Miss Grantley's Girls Part 4

"Here am I," said Peter, suddenly confronting him, and drawing Antoine into the room, all grimed and torn, and smirched with mud, as he was.

"What is the meaning of that?" said old Dormeur, glaring into Peter's eyes, and laying a grip upon his shoulder that must have left a bruise there.

"The meaning of _that_ is," said Peter steadily, and looking back with an eye as fierce as his master's--"the meaning of _that_ is, that when nearly nineteen years ago I stood under St. Guillotine and vowed a vow, I meant to keep it. That when Sara Dufarge--once Sara Dormeur--my loved and lovely mistress, joined her husband--not by the guillotine, but by a broken heart in a little country lodging at Nogent--she left her child--_that_ child--to the nurse who had been faithful to her--to my own good sister Nancy, who, bringing her to England when she and her husband came to escape the troubles, found here another sister, the widow Rondeau--childless--to whom came as a legacy that same little orphaned one who lies now in her grandsire's chair."

Anton Dormeur stood and glared for a moment at the undaunted little old man, who had thus kept a secret for eighteen years, though he had been here in his service; but even in his bitter anger there came to him the recollection of the stern relentless temper with which he had blotted out his daughter's name from the family record; and, with a drooping head and tears that fell fast on his furrowed cheeks, he went again and knelt beside the girl, who now sat looking at them all with wide and wondering eyes.

"Peter Dobree," he said presently, "go or send for your sister Rondeau.--Antoine, dear lad, go you into the kitchen and see if any one has come in; for we will have supper through all, and Sara, Sara, my child, my little one, you must never leave me more."

"What! and are you, monsieur, truly my grandfather, and Monsieur Antoine truly your grandson? Then he is--no, not my brother; what then?--But I may kiss him?" said the wondering girl, as she stood the centre of a talking group, apart from which stood the lad, who still looked at her wistfully enough.

They broke into a laugh, at which she turned red as a rose, and with a sudden gesture, which shot a pain to the old man's heart, for it was that of her mother once again, turned away.

"Yes, but you may kiss him," said Anton gently, and leading her to where Antoine stood--"a cousin's kiss, you know--have you learned what that is?"

"No, I never had a cousin--at least, Antoine never kissed me," she said simply, and held up her sweet face to the young man, who bent and touched it with his lips.

"I do not think I need say any more; but that is the story of the Silver Goblet," said our governess as she rang the bell for the strawberries and cream.

On the following evening the weather was so close and lowering that we had to remain indoors. It was one of those heavy days which sometimes occur in the summer months, when the whole atmosphere appears to be one low-hanging cloud, enveloping everything in a kind of dark-gray mist, that is only now and then pierced with red rays, and droops upon the distant fields in a straw-coloured vapour--the effect of the sunlight behind the atmosphere of mist.

"What a dim, uninviting evening!" said Miss Grantley as we stood at the window looking out at the garden, where the roses seemed to droop heavy-headed in the moisture-laden air, and the song of the birds was hushed, or only an occasional chirp was heard as one or two thrushes flashed from amidst the plum-trees, or a martin twittered beneath the eaves. "What a dim evening! It almost reminds one of a London fog--not a black fog, but a yellow one, such as one sees in the city sometimes on a late autumn afternoon or an evening in February."

"Oh! do tell us a story about London, Miss Grantley. You _must_ know ever so much of the streets and places there, or how could you have learned so easily about Spitalfields and all that? Beside, you've lived in London, haven't you?"

"Well, yes. I was in London for more than two years, and near the city too, and I think I must have spent too much time in wandering about some of the quaint old streets and lanes, where there are rare old churches, and halls belonging to city companies, and ancient houses that once belonged to n.o.blemen of the court of King James and King Charles, but are now used for counting-houses and warehouses, such of them as are not pulled down at least. I made some odd acquaintances too; and a kind old couple, who were caretakers at one of the smaller city halls, used to ask me to take tea with them, for the old gentleman had known my great-uncle Joseph, who was an East India merchant, and belonged to the company that used to meet in the hall. I think the old gentleman said he had been the 'master;' but at any rate his portrait was on the wall along with many others, and he was so like my dear father that I stood and cried, and often wished I could take the portrait itself away, but that of course was impossible."

Here Miss Grantley became silent, and we could see tears s.h.i.+ning in her eyes, till Annie Bowers, who was standing near her, gently took her in her arms and kissed her on the cheek, and without saying a word held her round the waist.

