by Grant Allen
Poor little Miss Butterfly! and had it really come to this! You, so bright, so light, so airy, in want, in positive want, in hunger even, with your good, impossible, impracticable Ernest! Had it come to this! Bread and water; dry bread and water! Down tears, down; a man must be a man; but, oh, what a bitter sight for Arthur Berkeley! And yet, what could he do to mend it? Money they would not take; he dare not even offer it; and he was at his wit’s end for any other contrivance for serving them without their knowledge. He must do what he could; but how he was to do it, he couldn’t imagine.
As he stood there, ruminating bitterly over that poor bare table, he thought he heard sounds above, as of Edie coming downstairs with Dot on her shoulder. He knew she would not like to know that he had surprised the secret of their dire poverty; and he turned silently and cautiously to descend the stair. There was only just time enough to get away, for Edie was even then opening the door of the nursery. Noiselessly, with cat-like tread, he crept down the steps once more, and heard Edie descending, and singing as she came down to Dot. It was a plaintive little song, in a sad key — a plaintive little song of his own — but not wholly distressful, Arthur thought; she could still sing, then, to her baby! With the hot tears rising a second time to his eyes, he groped his way to the foot of the staircase. There he brushed them hurriedly aside with his hand, and turned out into the open street. The children were playing and tumbling in the sun, and a languid young man in a faultless frock coat and smooth silk hat was buying a showy button-hole flower from the little suburban florist’s opposite.
With a heavy heart Arthur Berkeley turned homeward to his own cosy little cottage; that modest palace of art which he had once hoped little Miss Butterfly might have shared with him. He went up the steps, and turned quickly into his own small study. The Progenitor was there, sitting reading in an easy-chair. ‘At least,’ Arthur thought to himself, ‘I have made HIS old age happy. If I could only do as much for little Miss Butterfly! for little Miss Butterfly! for little Miss Butterfly! If I could only do as much for her, oh, how happy and contented I should be!’
He flung himself down on his own sofa, and brushed big eyes nervously with his handkerchief before he dared lookup again towards the Progenitor. ‘Father,’ he said, clutching his watchchain hard and playing with it nervously to keep down his emotion, ‘I’m afraid those poor Le Bretons are in an awfully bad way. I’m afraid, do you know, that they actually haven’t enough to eat! I went into their rooms just now, and, would you believe it, I found nothing on the table for breakfast but dry bread and tea!’
The Progenitor looked up quietly from the volume of Morley’s ‘Voltaire’ which he was at that moment placidly engaged in devouring. ‘Nothing but dry bread and tea,’ he said, in what seemed to Arthur a horribly unconcerned tone. ‘Really, hadn’t they? Well, I dare say they ARE very badly off, poor people. But after all, you know, Artie, they can’t be really poor, for Le Breton told me himself he was generally earning fifteen shillings or a pound a week, and that, you see, is really for three people a very good income, now isn’t it?’
Arthur, delicate-minded, gentle, chivalrous Arthur, gazed in surprise and sudden distress at that dear, good, unselfish old father of his. How extraordinary that the kindly old man couldn’t grasp the full horror of the situation! How strange that he, who would himself have been so tender, so considerate, so womanly in his care and sympathy towards anything that seemed to him like real poverty or real suffering, should have been so blinded by his long hard workingman life towards the peculiar difficulties and trials of classes other than his own as not to recognise the true meaning of that dreadful disclosure! Arthur was not angry with him — he felt too fully at that moment what depths of genuine silent hardship uncomplainingly endured were implied in the stoically calm frame of mind which could treat Edie Le Breton’s penury of luxuries as a comparatively slight matter: after all, his father was right at bottom; such mere sentimental middle-class poverty is as nothing to the privations of the really poor; yet he could not help feeling a little disappointed for all that. He wanted sympathy in his pity, and he could clearly expect none here. ‘Why, father,’ he cried bitterly, ‘you don’t throw yourself into the position as you ought to do. A pound a week, paid regularly, would be a splendid income of course for people brought up like you or me. But just consider how those two young people have been brought up! Consider their wants and their habits! Consider the luxury they have been accustomed to! And then think of their being obliged to want now almost for food in their last extremity!’
