by Ellen Wood
“I’ll telegraph up to that ship to-morrow morning, and get him to put off starting for a week or two,” cried Margery, nodding her head with authority. “Never you trouble yourself, ma’am; it will be all right. You shall go to sleep again comfortably, and we’ll see about the things with morning light.”
Margery talked as she conveyed her mistress back to bed, and remained talking after she was in it. A stock of this should be got in, a stock of the other: as for linen, it could all be bought ready made — and the best way too, now calico was so cheap. Somewhat surprised that she heard no answer, no further expressed fear, Margery looked close at her mistress by the night-lamp, wondering whether she had gone to sleep again. She had not gone to sleep. She was lying still, cold, white, without sense or motion; and Margery, collected Margery, very nearly screamed.
Maria had fainted away. Margery did not understand it at all, or why she should have fainted when she ought to have gone to sleep. Margery liked it as little as she understood it; and she ran upstairs to their landlady, Mrs. James, and got her to despatch her son for Mr. Snow.
But that was only the beginning. Night after night would these attacks of semi-delirium come upon her, though in the day she seemed pretty well. Mr. Snow came and came, and drew an ominous face and doubled the tonics and changed them, and talked and joked and scolded. But it all seemed unavailing: she certainly did not get better. Weary, weary hours! weary, weary days! as she lay there alone, struggling with her malady. And yet no malady, either, that Mr. Snow could discover; nothing but a weakness which he only half believed in.
Janet and Bessy Godolphin were one day sitting with Mrs. George. The time had come for Janet to quit Ashlydyat, and she was paying her farewell visit to Maria. Maria was at the window at work when they arrived; at work with her weak and fevered hands. No very poetical employment, that on which she was engaged, but one which has to be done in most families nevertheless — stocking-darning. She was darning socks for Miss Meta. Miss Meta, her sleeves and white pinafore tied up with black ribbon, her golden curls somewhat in disorder, for the young lady had rebelliously broken from Margery and taken a race round the garden in the blowing wintry wind, her smooth cheeks fresh and rosy, was now roasting her face in front of the fire, her doll and a whole collection of dolls’ clothes lying around her on the hearth-rug.
Bessy had come, not so much to accompany Janet, as for a special purpose — to deliver a message from Lady Godolphin. My lady, deeming possibly that her displeasure had lasted long enough, graciously charged Bessy with an invitation to Maria — to spend a day or two at the Folly ere her departure for Calcutta.
Maria gave a sort of sobbing sigh. “She is very kind. Tell Lady Godolphin how kind I think it of her, Bessy, but that I am not strong enough to go from home now.”
Bessy looked at her. “But, Maria, if you are not strong enough to go out on a short visit, how shall you be strong enough to undertake a three or four months’ voyage?”
Maria paused ere she answered the question. She was gazing out straight before her, as if seeing something at a distance — something in the future. “I think of it and of its uncertainty a great deal,” she presently said. “If I can only get away: if I can only keep up sufficiently to get away, I can lie down always in my berth. And if I do die before I reach India, George will be with me.”
“Child!” almost sharply interrupted Janet, “what are you saying?”
She seemed scarcely to hear the interruption. She sat, gazing still, her white and trembling hands lying clasped on her black dress, and she resumed, as if pursuing the train of thought.
“My great dread is, lest I should not keep up to get to London, to be taken on board; lest George should, after all, be obliged to sail without me. It is always on my mind, Janet; it makes me dream constantly that the ship has gone and I am left behind. I wish I did not have those dreams.”
“Come to Lady Godolphin’s Folly, Maria,” persuasively spoke Bessy. “It will be the very best thing to cheat you of those fears. They all arise from weakness.”
“I have no doubt they do. I had a pleasant dream one night,” she added with some animation. “I thought we had arrived in safety, and I and George and Meta were sitting under a tree whose leaves were larger than an umbrella. It was very hot, but these leaves shaded us, and I seemed to be well, for we were all laughing merrily together. It may come true, you know, Janet.”
“Yes,” assented Janet. “Are you preparing much for the voyage?”
