The Atlantic Monthly Part 5

"LETTER OF ARTHUR.

"'Only a moment or so left to me. Goodbye, my Lina! I am dying--and without you near me. We have waited so long! It is hard to leave you alone in the world, darling. Come and live here--your own home. If you had been here but one day, things might have been otherwise. Take care of the poor--keep Mrs. Eldridge with you, she is faithful and true--true--she knows--G.o.d keep you, darling. I am so weak--there is no hope.

"'ARTHUR KIRKDALE.'

"For three days Lina lay on her bed almost without giving a sign of life,--her face rigid and colorless. She refused to eat, and only when I myself used my authority with her did any nourishment pa.s.s her lips. On the evening of the third day I became alarmed, and determined to send for a physician. I told Justine to despatch one of the servants for Dr.

B----, but to request him to come after five o'clock, when I should have returned from vespers, as I wished to see him myself. I gave my directions to Justine as we stood together at the foot of Lina's bed, in so low a whisper as to prevent, as I thought, the possibility of her hearing me. Great, then, was my astonishment, when, on leaving my room, ready for church, I met Lina on the staircase. Her face was very pale, and she clung to the banisters for support as she descended. Before I could express my surprise, she said,--

"'I feel very much better, Madame, and if you please will call the cla.s.s for English lesson at six.'

"I told her she must go back to her room,--that she should not have risen without my knowledge.

"'I must have occupation,' she replied; 'it is much better for me.'

"I felt she was right, and let her go down,--and that evening she held her cla.s.s as usual. So she continued, day after day, her accustomed round of duties, with all her usual precision and care. Her self-control annoyed me. She pa.s.sed to and fro in the house, her face pale and wan, though with a composed expression, and all my earnest entreaties that she should seek rest or relaxation were met by the same calm refusal.

Sat.u.r.day came, and I was glad to see she showed something like interest in the prospect of the letters from England that would arrive that day, and begged me to allow her to go as usual to get them at the post-office. I willingly acceded to her request, thinking the fresh air and sea-breeze would do her good. She returned with several letters, and brought them to me, seeming to desire my company while she read them.

One was from Marmaduke, one from Mr. R----, her husband's lawyer in Lincoln. The former puzzled me; it was vague and threatening, and yet there were expressions in it almost befitting a love-letter. Lina read it to me with hardly any change of expression, but dropped it from her fingers as she finished it, with a look of mingled indifference and disgust. The grave, business-like letter of the lawyer had still less effect upon her. I read it to her,--for, although in English, I had no difficulty in making out every syllable, so distinctly was it written, and with such legal precision. It informed Lina that Mr. R----felt some apprehension of her having trouble in substantiating her marriage, that his conversation with Mr. Marmaduke Kirkdale had been (although somewhat vague on the part of the latter) wholly unsatisfactory. This, and the fact that no will had as yet been found among her husband's papers, made him fear that she might be involved in lengthy and perhaps annoying legal proceedings. At the close, he desired her to write out a careful account of all the circ.u.mstances of her marriage, as it was most important that he should know all the details of the case.

"'These things weary me so!' said Lina; 'but it does not matter,' she added, sighing; 'for _his_ sake I must do this.'

"The few contemptuous words in answer to Marmaduke's letter were soon written, and she then began her reply to the letter of her lawyer. This seemed to cost her a great effort; she sighed frequently as she wrote, and at the end of two hours, as she finished the last words, her head fell on the sheet of paper before her, and she burst into tears. I could not try to check this outburst of grief, knowing that it must be a great relief to her overtaxed system after the strain of the last few days. She was soon again calm, and resumed her writing. A letter to her parents, informing them of her secret marriage and sudden widowhood, was next written, and Lina, in her plain bonnet and shawl and closely veiled, set off with the three letters to the post-office."

Here Madame paused. She smiled faintly.

"I find that I have become again unconsciously, interested in Lina, as I have told her story, and I hesitate to approach the _denoument_; but"--and she sighed delicately, not sufficiently to disperse the smile--"I must go through with this, as Lina herself used to say. One night about this time I had been writing late, and it was past midnight when I descended with my lamp in my hand to go the round of the cla.s.s-rooms, as is my wont before retiring to rest. I paused, as I pa.s.sed down the school-room, opposite the _Sainte Croix_, and repeated my _salut_ before the Holy Emblem. As I finished the last words, my eyes fell on a small slip of paper lying on Lina's desk, on which my own name was written three times, in what appeared my own handwriting,--Jeanne Clinie La P----re. A cold shudder ran through me, as if I had heard my name in the accents of my _double_. Obeying a sudden impulse, I opened Lina's desk, and seized the papers within. Uppermost lay a thick _cahier_, in which, in Lina's writing, were what at first seemed copies of all the letters she had received from England within the last few months. There were also facsimiles of letters to me from Mrs. Baxter, Mr. A. Kirkdale, and others. Then there were draughts of the same letters, written in the various handwritings with which I had become familiar, as those of Lina's and my own English correspondents. Here and there were improvements and corrections in Lina's own writing. Below these lay piles of letters,--a bundle of ten letters of my own, forming part of my correspondence with Mrs. Baxter, and which I had intrusted to Lina at various times to post. These were without envelopes, and simply tied together. I sat there for more than an hour, stupefied by this strange revelation; and then, taking the bundle of my own letters addressed to Mrs. Baxter, I went to my room.