His father answered in the same quiet tone — not hardly, but calmly, as though he were discussing a problem in political economy instead of the problem of Edie Le Breton’s happiness— ‘Well, you see, it’s all a matter of the standard of comfort. These two friends of yours have been brought up above their future; and now that they’re got to come down to their natural level, why, of course, they feel it, depend upon it, they feel it. Their parents, of course, shouldn’t have accustomed them to a style of life above their station. Good dry bread, not too stale, does nobody any harm: still, I dare say they don’t like coming down to it. But bless your heart, Artie, if you’d seen the real want and poverty that I’ve seen, my boy — the actual hunger and cold and nakedness that I’ve known honest working people brought down to by no work, and nothing but the House open before them, or not that even, you wouldn’t think so much of the sentimental grievances of people who are earning fifteen shillings a week in ease and comfort.’
‘But, Father,’ Arthur went on, scarcely able to keep down the rising tone of indignation at such seeming heartlessness, ‘Ernest doesn’t earn even that always. Sometimes he earns nothing, or next to nothing; and it’s the uncertainty and insecurity that tells upon them even more than the poverty itself. Oh, Father, Father, you who have always been so good and kind, I never heard you speak so cruelly about anyone before as you’re speaking now about that poor, friendless, helpless, penniless, heart-broken little woman!’
The old shoemaker caught at the word suddenly, and looking him through and through with an unexpected gleam of discovery, laid down the life of Voltaire on the table with a bang, and sat straight upright in his chair, nodding his head, and muttering slowly to himself, ‘Little woman — he said “little woman!” Poor Artie, Poor Artie!’ in a tone of inexpressible pity. At last he turned to Arthur and cried with a voice of womanly tenderness, ‘My boy, my boy, I didn’t know before it was the lassie you were thinking of; I thought it was only poor young Le Breton. I see it all now; I’ve surprised your secret; you’ve let it out to me without knowing it. Oh, Artie, if that’s She, I’m sorry for her, and I’m sorry for you, my boy, from the bottom of my heart. If that’s She, Artie, we’ll put our heads together, and see what plan we can manage to save her from what she has never been accustomed to. Don’t think too hardly of your old Progenitor, Artie; he hasn’t mixed with these people all his life, and learned to sympathise with them as you’ve done, my son; he doesn’t understand them or know their troubles as you do: but if that’s her that you told me about one day, we shall find the means to make her happy and comfortable yet, if we have to starve for it. Dear Arthur, do not think I could be harsh or unfeeling for a moment to the woman that you ever once in passing fixed your heart upon. Let’s talk it over and think it over, and sooner or later we’ll surely find the way to accomplish it.’
CHAPTER XXXII.
PRECONTRACT OF MARRIAGE.
Whether Ronald Le Breton’s abstruse speculations on the theory of heredity were well founded or not, it certainly did happen, at any rate, that the more he saw of Selah Briggs the better he liked her; and the more Selah saw of him the better she liked him in return. Curiously enough, too, Selah did actually recognise in him what he fancied he recognised in himself, that part of his brother’s nature (not all wholly assumed) which was just what Selah had first been drawn to admire in Herbert himself. It wasn’t merely the originality of his general point of view: it was something more deep-seat
ed and undefinable than that — in a word, his idiosyncrasy. Selah Briggs, with her peculiar fiery soul and rebellious nature, found in both the Le Bretons something that seemed at once to satisfy her wants, to fulfil her desires, to saturate her affinities: and with Ronald, as with Herbert before, she was conscious of a certain awe and respect which was all the more pleasant to her because her untamed spirit had never felt anything like it with any other human being. She didn’t understand them, and she didn’t want to understand them: that constituted just the very charm of their whole personality to her peculiar fancy. All the other people she had ever met were as transparent as glass, for good or for evil; she could see through all their faults and virtues as easily as one sees through a window: the Le Bretons were to her inscrutable, novel, incomprehensible, inexplicable, and she prized them for their very inscrutability. And so it came to pass, that almost by a process of natural and imperceptible transference, she passed on at last to Ronald’s account very much the same intensity of feeling that she had formerly felt towards his brother Herbert.
But at the same time, Selah never for a moment let him see it. She was too proud to confess now that she could ever love another man: the Mr. Walters she had once believed in had never, never, never existed: and she would raise no other idol in future to take the place of that vanished ideal. She was grateful to Ronald, and even fond of him: but that was all-outwardly at least. She never let him see, by word or act, that in her heart of hearts she was beginning to love him. And yet Ronald instinctively knew it. He himself could not have told you why; but he knew it. Even a woman cannot hide a secret from a man with that peculiarly penetrating intuitive temperament which belongs to sensitive, delicate types like Ronald Le Breton’s.