“Not yet. Clothes can be had so quickly now. George talked it over with me when he was down, and we decided to send a list to the outfitter’s, just before we sailed, so that the things might not come down here, but be packed in London.”
“And Margery?” asked Janet.
“I do not know what she means to do,” answered Maria, shaking her head. “She protests ten times a day that she will not go; but I see she is carefully mending up all her cotton gowns, and one day I heard her say to Meta that she supposed nothing but cotton was bearable out there. What I should do without Margery on the voyage I don’t like to think about. George told her to consider of it, and give us her decision when he next came down. And you, Janet? When shall you be back again at Prior’s Ash?”
“I do not suppose I shall ever come back to it,” was Janet’s answer. “Its reminiscences will not be so pleasing to me that I should seek to renew my acquaintance with it.”
“Bexley attends you, I hear.”
“Yes. My aunt’s old servant has got beyond his work — he has been forty-two years in the family, Maria — and Bexley will replace him.”
When Janet rose to leave, she bent over Maria and slipped four sovereigns into her hand. “It is for yourself, my dear,” she whispered.
“Oh, thank you! But indeed I have enough, Janet. George left me five pounds when he was at home, and it is not half gone. You don’t know what a little keeps us. I eat next to nothing, and Margery, I think, lives chiefly upon porridge: there’s only Meta.”
“But you ought to eat, child!”
“I can’t eat,” said Maria. “I have never lost that pain in my throat.”
“What pain?” asked Janet.
“I do not know. It came on with the trouble. I feel — I feel always ill within myself, Janet. I seem to be always shivering inwardly; and the pain in the throat is sometimes better, sometimes worse, but it never quite goes away.”
Janet looked at her searchingly. She heard the meek, resigned tone, she saw the white, wan face, the attenuate hands, the chest rising with every passing emotion, the mournful look in the sweet eyes; and for the first time a suspicion that another life would shortly have to go, took possession of Miss Godolphin.
“What is George at, that he is not here to see after you?” she asked in a strangely severe accent.
“He cannot bear Prior’s Ash, Janet,” whispered Maria. “But for me and Thomas, he never would have come back to it. And I suppose he is busy in London: there must be many arrangements to make.”
Janet stooped and gravely kissed her; kissed her twice. “Take care of yourself, my dear, and do all you can to keep your mind tranquil and to get up your strength. You shall hear from me before your departure.”
Margery stood in the little hall. Miss Bessy Godolphin was in the garden, in full chase after that rebellious damsel, Meta, who had made a second escape through the opened door, passing angry Margery and the outstretched hand that would have made a prisoner of her, with a laugh of defiance. Miss Godolphin stopped to address Margery.
“Shall you go to India or not, Margery?”
“I’m just almost torn in two about it, ma’am,” was the answer, delivered confidentially. “Without me, that child would never reach the other side alive: she’d be clambering up the sides o’ the ship and get drownded ten times over before they got there. Look at her now! And who’d take care of her over there, among those native beasts — those elephants and black people? If I thought she’d ever come to be waited on by a bl
ack woman with woolly hair, I should be fit to smother her before she went out. I shall see, Miss Janet.”
“Margery, your mistress appears to want the greatest care.”
“She has wanted that a long while,” was Margery’s composed answer.
“She ought to have everything strengthening. Wine and other necessaries required by the sick.”
“I suppose she ought,” said Margery. “But she won’t take them, Miss Janet; she says she can’t eat and drink. And for the matter of that, we have nothing of that sort for her to take. There were more good things consumed in the Bank in a day than we should see in a month now.”
“Where’s your master?” repeated Janet in an accent not less sharp than the one she had used for the same question to Maria.
“He?” cried wrathful Margery, for the subject was sure to put her out uncommonly, in the strong opinion she was pleased to hold touching her master’s short-comings. “I suppose he’s riding about with his choice friend, Madam Pain. Folks talk of their horses being seen abreast pretty often.”
There was no opportunity for further colloquy. Bessy came in, carrying the laughing truant; and Margery, with a tart word to the young lady, attended the Miss Godolphins down the garden path to throw open the gate for them. In her poor way, in her solitary self, Margery strove to make up for the state they had been accustomed to, when the ladies called from Ashlydyat.