"Well," resumed our governess, smiling, and pressing Annie's hand, "I was going to say that the old gentleman had kept a kind of diary or great memorandum-book, in which he had written--oh, in such a neat, stiff, stalky kind of hand!--all kinds of things that had happened among his friends and acquaintances for many years. He used to read it to me sometimes; and once, when I had to stay there in the little cozy parlour for a whole winter evening because of a downpour of rain, he asked me if I should mind his reading to me a little story that he had written about a very strange occurrence to an old friend of his who lived in just such another lane, near just such another old hall in the city. He said that he felt like Robinson Crusoe sometimes, except that his wife was there with him in that quiet island of bricks and mortar; and, like Robinson Crusoe, he had learned to put his narratives upon paper in quite a remarkable way, so that if I didn't mind listening he would read me a bit of a romance that was as true as anything I should be likely to get out of the circulating libraries.

"I said of course that I should like it very much; and so, while his wife sat on one side the fire knitting, and I was half lost in a great leather easy-chair on the other side, the old gentleman took a bundle of papers out of a drawer in the bookcase and read me the story that I am now going to read to you; for as I was very much interested in it he was so pleased that he made me a low bow, and handed me the paper neatly folded and tied with a bit of red tape. He said it would be something to remember him by when I went away from London."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER III.

A BABY'S HAND.

PEOPLE who know the city of London, and like to wander up and down the streets, soon learn to leave the broad and more modern thoroughfares and to plunge into the silence and seclusion of the queer by-ways which lie away from the great roaring sea of traffic, like the caves and shallows that skirt some great ocean bay.

Amongst these retired spots none are more suggestive than the old churchyards all blurred and dim with London smoke, but yet in which a few trees yearly put forth green leaves of little promise, and a choir of sooty sparrows chirp around the queer old steeples or perch impudently upon the leaden ornaments which adorn the sacred porch. In these places--which even in summer are well-like in their cool impenetrable shade--there is no little business going on, however, for all round the rusty iron railing which incloses the weed-entangled graveyard the houses of city merchants seem to crowd and hustle for s.p.a.ce; and, if they had any time for it, the clerks behind those dust-blinded windows might spend an hour not unprofitably in looking down upon the decaying monuments of departed citizens and meditating at once on the uncertainty of human affairs and the benefits of life a.s.surance.

Amongst the dozen or so of such places ill.u.s.trating the brick-and-mortar history of the city none are more suggestive than the church and yard of St. Simon Swynherde, which, lying in the circ.u.mbendibus of a lane named after the same saint, forms, as it were, a sort of outlying island, upon whose quiet sh.o.r.es the incautious wayfarer, being sometimes lost or cast away, can hear the humming surges of the great sea as they boom in the thoroughfares beyond. There is no alteration in this place from year to year, except such differences as are brought about by the change of seasons; no civic improvement troubles its sedate gloom--no adventurous speculator regards it as a promising site for building blocks of offices--no railway company casts an evil eye upon its seclusion within the area formed by the church and the tall dim houses which have mouldered into uniform neutrality of colour.

Even the march of time seems to have been arrested amidst the decay of the place, since the bell of the church clock rusted from its bearings and the index of the old sun-dial fell a prey to acc.u.mulated canker. The spring brings a few green buds and feeble leaves upon the grimy trees; the summer serves to acc.u.mulate the store of dust and torn paper and shreds of light rubbish which the autumn wind swirls into neglected corners on the dim evenings when the rain weeps on the blackened windows and the mist creeps up to the steeple in long ghostly shapes. The winter brings a frozen cyclone which whistles round and round or gently covers the graveyard with snow, the unbroken whiteness of which is gradually spotted and interlaced with sooty flakes, as though the genius of the place resented the intrusion and would make no further compromise than half mourning.

The dimmest, darkest, and dirtiest of all the houses round the yard was that of Richard Dryce & Co., factors and general merchants. It was never known who was the Co., for Richard Dryce managed his own business, and lived in the house, in one of the back rooms of which overlooking a square paved courtyard he had been born. The business belonged to his father before him, and he himself had married into the business of another factor and general merchant. His wife had died some twenty years before the period of this story--died in giving birth to a boy, who was sometimes mistaken for the Co., but who at present occupied no better position than that of a superior clerk, with the questionable advantage of living with his father in the dull old house, where he had to go through the warehouse amidst innumerable bales and crates and packages to reach the staircase that conducted him to the gloomy rooms, the old-fas.h.i.+oned furniture of which suited his father, but was sorely against his own taste.

