Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

“Are they all like Norah Lee?”

  “Most of them. They have their ups and downs — moping one day, and wanting to jump over the moon to-morrow — all happy-go-lucky, sobbing in church of a Sunday evening, if the sermon stirs up their feelings, and giving no end of trouble on Monday. We may wash vice out of them, but their vulgarity is ingrained. Not even the Gospel can touch that. They are born so, you see, Mr. Sedgwick. Well, you know more about that class than even we do.”

  “What have you been able to make of Mary Smith? I mean as to her chances of the future. Will she be able to earn her living?”

  “In half a dozen ways, if she is lucky, and can be put in the right groove. She’s as clever as she can stick, and she doesn’t mind work. I put her to housework first; gave her all the upstairs rooms to clean; and though I don’t think she had ever been trained as a housemaid, or had done much in that line, she went at it with a will — scrubbed the floors as they aren’t often scrubbed, and was on her knees all the morning, and polished the furniture, and made the rooms look better than they’ve looked for years. But she was like a rag in the evening after, and fainted in the middle of prayers. I told her she had done too much; but she said she liked rough work. It helped her to forget. She must have a sad history.”

  “Has she told you nothing of her history?”

  “Nothing. She turns to stone if I try to question her. She’ll talk about other things, but never about herself. After she’d been at the housework a week, I put her to some fine needlework. Her hands were fitter for that than for scrubbing floors.”

  “And is she a good needlewoman?”

  “Exquisite. After that I made her take a class of the most ignorant girls in the place, and teach them to read and speak properly — and to write a hand that could be read.”

  “That was harder,” said Austin.

  “Much harder; but she did it. They tried to rot her, but she mastered them — and after a few days they got to like their lessons, and to ask for more. She hadn’t been used to teaching, but she put her back into it, the girls told me. There was nothing lardy-dardy about her. After that I knew she was the right sort — the scrubbingbrush had proved her will — the fine needlework her capacity — and the teaching showed that she had tact as well as talent.”

  “Then you ought to be able to place her where she may earn a decent living.”

  “I ought to be able to place her? Yes. But can I do it? There are hundreds of families in which such a girl would be a treasure — but is there one master or mistress who would take her without a character — with no better history than from the streets to this Refuge?”

  “You will have found out a good deal more about her when she has been with you six months, and there are people who are liberal minded, and will take your word for her merit and honesty.”

  Mrs. Gurdon answered dubiously.

  “One might happen upon such people. But do you mean to go on paying for her — for half a year?”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I know how generous you are — but it’s a good deal to spend on one case.”

  “Perhaps. But doesn’t this strike you as an exceptional case?”

  “The girl is exceptional certainly — not a lovable girl, but interesting.”

  “Kindness may bring out a lovable side of her character — and I know you will be kind.”

  Mrs. Gurdon sighed before she answered.

  “I can’t pretend to be a lovable person myself,” she said. “Our work is apt to harden us. I dare say people think that the continual association with repentant sinners would make us fountains of tenderness and pity. But somehow even the best of them are disappointing, and the worst of them are incorrigible liars. When one has had ten years’ disappointments and deceptions, fine feelings are worn threadbare. After that one acts upon principle, and people who act on principle are tough.”

  “If you were not a good woman you would not have been here ten years.”

  “I was a kinder woman when I took up the work, Mr. Sedgwick — but you are not here to talk about me. Would you like to see Mary?”

  “I would — very much.”

  “Then I’ll send her to you. It will be better for you to see her alone. You can ring the bell when you have finished your talk, and I’ll come and fetch her.”

  Austin paced the room in a reverie while he waited for his protégée, stopping sometimes to look out of window at the shabby street, and wondering if Mary had seen nothing better since she had been under that roof. The prospect from the back windows was worse most likely, as it was in a busy quarter of London, where ground was too precious to allow of open spaces.

  A dull house, a dull street, a squalid neighbourhood — but shelter and safety! Was not that enough for a friendless woman to be thankful for?

  The door opened, and Mary Smith came to him, shyly, but with a smile that faintly lighted one of the saddest faces he had ever seen.

  He held out his hand, and his clasp upon the thin cold hand that met his was strong and friendly.

  And now for the first time he realized the exquisite refinement of a face that few would have praised for beauty. Colour, roundness, brilliancy, all the attributes of commonplace beauty were wanting. The cheeks were hollow, and the forehead had premature lines across its whiteness — the chin was pinched and sharpened, the lips were pale. Every feature had a delicacy of line that Austin had often seen in marble — but seldom in flesh and blood. The face recalled faces he had admired in the gallery of the Vatican: portraits of unremembered Empresses, low brows under plaited hair, and the line from brow to lip, as delicately drawn as it was here in this living face.

  The pencilling of the eyebrows, the moulding of the heavy eyelids, the depth of darkness in the eyes, were of a rare perfection. The hair was a pale brown, and there were no golden lights in it — shadowy hair which offered no claim to admiration, but which framed the thin face and harmonized with its subdued colouring, if that could be called colour in which all warmth was wanting.

