She drank the tea eagerly, but she was not as hungry as she ought to have been, after walking about all night, without food. Austin had to coax her to eat, and even to make a pretence of hunger on his own part — though the sickly ham and the doubtful egg did not appeal to a man who was accustomed to be “done for” by a retired butler and a cook of experience and capacity.
He persuaded her to eat, and he persuaded her to talk — to talk of that saddest of all subjects, her own history. Had she any friends?
No, she was alone in London. Her father had died two years ago, and her only friend had gone to seek his fortune in the Argentine Republic.
“Is that your nearest friend, something more than a friend, the man you are going to marry some day, when he has made his fortune?”
“No,” she answered in a dull voice, and with a gloomy face. “We are not engaged — we were once — but that is over and done with. The tie was broken half a year ago, when he left England.”
“And have you no one in London or near London to whom you could go for shelter?”
“No one. But I suppose there is always the workhouse.”
Something in her eyes and lips made him think that in her own mind there was that other resource, and that she should have said: “There is always the river.”
“Even about the workhouse there would be difficulties — if you are a stranger in London.”
“I have lived in Chelsea for the last year.”
“And have made no friends there?”
“No one but my landlady, and our friendship ended when I left off paying her. I suppose I can get shelter in the Chelsea Union?”
“It is not to be thought of — but I know of a house where you might be safe — and fairly comfortable till there was some kind of employment found for you — something by which you could make a living. I suppose that is what you have thought of. You must want to earn your bread, as other young women do, hundreds of them in this great city.”
She gave a weary sigh.
“Life is odious,” she said. “It seems hardly worth working for.”
“Nonsense. There is always hope. If life is bad today, it may be better to-morrow. How old are you?”
“I was nineteen last May.”
“In the morning of life—”
“No, in the deep dark night. I have spent my life as prodigal sons spend their fortunes — what does age matter? My life is gone, wasted in a year. If I had stayed at home with my father I should have been a girl — but as it is, I am an old broken-hearted woman. A worthless creature, useless to myself and everybody else.”
“Are you a Christian?”
“I was once. I am nothing now. There was a day when I wanted God to help me — to save one little life. I prayed to Him seven days and nights while the life trembled in the balance — while the flame flickered and faded. And he would not hear me. I prayed to Christ the Saviour — Christ who called Lazarus out of the grave, the God who was once man, and who could love and pity men. That was what I had been taught. I knew better after those seven days and nights of endless prayer. I had done with that fable.”
“I am very sorry for you,” Austin said softly; “but if you will be ruled by me, I think I can put you among those who will give you a decent shelter, and who will help you to a happier frame of mind — people whose mission is to help the helpless. There is a Refuge for friendless women not far from here, and if you will let me take you there, I will answer for your comfort and your safety. You may have to associate with women of a lower grade than yours — but at the worst it will be better than the workhouse. And you may stay there quietly till some kind of employment can be found for you, if you are not too proud to work.”
“Proud,” she cried, with a short hard laugh. “Do I look like a proud woman?”
“You look and speak like a lady.”
“My father was a gentleman and a scholar. If I am to go on living I must earn my bread somehow — anyhow. Pride will not stand in my way.”
“Come, then,” said Austin cheerfully.
He paid for the breakfast, and they went out together and walked to the next street, where they met a prowling cab, and on the way Austin tried to learn more of this pale creature whose pinched face might once have been beautiful. Only nineteen, and with such markings from the pencil of care upon the forehead and round the thin lips.
He had learnt nothing but her name, Mary Smith. She had hesitated for an instant between Christian and surname, and the “Smith” sounded like an alias.
The cab stopped at a decent-looking house in a street near the Euston Road. The girl looked about her suspiciously as she alighted, and then looked at Austin with beseeching eyes.
“You are not setting a trap for me?” she asked. “You are not deceiving me?”
“What do you think I am made of? he exclaimed, holding her arm as they stood side by side upon the doorstep, after he had rung the bell. “You will find safety in this house, if not comfort.”
A young woman in a black gown and a large white apron opened the door, and, on Austin asking to see the matron, she ushered them into a parlour on the right hand of the passage, where a grey-haired woman was sitting at a desk writing busily, with a heap of papers in front of her.
She was elderly, spare and careworn, and her gown was grey like her hair, and even her complexion had a certain greyness. To meet her in the twilight would be to think one had seen a ghost.
She greeted Austin with a friendly smile and looked from him to the girl called Mary.
“Good morning, Mr. Sedgwick. This is an early visit. What can I do for you?”
“You can be kind and helpful to this lady, who has fallen upon evil days.”
“This is hardly a place for ladies,” the grey woman answered. The voice was hard, and there was a suspicion of a sneer — a touch of incredulity.
The girl shrank, as from a breath of cold wind.