"Next morning, when I descended to the school-room, I glanced, in pa.s.sing, at Lina, and thought I perceived a slightly fluttered, disturbed expression in her face; but I continued the usual routine of the morning's work without speaking to her. After cla.s.s was over, I sent for her to come to my room. I myself was much disturbed; _she_ was perfectly calm and collected; but as I laid the bundle of my own letters to Mrs. Baxter on the table, and demanded an explanation of their being found in her desk, she turned pale, and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the packet and held it tightly. To my question, she answered that I evidently did her great wrong, but she was used to being misunderstood; that the kindness I had shown her ent.i.tled me to an explanation, which she would not otherwise have given.

"'It is a weakness that I am ashamed of that has caused this trouble,'

she said. 'I have sat up in the lonely nights and read and re-read my letters, and then I began to copy them, copied even the handwriting, till I grew very perfect in it, and then I could not bear to destroy any of those precious words, but kept them, as I thought, in secret,--but now some one has _basely taken them from my desk_, and brought them to you. As for your letters to Mrs. Baxter, there are, I see, only one or two here. Give me only time and you shall have that cleared up also. I will write to Mrs. Baxter, beg her to explain how she let these letters get out of her possession, and ask her to inclose all the rest of your letters to her. I will take care that her answer shall come _through the post-office_, and not, as heretofore, inclosed in a letter to _me_; so that you may feel quite sure that there is no mistake, Madame La P----re.'

"I felt baffled and guilty before her; and the next three days were most uncomfortable. I could not but feel _genee_ with Lina, while she maintained the character of wounded innocence. The evening of the third day, Justine handed to me a large packet which the postman had just brought, and upon which there were ten francs to pay. It was directed to me in Mrs. Baxter's well-known handwriting. I tore open the cover, and a shower of letters fell on the table. _All_ my letters to Mrs. Baxter, and one from herself, entreating to know the reason of this 'singular request of dear Lina's.' I was disconcerted and relieved at once, when, turning the wrapper listlessly in my fingers, my eye suddenly caught, on the reverse side, and _printed_ in large letters, these words,--'This packet was sent to the Postmaster in Bristol to be reposted to ----.'

That was the end of it. I had paid ten francs for learning the agreeable fact that I had been duped,--for the satisfaction of knowing that for two years and a half I had been wasting my sympathy and even tears on a set of purely imaginary characters and the little _intrigante_ who had befooled me.

"When I showed Lina the printed words on the wrapper, she turned very pale, but maintained a stubborn silence to all my reproaches.

"'How could you deceive me so?'

"'I don't know.'

"'What reason _could_ you have?'

"'None.'

"'Lina! was there a particle of truth in anything you have told me?'

"'No, Madame.'

"This was all I could get from her; but as she left the room, she turned and said, looking at me half reproachfully, half maliciously,--

"'I suppose we had better part now. At any rate, you will at least own that I have interested you, Madame!'

"She left me two days afterwards, and the last I heard of her was in the situation of companion to a Russian Countess, with whom she was an immense favorite. She made some effort to gain possession of these letters; but I reminded her, that, as they had been written exclusively for my benefit, I considered I had a right to keep them. To this she simply answered, 'Very well, Madame.'"

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add that the story of Lina Dale is told here precisely as related to us by Madame La P----re, of course excepting the necessary changes in the names of places and persons. The three letters are not copies of the original ones in the possession of Madame La P----re, but a close transcript of them from memory,--the substance of them is identical, and in many instances the words also.

The extraordinary power shown by Lina Dale in maintaining the character she had a.s.sumed and sustained during two years and a half was fully carried out by the skill and cleverness of her pretended correspondence; and in reading over these piles of letters, so full of originality, one could not but feel regret at the perversion of powers so remarkable,--powers which might have been developed by healthy action into means of usefulness and good.

CHARLES LAMB'S UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS.

FOURTH PAPER.

