Mistress and Maid Part 13

"No, my dear, not vexed. Only I wish we had known this a little sooner that we might have made arrangements. Now, where shall we go?"

Ascott mentioned a dozen hotels, but they found he only knew them by name. At last Miss Leaf remembered one, which her father used to go to, on his frequent journeys to London, and whence, indeed, he had been brought home to die. And though all the recollections about it were sad enough, still it felt less strange than the rest, in this dreariness of London. So she proposed going to the "Old Bell,"

Holborn.

"A capital place!" exclaimed Ascott, eagerly. "And I'll take and settle you there: and we'll order supper, and make a jolly night of it. All right. Drive on, cabby."

He jumped on the box, and then looked in mischievously, flourishing his lit cigar and shaking his long hair--his Aunt Selina's two great abominations--right in her indignant face: but withal looking so merry and good tempered that she shortly softened into a smile.

"How handsome the boy is growing!"

"Yes," said Johanna, with a slight sigh; "and did you notice? how exceedingly like his--"

The sentence was left unfinished. Alas! if every young man, who believes his faults and follies injure himself alone, could feel what it must be, years afterward, to have his nearest kindred shrink from saying as the saddest, most ominous thing they could say of his son, that the lad is growing "so like his father!"

It might have been--they a.s.sured each other that it was--only the incessant roll, roll of the street sounds below their windows, which kept the Misses Leaf awake half the night of this their first night in London. And when they sat down to breakfast--having waited an hour vainly for their nephew--it might have been only the gloom of the little parlor which cast a slight shadow over them all. Still the shadow was there.

It deepened despite the sunshiny morning into which the last night's rain had brightened till Holborn Bars looked cheerful, and Holborn pavement actually clean, so that, as Elizabeth said, "you might eat your dinner off it;" which was the one only thing she condescended to approve in London. She had sat all evening mute in her corner, for Miss Leaf would not send her away into the terra incognita of a London hotel. Ascott, at first considerably annoyed at the presence of what he called a "skeleton at the feast," had afterward got over it; and run on with a mixture of childish glee and mannish pomposity about his plans and intentions--how he meant to take a house, he thought, in one of the squares, or a street leading out of them: how he would put up the biggest of bra.s.s plates, with "Mr. Leaf, surgeon." and soon get an extensive practice, and have all his aunts to live with him. And his aunts had smiled and listened, forgetting all about the silent figure in the corner, who perhaps had gone to sleep, or had also listened.

"Elizabeth, come and look out at London."

So she and Miss Hilary whiled away another heavy three quarters of an hour in watching and commenting on the incessantly shifting crowd which swept past Holborn Bars. Miss Selina sometimes looked out too, but more often sat fidgeting and wondering why Ascott did not come; while Miss Leaf, who never fidgeted, became gradually more and more silent. Her eyes were fixed on the door, with an expression which, if Hilary could have remembered so far back, would have been to her something not painfully new, but still more painfully old--a look branded into her face by many an anxious hour's listening for the footstep that never came, or only came to bring distress. It was the ineffaceable token of that long, long struggle between affection and conscience, pity and scarcely repressible contempt, which, for more than one generation, had been the appointed burden of this family--at least the women of it--till sometimes it seemed to hang over them almost like a fate.

About noon Miss Leaf proposed calling for the hotel bill. Its length so alarmed the country ladies that Hilary suggested not staying to dine, but going immediately in search of lodgings.

"What, without a gentleman! Impossible! I always understood ladies could go nowhere in London without a gentleman!"

"We shall come very ill off then, Selina. But any how I mean to try.

You know the region where, we have heard, lodgings are cheapest and best--that is, best for us. It can not be far from here. Suppose I start at once?"

"What, alone?" cried Johanna, anxiously.

"No, dear, I'll take the map with me, and Elizabeth. She is not afraid."

Elizabeth smiled, and rose, with that air of dogged devotedness with which she would have prepared to follow Miss Hilary to the North Pole, if necessary. So, after a few minutes of arguing with Selina, who did not press her point overmuch, since she herself had not to commit the impropriety of the expedition. After a few minutes more of hopeless lingering about--till even Miss Leaf said they had better wait no longer--mistress and maid took a farewell nearly as pathetic as if they had been really Arctic voyagers, and plunged right into the dusty glare and hurrying crowd of the "sunny side" of Holborn in July.

A strange sensation, and yet there was something exhilarating in it.

The intense solitude that there is in a London crowd these country girls--for Miss Hilary herself was no more than a girl--could not as yet realize. They only felt the life of it; stirring, active, incessantly moving life; even though it was of a kind that they knew as little of it as the crowd did of them. Nothing struck Hilary more than the self-absorbed look of pa.s.sers-by: each so busy on his own affairs, that, in spite of Selina's alarm, for all notice taken of them, they might as well be walking among the cows and horses in s...o...b..ry field.

Poor old s...o...b..ry! They felt how far away they were from it when a ragged, dirty, vicious looking girl offered them a moss rose bud for "one penny, only one penny;" which Elizabeth, lagging behind, bought, and found it only a broken off bud stuck on to a bit of wire.

"That's London ways, I suppose," said she, severely, and became so misanthropic that she would hardly vouchsafe a glance to the hand some square they turned into, and merely observed of the tall houses, taller than any Hilary had ever seen, that she "wouldn't fancy running up and down them stairs."

