Chapter 16

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_ CHAPTER XVI

Next morning, while with that cheerful, unanxious countenance which those about an invalid must learn continually to wear, Elizabeth was trying to persuade her mistress not to rise, she heard a knock, and made some excuse for escaping. She well knew what it was and who had come.

There, in the parlor, sat Miss Hilary, Mrs. Jones talking at her rather than to her, for she hardly seemed to hear. But that she had heard every thing was clear enough. Her drawn white face, the tight clasp of her hands, showed that the ill tidings had struck her hard.

"Go away, Mrs. Jones," cried Elizabeth, fiercely. "Miss Hilary will call when she wants you."

And with an ingenious movement that just fell short of a push, somehow the woman was got on the other side of the parlor door, which Elizabeth immediately shut. Then Miss Hilary stretched her hands across the table and looked up piteously in her servant's face.

Only a servant; only that poor servant to whom she could look for any comfort in this sore trouble, this bitter humiliation. There was no attempt at disguise or concealment between mistress and maid.

"Mrs. Jones has told me every thing, Elizabeth. How is my sister? She does not know?"

"No; and I think she is a good deal better this morning. She has been very bad all week; only she would not let me send for you. She is really getting well now; I'm sure of that!"

"Thank God!" And then Miss Hilary began to weep.

Elizabeth also was thankful, even for those tears, for she had been perplexed by the hard, dry-eyed look of misery, deeper than anything she could comprehend, or than the circumstances seemed to warrant.

It was deeper. The misery was not only Ascott's arrest; many a lad has got into debt and got out again--the first taste of the law proving a warning to him for life; but it was this ominous "beginning of the end." The fatal end--which seemed to overhang like a hereditary cloud, to taint as with hereditary disease, the Leaf family.

Another bitterness (and who shall blame it, for when love is really love, have not the lovers a right to be one another's first thought?)--what would Robert Lyon say? To his honest Scotch nature poverty was nothing; honor every thing. She knew his horror of debt was even equal to her own. This, and her belief in his freedom from all false pride, had sustained her against many doubts lest he might think the less of her because of her present position--might feel ashamed could he see her sitting at her ledger in that high desk, or even occasionally serving in the shop.

Many a time things she would have passed over lightly on her own account she had felt on his; felt how they would annoy and vex him. The exquisitely natural thought which Tennyson has put into poetry--

"If I am dear to some one else,
Then I should be to myself more dear"--

had often come, prosaically enough perhaps, into her head, and prevented her from spoiling her little hands with unnecessarily rough work, or carelessly passing down ill streets and by-ways, where she knew Robert Lyon, had he been in London, would never have allowed her to go. Now what did such things signify? What need of taking care of herself? These were all superficial, external disgraces, the real disgrace was within. The plague-spot had burst out anew; it seemed as if this day were the recommencement of that bitter life of penury, misery, and humiliation, familiar through three generations to the women of the Leaf family.

It appeared like a fate. No use to try and struggle out of it, stretching her arms up to Robert Lyon's tender, honest, steadfast heart, there to be sheltered, taken care of, and made happy. No happiness for her! Nothing but to go on enduring and enduring to the end.

Such was Hilary's first emotion; morbid perhaps, yet excusable. It might have lasted longer--though in her healthy nature it could not have lasted very long--had not the reaction come, suddenly and completely, by the opening of the parlor door, and the appearance of Miss Leaf.

Miss Leaf--pale, indeed; but neither alarmed nor agitated, who hearing somehow that her child had arrived, had hastily dressed herself, and come down stairs, in order not to frighten Hilary. And as she took her in her arms, and kissed her with those mother-like kisses, which were the sweetest Hilary had as yet ever known--the sharp anguish went out of the poor girl's heart.

"Oh, Johanna! I can bear any thing as long as I have you"

And so in this simple and natural way the miserable secret about Ascott came out.

Being once out, it did not seem half so dreadful; nor was its effect nearly so serious as Miss Hilary and Elizabeth had feared.--Miss Leaf bore it wonderfully; she might almost have known it beforehand; they would have thought she had, but that she said decidedly she had not.

"Still you need not have minded telling me; though it was very good and thoughtful of you Elizabeth. You have gone through a great deal for our sakes, my poor girl."

Elizabeth burst into one smothered sob the first and the last.

"Nay," said Miss Leaf, very kindly; for this unwonted emotion in their servant moved them both. "You shall tell me the rest another time. Go down now, and get Miss Hilary some breakfast."

