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The Doctor's Wife: A Novel

by M. E. Braddon · English · Gutenberg #35485 · 951,023 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Doctor's Wife: A Novel

Author: M. E. Braddon


        
Release date: March 4, 2011 [eBook #35485]
                Most recently updated: November 17, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35485

Credits: E-text prepared by Joyce McDonald, Christine Bell, and Marc D'Hooghe


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOCTOR'S WIFE: A NOVEL ***


E-text prepared by Joyce McDonald, Christine Bell, and Marc D'Hooghe
(http:www.girlebooks.com & http://www.freeliterature.org)



THE DOCTOR'S WIFE

A Novel

By the Author of
"Lady Audley's Secret," "Aurora Floyd"
Etc. Etc. Etc.







London
John and Robert Maxwell
Milton House, Shoe Lane, Fleet Street



CONTENTS.

    I. A young man from the country
    II. A sensation author
    III. Isabel
    IV. The end of George Gilbert's holiday
    V. George at home
    VI. Too much alone
    VII. On the bridge
    VIII. About poor Joe Tillet's young wife
    IX. Miss Sleaford's engagement
    X. A bad beginning
    XI. "She only said, 'my life is weary!'"
    XII. Something like a birthday
    XIII. "Oh, my cousin, shallow-hearted!"
    XIV. Under Lord Thurston's oak
    XV. Roland says, "Amen"
    XVI. Mr. Lansdell relates an adventure
    XVII. The first warning
    XVIII. The second warning
    XIX. What might have been!
    XX. "Oceans should divide us!"
    XXI. "Once more the gate behind me falls"
    XXII. "My love's a noble madness"
    XXIII. A little cloud
    XXIV. Lady Gwendoline does her duty
    XXV. "For love himself took part against himself"
    XXVI. A popular preacher
    XXVII. "And now I live, and now my life is done!"
    XXVIII. Trying to be good.
    XXIX. The first whisper of the storm
    XXX. The beginning of a great change
    XXXI. Fifty pounds
    XXXII. "I'll not believe but Desdemona's honest"
    XXXIII. Keeping a promise
    XXXIV. Retrospective
    XXXV. "'Twere best at once to sink to peace"
    XXXVI. Between two worlds
    XXXVII. "If any calm, a calm despair"




THE DOCTORS WIFE.




CHAPTER I.

A YOUNG MAN FROM THE COUNTRY


There were two surgeons in the little town of
Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, in pretty pastoral Midlandshire,--Mr.
Pawlkatt, who lived in a big, new, brazen-faced house in the middle of
the queer old High Street; and John Gilbert, the parish doctor, who
lived in his own house on the outskirts of Graybridge, and worked very
hard for a smaller income than that which the stylish Mr. Pawlkatt
derived from his aristocratic patients.

John Gilbert was an elderly man, with a young son. He had married late
in life, and his wife had died very soon after the birth of this son. It
was for this reason, most likely, that the surgeon loved his child as
children are rarely loved by their fathers--with an earnest,
over-anxious devotion, which from the very first had been something
womanly in its character, and which grew with the child's growth. Mr.
Gilbert's mind was narrowed by the circle in which he lived. He had
inherited his own patients and the parish patients from his father, who
had been a surgeon before him, and who had lived in the same house, with
the same red lamp over the little old-fashioned surgery-door, for
eight-and-forty years, and had died, leaving the house, the practice,
and the red lamp to his son.

If John Gilbert's only child had possessed the capacity of a Newton or
the aspirations of a Napoleon, the surgeon would nevertheless have shut
him up in the surgery to compound aloes and conserve of roses, tincture
of rhubarb and essence of peppermint. Luckily for the boy, he was only a
common-place lad, with a good-looking, rosy face; clear grey eyes, which
stared at you frankly; and a thick stubble of brown hair, parted in the
middle and waving from the roots. He was tall, straight, and muscular; a
good runner, a first-rate cricketer, tolerably skilful with a pair of
boxing-gloves or single-sticks, and a decent shot. He wrote a fair
business-like hand, was an excellent arithmetician, remembered a
smattering of Latin, a random line here and there from those Roman
poets and philosophers whose writings had been his torment at a certain
classical and commercial academy at Wareham. He spoke and wrote
tolerable English, had read Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, and
infinitely preferred the latter, though he made a point of skipping the
first few chapters of the great novelist's fictions in order to get at
once to the action of the story. He was a very good young man, went to
church two or three times on a Sunday, and would on no account have
broken any one of the Ten Commandments on the painted tablets above the
altar by so much as a thought. He was very good; and, above all, he was
very good-looking. No one had ever disputed this fact: George Gilbert
was eminently good-looking. No one had ever gone so far as to call him
handsome; no one had ever presumed to designate him plain. He had those
homely, healthy good looks which the novelist or poet in search of a
hero would recoil from with actual horror, and which the practical mind
involuntarily associates with tenant-farming in a small way, or the sale
of butcher's meat.

I will not say that poor George was ungentlemanly, because he had kind,
cordial manners, and a certain instinctive Christianity, which had never
yet expressed itself in any very tangible form, but which lent a genial
flavour to every word upon his lips, to every thought in his heart. He
was a very trusting young man, and thought well of all mankind; he was a
Tory, heart and soul, as his father and grandfather had been before him;
and thought especially well of all the magnates round about Wareham and
Graybridge, holding the grand names that had been familiar to him from
his childhood in simple reverence, that was without a thought of
meanness. He was a candid, honest, country-bred young man, who did his
duty well, and filled a small place in a very narrow circle with credit
to himself and the father who loved him. The fiery ordeal of two years'
student-life at St. Bartholomew's had left the lad almost as innocent as
a girl; for John Gilbert had planted his son during those two awful
years in the heart of a quiet Wesleyan family in the Seven-Sisters Road,
and the boy had enjoyed very little leisure for disporting himself with
the dangerous spirits of St. Bartholomew's. George Gilbert was
two-and-twenty, and in all the course of those two-and-twenty years
which made the sum of the young man's life, his father had never had
reason to reproach him by so much as a look. The young doctor was held
to be a model youth in the town of Graybridge; and it was whispered that
if he should presume to lift his eyes to Miss Sophronia Burdock, the
second daughter of the rich maltster, he need not aspire in vain. But
George was by no means a coxcomb, and didn't particularly admire Miss
Burdock, whose eyelashes were a good deal paler than her hair, and whose
eyebrows were only visible in a strong light. The surgeon was young, and
the world was all before him; but he was not ambitious; he felt no sense
of oppression in the narrow High Street at Graybridge. He could sit in
the little parlour next the surgery reading Byron's fiercest poems,
sympathizing in his own way with Giaours and Corsairs; but with no
passionate yearning stirring up in his breast, with no thought of revolt
against the dull quiet of his life.

George Gilbert took his life as he found it, and had no wish to make it
better. To him Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne was all the world. He had been
in London, and had felt a provincial's brief sense of surprised delight
in the thronged streets, the clamour, and the bustle; but he had very
soon discovered that the great metropolis was a dirty and disreputable
place as compared to Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, where you might have
taken your dinner comfortably off any doorstep as far as the matter of
cleanliness is concerned. The young man was more than satisfied with his
life; he was pleased with it. He was pleased to think that he was to be
his father's partner, and was to live and marry, and have children, and
die at last in the familiar rooms in which he had been born. His nature
was very adhesive, and he loved the things that he had long known,
because they were old and familiar to him; rather than for any merit or
beauty in the things themselves.