How he should have come to have any opinion of his own is perhaps a mystery, for he resembled his mother, who was a simple creature, easily influenced, and with all her tastes apparently moulded on the pattern set before her by her husband. Still, however it may have been, though he was born in the gloomy house, and was subject to the same influences, the younger Dryce--whose name was Robert--never took kindly to the dull routine to which his father's habits doomed him. He was too dutiful and too mild in disposition--in fact, too unlike his own father--to offer any direct opposition to it, or to complain very often of its exactions; but he felt that at twenty he was kept with too tight a hand, and that there were worlds beyond Saint Simon Swynherde, which might be harmlessly explored.

Richard Dryce was, however, not a bad man, not a cruel or a hard man in his inmost heart; but he had been himself devoted from early life to one condition of things, which were in some strange way in accordance with his natural const.i.tution, or with which he had become identified till they grew into a necessary part of his existence. He was a self-contained man--an undemonstrative man, whose mind was attuned to respectable solitude, and who, without being a misanthrope, regarded his fellow creatures through a ground-gla.s.s medium, which made them seem shadowy and unapproachable. A few business acquaintances he had, with whom he would sometimes take his chop and gla.s.s of old port at a city tavern of an evening; he would even, on rare occasions, go the length of smoking a cigar in company with one or two of his less distant companions; but his laugh was like the harsh echo of a disused violin, and he seldom or never invited anybody to see him at home.

One of the people whom he disliked most said that he was "a b.u.t.toned-up man," and Richard Dryce could never forgive him--the description was so true.

One of his most intimate friends, an alderman, of congenial temperament, who had greatly distinguished himself by quarrelling and exchanging vituperative epithets with another alderman on the magisterial bench, seriously advised him to become a candidate for civic honours; but he strenuously refused, although he ultimately permitted his son Robert to achieve something like independence by becoming a liveryman of the Wors.h.i.+pful Company of Twidlers, whose hall stood within the precincts of Saint Simon Swynherde. It was only on the occasion of one of their dinners that Robert was allowed to be out after ten o'clock; but that restriction did not prevent his spending the larger number of his evenings between eight o'clock and ten at the Twidlers' Hall, which mouldy old structure, with its great, cold, lonely dining-room and awkward polygonal ante-rooms decorated with portraits of deceased dignitaries, held an attraction not to be found elsewhere, in the person of pretty Agnes Raincliffe, the only daughter of the company's beadle.

For six months they had been under the sweet illusion that disinterested affection must eventually win for itself a way to union; but old Mr.

Raincliffe had spoken seriously to them, and altogether forbade their further meeting until Robert had spoken to his father. He went home that very night, and, nerved to a sort of desperation, _did_ speak to his father, ending with the usual declarations that his choice was unalterable. Perhaps it was; but, whether or not, Richard Dryce went the very way to make it so when he laughed that discordant laugh, and, with a taunt against his son's weakness of purpose and his dependent position, told him to dismiss such a scheming little hussey from his thoughts, for he was to marry when he had permission, which would never be granted to such a match as the beadle wanted to bring about.

Robert left his father's presence without a word; but in a week from that date he had followed Agnes down into the country, whither she had been sent out of the way. When he returned he wrote a letter to his father, to say that they were married. It is easy to guess what followed. When he called for an answer to his communication, he received a brief note, saying that he was discarded from that hour, need never trouble himself to enter the doors of the old house again, and that henceforth he must look to his own exertions for the means of living.

This letter was sent by the hand of a sort of managing clerk, one Jaggers, who was at the same time commissioned to tell Robert that he could, if he chose, obtain a situation in a house at Liverpool, where his father's interest was sufficient to secure him a clerks.h.i.+p at a very moderate salary. Now it so happened that Jaggers had always appeared to be the best friend young Robert ever had; he had sympathized with him on the subject of his father's harshness; had applauded his n.o.ble sentiments when he had imparted the secret of his engagement to Agnes; had wished that _he_ was master of the establishment in St. Simon's Yard, that justice might be done to disinterested virtue, and had generally a.s.sumed the part of guide, philosopher, and friend, tempered by humble deference, to the young man. It was arranged between them, therefore, that, after a time, during which Robert should accept the situation at Liverpool, a more successful appeal might be made to Dryce senior, and that a letter addressed to him should be sent under cover to Jaggers, who would lay it on his table.

