back to him with all its unconscious happiness,
and he fell on his knees by his cousin’s chair in a tumult of emotion.
“Susy, my darling, my pet! at last, at last I have found you!”
The boy slid from his mother’s arms, frightened by this tumultuous
stranger. Susan rose pale and trembling, and shrank away with her hands
spread before her face, as if even now she would have hidden herself
from her cousin.
“Oh, Francis,” she cried, “don’t come near me--don’t look at me! Oh,
Heaven have pity on me! I have so prayed that none who ever knew me in
my childhood should see me now.”
“But, my darling, why, why should you hide yourself from those who love
you so fondly?”
She made him no direct answer, but covered her face with her hands and
sobbed aloud--
“Oh, my shame--my shame! Who will believe me when my father would not?”
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