  Mary stood before him patiently during a silence that was longer than it should have been, but there was neither embarrassment nor self-consciousness in her manner. She stood before him, tall and slender, straight as an arrow, and she was the first to speak.

  “It is very kind of you to come to see me,” she said gravely.

  “I ought to have come sooner perhaps — but Mrs Gurdon does not like visitors. I am anxious to know if you are comfortable and contented.”

  “Quite contented.”

  “I’m afraid you must find life rather dull in this house.”

  “I have not been used to gaiety, and I could not bear it if it came in my way. The only thing that jars here is the high spirits of the inmates. There are some of them who seem not to know what sadness means — and yet most of them have gone through deep waters.”

  “It is a blessing not to be too finely made.”

  “I am quite contented; and I am grateful to you for bringing me here. You found me in a dark hour, and I dare say you thought me rude and ungrateful. I am in a better mood now, and I begin to feel how much I owe you.”

  “Mrs. Gurdon tells me that you are clever and industrious; and that you have the art of teaching, which is a rare gift.”

  “I like teaching those rough girls. It is new and strange to find oneself face to face with such ignorance, such hopeless indifference to all the best things in life. It is strangest of all that they can have got so little out of their schools — only a smattering of things they never can understand — scraps of knowledge that seem to darken their ignorance. I asked them if they knew anything about geography. Yes, one of them said they knew it inside out — geography was Tuesday mornings. And that very one asked me if an archipelago was higher than an archbishop. But I never laugh at them — for they are good-natured and do their best. It is I who am learning from them — learning how to teach children. Mrs. Gurdon hopes to get me a situation before long.”

  “That will be a dull life, I fear, teac
hing children in a middle-class family.”

  “What right have I to want anything better?” she said with a long-drawn sigh. “The question with me has been life or death. The river or an ounce of laudanum — I could get it at the chemist’s a pennyworth at a time — or any kind of work that could be found for me, any kind of roof that would shelter me.”

  “Do not take too dark a view of the situation. Mrs. Gurdon and I will do all we can. And now tell me about your life here. Is it really comfortable?”

  “It is a refuge,” she answered enigmatically. “I am quite comfortable while I have work. That is the only anodyne.”

  “Do you get enough fresh air? Do you go for a walk every day?”

  She smiled at his simplicity.

  “I have not been farther than the yard since you brought me here, but that is my fault. Mrs. Gurdon takes some of the inmates for a walk every day; three or four at a time. She could not manage more. So in that way they all get an airing once a week, or so. I refused to go in one of her batches; she was kind and did not force me — so I tramp round the yard every morning, and think of the prisoners in Reading Gaol.”

  “You know that poem?”

  “I know every heart-breaking word of it. My father knew the man who wrote it.”

  “Was your father by way of being literary?”

  “He was steeped to the lips in literature.”

  He longed to question her more, but refrained. I was something to have been told as much as this, by lips that had seemed so resolutely locked. He shook hands with her again and went away.

  When he had gone some distance, carrying her image with him as if it had been a living presence, it occurred to him that if she had to live six months in that dreary house — in order to get a “character” — he might do something to lighten her captivity. He might take her for a walk once in a way, if Mrs. Gurdon consented — and Mrs. Gurdon had known him so long, that he had no fear of being refused.

  The very superior government office in which he laboured closed its monumental doors upon the outside world at four o’clock, and as the spring days were lengthening, there would be time to take Mary Smith for an hour’s walk, before his evening engagements necessitated his return to Cleveland Gardens for that restful hour with a book, which was a sine qua non with him, before going out to dinner. Women who are careful of their beauty demand an hour’s sleep before putting on their evening splendour; the professional diner-out likes a quiet half-hour with his note-book or treasury of wit and anecdote; and for Austin an hour’s serious reading was the best preparation for an evening of trivial gaiety.

  After that brief interview at the Refuge he thought of Mary Smith oftener than he had thought before her face came out of the shadows. Until that afternoon the face had been a vague memory, the voice unremembered. There had been nothing but the impression that she was a star that had fallen from its orbit, or what Mrs. Gurdon would call “an exceptional case.” But now she was a woman, young, interesting, bravely facing an unknown future that must needs be dreary — as she was not the kind of woman to fall on her feet, as the phrase goes, to find the swift success that sometimes offers to marketable charms. Whatever the other women might be, there was nothing “happy-go-lucky” about Mary Smith.

  “I am not falling in love with her,” he told himself very often. “She interests me, but she doesn’t attract me.”

  He let some weeks go by before he called at the Refuge. It was the sweetness of the April weather, the sunshine on the tender green of opening leaves, the blue water, and the colour upon the water-fowls’ plumage that set him thinking of Mary Smith, as he walked across the Park on his way from his office to his club.

  Air that was like a caress, sunshine that glorified common things, and Mary Smith had nothing better than the yard, the miserable yard that made her think of “Reading Gaol.”

  He went straight from his office to the Refuge next day. He was in the dreary parlour at a quarter past four, telling Mrs. Gurdon his notion that he might do Mary Smith a small kindness by taking her for a walk on Hampstead Heath. He had a taxi-cab at the door and they could be at Hampstead in half an hour.