The 20th of July, 1852, was a very great day for George Gilbert, and
indeed for the town of Graybridge generally; for on that day an
excursion train left Wareham for London, conveying such roving spirits
as cared to pay a week's visit to the great metropolis upon very
moderate terms. George had a week's holiday, which he was to spend with
an old schoolfellow who had turned author, and had chambers in the
Temple, but who boarded and lodged with a family at Camberwell. The
young surgeon left Graybridge in the maltster's carriage at eight
o'clock upon that bright summer morning, in company with Miss Burdock
and her sister Sophronia, who were going up to London on a visit to an
aristocratic aunt in Baker Street, and who had been confided to George's
care during the journey.

The young ladies and their attendant squire were in very high spirits.
London, when your time is spent between St. Bartholomew's Hospital and
the Seven-Sisters Road, is not the most delightful city in the world;
but London, when you are a young man from the country, with a week's
holiday, and a five-pound note and some odd silver in your pocket,
assumes quite another aspect. George was not enthusiastic; but he looked
forward to his holiday with a placid sense of pleasure, and listened
with untiring good humour to the conversation of the maltster's
daughters, who gave him a good deal of information about their aunt in
Baker Street, and the brilliant parties given by that lady and her
acquaintance. But, amiable as the young ladies were, George was glad
when the Midlandshire train steamed into the Euston Terminus, and his
charge was ended. He handed the Misses Burdock to a portly and rather
pompous lady, who had a clarence-and-pair waiting for her, and who
thanked him with supreme condescension for his care of her nieces. She
even went so far as to ask him to call in Baker Street during his stay
in London, at which Sophronia blushed. But, unhappily, Sophronia did not
blush prettily; a faint patchy red broke out all over her face, even
where her eyebrows ought to have been, and was a long time dispersing.
If the blush had been Beauty's bright, transient glow, as brief as
summer lightning in a sunset sky, George Gilbert could scarcely have
been blind to its flattering import; but he looked at the young lady's
emotion from a professional point of view, and mistook it for
indigestion.

"You're very kind, ma'am," he said. "But I'm going to stay at
Camberwell; I don't think I shall have time to call in Baker Street."

The carriage drove away, and George took his portmanteau and went to
find a cab. He hailed a hansom, and he felt as he stepped into it that
he was doing a dreadful thing, which would tell against him in
Graybridge, if by any evil chance it should become known that he had
ridden in that disreputable vehicle. He thought the horse had a rakish,
unkempt look about the head and mane, like an animal who was accustomed
to night-work, and indifferent as to his personal appearance in the day.
George was not used to riding in hansoms; so, instead of balancing
himself upon the step for a moment while he gave his orders to the
charioteer, he settled himself comfortably inside, and was a little
startled when a hoarse voice at the back of his head demanded "Where to,
sir?" and suggested the momentary idea that he was breaking out into
involuntary ventriloquism.

"The Temple, driver; the Temple, in Fleet Street," Mr. Gilbert said,
politely.

The man banged down a little trap-door and rattled off eastwards.

I am afraid to say how much George Gilbert gave the cabman when he was
set down at last at the bottom of Chancery Lane; but I think he paid for
five miles at eightpence a mile, and a trifle in on account of a
blockade in Holborn; and even then the driver did not thank him.

George was a long time groping about the courts and quadrangles of the
Temple before he found the place he wanted, though he took a crumpled
letter out of his waistcoat-pocket, and referred to it every now and
then when he came to a standstill.

Wareham is only a hundred and twenty miles from London; and the
excursion train, after stopping at every station on the line, had
arrived at the terminus at half-past two o'clock. It was between three
and four now, and the sun was shining upon the river, and the flags in
the Temple were hot under Mr. Gilbert's feet.

He was very warm himself, and almost worn out, when he found at last the
name he was looking for, painted very high up, in white letters, upon a
black door-post,--"4th Floor: Mr. Andrew Morgan and Mr. Sigismund
Smith."

It was in the most obscure corner of the dingiest court in the Temple
that George Gilbert found this name. He climbed a very dirty staircase,
thumping the end of his portmanteau upon every step as he went up, until
he came to a landing, midway between the third and fourth stories; here
he was obliged to stop for sheer want of breath, for he had been lugging
the portmanteau about with him throughout his wanderings in the Temple,
and a good many people had been startled by the aspect of a well-dressed
young man carrying his own luggage, and staring at the names of the
different rows of houses, the courts and quadrangles in the grave
sanctuary.

George Gilbert stopped to take breath; and he had scarcely done so, when
he was terrified by the apparition of a very dirty boy, who slid
suddenly down the baluster between the floor above and the landing, and
alighted face to face with the young surgeon. The boy's face was very
black, and he was evidently a child of tender years, something between
eleven and twelve, perhaps; but he was in nowise discomfited by the
appearance of Mr. Gilbert; he ran up-stairs again, and placed himself
astride upon the slippery baluster with a view to another descent, when
a door above was suddenly opened, and a voice said, "You know where Mr.
Manders, the artist, lives?"

"Yes, sir;--Waterloo Road, sir, Montague Terrace, No. 2."

"Then run round to him, and tell him the subject for the next
illustration in the 'Smuggler's Bride.' A man with his knee upon the
chest of another man, and a knife in his hand. You can remember that?"

"Yes, sir."

"And bring me a proof of chapter fifty-seven."

"Yes, sir."

The door was shut, and the boy ran down-stairs, past George Gilbert, as
fast as he could go. But the door above was opened again, and the same
voice called aloud,--

"Tell Mr. Manders the man with the knife in his hand must have on
top-boots."

"All right, sir," the boy called from the bottom of the staircase.

George Gilbert went up, and knocked at the door above. It was a black
door, and the names of Mr. Andrew Morgan and Mr. Sigismund Smith were
painted upon it in white letters as upon the door-post below.

A pale-faced young man, with a smudge of ink upon the end of his nose,
and very dirty wrist-bands, opened the door.

"Sam!"

"George!" cried the two young men simultaneously, and then began to
shake hands with effusion, as the French playwrights say.

"My dear old George!"

"My dear old Sam! But you call yourself Sigismund now?"

"Yes; Sigismund Smith. It sounds well; doesn't it? If a man's evil
destiny makes him a Smith, the least he can do is to take it out in his
Christian name. No Smith with a grain of spirit would ever consent to be
a Samuel. But come in, dear old boy, and put your portmanteau down;
knock those papers off that chair--there, by the window. Don't be
frightened of making 'em in a muddle; they can't be in a worse muddle
than they are now. If you don't mind just amusing yourself with the
'Times' for half an hour or so, while I finish this chapter of the
'Smuggler's Bride,' I shall be able to strike work, and do whatever you
like; but the printer's boy is coming back in half an hour for the end
of the chapter."

