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Mistress and Maid: A Household Story

by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik · English · Gutenberg #13461 · 636,845 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mistress and Maid: A Household Story

Author: Dinah Maria Mulock Craik


        
Release date: September 15, 2004 [eBook #13461]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13461

Credits: This ebook was formatted and edited by Robin Eugene Escovado


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISTRESS AND MAID: A HOUSEHOLD STORY ***

This ebook was formatted and edited by Robin Eugene Escovado




MISTRESS AND MAID. A Household Story.

BY

MISS MULOCH, AUTHOR OF
"JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN," "OLIVE," "THE OGILVIES,"
"THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY," "NOTHING NEW," "AGATHA'S HUSBAND," &c,, &c.

RICHMOND:
WEST & JOHNSTON, PUBLISHERS.
1864. Printed at the Lynchburg "Virginian" Book and Job Office.


MISTRESS AND MAID.



CHAPTER I.

She was a rather tall, awkward, and strongly-built girl of about
fifteen. This was the first impression the "maid" gave to her
"mistresses," the Misses Leaf, when she entered their kitchen,
accompanied by her mother, a widow and washer-woman, by name Mrs.
Hand. I must confess, when they saw the damsel, the ladies felt a
certain twinge of doubt as to whether they had not been rash in
offering to take her; whether it would not have been wiser to have
gone on in their old way--now, alas! grown into a very old way, so as
almost to make them forget they had ever had any other--and done
without a servant still.

Many consultations had the three sisters held before such a
revolutionary extravagance was determined on. But Miss Leaf was
beginning both to look and to feel "not so young as she had been;"
Miss Selina ditto; though, being still under forty, she would not
have acknowledged it for the world. And Miss Hilary young, bright,
and active as she was, could by no possibility do every thing that
was to be done in the little establishment: be, for instance, in
three places at once--in the school-room, teaching little boys and
girls, in the kitchen cooking dinner, and in the rooms up stairs busy
at house-maid's work. Besides, much of her time was spent in waiting
upon "poor Selina," who frequently was, or fancied her self, too ill
to take any part in either the school or house duties.

Though, the thing being inevitable, she said little about it, Miss
Leaf's heart was often sore to see Hilary's pretty hands smeared with
blacking of grates, and roughened with scouring of floors. To herself
this sort of thing had become natural--but Hilary!

All the time of Hilary's childhood, the youngest of the family had of
course, been spared all house-work; and afterward her studies had
left no time for it. For she was a clever girl, with a genuine love
of knowledge Latin, Greek, and even the higher branches of arithmetic
and mathematics, were not beyond her range; and this she found much
more interesting than washing dishes or sweeping floors. True, she
always did whatever domestic duty she was told to do; but her bent
was not in the household line. She had only lately learned to "see
dust," to make a pudding, to iron a shirt; and, moreover, to reflect,
as she woke up to the knowledge of how these things should be done,
and how necessary they were, what must have been her eldest sister's
lot during all these twenty years! What pains, what weariness, what
eternal toil must Johanna have silently endured in order to do all
those things which till now had seemed to do themselves!

Therefore, after much cogitation as to the best and most prudent way
to amend matters, and perceiving with her clear common sense that,
willing as she might be to work in the kitchen, her own time would be
much more valuably spent in teaching their growing school. It was
Hilary who these Christmas holidays, first started the bold idea, "We
must have a servant;" and therefore, it being necessary to begin with
a very small servant on very low wages, (£3 per annum was, I fear the
maximum), did they take this Elizabeth Hand. So, hanging behind her
parent, an anxious-eyed, and rather sad-voiced woman, did Elizabeth
enter the kitchen of the Misses Leaf.

The ladies were all there. Johanna arranging the table for their
early tea: Selina lying on the sofa trying to cut bread and butter:
Hilary on her knees before the fire, making the bit of toast, her
eldest sister's one luxury. This was the picture that her three
mistresses presented to Elizabeth's eyes: which, though they seemed
to notice nothing, must, in reality, have noticed every thing.

"I've brought my daughter, ma'am, as you sent word you'd take on
trial," said Mrs. Hand, addressing herself to Selina, who, as the
tallest, the best dressed, and the most imposing, was usually
regarded by strangers as the head of the family.

"Oh. Joanna, my dear."

Miss Leaf came forward, rather uncertainly, for she was of a shy
nature, and had been so long accustomed to do the servant's work of
the household, that she felt quite awkward in the character of
mistress. Instinctively she hid her poor hands, that would at once
have betrayed her to the sharp eyes of the working-woman, and then,
ashamed of her momentary false pride, laid them outside her apron and
sat down.

"Will you take a chair, Mrs. Hand? My sister told you. I believe all
our requirements We only want a good, intelligent girl. We are
willing to teach her every thing."

"Thank you, kindly; and I be willing and glad for her to learn,
ma'am," replied the mother, her sharp and rather free tone subdued in
spite of herself by the gentle voice of Miss Leaf. Of course, living
in the same country town, she knew all about the three
school-mistresses, and how till now they had kept no servant. "It's
her first place, and her'll be awk'ard at first, most like. Hold up
your head, Lizabeth."

"Is her name Elizabeth?"

"Far too long and too fine," observed Selina from the sofa. "Call her
Betty."

"Any thing you please, Miss; but I call her Lizabeth. It wor my young
missis' name in my first place, and I never had a second."

"We will call her Elizabeth," said Miss Leaf, with the gentle
decision she could use on occasion.

There was a little more discussion between the mother and the future
mistress as to holidays, Sundays, and so on, during which time the
new servant stood silent and impassive in the door-way between the
back kitchen and the kitchen, or, as it is called in those regions,
the house-place.

As before said, Elizabeth was by no means, a personable girl, and her
clothes did not set her off to advantage. Her cotton frock hung in
straight lines down to her ankles, displaying her clumsily shod feet
and woolen stockings; above it was a pinafore--a regular child's
pinafore, of the cheap, strong, blue-speckled print which in those
days was generally worn. A little shabby shawl, pinned at the throat,
and pinned very carelessly and crookedly, with an old black bonnet,
much too small for her large head and her quantities of ill kept
hair, completed the costume. It did not impress favorably a lady who,
being, or rather having been very handsome herself, was as much alive
to appearances as the second Miss Leaf.

She made several rather depreciatory observations, and insisted
strongly that the new servant should only be taken "on trial," with
no obligation to keep her a day longer than they wished. Her feeling
on the matter communicated itself to Johanna, who closed the
negotiation with Mrs. Hand, by saying.

"Well, let us hope your daughter will suit us. We will give her a
fair chance at all events."

"Which is all I can ax for, Miss Leaf. Her bean't much to look at,
but her's willin' sharp, and her's never told me a lie in her life.
Courtesy to thy missis, and say thee'lt do thy best, Lizabeth."

Pulled forward Elizabeth did courtesy, but she never offered to
speak. And Miss Leaf, feeling that for all parties the interview had
better be shortened, rose from her chair.

Mrs. Hand took the hint and departed, saying only, "Good-by,
Lizabeth," with a nod, half-encouraging, half-admonitory, which
Elizabeth silently returned. That was all the parting between mother
and daughter; they neither kissed nor shook hands, which
undemonstrative farewell somewhat surprised Hilary.

Now, Miss Hilary Leaf had all this while gone on toasting. Luckily
for her bread the fire was low and black; meantime, from behind her
long drooping curls (which Johanna would not let her "turn up,"
though she was twenty), she was making her observations on the new
servant. It might be that, possessing more head than the one and more
heart than the other, Hilary was gifted with deeper perception of
character than either of her sisters, but certainly her expression,
as she watched Elizabeth, was rather amused and kindly that
dissatisfied.

"Now, girl, take off your bonnet," said Selina, to whom Johanna had
silently appealed in her perplexity as to the next proceeding with
regard to the new member of the household.

Elizabeth obeyed, and then stood, irresolute, awkward, and wretched
to the last degree, at the furthest end of the house-place.

"Shall I show you where to hang up your things?" said Hilary,
speaking for the first time; and at the new voice, so quick,
cheerful, and pleasant, Elizabeth visibly started.

Miss Hilary rose from her knees, crossed the kitchen, took from the
girl's unresisting hands the old black bonnet and shawl, and hung
them up carefully on a nail behind the great eight-day clock. It was
a simple action, done quite without intention, and accepted without
acknowledgment, except one quick glance of that keen, yet soft grey
eye; but years and years after Elizabeth reminded Hilary of it.

And now Elizabeth stood forth in her own proper likeness, unconcealed
by bonnet or shawl, or maternal protection. The pinafore scarcely
covered her gaunt neck and long arms; that tremendous head of rough,
dusky hair was evidently for the first time gathered into a comb.
Thence elf locks escaped in all directions, and were forever being
pushed behind her ears, or rubbed (not smoothed; there was nothing
smooth about her) back from her forehead, which, Hilary noticed, was
low, broad, and full. The rest of her face, except the
before-mentioned eyes was absolutely and undeniably plain. Her
figure, so far as the pinafore exhibited it, was undeveloped and
ungainly, the chest being contracted and the shoulders rounded, as if
with carrying children or other weights while still a growing girl.
In fact, nature and circumstances had apparently united in dealing
unkindly with Elizabeth Hand.

Still here she was; and what was to be done with her?

Having sent her with the small burden, which was apparently all her
luggage, to the little room--formerly a box-closet--where she was to
sleep, the Misses Leaf--or as facetious neighbors called them, the
Miss Leaves--took serious counsel together over their tea.

Tea itself suggested the first difficulty. They were always in the
habit of taking that meal, and indeed every other, in the kitchen. It
saved time, trouble, and fire, besides leaving the parlor always tidy
for callers, chiefly pupils' parents, and preventing these latter
from discovering that the three orphan daughters of Henry Leaf, Esq.,
solicitor, and sisters of Henry Leaf, Junior, Esq., also solicitor,
but whose sole mission in life seemed to have been to spend every
thing, make every body miserably, marry, and die, that these three
ladies did always wait upon themselves at meal-time, and did
sometimes breakfast without butter, and dine without meat. Now this
system would not do any longer.

"Besides, there is no need for it," said Hilary, cheerfully. "I am
sure we can well afford both to keep and to feed a servant, and to
have a fire in the parlor every day. Why not take our meals there,
and sit there regularly of evenings?"

"We must," added Selina, decidedly. "For my part, I couldn't eat, or
sew, or do any thing with that great hulking girl sitting starting
opposite, or standing; for how could we ask her to sit with us?
Already, what must she have thought of us--people who take tea in the
kitchen?"

"I do not think that matters," said the eldest sister, gently, after
a moment's silence. "Every body in the town knows who and what we
are, or might, if they chose to inquire. We cannot conceal our
poverty if we tried; and I don't think any body looks down upon us
for it. Not even since we began to keep school, which you thought was
such a terrible thing, Selina."

"And it was. I have never reconciled myself to teaching the baker's
two boys and the grocer's little girl. You were wrong, Johanna, you
ought to have drawn the line somewhere, and it ought to have excluded
trades-people."

"Beggars can not be choosers," began Hilary.

"Beggars!" echoed Selina.

"No, my dear, we were never that," said Miss Leaf, interposing
against one of the sudden storms that were often breaking out between
these two. "You know well we have never begged or borrowed from any
body, and hardly ever been indebted to any body, except for the extra
lessons that Mr. Lyon would insist upon giving to Ascott at home."

Here Johanna suddenly stopped, and Hilary, with a slight color rising
in her face, said--

"I think, sisters, we are forgetting that the staircase is quite
open, and though I am sure she has an honest look and not that of a
listener, still Elizabeth might hear. Shall I call her down stairs,
and tell her to light a fire in the parlor?"

While she is doing it, and in spite of Selina's forebodings to the
contrary, the small maiden did it quickly and well, especially after
a hint or two from Hilary--let me take the opportunity of making a
little picture of this same Hilary.

Little it should be, for she was a decidedly little woman: small
altogether, hands, feet, and figure being in satisfactory proportion.
Her movements, like those of most little women, were light and quick
rather than elegant; yet every thing she did was done with a neatness
and delicacy which gave an involuntary sense of grace and harmony.
She was, in brief, one of those people who are best described by the
word "harmonious;" people who never set your teeth on edge, or rub
you up the wrong way, as very excellent people occasionally do. Yet
she was not over-meek or unpleasantly amiable; there was a liveliness
and even briskness about her, as if the every day wine of her life
had a spice of Champagniness, not frothiness but natural
effervescence of spirit, meant to "cheer but not inebriate" a
household.

And in her own household this gift was most displayed. No centre of a
brilliant, admiring circle could be more charming, more witty, more
irresistibly amusing than was Hilary sitting by the kitchen fire,
with the cat on her knee, between her two sisters, and the school-boy
Ascott Leaf, their nephew--which four individuals, the cat being not
the least important of them, constituted the family.

In the family, Hilary shone supreme. All recognized her as the light
of the house, and so she had been, ever since she was born, ever
since her

    "Dying mother mild,
     Said, with accents undefiled,
    'Child, be mother to this child.'"

It was said to Johanna Leaf--who was not Mrs. Leaf's own child. But
the good step-mother, who had once taken the little motherless girl
to her bosom, and never since made the slightest difference between
her and her own children, knew well whom she was trusting.

From that solemn hour, in the middle of the night, when she lifted
the hour-old baby out of its dead mother's bed into her own, it
became Johanna's one object in life. Through a sickly infancy, for it
was a child born amidst trouble, her sole hands washed, dressed, fed
it; night and day it "lay in her bosom, and was unto her as a
daughter."

She was then just thirty: not too old to look forward to woman's
natural destiny, a husband and children of her own. But years slipped
by, and she was Miss Leaf still. What matter! Hilary was her
daughter.

Johanna's pride in her knew no bounds. Not that she showed it much;
indeed she deemed it a sacred duty not to show it; but to make
believe her "child" was just like other children. But she was not.
Nobody ever thought she was--even in externals.--Fate gave her all
those gifts which are sometimes sent to make up for the lack of
worldly prosperity. Her brown eyes were as soft a doves' eyes, yet
could dance with fun and mischief if they chose; her hair, brown
also, with a dark-red shade in it, crisped itself in two wavy lines
over her forehead, and then turn bled down in two glorious masses,
which Johanna, ignorant, alas! of art, called very "untidy," and
labored in vain to quell under combs, or to arrange in proper,
regular curls Her features--well, they too, were good; better than
those unartistic people had any idea of--better even than Selina's,
who in her youth had been the belle of the town. But whether
artistically correct or not, Johanna, though she would on no account
have acknowledged it, believed solemnly that there was not such a
face in the whole world as little Hillary's.

Possibly a similar idea dawned upon the apparently dull mind of
Elizabeth Hand, for she watched her youngest mistress intently, from
kitchen to parlor, and from parlor back to kitchen; and once when
Miss Hilary stood giving information as to the proper abode of broom,
bellows, etc., the little maid gazed at her with such admiring
observation that the scuttle she carried was titled, and the coals
were strewn all over the kitchen floor. At which catastrophe Miss
Leaf looked miserable. Miss Selina spoke crossly, and Ascott, who
just then came in to his tea, late as usual, burst into a shut of
laughter.

It was as much as Hilary could do to help laughing herself, she being
too near her nephew's own age always to maintain a dignified
aunt-like attitude, but nevertheless, when, having disposed of her
sisters in the parlor, she coaxed Ascott into the school-room, and
insisted upon his Latin being done--she helping him, Aunt Hilary
scolded him well, and bound him over to keep the peace toward the new
servant.

"But she is such a queer one. Exactly like a South Sea Islander. When
she stood with her grim, stolid countenance, contemplating the coals
oh, Aunt Hilary, how killing she was!"

And the regular, rollicking, irresistible boy-laugh broke out again.

"She will be great fun. Is she really to stay?"

"I hope so," said Hilary, trying to be grave. "I hope never again to
see Aunt Johanna cleaning the stairs, and getting up to light the
kitchen fire of winter mornings, as she will do if we have not a
servant to do it for her. Don't you see, Ascott?"

"Oh, I see," answered the boy, carelessly, "But don't bother me,
please. Domestic affairs are for women, not men."

Ascott was eighteen, and just about to pass out of his caterpillar
state as a doctor's apprentice-lad into the chrysalis condition of a
medical student in London. "But," with sudden reflection, "I hope she
won't be in my way. Don't let her meddle with any of my books and
things."

"No; you need not be afraid. I have put them all into your room. I
myself cleared your rubbish out of the box closet."

"The box-closet! Now, really, I can't stand--"

"She is to sleep in the box-closet; where else could she sleep?" said
Hilary, resolutely, though inly quaking a little; for somehow, the
merry, handsome, rather exacting lad bad acquired considerable
influence in this household of women. "You must put up with the loss
of your 'den.' Ascott; it would be a great shame if you did not, for
the sake of Aunt Johanna and the rest of us."

"Um!" grumbled the boy, who, though he was not a bad fellow at heart,
had a boy's dislike to "putting up" with the slightest inconvenience.

"Well, it won't last long. I shall be off shortly. What a jolly life
I'll have in London, Aunt Hilary! I'll see Mr. Lyon there too."

"Yes," said Aunt Hilary, briefly, returning to Dido and Æneas; humble
and easy Latinity for a student of eighteen; but Ascott was not a
brilliant boy, and, being apprenticed early, his education had been
much neglected, till Mr. Lyon came as usher to the Stowbury
grammar-school, and happening to meet and take an interest in him,
taught him and his Aunt Hilary Latin, Greek, and mathematics
together, of evenings.

I shall make no mysteries here. Human nature is human nature all the
world over. A tale without love in it would be unnatural, unreal--in
fact, a simple lie; for there are no histories and no lives without
love in them: if there could be, Heaven pity and pardon them, for
they would be mere abortions of humanity.

Thank Heaven, we, most of us, do not philosophize: we only live. We
like one another, we hardly know why; we love one another, we still
less know why. If on the day she first saw--in church it was--Mr.
Lyon's grave, heavy-browed, somewhat severe face--for he was a
Scotsman, and his sharp, strong Scotch features did look "hard"
beside the soft, rosy, well conditioned youth of Stowbury--if on that
Sunday any one had told Hilary Leaf that the face of this stranger
was to be the one face of her life, stamped upon brain and heart, and
soul with a vividness that no other impressions were strong enough to
efface, and retained there with a tenacity that no vicissitudes of
time, or place, or fortunes had power to alter, Hilary would--yes, I
think she would--have quietly kept looking on. She would have
accepted her lot, such as it was, with its shine and shade, its joy
and its anguish; it came to her without her seeking, as most of the
solemn things in life do; and whatever it brought with it, it could
have come from no other source than that from which all high, and
holy, and pure loves ever must come--the will and permission of GOD.

Mr. Lyon himself requires no long description. In his first visit he
had told Miss Leaf all about himself that there was to be known; that
he was, as they were, a poor teacher, who had altogether "made
himself," as so many Scotch students do. His father, whom he scarcely
remembered, had been a small Ayrshire farmer; his mother was dead,
and he had never had either brother or sister.

Seeing how clever Miss Hilary was, and how much as a schoolmistress
she would need all the education she could get, he had offered to
teach her along with her nephew; and she and Johanna were only too
thankful for the advantage. But during the teaching he had also
taught her another thing, which neither had contemplated at the
time--to respect him with her whole soul, and to love him with her
whole heart.

Over this simple fact let no more be now said. Hilary said nothing.
She recognized it herself as soon as he was gone; a plain, sad,
solemn truth, which there was no deceiving herself did not exist,
even had she wished its non-existence. Perhaps Johanna also found it
out, in her darling's extreme paleness and unusual quietness for a
while; but she too said nothing. Mr. Lyon wrote regularly to Ascott,
and once or twice to her, Miss Leaf; but though every one knew that
Hilary was his particular friend in the whole family, he did not
write to Hilary. He had departed rather suddenly, on account of some
plan which he said, affected his future very considerably; but which,
though he was in the habit of telling them his affairs, he did not
further explain. Still Johanna knew he was a good man, and though no
man could be quite good enough for her darling, she liked him, she
trusted him.

What Hilary felt none knew. But she was very girlish in some things;
and her life was all before her, full of infinite hope. By-and-by her
color returned, and her merry voice and laugh were heard about the
house just as usual.

This being the position of affairs, it was not surprising that after
Ascott's last speech Hilary's mind wandered from Dido and Æneas to
vague listening, as the lad began talking of his grand future--the
future of a medical student, all expenses being paid by his
godfather, Mr. Ascott, the merchant, of Russell Square, once a shop
boy of Stowbury.

Nor was it unnatural that all Ascott's anticipations of London
resolved themselves, in his aunt's eyes, into the one fact that he
would "see Mr. Lyon."

But in telling thus much about her mistresses, I have for the time
being lost sight of Elizabeth Hand.

