Ellen Middleton-A Tale Part 15

I raised my head slowly--Edward was gone; I rushed to the door to call him back, but was met by the servant, who was come to answer the drawing-room bell. My uncle and aunt came into the room at the same time, and I retired to mine, to pa.s.s another night betwixt hours of waking misery, and moments of broken and feverish sleep.

At six o'clock in the morning I was woke out of one of these last, by the sound of carriage-wheels. Jumping out of bed, I went to the window, and unclosing the shutter, I saw Edward's carriage rolling away along the avenue, and ours being packed in the court below. I felt glad that we were going too; glad that we were going to London; glad that there was something to think of--to talk of--to do. _Glad!_ what a misuse of words.

G.o.d knows, there was no gladness in my heart that morning, but it was something to be able to forget myself occasionally in the bustle and excitement around me. Mr. and Mrs. Middleton were not aware that anything had pa.s.sed between Edward and myself. They mentioned him several times in the course of the day, and spoke of seeing him in London in three weeks' time.

At seven that evening we arrived in London, where I had not been for several years before; its immensity, the perpetual noise of carriages, the heaviness of the atmosphere, made me feel in another state of existence, and when giddy with the rapid motion of the carriage, flushed by the sudden transition from the cold night air to the vicinity of a blazing coal fire, I sat down to dinner in the small front dining-room of a house in Brook-street. It was only the uneasiness which I felt at the idea that any moment might bring Henry Lovell into my presence, that made me aware that nothing in myself or in my fate was changed. Really very much fatigued, I begged to go to bed, immediately after dinner, and, for many hours, slept heavily, in oblivion of all I had suffered, and all I feared.

CHAPTER X.

"Some kinds of baseness Are n.o.bly undergone, and most poor matters Point to rich ends."

SHAKESPEARE.

The next morning, after breakfast, I asked Mrs. Middleton what were her plans for the day. She told me she had got a note from Henry after I had gone to bed the evening before, to ask her when and where she wished to see him; that she had sent him word to come to her before two o'clock, but that she thought I had better not be present at their first interview.

I instantly proposed to her to go to Alice as soon as I could be sure that Henry had left his house, and prepare her for the visit which I knew my aunt intended to make to her in the afternoon, or else to bring her back with me to Brookstreet. I felt I had better meet Henry again in her presence than alone.

Mrs. Middleton agreed to all this; and I went to my room to wait there for his arrival, which was to be the signal for my departure. In about an hour's time I heard a knock at the house-door, and having ascertained that Henry was with his sister, I got into the carriage, and drove off to--Street.

I remember that accidentally I had in my hands a card of address which my maid had just given me for some shop in Regent-street, with a long list, in small print, at its back, of the various articles to be procured there, and that I read it over and over again, with that nervous attention which we give to anything that will fix our eyes, and the mechanical part of our thoughts, when we are in a state of restless impatience. The carriage stopped at No. 3, in--Street, and I told the servant to inquire if Mrs. Lovell was at home. The door was opened by a man who had been Henry's servant since he went first to Oxford, and who, on seeing me, came up to the carriage, and told me that Mrs. Lovell was in the square; but that if I would walk in, and wait a few minutes, he would go and tell her that I was come.

I followed him up the narrow carpeted stairs; he opened the door of the back drawing-room, and left me there. For a moment I sat down on the nearest chair to subdue the quick beating of my heart. I then looked about me, and examined Alice's room.

It was furnished just as most rooms in London are furnished, where no particular care has been taken to superintend their arrangement. There were blue striped sofas and chairs, a large table and a little table, blue and muslin curtains, and that was all. Everything was in the nicest order possible. On the small table which was placed near the window, with a chair before it, were laid, one upon the other, the same Bible and Prayer Book which I had seen in the closet at Bridman; in a bookcase between the chimney and the window were ranged the same books which had stood there on the wooden shelf; on the round table were a few flowers in a gla.s.s, and a basket containing some hemming. There was no fire in the chimney, and the room felt rather cold.

