Laid up in Lavender Part 14

The clock of St. Martin's was striking ten as Archdeacon Yale, of Studbury, in Gloucestershire, who had taken breakfast at the Athenaeum, walked down the club steps, eastward bound. He was a man of fresh complexion and good presence; of tolerable means and some reputation as the author of a curiously morbid book, "Timon Defended." As he walked the pavement briskly, an unopened letter which peeped from his pocket seemed--and rightly--to indicate a man free from anxieties: a man without a care.

Before he left the dignified stillness of Pall Mall, however, he found leisure to read the note. "I enclose," wrote his wife, "a letter which came for you this morning. I trust, Cyprian, that you are not fretting about the visitation question and that you get your meals fairly well cooked." The Archdeacon paused at this point and smiled as at some pleasant reminiscence. "Give my love to dear Jack. Oh--h'm--I do not recognise your correspondent's handwriting."

"Nor do I!" the Archdeacon said aloud; and he opened the enclosure with a curiosity that had in it no fear of trouble. After glancing at the signature, however, he turned into a side street and read the letter to the end. He sighed. "Oh dear, dear!" he muttered. "What can I do? I must go! There is no room for refusal. And yet--oh dear!--after all these years. Number 14, Sidmouth Street, Gray's Inn Road? What a place!"

It was a shabby third-rate lodging-house place, as perhaps he knew.

But he called a cab and had himself driven thither forthwith. At the corner of the street he dismissed the cab and looked about him furtively. For a man who had left his club so free from care, and whose wife at Studbury and son at Lincoln's Inn were well, he wore an anxious face. It could not be--for he was an Archdeacon--that he was about to do anything of which he was ashamed. Bishops, and others of that cla.s.s, may be open to temptations, or have pages of their lives folded down, which they would not wish turned. But an Archdeacon?

Yet when he was distant a house or so from No. 14 he started guiltily at a very ordinary occurrence; at nothing more than the arrival of a hansom cab at the door. True, a young woman descended from it, and let herself into the house with a latchkey. But young women and latchkeys are common in London, as common as--as dirt. It could hardly be that which darkened his face as he rang the bell.

In the hall, where a dun was sitting, there was little to remove the prejudice he may have conceived; little, too, in the dingy staircase, c.u.mbered with plates and stale food; or in the first-floor rooms, from which some one peeped and another whispered, and both giggled; or in that second-floor room, at once smart and shabby, and remarkable for many photographs of one young girl, where he was bidden to wait--little or nothing. But when he had pished and pshawed at the tenth photograph, he was called into an inner room, where a strange silence prevailed. Involuntarily he stepped softly. "It was kind of you to come," some one said--some one who was lying in a great chair brought very near to the open window that the speaker might breathe more easily--"very kind. And you have come so quickly."

"I have been in London some days," he answered gently, the fastidious expression gone from his face. "Your daughter's letter followed me from the country and reached me an hour ago. It has been no trouble to me to come. I am only pained at finding you so ill."

"Ah!" she answered. Doubtless her thoughts were busy; while his flew back nearly thirty years to a summer evening, when he had walked with her under the trees in Chelsea Gardens and heard her pour into his ear--she was a young actress in the first blush of success--her hopes and ambitions. There was nothing in the memory of which he had need to be ashamed. In those days he had been reading for orders, and, having lodgings in a respectable street, had come by chance to know two of his neighbours--her mother and herself. The two were living a quiet domestic life, which surprised and impressed him. The girl's talent and the contrast between her notoriety and her simple ways had had a charm for him. For some months the neophyte and the actress were as brother and sister. But there the feeling had stopped; and when his appointment to a country curacy had closed this pretty episode in his life, the exchange of a few letters had but added grace to its ending.

Now old feelings rose to swell his pity as he traced the girl's features in the woman's face. "You have a daughter. You have been married since we parted," he said.

"Yes. It is for her sake I have troubled you," was her answer. "She is a good girl--oh, so good! But she has no one in the world except me, and I am leaving her. Poor Grissel!"

"She is on the stage?" he inquired gravely.

"Yes; and she has succeeded young, as I did. We have not been unhappy together. You remember the life my mother and I had? I think it has been the same over again."

She smiled ever so little. He remembered something of the quiet pathos of that life. "Your husband is dead?" he asked.

"Dead! I wish he were!" she answered bitterly, the smile pa.s.sing from her face. "My girl had better be alone than with her father. Ah, you do not know! When he went to America years ago--with another woman--I thanked G.o.d for it. Dead? Oh, no! There is no chance that he is dead."

Mr. Yale was shocked. "You have not got a divorce?" he said.

"No. After he left me I fell ill, and there were expenses. We were very poor until last year, when Grissel made a good engagement. That is why we are here. Now that her name is known he will come back and find her out. She plays as Kittie Latouche, but the profession know who she is, and--and what can I do? Oh, Mr. Yale! tell me what I can do for her."

Her anxiety unnerved him. Her terror of the future, not her own, but her child's, wrung his heart. He had a presentiment whither she was leading him; and he tried to escape, he tried to murmur some commonplace of encouragement.

"You may yet recover," he urged. "At any rate, there will be time to talk of this again."

"There will not be time," she entreated him. "I have scarcely three days to live, and then my child will be alone. Oh, Mr. Yale! help me.