Left to herself, the girl stood for a minute or two looking around
her in a confused manner, then, rousing her faculties, began
mechanically to obey the order with which her mistress had quitted
the kitchen, and to wash up the tea-things. She did it in a fashion
that, if seen, would have made Miss Leaf thankful that the ware was
only the common set, and not the cherished china belonging to former
days: still she did it, noisily it is true, but actively, as if her
heart were in her work. Then she took a candle and peered about her
new domains.

These were small enough; at least they would have seemed so to other
eyes than Elizabeth's; for, until the school-room and box-closet
above had been kindly added by the landlord, who would have done any
thing to show his respect for the Misses Leaf, it had been merely a
six-roomed cottage--parlor kitchen, back kitchen, and three upper
chambers. It was a very cozy house notwithstanding, and it seemed to
Elizabeth's eyes a perfect palace.

For several minutes more she stood and contemplated her kitchen, with
the fire shining on the round oaken stand in the centre, and the
large wooden-bottomed chairs, and the loud-ticking clock, with its
tall case, the inside of which, with its pendulum and weights, had
been a perpetual mystery and delight, first to Hilary's and then to
Ascott's childhood. Then there was the sofa, large and ugly, but, oh!
so comfortable, with its faded, flowered chintz, washed and worn for
certainly twenty years. And, overall, Elizabeth's keen observation
was attracted by a queer machine apparently made of thin rope and
bits of wood, which hung up to the hooks on the ceiling--an
old-fashioned baby's swing. Finally, her eye dwelt with content on
the blue and red diamond tiled floor, so easily swept and mopped, and
(only Elizabeth did not think of that, for her hard childhood had
been all work and no play) so beautiful to whip tops upon! Hilary and
Ascott, condoling together over the new servant, congratulated
themselves that their delight in this occupation had somewhat failed,
though it was really not so many years ago since one of the former's
pupils, coming suddenly out of the school-room, had caught her in the
act of whipping a meditative top round this same kitchen floor.

Meantime Elizabeth penetrated farther, investigating the back
kitchen, with its various conveniences; especially the pantry, every
shelf of which was so neatly arranged and beautifully clean.
Apparently this neatness impressed the girl with a sense of novelty
and curiosity; and though she could hardly be said to meditate--her
mind was not sufficiently awakened for that--still, as she stood at
the kitchen fire, a slight thoughtfulness deepened the expression of
her face, and made it less dull and heavy than it had at first
appeared.

"I wonder which on 'em does it all. They must work pretty hard, I
reckon; and two o' them's such little uns."

She stood a while longer; for sitting down appeared to be to
Elizabeth as new a proceeding as thinking; then she went up stairs,
still literally obeying orders, to shut windows and pull down blinds
at nightfall. The bedrooms were small, and insufficiently, nay,
shabbily furnished; but the floors were spotless--ah! poor
Johanna!--and the sheets, though patched and darned to the last
extremity, were white and whole. Nothing was dirty, nothing untidy.
There was no attempt at picturesque poverty--for whatever novelists
may say, poverty can not be picturesque; but all things were decent
and in order. The house, poor as it was, gave the impression of
belonging to "real ladies;" ladies who thought no manner of work
beneath them, and who, whatever they had to do, took the pains to do
it as well as possible.

Mrs. Hand's roughly-brought-up daughter had never been in such a
house before, and her examination of every new corner of it seemed
quite a revelation. Her own little sleeping nook was fully as tidy
and comfortable as the rest, which fact was not lost upon Elizabeth.
That bright look of mingled softness and intelligence--the only thing
which beautified her rugged face--came into the girl's eyes as she
"turned down" the truckle-bed, and felt the warm blankets and sheets,
new and rather coarse, but neatly sewed.

"Her's made 'em hersel', I reckon. La!" Which of her mistresses the
"her" referred to remained unspecified; but Elizabeth, spurred to
action by some new idea, went briskly back into the bedrooms, and
looked about to see if there was any thing she could find to do. At
last, with a sudden inspiration, she peered into a wash-stand, and
found there an empty ewer. Taking it in one hand and the candle in
the other, she ran down stairs.

Fatal activity! Hilary's pet cat, startled from sleep on the kitchen
hearth, at the same instant ran wildly up stairs; there was a
start--a stumble--and then down came the candle, the ewer, Elizabeth,
and all.

It was an awful crash. It brought every member of the family to see
what was the matter.

"What has the girl broken?" cried Selina.

"Where has she hurt herself?" anxiously added Johanna.

Hilary said nothing, but ran for a light, and then picked up first
the servant, then the candle, and then the fragments of crockery.

"Why, it's my ewer, my favorite ewer, and it's all smashed to bits,
and I never can match it again. You careless, clumsy,
good-for-nothing creature!"

"Please, Selma," whispered her eldest sister.

"Very well, Johanna. You are the mistress, I suppose; why don't you
speak to your servant?"

Miss Leaf, in an humbled, alarmed way, first satisfied herself that
no bodily injury had been sustained by Elizabeth, and then asked her
how this disaster had happened? For a serious disaster she felt it
was. Not only was the present loss annoying, but a servant with a
talent for crockery breaking would be a far too expensive luxury for
them to think of retaining. And she had been listening in the
solitude of the parlor to a long lecture from her always dissatisfied
younger sister, on the great doubts Selina had about Elizabeth's
"suiting."

"Come, now," seeing the girl hesitated, "tell me the plain truth. How
was it?"

"It was the cat," sobbed Elizabeth.

"What a barefaced falsehood." exclaimed Selina. "You wicked girl, how
could it possibly be the cat? Do you know that you are telling a lie,
and that lies are hateful, and that all liars go to--"

"Nonsense, hush!" interrupted Hilary, rather sharply; for Selina's
"tongue," the terror of her childhood, now merely annoyed her.
Selina's temper was a long understood household fact--they did not
much mind it, knowing that her bark was worse than her bite--but it
was provoking that she should exhibit herself so soon before the new
servant.

The latter first looked up at the lady with simple surprise; then, as
in spite of the other two, Miss Selina worked herself up into a
downright passion, and unlimited abuse fell upon the victim's devoted
head, Elizabeth's manner changed. After one dogged repetition of, "It
was the cat!" not another word could be got out of her. She stood,
her eyes fixed on the kitchen floor, her brows knitted, and her under
lip pushed out--the very picture of sullenness. Young as she was,
Elizabeth evidently had, like her unfortunate mistress, "a temper of
her own"--a spiritual deformity that some people are born with, as
others with hare-lip or club-foot; only, unlike these, it may be
conquered, though the battle is long and sore, sometimes ending only
with life.

It had plainly never commenced with poor Elizabeth Hand. Her
appearance, as she stood under the flood of sharp words poured out
upon her, was absolutely repulsive. Even Miss Hilary turned away, and
began to think it would have been easier to teach all day and do
house work half the night, than have the infliction of a servant--to
say nothing of the disgrace of seeing Selina's "peculiarities" so
exposed before a stranger.

She knew of old that to stop the torrent was impracticable. The only
chance was to let Selina expend her wrath and retire, and then to
take some quiet opportunity of explaining to Elizabeth that sharp
language was only "her way," and must be put up with. Humiliating as
this was, and fatal to domestic authority that the first thing to be
taught a new servant was to "put up" with one of her mistresses,
still there was no alternative.--Hilary had already foreboded and
made up her mind to such a possibility, but she had hoped it would
not occur the very first evening.

It did, however, and its climax was worse even than she anticipated.
Whether, irritated by the intense sullenness of the girl. Selina's
temper was worse than usual, or whether, as is always the case with
people like her, something else had vexed her, and she vented it upon
the first cause of annoyance that occurred, certain it is that her
tongue went on unchecked till it failed from sheer exhaustion. And
then, as she flung herself on the sofa--oh, sad mischance!--she
caught sight of her nephew standing at the school-room door, grinning
with intense delight, and making faces at her behind her back.

It was too much. The poor lady had no more words left to scold with;
but she rushed up to Ascott, and big lad as he was, she soundly boxed
his ears.

On this terrible climax let the curtain fall.



CHAPTER II.

Common as were the small fends between Ascott and his Aunt Selina,
they seldom reached such a catastrophe as that described in my last
chapter. Hilary had to fly to the rescue, and literally drag the
furious lad back into the school-room; while Johanna, pale and
trembling, persuaded Selina to quit the field and go and lie down.
This was not difficult; for the instant she saw what she had done,
how she had disgraced herself and insulted her nephew. Selina felt
sorry. Her passion ended in a gush of "nervous" tears under the
influence of which she was led up stairs and put to bed, almost like
a child--the usual termination of these pitiful outbreaks.

For the time nobody thought of Elizabeth. The hapless cause of all
stood "spectatress of the fray" beside her kitchen fire. What she
thought history saith not. Whether in her own rough home she was used
to see brothers and sisters quarrelling, and mothers boxing their
childrens' ears, can not be known; whether she was or was not
surprised to see the same proceedings among ladies and gentlemen, she
never betrayed, but certain it is that the little servant became
uncommonly serious; yes, serious rather than sulky, for her "black"
looks vanished gradually, as soon as Miss Selina left the kitchen.

On the reappearance of Miss Hilary it had quite gone. But Hilary took
no notice of her; she was in search of Johanna, who, shaking and cold
with agitation, came slowly down stairs.

"Is she gone to bed?"

"Yes, my dear. It was the best thing for her; she is not at all well
to-day."

Hilary's lip curled a little, but she replied not a word. She had not
the patience with Selina that Johanna had. She drew her elder sister
into the little parlor, placed her in the arm-chair, shut the door,
came and sat beside her, and took her hand. Johanna pressed it, shed
a quiet tear or two, and wiped them away. Then the two sisters
remained silent, with hearts sad and sore.

Every family has its skeleton in the house: this was theirs. Whether
they acknowledged it or not, they knew quite well that every
discomfort they had, every slight jar which disturbed the current of
household peace, somehow or other originated with "poor Selina." They
often called her "poor" with a sort of pity--not unneeded. Heaven
knows! for if the unhappy are to be pitied, ten times more so are
those who make others miserable.

This was Selina's case, and had been all her life. And, sometimes,
she herself knew it. Sometimes, after an especially bad outbreak, her
compunction and remorse would be almost as terrible as her passion;
forcing her sisters to make every excuse for her; she "did not mean
it," it was only "ill health," or "nerves," or her "unfortunate way
of taking things."

But they knew in their hearts that not all their poverty and the
toils it entailed, not all the hardships and humiliation of their
changed estate, were half so bitter to bear as this something--no
moral crime, and yet in its results as fatal as crime--which they
called Selina's "way."

Ascott was the only one who did not attempt to mince matters. When a
little boy he had openly declared he hated Aunt Salina; when he grew
up he as openly defied her, and it was a most difficult matter to
keep even decent peace between them. Hilary's wrath had never gone
further than wishing Selina was married, that appearing the easiest
way of getting rid of her. Latterly she had ceased this earnest
aspiration; it might be, because, learning to think more seriously of
marriage, she felt that a woman who is no blessing in her own
household, is never likely much to bless a husband's; and that,
looking still farther forward, it was, on the whole, a mercy of
Providence, which made Selina not the mother of children.

Yet her not marrying had been somewhat a surprise; for she had been
attractive in her day, handsome and agreeable in society. But
perhaps, for all that, the sharp eye of the opposite sex had
discovered the cloven foot; since, though she had received various
promising attentions, poor Selina had never had an offer. Nor,
fortunately, had she ever been known to care for any body; she was
one of those women who would have married as a matter of course, but
who never would have been guilty of the weakness of falling in love.
There seemed small probability of shipping her off, to carry into a
new household the restlessness, the fretfulness, the captious
fault-finding with others, the readiness to take offence at what was
done and said to herself, which made poor Selina Leaf the
unacknowledged grief and torment of her own.

Her two sisters sat silent. What was the use of talking? It would be
only going ever and over again the old thing; trying to ease and
shift a little the long familiar burden which they knew must be
borne. Nearly every household has, near or remote, some such burden,
which Heaven only can lift off or help to bear. And sometimes,
looking round the world outside, these two congratulated themselves,
in a half sort of way, that theirs was as light as it was; that
Selina was after all, a well-meaning well-principled woman, and, in
spite of her little tempers, really fond of her family, as she truly
was, at least as fond as a nature which has its centre in self can
manage to be.

Only when Hilary looked, as to-night, into her eldest sister's pale
face, where year by year the lines were deepening, and saw how every
agitation such as the present shook her more and more--she who ought
to have a quiet life and a cheerful home, after so many hard
years--then Hilary, fierce in the resistance of her youth, felt as if
what she could have borne for herself she could not bear for Johanna,
and at the moment, sympathized with Ascott in actually "hating" Aunt
Selina.

"Where is that boy? He ought to be spoken to," Johanna said, at
length, rising wearily.

"I have spoken to him; I gave him a good scolding. He is sorry, and
promises never to be so rude again."

"Oh no; not till the next time," replied Miss Leaf. hopelessly. "But
Hilary." with a sudden consternation, "what are we to do about
Elizabeth?"

The younger sister had thought of that. She had turned over in her
mind all the pros and cons, the inevitable "worries" that would
result from the presence of an additional member of the family,
especially one from whom the family skeleton could not be hid, to
whom it was already only too fatally revealed.

But Hilary was a clear headed girl, and she had the rare faculty of
seeing things as they really were, undistorted by her own likings or
dislikings--in fact, without reference to herself at all. She
perceived plainly that Johanna ought not to do the housework, that
Selina would not, and that she could not: ergo, they must keep a
servant. Better, perhaps, a small servant, over whom they could have
the same influence as over a child, than one older and more
independent, who would irritate her mistresses at home, and chatter
of them abroad. Besides, they had promised Mrs. Hand to give her
daughter a fair trial. For a month, then, Elizabeth was bound to
stay; afterward, time would show. It was best not to meet troubles
half way.

This explained, in Hilary's cheerful voice, seemed greatly to
reassure and comfort her sister.

"Yes, love, you are right; she must remain her month out, unless she
does something very wrong. Do you think that really was a lie she
told?"

"About the cat? I don't quite know what to think. Let us call her,
and put the question once more. Do you put it, Johanna. I don't think
she could look at you and tell you a story."

Other people, at sight of that sweet, grave face, its bloom faded,
and hairs silvered long before their time, yet beautiful, with an
almost childlike simplicity and childlike peace--most other people
would have been of Hilary's opinion.

"Sit down; I'll call her. Dear me, Johanna, we shall have to set up a
bell as well as a servant, unless we had managed to combine the two."

But Hilary's harmless little joke failed to make her sister smile;
and the entrance of the girl seemed to excite positive apprehension.
How was it possible to make excuse to a servant for her mistress's
shortcomings? how scold for ill-doing this young girl, to whom, ere
she had been a night in the house, so bad an example had been set?
Johanna half expected Elizabeth to take a leaf out of Selina's book
and begin abusing herself and Hilary.

No: she stood very sheepish, very uncomfortable, but not in the least
bold or sulky--on the whole, looking rather penitent and humble.

Her mistress took courage.

"Elizabeth I want you to tell me the truth about that unfortunate
breakage. Don't be afraid. I had rather you broke every thing in the
house than have told me what was not true."

"It was true; it was the cat."

"How could that be possible? You were coming down stairs with the
ewer in your hand."

"Her got under my feet, and throwed me down, and so I tumbled, and
smashed the thing agin the floor."

The Misses Leaf glanced at each other. This version of the momentous
event was probable enough, and the girl's eager, honest manner gave
internal confirmatory evidence pretty strong.

"I am sure she is telling the truth." said Hilary. "And remember what
her mother said about her word being always reliable."

This reference was too much for Elizabeth. She burst out, not into
actual crying, but into a smothered choke.

"If you donnot believe me, missus, I'd rather go home to mother."

"I do believe you," said Miss Leaf, kindly then waited till the
pinafore, used as a pocket handkerchief, had dried up grief and
restored composure.

"I can quite well understand the accident now; and I am sure if you
had put it as plainly at first, my sister would have understood it
too. She was very much annoyed, and no wonder. She will be equally
glad to find she was mistaken."

Here Miss Leaf paused, somewhat puzzled how to express what she felt
it her duty to say, so as to be comprehended by the servant, and yet
not let down the dignity of the family Hilary came to her aid.

"Miss Selina is sometimes hasty; but she means kindly always. You
must take care not to vex her, Elizabeth; and you must never answer
her back again, however sharply she speaks. It is not your business;
you are only a child, and she is your mistress."

"Is her? I thought it was this 'un."

The subdued clouding of Elizabeth's face, and her blunt pointing to
Miss Leaf as "this 'un." were too much for Hilary's gravity She was
obliged to retreat to the press, and begin an imaginary search for a
book.

"Yes, I am the eldest, and I suppose you may consider me specially as
your mistress," said Johanna, simply."

"Remember always to come to me in any difficulty; and above all, to
tell me every thing outright, as soon as it happens. I can forgive
you almost any fault, if you are truthful and honest; but there is
one thing I never could forgive, and that is deception. Now go with
Miss Hilary, and she will teach you how to make the porridge for
supper."

Elizabeth obeyed silently; she had apparently a great gift for
silence. And she was certainly both obedient and willing; not stupid,
either, though a nervousness of temperament which Hilary was
surprised to find in so big and coarse-looking a girl, made her
rather awkward at first. However, she succeeded in pouring out and
carrying into the parlor, without accident, three platefuls of that
excellent condiment which formed the frugal supper of the family; but
which they ate, I grieve to say, in an orthodox southern fashion,
with sugar or treacle, until Mr. Lyon--greatly horrified thereby--had
instituted his national custom of "supping" porridge with milk.

It may be a very unsentimental thing to confess, but Hilary, who even
at twenty was rather practical than poetical, never made the porridge
without thinking of Robert Lyon, and the day when he first staid to
supper, and ate it, or as he said and was very much laughed at, ate
"them" with such infinite relish Since then, whenever he came, he
always asked for his porridge, saying it carried him back to his
childish days. And Hilary, with that curious pleasure that women take
in waiting upon any one unto whom the heart is ignorantly beginning
to own the allegiance, humble yet proud, of Miranda to Ferdinand:

    "To be your fellow
     You may deny me; but I'll be your servant
     Whether you will or no."

Hilary always contrived to make his supper herself.

Those pleasant days were now over. Mr. Lyon was gone. As she stool
alone over the kitchen fire, she thought--as now and then she let
herself think for a minute or two in her busy prosaic life--of that
August night, standing at the front door, of his last "good-by," and
last hand-clasp, tight, warm, and firm; and somehow she, like
Johanna, trusted in him.

Not exactly in his love; it seemed almost impossible that he should
love her, at least till she grew much more worthy of him than now;
but in himself, that he would never be less himself, less thoroughly
good and true than now. That, some time, he would be sure to come
back again, and take up his old relations with them, brightening
their dull life with his cheerfulness; infusing in their feminine
household the new element of a clear, strong, energetic, manly will,
which sometimes made Johanna say that instead of twenty-five the
young man might be forty; and, above all, bringing into their poverty
the silent sympathy of one who had fought his own battle with the
world--a hard one, too, as his face sometimes showed--though he never
said much about it.

Of the results of this pleasant relation--whether she being the only
truly marriageable person in the house. Robert Lyon intended to marry
her, or was expected to do so, or that society would think it a very
odd thing if he did not do so--this unsophisticated Hilary never
thought at all. If he had said to her that the present state of
things was to go on forever; she to remain always Hilary Leaf, and he
Robert Lyon, the faithful friend of the family, she would have smiled
in his face and been perfectly satisfied.

True, she had never had any thing to drive away the smile from that
innocent face; no vague jealousies aroused; no maddening rumors
afloat in the small world that was his and theirs. Mr. Lyon was grave
and sedate in all his ways; he never paid the slightest attention to,
or expressed the slightest interest in, any woman whatsoever.

And so this hapless girl loved, him--just himself; without the
slightest reference to his "connections," for he had none; or his
"prospects," which, if he had any, she did not know of. Alas! to
practical and prudent people I can offer no excuse for her; except,
perhaps what Shakspeare gives in the creation of the poor Miranda.

When the small servant re-entered the kitchen, Hilary, with a half
sigh, shook off her dreams, called Ascott out of the school-room, and
returned to the work-a-day world and the family supper.

This being ended, seasoned with a few quiet words administered to
Ascott, and which on the whole he took pretty well, it was nearly ten
o'clock.

"Far too late to have kept up such a child as Elizabeth; we must not
do it again," said Miss Leaf, taking down the large Bible with which
she was accustomed to conclude the day--Ascott's early hours at
school and their own house-work making it difficult of mornings. Very
brief the reading was, sometimes not more than half a dozen verses,
with no comment thereon; she thought the Word of God might safely be
left to expound itself Being a very humble-minded woman, she did not
feel qualified to lead long devotional "exercises," and she disliked
formal written prayers. So she merely read the Bible to the family,
and said after it the Lord's Prayer.

But, constitutionally shy as Miss Leaf was to do even this in
presence of a stranger cost her some effort; and it was only a sense
of duty that made her say "yes" to Hilary's suggestion, "I suppose we
ought to call in Elizabeth?"