"I won't speak a word," George said, respectfully. The young man with
the smudgy nose was an author, and George Gilbert had an awful sense of
the solemnity of his friend's vocation. "Write away, my dear Sam; I
won't interrupt you."

He drew his chair close to the open window, and looked down into the
court below, where the paint was slowly blistering in the July sun.




CHAPTER II.

A SENSATION AUTHOR.


Mr. Sigismund Smith was a sensation author. That bitter term of
reproach, "sensation," had not been invented for the terror of romancers
in the fifty-second year of this present century; but the thing existed
nevertheless in divers forms, and people wrote sensation novels as
unconsciously as Monsieur Jourdain talked prose. Sigismund Smith was the
author of about half-a-dozen highly-spiced fictions, which enjoyed an
immense popularity amongst the classes who like their literature as they
like their tobacco--very strong. Sigismund had never in his life
presented himself before the public in a complete form; he appeared in
weekly numbers at a penny, and was always so appearing; and except on
one occasion when he found himself, very greasy and dog's-eared at the
edges, and not exactly pleasant to the sense of smell, on the shelf of a
humble librarian and newsvendor, who dealt in tobacco and sweetstuff as
well as literature, Sigismund had never known what it was to be bound.
He was well paid for his work, and he was contented. He had his
ambition, which was to write a great novel; and the archetype of this
_magnum opus_ was the dream which he carried about with him wherever he
went, and fondly nursed by night and day. In the meantime he wrote for
his public, which was a public that bought its literature in the same
manner as its pudding--in penny slices.

There was very little to look at in the court below the window; so
George Gilbert fell to watching his friend, whose rapid pen scratched
along the paper in a breathless way, which indicated a dashing and
Dumas-like style of literature, rather than the polished composition of
a Johnson or an Addison. Sigismund only drew breath once, and then he
paused to make frantic gashes at his shirt-collar with an inky bone
paper-knife that lay upon the table.

"I'm only trying whether a man would cut his throat from right to left,
or left to right," Mr. Smith said, in answer to his friend's look of
terror; "it's as well to be true to nature; or as true as one can be,
for a pound a page--double-column pages, and eighty-one lines in a
column. A man would cut his throat from left to right: he couldn't do it
in the other way without making perfect slices of himself."

"There's a suicide, then, in your story?" George said, with a look of
awe.

"_A_ suicide!" exclaimed Sigismund Smith; "_a_ suicide in the
'Smuggler's Bride!' why, it teems with suicides. There's the Duke of
Port St. Martin's, who walls himself up alive in his own cellar; and
there's Leonie de Pasdebasque, the ballet-dancer, who throws herself out
of Count Cæsar Maraschetti's private balloon; and there's Lilia, the
dumb girl,--the penny public like dumb girls,--who sets fire to herself
to escape from the--in fact, there's lots of them," said Mr. Smith,
dipping his pen in his ink, and hurrying wildly along the paper.

The boy came back before the last page was finished, and Mr. Smith
detained him for five or ten minutes; at the end of which time he rolled
up the manuscript, still damp, and dismissed the printer's emissary.

"Now, George," he said, "I can talk to you."

Sigismund was the son of a Wareham attorney, and the two young men had
been schoolfellows at the Classical and Commercial Academy in the
Wareham Road. They had been schoolfellows, and were very sincerely
attached to each other. Sigismund was supposed to be reading for the
Bar; and for the first twelve months of his sojourn in the Temple the
young man had worked honestly and conscientiously; but finding that his
legal studies resulted in nothing but mental perplexity and confusion,
Sigismund beguiled his leisure by the pursuit of literature.

He found literature a great deal more profitable and a great deal easier
than the study of Coke upon Lyttleton, or Blackstone's Commentaries; and
he abandoned himself entirely to the composition of such works as are to
be seen, garnished with striking illustrations, in the windows of humble
newsvendors in the smaller and dingier thoroughfares of every large
town. Sigismund gave himself wholly to this fascinating pursuit, and
perhaps produced more sheets of that mysterious stuff which literary
people call "copy" than any other author of his age.

It would be almost impossible for me adequately to describe the
difference between Sigismund Smith as he was known to the very few
friends who knew anything at all about him, and Sigismund Smith as he
appeared on paper.

In the narrow circle of his home Mr. Smith was a very mild young man,
with the most placid blue eyes that ever looked out of a human head, and
a good deal of light curling hair. He was a very mild young man. He
could not have hit any one if he had tried ever so; and if you had hit
him, I don't think he would have minded--much. It was not in him to be
very angry; or to fall in love, to any serious extent; or to be
desperate about anything. Perhaps it was that he exhausted all that was
passionate in his nature in penny numbers, and had nothing left for the
affairs of real life. People who were impressed by his fictions, and
were curious to see him, generally left him with a strong sense of
disappointment, if not indignation.

Was this meek young man the Byronic hero they had pictured? Was this the
author of "Colonel Montefiasco, or the Brand upon the Shoulder-blade?"
They had imagined a splendid creature, half magician, half brigand, with
a pale face and fierce black eyes, a tumbled mass of raven hair, a bare
white throat, a long black velvet dressing-gown, and thin tapering
hands, with queer agate and onyx rings encircling the flexible fingers.

And then the surroundings. An oak-panelled chamber, of course--black
oak, with grotesque and diabolic carvings jutting out at the angles of
the room; a crystal globe upon a porphyry pedestal; a mysterious
picture, with a curtain drawn before it--certain death being the fate of
him who dared to raise that curtain by so much as a corner. A
mantel-piece of black marble, and a collection of pistols and scimitars,
swords and yataghans--especially yataghans--glimmering and flashing in
the firelight. A little show of eccentricity in the way of household
pets: a bear under the sofa, and a tame rattlesnake coiled upon the
hearth-rug. This was the sort of thing the penny public expected of
Sigismund Smith; and, lo, here was a young man with perennial
ink-smudges upon his face, and an untidy chamber in the Temple, with
nothing more romantic than a waste-paper basket, a litter of old letters
and tumbled proofs, and a cracked teapot simmering upon the hob.

This was the young man who described the reckless extravagance of a
Montefiasco's sumptuous chamber, the mysterious elegance of a Diana
Firmiani's dimly-lighted boudoir. This was the young man in whose works
there were more masked doors, and hidden staircases, and revolving
picture-frames and sliding panels, than in all the old houses in Great
Britain; and a greater length of vaulted passages than would make an
underground railway from the Scottish border to the Land's End. This was
the young man who, in an early volume of poems--a failure, as it is the
nature of all early volumes of poems to be--had cried in passionate
accents to some youthful member of the aristocracy, surname unknown--

     "Lady Mable, Lady May, no pæan in your praise I'll sing;
       My shattered lyre all mutely tells
     The tortured hand that broke the string.
       Go, fair and false, while jangling bells
     Through golden waves of sunshine ring;
       Go, mistress of a thousand spells:
     But know, midst those you've left forlorn,
       _One_, lady, gives you scorn for scorn."

"Now, George," Mr. Smith said, as he pushed away a very dirty inkstand,
and wiped his pen upon the cuff of his coat,--"now, George, I can attend
to the rights of hospitality. You must be hungry after your journey,
poor old boy! What'll you take?"

