by Ellen Wood
“You are just playing a trick upon me, young gentlemen.”
“It is as true as that we are here, Mrs. Broom; it is true as gospel. They’ll both be dead if something’s not done for them.”
“Well, I never heard of such a thing,” she exclaimed, beginning to stir about. “Lying in that cow-shed for two days without help! You ought to have brought the poor baby away with you, sirs.”
“She wouldn’t let it come.”
“I wouldn’t have minded her saying that. A fortnight-old baby lying in the shed in this cold!”
“I don’t think it will make much difference in the long-run, whether the baby stays in the shed or comes out of it,” said Tom Coney. “If it sees to-morrow’s dawn, I shall wonder.”
“Well, this is a fine start!” cried Mother Broom. “And the master never to have come home — that’s another,” she went on. For, what to do, she didn’t know the least in the world, and was like a woman with a lost head.
We left the matter to her, carrying some things to the shed as we passed it on our way home — blankets and a pillow, fresh water, milk-and-water for the baby, and a candle and matches. One of the women-servants was to come after us, with hot broth and wine.
When we reached Crabb Cot, the dismay there at hearing Robert Ashton had not turned up, was diversified by this news, which we told of. Not that they thought very much of it: the woman was only a poor tramp, they said; and such things — fevers, and that — happen to poor tramps every day.
“Do you think the baby’s dying?” asked Charles Ashton, the parson.
“I’m nearly sure it is,” said Tom Coney.
“That’s a kind of woman, you know, that ought to be committed for fourteen-days’ hard labour,” observed the Squire, fiercely, who was in a frightfully cross mood with the various mishaps and uncertainties of the evening. “Seems to be very sickly and humble, you say, Mr. Johnny! Hold your tongue, sir; what should you know about it? These women tramps bring death on their infants through exposure.”
“And that’s true,” said old Coney. “I’d punish ‘em, Squire, if I were a magistrate like you.”
But what do you think Parson Ashton did? When the dog-cart had taken him and Mr. and Mrs. James Ashton to the Court — where they were to stay all night — he started off for the shed, and did not come away from it until he had baptized the baby.
We heard nothing more about it until the next day — and I don’t suppose any one has forgotten what sort of a miserable day that was, at old Coney’s Farm. How the wedding never took place, and Robert Ashton was still missing, and Jane Coney was dressed in her bridal robes for nothing, and the breakfast could not be eaten, and we guests staring in each other’s faces like so many helpless dummies. What news we had of it then, came from Charles Ashton: he had been to the shed again that morning. Whilst the carriages stood waiting at the gate, the post-boys’ scarlet jackets flaming in the sun, and the company indoors sat looking hopelessly for the bridegroom, Parson Ashton talked about it in a corner to Mrs. Coney and the Squire’s wife: both of them in their grand silk plumage then, one plum-coloured, the other sea-green, with feathers for top-knots.
The little baby was dead, Charles Ashton said. The mother had been removed to a shelter in Timberdale village, and was being cared for. The doctor, called in to her, Darbyshire, thought she might get over it.
“You baptized the child, I hear, Charles?” said Mrs. Coney, to the parson.
“Oh yes.”
“What did you name it?”
“Lucy. Something in the mother’s face put me in mind of my sister, and it was the name I first thought of. I asked the mother what she would have it called. Anything, she answered; it did not matter. Neither did it, for the little thing was dying then. Hot-water bottles and other remedies were tried last night as soon as they could be had, to get warmth into the child — to renew its life, in fact; but nothing availed.”
“Where was the woman taken to?”
“To Jael Batty’s. Jael consented to take her in.”
“I suppose it is but another case of the old, sad story?” groaned Mrs. Todhetley.
“Nothing else. And she, poor thing, is not much more than a girl.”
“Now, Charles, I tell you what. It may be all very consistent for you clergymen — men of forgiveness, and that — to waste your compassion over these poor stray creatures, but I think it might do more good sometimes if you gave them blame,” spoke Mrs. Coney, severely.