Elizabeth came.

"Sit down," said her mistress: and she sat down, staring uneasily
round about her, as if wondering what was going to befall her next.
Very silent was the little parlor; so small, that it was almost
filled up by its large square piano, its six cane-bottomed chairs,
and one easy chair, in which sat Miss Leaf with the great Book in her
lap.

"Can you read, Elizabeth?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Hilary, give her a bible."

And so Elizabeth followed, guided by her not too clean finger, the
words, read in that soft, low voice, somewhere out of the New
Testament; words simple enough for the comprehension of a child or a
heathen. The "South Sea Islander," as Ascott persisted in calling
her, then, doing as the family did, turned round to kneel down; but
in her confusion she knocked over a chair, causing Miss Leaf to wait
a minute till reverent silence was restored. Elizabeth knelt, with
her eyes fixed on the wall: it was a green paper, patterned with
bunches of nuts. How far she listened, or how much she understood, it
was impossible to say; but her manner was decent and decorous.

"Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against
us." Unconsciously Miss Leaf's gentle voice rested on these words, so
needed in the daily life of every human being, and especially of
every family. Was she the only one who thought of "poor Selina?"

They all rose from their knees, and Hilary out the Bible away. The
little servant "hung about," apparently uncertain what was next to be
done, or what was expected of her to do. Hilary touched her sister.

"Yes," said Miss Leaf. recollecting herself, and assuming the due
authority, "it is quite time for all the family to be in bed. Take
care of your candle, and mind and be up at six tomorrow morning."

This was addressed to the new maiden, who dropped a courtesy, and
said, almost cheerfully, "Yes, ma'am."

"Very well, Good night. Elizabeth."

And following Miss Leaf's example, the other two, even Ascott, said
civilly and kindly, "Good night, Elizabeth."



CHAPTER III.

The Christmas holidays ended, and Ascott left for London. It was the
greatest household change the Misses Leaf had known for years, and
they missed him sorely. Ascott was not exactly a lovable boy, and
yet, after the fashion of womankind, his aunts were both fond and
proud of him; fond, in their childless old maidenhood, of any sort of
nephew, and proud, unconsciously, that the said nephew was a big
fellow, who could look over all their heads, besides being handsome
and pleasant mannered, and though not clever enough to set the Thames
on fire, still sufficiently bright to make them hope that in his
future the family star might again rise.

There was something pathetic in these three women's idealization of
him--even Selina's who though quarrelling with him to his face always
praised him behind his back,--that great, good-looking, lazy lad;
who, every body else saw clearly enough, thought more of his own
noble self than of all his aunts put together.

The only person he stood in awe of was Mr. Lyon--for whom he always
protested unbounded respect and admiration. How far Robert Lyon liked
Ascott even Hilary could never quite find out; but he was always very
kind to him.

There was one person in the house who, strange to say, did not
succumb to the all-dominating youth. From the very first there was a
smouldering feud between him and Elizabeth. Whether she overheard,
and slowly began to comprehend his mocking gibes about the "South Sea
Islander," or whether her sullen and dogged spirit resisted the first
attempts the lad made to "put upon her"--as he did upon his aunts, in
small daily tyrannies--was never found out; but certainly Ascott, the
general favorite, found little favor with the new servant. She never
answered when he "hollo'd" for her; she resisted blacking his boots
more than once a day; and she obstinately cleared the kitchen
fire-place of his "messes," as she ignominiously termed various pots
and pans belonging to what he called his "medical studies."

Although the war was passive rather than aggressive, and sometimes a
source of private amusement to the aunts, still, on the whole, it was
a relief when the exciting cause of it departed; his new and most
gentlemanly port manteau being carried down stairs by Elizabeth
herself, of her own accord, with an air of cheerful alacrity, foreign
to her mien for some weeks past, and which, even in the midst of the
dolorous parting, amused Hilary extremely.

"I think that girl is a character," she said afterward to Johanna.
"Any how she has curiously strong likes and dislikes."

"You may say that, my dear; for she brightens up whenever she looks
at you."

"Does she? Oh, that must be because I have most to do with her. It is
wonderful how friendly one gets over sauce pans and brooms; and what
reverence one inspires in the domestic mind when one really knows how
to make a bed or a pudding."

"How I wish you had to do neither!" sighed Johanna, looking fondly at
the bright face and light little figure that was flitting about
putting the school-room to rights before the pupils came in.

"Nonsense--I don't wish any such thing. Doing it makes me not a whit
less charming and lovely." She often applied these adjectives to
herself, with the most perfect conviction that she was uttering a
fiction patent to every body. I must be very juvenile also, for I'm
certain the fellow-passenger at the station to-day took me for
Ascott's sweetheart. When we were saying good by an old gentleman who
sat next him was particularly sympathetic, and you should have seen
how indignantly Ascott replied, "It's only my aunt!"

Miss Leaf laughed, and the shadow vanished from her face, as Hilary
had meant it should. She only said, caressing her, "Well, my pet,
never mind. I hope you will have a real sweetheart some day."

"I'm in no hurry, thank you, Johanna."

But now was heard the knock after knock of the little boys and girls,
and there began that monotonous daily round of school labor, rising
from the simplicities of c, a, t, cat, and d, o, g, dog--to the
sublime heights of Pinnock and Lennie, Telemaque and Latin Delectus.
No loftier; Stowbury being well supplied with first class schools,
and having a vague impression that the Misses Leaf, born ladies and
not brought up as governesses, were not competent educators except of
very small children.

Which was true enough until lately. So Miss Leaf kept contentedly to
the c, a, t, cat, and d, o, g, dog, of the little butchers and
bakers, as Miss Selina, who taught only sewing, and came into the
school-room but little during the day, scornfully termed them. The
higher branches such as they were, she left gradually to Hilary, who,
of late, possibly out of sympathy with a friend of hers, had begun to
show an actual gift for teaching school.

It is a gift--all will allow; and chiefly those who have it not,
among which was poor Johanna Leaf. The admiring envy with which she
watched Hilary, moving briskly about from class to class, with a word
of praise to one and rebuke to another, keeping every one's attention
alive, spurring on the dull, controlling the unruly, and exercising
over every member in this little world that influence, at once the
strongest and most intangible and inexplicable--personal
influence--was only equaled by the way in which, at pauses in the
day's work, when it grew dull and monotonous or when the stupidity of
the children ruffled her own quick temper beyond endurance, Hilary
watched Johanna.

The time I am telling of now is long ago.

The Stowbury children, who were then little boys and girls, are now
fathers and mothers--doubtless a large proportion being decent
tradesfolk in Stowbury still; though, in this locomotive quarter,
many must have drifted elsewhere--where, Heaven knows. But not a few
of them may still call to mind Miss Leaf, who first taught them their
letters--sitting in her corner between the fire and the window, while
the blind was drawn down to keep out, first the light from her own
fading eyes, and, secondly, the distracting view of green fields and
trees from the youthful eyes by her side. They may remember still her
dark plain dress and her white apron, on which the primers, torn and
dirty, looked half ashamed to lie; and above all, her sweet face and
sweeter voice, never heard in any thing sharper than that grieved
tone which signified their being "naughty children." They may recall
her unwearied patience with the very dullest and most wayward of
them; her unfailing sympathy with every infantile pleasure and pain.
And I think they will acknowledge that whether she taught them much
or little--in this advancing age it might be thought little--Miss
Leaf taught them one thing--to love her. Which, as Ben Johnson said
of the Countess of Pembroke, was in itself a "liberal education."

Hilary, too. Often when Hilary's younger and more restless spirit
chafed against the monotony of her life; when, instead of wasting her
days in teaching small children, she would have liked to be learning,
learning--every day growing wiser and cleverer, and stretching out
into that busy, bright, active world of which Robert Lyon had told
her--then the sight of Johanna's meek face bent over those dirty
spelling books would at once rebuke and comfort her. She felt, after
all, that she would not mind working on forever, so long as Johanna
still sat there.

Nevertheless, that winter seemed to her very long--especially after
Ascott was gone. For Johanna, partly for money, and partly for
kindness, had added to her day's work four evenings a week when a
half educated mother of one of her little pupils came to be taught to
write a decent hand, and to keep the accounts of her shop. Upon which
Selina, highly indignant, had taken to spending her evenings in the
school room, interrupting Hilary's solitary studies there by many a
lamentation over the peaceful days when they all sat in the kitchen
together and kept no servant. For Selina was one of those who never
saw the bright side of any thing till it had gone by.

"I'm sure I don't know how we are to manage with Elizabeth. That
greedy--"

"And growing," suggested Hilary.

"I say that greedy girl eats as much as any two of us. And as for her
clothes--her mother does not keep her even decent."

"She would find it difficult upon three pounds a year."

"Hilary, how dare you contradict me! I am only stating a plain fact."

"And I another. But, indeed, I don't want to talk Selina."

"You never do except when you are wished to be silent; and then your
tongue goes like any race horse."

"Does it? Well, like Gilpin's,

    'It carries weight: it rides a race,
    'Tis for a thousand pound?'

--and I only wish it were. Heigh ho! if I could but earn a thousand
pounds!"

Selina was too vexed to reply and for five quiet minutes Hilary bent
over her Homer which Mr. Lyon had taken such pleasure in teaching
her, because he said, she learned it faster than any of his grammar
school boys. She had forgotten all domestic grievances in a vision of
Thetis and the water nymphs; and was repeating to herself, first in
the sonorous Greek and then in Pope's small but sweet English, that
catalogue of oceanic beauties ending with

    "Black Janira and Janassa fair,
    And Amatheia with her amber hair."

"Black, did you say? I'm sure she was as black as a chimney sweep all
to-day. And her pinafore"

"Her what? Oh, Elizabeth, you mean--"

"Her pinafore had three rents in it, which she never thinks of
mending though I gave her needles and thread myself a week ago. But
she does not know how to use them any more than a baby."

"Possibly, nobody ever taught her."

"Yes; she went for a year to the National School, she says, and
learned both marking and sewing."

"Perhaps she has never practiced them since. She could hardly have
had time, with all the little Hands to look after, as her mother says
she did. All the better for us. It makes her wonderfully patient with
our troublesome brats. It was only to day, when that horrid little
Jacky Smith hurt himself so, that I saw Elizabeth take him into the
kitchen, wash his face and hands, and cuddle him up and comfort him,
quite motherly. Her forte is certainly children."

"You always find something to say for her."

"I should be ashamed if I could not find something to say for any
body who is always abused."

Another pause--and then Selina returned to the charge.

"Have you ever observed, my dear, the extraordinary way she has of
fastening, or rather, not fastening her gown behind? She just hooks
it together at the top and at the waist, while between there is a--"

"Hiatus valde deflendus. Oh dear me! what shall I do? Selina, how can
I help it if a girl of fifteen years old is not a paragon of
perfection? as of course we all are, if we only could find it out."

And Hilary, in despair, rose to carry her candle and books into the
chilly but quiet bedroom, biting her lips the while lest she should
be tempted to say something which Selina called "impertinent," which
perhaps it was, from a younger sister to an elder. I do not set
Hilary up as a perfect character. Through sorrow only do people go on
to perfection; and sorrow, in its true meaning, the cherished girl
had never known.

But that night, talking to Johanna before they went to sleep--they
had always slept together since the time when the elder sister used
to walk the room of nights with that pulling, motherless infant in
her arms--Hilary anxiously started the question of the little
servant.

"I am afraid I vexed Selina greatly about her to-night, and yet what
can one do? Selina is so very unjust--always expecting
impossibilities. She would like to have Elizabeth at once a first
rate cook, a finished house-maid, and an attentive lady's maid, and
all without being taught! She gives her things to do, neither waiting
to see if they are comprehended by her, nor showing her how to do
them. Of course the girl stands gaping and staring and does not do
them, or does them so badly, that she gets a thorough scolding."

"Is she very stupid, do you think?" asked Johanna, in unconscious
appeal to her pet's stronger judgment.

"No, I don't. Far from stupid; only very ignorant, and--you would
hardly believe it--very nervous. Selina frightens her. She gets on
extremely well with me."

"Any one would, my dear. That is," added the conscientious elder
sister, still afraid of making the "child" vain, "any one whom you
took pain with. But do you think you can ever make any thing out of
Elizabeth? Her month ends to-morrow. Shall we let her go?"

"And perhaps get in her place a story-teller--a tale-bearer--even a
thief. No, no; let us

    'Rather bear the ills we have,
    Than fly to others that we know not of;'

and a thief would be worse than even a South Sea Islander."

"Oh yes, my dear," said Johanna, with a shiver.

"By-the-by, the first step in the civilization of the Polynesians was
giving them clothes. And I have heard say that crime and rags often
go together; that a man unconsciously feels that he owes something to
himself and society in the way of virtue when he has a clean face and
clean shirt, and a decent coat on. Suppose we try the experiment of
dressing Elizabeth. How many old gowns have we?"

The number was few. Nothing in the Leaf family was ever cast off till
its very last extremity of decay; the talent that

    "Gars auld claes look amaist as gude's the new"

being specially possessed by Hilary. She counted over her own
wardrobe and Johanna's but found nothing that could be spared.

"Yes, my love, there is one thing. You certainly shall never put on
that old brown merino again; though you have laid it so carefully by,
as if you meant it to come out as fresh as ever next winter. No,
Hilary, you must have a new gown, and you must give Elizabeth your
brown merino."

Hilary laughed, and replied not.

Now it might be a pathetic indication of a girl who had very few
clothes, but Hilary had a superstitious weakness concerning
hers.--Every dress had its own peculiar chronicle of the scenes where
it had been, the enjoyments she had shared in it. Particular dresses
were special memorials of her loves, her pleasures, her little
passing pains; as long as a bit remained of the poor old fabric the
sight of it recalled them all.

This brown merino--in which she had sat two whole winters over her
Greek and Latin by Robert Lyon's side, which he had once stopped to
touch and notice, saying what a pretty color it was, and how he liked
soft-feeling dresses for women--to cut up this old brown merino
seemed to hurt her so she could almost have cried.

Yet what would Johanna think if the refused? And there was Elizabeth
absolutely in want of clothes. "I must be growing very wicked,"
thought poor Hilary.

She lay a good while silent in the dark, while Johanna planned and
replanned--calculating how, even with the addition of an old cape of
her own, which was out of the same piece, this hapless gown could be
made to fit the gaunt frame of Elizabeth Hand.--Her poor kindly brain
was in the last extremity of muddle, when Hilary, with a desperate
effort, dashed in to the rescue, and soon made all clear, contriving
body, skirt, sleeves and all.

"You have the best head in the world, my love. I don't know whatever
I should do without you."

"Luckily you are never likely to be tried. So give me a kiss; and
good night, Johanna."

I misdoubt many will say I am writing about small, ridiculously
small, things. Yet is not the whole of life made up of
infinitesimally small things? And in its strange and solemn mosaic,
the full pattern of which we never see clearly till looking back on
it from far away, dare we say of any thing which the hand of Eternal
Wisdom has put together, that it is too common or too small?



CHAPTER IV.

While her anxious mistresses were thus talking her over the servant
lay on her humble bed and slept. They knew she did, for they heard
her heavy breathing through the thin partition wall. Whether, as
Hilary suggested, she was too ignorant to notice the days of the
week, or month, or, as Selina thought, too stupid to care for any
thing beyond eating, drinking, and sleeping. Elizabeth manifested no
anxiety about herself or her destiny.

She went about her work just as usual; a little quicker and readier,
now she was becoming familiarized to it; but she said nothing. She
was undoubtedly a girl of silent and undemonstrative nature.

"Sometimes still waters run deep," said Miss Hilary.

"Nevertheless. there are such things as canals," replied Johanna.
"When do you mean to have your little talk with her?"

Hilary did not know. She was sitting, rather more tired than usual,
by the school-room fire, the little people having just departed for
their Saturday half-holiday. Before clearing off the debris which
they always left behind, she stood a minute at the window, refreshing
her eyes with the green field opposite, and the far-away wood,
crowned by a dim white monument, visible in fair weather, on which
those bright brown eyes had a trick of lingering, even in the middle
of school hours. For the wood and the hill beyond belonged to a
nobleman's "show" estate, five miles off--the only bit of real
landscape beauty that Hilary had ever beheld. There, during the last
holidays but one, she, her sisters, her nephew, and, by his own
special request, Mr. Lyon, had spent a whole long, merry, midsummer
day. She wondered whether such a day would ever come again!

But spring was coming again, any how; the field looked smiling and
green, specked here and there with white dots which, she opined.
might possibly be daisies. She half wished she was not too old and
dignified to dart across the road, leap the sunk fence, and run to
see.

"I think, Johanna--Hark, what can that be?"

For at this instant somebody came tearing down the stairs, opened the
front door, and did--exactly what Hilary had just been wishing to do.

"It's Elizabeth, without her bonnet or shawl, with something white
flying behind her. How she is dashing across the field! What can she
be after? Just look."

But loud screams from Selina's room, the front, one, where she had
been lying in bed all morning, quite obliterated the little servant
from their minds. The two sisters ran hastily up stairs.

Selina was sitting up, in undisguised terror and agitation.

"Stop her! Hold her! I'm sure she has gone mad. Lock the door, or
she'll come back and murder us all."

"Who? Elizabeth! Was she here? What has been the matter?"

But it was some time before they could make out any thing. At last
they gathered that Elizabeth had been waiting upon Miss Selina,
putting vinegar cloths on her head, and doing various things about
the room. "She is very handy when one is ill." even Selina allowed.

"And I assure you I was talking most kindly to her; about the duties
of her position, and how she ought to dress better, and be more civil
behaved, or else she never could except to keep any place. And she
stood in her usual sulky way of listening, never answering a
word--with her back to me, staring right out of window. And I had
just said, Elizabeth, my girl'--indeed, Hilary, I was talking to her
in my very kindest way--"

"I've no doubt of it--but do get on."

"When she suddenly turned round, snatched a clean towel from a chair
back, and another from my head--actually from my very head,
Johanna--and out she ran. I called after her, but she took no more
notice than if I had been a stone. And she left the door wide
open--blowing upon me. Oh, dear; she has given me my death of cold."
And Selina broke out into piteous complainings.

Her elder sister soothed her as well as she could, while Hilary ran
down to the front door and looked, and enquired every where for
Elizabeth. She was not to be seen on field or road; and along that
quiet terrace not a soul had even perceived her quit the house.

"It's a very odd thing." said Hilary, returning. "What can have come
over the girl? You are sure, Selina, that you said nothing which--"

"Now I know what you are going to say, You are going to blame me.
Whatever happens in this house you always blame me. And perhaps
you're right. Perhaps I am a nuisance--a burden--would be far better
dead and buried. I wish I were!"

When Selina took this tack, of course her sisters were silenced. They
quited her a little, and then went down and searched the house all
over.

All was in order; at least in as much order as was to be expected the
hour before dinner. The bowl of half-peeled potatoes stood on the
back kitchen "sink;" the roast was down before the fire; the knives
were ready for cleaning. Evidently Elizabeth flight had not been
premeditated.

"It's all nonsense about her going mad. She has as sound a head as I
have," said Hilary to Johanna, who began to look seriously uneasy.
"She might have run away in a fit of passion, certainly; and yet that
is improbable; her temper is more sullen than furious. And having no
lack of common sense she must know that doing a thing like this is
enough to make her lose her place at once."

"Yes," said Johanna, mournfully, "I'm afraid after this she must go."

"Wait and see what she has to say for herself." pleaded Hilary. "She
will surely be back in two or three minutes."

But she was not, nor even in two or three hours.

Her mistresses' annoyance became displeasure, and that again subsided
into serious apprehension. Even Selina ceased talking over and over
the incident which gave the sole information to be arrived at; rose,
dressed, and came down to the kitchen. There, after long and anxious
consultation, Hilary, observing that "Somebody had better do
something," began to prepare the dinner as in pre-Elizabethan days;
but the three ladies' appetites were small.

About three in the afternoon, Hilary, giving utterance to the hidden
alarm of all, said--

"I think, sisters, I had better go down as quickly as I can to Mrs.
Hand's."

This agreed, she stood consulting with Johanna as to what could
possibly be said to the mother in case that unfortunate child had not
gone home, when the kitchen door opened, and the culprit appeared.

Not, however, with the least look of a culprit. Hot she was, and
breathless; and with her hair down about her ears, and her apron
rolled up round her waist, presented a most forlorn and untidy
aspect; but her eyes were bright, and her countenance glowing.

She took a towel from under her arm.--"There's one on 'em--and you'll
get back--the other--when it's washed."

Having blurted out this, she leaned against the wall, trying to
recover her breath.

"Elizabeth! Where have you been? How dared you go? Your behavior is
disgraceful--most disgraceful, I say. Johanna, why don't you speak to
your servant?" (When, for remissness in reproving others, the elder
sister herself fell under reproof, it was always emphatically "your
sister--"your nephew"--"your servant.")