There were no cupboards in the room, which was very bare of furniture,
and the only vestiges of any kind of refreshment were a brown
crockery-ware teapot upon the hob, and a roll and pat of butter upon a
plate on the mantel-piece.

"Have something!" Sigismund said. "I know there isn't much, because, you
see, I never have time to attend to that sort of thing. Have some bread
and marmalade?"

He drew out a drawer in the desk before which he was sitting, and
triumphantly displayed a pot of marmalade with a spoon in it.

"Bread and marmalade and cold tea's capital," he said; "you'll try some,
George, won't you? and then we'll go home to Camberwell."

Mr. Gilbert declined the bread and marmalade; so Sigismund prepared to
take his departure.

"Morgan's gone into Buckinghamshire for a week's fishing," he said, "so
I've got the place to myself. I come here of a morning, you know, work
all day, and go home to tea and a chop or a steak in the evening. Come
along, old fellow."

The young men went out upon the landing. Sigismund locked the black door
and put the key in his pocket. They went down-stairs, and through the
courts, and across the quadrangles of the Temple, bearing towards that
outlet which is nearest Blackfriars Bridge.

"You'd like to walk, I suppose, George?" Mr. Smith asked.

"Oh, yes; we can talk better walking."

They talked a great deal as they went along. They were very fond of one
another, and had each of them a good deal to tell; but George wasn't
much of a talker as compared to his friend Sigismund. That young man
poured forth a perpetual stream of eloquence, which knew no exhaustion.

"And so you like the people at Camberwell?" George said.

"Oh yes, they're capital people; free and easy, you know, and no stupid
stuck-up gentility about them. Not but what Sleaford's a gentleman; he's
a barrister. I don't know exactly where his chambers are, or in what
court he practises when he's in town; but he _is_ a barrister. I suppose
he goes on circuit sometimes, for he's very often away from home for a
long time together; but I don't know what circuit he goes on. It doesn't
do to ask a man those sort of questions, you see, George; so I hold my
tongue. I don't think he's rich, that's to say not rich in a regular
way. He's flush of money sometimes, and then you should see the Sunday
dinners--salmon and cucumber, and duck and green peas, as if they were
nothing."

"Is he a nice fellow?"

"Oh yes; a jolly, out-spoken sort of a fellow, with a loud voice and
black eyes. He's a capital fellow to me, but he's not fond of company.
He seldom shows if I take down a friend. Very likely you mayn't see him
all the time you stay there. He'll shut himself up in his own room when
he's at home, and won't so much as look at you."

George seemed to be rather alarmed at this prospect.

"But if Mr. Sleaford objects to my being in the house," he began,
"perhaps I'd better--"

"Oh, he doesn't object, bless you!" Sigismund cried, hastily; "not a bit
of it. I said to Mrs. Sleaford the other morning at breakfast, 'A friend
of mine is coming up from Midlandshire; he's as good a fellow as ever
breathed,' I said, 'and good-looking into the bargain,'--don't you
blush, George, because it's spooney,--and I asked Mrs. S. if she could
give you a room and partially board you,--I'm a partial boarder, you
know,--for a week or so. She looked at her husband,--she's very sharp
with all of _us_, but she's afraid of _him_,--and Sleaford said yes; my
friend might come and should be welcome, as long as he wasn't bothered
about it. So your room's ready, George, and you come as my visitor; and
I can get orders for all the theatres in London, and I'll give you a
French dinner in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square every day of your
life, if you like; and we'll fill the cup of dissipation to the highest
top sparkle."

It was a long walk from the Temple to Camberwell; but the two young men
were good walkers, and as Sigismund Smith talked unceasingly all the
way, there were no awkward pauses in the conversation. They walked the
whole length of the Walworth Road, and turned to the left soon after
passing the turn-pike. Mr. Smith conducted his friend by mazy
convolutions of narrow streets and lanes, where there were pretty little
villas and comfortable cottages nestling amongst trees, and where there
was the perpetual sound of clattering tin pails and the slopping of
milk, blending pleasantly with the cry of the milkman. Sigismund led
George through these shady little retreats, and past a tall
stern-looking church, and along by the brink of a canal, till they came
to a place where the country was wild and sterile in the year 1852. I
dare say that railways have cut the neighbourhood all to pieces by this
time, and that Mr. Sleaford's house has been sold by auction in the form
of old bricks; but on this summer afternoon the place to which Sigismund
brought his friend was quite a lonely, countrified spot, where there was
one big, ill-looking house, shut in by a high wall, and straggling rows
of cottages dwindling away into pigsties upon each side of it.

Standing before a little wooden door in the wall that surrounded Mr.
Sleaford's garden, George Gilbert could only see that the house was a
square brick building, with sickly ivy straggling here and there about
it, and long narrow windows considerably obscured by dust and dirt. It
was not a pleasant house to look at, however agreeable it might be as a
habitation; and George compared it unfavourably with the trim
white-walled villas he had seen on his way,--those neat little mansions
at five-and-thirty pounds a year; those cosy little cottages, with
shining windows that winked and blinked in the sunshine by reason of
their cleanliness; those dazzling brass plates, which shone like brazen
shields upon the vivid green of newly-painted front doors. If Mr.
Sleaford's house had ever been painted within Mr Sleaford's memory, the
barrister must have been one of the oldest inhabitants of that sterile
region on the outskirts of Camberwell; if Mr. Sleaford held the house
upon a repairing lease, he must have anticipated a prodigious claim for
dilapidations at the expiration of his tenancy. Whatever could be broken
in Mr. Sleaford's house was broken; whatever could fall out of repair
had so fallen. The bricks held together, and the house stood; and that
was about all that could be said for the barrister's habitation.

The bell was broken, and the handle rattled loosely in a kind of basin
of tarnished brass, so it was no use attempting to ring; but Sigismund
was used to this. He stooped down, put his lips to a hole broken in the
wood-work above the lock of the garden-door, and gave a shrill whistle.

"They understand that," he said; "the bell's been broken ever since I've
lived here, but they never have anything mended."

"Why not?"

"Because they're thinking of leaving. I've been with them two years and
a half, and they've been thinking of leaving all the time. Sleaford has
got the house cheap, and the landlord won't do anything; so between them
they let it go. Sleaford talks about going to Australia some of these
days."