Maria, lying motionless on the sofa, where on being left alone she had thrown herself in weariness, heard Margery’s gratuitous remark about Mrs. Pain, through the unlatched door, and a contraction arose to her brow. In her hand lay the four sovereigns left there by Janet. She looked at them musingly, and then murmured, “I can afford to give her half.” When Margery returned indoors, she called her in, and sent her for Mrs. Bond.
A little while, and Mrs. Bond, on her meekest and civilest behaviour, stood before Maria, her thin shawl and wretched old gown drawn tightly round her, to protect her from the winter’s cold. Maria put two sovereigns into her hand.
“It is the first instalment of my debt to you, Mrs. Bond. If I live, I will pay it you all, but it will be by degrees. And perhaps that is the best way that you could receive it. I wish I could have given you some before.”
Mrs. Bond burst into tears. Not the crocodile’s tears that she was somewhat in the habit of favouring the world with when not quite herself, but real, genuine tears of gratitude. She had given up all hope of the ten pounds, did not expect to see a penny of it; and the joy overcame her. Her conscience pricked her a little also, for she remembered sundry hard words she had at one time liberally regaled her neighbours’ ears with, touching Mrs. George Godolphin. In her grateful repentance she could have knelt at Maria’s feet: hunger and other ills of poverty had tended to subdue her spirit.
“May the good Lord bless and repay you, ma’am! — and send you a safe journey to the far-off place where I hear you be going!”
“Yes, I shall go, if I am well enough,” replied Maria. “It is from thence that I shall send you home some money from time to time if I can do so. Have you been well, lately?”
“As well as pretty nigh clamming will let me be, ma’am. Things has gone hard with me: many a day I’ve not had as much as a crust to eat. But this ‘ll set me up again, and, ma’am, I’ll never cease to pray for you.”
“Don’t spend it in — in — you know, Mrs. Bond,” Maria ventured timidly to advise, in a lowered voice.
Mrs. Bond shook her head and turned up her eyes by way of expressing a very powerful negative. Probably she did not feel altogether comfortable on the subject, for she hastened to quit it.
“Have you heard the news about old Jekyl, ma’am?”
“No. What news?”
“He’s dead. He went off at one o’clock this a’ternoon. He fretted continual after his money, folks says, and it wore him to a skeleton. He couldn’t abear to be living upon his sons; and Jonathan don’t earn enough for himself now, and the old ‘un felt it.”
Some one else was feeling it. Fretting continually after his money! — that money which might never have been placed in the Bank but for her! Miss Meta came flying in, went straight up to the visitor, and leaned her pretty arm upon the snuffy black gown.
“When shall I come and see the parrot?”
“The parrot! Lawks bless the child! I haven’t got the parrot now, I haven’t had him this many a day. I couldn’t let him clam,” she continued, turning to Maria. “I was clamming myself, ma’am, and I sold him, cage and all, just as he stood.”
“Where is he?” asked Meta, looking disappointed.
“He’s where he went,” lucidly explained Mrs. Bond. “It were the lady up at t’other end o’ the town, beyond the parson’s, what bought him, ma’am. Leastways her daughter did: sister to her what was once to have married Mr. Godolphin. It’s a white house.”
“Lady Sarah Grame’s,” said Maria. “Did she buy the parrot?”
“Miss did: that cross-looking daughter of her’n. She see him as she was going by my door one day, ma’am, and she stopped and looked at him, and asked me what I’d sell him for. Well, on the spur o’ the moment I said five shilling; for I’d not a halfpenny in the place to buy him food, and for days and days he had had only what the neighbours brought him; but it warn’t half his worth. And miss was all wild to buy him, but her mother wasn’t. She didn’t want screeching birds in her house, she said, and they had a desperate quarrel in my kitchen before they went away. Didn’t she call her mother names! She’s a vixen that daughter, if ever there were one. But she got her will, for an hour or two after that, a young woman come down for the parrot with the five shilling in her hand. And there’s where he is.”
“I shall have twenty parrots when I go to India,” struck in Meta.