But, for once, Miss Selina's sharp voice failed to bring the
customary sullen look to Elizabeth's face, and when Miss Leaf, in her
milder tones, asked where she had been, she answered unhesitatingly--

"I've been down the town."

"Down the town!" the three ladies cried, in one chorus of
astonishment.

"I've been as quick as I could, missis. I runned all the way there
and back; but it was a good step, and he was some'at heavy, though he
is but a little'un,"

"He! who on earth is he?"

"Deary me! I never thought of axing; but his mother lives in Hall
street. Somebody saw me carrying him to the doctor, and went and told
her. Oh! he was welly killed, Miss Leaf--the doctor said so; but
he'll do now, and you'll get your towel clean washed tomorrow."

While Elizabeth spoke so incoherently, and with such unwonted energy
and excitement, Johanna looked as if she thought her sister's fears
were true, and the girl had really gone mad; but Hilary's quicker
perceptions jumped at a different conclusion.

"Quiet yourself, Elizabeth," said she, taking a firm hold of her
shoulder, and making her sit down, when the rolled-up apron dropped,
and showed itself all covered with blood spots. Selina screamed
outright.

Then Elizabeth seemed to become half conscious that she had done
something blamable, or was at least a suspected character. Her warmth
of manner faded; the sullen cloud of dogged resistance to authority
was rising in her poor dirty face, when Hilary, beginning with, "Now,
we are not going to scold you; but we must hear the reason of this,"
contrived by adroit questions, and not a few of them, to elicit the
whole story.

It appeared that, while standing at Miss Selina's window, Elizabeth
had watched three little boys, apparently engaged in a very favorite
amusement of little boys in that field, going quickly behind a horse,
and pulling out the longest and handsomest hairs in his tail to make
fishing lines of. She saw the animal give a kick, and two of the boys
ran away; the other did not stir. For a minute or so she noticed a
black lump lying in the grass; then, with the quick instinct for
which nobody had ever given her credit, she guessed what had
happened, and did immediately the wisest and only thing possible
under the circumstances, namely, to snatch up a towel, run across the
field, bind up the child's head as well as she could, and carry it,
bleeding and insensible, to the nearest doctor, who lived nearly a
mile off.

She did not tell--and they only found it out afterward--how she had
held the boy while under the doctor's hands, the skull being so badly
fractured that the frightened mother fainted at the sight; how she
had finally carried him home, and left him comfortably settled in
bed, his senses returned, and his life saved.

"Ay, my arms do ache above a bit," she said, in answer to Miss Leaf's
questions. "He wasn't quite a baby--nigh upon twelve, I reckon; but
then he was very small of his age. And he looked just as if he was
dead--and he bled so."

Here, just for a second or two, the color left the big girl's lips,
and she trembled a little. Miss Leaf went to the kitchen cupboard,
and took out their only bottle of wine--administered in rare doses,
exclusively as medicine.

"Drink this, Elizabeth; and then go and wash your face and eat your
dinner. We will talk to you by-and-by."

Elizabeth looked up with a long, wistfull stare of intense surprise,
and then added, "Have I done any thing wrong, missis?"

"I did not say so. But drink this; and don't talk, child."

She was obeyed. By-and-by Elizabeth disappeared into the back
kitchen, emerged thence with a clean face, hands, and apron; and went
about her afternoon business as if nothing had happened.

Her mistresses' threatened "talk" with her never came about. What,
indeed, could they say? No doubt the little servant had broken the
strict letter of domestic law by running off in that highly eccentric
and inconvenient way; but, as Hilary tried to explain by a series of
most ingenious ratiocinations, she had fulfilled, in the spirit of
it, the very highest law--that of charity. She had also shown prompt
courage, decision, practical and prudent forethought, and above all,
entire self-forgetfulness.

"And I should like to know," said Miss Hilary, warming with her
subject, "if those are not the very qualities that go to constitute a
hero."

"But we don't want a hero; we want a maid-of-all-work."

"I'll tell you what we want, Selina. We want a woman; that is, a girl
with the making of a good woman in her. If we can find that, all the
rest will follow. For my part, I would rather take this child, rough
as she is, but with her truthfulness, conscientiousness, kindliness
of heart, and evident capability of both self-control and
self-devotedness, than the most finished servant we could find. My
advice is--keep her."

This settled the matter, since it was a curious fact that the
"advice" of the youngest Miss Leaf was, whether they knew it or not,
almost equivalent to a family ukase.

When Elizabeth had brought in the tea-things, which she did with
especial care, apparently wishing to blot out the memory of the
morning's escapade by astonishingly good behavior for the rest of the
day, Miss Leaf called her, and asked if she knew that her month of
trial ended this day?

"Yes, ma'am," with the strict normal courtesy, something between that
of the old-world family domestic--as her mother might have been to
the Miss Elizabeth Something she was named after--and the abrupt
"dip" of the modern National school girl; which constituted Elizabeth
Hand's sole experience of manners.

"If you had not been absent I should have gone to speak with your
mother to-day. Indeed Miss Hilary was going when you came in; but it
would have been with a very different intention from what we had in
the morning. However, that is not likely to happen again."

"Eh?" said Elizabeth, inquiringly.

Miss Leaf hesitated, and looked uneasily at her two sisters. It was
always a trial to her shy nature to find herself the mouth-piece of
the family; and this same shyness made it still more difficult to
break through the stiff barriers which seemed to rise up between her,
a gentlewoman well on in years, and this coarse working girl. She
felt, as she often complained, that with the-kindest intentions, she
did not quite know how to talk to Elizabeth.

"My sister means," said Hilary, "that as we are not likely to have
little boys half killed in the field every day, she trusts you will
not be running away again as you did this morning. She feels sure
that you would not do such a thing, putting us all to so great
annoyance and uneasiness, for any less cause than such as happened
to-day. You promise that?"

"Yes, Miss Hilary."

"Then we quite forgive you as regards ourselves. Nay"--feeling in
spite of Selina's warning nudge, that she had hardly been kind
enough--"we rather praise than blame you, Elizabeth. And if you like
to stay with us and will do your best to improve, we are willing to
keep you as our servant."

"Thank you ma'am. Thank you, Miss Hilary. Yes, I'll stop."

She said no more--but sighed a great sigh, as if her mind were
relieved--("So," thought Hilary, "she was not so indifferent to us as
we imagined")--and bustled back into her kitchen.

"Now for the clothing of her," observed Miss Leaf, also looking much
relieved that the decision was over. "You know what we agreed upon;
and there is certainly no time to be lost. Hilary, my dear, suppose
you bring down your brown merino?" Hilary went without a word.

People who inhabit the same house, eat, sit, and sleep
together--loving one another and sympathizing with one another, ever
so deeply and dearly--nevertheless inevitably have momentary seasons
when the intense solitude in which we all live, and must expect ever
to live, at the depth of our being, forces itself painfully upon the
heart. Johanna must have had many such seasons when Hilary was a
child; Hilary had one now.

She unfolded the old frock, and took out of its pocket, a hiding
place at once little likely to be searched, and harmless if
discovered, a poor little memento of that happy midsummer day.

    "Dear Miss Hilary. To-morrow, then, I shall come.
        Yours truly, Robert Lyon."

The only scrap of note she had ever received; he always wrote to
Johanna; as regularly as ever, or more so, now Ascott was gone; but
only to Johanna. She read over the two lines, wondered where she
should keep them now that Johanna might not notice them; and then
recoiled, as if the secret were a wrong to that dear sister who loved
her so well.

"But nothing makes me love her less; nothing ever could. She thinks
me quite happy, as I am; and yet--oh, if I did not miss him so!"

And the aching, aching want which sometimes came over began again.
Let us not blame her. God made all our human needs. God made love.
Not merely affection but actual love--the necessity to seek and find
out some other being, not another but the complement of one's
self--the "other half," who brings rest and strength for weakness,
sympathy in aspiration, and tenderness for tenderness, as no other
person ever can. Perhaps, even in marriage, this love is seldom
found, and it is possible in all lives to do without it. Johanna had
done so. But then she had been young, and was now growing old; and
Hilary was only twenty, with a long life before her. Poor child, let
us not blame her!

She was not in the least sentimental, her natural disposition
inclining her to be more than cheerful, actually gay. She soon
recovered herself, and when, a short time after, she stood, scissors
in hand, demonstrating how very easy it was to make something out of
nothing, her sisters never suspected how very near tears had lately
been to those bright eyes, which were always the sunshine of the
house.

"You are giving yourself a world of trouble," said Selina. "If I were
you, I would just make over the dress to Elizabeth, and let her do
what she could with it."

"My dear, I always find I give myself twice the trouble by expecting
people to do what they can't do. I have to do it myself afterward.
Prove how a child who can't even handle a needle and thread is
competent to make a gown for herself, and I shall be most happy to
secede in her favor."

"Nay," put in the eldest sister, afraid of a collision of words,
"Selina is right; if you do not teach Elizabeth to make her own gowns
how can she learn?"

"Johanna, you are the brilliantest of women! and you know you don't
like the parlor littered with rags and cuttings. You wish to get rid
of me for the evening? Well, I'll go! Hand me the work basket and the
bundle, and I'll give my first lesson in dress making to our South
Sea Islander."

But Fate stood in the way of Miss Hilary's good intentions.

She found Elizabeth not as was her wont, always busy, over the
perpetual toil of those who have not yet learned the mysterious art
of arrangement and order, nor, as sometimes, hanging sleepily over
the kitchen fire, waiting for bedtime; but actually sitting, sitting
down at the table. Her candle was flaring on one side of her; on the
other was the school room inkstand, a scrap of waste paper, and a pen
But she was not writing; she sat with her head on her hands, in an
attitude of disconsolate idleness, so absorbed that she seemed not to
hear Hilary's approach.

"I did not know you could write, Elizabeth."

"No more I can," was the answer, in the most doleful of voices. "It
bean't no good. I've forgotten all about it. T' letters wonna join."

"Let me look at them." And Hilary tried to contemplate gravely the
scrawled and blotted page, which looked very much as if a large
spider had walked into the ink bottle, and then walked out again on a
tour of investigation. "What did you want to write?" asked she,
suddenly.

Elizabeth blushed violently. "It was the woman, Mrs. Cliffe, t'
little lad's mother, you know; she wanted somebody to write to her
husband as is at work at Birmingham, and I said I would. I'd learned
at the National, but I've forgotten it all. I'm just as Miss Selina
says--I'm good for nowt."

"Come, come, never fret;" for there was a sort of choke in the girl's
voice. "There's many a good person who never learned to write. But I
don't see why you should not learn. Shall I teach you?"

Utter amazement, beaming gratitude, succeeded one another, plain as
light, in Elizabeth's eyes, but she only said, "Thank you, Miss
Hilary."

"Very well. I have brought you an old gown of mine, and was going to
show you how to make it up for yourself, but I'll look over your
writing instead. Sit down and let me see what you can do."

In a state of nervous trepidation, pitiful to behold, Elizabeth took
the pen. Terrible scratches resulted; blots innumerable; and one
fatal deluge of ink, which startled from their seats both mistress
and maid, and made Hilary thankful that she had taken off her better
gown for a common one, as, with sad thriftiness, the Misses Leaf
always did of evenings.

When Elizabeth saw the mischief she had done, her contrition and
humility were unbounded. "No, Miss Hilary, you can't make nothin' of
me. I be too stupid, I'll give it up."

"Nonsense!" And the bright active little lady looked steadily into
the heavy face of this undeveloped girl, half child, half woman,
until some of her own spirit seemed to be reflected there. Whether
the excitement of the morning had roused her, or her mistresses'
kindness had touched Elizabeth's heart, and--as in most women--the
heart was the key to the intellect; or whether the gradual daily
influence of her changed life during the last month had been taking
effect, now for the first time to appear--certain it is that Hilary
had never perceived before what an extremely intelligent face it was;
what good sense was indicated in the well shaped head and forehead;
what tenderness and feeling in the deep-set grey eyes.

"Nonsense," repeated she. "Never give up any thing; I never would.
We'll try a different plan, and begin from the beginning, as I do
with my little scholars. Wait, while I fetch a copy book out of the
parlor press."

She highly amused her sisters with a description of what she called
her "newly instituted Polynesian Academy;" returned, and set to work
to guide the rough, coarse hand through the mysteries of calligraphy.

To say this was an easy task would not be true. Nature's own laws and
limits make the using of faculties which have been unused for
generations very difficult at first. To suppose that a working man,
the son of working men, who applies himself to study, does it with as
little trouble as your upper-class children, who have been
unconsciously undergoing education ever since the cradle, is a great
mistake. All honor, therefore, to those who do attempt, and to ever
so small a degree succeed in, the best and wisest culture of all,
self-culture.

Of this honor Elizabeth deserved her share.

"She is stupid enough," Hilary confessed, after the lesson was over;
"but there is a dogged perseverance about the girl which I actually
admire. She blots her fingers, her nose, her apron, but she never
gives in; and she sticks to the grand principle of one thing at a
time. I think she did two whole pages of a's, and really performed
them satisfactorily, before she asked to go on to b's. Yes! I believe
she will do."

"I hope she will do her work, any how," said Selina, breaking into
the conversation rather crossly. "I'm sure I don't see the good of
wasting time over teaching Elizabeth to write, when there's so much
to be done in the house by one and all of us, from Monday morning
till Saturday night."

"Ay, that's it," answered Hilary, meditatively. "I don't see how I
ever shall get time to teach her, and she is so tired of nights when
the work is all done; she'll be dropping asleep with the pen in her
hand--I have done it myself before now."

Ay, in those days when, trying so hard to "improve her mind," and
make herself a little more equal and companionable to another mind
she knew, she had, after her daily house cares and her six hours of
school teaching, attempted at nine P. M. to begin close study on her
own account. And though with her strong will she succeeded tolerably,
still, as she told Johanna, she could well understand how slow was
the, "march of intellect" (a phrase which had just then come up)
among day laborers and the like; and how difficult it was for these
Mechanics Institutions, which were now talked so much of, to put any
new ideas into the poor tired heads, rendered sluggish and stupid
with hard bodily labor, "Suppose I were to hold my Polynesian Academy
on a Sunday?" and she looked inquiringly at her sisters, especially
Johanna.

Now the Misses Leaf were old fashioned country folk, who lived before
the words Sabbatarian and un-Sabbatarian had ever got into the
English language. They simply "remembered the Sabbath day to keep it
holy;" they arranged so as to make it for all the household a day of
rest: and they went regularly to church once--sometimes Selina and
Hilary went twice. For the intervening hours, their usual custom was
to take an afternoon walk in the fields; begun chiefly for Ascott's
sake, to keep the lad out of mischief, and put into his mind better
thoughts than he was likely to get from his favorite Sunday
recreation of sitting on the wall throwing stones. After he left for
London there was Elizabeth to be thought of; and they decided that
the best Sabbath duty for the little servant was to go and see her
mother. So they gave her every Sunday afternoon free; only requiring
that she should be at home punctually after church time, at eight
o'clock. But from thence till bedtime was a blank two hours, which,
Hilary had noticed, Elizabeth not infrequently spent in dozing over
the fire.

"And I wonder," said she, giving the end of her long meditation out
loud, "whether going to sleep is not as much Sabbath breaking as
learning to write? What do you say, Johanna?"

Johanna, simple, God-fearing woman as she was, to whom faith and love
came as natural as the breath she drew, had never perplexed herself
with the question. She only smiled acquiescence. But Selina was
greatly shocked. Teaching to write on a Sunday! Bringing the week day
work into the day of rest! Doing one's own pleasure on the holy day!
She thought it exceedingly wrong. Such a thing had never been heard
of in their house. Whatever else might be said of them, the Leafs
were always a respectable family as to keeping Sunday. Nobody could
say that even poor Henry--

But here Selina's torrent of words stopped.

When conversation revived, Hilary, who had been at first half annoyed
and half amused, resumed her point seriously.

"I might say that writing isn't Elizabeth's week-day work, and that
teaching her is not exactly doing my own pleasure; but I won't creep
out of the argument by a quibble. The question is, What is keeping
the Sabbath day 'holy?' I say--and I stick to my opinion--that it is
by making it a day of worship, a rest day--a cheerful and happy
day--and by doing as much good in it as we can. And therefore I mean
to teach Elizabeth on a Sunday."

"She'll never understand it. She'll consider it work."

"And if she did, work is a more religious thing than idleness. I am
sure I often feel that, of the two, I should be less sinful in
digging potatoes in my garden, or sitting mending stockings in my
parlor, than in keeping Sunday as some people do--going to church
genteelly in my best clothes, eating a huge Sunday dinner, and then
nodding over a good book, or taking a regular Sunday nap till
bedtime."

"Hush, child!" said Johanna, reprovingly; for Hilary's cheeks were
red, and her voice angry. She was taking the hot, youthful part which
in its hatred of forms and shams, sometimes leads--and not seldom led
poor Hilary--a little too far on the other side. "I think," Miss Leaf
added, "that our business is with ourselves, and not with our
neighbors. Let us keep the Sabbath according to our conscience. Only,
I would take care never to do any thing which jarred against my
neighbor's feelings. I would, like Paul, 'eat no meat while the world
standeth' rather than 'make my brother to offend.' "

Hilary looked in her sister's sweet, calm face, and the anger died
out of her own.

"Shall I give up my academy?" she said, softly.

"No, my love. It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath day, and
teaching a poor ignorant girl to write is an absolute good. Make her
understand that, and you need not be afraid of any harm ensuing."

"You never will make her understand," said Selina, sullenly. "She is
only a servant."

"Nevertheless I'll try."

Hilary could not tell how far she succeeded in simplifying to the
young servant's comprehension this great question, involving so many
points--such as the following of the spirit and the letter, the law
of duty and the compulsion of love, which, as she spoke, seemed
opening out so widely and awfully that she herself involuntarily
shrank from it, and wondered that poor finite creatures should, ever
presume to squabble about it at all.

But one thing the girl did understand--her young mistress's kindness.
She stood watching the delicate little hand that had so patiently
guided hers, and now wrote copy after copy for her future benefit. At
last she said--

"You're taking a deal o' trouble wi' a poor wench, and it's very kind
in a lady like you."

Miss Hilary was puzzled what answer to make. True enough it was
"kind," and she was "a lady;" and between her and Mrs. Hand's rough
daughter was an unmistakable difference and distinction. That
Elizabeth perceived it was proved by her growing respectfulness of
manner--the more respectful, it seemed, the more she herself
improved. Yet Hilary could not bear to make her feel more sharply
than was unavoidable the great gulf that lies and ever must lie--not
so much between mistress and servant, in their abstract
relation--(and yet that is right, for the relation and authority are
ordained of God)--but between the educated and the ignorant, the
coarse and the refined.

"Well," she said, after a pause of consideration, "you always have it
in your power to repay my 'kindness,' as you call it. The cleverer
you become the more useful you will be to me; and the more good you
grow the better I shall like you."

Elizabeth smiled--that wonderfully bright, sudden smile which seemed
to cover over all her plainness of feature.

"Once upon a time," Hilary resumed by-and-by, "when England was very
different from what it is now, English ladies used to have what they
call 'bower-women,' whom they took as girls, and brought up in their
service; teaching them all sorts of things--cooking, sewing,
spinning, singing, and, probably, except that the ladies of that time
were very ill-educated themselves, to read and write also. They used
to spend part of every day among their bower-women; and as people can
only enjoy the company of those with whom they have some sympathies
in common, we must conclude that--"

Here Hilary stopped, recollecting she must be discoursing miles above
the head of her little bower-maiden, and that, perhaps, after all,
her theory would be best kept to herself, and only demonstrated
practically.

"So, Elizabeth, if I spend a little of my time in teaching you, you
must grow up my faithful and attached bower-maiden?"

"I'll grow up any thing, Miss Hilary, if it's to please you," was the
answer, given with a smothered intensity that quite startled the
young mistress.

"I do believe the girl is getting fond of me," said she, half
touched, half laughing to Johanna. "If so, we shall get on. It is
just as with our school children, you know. We have to seize hold of
their hearts first, and their heads afterward. Now, Elizabeth's head
may be uncommonly tough, but I do believe she likes me."

Johanna smiled; but she would not for the world have said--never
encouraging the smallest vanity in her child--that she did not think
this circumstance so very remarkable.



CHAPTER V.

A household exclusively composed of women has its advantages and its
disadvantages. It is apt to become somewhat narrow in judgment,
morbid in feeling, absorbed in petty interests, and bounding its
vision of outside things to the small horizon which it sees from its
own fireside. But, on the other hand, by this fireside often abides a
settled peace and purity, a long-suffering, generous forbearance, and
an enduring affectionateness which the other sex can hardly
comprehend or credit. Men will not believe, what is nevertheless the
truth, that we can "stand alone" better than they can; that we can do
without them far easier, and with less deterioration of character,
than they can do without us; that we are better able to provide for
ourselves interests, duties, and pleasures; in short, strange as it
may appear, that we have more real self-sustaining independence than
they.