When Elizabeth had departed the sisters turned to one another. They did not talk much; where was the use of it? They both knew the worst, both as to facts and fears.

"What must be done. Johanna?"

Johanna, after a long pause, said, "I see but one thing--to get him home."

Hilary started up, and walked to and fro along the room.

"No, not that. I will never agree to it.--We can not help him. He does not deserve helping. If the debts were for food now, or any necessaries; but for mere luxuries, mere fine clothes; it is his tailor who has arrested him, you know. I would rather have gone in rags! I would rather see us all in rags!--It's mean, selfish, cowardly, and I despise him for it. Though he is my own flesh and blood, I despise him."

"Hilary!"

"No." and the tears burst from her angry eyes, "I don't mean that I despise him. I'm sorry for him: there is good in him, poor dear lad; but I despise his weakness; I feel fierce to think how much it will cost us all, and especially you, Johanna. Only think what comforts of all sorts that thirty pounds would have brought to you!"

"God will provide," said Johanna, earnestly. "But I know, my dear, this is sharper to you than to me. Besides, I have been more used to it."

She closed her eyes, with a half shudder, as if living over again the old days--when Henry Leaf's wife and eldest daughter used to have to give dinner parties upon food that stuck in their throats, as if every morsel had been stolen; which in truth it was, and yet they were helpless, innocent thieves; when they and the children had to wear clothes that seemed to poison them like the shirt of Dejanira; when they durst not walk along special streets, nor pass particular shops, for the feeling that the shop people must be staring, and pointing, and jibing at them, "Pay me what thou owest!"

"But things can not again be so bad as those days, Hilary. Ascott is young; he may mend. People can mend, my child; and he had such a different bringing up from what his father had, and his grandfather, too. We must not be hopeless yet. You see," and making Hilary kneel down before her, she took her by both hands, as if to impart something of her own quietness to this poor heart, struggling as young, honest, upright hearts do struggle with something which their whole nature revolts against, and loathes, and scorns--"you see, the boy is our boy; our own flesh and blood. We were very foolish to let him away from us for so long. We might have made him better if we had kept him at Stowbury. But he is young; that is my hope of him; and he was always fond of his aunts, and is still, I think."

Hilary smiled sadly. "Deeds, not words I don't believe in words."

"Well, let us put aside believing, and only act. Let us give him another chance."

Hilary shook her head. "Another, and another, and another--it will be always the same. I know it will. I can't tell how it is, Johanna; but whenever I look at you, I feel so stern and hard to Ascott. It seems as if there were circumstances when pity to some, to one, was wicked injustice to others: as if there were times when it is right and needful to lop off, at once and forever, a rotten branch rather than let the whole tree go to rack and ruin. I would do it! I should think myself justified in doing it."

"But not just yet. He is only a boy--our own boy."

And the two women, in both of whom the maternal passion existed strong and deep, yet in the one never had found, and in the other never might find, its natural channel, wept together over this lad, almost as mothers weep.

"But what can we do?" said Hilary at last.

"Thirty pounds, and not a halfpenny to pay it with; must we borrow?"

"Oh no--no," was the answer, with a shrinking gesture; "no borrowing. There is the diamond ring."

This was a sort of heir-loom from eldest daughter to eldest daughter of the Leaf family which had been kept even as a sort of superstition, through all temptations of poverty.--The last time Miss Leaf looked at it she had remarked, jestingly, it should be given some day to that important personage talked of for many a year among the three aunts--Mrs. Ascott Leaf.

"Who must do without it now," said Johanna, looking regretfully at the ring; "that is, if he ever takes to himself a wife, poor boy."

Hilary answered, beneath her breath, "Unless he alters, I earnestly hope he never may." And there came over her involuntarily a wild, despairing thought, Would it not be better that neither Ascott nor herself should ever be married, that the family might die out, and trouble the world no more?

Nevertheless she rose up to do what she knew had to be done, and what there was nobody to do but herself.

"Don't mind it, Johanna; for indeed I do not. I shall go to a first rate, respectable jeweler, and he will not cheat me; and then I shall find my way to the sponging-house--isn't that what they call it? I dare say many a poor woman has been there before me. I am not the first, and shall not be the last, and no body will harm me. I think I look honest, though my name is Leaf."