Austin moved to the window, and the grey woman followed him. They talked together for some minutes in undertones that were inaudible to Mary, and then they turned and came back to the place where she was standing, motionless and very pale.
“Mr. Sedgwick tells me you are homeless, and without resources, and that you are willing to work for your living if we can show you the way. If you are not a fine lady, and if you are willing to work at any employment that offers, you can have a shelter and food in this house, until we find you something better. But you must understand that within these walls there are more sinners than saints, and you may have to rub shoulders with women you may have been brought up to look upon with scorn and aversion.”
“Whatever they are, they can’t be more unhappy than I am,” the girl answered drearily.
“That is understood, then. You know that you are coming into a home made to save sinners, and that charity is the ruling spirit here.”
“Do you suppose that I am sinless? Others may have fallen lower, but I am no saint.”
“However low you have fallen we will raise you up. That is what we exist for.”
The voice had softened, and there was no longer the suspicion of a sneer.
There was little more to be said. The girl turned to Austin Sedgwick, and held out her hand.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” she said; and then, almost in a whisper: “It is better than the river. All I wanted was to get away from my old life.”
“And you will try to be happy here?”
“I will try to forget that I was ever happy anywhere else.”
“Good-bye. I will look in some day, to see how you are getting on. Good-bye, Mrs. Gurdon, I know you will be kind.”
He was gone. And he seemed to take all that there was of actual life away with him. The rest was a dull dream. The grey woman, the grey house, the grey light in the morning sky.
II
AUSTIN SEDGWICK thought much of this girl he had left in the grey woman’s charge. It was not the first case of the kind in which he had interested himself. Since he had
left Oxford, with a respectable degree and an immense popularity, half his life had been given up to good works.
Mary Smith was not the first friendless woman he had helped; but it was the first time he had met with a creature so friendless and forlorn and yet a lady.
He had begun to work among the poor while he was at the University, and now that he had been living in London, his own master, with no heavier fetters than his daily task at one of the superior government offices, and with a comfortable income to give backbone to his official salary, he had devoted most of his leisure to that underground London which is a world unknown to the prosperous bachelor, who looks down from a railway carriage at the wilderness of shabby streets, and wonders what kind of people herd together there, and what life can mean, or what it must seem to mean, to such people.
Austin Sedgwick had come to know a great deal about such people. He had got into their lives somehow; had found the way to understand them, and was able to talk with them on equal terms. The easy way in which the costers of the New Cut would hail him as “governor,” and reproach him for not coming to the Free-and-Easy oftener, was what any young friend he took with him would call “an eye-opener.” Yes, it was an eye-opener to find how class distinctions might be dropped and man meet man, as freely as strange dogs meet and gambol together in the gutter.
Mr. Sedgwick, young, good-looking, with fine manners, and independent means, was in request at some of the best houses in west-end London, and as he had a keen gusto for good society, the nights not given to the slums were spent in smart houses, and only his few intimate friends knew that this young man with an eyeglass and a languid manner, always carefully dressed at the top of the fashion, was deeply religious, sedulous in his attendance at the church he loved, and a generous supporter of the priests he believed in, nor did any but those intimate friends and followers know that he spent half his income on the corporal works of mercy.
People sometimes talk of double lives, and it might certainly be said of Austin Sedgwick that his was a double life.
It was a grievance in his family circle that he did not live at home, where the money he spent on “rooms” in Cleveland Gardens would have been of use in the household budget.
His mother and father, who thought themselves paupers, with an income that just scraped below the Super-Tax, were aggrieved because their only son chose to live alone, and spent the whole of his means in his own fashion.
“I should have thought this neighbourhood good enough for any young man in London,” said his mother, when Austin was sitting among his womenkind, after dropping in to tea at an hour when he might hope to find them alone. The sitting had been prolonged till the edge of darkness, and there was no fear of any more visitors.
“That’s what I say,” cried Clementina, the elder of his two sisters. “What’s the matter with Eaton Square? It’s within a taxi of everything any reasonable mortal can want. And there is more than room enough for you and your man on the second floor — three good rooms eating their heads off — and I suppose it’s a decent address, since if you run your eye along the Directory you’ll see that we positively swarm with nobility.”
“We’ve two dukes and three marquises,” said Julia, who was seventeen and a half, and not out, but thought she ought to have been.
“I should like to know who you’ve got in Cleveland Gardens,” said Clementina, who was five feet eight, and still known to family and friends as Tiny.
I’ve a girl next door who plays the violin five hours a day,” answered Austin, rather wearily. “I could make you a present of her.”
“And not a title from Number One to Number Thirty,’’ said Julia.
I don t know what people call a title nowadays — but I believe every other householder in the Gardens has been knighted and I expect to see all the knights transformed into lords whenever the superior article is wanted.”
“What you can see in Cleveland Gardens?” sighed his mother, with her customary languor.