Of course, that the true life, the highest life, is that of man and
woman united, no one will be insane enough to deny; I am speaking of
the substitute for it, which poor humanity has so often to fall back
upon and make the best of--a better best very frequently than what
appears best in the eyes of the world. In truth, many a troubled,
care ridden, wealthy family, torn with dissensions, or frozen up in
splendid formalities, might have envied that quiet, humble, maiden
household of the Misses Leaf, where their only trial was poverty, and
their only grief the one which they knew the worst of, and had met
patiently for many a year--poor Selina's "way."

I doubt not it was good for Elizabeth Hand that her first place--the
home in which she received her first impressions--was this feminine
establishment, simple and regular, in which was neither waste nor
disorder allowed. Good, too, that while her mistresses' narrow means
restricted her in many things enjoyed by servants in richer families,
their interests, equally narrow, caused to be concentrated upon
herself a double measure of thought and care. She became absolutely
"one of the family," sharing in all its concerns. From its small and
few carnal luxuries--such as the cake, fruit, or pot of preserve,
votive offerings from pupils' parents--up to the newspaper and the
borrowed book, nothing was either literally or metaphorically
"locked" up from Elizabeth.

This grand question of locking up had been discussed in full conclave
the day after her month of preparation ended, the sisters taking
opposite sides, as might have been expected. Selina was for the
immediate introduction of a locksmith and a key basket.

"While she was only on trial, it did not so much signify; besides, if
it did, we had only buttons on the press doors; but now she is our
regular servant we ought to institute a regular system of authority.
How can she respect a family that never locks up any thing?"

"How can we respect a servant from whom we lock up every thing!"

"Respect a servant! What do you mean, Hilary?"

"I mean that if I did not respect a servant I would be very sorry to
keep her one day in any house of mine."

"Wait till you've a house of your own to keep, Miss," said Selina,
crossly. "I never heard such nonsense. Is that the way you mean to
behave to Elizabeth? leave every thing open to her--clothes, books,
money; trust her with all your secrets; treat her as your most
particular friend?"

"A girl of fifteen would be rather an inconvenient particular friend!
And I have happily few secrets to trust her with. But if I could not
trust her with our coffee, tea, sugar, and so on, and bring her up
from the very first in the habit of being trusted, I would recommend
her being sent away to-morrow."

"Very fine talking; and what do you say, Johanna?--if that is not an
unnecessary question after Hilary has given her opinion."

"I think," replied the elder sister, taking no notice of the long
familiar innuendo, "that in this case Hilary is right. How people
ought to manage in great houses I can not say; but in our small house
it will be easier and better not to alter our simple ways. Trusting
the girl--if she is a good girl--will only make her more trustworthy;
if she is bad, we shall the sooner find it out and let her go."

But Elizabeth did not go. A year passed; two years; her wages were
raised, and with them her domestic position. From a "girl" she was
converted into a regular servant; her pinafores gave place to
grown-up gowns and aprons; and her rough head, at Miss Selina's
incessant instance, was concealed by a cap--caps being considered by
that lady as the proper and indispensable badge of servant-hood.

To say that during her transition state, or even now that she had
reached the cap era, Elizabeth gave her mistresses no trouble, would
be stating a self-evident improbability. What young lass under
seventeen, of any rank, does not cause plenty of trouble to her
natural guardians? Who can "put an old head on young shoulders?" or
expect from girls at the most unformed and unsatisfactory period of
life that complete moral and mental discipline, that unfailing
self-control, that perfection of temper, and every thing else which,
of course, all mistresses always have?

I am obliged to confess that Elizabeth had a few--nay, not a
few--most obstinate faults; that no child tries its parents, no pupil
its school teachers, more than she tried her three mistresses at
intervals. She was often thoughtless and careless, brusque in her
manner, slovenly, in her dress; sometimes she was down-right "bad,"
filled full--as some of her elders and betters are, at all ages--with
absolute naughtiness; when she would sulk for hours and days
together, and make the whole family uncomfortable, as many a servant
can make many a family small as that of the Misses Leaf.

But still they never lost what Hilary termed their "respect" for
Elizabeth; they never found her out in a lie, a meanness, or an act
of deception or dishonesty. They took her faults as we must take the
surface faults of all connected with us--patiently rather than
resentfully, seeking to correct rather than to punish. And though
there were difficult elements in the household, such as their being
three mistresses to be obeyed the youngest mistress a thought too lax
and the second one undoubtedly too severe, still no girl could live
with these high-principled, much-enduring women without being
impressed with two things which the serving class are slowest to
understand--the dignity of poverty, and the beauty of that which is
the only effectual law to bring out good and restrain evil--the law
of loving-kindness.

Two fracas, however, must be chronicled, for after both, the girl's
dismissal hung on a thread. The first was when Mrs. Cliffe, mother of
Tommy Cliffe, who was nearly killed in the field, being discovered to
be an ill sort of woman, and in the habit of borrowing from Elizabeth
stray shillings, which were never returned, was forbidden the house,
Elizabeth resented it so fiercely that she sulked for a whole week
afterward.

The other and still more dangerous crisis in Elizabeth's destiny was
when a volume of Scott's novels, having been missing for some days,
was found hidden in her bed, and she lying awake reading it was thus
ignominiously discovered at eleven P. M. by Miss Selina, in
consequence of the gleam of candle light from under her door.

It was true neither of these errors were actual moral crimes. Hilary
even roused a volley of sharp words upon herself by declaring they
had their source in actual virtues; that a girl who would stint
herself of shillings, and hold resolutely to any liking she had, even
if unworthy, had a creditable amount of both self-denial and fidelity
in her disposition. Also that a tired out maid-of all-work, who was
kept awake of nights by her ardent appreciation of the "Heart of
Mid-Lothian," must possess a degree of both intellectual and moral
capacity which deserved cultivation rather than blame. And though
this surreptitious pursuit of literature under difficulties could not
of course be allowed, I grieve to say that Miss Hilary took every
opportunity of not only giving the young servant books to read, but
of talking to her about them. And also that a large proportion of
these books were--to Miss Selina's unmitigated horror--absolutely
fiction! stories, novels, even poetry--books that Hilary liked
herself--books that had built up in her own passionate dream of life;
wherein all the women were faithful, tender, heroic, self-devoted;
and all the men were--something not unlike Robert Lyon.

Did she do harm? Was it; as Selina and even Johanna said sometimes,
"dangerous" thus to put before Elizabeth a standard of ideal
perfection, a Quixotic notion of life--life in its full purpose
power, and beauty--such as otherwise never could have crossed the
mind of this working girl, born of parents who, though respectable
and worthy, were in no respect higher than the common working class?
I will not argue the point: I am not making Elizabeth a text for a
sermon; I am simply writing her story.

One thing was certain, that by degrees the young woman's faults
lessened; even that worst of them, the unmistakable bad temper, not
aggressive, but obstinately sullen, which made her and Miss Selina
sometimes not on speaking terms for a week together. But she simply
"sulked;" she never grumbled or was pert; and she did her work just
as usual--with a kind of dogged struggle not only against the
superior powers but against something within herself much harder to
fight with.

"She makes me feel more sorry for her than angry with her," Miss Leaf
would sometimes say, coming out of the kitchen with that grieved
face, which was the chief sign of displeasure her sweet nature ever
betrayed. "She will have up-hill work through life, like us all, and
more than many of us, poor child!"

But gradually Elizabeth, too, copying involuntarily the rest of the
family, learned to put up with Miss Selina; who, on her part, kept a
sort of armed neutrality. And once, when a short but sharp illness of
Johanna's shook the house from its even tenor, startled every body
out of their little tempers, and made them cling together and work
together in a sort of fear-stricken union against one common grief,
Selina allowed that they might have gone farther and fared worse on
the day they engaged Elizabeth.

After this illness of his Aunt. Ascott came home. It was his first
visit since he had gone to London: Mr. Ascott, he said, objected to
holidays. But now, from some unexplained feeling, Johanna in her
convalescence longed after the boy--no longer a boy, however, but
nearly twenty, and looking fully his age. How proud his aunts were to
march him up the town, and hear every body's congratulations on his
good looks and polished manners! It was the old story--old as the
hills! I do not pretend to invent any thing new. Women, especially
maiden aunts, will repeat the tale till the end of time, so long as
they have youths belonging to them on whom to expend their natural
tendency to clinging fondness, and ignorant, innocent hero worship.
The Misses Leaf--ay, even Selina, whose irritation against the
provoking boy was quite mollified by the elegant young man--were no
wiser than their neighbors.

But there was one person in the household who still obstinately
refused to bow the knee to Ascott. Whether it was, as psychologists
might explain, some instinctive polarity in their natures; or
whether, having once conceived a prejudice, Elizabeth held on to it
like grim death; still there was the same unspoken antagonism between
them. The young fellow took little notice of her except to observe
"that she hadn't grown any handsomer;' but Elizabeth watched him with
a keen severity that overlooked nothing, and resisted, with a passive
pertinacity that was quite irresistible, all his encroachments on the
family habits, all the little self-pleasing ways which Ascott had
been so used to of old, that neither he nor his aunts apparently
recognized them as selfish.

"I canna bear to see him" ("can not," suggested her mistress, who not
seeing any reason why Elizabeth should not speak the Queen's English
as well as herself, had instituted h's, and stopped a few more
glaring provincialisms.) "I cannot bear to see him, Miss Hilary,
lolling on the arm-chair, when Missis looks so tired and pale, and
sitting up o' nights, burning double fires, and going up stairs at
last with his boots on, and waking every body. I dunnot like it, I
say."

"You forget; Mr. Ascott has his studies. He must work for the next
examination."

"Why doesn't he get up of a morning then instead of lying in bed, and
keeping the break-fast about till ten? Why can't he do his learning
by daylight? Daylight's cheaper than mould candles, and a deal better
for the eyes."

Hilary was puzzled. A truth was a truth, and to try and make it out
otherwise, even for the dignity of the family, was something from
which her honest nature revolted. Besides, the sharp-sighted servant
would be the first to detect the inconsistency of one law of right
for the parlor and another for the kitchen. So she took-refuge in
silence and in the apple-pudding she was making.

But she resolved to seize the first opportunity of giving Ascott, by
way of novelty, the severest lecture that tongue of aunt could
bestow. And this chance occurred the same afternoon, when the other
two aunts had gone out to tea, to a house which Ascott voted "slow,"
and declined going to. She remained to make tea for him, and in the
mean time took him for a constitutional up and down the public walks
hard by.

Ascott listened at first very good humoredly; once or twice calling
her "a dear little prig," in his patronizing way--he was rather fond
of patronizing his Aunt Hilary. But when she seriously spoke of his
duties, as no longer a boy but a man, who ought now to assume the
true, manly right of thinking for and taking care of other people,
especially his aunts, Ascott began to flush up angrily.

"Now stop that, Aunt Hilary: I'll not have you coming Mr. Lyon over
me."

"What do you mean?"

For of late Ascott had said very little about Mr. Lyon--not half so
much as Mr. Lyon, in his steadily persistent letters to Miss Leaf,
told her about her nephew Ascott.

"I mean that I'll not be preached to like that by a woman. It's bad
enough to stand it from a man; but then Lyon's a real sharp fellow,
who knows the world, which women don't, Aunt Hilary. Besides, he
coaches me in my Latin and Greek; so I let him pitch into me now and
then. But I won't let you; so just stop it; will you."

Something new in Ascott's tone--speaking more of the resentful
fierceness of the man than the pettishness of the boy--frightened his
little aunt, and silenced her. By-and-by she took comfort from the
reflection that, as the lad had in his anger betrayed, he had beside
him in London a monitor whose preaching would be so much wiser and
more effectual than her own that she determined to say no more.

The rare hearing of Mr. Lyon's name--for, time and absence having
produced their natural effect, except when his letter came, he was
seldom talked about now--set Hilary thinking.

"Do you go to see him often?" she said, at last.

"Who? Mr. Lyon?" And Ascott, delighted' to escape into a fresh
subject, became quite cheerful and communicative. "Oh, bless you! He
wouldn't care for my going to him. He lives in a two-pair back, only
one room, 'which serves him for kitchen and parlor and all:' dines at
a cook shop for nine-pence a day, and makes his own porridge night
and morning. He told me so once, for he isn't a bit ashamed of it.
But he must be precious hard up sometimes. However, as he contrives
to keep a decent coat on his back, and pay his classes at the
University, and carry off the very first honors going there, nobody
asks any questions. That's the good of London life, Aunt Hilary,"
said the young fellow, drawing himself up with great wisdom. "Only
look like a gentleman, behave yourself as such, and nobody asks any
questions."

"Yes," acquiesced vaguely Aunt Hilary. And then her mind wandered
yearningly to the solitary student in the two-pair back. He might
labor and suffer; he might be ill; he might die, equally solitary,
and "nobody would ask any questions." This phase of London life let a
new light in upon her mind. The letters to Johanna had been chiefly
filled with whatever he thought would interest them. With his
characteristic Scotch reserve, he had said very little about himself,
except in the last, wherein he mentioned that he had "done pretty
well" at the college this term, and meant to "go in for more work"
immediately.

What this work entailed--how much more toil, how much more
poverty--Hilary knew not. Perhaps even his successes, which Ascott
went on to talk of, had less place in her thoughts than the picture
of the face she knew, sharpened with illness, wasted with hard work
and solitary care.

"And I can not help him--I can not help him!" was her bitter cry;
until, passing from the dream-land of fancy, the womanly nature
asserted itself. She thought if it had been, or if it were to be, her
blessed lot to be chosen by Robert Lyon, how she would take care of
him! what an utter slave she would be to him! How no penury would
frighten her, no household care oppress or humble her, if done for
him and for his comfort. To her brave heart no battle of life seemed
too long or too sore, if only it were fought for him and at his side.
And as the early falling leaves were blown in gusts across her path,
and the misty autumn night began to close in, nature herself seemed
to plead in unison with the craving of her heart, which sighed that
youth and summer last not always; and that, "be it ever so humble,"
as the song says, there is no place so bright and beautiful as the
fireside of a loveful home.

While the aunt and nephew were strolling thus, thinking of very
different things, their own fire newly lit--Ascott liked a fire--was
blazing away in solitary glory, for the benefit of all passers-by. At
length one--a gentleman--stopped at the gate, and looked in, then
took a turn to the end of the terrace, and stood gazing in once more.
The solitude of the room apparently troubled him; twice his hand was
on the latch before he opened it and knocked at the front door.

Elizabeth appeared, which seemed to surprise him.

"Is Miss Leaf at home?"

"No, Sir."

"Is she well? Are all the family well?" and he stepped right into the
passage, with the freedom of a familiar foot.

("I should ha' slammed the door in his face," was Elizabeth's comment
afterward; "only, you see, Miss Hilary, he looked a real gentleman.")

The stranger and she mutually examined one another.

"I think I have heard of you," said he, smiling. "You are Miss Leaf's
servant--Elizabeth Hand."

"Yes, Sir," still grimly, and with a determined grasp of the door
handle.

"If your mistresses are likely to be home soon, will you allow me to
wait for them? I am an old friend of theirs. My name is Lyon."

Now Elizabeth was far too much one of the family not to have heard of
such a person. And his knowing her was a tolerable proof of his
identity; besides, unconsciously, the girl was influenced by that
look and mien of true gentlemanhood, as courteous to the poor
maid-of-all-work as he would have been to any duchess born; and by
that bright, sudden smile, which came like sunshine over his face,
and like sunshine warmed and opened the heart of every one that met
it.

It opened that of Elizabeth. She relaxed her Cerberus keeping of the
door, and even went so far as to inform him that Miss Leaf and Miss
Selina were out to tea, but Miss Hilary and Mr. Ascott would be at
home shortly. He was welcome to wait in the parlor if he liked.

Afterward, seized with mingled curiosity and misgiving, she made
various errands to go in and look at him; but she had not courage to
address him, and he never spoke to her. He sat by the window, gazing
out into the gloaming. Except just turning his head at her entrance;
she did not think he had once stirred the whole time.

Elizabeth went back to her kitchen, and stood listening for her young
mistress's familiar knock. Mr. Lyon seemed to have listened too, for
before she could reach it the door was already opened.

There was a warm greeting--to her great relief: for she knew she had
broken the domestic laws in admitting a stranger unawares--and then
Elizabeth heard them all three go into the parlor, where they
remained talking, without ringing for either tea or candles, a full
quarter of an hour.

Miss Hilary at last came out, but much to Elizabeth's surprise, went
straight up into her bedroom without entering the kitchen at all.

It was some minutes more before she descended; and then, after giving
her orders for tea, and seeing that all was arranged with special
neatness, she stood absently by the kitchen fire. Elizabeth noticed
how wonderfully bright her eyes were, and what a soft, happy smile
she had. She noticed it, because she had never seen Miss Hilary look
exactly like that before; and she never did again.

"Don't you be troubling yourself with waiting about here," she said;
and her mistress seemed to start at being spoken to. "I'll get the
tea all right, Miss Hilary. Please go back into the parlor."

Hilary went in.



CHAPTER VI.

Elizabeth got tea ready with unwonted diligence and considerable
excitement. Any visitor was a rare occurrence in this very quiet
family; but a gentleman visitor--a young gentleman too--was a
remarkable fact, arousing both interest and curiosity. For in the
latter quality this girl of seventeen could scarcely be expected to
be deficient; and as to the former, she had so completely identified
herself with the family she served, that all their concerns were her
concerns also. Her acute comments on their few guests, and on their
little scholars, sometimes amused Hilary as much as her criticisms on
the books she read. But as neither were ever put forward intrusively
or impertinently, she let them pass, and only laughed over them with
Johanna in private.

In speaking of these said books, and the questions they led to, it
was not likely but that mistress and maid--one aged twenty-two, and
the other seventeen--should occasionally light upon a subject rather
interesting to women of their ages, though not commonly discussed
between mistresses and maids. Nevertheless, when it did come in the
way, Miss Hilary never shirked it, but talked it out, frankly and
freely, as she would to any other person.

"The girl has feelings and notions on the matter, like all other
girls, I suppose," reasoned she to herself; "so it is important that
her notions should be kept clear, and her feelings right. It may do
her some good, and save her from much harm."

And so it befell that Elizabeth Hand, whose blunt ways, unlovely
person, and temperament so oddly nervous and reserved, kept her from
attracting any "sweetheart" of her own class, had unconsciously
imbibed her mistress's theory of love. Love, pure and simple, the
very deepest and highest, sweetest and most solemn thing in life: to
be believed in devoutly until it came, and when it did come, to be
held to, firmly, faithfully, with a single-minded, settled constancy,
till death. A creed, quite impossible, many will say, in this
ordinary world, and most dangerous to be put into the head of a poor
servant. Yet a woman is but a woman, be she maid-servant or queen;
and if, from queens to maid-servants, girls were taught thus to think
of love, there might be a few more "broken" hearts perhaps, but there
would certainly be fewer wicked hearts; far fewer corrupted lives of
men, and degraded lives of women; far fewer unholy marriages, and
desolated, dreary, homeless homes.

Elizabeth, having cleared away her tea-things, stood listening to the
voices in the parlor, and pondering. She had sometimes wondered in
her own mind that no knight ever came to carry off her charming
princess--her admired and beloved Miss Hilary. Miss Hilary, on her
part, seemed totally indifferent to the youths at Stowbury; who
indeed were, Elizabeth allowed, quite unworthy her regard. The only
suitable lover for her young mistress must be somebody exceedingly
grand and noble--a compound of the best heroes of Shakespeare, Scott,
Fenimore Cooper, Maria Edgeworth, and Harriet Martineau. When this
strange gentleman appeared--in ordinary coat and hat, or rather
Glengary bonnet, neither particularly handsome nor particularly tall,
yet whose coming had evidently given Miss Hilary so much pleasure,
and who, once or twice while waiting at tea, Elizabeth fancied she
had seen looking at Miss Hilary as nobody ever looked before--when
Mr. Robert Lyon appeared on the horizon, the faithful "bower maiden"
was a good deal disappointed.

She had expected something better; at all events, something
different. Her first brilliant castle in the air fell, poor lass! but
she quickly built it up again, and, with the vivid imagination of her
age, she mapped out the whole future, ending by a vision of Miss
Hilary, all in white, sweeping down the Terrace in a carriage and
pair--to fortune and happiness; leaving herself, though with a sore
want at her heart, and a great longing to follow, to devote the
remainder of her natural life to Miss Johanna.

"Her couldna do without somebody to see to her--and Miss Selina do
worrit her so." muttered Elizabeth, in the excitement of this
Almaschar vision, relapsing into her old provincialisms. "So, even if
Miss Hilary axes me to come, I'll stop, I reckon. Ay, I'll stop wi'
Miss Leaf."

This valorous determination taken, the poor maid servant's dream was
broken by the opening of the parlor door, and an outcry of Ascott's
for his coat and gloves, he having to fetch his aunts home at nine
o'clock, Mr. Lyon accompanying him. And as they all stood together at
the front door, Elizabeth overheard Mr. Lyon say something about what
a beautiful night it was.