“What a sight of food they’ll eat!” ejaculated Mrs. Bond. “That there one o’ mine eats his fill now. I made bold one day to go up and ask after him, and the two young women in the kitchen took me to the room to see him, the ladies being out, and he had his tin stuffed full o’ seed. He knowed me again, he did, and screeched out to be heerd a mile off. The young women said that what with his screeching and the two ladies quarrelling, the house weren’t bearable sometimes.”
Meta’s large eyes were open in wondering speculation. “Why do they quarrel?” she asked.
“‘Cause it’s their natur’,” returned Mrs. Bond. “The one what had the sweet natur’ was took, and the two fretful ones was left. Them young women said that miss a’most drove my lady mad with her temper, and they expect nothing less but there’d be blows some day. A fine disgraceful thing to say of born ladies, ain’t it, ma’am?”
Maria, in her delicacy of feeling, would not endorse the remark of Dame Bond. But the state of things at Lady Sarah Grame’s was perfectly well known at Prior’s Ash. Sarah Anne Grame had become her mother’s bane, as Mr. Snow had once said she would be. A very terrible bane; to herself, to her mother, to all about her. And the “screeching” parrot had only added a little more noise to an already too noisy house.
Mrs. Bond curtsied herself out. She met Margery in the passage, and stopped to whisper.
“I say! how ill she do look!”
“Who looks ill?” was the ungracious demand.
Mrs. Bond nodded towards the parlour door. “The missis. Her face looks more as if it had death writ in it, than voyage-going.”
“Perhaps you’ll walk on your way, Dame Bond, and keep your opinions till they’re asked for,” was the tart reply of Margery.
But, in point of fact, the words had darted into the faithful servant’s heart, piercing it as a poisoned arrow. It seemed so great a confirmation of her own fears.
CHAPTER V. COMMOTION AT ASHLYDYAT.
A few more days went on, and they wrought a further change in Mrs. George Godolphin. She grew weaker and weaker: she grew — it was apparent now to Mr Snow as it was to Margery — nearer and nearer to that vault in the churchyard of All Souls’. There could no longer be any
indecision or uncertainty as to her taking the voyage; the probabilities were, that before the ship was ready to sail, all sailing in this world for Maria would be over. And rumours, faint, doubtful, very much discredited rumours of this state of things, began to circulate in Prior’s Ash.
Discredited because people were so unprepared for it. Mrs. George Godolphin had been delicate since the birth of her baby, as was known to every one, but not a soul, relatives, friends, or strangers, had felt a suspicion of danger. On the contrary, it was supposed that she was about to depart on that Indian voyage: and ill-natured spirits tossed their heads and said it was fine to be Mrs. George Godolphin, to be set up again and go out to lead a grand life in India, after ruining half Prior’s Ash. How she was misjudged! how many more unhappy wives have been, and will be again, misjudged by the world!
One dreary afternoon, as dusk was coming on, Margery, not stopping, or perhaps not caring, to put anything upon herself, but having hastily wrapped up Miss Meta, went quickly down the garden path, leading that excitable and chattering demoiselle by the hand. Curious news had reached the ears of Margery. Their landlady’s son had come in, describing the town as being in strange commotion, in consequence of something which had happened at Ashlydyat. Rumour set it down as nothing less than murder; and, according to the boy’s account, all Prior’s Ash was flocking up to the place to see and to hear.
Margery turned wrathful at the news. Murder at Ashlydyat! The young gentleman was too big to be boxed or shaken for saying it, but he persisted in his story, and Margery in her curiosity went out to see with her own eyes. “The people are running past the top of this road in crowds,” he said to her.
For some days past, workmen had been employed digging up the Dark Plain by the orders of Lord Averil. As he had told Cecil weeks before, his intention was to completely renew it; to do away entirely with its past character and send its superstition to the winds. The archway was being taken down, the gorse-bushes were being uprooted, the whole surface, in fact, was being dug up. He intended to build an extensive summer-house where the archway had been, and to make the plain a flower-garden, a playground for children when they should be born to Ashlydyat: and it appeared that in digging that afternoon under the archway, the men had come upon a human skeleton, or rather upon the bones of what had once been a skeleton. This was the whole foundation for the rumour and the “murder.”