The garden-door was opened while Mr. Smith was talking, and the two
young men went in. The person who had admitted them was a boy who had
just arrived at that period of life when boys are most obnoxious. He had
ceased to be a boy pure and simple, and had not yet presumed to call
himself a young man. Rejected on one side by his juniors, who found him
arrogant and despotic, mooting strange and unorthodox theories with
regard to marbles, and evincing supreme contempt for boys who were not
familiar with the latest vaticinations of the sporting prophets in
"Bell's Life" and the "Sunday Times;" and flouted on the other hand by
his seniors, who offered him halfpence for the purchase of hardbake, and
taunted him with base insinuations when he was seized with a sudden
fancy for going to look at the weather in the middle of a strong
cheroot,--the hobbledehoy sought vainly for a standing-place upon the
social scale, and finding none, became a misanthrope, and wrapped
himself in scorn as in a mantle. For Sigismund Smith the gloomy youth
cherished a peculiar hatred. The young author was master of that proud
position to obtain which the boy struggled in vain. He was a man! He
could smoke a cigar to the very stump, and not grow ashy pale, or
stagger dizzily once during the operation; but how little he made of his
advantages! He could stay out late of nights, and there was no one to
reprove him, _He_ could go into a popular tavern, and call for
gin-and-bitters, and drink the mixture without so much as a wry face,
and slap his money upon the pewter counter, and call the barmaid "Mary;"
and there was no chance of _his_ mother happening to be passing at that
moment, and catching a glimpse of his familiar back-view through the
half-open swinging door, and rushing in, red and angry, to lead him off
by the collar of his jacket, amid the laughter of heartless bystanders.
No; Sigismund Smith was a MAN. He might have got tipsy if he had liked,
and walked about London half the night, ringing surgeons' bells, and
pulling off knockers, and being taken to the station-house early in the
morning, to be bailed out by a friend by-and-by, and to have his name in
the Sunday papers, with a sensational heading, "Another tipsy swell," or
"A modern spring-heeled Jack."

Yes; Horace Sleaford hated his mother's partial boarder; but his hatred
was tempered by disdain. What did Mr. Smith make of all his lofty
privileges? Nothing; absolutely nothing. The glory of manhood was thrown
away upon a mean-spirited cur, who, possessed of liberty to go where he
pleased, had never seen a fight for the championship of England, or the
last grand rush for the blue riband of the turf; and who, at
four-and-twenty years of age, ate bread and marmalade openly in the face
of contemptuous mankind. Master Sleaford shut the door with a bang, and
locked it. There was one exception to the rule of no repairs in Mr.
Sleaford's establishment, the locks were all kept in excellent order.
The disdainful boy took the key from the lock, and carried it in-doors
on his little finger. He had warts upon his hands, and warts are the
stigmata of boyhood; and the sleeves of his jacket were white and shiny
at the elbows, and left him cruelly exposed about the wrists. The
knowledge of his youth, and that shabby frouziness of raiment peculiar
to middle-class hobbledehoyhood, gave him a sulky fierceness of aspect,
which harmonized well with a pair of big black eyes and a tumbled shock
of blue-black hair. He suspected everybody of despising him, and was
perpetually trying to look-down the scorn of others with still deeper
scorn. He stared at George Gilbert, as the young man came into the
garden, but did not deign to speak. George was six feet high, and that
was in itself enough to make _him_ hateful.

"Well, Horace!" Mr. Smith said, good-naturedly.

"Well, young 'un," the boy answered, disdainfully, "how do _you_ find
yourself?"

Horace Sleaford led the way into the house. They went up a flight of
steps leading to a half-glass door. It might have been pretty once upon
a time, when the glass was bright, and the latticed porch sheltered by
clustering roses and clematis; but the clematis had withered, and the
straggling roses were choked with wild convolvulus tendrils, that wound
about the branches like weedy serpents, and stifled buds and blossoms in
their weedy embrace.

The boy banged open the door of the house, as he had banged-to the door
of the garden. He made a point of doing every thing with a bang; it was
one way of evincing his contempt for his species.

"Mother's in the kitchen," he said; "the boys are on the common flying a
kite, and Izzie's in the garden."

"Is your father at home?" Sigismund asked.

"No, he isn't, Clever; you might have known that without asking.
Whenever is he at home at this time of day?"

"Is tea ready?"

"No, nor won't be for this half-hour," answered the boy, triumphantly;
"so, if you and your friend are hungry, you'd better have some bread and
marmalade. There's a pot in your drawer up-stairs. I haven't taken any,
and I shouldn't have seen it if I hadn't gone to look for a steel pen;
so, if you've made a mark upon the label, and think the marmalade's gone
down lower, it isn't _me_. Tea won't be ready for half-an-hour; for the
kitchen-fire's been smokin', and the chops can't be done till that's
clear; and the kettle ain't on either; and the girl's gone to fetch a
fancy loaf,--so you'll have to wait."

"Oh, never mind that," Sigismund said; "come into the garden, George;
I'll introduce you to Miss Sleaford."

"Then _I_ shan't go with you," said the boy; "I don't care for girls'
talk. I say, Mr. Gilbert, you're a Midlandshire man, and you ought to
know something. What odds will you give me against Mr. Tomlinson's brown
colt, Vinegar Cruet, for the Conventford steeple-chase?"

Unfortunately Mr. Gilbert was lamentably ignorant of the merits or
demerits of Vinegar Cruet.

"I'll tell you what I'll do with you, then," the boy said; "I'll take
fifteen to two against him in fourpenny-bits, and that's one less than
the last Manchester quotation."

George shook his head. "Horse-racing is worse than Greek to me, Master
Sleaford," he said.

The "Master" goaded the boy to retaliate.

"Your friend don't seem to have seen much life," he said to Sigismund.
"I think we shall be able to show him a thing or two before he goes back
to Midlandshire, eh, Samuel?"

Horace Sleaford had discovered that fatal name, Samuel, in an old
prayer-book belonging to Mr. Smith; and he kept it in reserve, as a kind
of poisoned dart, always ready to be hurled at his foe.

"We'll teach him a little life, eh, SAMUEL?" he repeated, "Haw, haw,
haw!"

But his gaiety was cut suddenly short; for a door in the shadowy passage
opened, and a woman's face, thin and vinegary of aspect, looked out, and
a shrill voice cried:

"Didn't I tell you I wanted another penn'orth of milk fetched, you young
torment? But, law, you're like the rest of them, that's all! _I_ may
slave my life out, and there isn't one of you will as much as lift a
finger to help me."

The boy disappeared upon this, grumbling sulkily; and Sigismund opened a
door leading into a parlour.

The room was large, but shabbily furnished and very untidy. The traces
of half-a-dozen different occupations were scattered about, and the
apartment was evidently inhabited by people who made a point of never
putting anything away. There was a work-box upon the table, open, and
running over with a confusion of tangled tapes, and bobbins, and a mass
of different-coloured threads, that looked like variegated vermicelli.
There was an old-fashioned desk, covered with dusty green baize, and
decorated with loose brass-work, which caught at people's garments or
wounded their flesh when the desk was carried about; this was open, like
the work-box, and was littered with papers that had been blown about by
the summer breeze, and were scattered all over the table and the floor
beneath it. On a rickety little table near the window there was a
dilapidated box of colours, a pot of gum with a lot of brushes sticking
up out of it, half-a-dozen sheets of Skelt's dramatic scenes and
characters lying under scraps of tinsel, and fragments of coloured
satin, and neatly-folded packets of little gold and silver dots, which
the uninitiated might have mistaken for powders. There were some
ragged-looking books on a shelf near the fire-place; two or three
different kinds of inkstands on the mantel-piece; a miniature wooden
stage, with a lop-sided pasteboard proscenium and greasy tin lamps, in
one corner of the floor; a fishing-rod and tackle leaning against the
wall in another corner; and the room was generally pervaded by
copy-books, slate-pencils, and torn Latin grammars with half a
brown-leather cover hanging to the leaves by a stout drab thread.
Everything in the apartment was shabby, and more or less dilapidated;
nothing was particularly clean; and everywhere there was the evidence of
boys.