"It would do you no harm, Miss Hilary; will you walk with us?"

"If you like."

Hilary went up stairs for her bonnet and shawl; but when, a minute or
two after, Elizabeth followed her with a candle, she found her
standing in the centre of the room, all in the dark, her face white
and her hands trembling.

"Thank you, thank you!" she said mechanically, as Elizabeth folded
and fastened her shawl for her--and descended immediately. Elizabeth
watched her take, not Ascott's arm, but Mr. Lyon's, and walk down the
terrace in the starlight.

"Some'at's wrong. I'd like to know who's been a-vexin' of her,"
thought fiercely the young servant.

No, nobody had been "a-vexing" her mistress. There was nobody to
blame; only there had happened to Hilary one of those things which
strike like a sword through a young and happy heart, taking all the
life and youth out of it.

Robert Lyon had, half an hour ago, told her--and she had had to hear
it as a piece of simple news, to which she had only to say,
"Indeed!"--that to day and to-morrow were his two last days at
Stowbury--almost his last in England. Within a week he was to sail
for India.

There had befallen him what most people would have considered a piece
of rare good fortune. At the London University, a fellow student,
whom he had been gratuitously "coaching" in Hindostanee, fell ill,
and was "thrown upon his hands." as he briefly defined services which
must have been great, since they had resulted in this end. The young
man's father--a Liverpool and Bombay merchant--made him an offer to
go out there, to their house, at a rising salary of 300 rupees a
month for three years; after the third year to become a junior
partner; remaining at Bombay in that capacity for two years more.

This he told to Hilary and Ascott in almost as few words as I have
here put it--for brevity seemed a refuge to him. It was also to one
of them. But Ascott asked so many questions that his aunt needed to
ask none. She only listened, and tried to take all in, and understand
it, that is, in a consecutive, intelligent, business shape, without
feeling it. She dared not let herself feel it, not for a second, till
they were out, arm-in-arm, under the quiet winter stars. Then she
heard his voice asking her, "So you think I was right?"

"Right?" she echoed mechanically.

"I mean in accepting that sudden chance, and changing my whole plan
of life. I did not do it--believe me--without a motive."

"What motive?" she would once unhesitatingly have asked; now she could
not.

Robert Lyon continued speaking, distinctly and yet in an undertone,
that though Ascott was walking a few yards off, Hilary felt was meant
for her alone to hear.

"The change is, you perceive, from the life of a student to that of a
man of business. I do not deny that I preferred the first. Once upon
a time to be a fellow in a college, or a professor, or the like, was
my utmost aim and I would have half killed myself to attain it. Now,
I think differently."

He paused, but did not seem to require an answer, and it did not
come.

"I want, not to be rich but to get a decent competence, and to get it
as soon as I can. I want not to ruin my health with incessant study.
I have already injured it a good deal."

"Have you been ill? You never said so."

"Oh no, it was hardly worth while. And I knew an active life would
soon set me right again. No fear! there's life in the old dog yet. He
does not wish to die. But," Mr. Lyon pursued, "I have had a 'sair
fecht' the last year or two. I would not go through it again, nor see
any one dear to me go through it. It is over, but it has left its
scars. Strange! I have been poor all my life, yet I never till now
felt an actual terror of poverty."

Hilary shrank within herself; less even at the words than at
something in their tone--something hard, nay fierce; something at
once despairing and aggressive.

"It is strange," she said; "such a terror is not like you. I feel
none; I can not even understand it."

"No, I knew you could not," he muttered; and was silent.

So was Hilary. A vague trouble came over her. Could it be that he,
Robert Lyon, had been seized with the _auri sacra fames_, which he had
so often inveighed against and despised? that his long battle with
poverty had caused in him such an overweening desire for riches that,
to obtain them, he would sacrifice every thing else, exile himself to
a far country for years, selling his very life and soul for gold?

Such a thought of him was so terrible--that is, would have been were
it tenable--that Hilary for an instant felt herself shiver all over.
The next she spoke out--in justice to him she forced herself to speak
out--all her honest soul.

"I do believe that this going abroad to make a fortune, which young
men so delight in, is often a most fatal mistake. They give up far
more than they gain--country, home, health. I think a man has no
right to sell his life any more than his soul for so many thousands a
year."

Robert Lyon smiled--"No, and I am not selling mine. With my temperate
habits I have as good a chance of health at Bombay as in
London--perhaps better. And the years I must be absent I would have
been absent almost as much from you--I mean they would have been
spent in work as engrossing and as hard. They will soon pass, and
then I shall come home rich--rich. Do you think I am growing
mercenary?"

"No."

"Tell me what you do think about me?"

"I--can not quite understand."

"And I cannot make you understand. Perhaps I will, some day when I
come back again. Till then, you must trust me, Hilary."

It happens occasionally, in moments of all but tolerable pain, that
some small thing, a word, a look, a touch of a hand, lets in such a
gleam of peace that nothing ever extinguishes the light of it: it
burns on for years and years, sometimes clear, sometimes obscured,
but as ineffaceable from life and memory as a star from its place in
the heavens. Such, both then, and through the lonely years to come,
were those five words, "You must trust me. Hilary."

She did; and in the perfection of that trust her own separate
identity, with all its consciousness of pain, seemed annihilated; she
did not think of herself at all, only of him, and with him, and for
him. So, for the time being, she lost all sense of personal
suffering, and their walk that night was as cheerful and happy as if
they were to walk together for weeks and months and years, in
undivided confidence and content, instead of its being the last--the
very last.

Some one has said that all lovers have, soon or late, to learn to be
only friends: happiest and safest are those in whom the friendship is
the foundation--always firm and ready to fall back upon, long after
the fascination of passion dies. It may take a little from the
romance of these two if I own that Robert Lyon talked to Hilary not a
word about love, and a good deal about pure business, telling her all
his affairs and arrangements, and giving her as clear an idea of his
future life as it was possible to do within the limits of one brief
half hour.

Then casting a glance round, and seeing that Ascott was quite out of
ear-shot, he said, with that tender fall of the voice that felt, as
some poet hath it,

        "Like a still embrace,"

"Now tell me as much as you can about yourself."

At first there seemed nothing to tell; but gradually he drew from
Hilary a good deal. Johanna's feeble health, which caused her
continuing to teach to be very unadvisable; and the gradual
diminishing of the school--from what cause they could not
account--which made it very doubtful whether some change would not
soon or late be necessary.

What this change should be she and Mr. Lyon discussed a little--as
far as in the utterly indefinite position of affairs was possible.
Also, from some other questions of his, she spoke to him about
another dread which had lurked in her mind, and yet to which she
could give no tangible shape, about Ascott. He could not remove it,
he did not attempt; but he soothed it a little, advising with her as
to the best way of managing the willful lad. His strong, clear sense,
just judgment, and, above all, a certain unspoken sense of union, as
if all that concerned her and hers he took naturally upon himself as
his own, gave Hilary such comfort that, even on this night, with a
full consciousness of all that was to follow, she was happy--nay, she
had not been so happy for years. Perhaps (let the truth be told), the
glorious truth of true love, that its recognition, spoken or silent,
constitutes the only perfect joy of life that of two made perhaps she
had never been so really happy since she was born.

The last thing he did was to make her give him an assurance that in
any and all difficulty she would apply to him.

"To me, and to no one else, remember. No one but myself must help
you. And I will, so, long as I am alive. Do you believe this?"

She looked up at him by the lamp light, and said, "I do."

"And you promise?"

"Yes."

Then they loosed arms, and Hilary knew that they should never walk
together again till--when and how?

Returning, of course, he walked with Miss Leaf; and throughout the
next day, a terribly wet Sunday, spent by them entirely in the little
parlor, they had not a minute of special or private talk together. He
did not seem to wish it; indeed, almost avoided it.

Thus slipped away the strange, still day--a Sunday never to be
forgotten. At night, after prayers were, over, Mr. Lyon rose
suddenly, saying he must leave them now; he was obliged to start from
Stowbury at daybreak.

"Shall we not see you again?" asked Johanna.

"No. This will be my last Sunday in England. Good-by!"

He turned excessively pale, shook hands silently with them
all--Hilary last--and almost before they recognized the fact, he was
gone.

With him departed, not all Hilary's peace or faith or courage of
heart, for to all who love truly, while the best beloved lives, and
lives worthily, no parting is hopeless and no grief overwhelming; but
all the brightness of her youth, all the sense of joy that young
people have in loving, and in being beloved again, in fond meetings
and fonder partings, in endless walks and talks, in sweet kisses and
clinging arms. Such happiness was not for her: when she saw it the
lot of others, she said to herself sometimes with a natural sharp
sting of pain, but oftener with a solemn acquiescence, "It is the
will of God; it is the will of God."

Johanna, too, who would have given her life almost to bring some
color back to the white face of her darling, of whom she asked no
questions, and who never complained nor confessed any thing, many and
many a night when Hilary either lay awake by her side, or tossed and
moaned in her sleep, till the elder sister took her in her arms like
a baby--Johanna, too, said to herself, "This is the will of God."

I have told thus much in detail the brief sad story of Hilary's
youth, to show how impossible it was that Elizabeth Hand could live
in the house with these two women without being strongly influenced
by them, as every person--especially every woman--influences for good
or for evil every other person connected with her, or dependent upon
her. Elizabeth was a girl of close observation and keen perception.
Besides, to most people, whether or not their sympathy be universal,
so far as the individual is concerned, any deep affection generally
lends eyes, tact, and delicacy.

Thus when on the Monday morning at breakfast Miss Selina observed,
"What a fine day Mr. Lyon was having for his journey; what a lucky
fellow he was; how he would be sure to make a fortune, and if so, she
wondered whether they should ever see or hear any thing of him
again"--Elizabeth, from the glimpse she caught of Miss Hilary's face,
and from the quiet way in which Miss Leaf merely answered, "Time will
show;" and began talking to Selina about some other
subject--Elizabeth resolved never in any way to make the smallest
allusion to Mr. Robert Lyon. Something had happened, she did not know
what; and it was not her business to find out; the family affairs, so
far as she was trusted with them, were warmly her own, but into the
family secrets she had no right to pry.

Yet, long after Miss Selina had ceased to "wonder" about him, or even
to name him--his presence or absence did not touch her personally,
and she was always the centre of her own small world of interest--the
little maidservant kept in her mind, and pondered over at odd times
every possible solution of the mystery of this gentleman's sudden
visit; of the long wet Sunday when he sat all day talking with her
mistresses in the parlor; of the evening prayer, when Miss Leaf had
twice to stop, her voice faltered so; and of the night when, long
after all the others had gone to bed, Elizabeth, coming suddenly into
the parlor, had found Miss Hilary sitting alone over the embers of
the fire, with the saddest, saddest look! so that the girl had softly
shut the door again without ever speaking to "Missis."

Elizabeth did more; which, strange as it may appear, a servant who is
supposed to know nothing of any thing that has happened can often do
better than a member of the family who knows every thing, and this
knowledge is sometimes the most irritating consciousness a sufferer
has. She followed her young mistress with a steady watchfulness, so
quiet and silent that Hilary never found it out; saved her every
little household care, gave her every little household treat. Not
much to do, and less to be chronicled; but the way in which she did
it was all.

During the long dull winter days, to come in and find the parlor fire
always bright, the hearth clean swept, and the room tidy; never to
enter the kitchen without the servant's face clearing up into a
smile; when her restless irritability made her forget things and grow
quite vexed in the search after them, to see that somehow her shoes
were never misplaced, and her gloves always came to hand in some
mysterious manner--these trifles; in her first heavy days of
darkness, soothed Hilary more than words could tell.

And the sight of Miss Hilary going about the house and school room as
usual, with that poor white face of hers; nay, gradually bringing to
the family fireside, as usual, her harmless little joke, and her
merry laugh at it and herself--who shall say what lessons may not
have been taught by this to the humble servant, dropping deep sown
into her heart, to germinate and fructify, as her future life's needs
required?

It might have been so--God knows! He alone can know, who, through
what (to us) seem the infinite littleness of our mortal existence, is
educating us into the infinite greatness of His and our immortality.



CHAPTER VII.

Autumn soon lapsed into winter: Christmas came and went, bringing,
not Ascott, as they hoped and he had promised, but a very serious
evil in the shape of sundry bills of his, which, he confessed in a
most piteous letter to his Aunt Hilary, were absolutely unpayable out
of his godfather's allowance. They were not large--or would not have
seemed so to rich people--and they were for no more blamable luxuries
than horse hire, and a dinner or two to friends out in the country;
but they looked serious to a household which rarely was more than
five pounds beforehand with the world.

He had begged Aunt Hilary to keep his secret, but that was evidently
impossible; so on the day the school accounts were being written out
and sent in, and their amount anxiously reckoned, she laid before her
sisters the lad's letter, full of penitence and promises: "I will be
careful--I will indeed--if you will help me out this once, dear Aunt
Hilary; and don't think too ill of me. I have done nothing wicked.
And you don't know London; you don't know, with a lot of young
fellows about one, how very hard it is to say no."

At that unlucky postscript the Misses Leaf sorrowfully exchanged
looks. Little the lad thought about it; but these few words were the
very sharpest pang Ascott had ever given to his aunts.

"What's bred in the bone will come out in the flesh." "Like father
like son." "The sins of the parents shall be visited on the
children." So runs many a proverb: so confirms the unerring decree of
a just God, who would not be a just God did He allow Himself to break
His own righteous laws for the government of the universe; did He
falsify the requirements of His own holy and pure being, by
permitting any other wages for sin than death. And though, through
His mercy, sin forsaken escapes sin's penalty, and every human being
has it in his own power to modify, if not to conquer, any hereditary
moral as well as physical disease, thereby avoiding the doom and
alleviating the curse, still the original law remains in force, and
ought to remain, an example and a warning. As true as that every
individual sin that a man commits breeds multitudes more, is it that
every individual sin may transmit his own peculiar type of weakness
or wickedness to a whole race, disappearing in one generation,
re-appearing in another, exactly the same as physical peculiarities
do, requiring the utmost caution of education to counteract the
terrible tendencies of nature--the "something in the blood" which is
so difficult to eradicate: which may even make the third and fourth
generation execrate the memory of him or her who was its origin.

The long life-curse of Henry Leaf the elder, and Henry Leaf the
younger, had been--the women of the family well knew--that they were
men who "couldn't say No." So keenly were the three sisters alive to
this fault--it could hardly be called a crime, and yet in its
consequences it was so--so sickening the terror of it which their own
wretched experience had implanted in their minds, that during
Ascott's childhood and youth his very fractiousness and roughness,
his little selfishness, and his persistence in his own will against
theirs, had been hailed by his aunts as a good omen that he would
grow up "so unlike his poor father."

If the two unhappy Henry Leafs--father and son--could have come out
of their graves that night and beheld these three women, daughters
and sisters, sitting with Ascott's letter on the table, planning how
the household's small expenses could be contracted, its still smaller
luxuries relinquished, in order that the boy might honorably pay for
pleasures he might so easily have done without! If they could have
seen the weight of apprehension which then sank like a stone on these
long-tried hearts, never to be afterward removed: lightened
sometimes, but always--however Ascott might promise and amend--always
there! On such a discovery, surely, these two "poor ghosts" would
have fled away moaning, wishing they had died childless, or that
during their mortal lives any amount of self restraint and self
compulsion had purged from their natures the accursed thing; the sin
which had worked itself out in sorrow upon every one belonging to
them, years after their own heads were laid in the quiet dust.

"We must do it," was the conclusion the Misses Leaf unanimously came
to; even Selina; who with all her faults, had a fair share of good
feeling and of that close clinging to kindred which is found in
fallen households, or households whom the sacred bond of common
poverty, has drawn together in a way that large, well-to-do home
circles can never quite understand.

"We must not let the boy remain in debt; it would be such a disgrace
to the family."

"It is not the remaining in debt, but the incurring of it, which is
the real disgrace to Ascott and the family."

"Hush Hilary," said Johanna, pointing to the opening door; but it was
too late.

Elizabeth, coming suddenly in--or else the ladies had been so
engrossed with their conversation that they had not noticed her--had
evidently heard every word of the last sentence. Her conscious face
showed it; more especially the bright scarlet which covered both her
cheeks when Miss Leaf said "Hush!" She stood, apparently irresolute
as to whether she should run away again; and then her native honesty
got the upper hand, and she advanced into the room.

"If you please, missis, I didn't mean to--but I've heard--"

"What have you heard; that is, how much?"

"Just what Miss Hilary said. Don't be afeared. I shan't tell. I never
chatter about the family. Mother told me not."

"You owe a great deal, Elizabeth, to your good mother. Now go away."

"And another time." said Miss Selina, "knock at the door."

This was Elizabeth's first initiation into what many a servant has to
share--the secret burden of the family. After that day, though they
did not actually confide in her, her mistresses used no effort to
conceal that they had cares; that the domestic economies must, this
winter, be especially studied; there must be no extra fires, no
candles left burning to waste; and once a week or so, a few
butterless breakfasts or meatless dinners must be partaken of
cheerfully, in both parlor and kitchen. The Misses Leaf never stinted
their servant in any thing in which they did not stint themselves.

Strange to say, in spite of Miss Selina's prophecies, the girl's
respectful conduct did not abate: on the contrary, it seemed to
increase. The nearer she was lifted to her mistress's level, the more
her mind grew, so that she could better understand her mistresses
cares, and the deeper her consciousness of the only thing which gives
one human being any real authority over another--personal character.

Therefore, though the family means were narrowed, and the family
luxuries few, Elizabeth cheerfully put up with all; she even felt a
sort of pride in wasting nothing and in making the best of every
thing, as the others did. Perhaps, it may be said she was an
exceptional servant; and yet I would not do her class the wrong to
believe so-I would rather believe that there are many such among it;
many good, honest, faithful girls, who only need good mistresses unto
whom to be honest and faithful, and they would be no less so than
Elizabeth Hand.

The months went by--heavy and anxious months; for the school
gradually dwindled away, and Ascott's letter--now almost the only
connection his aunts had with the outer world, for poverty
necessarily diminished even their small Stowbury society--became more
and more unsatisfactory; and the want of information in them was not
supplied by those other letters which had once kept Johanna's heart
easy concerning the boy.

Mr. Lyon had written once before sailing, nay, after sailing, for he
had sent it home by the pilot from the English Channel; then there
was, of course, silence. October, November, December, January,
February, March--how often did Hilary count the months, and wonder
how soon a letter would come, whether a letter ever would come again.
And sometimes--the sharp present stinging her with its small daily
pains, the future looking dark before her and them all--she felt so
forlorn, so forsaken, that but for a certain tiny well-spring of
hope, which rarely dries up till long after three-and twenty, she
could have sat down and sighed, "My good days are done."

Rich people break their hearts much sooner than poor people; that is,
they more easily get into that morbid state which is glorified by the
term, "a broken heart." Poor people can not afford it. Their constant
labor "physics pain." Their few and narrow pleasures seldom pall.
Holy poverty! black as its dark side is, it has its bright side too,
that is, when it is honest, fearless, free from selfishness.
wastefulness, and bickerings; above all, free from the terror of
debt.

"We'll starve, we'll go into the work house rather than we'll go into
debt!" cried Hilary once, in a passion of tears, when she was in sore
want of a shawl, and Selina urged her to get it, and wait till she
could pay for it. "Yes; the work house! It would be less shame to be
honorably indebted to the laws of the land than to be meanly
indebted, under false pretences, to any individual in it".

And when, in payment for some accidental lessons, she got next month
enough money to buy a shawl, and a bonnet, too--nay, by great
ingenuity, another bonnet for Johanna--Hilary could have danced and
sang--sang, in the gladness and relief of her heart, the glorious
euthanasia of poverty.

But these things happened only occasionally; the daily life was hard
still; ay, very hard, even though at last came the letter from
"foreign parts;" and following it, at regular intervals, other
letters. They were full of facts rather than feelings--simple,
straightforward; worth little as literary compositions; school-master
and learned man as he was, there was nothing literary or poetical
about Mr. Lyon; but what he wrote was like what he spoke, the
accurate reflection of his own clear, original mind and honest,
tender heart.

His letters gave none the less comfort because, nominally, they were
addressed to Johanna. This might have been from some crotchet of
over-reserve, delicacy, or honor--the same which made him part from
her for years with no other word than 'You must trust me, Hilary;'
but whatever it was she respected it, and she did trust him. And
whether Johanna answered his letters or not, month by month they
unfailingly came, keeping her completely informed of all his
proceedings, and letting out, as epistles written from over the seas
often do, much more of himself and his character than he was probably
aware that he betrayed.

And Hilary, whose sole experience of mankind had been the scarcely
remembered father, the too well remembered brother, and the anxiously
watched nephew, thanked God that there seemed to be one man in the
world whom a woman could lean her heart upon, and not feel the
support break like a reed beneath her--one man whom she could
entirely believe in, and safely and sacredly trust.