Lamb's time, after his manumission from India-House, seems to have hung rather heavily upon his hands. Though the "birds of the air" were not so free as he was then, I fear they were a great deal happier and vastly more contented than our liberated and idle old clerk. Though in the first flush and excitement of his freedom from his six-and-thirty years'

confinement in a counting-house,--(he entered the office a dark-haired, bright-eyed, light-hearted boy; he left it a decrepit, silver-haired, rather melancholy, somewhat disappointed man, whose spirits, as he himself confesseth, had grown gray before his hair,)--though, when in the dizzy and happy early hours of his freedom, Elia exultingly wrote (and felt) that "a man can never have too much time to himself," the honeymoon (if I may so express it) of his emanc.i.p.ation from the

"Dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood"

was not fairly over before he felt that man's true element is labor,--that occupation, which in his younger days he had called a "fiend," was in very truth an angel,--the angel of contentment and joy.

Doctor Johnson stoutly maintained by both tongue and pen, that, in general, no one could be virtuous or happy who was not completely employed. Not only the bread we eat, but the true pleasures and real enjoyments of life, must be earned by the sweat of the brow. The poor old mill-horse, turned loose in the pasture on Sundays, seems sadly to miss his accustomed daily round of weary labor; the retired tallow-chandler, whose story has pointed so many morals and adorned so many tales, would have died of inertia and ennui in less than six months after his retirement from business, had not his successor kindly allowed him to help on melting-days; and methinks the very ghosts of certain busy and energetic men must fret and fume at the idle and inactive state of their shadowy and incorporal selves; nor, unless--as some hope and believe--we are to have our familiar and customary tasks and duties to perform in heaven, could their souls be happy and contented in Paradise.

But--after this rather foolish and wholly unnecessary digression--to return to Lamb. Elia, who had while a toil-worn clerk so carefully and frugally husbanded every odd moment and spare hour of time,--who, after his day's labor at India-House was over, had read so many ma.s.sive old folios, and written so many pleasant pages for the pleasure and solacement of himself, and a choice and select number of men and women,--now that he had the whole long day to himself, read but little, and wrote but seldom.

And as for those long walks in the country, which he talked of so fondly in some of his letters to his friends,--those walks to Hoddesdon, to Amwell, to Windsor, and other towns and villages in the near vicinity of London, which he had enjoyed in antic.i.p.ation a few years before he had the leisure actually to take them,--those long walks on "fine Isaac-Walton mornings," were found to be, it must be confessed, rather tiresome and unsatisfactory. They were most melancholy failures, when compared--as Elia could not help comparing them--with the pleasant walks he and Mary had taken years before to Enfield, and Potter's-Bar, and Waltham. Nay, even the "saunterings in Bond Street," the "digressions into Soho," to explore book-stalls, the visits to print-shops and picture-galleries, soon ceased to afford Lamb much real pleasure or enjoyment. Yea, London itself, with all its wonders and marvels, with all its (to him) memories and a.s.sociations, he found to be, to one who had nothing to do but wander idly and purposeless through her thronged and busy streets and thoroughfares,--a mere looker-on in Vienna,--a somewhat dreary and melancholy place. Indeed, the London of 1825-30 was a far different place to Elia from the London of twenty years before, when he resided at No. 4, Inner-Temple Lane, (near the place of his "kindly engendure,") and gave his famous Wednesday-evening parties, ("Oh!" exclaims Hazlitt, "for the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a _pet.i.t souvenir_ to their memory!") and when Jem White, and Ned P----, and Holcroft, and Captain Burney, and other of his old friends and jovial companions were alive and merry.

And now, in these later years and altered times, when even the old memories and the old a.s.sociations seemed to have lost their power over him, and gone were most of "the old familiar faces," and when he felt as if the game of life were scarcely worth the candle, our melancholy and forlorn old humorist thus sadly and pathetically writes to the Quaker poet:--"But town, with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was. The streets, the shops, are left, but all old friends are gone. And in London I was frightfully convinced of this, as I pa.s.sed houses and places, empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody.

The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old chums, that lived so long and flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. When I took leave of our adopted young friend at Charing Cross, 'twas a heavy unfeeling rain, and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none, and not a sympathizing house to turn to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house, but it was large and straggling,--one of the individuals of my old long knot of friends, card-players, pleasant companions, that have tumbled to pieces, into dust and other things; and I got home on Thursday, convinced that it was better to get home to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner." And at Enfield Elia was far from being happy or contented. Winter, however,--"confining, room-keeping winter," with its short days and long evenings, and cozy, comfortable fireside and cheerful candle-light,--he succeeded in pa.s.sing tolerably pleasantly there; but the "deadly long days" of summer--"all-day days," he called them, "with but a half-hour's candle-light, and no fire-light"--were fearfully dull, wearisome, and unprofitable to him, "a scorner of the fields," an exile from London.