Robert and his young wife went away, leaving this good-natured fellow to watch their interests. A year pa.s.sed, and the letter had been written, but remained unanswered; indeed, according to Jaggers's showing, Richard Dryce was more inveterate than ever, and was unapproachable on the subject of his undutiful son, in pleading whose cause he, Jaggers, had very nearly obtained his own dismissal. The firm in which Robert was a clerk became bankrupt in the commercial crisis, and he was thrown out of employment. Again he wrote to his father, saying that he had an appointment offered him in Australia, and only wanted the money to pay his pa.s.sage. He received no reply, but some people who knew him in Liverpool made up the sum, and his wife came to London to live with her father (who was now superannuated in favour of a new beadle), and to wait for his return, or for the remittance that was to come by the first mail, that she might join him there.

Their first child, a girl, had been a poor sickly little creature, and was dead; but Agnes was likely again to become a mother, and waited anxiously for the money which would enable her to prepare for such an event. Anxiously as she waited, it never came, and Jaggers, to whom it was to have been directed, advanced her a sovereign, as he said, "out of his small means," and then lost sight of her, for she and her father had moved into other lodgings, where the managing clerk could scarcely trouble himself to go, unless he had good news to take with him. Indeed, he had so much to occupy his attention, that some months had elapsed since he had seen Agnes; once only he had written a short reply to a note imploring him to say whether any remittance had arrived; but how could he spare time to attend to such matters when Mr. Dryce was every week taking a less active part in the business, and the Christmas quarter was stealing on with the balance-sheet not even thought of in the press of country orders. Mr. Richard Dryce was still hale and active; but those who knew him best, thought that he was breaking. His voice was less harsh, his hair had turned from iron-gray to white, and in his face there was an anxious look as of one who waits for something that does not come. Once or twice old acquaintances ventured to ask after his son, but he shook his head, and said that he knew nothing of him; he had written to his last address, but had received no reply.

It was cold dull wintry weather, and the old man looked so solitary, that one or two tried to rally him, and even asked him to come and dine or spend the evening with them, to which he responded by his old harsh laugh, and putting on his worsted gloves, trudged home through the snow.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. DRYCE'S PEt.i.tION ANSWERED.]

One morning he awoke early, almost before daylight had penetrated the dull rooms where he lived, and had a sudden fancy to walk into the church. It was already daylight in the streets, but the interior of St.

Simon Swynherde was dim with mist and with the obscurity of the high windows. He could only just see the pillars and the organ, where his own name had been painted in gilt letters since the time that he had been churchwarden and helped to restore it. Even as he looked up at it, the notes of the Christmas hymn came trembling into the chill morning air, for the organist had come there to practise, and expected the parish school children to come in to sing at a morning service. To most people there might have been nothing in the place or its a.s.sociations to evoke much gentle feeling; but as the tones of the organ swelled and the music grew louder, old Richard Dryce sat down in the corner of his own pew and leaned his head upon the book-board, with his hands clasped before his face. Not till the warm tears had trickled from between his fingers did he raise his head, and then it was to look round him to the cus.h.i.+on at the other end of the pew, for from some place near him he thought he had heard a sound that was out of all harmony with the organ, but not altogether apart from the a.s.sociations of the Christmas hymn--the wailing of a child. Another moment and he was bending over a bundle seemingly composed of a coa.r.s.e blue cloak, but from which there presently came out a baby hand and, the covering once pulled aside, a little round rosy face in which a pair of large blue eyes were wide awake in utter astonishment. Who can tell what had been the thoughts busy in old Dryce's mind? Was it prayer? Was it that yearning which finds no words of entreaty, but yet ardently and dumbly implores--all vaguely--that the crooked paths of former error may be made straight at last--that the rough places of a mistaken course may become divinely plain? He could not tell; and yet in some way he accepted this child as a visible answer to a pet.i.tion that he had meant to frame. When the organist and the s.e.xtoness came down presently, and with indignant virtue advised the removal of the child to the workhouse, he regarded their suggestion as little less than impious, and expressed his determination of taking the little one home with him.