But Hilary was cheerful in spite of all. She was glad to be in this region, which, theoretically, she knew by heart--glad to find herself in the body, where in the spirit she had come so many a time. The mere consciousness of this seemed to refresh her. She thought she would be much happier in London; that in the long years to come that must be borne, it would be good for her to have something to do as well as to hope for; something to fight with as well as to endure.

Now more than ever came pulsing in and out of her memory a line once repeated in her hearing, with an observation of how "true" it was.

And though originally it was applied by a man to a woman, and she smiled sometimes to think how "unfeminine" some people--Selina for instance--would consider her turning it the other way, still she did so. She believed that, for woman as for man, that is the purest and n.o.blest love which is the most self-existent, most independent of love returned; and which can say, each to the other equally on both sides, that the whole solemn purpose of life is, under G.o.d's service,

"If not to win, to feel more worthy thee."

Such thoughts made her step firmer and her heart lighter; so that she hardly noticed the distance they must have walked till the close London air began to oppress her, and the smooth glaring London pavements made her s...o...b..ry feet ache sorely.

"Are you tired, Elizabeth? Well, we'll rest soon. There must be lodgings near here. Only I can't quite make out--"

As Miss Hilary looked up to the name of the street the maid noticed what a glow came into her mistress's face, pale and tired as it was.

Just then a church clock struck the quarter hour.

"That must be St. Pancras. And this--yes, this is Burton Street, Burton Crescent."

"I'm sure Missis wouldn't like to live there;" observed Elizabeth, eyeing uneasily the gloomy rez de-chaussee, familiar to many a generation of struggling respectability, where, in the decadence of the season, every second house bore the announcement "apartments furnished."

"No," Miss Hilary replied, absently. Yet she continued to walk up and down the whole length of the street; then pa.s.sed out into the dreary, deserted looking Crescent, where the trees were already beginning to fade; not, however, into the bright autumn tint of country woods, but into a premature withering, ugly and sad to behold.

"I am glad he is not here--glad, glad!" thought Hilary, as she realized the unutterable dreariness of those years when Robert Lyon lived and studied in his garret from month's end to month's end--these few dusty trees being the sole memento of the green country life in which he had been brought up, and which she knew he so pa.s.sionately loved. Now she could understand, that "calenture"

which he had sometimes jestingly alluded to, as coming upon him at times, when he felt literally sick for the sight of a green field or a hedge full of birds. She wondered whether the same feeling would ever come upon her in this strange desert of London, the vastness of which grew upon her every hour.

She was glad he was away; yes, heart glad! And yet, if this minute she could only have seen him coming round the Crescent, have met his smile, and the firm, warm clasp of his hand--

For an instant there rose up in her one of those wild, rebellious outcries against fate, when to have to waste years of this brief life of ours, in the sort of semi-existence that living is, apart from the treasure of the heart and delight of the eyes, seems so cruelly, cruelly hard!

"Miss Hilary."

She started, and "put herself under lock and key" immediately. "Miss Hilary; you do look so tired!"

"Do I? Then we will go and sit down in this baker's shop, and get rested and fed. We cannot afford to wear ourselves out, you know. We have a great deal to do to-day."

More indeed, than she calculated, for they walked up one street and down another, investigating at least twenty lodgings before any appeared which seemed fit for them. Yet some place must be found where Johanna's poor, tired head could rest that night. At last, completely exhausted, with that oppressive exhaustion which seems to crush mind as well as body after a day's wandering in London.

Hilary's courage began to ebb. Oh for an arm to lean on, a voice to listen for, a brave heart to come to her side, saying, "Do not be afraid, there are two of us!" And she yearned, with an absolutely sick yearning such as only a woman who now and then feels the utter helplessness of her womanhood can know, for the only arm she cared to lean on, the only voice dear enough to bring her comfort, the only heart that she felt she could trust.

Poor Hilary! And yet why pity her? To her three alternatives could but happen: were Robert Lyon true to her she would be his entirely and devotedly, to the end of her days; did he forsake her, she would forgive him should he die, she would be faithful to him eternally.

Love of this kind may know anguish, but not the sort of anguish that lesser and weaker loves do. If it is certain of nothing else, it can always be certain of itself.

"Its will is strong; 'It suffers; but it can not suffer long."

And even in its utmost pangs is an underlying peace which often approaches to absolute joy.

Hilary roused herself, and bent her mind steadily on lodgings till she discovered one from the parlor of which you could see the trees of Burton Crescent and hear the sound of Saint Pancras's clock.

"I think we may do here--at least for a while," said she cheerfully; and then Elizabeth heard her inquiring if an extra bedroom could be had if necessary.

There was only one small attic. "Ascott never could put up with that," said Hilary, half to herself. Then suddenly--"I think I will see Ascott before I decide. Elizabeth, will you go with me, or remain here?"

"I'll go with you, if you please, Miss Hilary."

"If you please," sounded not unlike, "if I please," and Elizabeth had gloomed over a little. "Is Mr. Ascott to live with us?"

"I suppose so."

No more words were interchanged till they reached Gower street, when Miss Hilary observed, with evident surprise, what a handsome street it was.