Miss Grantley's Girls Part 8

"What is this? Why are you here, Algernon?" she asked, turning to the captain.

"He was here to rob your father of another treasure besides yourself," I said. "He is a thief, and I will proclaim him as such."

"A thief! How dare you?" she said, her face all aflame. "Do you know you are speaking of my husband?"

"Husband!" I cried--"Husband!" And I leaned on a chair for support.

"Richard," she said, placing the letter on the table, "I brought this that I might leave it for my father when he came in. You will see that he has it, will you?--or if you go before his return, let him find it when he comes."

Married! The room swam round; and as I stood there, dumb and sick, they seemed to swim with it out at the door.

When I came to myself the place was still as death, save for the ticking of the clock and the click of the failing fire. But there lay the letter. Another moment, as it seemed to me, and her father had let himself in and I had placed it in his hand. He read it half through before he quite understood what had been inclosed in it--a narrow printed slip of paper. Suddenly he unfolded that and carried it nearer the light.

"Married!" he said. "Well, thank G.o.d for that! But--but--married, and to him!"--and he fell forward on the table.

He didn't die. People don't mostly die of these shocks. The months went on; the years went on; and though he'd never seen his daughter, nor rightly knew where she was, he heard that her husband had an allowance made him by his father after his gambling debts had been paid; but the alderman had taken his head clerk into partnership, and there was an end of the captain's going into the business.

My dear old father died and left me this house and his small savings. I seldom went to the Hall, though I should have been welcome there. Four times a year I lent a hand with the accounts for the sake of old routine, and stayed to eat a little supper and drink a gla.s.s of the famous claret, or to smoke a pipe with the old gentleman, who was failing greatly. His daughter was never mentioned between us, and I supposed he had lost sight of her altogether, when, one night, he said quite suddenly: "d.i.c.k, I wish you'd take a letter and a message to Mary for me."

He hadn't called me d.i.c.k for years, and I thought he was drivelling, but he held an open letter into which he was folding some banknotes.

"You may read it, d.i.c.k. They are in London, but she has not been to see me, and she writes for help to tide over some difficulties, she says, till her husband can see his father. She evidently doesn't know that the alderman's in the bankruptcy court. Poor dear, poor dear, she's reaping the fruits of her disobedience, and yet she will not come to see me. To her own hand, d.i.c.k, to her own hand only, must this letter go. It tells her how, in the last resort, she may seek my cousin, if she will not come to me before I die. My poor savings--they are but little, d.i.c.k--will be in trust for her with my cousin, but she sha'n't know that from me. Could you take this to-morrow morning, d.i.c.k?"

I could do no less than promise to convey it to her, and the next morning set off to find the house, in a rather mean neighbourhood, where I found that she and her husband had taken furnished lodgings. A servant girl took up my name, and I was asked to walk upstairs. There, upon the landing, stood the woman I had not seen since the night she left her father's home, but changed, as years should not have changed her, and with a pleading anxious look in her scared eyes that was grievous to see.

"Richard," she said with a faint smile, and holding out her hand, "is it you?"

"I come as the bearer of a written message," I replied; "but if I can ever do you real service you know well enough that I should gladly aid you."

"Thank you, Richard," she said gently, "I know it; but my father, he is well? His writing has changed though, it trembles so," and she burst into tears as she went to the landing window to read the letter. She had but just finished, and was slipping it into the bosom of her dress, when, with a sudden gesture, she said, "I dare not stay. I hear him coming up the street. Good-bye, good-bye, and take my love to papa, my dear, dear love. Say I'll write again or see him; but now go, and take no notice."

I went down, and should have pa.s.sed quietly from the house, but a latch-key turned in the street door, and, as I tried to go out, the "Captain" stood in the way. I knew him, bloated, shabby, and broken down as he looked, but should have said nothing had he not also recognized me, and turned upon me with an oath, wanting to know what I did there.

I had heard of their address, I said, and that misfortune had overtaken his father, and had come to see whether I could do anything to help them.

Could I lend him a ten-pound note there and then? he asked, with an ugly laugh; and when I said, I had no such sum, he broke out again in a torrent of abuse.

I would have pushed past him, but he seized me by the arm, and swung me round facing him. I still strove to get away, when I heard his wife's imploring voice upon the stairs; and he spoke words that made the little blood that was in me surge swift and hot to my face. In a moment I had wrenched myself free, and struck him full on the mouth with my clenched hand. He was cowed for a moment, and turned white, but there were two or three people looking on by that time.

"You miserable old pantaloon," he screamed, as he made a rush at me.

But I had one hand on the k.n.o.b of the door, and, swinging round as though I worked on a pivot, I caught him full between the eyes, and sent him sprawling among the hats and umbrellas that he had knocked down in his fall. Then I closed the door, and walked away. The page is turned for ever now, I muttered to myself. I cannot even meet her father again.

Poor old gentleman!--he died--he died too soon; but not before I'd seen him and held his hand in mine. But she had never been to the old home; and on inquiring at the place where they had lodged, it was believed that they had gone abroad after the death of their two children.

So that was the bitter ending, I thought. And all that dead past was to be closed like a page in a book that is read and clasped.

Yes; but the book is reopened sometimes, where a sprig of rue has been placed to mark between the leaves.

I didn't change. I was long past changing. And I followed my old pursuits; went to my old haunts; wore my old clothes, as I do now, from day to day.

