Only a clod
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!”