She laughed--a bitter laugh; but Johanna silenced it in a close embrace; and when Hilary rose up again she was quite her natural self. She summoned Elizabeth, and began giving her all domestic directions, just as usual; finally, bade her sister good by in a tone as like her usual tone as possible, and left her settled on the sofa in content and peace.

Elizabeth followed to the door. Miss Hilary had asked her for the card on which Ascott had written the address of the place where he had been taken to; and though the girl said not a word, her anxious eyes made piteous inquiry.

Her mistress patted her on the shoulder.

"Never mind about me; I shall come to no harm, Elizabeth."

"It's a bad place; such a dreadful place, Mrs. Jones says."

"Is it?" Elizabeth guessed part, not the whole of the feelings that made Hilary hesitate, shrink even, from the duty before her, turning first so hot, and then so pale. Only as a duty could she have done it at all. "No matter, I must go. Take care of my sister."

She ran down the door steps, and walked quickly through the Crescent. It was a clear, sunshiny, frosty day--such a day as always both cheered and calmed her. She had, despite all her cares, youth, health, energy; and a holy and constant love lay like a sleeping angel in her heart. Must I tell the truth, and own that before she had gone two streets' length Hilary ceased to feel so very, very miserable?

Love--this kind of love of which I speak--is a wonderful thing, the most wonderful thing in all the world. The strength it gives, the brightness, the actual happiness, even in hardest times, is often quite miraculous. When Hilary sat waiting in the jeweler's shop, she watched a little episode of high life--two wealthy people choosing their marriage plate; the bride, so careless and haughty; the bridegroom, so unutterably mean to look at, stamped with that innate smallness and coarseness of soul which his fine clothes only made more apparent. And she thought--oh, how fondly she thought!--of that honest, manly mein; of that true, untainted heart, which she felt sure, had never loved any woman but herself; of the warm, firm hand, carving its way thro' the world for her sake, and waiting patiently till it could openly clasp hers, and give her every thing it had won. She would not have exchanged him. Robert Lyon, with his penniless love, his half-hopeless fortunes, or maybe his lot of never ending care, for the "brawest bridegroom" under the sun.

Under this sun--the common, everyday winter sun of Regent and Oxford streets--she walked now as brightly and bravely as if there were no trouble before her, no painful meeting with Ascott, no horrid humiliation from which every womanly feeling in her nature shrunk with acute pain. "Robert, my Robert!" she whispered in her heart, and felt him so near to her that she was at rest, she hardly knew why.

Possibly grand, or clever, or happy people who condescend to read this story may despise it, think it unideal, uninteresting; treating of small things and common people--"poor persons," in short. I can not help it. I write for the poor; not to excite the compassion of the rich toward them, but to show them their own dignity and the bright side of their poverty. For it has its bright side; and its very darkest, when no sin is mixed up therewith, is brighter than many an outwardly prosperous life.

"Better is a dinner of herbs, where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than a house full of sacrifices and strife."

With these two sage proverbs--which all acknowledge and scarcely any really believe, or surely they would act a little more as if they did--I leave Johanna Leaf sitting silently in her solitary parlor, knitting stockings for her child; weaving many a mingled web of thought withal, yet never letting a stitch go down; and Hilary Leaf walking cheerily and fearlessly up one strange street and down another to find out the "bad" place, where she once had no idea it would ever have been her lot to go.--One thing she knew, and gloried in the knowledge, that if Robert Lyon had known she was going, or known half the cares she had to meet, he would have recrossed the Indian seas--have risked fortune, competence, hope of the future, which was the only cheer of his hard present--in order to save her from them all.

The minute history of this painful day I do not mean to tell. Hilary never told it till, years after, she wept it out upon a bosom that could understand the whole, and would take good care that while the life beat in his she never should go through the like again.

Ascott came home--that is, was brought home--very humbled, contrite, and grateful. There was no one to meet him but his Aunt Johanna, and she just kissed him quietly, and bade him come over to the fire; he was shivering, and somewhat pale. He had even two tears in his handsome eyes, the first Ascott had been known to shed since he was a boy. That he felt a good deal, perhaps as much as was in his nature to feel, there could be no doubt. So his two aunts were glad and comforted; gave him his tea and the warmest seat at the hearth; said not a harsh word to him, but talked to him about indifferent things.--Tea being over, Hilary was anxious to get every thing painful ended before Selina came home--Selina, who, they felt by instinct, had now a separate interest from themselves, and had better not be told this sad story if possible; so she asked her nephew "if he remembered what they had to do this evening?"