So years went on, until one dreary afternoon in November--one bright and sunny afternoon it might have been for its influence on my dim calendar--I was rummaging one of the boxes of a bookstall in Holborn, when the keeper of it came out and put two or three battered volumes among the rest. Instinctively I took one of them up and opened it. A great throb came into my heart and made me reel; for it was a prayer-book, and there on the t.i.tle-page was _her_ name--_hers_, and in _my_ handwriting of years and years ago. The prayer-book that I had given her.

"Dear me, sir, you look faint-like," says the dealer; "let me fetch you a stool, or come in and sit down a bit."

"Can you--tell--me," I gasped, "where you bought this book? Where and when?"

"Where? Why here. When? Why five minutes ago, along with two or three more, of no particular value, of a poor little thing that said it was all her mother had to part with--Stop, sir, stop; why, there she is coming out of the grocer's shop this very minute. Run after the old gentleman, James; he'll do himself a mischief, or be run over, or something."

For I had dashed after the child like a madman, my hat off, the open book in my hand. James had outrun me though, and was now coming back with a child--a young girl--poorly clad; oh! so poorly clad; but yet like Mary--my Mary--on the day I wrote that name in the book still open in my hand.

"Mary!" I gasped.

"Yes, sir," said the child; "I must make haste home, or my mother will have no tea."

No, no, I will not dwell on the recollection of that poor room, with its evidences of want, its signs of suffering; nor of all that might have been said and was not. By the bedside of the woman whom I had loved and lost, and who was now pa.s.sing from the world into the great reality of life, I had few words to speak. The only witness of the promise I made--except the Lord and His angels--was the silently weeping girl, _his_ only remaining child. Almost the only words were:--

"Mary."

"d.i.c.k."

And the child stood there clasping her mother's hand--_my_ hand; to be in future my child and the child of the mother in heaven; and who shall tell but at the resurrection----

Ah! I hear her foot upon the stair, her sweet voice singing as she comes--that sweet sweet voice that one day, maybe, will sing me to sleep.

"Ah-h-h!" sighed Mrs. Parmigan, who had listened to the last two stories without saying a word but with an expression of wonder. "How you can remember so much about people I can't imagine; but really, my dear, these love stories never do end except in the saddest way. Now if I could only write a tale, which I know is, of course, quite impossible, it should be every word of it true, and everybody should be as happy as the day is long."

"But then you see, dear Mrs. Parmigan, that wouldn't be every word true," said Miss Grantley with her grave smile. "I hope, my dear young friends here are mostly happy with me at school, but there are times when we don't feel altogether in harmony, and lessons are not learned, and our tempers get the upper hand, and the sun seems to have gone behind a cloud and the world turns the wrong way, till the storm lowers and breaks, and then come regret and forbearance, and the stillness, and 'the gentle shining after rain.' Life is often a rather difficult school, and our education in this world is not completed without trouble and the discipline of pain and the finding of strength through weakness and of truth through error. But come, old lady, I am not to be led into a lecture, especially to a person of your years and experience, so tell me what you mean,--where am I to find 'a love story,' as you call it, that shall be without bitter-sweet, and come to a bright ending without going through a dark pa.s.sage?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, my dear, I was first thinking of my own very happy, but at the same time very commonplace and unromantic married life with Mr. Parmigan, who, as you know, was in the Bank of England, and came home as regularly as the clock struck half-past five; but then I was trying to recall what Mrs. Schwartz the cooper's wife was telling you that day when we went into her house out of the rain after our long walk from Fernside."

"What! has that pretty, fair, round rosy-cheeked German woman a romance in her life?" asked Annie Bowers. "I declare I've often thought there must have been some kind of sentimental recollection in those great dreamy blue eyes. What a fine, strong-looking man her husband is too!

Marion and I have often stood looking into the shed while he has been at work making tubs and casks, and sometimes we have heard him singing some German song as we walked that way. He speaks English so well too; but Mrs. Schwartz has a pretty buzzing accent, even the two flaxen-headed children have caught it, and talk in what seems to be a German idiom."

"Well, would you like me to try and repeat Mrs. Schwartz's story as she has told it to me?" said our governess. "I must let you know, however, that she and I are very old friends, for I have been to see her over and over again, and she and her children have been here to tea several times in the holidays, her husband fetching them home in the evening. I was selfish in that, for I wanted to refresh my own ear with the German accent, and they both speak well, particularly the master cooper, who like most of his countrymen was a true journeyman, and travelled all over the country to practise his trade before he was drafted off to the army to fight in the Franco-German War."

"Oh tell us the Schwartz love story!" said Sarah Jorring, "and try to tell it just as you heard it; it would be so much more sentimental."

"But not in German," we cried, "that wouldn't be fair, to give us a German exercise under the pretence of a story; we'll have it in English."

"Well, you shall have it in something like the original German-English, which seems to me very much to resemble real old English, and sounds to my ear more simple and more fit for story-telling than the more modern tongue. You must try to picture to yourselves Mrs. Schwartz when she was younger and paler, and wore a round white cap and great silver ear-rings, and was in fact a slender, rather pale pretty girl with a plaintive look in her great blue eyes, and a voice soft and low. The story arose from our talking about the fashion of Christmas-trees having been adopted in England, and the recollection of the last Christmas-tree that she had seen at her old home with her former mistress caused her to say with a deep sigh, 'Ach! _Ich habe gelebt und geliebet_;' so I will call the story 'I have lived and loved,' and you must try to fancy that Mrs. Schwartz is speaking."

[Ill.u.s.tration]