Mistress and Maid Part 14

"I must have made some mistake. Still we will find out Mr. Ascott's number, and inquire."

No, there was no mistake. Mr. Ascott Leaf had lodged there for three months, but had given up his rooms that very morning.

"Where had he gone to?"

The servant--a London lodging house servant all over--didn't know; but she fetched the landlady, who was after the same pattern of the dozen London landladies with whom Hilary had that day made acquaintance, only a little more c.o.c.kney, smirking, dirty, and tawdrily fine.

"Yes, Mr. Leaf had gone, and he hadn't left no address. Young College gentlemen often found it convenient to leave no address. P'raps he would if he'd known there would be a young lady a calling to see him."

"I am Mr. Leaf's aunt," said Hilary, turning as hot as fire.

"Oh, in-deed," was the answer, with civil incredulousness.

But the woman was sharp of perception--as often-cheated London landladies learn to be. After looking keenly at mistress and maid, she changed her tone; nay, even launched out into praises of her late lodger: what a pleasant gentleman he was; what good company he kept, and how he had promised to recommend her apartments to his friends.

"And as for the little some'at of rent, Miss--tell him it makes no matter, he can pay me when he likes. If he don't call soon p'raps I might make bold to send his trunk and his books over to Mr. Ascott's of--dear me, I forget the number and the square."

Hilary unsuspiciously supplied both.

"Yes, that's it--the old gen'leman as Mr. Leaf went to dine with every other Sunday, a very rich old gentleman, who, he says, is to leave him all his money. Maybe a relation of yours, Miss?"

"No," said Hilary; and adding something about the landlady's hearing from Mr. Leaf very soon, she hurried out of the house, Elizabeth following.

"Won't you be tired if you walk so fast, Miss Hilary?"

Hilary stopped, choking. Helplessly she looked up and down the forlorn, wide, glaring, dusty street; now sinking into the dull shadow of a London afternoon.

"Let us go home!" And at the word a sob burst out--just one pa.s.sionate pent up sob. No more. She could not afford to waste strength in crying.

"As you say, Elizabeth, I am getting tired, and that will not do. Let me see; something must be decided." And she stood still, pa.s.sing her hand over her hot brow and eyes. "I will go back and take the lodgings, leave you there to make all comfortable, and then fetch my sisters from the hotel. But stay first, I have forgotten something."

She returned to the house in Gower Street, and wrote on one of her cards an address--the only permanent address she could think of--that of the city broker who was in the habit of paying them their yearly income of 50.

"If any creditors inquire for Mr. Leaf, give them this. His friends may always hear of him at the London University."

"Thank you, ma'am," replied the now civil landlady. "Indeed, I wasn't afraid of the young gentleman giving us the slip. For though he was careless in his bills he was every inch the gentleman. And I wouldn't object to take him in again. Or p'raps you yourself, ma'am, might be a-wanting rooms."

"No, I thank you. Good morning." And Hilary hurried away.

Not a word did she say to Elizabeth, or Elizabeth to her, till they got into the dull, dingy parlor--henceforth, to be their sole apology for "home:" and then she only talked about domestic arrangements--talked fast and eagerly, and tried to escape the affectionate eyes which she knew were so sharp and keen. Only to escape them--not to blind them; she had long ago found out that Elizabeth was too quick-witted for that, especially in any thing that concerned "the family." She felt convinced the girl had heard every syllable that pa.s.sed at Ascott's lodgings: that she knew all that was to be known, and guessed what was to be feared as well as Hilary herself.

"Elizabeth"--she hesitated long, and doubted whether she should say the thing before she did say it--"remember we are all strangers in London, and family matters are best kept within the family. Do not mention either in writing home, or to any body here, about--about--"

She could not name Ascott; she felt so horribly ashamed.

CHAPTER X.

Living in lodgings, not temporarily, but permanently, sitting down to make one's only "home" in Mrs. Jones's parlor or Mrs. Smith's first floor, of which not a stick or a stone that one looks at is one's own, and whence one may be evicted or evade, with a week's notice or a week's rent, any day--this sort of life is natural and even delightful to some people. There are those who, like strawberry plants, are of such an errant disposition, that grow them where you will, they will soon absorb all the pleasantness of their habitat, and begin casting out runners elsewhere; may, if not frequently transplanted, would actually wither and die. Of such are the pioneers of society--the emigrants, the tourists, the travelers round the world; and great is the advantage the world derives from them, active, energetic, and impulsive as they are. Unless, indeed, their talent for incessant locomotion degenerates into rootless restlessness, and they remain forever rolling stones, gathering no moss, and acquiring gradually a smooth, hard surface, which adheres to nothing, and to which n.o.body dare venture to adhere.