CHAPTER VIII.

Time slipped by. Robert Lyon had been away more than three years. But
in the monotonous life of the three sisters at Stowbury, nothing was
changed. Except, perhaps, Elizabeth, who had grown quite a woman;
might have passed almost for thirty; so solidly old fashioned were
her figure and her manners.

Ascott Leaf had finished his walking the hospitals and his
examinations, and was now fitted to commence practice for himself.
His godfather had still continued his allowance, though once or
twice, when he came down to Stowbury, he had asked his aunts to help
him in small debts the last time in one a little more serious; when,
after some sad and sore consultation, it had been resolved to tell
him he must contrive to live within his own allowance. For they were
poorer than they used to be; many more schools had arisen in the
town, and theirs had dwindled away. It was becoming a source of
serious anxiety whether they could possibly make ends meet; and when,
the next Christmas, Ascott sent them a five pound note--an actual
five pound note, together with a fond, grateful letter that was worth
it all--the aunts were deeply thankful, and very happy.

But still the school declined. One night they were speculating upon
the causes of this, and Hilary was declaring, in a half jocular, half
earnest way, that it must be because a prophet is never a prophet in
his own country.

"The Stowbury people will never believe how clever I am. Only, it is
a useless sort of cleverness, I fear. Greek, Latin, and mathematics
are no good to infants under seven, such as Stowbury persists in
sending to us."

"They think I am only fit to teach little children--and perhaps it is
true," said Miss Leaf.

"I wish you had not to teach at all. I wish I was a daily
governess--I might be, and earn enough to keep the whole family;
only, not here."

"I wonder," said Johanna, thoughtfully, "if we shall have to make a
change."

"A change!" It almost pained the elder sister to see how the younger
brightened up at the word. "Where to--London? Oh, I have so longed to
go and live in London! But I thought you would not like it, Johanna."

That was true. Miss Leaf, whom feeble health had made prematurely
old, would willingly have ended her days in the familiar town; but
Hilary was young and strong. Johanna called to mind the days when she
too had felt that rest was only another name for dullness; and when
the most difficult thing possible to her was what seemed now so
easy--to sit down and endure.

Besides, unlike herself, Hilary had her life all before her. It might
be a happy life, safe in a good man's tender keeping; those unfailing
letters from India seemed to prophecy that it would. But no one could
say. Miss Leaf's own experience had not led her to place much faith
in either men or happiness.

Still, whatever Hilary's future might be, it would likely be a very
different one from that quiet, colorless life of hers. And as she
looked at her younger sister, with the twilight glow on her
face--they were taking an evening stroll up and down the
terrace--Johanna hoped and prayed it might be so. Her own lot seemed
easy enough for herself; but for Hilary--she would like to see Hilary
something better than a poor schoolmistress at Stowbury.

No more was said at that time, but Johanna had the deep, still,
Mary-like nature, which "kept" things, and "pondered them in her
heart." So that when the subject came up again she was able to meet
it with that sweet calmness which was her especial
characteristic--the unruffled peace of a soul which no worldly storms
could disturb overmuch, for it had long since cast anchor in the
world unseen.

The chance which revived the question of the Great Metropolitan
Hegira, as Hilary called it, was a letter from Mr. Ascott, as
follows:

"MISS LEAF.  MADAM,--I shall be obliged by your informing me if it is
your wish, as it seems to be your nephew's, that instead of returning
to Stowbury, he should settle in London as a surgeon and general
practitioner? His education complete, I consider that I have done my
duty by him; but I may assist him occasionally still, unless he turns
out--as his father did before him--a young man who prefers being
helped to helping himself, in which case I shall have nothing more to
do with him. I remain, Madam, your obedient servant,
    PETER ASCOTT."

The sisters read this letter, passing it round the table, none of
them apparently liking to be the first to comment upon it. At length
Hilary said: "I think that reference to poor Henry is perfectly
brutal."

"And yet he was very kind to Henry. And if it had not been for his
common sense in sending poor little Ascott and the nurse down to
Stowbury the baby might have died. But you don't remember any thing
of that time, my dear," said Johanna, sighing.

"He has been kind enough, though he has done it in such a patronizing
way," observed Selina. "I suppose that's the real reason of his doing
it. He thinks it fine to patronize us, and show kindness to our
family; he, the stout, bullet-headed grocer's boy, who used to sit
and stare at us all church time."

"At you--you mean. Wasn't he called your beau?" said Hilary
mischievously, upon which Selina drew herself up in great
indignation.

And then they fell to talking of that anxious question--Ascott's
future. A little they reproached themselves that they had left the
lad so long in London--so long out of the influence that might have
counteracted the evil, sharply hinted in his godfather's letter. But
once away--to lure him back to their poor home was impossible.

"Suppose we were to go to him," suggested Hilary.

The poor and friendless possess one great advantage--they have nobody
to ask advice of; nobody to whom it matters much what they do or
where they go. The family mind has but to make itself up, and act
accordingly. Thus within an hour or two of the receipt of Mr.
Ascott's letter Hilary went into the kitchen, and told Elizabeth that
as soon as her work was done Miss Leaf wished to have a little talk
with her.

"Eh! what's wrong? Has Miss Selina been a-grumbling at me?"

Elizabeth was in one of her bad humors, which, though of course they
never ought to have, servants do have as well as their superiors.
Hilary perceived this by the way she threw the coals on and tossed
the chairs about. But to-day her heart was full of far more serious
cares than Elizabeth's ill temper. She replied, composedly--

"I have not heard that either of my sisters is displeased with you.
What they want to talk to you about is for your own good. We are
thinking of making a great change. We intend to leave Stowbury and
going to live in London."

"Going to live in London!"

Now, quick as her tact and observation were--her heart taught her
these things--Elizabeth's head was a thorough Saxon one, slow to
receive impressions. It was a family saying, that nothing was so hard
as to put a new idea into Elizabeth except to get it out again.

For this reason Hilary preferred paving the way quietly, before
startling her with the sudden intelligence of their contemplated
change.

"Well, what do you say to the plan?" asked she, good-humoredly.

"I dunnot like it at all," was the brief gruff answer of Elizabeth
Hand.

Now it was one of Miss Hilary's doctrines that no human being is good
for much unless he or she has what is called "a will of one's own."
Perhaps this, like many another creed, was with her the result of
circumstances. But she held it firmly, and with that exaggerated
one-sidedness of feeling which any bitter family or personal
experience is sure to leave behind--a strong will was her first
attraction to every body. It had been so in the case of Robert Lyon,
and not less in Elizabeth's.

But this quality has its inconveniences. When the maid began sweeping
up her hearth with a noisy, angry gesture, the mistress did the
wisest and most dignified thing a mistress could do under the
circumstances and which she knew was the sharpest rebuke she could
administer to the sensitive Elizabeth--she immediately quitted the
kitchen.

For an hour after the parlor bell did not ring; and though it was
washing day, no Miss Hilary appeared to help in folding up the
clothes. Elizabeth, subdued and wretched, waited till she could wait
no longer; then knocked at the door, and asked humbly if she should
bring in supper?

The extreme kindness of the answer, to the effect that she must come
in, as they wanted to speak to her, crushed the lingering fragments
of ill humor out of the girl.

"Miss Hilary has told you our future plans, Elizabeth; now we wish to
have a little talk with you about yours."

"Eh?"

"We conclude you will not wish to go with us to London; and it would
be hardly advisable you should. You can get higher wages now than any
we can afford to give you; indeed, we have more than once thought of
telling you so, and offering you your choice of trying for a better
place."

"You're very kind," was the answer, stolid rather than grateful.

"No; I think we are merely honest. We should never think of keeping a
girl upon lower wages than she was worth. Hitherto, however, the
arrangement has been quite fair you know, Elizabeth, you have given
us a deal of trouble in the teaching of you." And Miss Leaf smiled,
half sadly, as if this, the first of the coming changes, hurt her
more than she liked to express. "Come, my girl," she added, "you
needn't look so serious. We are not in the least vexed with you; we
shall be very sorry to lose you, and we will give you the best of
characters when you leave."

"I dunnot--mean--to leave."

Elizabeth threw out the words like pellets, in a choked fashion, and
disappeared suddenly from the parlor.

"Who would have thought it!" exclaimed Selina; "I declare the girl
was crying."

No mistake about that; though when, a few minutes after, Miss Hilary
entered the kitchen, Elizabeth tried in a hurried, shamefaced way to
hide her tears by being very busy over something. Her mistress took
no notice, but began, as usual on washing days, to assist in various
domestic matters, in the midst of which she said, quietly, "And so,
Elizabeth, you would really like to go to London?"

"No! I shouldn't like it at all; never said I should. But if you go,
I shall go too; though Missis is so ready to get shut o' me."

"It was for your own good, you know."

"You always said it was for a girl's good to stop in one place; and
if you think I'm going to another. I aren't that's all."

Rude as the form of the speech was--almost the first rude speech that
Elizabeth had ever made to Miss Hilary, and which, under other
circumstances she would have felt bound severely to reprove--the
mistress passed it over. That which lay beneath it, the sharpness of
wounded love, touched her heart. She felt that, for all the girl's
rough manner, it would have been hard to go into her London kitchen
and meet a strange London face, instead of that fond homely one of
Elizabeth Hand's.

Still, she thought it right to explain to her that London life might
have many difficulties, that; for the present at least, her wages
could not be raised, and the family might at first be in even more
straitened circumstances than they were at Stowbury.

"Only at first, though, for I hope to find plenty of pupils, and
by-and-by our nephew will get into practice."

"Is it on account of him you're going, Miss Hilary?"

"Chiefly."

Elizabeth gave a grunt which said as plainly as words could say, "I
thought so;" and relapsed into what she, no doubt, believed to be
virtuous indignation, but which, as it was testified against the
wrong parties, was open to the less favorable interpretation of ill
humor--a small injustice not uncommon with us all.

I do not pretend to paint this young woman as a perfect character.
She had her fierce dislikes as well as her strong fidelities; her
faults within and without, which had to be struggled with, as all of
us have to struggle to the very end of our days. Oftentimes not till
the battle is high over--sometimes not till it is quite over--does
God give us the victory.

Without more discussion on either side, it was agreed that Elizabeth
should accompany her mistresses. Even Mrs. Hand seemed to be pleased
thereat, her only doubt being lest her daughter should meet and be
led astray by that bad woman, Mrs. Cliffe, Tommy Cliffe's mother, who
was reported to have gone to London. But Miss Hilary explained that
this meeting was about as probable as the rencontre of two needles in
a hay-rick; and besides, Elizabeth was not the sort of girl to be
easily "led astray" by any body.

"No, no; her's a good wench, though I says it," replied the mother,
who was too hard worked to have much sentiment to spare. "I wish the
little 'uns may take pattern by our Elizabeth. You'll send her home,
may be, in two or three years' time, to let us have a look at her?"

Miss Hilary promised, and then took her way back through the familiar
old town--so soon to be familiar no more--thinking anxiously, in
spite of herself, upon those two or three years, and what they might
bring.

It happened to be a notable day--that sunshiny 28th of June--when the
little, round-cheeked damsel, who is a grandmother now, had the crown
of three kingdoms first set upon her youthful head; and Stowbury,
like every other town in the land, was a perfect bower of green
arches, garlands, banners; white covered tables were spread in the
open air down almost every street, where poor men dined, or poor
women drank tea; and every body was out and abroad, looking at or
sharing in the holiday' making, wild with merriment, and brimming
over with passionate loyalty to the Maiden Queen.

That day is now twenty-four years ago; but all those who remember it
must own there never has been a day like it, when, all over the
country, every man's heart throbbed with chivalrous devotion, every
woman's with womanly tenderness, toward this one royal girl, who, God
bless her! has lived to retain and deserve it all.

Hilary called for, and protected through the crowd, the little,
timid, widow lady who had taken off the Misses Leaf's hands their
house and furniture, and whom they had made very happy--as the poor
often can make those still poorer than themselves--by refusing to
accept any thing for the "good will" of the school. Then she was
fetched by Elizabeth, who had been given a whole afternoon's holiday;
and mistress and maid went together home, watching the last of the
festivities, the chattering groups that still lingered in the
twilight streets, and listening to the merry notes of the "Triumph"
which came down through the lighted windows of the Town Hall, where
the open-air tea drinkers had adjourned to dance country dances, by
civic permission, and in perfectly respectable jollity.

"I wonder," said Hilary--while, despite some natural regret, her
spirit stretched itself out eagerly from the narrowness of the place
where she was born into the great wide world; the world where so many
grand things were thought and written and done; the world Robert Lyon
had so long fought with, and was fighting bravely still--"I wonder,
Elizabeth, what sort of place London is, and what our life will be in
it?"

Elizabeth said nothing. For the moment her face seemed to catch the
reflected glow of her mistress's, and then it settled down into that
look of mingled resistance and resolution which was habitual to her.
For the life that was to be, which neither knew--oh, if they had
known!--she also was prepared.



CHAPTER IX.

The day of the Grand Hegira came.

"I remember," said Miss Leaf, as they rumbled for the last time
through the empty morning streets of poor old Stowbury: "I remember
my grandmother telling me that when my grandfather was courting her,
and she out of coquetry refused him, he set off on horseback to
London, and she was so wretched to think of all the dangers he ran on
the journey, and in London itself, that she never rested till she got
him back, and then immediately married him."

"No such catastrophe is likely to happen to any of us, except,
perhaps, to Elizabeth," said Miss Hilary, trying to get up, a little
feeble mirth, any thing to pass away the time and lessen the pain of
parting, which was almost too much for Johanna. "What do you say? Do
you mean to get married in London, Elizabeth?"

But Elizabeth could make no answer, even to kind Miss Hilary. They
had not imagined she felt the leaving her native place so much. She
had watched intently the last glimpse of Stowbury church tower, and
now sat with reddened eyes, staring blankly out of the carriage
window,

"Silent as a stone."

Once or twice a large slow tear gathered on each of her eyes, but it
was shaken off angrily from the high check bones, and never settled
into absolute crying. They thought it best to take no notice of her.
Only, when reaching the new small station, where the "resonant steam
eagles" were, for the first time, beheld by the innocent Stowbury
ladies, there arose a discussion as to the manner of traveling. Miss
Leaf said, decidedly "Second class; and then we can keep Elizabeth
with us." Upon which Elizabeth's mouth melted into something between
a quiver and a smile.

Soon it was all over, and the little house-hold was compressed into
the humble second class carriage, cheerless and cushionless, whirling
through indefinite England in a way that confounded all their
geography and topography. Gradually as the day darkened into heavy,
chilly July rain, the scarcely kept up spirits of the four passengers
began to sink. Johanna grew very white and worn, Selina became, to
use Ascott's phrase, "as cross as two sticks," and even Hilary,
turning her eyes from the gray sodden looking landscape without,
could find no spot of comfort to rest on within the carriage, except
that round rosy face of Elizabeth Hand's.

Whether it was from the spirit of contradiction existing in most such
natures, which, especially in youth, are more strong than sweet, or
from a better feeling, the fact was noticeable, that when every one
else's spirits went down Elizabeth's went up. Nothing could bring her
out of a "grumpy" fit so satisfactorily as her mistresses falling
into one. When Miss Selina now began to fidget hither and thither,
each tone of her fretful voice seeming to go through her eldest
sister's every nerve, till even Hilary said, impatiently, "Oh,
Selina, can't you be quiet?" then Elizabeth rose from the depth of
her gloomy discontent up to the surface immediately.

She was only a servant; but Nature bestows that strange vague thing
that we term "force of character" independently of position. Hilary
often remembered afterward, how much more comfortable the end of the
journey was than she had expected--how Johanna lay at ease, with her
feet in Elizabeth's lap, wrapped in Elizabeth's best woolen shawl;
and how, when Selina's whole attention was turned to an ingenious
contrivance with a towel and fork and Elizabeth's basket, for
stopping the rain out of the carriage roof--she became far less
disagreeable, and even a little proud of her own cleverness. And so
there was a temporary lull in Hilary's cares, and she could sit
quiet, with her eyes fixed on the rainy landscape, which she did not
see, and her thoughts wandering toward that unknown place and unknown
life into which they were sweeping, as we all sweep, ignorantly,
unresistingly, almost unconsciously, into new destinies. Hilary, for
the first time, began to doubt of theirs. Anxious as she had been to
go to London, and wise as the proceeding appeared, now that the die
was cast and the cable cut, the old simple, peaceful life at Stowbury
grew strangely dear.

"I wonder if we shall ever go back again, or what is to happen to us
before we do go back," she thought, and turned, with a half defined
fear, toward her eldest sister, who looked so old and fragile beside
that sturdy, healthful servant girl. "Elizabeth!" Elizabeth, rubbing
Miss Leaf's feet, started at the unwonted sharpness of Miss Hilary's
tone.

"There; I'll do that for my sister. Go and look out of the window at
London."

For the great smoky cloud which began to rise in the rainy horizon
was indeed London. Soon through the thickening nebula of houses they
converged to what was then the nucleus of all railway traveling, the
Euston Terminus, and were hustled on to the platform, and jostled
helplessly to and fro these poor country ladies! Anxiously they
scanned the crowd of strange faces for the one only face they knew in
the great metropolis--which did not appear.

"It is very strange; very wrong of Ascott. Hilary, you surely told
him the hour correctly. For once, at least, he might have been in
time"

So chafed Miss Selina, while Elizabeth, who by some miraculous effort
of intuitive genius, had succeeded in collecting the luggage, was now
engaged in defending it from all comers, especially porters, and
making of it a comfort able seat for Miss Leaf.

"Nay, have patience, Selina. We will give him just five minutes more,
Hilary."

And Johanna sat down, with her sweet, calm, long suffering face
turned upward to that younger one, which was, as youth is apt to be,
hot, and worried, and angry. And so they waited till the terminus was
almost deserted, and the last cab had driven off, when, suddenly,
dashing up the station yard out of another, came Ascott.

He was so sorry, so very sorry, downright grieved, at having kept his
aunts waiting. But his watch was wrong--some fellows at dinner
detained him--the train was before its time surely. In fact, his
aunts never quite made out what the excuse was; but they looked into
his bright handsome face, and their wrath melted like clouds before
the sun. He was so gentlemanly, so well dressed--much better dressed
than even at Stowbury--and he seemed so unfeignedly glad to see them.
He handed them all into the cab--even Elizabeth. though whispering
meanwhile to his Aunt Hilary, "What on earth did you bring her for?"
and their was just going to leap on to the box himself, when he
stopped to ask "Where he should tell cabby to drive to?"

"Where to?" repeated his aunts in undisguised astonishment. They had
never thought of any thing but of being taken home at once by their
boy.

"You see," Ascott said, in a little confusion, "you wouldn't be
comfortable with me. A young fellow's lodgings are not like a house
of one's own, and, besides--"

"Besides, when a young fellow is ashamed of his old aunts, he can
easily find reasons."

"Hush, Selina!" interposed Miss Leaf. "My dear boy, your old aunts
would never let you inconvenience yourself for them. Take us to an
inn for the night, and to morrow we will find lodgings for
ourselves."

Ascott looked greatly relieved.

"And you are not vexed with me, Aunt Johanna?" said he, with
something of his old childish tone of compunction, as he saw--he
could not help seeing--the utter weariness which Johanna tried so
hard to hide.

"No, my dear, not vexed. Only I wish we had known this a little
sooner that we might have made arrangements. Now, where shall we go?"

Ascott mentioned a dozen hotels, but they found he only knew them by
name. At last Miss Leaf remembered one, which her father used to go
to, on his frequent journeys to London, and whence, indeed, he had
been brought home to die. And though all the recollections about it
were sad enough, still it felt less strange than the rest, in this
dreariness of London. So she proposed going to the "Old Bell,"
Holborn.

"A capital place!" exclaimed Ascott, eagerly. "And I'll take and
settle you there: and we'll order supper, and make a jolly night of
it. All right. Drive on, cabby."

He jumped on the box, and then looked in mischievously, flourishing
his lit cigar and shaking his long hair--his Aunt Selina's two great
abominations--right in her indignant face: but withal looking so
merry and good tempered that she shortly softened into a smile.

"How handsome the boy is growing!"

"Yes," said Johanna, with a slight sigh; "and did you notice? how
exceedingly like his--"

The sentence was left unfinished. Alas! if every young man, who
believes his faults and follies injure himself alone, could feel what
it must be, years afterward, to have his nearest kindred shrink from
saying as the saddest, most ominous thing they could say of his son,
that the lad is growing "so like his father!"

It might have been--they assured each other that it was--only the
incessant roll, roll of the street sounds below their windows, which
kept the Misses Leaf awake half the night of this their first night
in London. And when they sat down to breakfast--having waited an hour
vainly for their nephew--it might have been only the gloom of the
little parlor which cast a slight shadow over them all. Still the
shadow was there.