I believe Mr. Sleaford's was the true policy. If you have boys, "cry
havoc, and let loose the dogs of war;" shut your purse against the
painter and the carpenter, the plumber and glazier, the upholsterer and
gardener; "let what is broken, so remain,"--reparations are wasted
labour and wasted money. Buy a box of carpenter's tools for your boys,
if you like, and let them mend what they themselves have broken; and, if
you don't mind their sawing off one or two of their fingers
occasionally, you may end by making them tolerably useful.

Mr. Sleaford had one daughter and four sons, and the sons were all boys.
People ceased to wonder at the shabbiness of his furniture and the
dilapidation of his house, when they were made aware of this fact. The
limp chintz curtains that straggled from the cornice had been torn
ruthlessly down to serve as draperies for Tom when he personated the
ghost in a charade, or for Jack when he wanted a sail to fasten to his
fishing-rod, firmly planted on the quarter-deck of the sofa. The chairs
had done duty as blocks for the accommodation of many an imaginary Anne
Boleyn and Marie Antoinette, upon long winter evenings, when Horace
decapitated the sofa-pillow with a smoky poker, while Tom and Jack kept
guard upon the scaffold, and held the populace--of one--at bay with
their halberds--the tongs and shovel. The loose carpets had done duty as
raging oceans on many a night, when the easy-chair had gone to pieces
against the sideboard, with a loss of two wine-glasses, and all hands
had been picked up in a perishing state by the crew of the sofa, after
an undramatic interlude of slaps, cuffs, and remonstrances from the
higher powers, who walked into the storm-beaten ocean with cruel
disregard of the unities. Mr. Sleaford had a room to himself
up-stairs--a Bluebeard chamber, which the boys never entered; for the
barrister made a point of locking his door whenever he left his room,
and his sons were therefore compelled to respect his apartment. They
looked through the keyhole now and then, to see if there was anything of
a mysterious nature in the forbidden chamber; but, as they saw nothing
but a dingy easy-chair and an office-table, with a quantity of papers
scattered about it, their curiosity gradually subsided, and they ceased
to concern themselves in any manner about the apartment, which they
always spoke of as "Pa's room."




CHAPTER III.

ISABEL.


The garden at the back of Mr. Sleaford's house was a large square plot
of ground, with fine old pear-trees sheltering a neglected lawn. A row
of hazel-bushes screened all the length of the wall upon one side of the
garden; and wherever you looked, there were roses and sweet-brier,
espaliered apples, and tall straggling raspberry-bushes, all equally
unfamiliar with the gardener's pruning knife; though here and there you
came to a luckless bush that had been hacked at and mutilated in some
amateur operations of "the boys."

It was an old-fashioned garden, and had doubtless once been beautifully
kept; for bright garden-flowers grew up amongst the weeds summer after
summer, as if even neglect or cruel usage could not disroot them from
the familiar place they loved. Thus rare orchids sprouted up out of beds
that were half full of chickweed, and lilies-of-the-valley flourished
amongst the ground-sel in a shady corner under the water-butt. There
were vines, upon which no grape had ever been suffered to ripen during
Mr. Sleaford's tenancy, but which yet made a beautiful screen of verdant
tracery all over the back of the house, twining their loving tendrils
about the dilapidated Venetian shutters, that rotted slowly on their
rusted hinges. There were strawberry-beds, and there was an arbour at
one end of the garden in which the boys played at "beggar my neighbour,"
and "all fours," with greasy, dog's-eared cards in the long summer
afternoons; and there were some rabbit-hutches--sure evidence of the
neighbourhood of boys--in a sheltered corner under the hazel-bushes. It
was a dear old untidy place, where the odour of distant pigsties mingled
faintly with the perfume of the roses; and it was in this neglected
garden that Isabel Sleaford spent the best part of her idle, useless
life.

She was sitting in a basket-chair under one of the pear-trees when
Sigismund Smith and his friend went into the garden to look for her. She
was lolling in a low basket-chair, with a book on her lap, and her chin
resting on the palm of her hand, so absorbed by the interest of the page
before her that she did not even lift her eyes when the two young men
went close up to her. She wore a muslin dress a good deal tumbled and
not too clean, and a strip of black velvet was tied round her long
throat. Her hair was almost as black as her brother's, and was rolled up
in a great loose knot, from which a long untidy curl fell straggling on
her white throat--her throat was very white, with the dead, yellowish
whiteness of ivory.

"I wish that was 'Colonel Montefiasco,'" said Mr. Smith, pointing to the
book which the young lady was reading. "I should like to see a lady so
interested in one of _my_ books that she wouldn't so much as look up
when a gentleman was waiting to be introduced to her."

Miss Sleaford shut her book and rose from her low chair, abashed by this
reproach; but she kept her thumb between the pages, and evidently meant
to go on with the volume at the first convenient opportunity. She did
not wait for any ceremonious introduction to George, but held out her
hand to him, and smiled at him frankly.

"Yon are Mr. Gilbert, I know," she said. "Sigismund has been talking of
you incessantly for the last week. Mamma has got your room ready; and I
suppose we shall have tea soon. There are to be some chops on purpose
for your friend, Sigismund, mamma told me to tell you."

She glanced downwards at the book, as much as to say that she had
finished speaking, and wanted to get back to it.

"What is it, Izzie?" Sigismund asked, interpreting her look.

"Algerman Mountfort."

"Ah, I thought so. Always _his_ books."

A faint blush trembled over Miss Sleaford's pale face.

"They are so beautiful!" she said.

"Dangerously beautiful, I'm afraid, Isabel," the young man said,
gravely; "beautiful sweetmeats, with opium inside the sugar. These books
don't make you happy, do they, Izzie?"

"No, they make me unhappy; but"--she hesitated a little, and then
blushed as she said--"I like that sort of unhappiness. It's better than
eating and drinking and sleeping, and being happy that way."

George could only stare at the young lady's kindling face, which lighted
up all in a moment, and was suddenly beautiful, like some transparency
which seems a dingy picture till you put a lamp behind it. The young
surgeon could only stare wonderingly at Mr. Sleaford's daughter, for he
hadn't the faintest idea what she and his friend were talking about. He
could only watch her pale face, over which faint blushes trembled and
vanished like the roseate reflections of a sunset sky. George Gilbert
saw that Isabel Sleaford had eyes that were large and black, like her
brother's, but which were entirely different from his, notwithstanding;
for they were soft and sleepy, with very little light in them, and what
little light there was, only a dim dreamy glimmer in the depths of the
large pupils. Being a very quiet young man, without much to say for
himself, George Gilbert had plenty of leisure in which to examine the
young lady's face as she talked to her mother's boarder, who was on
cordial brotherly terms with her. George was not a very enthusiastic
young man, and he looked at Miss Sleaford's face with no more emotion
than if she had been a statue amongst many statues in a gallery of
sculpture. He saw that she had small delicate features and a pale face,
and that her great black eyes alone invested her with a kind of weird
and melancholy beauty, which kindled into warmer loveliness when she
smiled.