But there are others possessing in a painful degree this said quality of adhesiveness, to whom the smallest change is obnoxious; who like drinking out of a particular cup, and sitting in a particular chair; to whom even a variation in the position of furniture is unpleasant.

Of course, this peculiarity has its bad side, and yet it is not in itself mean or ign.o.ble. For is not adhesiveness, faithfulness, constancy--call it what you will--at the root of all citizenship, clanship, and family love? Is it not the same feeling which, granting they remain at all, makes old friendships dearer than any new? Nay, to go to the very sacredest and closest bond, is it not that which makes an old man see to the last in his old wife's faded face the beauty which perhaps n.o.body ever saw except himself, but which he sees and delights in still, simply because it is familiar and his own.

To people who possess a large share of this rare--shall I say fatal?--characteristic of adhesiveness, living in lodgings is about the saddest life under the sun. Whether some dim foreboding of this fact crossed Elizabeth's mind as she stood at the window watching for her mistresses' first arrival at "home," it is impossible to say. She could feel, though she was not accustomed to a.n.a.lyze her feelings.

But she looked dull and sad. Not cross, even Ascott could not have accused her of "savageness."

And yet she had been somewhat tried. First, in going out what she termed "marketing," she had traversed a waste of streets, got lost several times, and returned with light weight in her b.u.t.ter, and sand in her moist sugar; also with the conviction that London tradesmen were the greatest rogues alive. Secondly, a pottle of strawberries, which she had bought with her own money to grace the tea-table with the only fruit Miss Leaf cared for, had turned out a large delusion, big and beautiful at top, and all below small, crushed, and stale.

She had thrown it indignantly, pottle and all, into the kitchen fire.

Thirdly, she had a war with the landlady, partly on the subject of their fire--which, with her s...o...b..ry notions on the subject of coals, seemed wretchedly mean and small--and partly on the question of table cloths at tea, which Mrs. Jones had "never heard of," especially when the use of plate and lines was included in the rent. And the dinginess of the article produced at last out of an omnium-gatherum sort of kitchen cupboard, made an ominous impression upon the country girl, accustomed to clean, tidy, country ways--where the kitchen was kept as neat as the parlor, and the bedrooms were not a whit behind the sitting rooms in comfort and orderliness. Here it seemed as if, supposing people could show a few respectable living rooms, they were content to sleep any where, and cook any how, out of anything, in the midst of any quant.i.ty of confusion and dirt. Elizabeth set all this down as "London," and hated it accordingly.

She had tried to ease her mind by arranging and rearranging the furniture--regular lodging house furniture--table, six chairs, horse-hair sofa, a what not, and the chiffonnier, with a tea-caddy upon it, of which the respective keys had been solemnly presented to Miss Hilary. But still the parlor looked homeless and bare; and the yellowish paper on the walls, the large patterned, many colored Kidderminster on the floor, gave an involuntary sense of discomfort and dreariness. Besides, No. 15 was on the shady side of the street--cheap lodgings always are; and no one who has not lived in the like lodgings--not a house--can imagine what it is to inhabit perpetually one room where the sunshine just peeps in for an hour a day, and vanishes by eleven A. M.; leaving behind in winter a chill dampness, and in summer a heavy, dusty atmosphere, that weighs like lead on the spirits in spite of one's self. No wonder that, as is statistically known and proved, cholera stalks, fever rages, and the registrar's list is always swelled along the shady side of a London street.

Elizabeth felt this, though she had not the dimmest idea why. She stood watching the sunset light fade out of the topmost windows of the opposite house--ghostly reflection of some sunset over fields and trees far away; and she listened to the long monotonous cry melting away round the crescent, and beginning again at the other end of the street--"Straw-berries--straw-ber-ries!" Also, with an eye to tomorrow's Sunday dinner, she investigated the cart of the tired costermonger, who crawled along beside his equally tired donkey, reiterating at times, in tones hoa.r.s.e with a day's bawling, his dreary "Cauli-flower! Cauli-flower!--Fine new pease, sixpence peck!"