“There are times and seasons when you cannot express blame, however much it may be deserved,” he answered. “The worst of it in these cases is, that we rarely know there exists cause for censure before it is too late for any censure to avail, or avert the evil.”
What with the astounding events of the day, connected with the interrupted wedding, nothing more was said or thought of the affair. Except by Jane. When she and I were in the big dining-room together — I trying to blow up the fire, and she in full dread that Robert Ashton would have to be tried for his life at the Worcester Spring Assizes, and lie in prison until then — she suddenly spoke of it, interrupting the noise made by the crackling of the wood.
“So that poor baby’s dead, Johnny! What a happy fate — not to grow up to trouble. Charles named it Lucy, I hear. I should like to see the poor mother.”
“See her for what, Jane?”
“She is in distress, and so am I. I don’t suppose she has a corner to turn to for comfort in the wide world. I have not.”
It was not so very long after this that her distress was over. Robert Ashton arrived in triumph, and so put an end to it. One might suppose Jane would no longer have remembered that other one’s distress; what with the impromptu dinner, where we had no room for our elbows, and the laughter, and the preparations for the next day’s wedding.
But the matter had taken hold of Jane Coney’s mind, and she reverted to it on the morrow before going away. When the wedding-breakfast was over, and she — nevermore Jane Coney, but Jane Ashton — had changed her dress and was saying good-bye to her mother upstairs, she suddenly spoke of it.
“Mamma, I want to ask you to do something for me.”
“Well, my dear?”
“Will you see after that poor young woman who was found in the shed?”
Naturally Mrs. Coney was taken by surprise. She didn’t much like it.
“After that young woman, Jane?”
“Yes; for me.”
“Mrs. Broom has seen to her,” returned Mrs. Coney, in a voice that sounded very frozen.
“Mother, dear,” said Jane, “I was comparing myself with her yesterday; wondering which of us was the worst off, the more miserable. I thought I was. I almost felt that I could have changed places with her.”
“Jane!” angrily interjected Mrs. Coney.
“I did. She knew the extent of her trouble, she could see all that it involved; I did not see the extent of mine. I suppose it is always thus — that other people’s sorrows seem light when compared with our own. The reason must no doubt be that we cannot realize theirs, whilst we realize ours only too keenly.”
“My dear, I don’t care to talk of this.”
“Nor I much — but hear me for a minute, mother. God has been so merciful to me, and she is still as she was, that I — I should like to do what I can for her when we come back again, and comfort and keep her.”
“Keep her!”
“Keep her from want, I mean.”
“But, child, she has been — you don’t know what she has been,” gravely rebuked Mrs. Coney.
“I think I do, mother.”
“She is a poor outcast, Jane; with neither home to go to, nor friends to look upon her.”
Jane burst into tears: they had been hardly kept down since she had begun to speak.
“Just so, mother. But what was I yesterday? If Robert had been tried for his life, and condemned, I should have felt like an outcast; perhaps been looked upon as no better than one by the world.”
“Go
odness, Jane, I wish you’d exercise your common sense,” cried Mrs. Coney, losing patience. “I tell you she is an outcast, and has forfeited home and friends. She has been a great sinner.”
“Mother, if she had a home and friends, there would be no need to succour her. As to sin — perhaps we can save her from that for the future. My gratitude for the mercy shown to me is such that I feel as if I could take her to my bosom; it seems to my mind that I ought to do something for her, that she has been thrown in my way that I should do it. Mother, it is my last petition to you: see after her a little for me until we come back again.”
“Very well, dear; as you make this point of it,” concluded Mrs. Coney, relenting just a little. And then Jane began to cry hysterically; and Tom Coney knocked at the door, saying time was up.