It deepened despite the sunshiny morning into which the last night's
rain had brightened till Holborn Bars looked cheerful, and Holborn
pavement actually clean, so that, as Elizabeth said, "you might eat
your dinner off it;" which was the one only thing she condescended to
approve in London. She had sat all evening mute in her corner, for
Miss Leaf would not send her away into the terra incognita of a
London hotel. Ascott, at first considerably annoyed at the presence
of what he called a "skeleton at the feast," had afterward got over
it; and run on with a mixture of childish glee and mannish pomposity
about his plans and intentions--how he meant to take a house, he
thought, in one of the squares, or a street leading out of them: how
he would put up the biggest of brass plates, with "Mr. Leaf,
surgeon." and soon get an extensive practice, and have all his aunts
to live with him. And his aunts had smiled and listened, forgetting
all about the silent figure in the corner, who perhaps had gone to
sleep, or had also listened.

"Elizabeth, come and look out at London."

So she and Miss Hilary whiled away another heavy three quarters of an
hour in watching and commenting on the incessantly shifting crowd
which swept past Holborn Bars. Miss Selina sometimes looked out too,
but more often sat fidgeting and wondering why Ascott did not come;
while Miss Leaf, who never fidgeted, became gradually more and more
silent. Her eyes were fixed on the door, with an expression which, if
Hilary could have remembered so far back, would have been to her
something not painfully new, but still more painfully old--a look
branded into her face by many an anxious hour's listening for the
footstep that never came, or only came to bring distress. It was the
ineffaceable token of that long, long struggle between affection and
conscience, pity and scarcely repressible contempt, which, for more
than one generation, had been the appointed burden of this family--at
least the women of it--till sometimes it seemed to hang over them
almost like a fate.

About noon Miss Leaf proposed calling for the hotel bill. Its length
so alarmed the country ladies that Hilary suggested not staying to
dine, but going immediately in search of lodgings.

"What, without a gentleman! Impossible! I always understood ladies
could go nowhere in London without a gentleman!"

"We shall come very ill off then, Selina. But any how I mean to try.
You know the region where, we have heard, lodgings are cheapest and
best--that is, best for us. It can not be far from here. Suppose I
start at once?"

"What, alone?" cried Johanna, anxiously.

"No, dear, I'll take the map with me, and Elizabeth. She is not
afraid."

Elizabeth smiled, and rose, with that air of dogged devotedness with
which she would have prepared to follow Miss Hilary to the North
Pole, if necessary. So, after a few minutes of arguing with Selina,
who did not press her point overmuch, since she herself had not to
commit the impropriety of the expedition. After a few minutes more of
hopeless lingering about--till even Miss Leaf said they had better
wait no longer--mistress and maid took a farewell nearly as pathetic
as if they had been really Arctic voyagers, and plunged right into
the dusty glare and hurrying crowd of the "sunny side" of Holborn in
July.

A strange sensation, and yet there was something exhilarating in it.
The intense solitude that there is in a London crowd these country
girls--for Miss Hilary herself was no more than a girl--could not as
yet realize. They only felt the life of it; stirring, active,
incessantly moving life; even though it was of a kind that they knew
as little of it as the crowd did of them. Nothing struck Hilary more
than the self-absorbed look of passers-by: each so busy on his own
affairs, that, in spite of Selina's alarm, for all notice taken of
them, they might as well be walking among the cows and horses in
Stowbury field.

Poor old Stowbury! They felt how far away they were from it when a
ragged, dirty, vicious looking girl offered them a moss rose bud for
"one penny, only one penny;" which Elizabeth, lagging behind, bought,
and found it only a broken off bud stuck on to a bit of wire.

"That's London ways, I suppose," said she, severely, and became so
misanthropic that she would hardly vouchsafe a glance to the hand
some square they turned into, and merely observed of the tall houses,
taller than any Hilary had ever seen, that she "wouldn't fancy
running up and down them stairs."

But Hilary was cheerful in spite of all. She was glad to be in this
region, which, theoretically, she knew by heart--glad to find herself
in the body, where in the spirit she had come so many a time. The
mere consciousness of this seemed to refresh her. She thought she
would be much happier in London; that in the long years to come that
must be borne, it would be good for her to have something to do as
well as to hope for; something to fight with as well as to endure.
Now more than ever came pulsing in and out of her memory a line once
repeated in her hearing, with an observation of how "true" it was.
And though originally it was applied by a man to a woman, and she
smiled sometimes to think how "unfeminine" some people--Selina for
instance--would consider her turning it the other way, still she did
so. She believed that, for woman as for man, that is the purest and
noblest love which is the most self-existent, most independent of
love returned; and which can say, each to the other equally on both
sides, that the whole solemn purpose of life is, under God's service,

"If not to win, to feel more worthy thee."

Such thoughts made her step firmer and her heart lighter; so that she
hardly noticed the distance they must have walked till the close
London air began to oppress her, and the smooth glaring London
pavements made her Stowbury feet ache sorely.

"Are you tired, Elizabeth? Well, we'll rest soon. There must be
lodgings near here. Only I can't quite make out--"

As Miss Hilary looked up to the name of the street the maid noticed
what a glow came into her mistress's face, pale and tired as it was.
Just then a church clock struck the quarter hour.

"That must be St. Pancras. And this--yes, this is Burton Street,
Burton Crescent."

"I'm sure Missis wouldn't like to live there;" observed Elizabeth,
eyeing uneasily the gloomy rez de-chaussee, familiar to many a
generation of struggling respectability, where, in the decadence of
the season, every second house bore the announcement "apartments
furnished."

"No," Miss Hilary replied, absently. Yet she continued to walk up and
down the whole length of the street; then passed out into the dreary,
deserted looking Crescent, where the trees were already beginning to
fade; not, however, into the bright autumn tint of country woods, but
into a premature withering, ugly and sad to behold.

"I am glad he is not here--glad, glad!" thought Hilary, as she
realized the unutterable dreariness of those years when Robert Lyon
lived and studied in his garret from month's end to month's
end--these few dusty trees being the sole memento of the green
country life in which he had been brought up, and which she knew he
so passionately loved. Now she could understand, that "calenture"
which he had sometimes jestingly alluded to, as coming upon him at
times, when he felt literally sick for the sight of a green field or
a hedge full of birds. She wondered whether the same feeling would
ever come upon her in this strange desert of London, the vastness of
which grew upon her every hour.

She was glad he was away; yes, heart glad! And yet, if this minute
she could only have seen him coming round the Crescent, have met his
smile, and the firm, warm clasp of his hand--

For an instant there rose up in her one of those wild, rebellious
outcries against fate, when to have to waste years of this brief life
of ours, in the sort of semi-existence that living is, apart from the
treasure of the heart and delight of the eyes, seems so cruelly,
cruelly hard!

"Miss Hilary."

She started, and "put herself under lock and key" immediately. "Miss
Hilary; you do look so tired!"

"Do I? Then we will go and sit down in this baker's shop, and get
rested and fed. We cannot afford to wear ourselves out, you know. We
have a great deal to do to-day."

More indeed, than she calculated, for they walked up one street and
down another, investigating at least twenty lodgings before any
appeared which seemed fit for them. Yet some place must be found
where Johanna's poor, tired head could rest that night. At last,
completely exhausted, with that oppressive exhaustion which seems to
crush mind as well as body after a day's wandering in London.
Hilary's courage began to ebb. Oh for an arm to lean on, a voice to
listen for, a brave heart to come to her side, saying, "Do not be
afraid, there are two of us!" And she yearned, with an absolutely
sick yearning such as only a woman who now and then feels the utter
helplessness of her womanhood can know, for the only arm she cared to
lean on, the only voice dear enough to bring her comfort, the only
heart that she felt she could trust.

Poor Hilary! And yet why pity her? To her three alternatives could
but happen: were Robert Lyon true to her she would be his entirely
and devotedly, to the end of her days; did he forsake her, she would
forgive him should he die, she would be faithful to him eternally.
Love of this kind may know anguish, but not the sort of anguish that
lesser and weaker loves do. If it is certain of nothing else, it can
always be certain of itself.

    "Its will is strong;
    'It suffers; but it can not suffer long."

And even in its utmost pangs is an underlying peace which often
approaches to absolute joy.

Hilary roused herself, and bent her mind steadily on lodgings till
she discovered one from the parlor of which you could see the trees
of Burton Crescent and hear the sound of Saint Pancras's clock.

"I think we may do here--at least for a while," said she cheerfully;
and then Elizabeth heard her inquiring if an extra bedroom could be
had if necessary.

There was only one small attic. "Ascott never could put up with
that," said Hilary, half to herself. Then suddenly--"I think I will
see Ascott before I decide. Elizabeth, will you go with me, or remain
here?"

"I'll go with you, if you please, Miss Hilary."

"If you please," sounded not unlike, "if I please," and Elizabeth had
gloomed over a little. "Is Mr. Ascott to live with us?"

"I suppose so."

No more words were interchanged till they reached Gower street, when
Miss Hilary observed, with evident surprise, what a handsome street
it was.

"I must have made some mistake. Still we will find out Mr. Ascott's
number, and inquire."

No, there was no mistake. Mr. Ascott Leaf had lodged there for three
months, but had given up his rooms that very morning.

"Where had he gone to?"

The servant--a London lodging house servant all over--didn't know;
but she fetched the landlady, who was after the same pattern of the
dozen London landladies with whom Hilary had that day made
acquaintance, only a little more Cockney, smirking, dirty, and
tawdrily fine.

"Yes, Mr. Leaf had gone, and he hadn't left no address. Young College
gentlemen often found it convenient to leave no address. P'raps he
would if he'd known there would be a young lady a calling to see
him."

"I am Mr. Leaf's aunt," said Hilary, turning as hot as fire.

"Oh, in-deed," was the answer, with civil incredulousness.

But the woman was sharp of perception--as often-cheated London
landladies learn to be. After looking keenly at mistress and maid,
she changed her tone; nay, even launched out into praises of her late
lodger: what a pleasant gentleman he was; what good company he kept,
and how he had promised to recommend her apartments to his friends.

"And as for the little some'at of rent, Miss--tell him it makes no
matter, he can pay me when he likes. If he don't call soon p'raps I
might make bold to send his trunk and his books over to Mr. Ascott's
of--dear me, I forget the number and the square."

Hilary unsuspiciously supplied both.

"Yes, that's it--the old gen'leman as Mr. Leaf went to dine with
every other Sunday, a very rich old gentleman, who, he says, is to
leave him all his money. Maybe a relation of yours, Miss?"

"No," said Hilary; and adding something about the landlady's hearing
from Mr. Leaf very soon, she hurried out of the house, Elizabeth
following.

"Won't you be tired if you walk so fast, Miss Hilary?"

Hilary stopped, choking. Helplessly she looked up and down the
forlorn, wide, glaring, dusty street; now sinking into the dull
shadow of a London afternoon.

"Let us go home!" And at the word a sob burst out--just one
passionate pent up sob. No more. She could not afford to waste
strength in crying.

"As you say, Elizabeth, I am getting tired, and that will not do. Let
me see; something must be decided." And she stood still, passing her
hand over her hot brow and eyes. "I will go back and take the
lodgings, leave you there to make all comfortable, and then fetch my
sisters from the hotel. But stay first, I have forgotten something."

She returned to the house in Gower Street, and wrote on one of her
cards an address--the only permanent address she could think of--that
of the city broker who was in the habit of paying them their yearly
income of £50.

"If any creditors inquire for Mr. Leaf, give them this. His friends
may always hear of him at the London University."

"Thank you, ma'am," replied the now civil landlady. "Indeed, I wasn't
afraid of the young gentleman giving us the slip. For though he was
careless in his bills he was every inch the gentleman. And I wouldn't
object to take him in again. Or p'raps you yourself, ma'am, might be
a-wanting rooms."

"No, I thank you. Good morning." And Hilary hurried away.

Not a word did she say to Elizabeth, or Elizabeth to her, till they
got into the dull, dingy parlor--henceforth, to be their sole apology
for "home:" and then she only talked about domestic
arrangements--talked fast and eagerly, and tried to escape the
affectionate eyes which she knew were so sharp and keen. Only to
escape them--not to blind them; she had long ago found out that
Elizabeth was too quick-witted for that, especially in any thing that
concerned "the family." She felt convinced the girl had heard every
syllable that passed at Ascott's lodgings: that she knew all that was
to be known, and guessed what was to be feared as well as Hilary
herself.

"Elizabeth"--she hesitated long, and doubted whether she should say
the thing before she did say it--"remember we are all strangers in
London, and family matters are best kept within the family. Do not
mention either in writing home, or to any body here, about--about--"

She could not name Ascott; she felt so horribly ashamed.



CHAPTER X.

Living in lodgings, not temporarily, but permanently, sitting down to
make one's only "home" in Mrs. Jones's parlor or Mrs. Smith's first
floor, of which not a stick or a stone that one looks at is one's
own, and whence one may be evicted or evade, with a week's notice or
a week's rent, any day--this sort of life is natural and even
delightful to some people. There are those who, like strawberry
plants, are of such an errant disposition, that grow them where you
will, they will soon absorb all the pleasantness of their habitat,
and begin casting out runners elsewhere; may, if not frequently
transplanted, would actually wither and die. Of such are the pioneers
of society--the emigrants, the tourists, the travelers round the
world; and great is the advantage the world derives from them,
active, energetic, and impulsive as they are. Unless, indeed, their
talent for incessant locomotion degenerates into rootless
restlessness, and they remain forever rolling stones, gathering no
moss, and acquiring gradually a smooth, hard surface, which adheres
to nothing, and to which nobody dare venture to adhere.

But there are others possessing in a painful degree this said quality
of adhesiveness, to whom the smallest change is obnoxious; who like
drinking out of a particular cup, and sitting in a particular chair;
to whom even a variation in the position of furniture is unpleasant.
Of course, this peculiarity has its bad side, and yet it is not in
itself mean or ignoble. For is not adhesiveness, faithfulness,
constancy--call it what you will--at the root of all citizenship,
clanship, and family love? Is it not the same feeling which, granting
they remain at all, makes old friendships dearer than any new? Nay,
to go to the very sacredest and closest bond, is it not that which
makes an old man see to the last in his old wife's faded face the
beauty which perhaps nobody ever saw except himself, but which he
sees and delights in still, simply because it is familiar and his
own.

To people who possess a large share of this rare--shall I say
fatal?--characteristic of adhesiveness, living in lodgings is about
the saddest life under the sun. Whether some dim foreboding of this
fact crossed Elizabeth's mind as she stood at the window watching for
her mistresses' first arrival at "home," it is impossible to say. She
could feel, though she was not accustomed to analyze her feelings.
But she looked dull and sad. Not cross, even Ascott could not have
accused her of "savageness."

And yet she had been somewhat tried. First, in going out what she
termed "marketing," she had traversed a waste of streets, got lost
several times, and returned with light weight in her butter, and sand
in her moist sugar; also with the conviction that London tradesmen
were the greatest rogues alive. Secondly, a pottle of strawberries,
which she had bought with her own money to grace the tea-table with
the only fruit Miss Leaf cared for, had turned out a large delusion,
big and beautiful at top, and all below small, crushed, and stale.
She had thrown it indignantly, pottle and all, into the kitchen fire.

Thirdly, she had a war with the landlady, partly on the subject of
their fire--which, with her Stowbury notions on the subject of coals,
seemed wretchedly mean and small--and partly on the question of table
cloths at tea, which Mrs. Jones had "never heard of," especially when
the use of plate and lines was included in the rent. And the
dinginess of the article produced at last out of an omnium-gatherum
sort of kitchen cupboard, made an ominous impression upon the country
girl, accustomed to clean, tidy, country ways--where the kitchen was
kept as neat as the parlor, and the bedrooms were not a whit behind
the sitting rooms in comfort and orderliness. Here it seemed as if,
supposing people could show a few respectable living rooms, they were
content to sleep any where, and cook any how, out of anything, in the
midst of any quantity of confusion and dirt. Elizabeth set all this
down as "London," and hated it accordingly.

She had tried to ease her mind by arranging and rearranging the
furniture--regular lodging house furniture--table, six chairs,
horse-hair sofa, a what not, and the chiffonnier, with a tea-caddy
upon it, of which the respective keys had been solemnly presented to
Miss Hilary. But still the parlor looked homeless and bare; and the
yellowish paper on the walls, the large patterned, many colored
Kidderminster on the floor, gave an involuntary sense of discomfort
and dreariness. Besides, No. 15 was on the shady side of the
street--cheap lodgings always are; and no one who has not lived in
the like lodgings--not a house--can imagine what it is to inhabit
perpetually one room where the sunshine just peeps in for an hour a
day, and vanishes by eleven A. M.; leaving behind in winter a chill
dampness, and in summer a heavy, dusty atmosphere, that weighs like
lead on the spirits in spite of one's self. No wonder that, as is
statistically known and proved, cholera stalks, fever rages, and the
registrar's list is always swelled along the shady side of a London
street.

Elizabeth felt this, though she had not the dimmest idea why. She
stood watching the sunset light fade out of the topmost windows of
the opposite house--ghostly reflection of some sunset over fields and
trees far away; and she listened to the long monotonous cry melting
away round the crescent, and beginning again at the other end of the
street--"Straw-berries--straw-ber-ries!" Also, with an eye to
tomorrow's Sunday dinner, she investigated the cart of the tired
costermonger, who crawled along beside his equally tired donkey,
reiterating at times, in tones hoarse with a day's bawling, his
dreary "Cauli-flower! Cauli-flower!--Fine new pease, sixpence peck!"

But, alas! the pease were neither fine nor new; and the cauliflowers
were regular Saturday night's cauliflowers. Besides, Elizabeth
suddenly doubted whether she had any right, unordered, to buy these
things which, from being common garden necessaries, had become
luxuries. This thought, with some others that it occasioned, her
unwonted state of Idleness and the dullness of every thing about
her--what is so dull as a "quiet" London street on a summer
evening?--actually made Elizabeth stand, motionless and meditative,
for a quarter of an hour. Then she started to hear two cabs drive up
to the door; the "family" had at length arrived.

Ascott was there too. Two new portmanteaus and a splendid hat-box
east either ignominy or glory upon the poor Stowbury luggage;
and--Elizabeth's sharp eye noticed--there was also his trunk which
she had seen lying detained for rent in his Gower Street lodgings.
But he looked quite easy and comfortable: handed out his Aunt
Johanna, commanded the luggage about, and paid the cabmen with such a
magnificent air, that they touched their bats to him, and winked at
one another as much as to say. "That's a real gentleman!"

In which statement the landlady evidently coincided, and courtesied
low when Miss Leaf introducing him as "my nephew," hoped that a room
could be found for him. Which at last there was, by his appropriating
Miss Leaf's, while she and Hilary took that at the top of the house.
But they agreed, Ascott must have a good airy room to study in.

"You know, my dear boy," said his Aunt Johanna to him--and at her
tender tone he looked a little downcast, as when he was a small
fellow and had been forgiven something -- "You know you will have to
work very hard."

"All right, aunt! I'm your man for that! This will be a jolly room;
and I can smoke up the chimney capitally!"

So they came down stairs quite cheerfully, and Ascott applied himself
with the best of appetites to what he called a "hungry" tea. True,
the ham, which Elizabeth had to fetch from an eating house some
streets off, cost two shillings a pound, and the eggs, which caused
her another war below over the relighting of a fire to boil them,
were dismissed by the young gentleman as "horrid stale." Still,
woman-like, when there is a man in the question, his aunts let him,
have his why. It seemed as if they had resolved to try their utmost
to make the new home to which he came, or rather was driven, a
pleasant home, and to bind him to it with cords of love, the only
cords worth any thing, though sometimes--Heaved knows why--even they
fail, and are snapped and thrown aside like straws.

Whenever Elizabeth went in and out of the parlor she always heard
lively talk going on among the family; Ascott making his jokes,
telling about his college life, and planning his life to come as a
surgeon in full practice, on the most extensive scale. And when she
brought in the chamber candles, she saw him kiss his aunts
affectionately, and even help his Aunt Johanna--who looked
frightfully pale and tired, but smiling still--to her bed-room door.

"You'll not sit up long, my dear? No reading to night?" said she,
anxiously.

"Not a bit of it. And I'll be up with the lark to-morrow morning. I
really will auntie. I'm going to turn over a new leaf, you know."

She smiled again at the immemorial joke, kissed and blessed him, and
the door shut up on her and Hilary.

Ascott descended to the parlor, threw himself on the sofa with an air
of great relief, and an exclamation of satisfaction that "the women"
were all gone. He did not perceive Elizabeth, who, hidden behind, was
kneeling to arrange something in the chiffonnier, till she rose up
and proceeded to fasten the parlor shutters.

"Hollo! are you there? Come, I'll do that when I go to bed. You may
'slope' if you like."

"Eh, Sir."

"Slope, mizzle, cut your stick; don't you understand. Any how, don't
stop here, bothering me."

"I don't mean to," replied Elizabeth; gravely, rather than gruffly,
as if she had made up her mind to things as they were, and was
determined to be a belligerent party no longer. 

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