"Had to do? Oh, Aunt Hilary, I'm so tired! can't you let me be quiet? Only this one night. I promise to bring you everything on Monday."

"Monday will be too late. I shall be away. And you know you can't do without my excellent arithmetic," she added with a faint smile. "Now, Ascott, be a good boy--fetch down all those bills and let us go over them together."

"His debts came to more than the thirty pounds then?" said his Aunt Johanna, when he was gone.

"Yes. But the ring sold for fifty." And Hilary drew to the table, got writing materials, and sat waiting, with a dull, silent patience in her look, at which Johanna sighed and said no more.

The aunt and nephew spent some time in going over that handful of papers, and approximating to the sum total, in that kind of awful arithmetic when figures cease to be mere figures, but grow into avenging monsters, bearing with them life or death.

"Is that all! You are quite sure it is all?" said Hilary at last, pointing to the whole amount, and looking steadily into Ascott's eyes.

He flushed up, and asked what she meant by doubting his word?

"Not that, but you might easily have made a mistake; you are so careless about money matters."

"Ah, that's it. I'm just careless, and so I come to grief. But I never mean to be careless any more. I'll be as precise as you. I'll balance my books every week--every day if you like--exactly as you do at that horrid shop, Aunt Hilary."

So he was rattling on, but Hilary stopped him by pointing to the figures.

"You see, this sum is more than we expected. How is it to be met? Think for yourself. You are a man now."

"I know that," said Ascott, sullenly; "but what's the use of it?--money only makes the man, and I have none. If the ancient Peter would but die now and leave me his heir, though to be sure Aunt Selina might be putting her oar in. Perhaps--considering I'm Aunt Selina's nephew--if I were to walk into the old chap now he might be induced to fork out! Hurrah! that's a splendid idea."

"What idea?"

"I'll borrow the money from old Ascott."

"That means, because he has already given, you would have him keep on giving--and you would take and take and take--Ascott, I'm ashamed of you."

But Ascott only burst out laughing. "Nonsence!--he has money and I have none; why shouldn't he give it me?"

"Why?"--she repeated, her eyes flashing and her little feminine figure seeming to grow taller as she spoke--"I'll tell you, since you don't seem yourself to understand it. Because a young man, with health and strength in him, should blush to eat any bread but what he himself earns. Because he should work at any thing and every thing, stint himself of every luxury and pleasure, rather than ask or borrow, or, except under rare circumstances, rather than be indebted to any living soul for a single half-penny. I would not, if I were a young man."

"What a nice young man you would make, Aunt Hilary!"

There was something in the lad's imperturbable good humor at once irritating and disarming. Whatever his faults, they were more negative than positive; there was no malice prepense about him, no absolute personal wickedness. And he had the strange charm of manner and speech which keeps up one's outer surface of habitual affection toward a person long after all its foundations of trust and respect have hopelessly crumbled away.

"Come now, my pretty aunt must go with me. She will manage the old ogre much better than I. And he must be managed somehow. It's all very fine talking of independence, but isn't it hard that a poor fellow should be living in constant dread of being carried off to that horrid, uncleanly, beastly den--bah! I don't like thinking of it--and all for the want of twenty pounds? You must go to him, Aunt Hilary."

She saw they must--there was no help for it. Even Johanna said so. It was after all only asking for Ascott's quarterly allowance three days in advance, for it was due on Tuesday. But what jarred against her proud, honest spirit was the implication that such a request gave of taking as a right that which had been so long bestowed as a favor. Nothing but the great strait they were in could ever have driven her to consent that Mr. Ascott should be applied to at all; but since it must be done, she felt that she had better do it herself. Was it from some lurking doubt or dread that Ascott might not speak the entire truth, as she had insisted upon its being spoken, before Mr. Ascott was asked for any thing? since whatever he gave must be given with a full knowledge on his part of the whole pitiable state of affairs.

It was with a strange, sad feeling--the sadder because he never seemed to suspect it, but talked and laughed with her as usual--that she took her nephew's arm and walked silently through the dark squares, perfectly well aware that he only asked her to go with him in order to do an unpleasant thing which he did not like to do himself, and that she only went with him in the character of watch, or supervisor, to try and save him from doing something which she herself would be ashamed should be done.

Yet he was ostensibly the head, hope, and stay of the family. Alas! many a family has to submit to, and smile under an equally melancholy and fatal sham. _

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