Mrs. Coney was not a hard-hearted woman, just the opposite: but only those who live in rural parts of the country can imagine the tricks and turns of regular tramps, and what a bad lot some of them are. They deceive you with no end of a plausible tale, and stare pitifully in your face whilst they tell it. Not long before this, a case had happened where both our house and the Coneys’ had been taken in. A woman in jagged widows’ garments presented herself at the door of Crabb Cot and asked to see the Squire. Her shoes wanted mending, and one side of her face was bandaged up. Mrs. Todhetley went to her. Of all pitiable tales that poor woman told the most: it would have melted a heart of stone. She came from near Droitwich, she said: her husband had worked under Sir John Pakington; that is, had been a labourer on part of his estate, Westwood Park. She lost her husband and grown-up son the past autumn with fever; she caught it herself, and was reduced to a skeleton, lost her cottage home through the things being seized for rent, and went to live with a married daughter in Oxfordshire. Cancer had appeared in her cheek, the daughter could not keep her, for she and all her children were down with sickness, and the husband had no work — and she, the widow, was making her way by easy walking-stages to Worcester, there to try and get into the infirmary. What she wanted at Crabb Cot was — not to beg, either money or food: money she could do without, food she could not eat — but to implore the gentleman (meaning the Squire) to give her a letter to the infirmary doctors, so that they might take her in.
I can tell you that she took us in — every one of us. The Squire, coming up during the conference, surrendered without fight. Questions were put to her about Droitwich and Ombersley, which she answered at once. There could be no mistaking that she knew all the neighbourhood about there well, and Sir John and Lady Pakington into the bargain. I think it was that that threw us off our guard. Mrs. Todhetley, brimming over with compassion, offered her some light refreshment, broth or milk. She said she could not swallow either, “it went against her,” but she’d be thankful for a drink of water. Molly, the greatest termagant to tramps and beggars in general, brought out a half-pint bottle of store cordial, made by her own hands, of sweetened blackberry juice and spice, for the woman to put in her pocket and sip, on her journey to Worcester. Mrs. Todhetley gave her a pair of good shoes and some shillings, and two old linen handkerchiefs for the face; and the Squire, putting on his writing spectacles, wrote a letter to Mr. Carden, begging him to see if anything, in the shape of medical aid, could be done for the bearer. The woman burst into tears of thankfulness, and went away with her presents, including the letter, Molly the cross-grained actually going out to open the back-gate for her.
And now would anybody believe that this woman had only then come out of the Coneys’ house — where she had been with the same tale and request, and had received nearly the same relief? We never saw or heard of her again. The note did not reach Mr. Carden; no such patient applied to the infirmary. She was a clever impostor; and we got to think that the cheek had only been rubbed up with a little blistering-salve. Many another similar thing I could tell of — and every one of them true. So you must not wonder at Mrs. Coney’s unwillingness to interfere with this latest edition in the tramp line.
But she had given her promise: perhaps, as Jane put it, she could not do otherwise. And on the morning after the wedding she went over to Timberdale. I was sliding in the Ravine — for there was ice still in that covered spot, though the frost had nearly disappeared elsewhere — when I saw Mrs. Coney come down the zigzag by the help of her umbrella, and her everyday brown silk gown on.
“Are you here, Johnny! Shall I be able to get along?”
“If I help you, you will, Mrs. Coney.”
“Take care. I had no idea it would be slippery here. But it is a long way round to walk by the road, and the master has taken out the pony-chaise.”
“What wind is blowing you to Timberdale to-day?”
“An errand that I’m not at all pleased to go upon, Johnny; only Jane made a fuss about it before leaving yesterday. If I told the master he would be in a fine way. I am going to see the woman that you boys found in the shed.”
“I fancied Jane seemed to think a good deal about her.”
“Jane did think a good deal about her,” returned Mrs. Coney. “She has not had the experience of this sort of people that I have, Johnny; and girls’ sympathies are so easily aroused.”
“There was a romance about it, you see.”
“Romance, indeed!” wrathfully cried Mrs. Coney. “That’s what leads girls’ heads away: I wish they’d think of good plain sense instead. It was nothing but romance that led poor Lucy Ashton to marry that awful man, Bird.”
“Why does Lucy not leave him?”
“Ah! it’s easier to talk about leaving a man than to do it, once he’s your husband. You don’t understand it yet, Johnny.”
“And shall not, I suppose, until I am married myself. But Lucy has never talked of leaving Bird.”