  Mrs. Gurdon was evidently troubled by the proposal. If anybody else had made the suggestion, she would have negatived it on the instant. But Sedgwick had been a staunch supporter of the Refuge. He had given his own money liberally, and had collected money from his friends, and had hunted up regular subscribers. The Refuge could not do without Austin Sedgwick.

  Yet the thing he proposed was extraordinary, and its effect might be pernicious.

  “What will the other women think? Not one of them has ever been allowed to leave this house for more than an hour’s walk with me, till she has gone into service. If it came to going for walks with their friends or even their relatives, you’d soon see the end of the Institution.”

  “But you have yourself admitted that this is an exceptional case,” Austin said earnestly. “You must see yourself that this girl is of a different class.”

  “All the more danger. The others are jealous and watchful of her — and if they find the strictest of our rules has been broken in her case — there’ll be rank rebellion. You don’t know what they are when their backs are up.”

  “Need they know anything about it?”

  “Of course they’ll know. They are horribly inquisitive.”

  “After all you are not accountable to them. You have only to put your foot down.”

  “I’m always doing that — putting it down, and holding it down — tight.”

  Her lips tightened as she spoke, and Austin remembered that her chief merit was the power to manage the unmanageable. She was kind in her own way, and her compassion was inexhaustible; but it was part of her business to rule the incorrigible, and she was no shirker.

  She yielded at last, but she reminded Austin that it was Smith’s fault that she had not been beyond the yard. She had resolutely refused to go for an airing with Mrs. Gurdon and some of the girls, a pleasant walk in Regent’s Park for instance.

  “She was too proud to come with me and the others.” Austin smiled.

  “She may be too proud to come with me,” he said. But on Mary Smith being summoned, and the excursion proposed, a lovely carnation came to her cheeks, and her eyes brightened.

  “You are too kind,” she faltered. “But why should I be a trouble to you?”

  “You will not be a trouble. Please put on your hat. Mrs. Gurdon has been very good in letting you come which is a breach of the rule of the house.”

  “I know, I know,” Mary said, with a grateful look at the matron. “It is more than kind of you. But you have always been kind, even when I was gloomy and disagreeable.”

  She went away quickly, and came back neatly dressed for out of doors. Her black straw hat and little cloth jacket — things that Mrs. Gurdon had bought for her with money provided by Austin — were of the cheapest, and she carried the stamp of poverty, but it was not the stamp of low birth or commonness.

  Austin promised to take her back to the Refuge before six o’clock, and in less than half an hour they were on the Heath in the glory of the westering sun. Her face showed the rapture of the change from the stony yard to that lovely spot, and she soon began to talk freely, but of indifferent things, and Austin was careful not to scare her by troublesome questions about herself. He talked of books, and found that she had read much more than the average girl of twenty, even in this highly educated age. And by and by, when they were sitting opposite each other at a pastrycook’s tea-table, he ventured to talk of her father.

  “You told me he was steeped in literature. It was from him you learnt all you know about books, I suppose?”

  “It was from him I learnt everything I know. He was my only teacher.”

  “And you were very fond of him, no doubt?”

  “I was as fond of him as he would let me be. I adored him when I was a child, and he was very kind to me in those happy days; but as I began to understand him better, I
knew that he could never love me. I think he tried to care for me, but there was more strength than warmth in his nature. He had loved my mother passionately, but I do not think he ever cared for anybody after he lost her. I was their only child, and they had been married a good many years before I was born, and I don’t think either of them wanted me. They were all the world to each other. My mother’s health failed soon after my birth, and she died before I was a year old.”

  She went on to tell him of her father’s work in literature. He had taken high honours at Oxford, and gone to the Bar, but he had soon wearied of a waiting race, and his legal career had been a failure. He had an income that allowed him to please himself as to a profession, and it was not till he married that he set himself seriously to earn a living. He was a student by nature, and wanted nothing more in life than his tasks and the woman he loved. Without much consideration as to his young wife’s inclination — taking it for granted that she must care for the things he cared for, he established his home in a fishing village on the Cornish coast, where he had found an old house that gave him ample room for his books, and thirty acres of meadow and wood where his wife, who was country-bred, could indulge her passion for gardening. The garden was not finished when the frail life snapped, and the student was left to a scholarly solitude. It was then that he began to write with a power that he had never known in his happier days. He lived only to write and to think — a gloomy, self-contained, unhappy man.

  His contributions to the Press won immediate recognition — and he wrote a book upon political economy that was a triumph of art, from a man who had shunned all beaten tracks, and might be supposed to know very little about his fellow-men. He had never lived among the classes of whom he wrote, had rarely rubbed shoulders with them; but he knew them from the inside, by the searchlight of an intellect that was intense rather than wide. If he had not been wanting in the divine gift of sympathy he might have been one of the most popular writers of the age; but, though he won a high place among the thinkers of his day, his followers were more distinguished than numerous. Style was his supreme gift, and it was a distinction to be familiar with his work.