After a few minutes had elapsed, the door opened and Alice came in. As she came up to me, her perfect calmness gave me at once that self-possession which I had vainly struggled for before-hand. As I kissed her, and sat down by her side, it felt to me like entering a church on a hot and dusty summer's day; like leaving behind me the glare and the noise of the busy world without; like plunging into those

"Arched retreats, where pa.s.sion's thirst is calmed, And care's unthankful gloom." *

[* Lyra Apostolica.]

She was simply dressed in a brown silk gown. As she took off her straw bonnet, and laid it, and a handful of daisies by it, on the table, she turned to me with one of those grave smiles which were peculiar to her, and said--

"I have longed to see you again, I am so glad you are come. It seemed to me as if the trees would never get their leaves in London; but they are growing at last, and you are come. But you are looking pale. You are not ill, I hope?"

"No; only very tired, Alice. I am unused to London, and the noise stuns and bewilders me. You look just as you did a year ago at Bridman."

A slight colour rose in her cheek at the name of Bridman. "I was a child _then_, though an old one, and now--"

As she paused I said, "Now a woman, and a happy one I hope, dear Alice."

She turned her large blue eyes full upon me, something like a sigh rose in her throat, and she only said, in so low a voice that I could hardly catch the sound, "G.o.d is everywhere!"

After this answer I did not feel courage to speak to her of Henry, of her own relations, of the circ.u.mstances attending her marriage, of anything, in short, that could cause her pain or disturbance, and I therefore asked her how she spent her time in London.

"That will be easily described," she said; "for in London one day exactly resembles another,--in its employment, at least."

"Does it really?" I exclaimed; for this was certainly not my idea of a London life.

"Yes," she replied. "I get up every day at six o'clock; and, after attending to some of my household concerns, I walk to Church, at St. Margaret's, where there is a service every morning. It feels almost like the country to walk at that hour."

"You must have found it piercingly cold in the winter?"

"It was cold enough sometimes; but lately it has been so mild that I walk slowly by the balconies to smell longer the mignonette which fills them. After Church comes breakfast; and then I go to the square."

"To walk there?"

"Yes; a kind of a walk."

"Alone?"

"Oh, no; I have plenty of companions--but never mind that. I will tell it you all another time."

"No; tell it me now; it interests me so much."

"It will make you think me a child still, though we said I was a woman just now. Well, then, first there are the birds,--the black, starved, unhappy-looking London birds; you cannot think how pleased they are with the seed and the crumbs which I take them every morning. I have chosen a particular old thorn-tree for our meeting-place; its leaves are beginning now to peep out, and it will be a great day for the birds and me when its white blossoms appear. As it is, they flock to it quick enough when I come into the square, and seem almost to call to me to make haste."

"You love them, Alice, as you used to love your Pa.s.sion Flower?"

"Not exactly; I loved my Pa.s.sion Flower because it did me good; my birds I love because I do _them_ good. But I have greater friends than these in the square; friends that run to me too when I come in--the darling children."

"How do you love _them_, Alice?"

"Oh, as G.o.d's own chosen ones, whose Angels behold his face in Heaven. They seem so very _near_ Heaven. Will you come some day into the square with me, Miss Middleton?"

"Call me Ellen, and I will go with you wherever you like."

"Well, then, dear Ellen, you must come and see those I love best. There is one so like Johnny!" (her eyes filled with tears as she said this) "only that he looks as if he belonged to some n.o.ble race, like those that the verses talk about; and another looks like the picture in my prayer-book of young David going to fight Goliath. I am so happy with them that I sometimes forget myself, and stay longer in the square than I ought."

"Why, what have you to do afterwards?"

"Oh, then, it is time to go to the hospital."

"What do you mean? What hospital?"

"The hospital in--Place. I go there every day for five or six hours."

"What to do?"

"Whatever they give me to do."

"I don't understand you, Alice."

"You mean how I got leave to go there? I will tell you;--one of the nurses, sisters they call them now, knew me when we lived at Bromley, and two or three times I had met her in the street, and talked with her. She took me one day with her into the hospital to see a poor woman who had broken her leg; she was in sad distress of mind, and could not bear to be left alone, and, as the sisters had too much to do to sit much by her bed-side, they were glad enough to leave me with her. Ever since, I have gone there almost every day, and they always find something or other for me to do."

"And when you leave the hospital, what do you do?"