Mattie:-A Stray Volume I Part 31

THE PLAN FRUSTRATED.

Yes, the house in Great Suffolk Street had been again visited by "the dangerous cla.s.ses." It was a house well watched, or a house that was doomed to be unfortunate in its latter days. A house left in charge of a girl of seventeen, therefore likely to have its weak points, and considered worth watching in the dark hours. This was Mattie's idea upon awakening to the conviction of a second successful attempt upon Mr.

Wesden's property; but Mattie was wrong.

The robbery was the result of accident and neglect, as most robberies are in this world. A youth had entered the shop to make a small purchase, and hammered honestly on the counter with the edge of his penny piece--a youth of no principle, certainly, brought up ragged, dirty, ignorant, and saucy--a Borough boy. Fate and the devil contrived that Mattie should be absorbed in the love-story of Harriet Wesden at the time, and the boy finding no attention paid to his summons, looked over the shop blind, saw the rapt position of the parlour occupants, dropped upon his hands and knees like a lad brought up to the "profession," and slid insidiously towards the till, which he found locked and keyless. Fortune being against his possession of any current coin of the realm, the young vagabond turned his attention to stock, and in less time than it takes to sum up his defalcations, had appropriated and made off with a very large parcel underneath the counter--a parcel that Wiggins, wholesale stationers of Cannon Street, had just forwarded by London Parcels' Delivery Company to order of John Wesden, Esq., and which parcel had been found almost too large to decamp with.

Mattie thought no more of Harriet Wesden's troubles; here was a second instance of her carelessness--of her incapacity for business. What would Mr. Wesden think now; he who had been so cold and strange to her after the last robbery? And what did she deserve?--she who had had a trust committed to her and abused it.

Mattie did not give way to any ebullition of tears; she was a girl with considerable self-command, and only betrayed her agitation by her whiter face. She did all that lay in her power to remedy the great error, leaving Harriet Wesden in charge of the shop whilst she ran down Great Suffolk Street and towards the Borough, hoping to overtake the robber.

Straight to Kent Street went Mattie; thieves would be sure to make for Kent Street--all the years of her honest life faded away like a dream, and she ran at once to the house of a receiver of stolen goods, a house that she had known herself in the old guilty past.

Her hand was on the latch of the door, when a policeman touched her on the arm,

"Do you want anything here?"

"I've been robbed of a large parcel--I thought they must have brought it here."

"Why here?"

"This is Simes's--this used to be Simes's--surely."

"Yes, and it's Simes's still; but n.o.body's been here with a parcel. You haven't been and left n.o.body in Mr. Wesden's shop?" was his inelegant query.

Mattie did not remark that the policeman knew her then; she was too excited by her loss.

"Mr. Wesden's daughter's there."

"Then you had better come round to the police-station, and state your loss, Miss."

Mattie thought so too; she went to the police station, mentioned the facts of the robbery, the nature of the parcel stolen, &c, and then returned very grave and disconsolate to Great Suffolk Street, to find three customers waiting to be served, Harriet turning over drawer after drawer in search of the goods required, and one woman waiting for change, which Harriet, having mislaid her own purse, and found the till locked, was unable to give her.

Mattie turned to business again, attended to the customers, and then re-entered the parlour.

"It cannot be helped, and I must make the best of it," said Mattie; "I don't mind the loss it is to me, who'll pay for it out of my own earnings, as I do the vexation it will be to your father."

"Leave it to me, Mattie," said Harriet; "when I go home this evening, I will tell him exactly how it occurred, and how it was not your fault but mine. And, Mattie, I intend to pay for it myself, and not have your hard earnings entrenched upon."

"You're not in trust here," said Mattie, somewhat shortly; "if I don't pay for it, I shall be unhappy all my life."

"Then it's over and done with, and I wouldn't fret about it," said Harriet, suddenly finding herself in the novel position of comforter.

"I never fret--and I said that I would make the best of it," replied Mattie, placing her chair at the parlour door, half within the room and half in the shop; "and if I'm ever tricked again whilst I remain here, it's very odd to me."

Harriet Wesden, not much impressed by so matter-of-fact event as a robbery, was anxious to return to the subject which more closely affected herself; the parcel, after all, was of no great value; the police were doubtless looking for the thief; let the matter be pa.s.sed over for the present, and the great distress of her unsettled mind be once more gravely dwelt upon! This was scarcely selfishness--for Harriet Wesden was not a selfish girl--it was rather an intense craving for support in the hard task of shattering another's hopes.