“I see nothing wonderful, dearest. Only large airy rooms, and perfect independence; the right to go in and out as I like.”
“As if we should refuse you a latch-key!”
“I know you would be kind, but you would listen for my coming in, and would be worried if I was out in the small hours. I am not dissipated, my dear mother, but I love the night, and I should be a source of uneasiness if I lived here. You would be anxious, and my father would ask questions. Where I am, I give nobody the trouble of wondering about me. Mr and Mrs. Dover are of that high class of servants who behave like automatons.” Dreadful,” sighed his mother. “Suppose you were taken ill. What would happen then?”
“They would send for my doctor, and telephone to you, and would take every possible care of me. My dear mother, it is better for all of us that I should be where I am. I have all the sweets of independence, and I am really as near you as if I were living under this roof — the telephone has annihilated distance.”
“When you know I can’t work it!” cried his mother piteously.
‘ But your maid can, and that is the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s too humiliating for me to know that Stringer can talk to you and I can’t.”
“You’ll get clever at it in time.”
“Never! I abhor the odious thing.”
“Because you have never tried to use it. ‘ Never given your mind to it,’ as Stringer would say.”
This was one of many conversations in his mother’s drawing-room, and Austin had also undergone occasional skirmishes with his father after a family dinner, Mr. Sedgwick wanting to know why his only son, who was obviously a paragon of good behaviour, should not have gentlemanly feeling enough to do what was best and most advantageous for his family.
“My dear father, if I thought that the three or four hundred a year that I spend in Cleveland Gardens could be of any substantial use in this house, I would come here to-morrow — but what difference could it make in your five or six thousand?”
“Five or six!” ejaculated his parent. “What are you dreaming of? I have nothing like five thousand a year.”
“Nobody has, nowadays. Well, we won’t discuss ways and means.”
Austin thought of the girl, Mary Smith, but not with the tender pity with which he had often thought of the creatures he had helped, the jetsam and flotsam of the great overcrowded city, the stony labyrinth where such creatures are lost, where it is only by accident they meet the men and women with a will to succour them. It is not on the high road that the good Samaritan of the twentieth century finds his neighbour, but in narrow, crooked streets and nameless places. There was nothing romantic in Austin’s discovery of the girl asleep on the doorstep, nothing romantic in her history, so far as she had revealed it — letting him guess rather than telling him the outline of her tragedy.
The man who had gone to South America was not her husband, and he was not even her faithful lover — for she had no expectation of his return. Austin had asked her if she was engaged to him, and she had answered no, which meant in plain words that he had deserted her, left her alone in London to die on the breast of that stonyhearted stepmother. Her face, when she spoke of this deserter, had told Austin that, if she had ever loved him, that love was dead. But there had been someone she loved passionately — the little life God did not save — the life for which she had prayed seven days and seven nights. And, her prayer not being granted, she had given up all hope in God. There had been a child she loved, when all love for the child’s father was over and done with. That was where sorrow had touched her; that was where the wound was deepest, and it was this womanly sorrow that alone made her interesting. Otherwise he had found her hard wood. Austin recalled the sharp lines of her face, the steely look in her eyes, and questioned if she had ever been beautiful, or had possessed even the common charm of girlhood. He doubted if she had ever been what men call “attractive.” There was no sentimental weakness in his thought of her. He had never told himself that she had a hauntin
g face, and his dreams had never recalled her image. His thoughts about her were serious and benevolent. He had arranged with the matron at the Rescue Home that she was to be maintained there, at his expense, until some employment could be found for her, but she was never to know that he paid for her board and lodging, or that her position in the house was in any way exceptional. She was to live as the other women lived, and work as they worked.
This had all been settled in half a dozen sentences, while he and Mrs. Gurdon stood by the window, and while Mary Smith waited, out of earshot.
III
THE sun rose earlier now over London, and the London planes and acacias were showing the tender green of newly-opened leaves. Mary Smith had been in the Home for a month, and Austin felt that it would be only human to go and see how she had thriven there. If she was, as lie believed, a lady by birth and education, her surroundings must have called upon her fortitude, and perhaps tried her temper.
He was relieved to learn that she had not given trouble. That, from Mrs. Gurdon, was praise.
“And has she got on comfortably with the other women?”
“She has been civil, and they have not complained of her — but I won’t tell you that she has made herself a favourite.”
“I hardly expected that. She is not of their class.”
“She has not a happy disposition. The others would like her better if she could let herself down a little, and be friendly with them — if she were what they call ‘jolly.’”
“Are any of the others jolly?”
A shrill soprano voice with a strong East London twang rang out from an upper story, in the refrain of a famous comic song, as if in answer to Austin’s question.
Mrs. Gurdon opened the parlour door, and called up the staircase.
“Not so loud, Norah Lee. What are you doing on the stairs? Keep your singing for the workroom, please.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1002