She is young and handsome, with no one to guide her. If her father return, he will be her worst enemy. There is some one, too--some gentleman--who has fallen in with her, and been here. He may be a friend--what you were to me--or not! Don't you understand me?" she cried piteously. "How can I leave her unless you--there is no one else whom I can ask--will protect her?"

He started and looked round for relief, but found none. "I? It is impossible!" he cried. "Oh dear, dear! I am afraid that it is impossible, Mrs. Kent."

"Not impossible! I do not ask you to give her a home or money! Only care. If you will be her guardian--her friend----"

She was a woman dying in sore straits. He was a merciful man. In the end he promised to do what she wished. Then he hastened to escape her grat.i.tude, unconscious, as he pa.s.sed down the stairs, of the whispering and giggling, the slatternliness and dirt, which had been so dreadful to him on his entrance.

He walked along Oxford Street in a reverie, "Poor thing!" falling from him at intervals, until he reached the corner of Tottenham Court Road, and his eye rested upon a h.o.a.rding--at the first idly, then with a purpose, finally with a sidelong glance. The advertis.e.m.e.nt which had caught his attention was a coa.r.s.e engraving of half a dozen heads, arranged in a circle, with one in the centre. Under this last, which was larger and more staring, and less to be evaded than the others, appeared the words, "Miss Kittie Latouche." He went on with a shiver, crossing here and there to avoid the h.o.a.rdings, but only to fall in with a string of sandwich-men bearing the same device. He plunged into the haven of Soho as if he were a political conspirator.

The portrait and the name of his ward! In a few days he would be left in charge of an actress whose name was known to all London--guardian, _in loco parentis_, what you will, of the closest and most responsible, to a giddy girl of unknown antecedents, and too well-known name! He wondered whether Archdeacon had ever been in such a position before, a position which it would be hard to acknowledge and impossible to explain. He could talk of his old friendship for her mother, the actress, and his duty to a dying woman. But would the world believe him? Would even his wife believe him? Would not she read much between the lines, though the s.p.a.ce were white as snow? He, a man of nearly sixty, grew red and white by turns as he thought of this.

"I will tell Jack the story," was his first resolve. "I will tell it him at dinner to-night," he groaned. But would he have the courage? He had much respect for his son's practical nature. He had heard him called "hard as nails." And when he found himself opposite to him, and eyed the close-shaven young lawyer, who looked a decade older than his years, he resorted to a subterfuge.

"Jack," he said, "I want your opinion for a friend of mine."

"It is at your service, sir," his son said, his hand upon the apricots. "What is the subject? Law?"

"Not precisely," the Archdeacon replied, clearing his throat. "It is rather a question of knowledge of the world. You know, my boy," he went on, "that I have a very high opinion of your discretion."

"You are very good," said Jack. And he did that which was unusual with him. He blushed; but the other did not observe it.

"My friend, who, I may say, is a clergyman in my archdeaconry," the elder gentleman resumed, "has been appointed guardian--it is a ridiculous thing for a man in his position--to a--a young actress. She is quite a girl, I understand, but of some notoriety."

"Indeed," said Jack drily. "May I ask how that came about? Wards of that kind do not fall from heaven--as a rule."

The Archdeacon winced. "He tells me," he explained, "that her mother was an old friend of his, and when she died, some time back, she left the girl as a kind of legacy, you see."

"A legacy to him, sir?"

"To him, certainly," the elder man said in some distress. "You follow me?"

"Quite so," said Jack. "Oh, quite so! A common thing, no doubt. Did you say that your friend was a married man, sir?"

"Yes," the Archdeacon replied faintly.

"Just so! just so!" his son said, in the same tone, a tone that was so dreadful to the Archdeacon that it needed Jack's question, "And what is the point upon which he wants advice?" to induce him to go on.

"What he had better do, being a clergyman."

"He should have thought of that earlier--ahem!--I mean it depends a good deal on the young lady. There are actresses _and_ actresses, you know."

"I suppose so," the Archdeacon admitted grudgingly. He was in a mood to see the darkest side of his difficulty.

"Of course there are!" Jack said, for him quite warmly. And indeed that is the worst of barristers. They will argue in season and out of season if you do not agree with them quickly. "Some are as good--as good girls as my mother when you married her, sir."

"Well, well, she may be a good girl--I do not know," the elder man allowed.

"You always had a prejudice against the stage, sir."

The Archdeacon looked up sharply, thinking this uncalled for; unless, horrible thought! his son knew something of the matter, and was chaffing him. He made an effort to get on firmer ground. "Granted she is a good girl," he said, "there are still two difficulties. Her father is a rascal, and there is a man, probably a rascal too, hanging about her, and likely to give trouble in another way."

Jack nodded and sagely pondered the position. "I think I should advise your friend to get some respectable woman to live with the girl," he suggested, "and play the duenna--first getting rid of your second rascal."

"But how will you do that? And what would you do about the father?"

"Buy him off!" said Jack curtly. "As to the lover, have an interview with him. Say to him, 'Do you wish to marry my ward? If you do, who are you? If you do not, go about your business.'"

"But if he will not go," the Archdeacon said, "what can my friend do?"

"Well, indeed," replied Jack, looking rather nonplussed, "I hardly know, unless you make her a ward of court. You see," he added apologetically, "your friend's position is a little--shall I say a little anomalous?"