George did not see the full extent of Isabel Sleaford's beauty, for he
was merely a good young man, with a tolerable commonplace intellect, and
Isabel's beauty was of a poetical kind, which could only be fully
comprehended by a poet; but Mr. Gilbert arrived at a vague conviction
that she was what he called "pretty," and he wondered how it was that
her eyes looked a tawny yellow when the light shone full upon them, and
a dense black when they were shadowed by their dark lashes.

George was not so much impressed by Miss Sleaford's beauty as by the
fact that she was entirely different from any woman he had ever seen
before; and I think herein lay this young lady's richest charm, by right
of which she should have won the homage of an emperor. There was no one
like her. Whatever beauty she had was her own, and no common property
shared with a hundred other pretty girls. You saw her once, and
remembered her for ever; but you never saw any mortal face that reminded
you of hers.

She shut her book altogether at Sigismund's request, and went with the
two young men to show George the garden; but she carried the
dingy-looking volume lovingly under her arm, and she relapsed into a
dreamy silence every now and then, as if she had been reading the hidden
pages by some strange faculty of clairvoyance.

Horace Sleaford came running out presently, and summoned the wanderers
to the house, where tea was ready.

"The boys are to have theirs in the kitchen," he said; "and we elders
tea together in the front parlour."

Three younger boys came trooping out as he spoke, and one by one
presented a dingy paw to Mr. Gilbert. They had been flying a kite, and
fishing in the canal, and helping to stack some hay in the distant
meadow; and they were rough and tumbled, and smelt strongly of out-door
amusements. They were all three very much like their brother; and
George, looking at the four boys as they clustered round him, saw eight
of the blackest eyes he ever remembered having looked upon; but not one
of those four pairs of eyes bore any resemblance to Isabel's. The boys
were only Miss Sleaford's half-brothers. Mr. Sleaford's first wife had
died three years after her marriage, and Isabel's only memory of her
mother was the faint shadow of a loving, melancholy face; a transient
shadow, that came to the motherless girl sometimes in her sleep.

An old servant, who had come one day, long ago, to see the Sleafords,
told Isabel that her mother had once had a great trouble, and that it
had killed her. The child had asked what the great trouble was; but the
old servant only shook her head, and said, "Better for you not to know,
my poor, sweet lamb; better for you never to know."

There was a pencil-sketch of the first Mrs. Sleaford in the best
parlour; a fly-spotted pencil-sketch, which represented a young woman
like Isabel, dressed in a short-waisted gown, with big balloon sleeves;
and this was all Miss Sleaford knew of her mother.

The present Mrs. Sleaford was a shrewish little woman, with light hair,
and sharp grey eyes; a well-meaning little woman, who made everybody
about her miserable, and who worked from morning till night, and yet
never seemed to finish any task she undertook. The Sleafords kept one
servant, a maid-of-all-work, who was called the girl; but this young
person very rarely emerged from the back kitchen, where there was a
perpetual pumping of water and clattering of hardware, except to
disfigure the gooseberry-bushes with pudding-cloths and dusters, which
she hung out to dry in the sunshine. To the ignorant mind it would have
seemed that the Sleafords might have been very nearly as well off
without a servant; for Mrs. Sleaford appeared to do all the cooking and
the greater part of the house-work, while Isabel and the boys took it in
turns to go upon errands and attend to the garden-door.

The front parlour was a palatial chamber as compared to the back; for
the boys were chased away with slaps by Mrs. Sleaford when they carried
thither that artistic paraphernalia which she called their "rubbish,"
and the depredations of the race were, therefore, less visible in this
apartment. Mrs. Sleaford had made herself "tidy" in honour of her new
boarder, and her face was shining with the recent application of strong
yellow soap. George saw at once that she was a very common little woman,
and that any intellectual graces inherited by the boys must have
descended to them from their father. He had a profound reverence for the
higher branch of the legal profession, and he pondered that a barrister
should have married such a woman as Mrs. Sleaford, and should be content
to live in the muddle peculiar to a household where the mistress is her
own cook, and the junior branches are amateur errand boys.

After tea the two young men walked up and down the weedy pathways in the
garden, while Isabel sat under her favourite pear-tree reading the
volume she had been so loth to close. Sigismund and his Midlandshire
friend walked up and down, smoking cigars, and talking of what they
called old times; but those old times were only four or five years ago,
though the young men talked like greybeards, who look back half a
century or so, and wonder at the folly of their youth.

Isabel went on with her book; the light was dying away little by little,
dropping down behind the pear-trees at the western side of the garden,
and the pale evening star glimmered at the end of one of the pathways.
She read on more eagerly, almost breathlessly, as the light grew less;
for her step-mother would call her in by-and-by, and there would be a
torn jacket to mend, perhaps, or a heap of worsted socks to be darned
for the boys; and there would be no chance of reading another line of
that sweet sentimental story, that heavenly prose, which fell into a
cadence like poetry, that tender, melancholy music which haunted the
reader long after the book was shut and laid aside, and made the dull
course of common life so dismally unendurable.

Isabel Sleaford was not quite eighteen years of age. She had been taught
a smattering of everything at a day-school in the Albany Road; rather a
stylish seminary in the opinion of the Camberwellians. She knew a little
Italian, enough French to serve for the reading of novels that she might
have better left unread, and just so much of modern history as enabled
her to pick out all the sugar-plums in the historian's pages,--the Mary
Stuarts, and Joan of Arcs, and Anne Boleyns, the Iron Masks and La
Vallières, the Marie Antoinettes and Charlotte Cordays, luckless
Königsmarks and wicked Borgias; all the romantic and horrible stories
scattered amid the dry records of Magna Chartas and Reform Bills,
clamorous Third Estates and Beds of Justice. She played the piano a
little, and sang a little, and painted wishy-washy-looking flowers on
Bristol-board _from_ nature, but not at all _like_ nature; for the
passion-flowers were apt to come out like blue muslin frills, and the
fuchsias would have passed for prawns with short-sighted people.