But, alas! the pease were neither fine nor new; and the cauliflowers were regular Sat.u.r.day night's cauliflowers. Besides, Elizabeth suddenly doubted whether she had any right, unordered, to buy these things which, from being common garden necessaries, had become luxuries. This thought, with some others that it occasioned, her unwonted state of Idleness and the dullness of every thing about her--what is so dull as a "quiet" London street on a summer evening?--actually made Elizabeth stand, motionless and meditative, for a quarter of an hour. Then she started to hear two cabs drive up to the door; the "family" had at length arrived.

Ascott was there too. Two new portmanteaus and a splendid hat-box east either ignominy or glory upon the poor s...o...b..ry luggage; and--Elizabeth's sharp eye noticed--there was also his trunk which she had seen lying detained for rent in his Gower Street lodgings.

But he looked quite easy and comfortable: handed out his Aunt Johanna, commanded the luggage about, and paid the cabmen with such a magnificent air, that they touched their bats to him, and winked at one another as much as to say. "That's a real gentleman!"

In which statement the landlady evidently coincided, and courtesied low when Miss Leaf introducing him as "my nephew," hoped that a room could be found for him. Which at last there was, by his appropriating Miss Leaf's, while she and Hilary took that at the top of the house.

But they agreed, Ascott must have a good airy room to study in.

"You know, my dear boy," said his Aunt Johanna to him--and at her tender tone he looked a little downcast, as when he was a small fellow and had been forgiven something -- "You know you will have to work very hard."

"All right, aunt! I'm your man for that! This will be a jolly room; and I can smoke up the chimney capitally!"

So they came down stairs quite cheerfully, and Ascott applied himself with the best of appet.i.tes to what he called a "hungry" tea. True, the ham, which Elizabeth had to fetch from an eating house some streets off, cost two shillings a pound, and the eggs, which caused her another war below over the relighting of a fire to boil them, were dismissed by the young gentleman as "horrid stale." Still, woman-like, when there is a man in the question, his aunts let him, have his why. It seemed as if they had resolved to try their utmost to make the new home to which he came, or rather was driven, a pleasant home, and to bind him to it with cords of love, the only cords worth any thing, though sometimes--Heaved knows why--even they fail, and are snapped and thrown aside like straws.

Whenever Elizabeth went in and out of the parlor she always heard lively talk going on among the family; Ascott making his jokes, telling about his college life, and planning his life to come as a surgeon in full practice, on the most extensive scale. And when she brought in the chamber candles, she saw him kiss his aunts affectionately, and even help his Aunt Johanna--who looked frightfully pale and tired, but smiling still--to her bed-room door.

"You'll not sit up long, my dear? No reading to night?" said she, anxiously.

"Not a bit of it. And I'll be up with the lark to-morrow morning. I really will auntie. I'm going to turn over a new leaf, you know."

She smiled again at the immemorial joke, kissed and blessed him, and the door shut up on her and Hilary.

Ascott descended to the parlor, threw himself on the sofa with an air of great relief, and an exclamation of satisfaction that "the women"

were all gone. He did not perceive Elizabeth, who, hidden behind, was kneeling to arrange something in the chiffonnier, till she rose up and proceeded to fasten the parlor shutters.

"Hollo! are you there? Come, I'll do that when I go to bed. You may 'slope' if you like."

"Eh, Sir."

"Slope, mizzle, cut your stick; don't you understand. Any how, don't stop here, bothering me."

"I don't mean to," replied Elizabeth; gravely, rather than gruffly, as if she had made up her mind to things as they were, and was determined to be a belligerent party no longer. Besides, she was older now; too old to have things forgiven to her that might be overlooked in a child; and she had received a long lecture from Miss Hilary on the necessity of showing respect to Mr. Ascott, or Mr.

Leaf, as it was now decided he was to be called, in his dignity and responsibility as the only masculine head of the family. As he lay and lounged there, with his eyes lazily shut, Elizabeth stood a minute gazing at him. Then, steadfast in her new good behavior, she inquired "if he wanted any thing more to-night?"