His old housekeeper and the younger servants were not a little surprised to see the merchant come home with such a companion; but Mr. Dryce was master in his own house, and the little guest was fed. Then Doctor Banks was sent for, and he declared that it would be necessary to provide a nurse, while, as luck would have it, he had that very morning been sent for to see a casual applicant for relief at the Union workhouse--a woman who had just lost a child. Temporarily she might do well enough, and Doctor Banks wanted to get home to dinner; so away went the housekeeper in a cab with a letter from the doctor, and in two hours came back bringing with her a pale pretty young woman whose name was Jane Harris, and who, her husband having gone abroad and left her with a child which she had just lost, was reduced to apply at the workhouse. She was so timid, and had at first such a scared look, that Mr. Dryce had much trouble to induce her to stay; but it was quite wonderful the way in which the child took to her, and so a room was got ready for them both, and she was comfortably settled, almost, as the housekeeper said, "as if she was a lady, though for the matter of that, Doctor Banks knew more about her than he said." At any rate Doctor Banks said the next day, after he had had a little conversation with the new nurse, that she was thoroughly trustworthy, and that he himself had known her father, who once held a very respectable position in the city. So Mrs. Harris became an inmate at the dim old house, and her charge throve under her care.

He was a bonny boy, and every day his little baby ways became of so great interest to the lonely old man, that he was never happy after business hours until he had the little fellow in the room. He never stayed at his old tavern now for more than half an hour beyond the time it took him to eat his dinner, and even went so far as to tell two or three of his friends what he had done, and invite them home to see the child, in whom--they being themselves fathers of families--they could see nothing extraordinary, and wondered amongst themselves at old Dryce's strange infatuation.

When the boy at last grew able to crawl about, and even to walk from chair to chair, he seemed to have so grown to the old man's heart that Dryce became subject to a kind of transformation. His laugh grew more mellow, as though the violin had been laid near the fire, and played upon gently; a dozen old and forgotten picture-books were disinterred from some box, and toys strewed the floor of the dingy sitting-room. At about this time Mrs. Harris was for a week or more strangely agitated by a letter which was brought to her one morning, and came as she said from her husband, who had been for some time in Australia. Upon her recovery Mr. Dryce inquired a little into her husband's circ.u.mstances, and hearing that he was endeavouring to establish an agency in Sydney, wrote a letter requesting him to make some inquiries about a house to which Dryce & Co. had made large consignments, but whose promised remittance had not duly arrived. The old man had other matters to occupy him, however, for with something like a resumption of his old vigour and his business habits he had called for his books, for he had had some serious losses lately, and began to think it necessary to give more personal attention to the current accounts. Still every day he had his little pet into the room to play about his knees, and indeed refused to part with him even when nurse Harris came to put him to bed, often making her stay and take some wine, or consulting her as to some future provisions, for her little charge, for whom she seemed to have even more affection than the old gentleman himself.

It was late one evening that he sat talking to her in this way, but still with a rather absent manner, for his heavy ledgers and cash-books lay beside him on the table. She would have taken the child away, but Mr. Dryce told her to let him remain, and at the same time asked her to step down into the counting-house, and if Mr. Jaggers had not left for the night, to ask him to come up.

Now Mr. Jaggers had so seldom been invited to come upstairs, that, although he of course knew of the adoption of the little foundling, he had never seen the nurse; but that was scarcely any reason for her stopping on her way downstairs and pressing her hand to her side with a sudden spasm of fear.

She got down at last, however, and opening the two doors which led to the pa.s.sage, at the end of which was the private counting-house, stood there in the shadow and looked in.

Mr. Jaggers was busy at his desk tearing up papers, some of which already blazed upon the hearth. The desk itself was open, and by the light of the shaded lamp she could see that it contained a heavily bound box in which hung a bunch of keys. As she delivered Mr. Dryce's message, still in the shadow of the door, he looked up with a scared face, and dropping the lid of the desk with a loud slam, peered into the darkness.

Mrs. Harris repeated her message, and returned swiftly up the stairs, nor stopped even to go in for the child, but shut herself into her own room. Somehow or other Mr. Jaggers felt a cold perspiration break out all over him, and yet he need scarcely have been cold, for he already had his greatcoat on, and there was a decent fire in the grate burning behind a guard. Still he s.h.i.+vered, and after taking the lamp and once more looking into the entry, gave a deep sigh of relief, and in a half-absent manner locked both box and desk and carefully placed the keys in a breast pocket. Leaving the lamp still burning, he went upstairs and found Mr. Dryce alone, sitting at the table with the books open before him. He looked up as his clerk entered. "Take a seat, Jaggers," he said, "I shall want you for an hour or more, for there are several things here that require explanation."

Mr. Jaggers turned pale, but he took off his coat and laid it along with his hat on the great horsehair sofa at the other end of the room. Then both he and his employer plunged into figures, till the chimes of a distant clock sounded nine. "We must finish this the day after to-morrow, Jaggers," said Mr. Dryce. "I won't keep you longer."