One Sunday evening, when Selah had been spending a few hours at Edie’s lodgings (Ronald always made it an excuse for finding them a supper, on the ground that Selah was really his guest, though he could not conveniently ask her to his own rooms), he walked home towards Notting Hill with Selah; and as they crossed the Regent’s Park, he took the opportunity to say something to her that he had had upon his mind for a few weeks past, in some vague, indefinite, half-unconscious fashion.
‘Selah,’ he began, a little timidly, ‘don’t you think it’s very probable we shan’t have Ernest here much longer with us?’
‘I’m afraid it is, Ronald,’ Selah answered. She had got quite accustomed now to calling him Ronald. With such a poor, weak, sickly fellow as that, why really, after all, it did not much matter.
‘Well, Selah,’ Ronald went on, gravely, his eyes filling with tears as he spoke, ‘in that case, you know, I can’t think what’s to become of poor Edie. It’s a dreadful contingency to talk about, Selah, and I can’t bear talking about it; but we MUST face these things, however terrible, mustn’t we? and in this case one’s absolutely bound to face it for poor Edie’s sake as well as for Ernest’s. Selah, she must have a home to go to, when dear Ernest’s taken from us.’
‘I’m very sorry for her, Ronald,’ Selah answered, with unusual softness of manner, ‘but I really don’t see how a home can possibly be provided for her.’
‘I do,’ Ronald answered, more calmly; ‘and for their sakes, Selah, I want you to help me in trying to provide it.’
‘How?’ Selah asked, looking up in his face curiously, as they passed into a ray of lamplight.
‘Listen, Selah, and I’ll tell you. Why, by marrying me.’
‘Never?’ Selah answered, firmly, and with a decided tinge of the old Adam in her trembling voice. ‘Never, Ronald! Never, never, never!’
‘Wait a minute, Selah,’ Ronald pleaded, ‘till you’ve heard the end of what I have to say to you. Consider that when dear Ernest’s gone (oh! Selah, you must excuse me; it makes me cry so to think of it), there’ll be nowhere on earth for poor little Edie and Dot to go to.’
‘Did ever a man propose to a girl so extraordinarily in all this world,’ Selah thought to herself, angrily. ‘He actually expects me to marry him in order to provide a home for his precious sister-in-law. That’s really carrying unselfishness a step too far, I call it.’
‘Edie couldn’t come and live with me, of course,’ Ronald went on, quickly, ‘if I were a bachelor; but if I were married, why then, naturally, she and Dot could come and live with us; and she could earn a little money somehow, no doubt; and, at any rate, it’d be better for her than starvation.’
Selah stopped a minute, and tapped the hard ground two or three times angrily with the point of her umbrella. ‘And me, Ronald?’ she said in a curious defiant voice. ‘And ME? I suppose you’ve forgotten all about ME. You don’t ask me to marry you because you love me; you don’t ask me whether I love you or not; you only propose to me that I should quietly turn domestic housekeeper for Mrs. Ernest Le Breton. And for my part, I answer you plainly, once for all, that I’m not going to do it — no, never, never, never!’
She spoke haughtily, flashing her eyes at him in the fierce old fashion, and Ronald was almost frightened at the angry intensity of her contemptuous gestures. ‘Selah,’ he cried, trying to take her hand, which she tore away from him hurriedly: ‘Selah, you misunderstand me. I only approached the subject that way because I didn’t want to seem overweening and presumptuous. It’s a very great piece of vanity, it seems to me, for any man to ask a woman whether she loves him. I’m too conscious of all my own faults and failings, Selah, to venture upon asking you ever to love me; but I do love you, Selah, I’m sure I do love you; and I hoped, I somehow fancied — it may have been mere fancy, but I DID imagine — that I detected, I can’t say how, that you did really love me, too, just a very very little. Oh, Selah, it’s because I really love you that I ask you whether you’ll marry me, such as I am; I know I’m a poor sort of person to marry, but I ventured to hope you might love me just a little for all that.’