“She won’t leave him. Robert has offered her —— Goodness me, Johnny, don’t hurry along like that! It’s nothing but ice here. If I were to get a tumble, I might be lamed for life.”
“Nonsense, Mrs. Coney! It would be only a Christmas gambol.”
“It’s all very well to laugh, Johnny. Christmas gambols mean fun to you young fellows with your supple limbs; but to us fifty-year-old people they may be something else. I wish I had tied some list round my boots.”
We left the ice in the Ravine, and she came up the zigzag path easily to the smooth road. I offered to take the umbrella.
“Thank you, Johnny; but I’d rather carry it myself. It’s my best silk one, and you might break it. I never dare trust my umbrellas to Tom: he drives them straight out against trees and posts, and snaps the sticks.”
She turned into Timberdale Court, and asked to see Mrs. Broom. Mrs. Broom appeared in the parlour with her sleeves turned up to the elbow, and her hands floury. She had been housekeeper during old Mr. Ashton’s time.
“Look here,” said Mrs. Coney, dropping her voice a little: “I’ve come to ask a word or two about that woman — from the shed, you know. Who is she? — and what is she?”
But the dropping of Mrs. Coney’s voice was as nothing to the dropping of the housekeeper’s face. The questions put her out uncommonly.
“I wish to my very heart, ma’am, that the woman — she’s but a poor young thing at best! — had chosen any part to fall ill in but this! It’s like a Fate.”
“Like a what?” cried Mrs. Coney.
“And so it is. A Fate for this house. ’Tis nothing less.”
“Why, what do you mean, Broom?”
Mother Broom bent her head forward, and said a word or two in Mrs. Coney’s ear. Louder, I suppose, than she thought for, if she had intended me not to hear.
“Raves about Captain Bird!” repeated Mrs. Coney.
“He is all her talk, ma’am — George Bird. And considering that George Bird, blackleg though he has turned out to be, married the young lady of this house, Miss Lucy Ashton, why, it goes against the grain for me to hear it.”
Mrs. Coney sat down in a sort of bewilderment, and gave me the silk umbrella. Folding her hands, she stared at Mother Broom.
“It seems as though we were always hearing fresh news about that man, Broom; each time it is something worse than the last. If he took all the young women within his reach, and — and — cut their heads off, it would be only like him.”
“‘George!’ she moans out in her sleep. That is, in her dreaming, or her fever, or whatever it is. ‘George, you ought not to have left me; you should have taken care of me.’ And then, ma’am, she’ll be quiet a bit, save for turning her head about; and begin again, ‘Where’s my baby? where’s my baby?’ Goodness knows ’twould be sad enough to hear her if it was anybody’s name but Bird’s.”
“There might be worse names than his, in the matter of giving us pain,” spoke Mrs. Coney. “As to poor Lucy — it is only another cross in her sad life.”
“I’ve not told this to anybody,” went on Mother Broom. “Jael Batty’s three parts deaf, as the parish knows, and may not have caught Bird’s name. It will vex my master frightfully for Miss Lucy’s sake. The baby is to be buried to-day. Mr. Charles has stayed to do it.”
“Oh, indeed!” snapped Mrs. Coney, and got up, for the baby appeared to be a sore subject with her. “I suppose the girl was coming across the country in search of Bird?”
Broom tossed her head. “Whether she was or not, it’s an odd thing that this house should be the one to have to succour her.”
“I am going,” said Mrs. Coney, “and I half wish I had never come in. Broom, I am sorry to have hindered you. You are busy.”
“I am making my raised pies,” said Broom. “It’s the second batch. What with master’s coming marriage, and one thing and another, I did not get ’em done before the new year. Your Molly says hers beat mine, Master Ludlow; but I don’t believe it.”
“She does, does she! It’s just like her boasting. Mrs. Todhetley often makes the pork-pies herself.”
“Johnny,” said Mrs. Coney, as we went along, she in deep thought: “that poor Lucy Bird might keep a stick for cutting notches — as it is said some prisoners used to do, to mark their days — and notch off her dreadful cares, that are ever recurring. Why, Johnny, what’s that crowd for?”