They had tea together in that little back parlour, and Harriet found it difficult work to keep Mattie's thoughts directed to the subject upon which advice had been given before the theft.

"You will not think of me," she said at last, reproachfully; "and what does it matter about that rubbis.h.i.+ng parcel?"

"What can I do for you, more?" asked Mattie, wearily. Her head ached very much with all the excitement of that day, and she was inwardly praying for the time to pa.s.s, and the boy to put the shutters up. The robbery was _not_ of great importance, and she wondered why it troubled her so much, and rendered her anxiety for others, just for a while, of secondary interest. Did she see looming before her the shadow of her coming trial; was there foreknowledge of all in store for her, stealing in upon her that dark December's night? She was superst.i.tions enough to think so afterwards, when the end had come and life had wholly changed with her!

After tea, Mattie's impression became less vivid, for Harriet's nervousness was on the increase. The stern business of life gave way to the romance--stern enough also at that time--of Harriet Wesden. It was close on seven o'clock, and every minute might bring the well-known form and figure home.

"I shan't know what to say," said Harriet; "it seems out of place to ask him in here, and coolly begin at once to tell him not to think of me any more, just as he comes home from business, tired and weary, too, poor Sid! Shall I write to him?--I'll begin the letter now, and leave it here for you to give him. Oh! I can't face him--I shall never be able to face him, and tell him how fickle-minded I am!"

"Write to him if you wish then, Harriet; perhaps it is best, and will spare you both some pain."

"Yes, yes, I'll write," said Harriet, opening Mattie's desk instantly, and sending its neatly arranged contents flying right and left; "it _is_ much the better way--why make a scene of it?--I hate scenes! And I'm not fickle-minded, Mattie," suddenly reverting to her self-accusation of a moment since; "for I had a right to think for myself, and choose for myself--we were not to be engaged till next month; and I did like him once--I do now, somehow! If _he_ will only think well of me afterwards, and not despise me, poor fellow, and believe that I had a right to turn away from him, if my heart said that I was not suitable for him at the last. If he--Mattie, _where_ do you keep your pens?"

Mattie remarked that she had turned the box full amongst the letter-paper. Harriet sat herself down to write the letter after much preparation and agitation; Mattie looked at her, sitting there, in the full light of the gas above her head, and thought how pretty a _child_ she looked--how unfit to cope with the world's harshness--how lucky for her that she was the only child of parents who had made money for her, and so smoothed one road in life at least. Yes, more a child than a woman even then; captious, excitable, easily influenced, swayed by a pa.s.sing gust of pa.s.sion like a leaf, trembling at the present, at the future, always unresolved, and yet always, by her trust and confidence in others, even by her sympathy for others, to be loved.

Mattie went into the shop, leaving Harriet to compose her epistle; after a while, and when she was brooding on the parcel again, and wondering if Mrs. Watts were at the bottom of the robbery, Harriet called her. She took her place again on the neutral ground, between parlour and shop, and found Harriet very much discomfited; her face flushed, her fair hair ruffled about her ears, her blue eyes full of tears.

"I don't know what to say--I can't think of anything that's kind enough, and good enough for _him_. What would you say, Mattie?"

"And you that have had so much money spent on your education to ask me--still a poor, ignorant, half-taught girl, Miss Harriet!"

"I'm too flurried to collect my thoughts--I _can't_ think of the right words," she said; "I can't tell him of Mr. Darcy before Mr. Darcy has spoken to me--and I--I don't like to write down that I--I don't love him--never did love him--it looks so spiteful, dear! Mattie, what would you say?"

"I should simply tell him the story which you told me."

"He might show the letter to father and mother, who are anxious--oh!

much more anxious than you fancy--to marry me to Sidney."

"They know his value, Harriet."

"And then it will all come at once to trouble them, instead of breaking it by degrees. Well, it's my fate. I must not keep it from them."

"No. How much have you written?"

"'Dear Sidney'--and--and the day of the month, of course. Oh! dear--here he is!"

Away went paper and pens into the desk again, and the desk cleared from the table, and turned topsy-turvy on to a chair.

"Oh! the top of the ink-stand's out--look here!--oh! what a mess there'll be!" cried Mattie.

Harriet reversed the desk.

"Perhaps it's not all spilt--I'm very sorry to have made such a mess of it, and--and it's only Sidney's father, after all. Don't tell him I'm here."

The old gentleman came into the shop, and nodded towards Mattie standing in the doorway.

"Has my boy come home?" he asked.

"Not yet, sir."

The father's countenance a.s.sumed a doleful expression on the instant--life without his boy was scarcely worth having.