He looked so frail and gentle as he stood there pleading in the pale moonlight, that Selah could have taken him to her bosom then and there and fondled him as one would pet a sick child, for pure womanliness; but the devil in her blood kept her from doing it, and she answered haughtily, instead: ‘Ronald, if you wanted to marry me, you ought to have asked me for my own sake. Now that you’ve asked me for another’s, you can’t expect me to give you an answer. Keep your money, my poor boy; you’ll want it all for you and her hereafter; don’t go sharing it and spending it on perfect strangers such as me. And don’t go talking to me again about this business as long as your sister-in-law is unprovided for. I’m not going to take the bread out of her mouth, and I’m not going to marry a man who doesn’t utterly and entirely love me.’
‘But I do,’ Ronald answered, earnestly; ‘I do, Selah; I love you truly and faithfully from the very bottom of my heart.’
‘Leave off, Roland,’ Selah said in the same angry tone. ‘If you ever talk to me of this again, I give you my word of honour about it, I’ll never speak another word to you.’
And Ronald, who deeply respected the sanctity of a promise, were it only a threat, bided his time, and said no more about it for the present.
Next day, as Ronald sat reading in his own rooms, he was much surprised at hearing a well-known voice at the door, inquiring with some asperity whether Mr. Le Breton was at home. He listened to the voice in intense astonishment. It was his mother’s.
‘Ronald,’ Lady Le Breton began, the moment she had been shown into his little sitting-room, ‘I didn’t think, after your undutiful, ungrateful conduct — with that abominable woman, too — that I should ever have come to see you, unless you came first, as you ought clearly to do, and begged my pardon penitently for your disgraceful behaviour. It’s hard, I know, to acknowledge oneself in the wrong, but every Christian ought to be above vindictiveness and obstinate self-will; and I expect you, therefore, sooner or later, to come and ask forgiveness for your dreadful unkindness to me. Till then, as I said, I didn’t expect to call upon you in any way. But I’ve felt compelled to-day to come and speak to you about a matter of duty, and as a ma
tter of duty strictly I regard it, not as any relaxation of my just attitude of indignant expectancy towards yourself; no parent ought rightly to overlook such conduct as yours on the part of a son.’ Ronald inclined his head respectfully. ‘Well, what I’ve come to speak to you about to-day, Ronald, is about your poor misguided brother Ernest. He, too, as you know, has behaved very badly to me.’
‘No,’ Ronald answered stoutly, without further note or comment. Where the matter touched himself only he could maintain a decent silence, but where it touched poor dying Ernest he couldn’t possibly restrain himself, even from a sense of filial obligation.
‘Very badly to me,’ Lady Le Breton went on sternly, without in any way noticing the brief interruption, ‘and I can’t, of course, go to see him either, especially not as I should by so doing expose myself to meeting the person whom he has chosen to make his wife. Still, as I hear that Ernest a in a very serious or even dangerous condition — —’
‘He’s dying,’ Ronald answered, the quick tears once more finding the easy road to his eyes as usual.
‘I considered, as a mother, it was my duty to warn him to take a little thought about his soul.’
‘His soul!’ Ronald exclaimed in astonishment. ‘Ernest’s soul! Why, mother, dear Ernest has no need to look after his soul. He doesn’t take that sordid, petty, limited view of our relations with eternity, and of our relations with the Infinite, which makes them all consist of the miserable, selfish, squalid desire to save our own poor personal little souls at all hazards. Ernest has something better and nobler to think of, I can assure you, than such a mere self-centred idea as that.’
‘Ronald!’ Lady Breton exclaimed, drawing herself up with much dignity; ‘how on earth you, who have always pretended to be a religious person, can utter such a shocking and wicked sentiment as that, really passes my comprehension. What in the world is religion for, I should like to know, if it isn’t to teach us how to save our own souls? But the particular thing I want to speak to you about is just this: couldn’t you manage to induce Ernest to see the Archdeacon a little, and let the Archdeacon speak to him about his deplorable spiritual condition? I thought about you both so much at church yesterday, when the dear Archdeacon was preaching such a beautiful sermon; his text was like this, as far as I can remember it. “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” I couldn’t help thinking all the time of my own two poor rebellious boys, and of the path that their misguided notions were leading them on. For I believe Ernest does really somehow persuade himself that he’s in the right — it’s inconceivable, but it’s the fact; and I’m afraid the end thereof will be the ways of death; and then, as the dear Archdeacon said, “After death the judgment.” Oh, Ronald, when I think of your poor dear brother Ernest’s open unbelief, it makes me tremble for his future, so that I couldn’t rest upon my bed until I’d been to see you and urged you to go and try to save him.’