And he thought, as he strolled through the green lanes and along the pleasant country-roads in the vicinity of Enfield, of the days when he was

"A clerk in London gay,"

and sighed for the drudgery and confinement of the counting-house, and longed to take his seat again at his old desk at India-House. In brief, Lamb felt that he should be happier and better, if he had something to do. And partly to amuse himself, and partly to a.s.sist a friend, he employed himself for a few months in a pleasant and congenial task. "I am going through a course of reading at the Museum," he writes to Bernard Barton,--"the Garrick plays, out of part of which I formed my Specimens. I have two thousand to go through; and in a few weeks have despatched the t.i.the of 'em. It is a sort of office-work to me; hours, ten to four, the same. It does me good. Men must have regular occupation that have been used to it." And in another (later) letter to Barton he says, "I am giving the fruit of my old play-reading to Hone, who sets forth a portion weekly in the 'Table-Book.'" And he not only furnished the "Table-Book" with specimens of the Garrick plays, but he wrote for that work, and the "Every-Day Book," a number of pleasant, characteristic little sketches and essays. We herewith present the reader with one of the best and most remarkable of these articles. Of course all will observe, and admire, the humorous, yet very gentle, loving, almost pathetic manner in which Elia describes the person and character of Mary's old usher,--

CAPTAIN STARKEY.

To the Editor of the "Every-Day Book":--

DEAR SIR,--I read your account of this unfortunate being, and his forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, "I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics," etc.; when I started as one does on the recognition of an old acquaintance in a supposed stranger. This, then, was that Starkey of whom I have heard my sister relate so many pleasant anecdotes, and whom, never having seen, I yet seem almost to remember.

For nearly fifty years she had lost all sight of him; and, behold! the gentle usher of her youth, grown into an aged beggar, dubbed with an opprobrious t.i.tle to which he had no pretensions, an object and a May-game! To what base purposes may we not return! What may not have been the meek creature's sufferings, what his wanderings, before he finally settled down in the comparative comfort of an old hospitaller of the almonry of Newcastle? And is poor Starkey dead?

I was a scholar of that "eminent writer" that he speaks of; but Starkey had quitted the school about a year before I came to it. Still the odor of his merits had left a fragrancy upon the recollection of the elder pupils. The school-room stands where it did, looking into a discolored, dingy garden, in the pa.s.sage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings. It is still a school,--though the main prop, alas! has fallen so ingloriously,--and bears a Latin inscription over the entrance in the lane, which was unknown in our humbler times. Heaven knows what "languages" were taught in it then! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it but a little of our native English. By "mathematics," reader, must be understood "cyphering." It was, in fact, a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, etc., in the evening. Now Starkey presided, under Bird, over both establishments. In my time, Mr. Cook, now or lately a respectable singer and performer at Drury-Lane Theatre, and nephew to Mr. Bird, had succeeded to him. I well remember Bird. He was a squat, corpulent, middle-sized man, with something of the gentleman about him, and that peculiar mild tone--especially while he was inflicting punishment--which is so much more terrible to children than the angriest looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent; but when they took place, the correction was performed in a private room adjoining, where we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the decorum and the solemnity. But the ordinary public chastis.e.m.e.nt was the bastinado, a stroke or two on the palm with that almost obsolete weapon now, the ferule. A ferule was a sort of flat ruler, widened at the inflicting end into a shape resembling a pear,--but nothing like so sweet,--with a delectable hole in the middle to raise blisters, like a cupping-gla.s.s. I have an intense recollection of that disused instrument of torture, and the malignancy, in proportion to the apparent mildness, with which its strokes were applied. The idea of a rod is accompanied with something ludicrous; but by no process can I look back upon this blister-raiser with anything but unmingled horror. To make him look more formidable,--if a pedagogue had need of these heightenings,--Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters, the strange figures upon which we used to interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering. But, boyish fears apart, Bird, I believe, was, in the main, a humane and judicious master.

Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other; and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position; the first copy I wrote after, with its moral lesson, "Art improves Nature"; the still earlier pot-hooks and the hangers, some traces of which I fear may yet be apparent in this ma.n.u.script; the truant looks sidelong to the garden, which seemed a mockery of our imprisonment; the prize for best spelling, which had almost turned my head, and which to this day I cannot reflect upon without a vanity which I ought to be ashamed of; our little leaden inkstands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the desks; the bright, punctually washed morning fingers, darkening gradually with another and another ink-spot! What a world of little a.s.sociated circ.u.mstances, pains, and pleasures, mingling their quotas of pleasure, arise at the reading of those few simple words,--"Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics, in Fetter Lane, Holborn"!