Miss Sleaford had received that half-and-half education which is popular
with the poorer middle classes. She left the Albany Road seminary in her
sixteenth year, and set to work to educate herself by means of the
nearest circulating library. She did not feed upon garbage, but settled
at once upon the highest blossoms in the flower-garden of fiction, and
read her favourite novels over and over again, and wrote little extracts
of her own choosing in penny account-books, usually employed for the
entry of butcher's-meat and grocery. She knew whole pages of her pet
authors by heart, and used to recite long sentimental passages to
Sigismund Smith in the dusky summer evenings; and I am sorry to say that
the young man, going to work at Colonel Montefiasco next morning, would
put neat paraphrases of Bulwer, or Dickens, or Thackeray into that
gentleman's mouth, and invest the heroic brigand with the genial humour
of a John Brodie, the spirituality of a Zanoni, and the savage sarcasm
of a Lord Steyne. Perhaps there never was a wider difference between two
people than that which existed between Isabel Sleaford and her mother's
boarder. Sigismund wrote romantic fictions by wholesale, and yet was as
unromantic as the prosiest butcher who ever entered a cattle-market. He
sold his imagination, and Isabel lived upon hers. To him romance was
something which must be woven into the form most likely to suit the
popular demand. He slapped his heroes into marketable shape as coolly as
a butterman slaps a pat of butter into the semblance of a swan or a
crown, in accordance with the requirements of his customers. But poor
Isabel's heroes were impalpable tyrants, and ruled her life. She wanted
her life to be like her books; she wanted to be a heroine,--unhappy
perhaps, and dying early. She had an especial desire to die early, by
consumption, with a hectic flush and an unnatural lustre in her eyes.
She fancied every time she had a little cough that the consumption was
coming, and she began to pose herself, and was gently melancholy to her
half-brothers, and told them one by one, in confidence, that she did not
think she should be with them long. They were slow to understand the
drift of her remarks, and would ask her if she was going out as a
governess; and, if she took the trouble to explain her dismal meaning,
were apt to destroy the sentiment of the situation by saying, "Oh, come
now, Hookee Walker. Who ate a plum-dumpling yesterday for dinner, and
asked for more? That's the only sort of consumption _you've_ got, Izzie;
two helps of pudding at dinner, and no end of bread-and-butter for
breakfast."

It was not so that Florence Dombey's friends addressed her. It was not
thus that little Paul would have spoken to his sister; but then, who
could tolerate these great healthy boys after reading about little Paul?

Poor Izzie's life was altogether vulgar and commonplace, and she could
not extract one ray of romance out of it, twist it as she would. Her
father was not a Dombey, or an Augustine Caxton, or even a Rawdon
Crawley. He was a stout, broad-shouldered, good-tempered-looking man,
who was fond of good eating, and drank three bottles of French brandy
every week of his life. He was tolerably fond of his children; but he
never took them out with him, and he saw very little of them at home.
There was nothing romantic to be got out of him. Isabel would have been
rather glad if he had ill-used her; for then she would have had a
grievance, and that would have been something. If he would have worked
himself up into a rage, and struck her on the stairs, she might have run
out into the lane by the canal; but, alas, she had no good Captain
Cuttle with whom to take refuge, no noble-hearted Walter to come back to
her, with his shadow trembling on the wall in the dim firelight! Alas,
alas! she looked north and south and east and west, and the sky was all
dark; so she was obliged to go back to her intellectual opium-eating,
and become a dreamer of dreams. She had plenty of grievances in a small
way, such as having to mend awkward three-cornered rents in her
brothers' garments, and being sent to fetch butter in the Walworth Road;
but she was willing enough to do these things when once you had wrenched
her away from her idolized books; and she carried her ideal world
wherever she went, and was tending delirious Byron at Missolonghi, or
standing by the deathbed of Napoleon the Great while the shopman slapped
the butter on the scale, and the vulgar people hustled her before the
greasy counter.

If there had been any one to take this lonely girl in hand and organize
her education, Heaven only knows what might have been made of her; but
there was no friendly finger to point a pathway in the intellectual
forest, and Isabel rambled as her inclination led her, now setting up
one idol, now superseding him by another; living as much alone as if she
had resided in a balloon, for ever suspended in mid air, and never
coming down in serious earnest to the common joys and sorrows of the
vulgar life about her.

George and Sigismund talked of Miss Sleaford when they grew tired of
discoursing upon the memories of their schoolboy life in Midlandshire.

"You didn't tell me that Mr. Sleaford had a daughter," George said.

"Didn't I?'

"No. She--Miss Sleaford--is very pretty."

"She's gorgeous," answered Sigismund, with enthusiasm; "she's lovely. I
do her for all my dark heroines,--the good heroines, not the wicked
ones. Have you noticed Isabel's eyes? People call them black; but
they're bright orange-colour, if you look at them in the sunshine.
There's a story of Balzac's called 'The Girl with the Golden Eyes.' I
never knew what golden eyes were till I saw Isabel Sleaford."

"You seem very much at home with her?"

"Oh, yes; we're like brother and sister. She helps me with my work
sometimes; at least she throws out suggestions, and I use them. But
she's dreadfully romantic. She reads too many novels."

"Too many?"

"Yes. Don't suppose that I want to depreciate the value of the article.
A novel's a splendid thing after a hard day's work, a sharp practical
tussle with the real world, a healthy race on the barren moorland of
life, a hearty wrestling match in the universal ring. Sit down then and
read 'Ernest Maltravers,' or 'Eugene Aram,' or the 'Bride of
Lammermoor,' and the sweet romance lulls your tired soul to rest, like
the cradle-song that soothes a child. No wise man or woman was ever the
worse for reading novels. Novels are only dangerous for those poor
foolish girls who read nothing else, and think that their lives are to
be paraphrases of their favourite books. That girl yonder wouldn't look
at a decent young fellow in a Government office with three hundred a
year and the chance of advancement," said Mr. Smith, pointing to Isabel
Sleaford with a backward jerk of his thumb. "_She's_ waiting for a
melancholy creature, with a murder on his mind."

They went across the grass to the pear-tree, under which Isabel was
still seated. It was growing dark, and her pale face and black eyes had
a mysterious look in the dusky twilight. George Gilbert thought she was
fitted to be the heroine of a romance, and felt himself miserably
awkward and commonplace as he stood before her, struggling with the
sensation that he had more arms and legs than he knew what to do with. I
like to think of these three people gathered in this neglected suburban
garden upon the 21st of July, 1852, for they were on the very threshold
of life, and the future lay before them like a great stage in a theatre;
but the curtain was down, and all beyond it was a dense mystery. These
three foolish children had their own ideas about the great mystery.
Isabel thought that she would meet a duke some day in the Walworth Road;
the duke would be driving his cab, and she would be wearing her best
bonnet and _not_ going to fetch butter; and the young patrician would be
struck by her, and would drive off to her father, and there and then
make a formal demand of her hand; and she would be married to him, and
wear ruby velvet and a diamond coronet ever after, like Edith Dombey in
Mr. Hablot Browne's grand picture. Poor George fashioned no such
romantic destiny in his day-dreams. He thought that he would marry some
pretty girl, and have plenty of patients, and perhaps some day be
engaged in a great case which would be mentioned in the "Lancet," and
live and die respected, as his grandfather had done before him, in the
old house with the red-tiled roof and oaken gable-ends painted black.
Sigismund had, of course, only one vision,--and that was the publication
of that great book, which should be written about by the reviewers and
praised by the public. He could afford to take life very quietly
himself; for was he not, in a vicarious manner, going through more
adventures than ever the mind of man imagined? He came home to
Camberwell of an afternoon, and took half a pound of rump-steak and
three or four cups of weak tea, and lounged about the weedy garden with
the boys; and other young men who saw what his life was, sneered at him
and called him "slow." Slow, indeed! Is it slow to be dangling from a
housetop with a frayed rope slipping through your hands and seventy feet
of empty space below you? Is it slow to be on board a ship on fire in
the middle of the lonely Atlantic, and to rescue the entire crew on one
fragile raft, with the handsomest female passenger lashed to your waist
by means of her back hair? Is it slow to go down into subterranean
passages, with a dark lantern and half-a-dozen bloodhounds, in pursuit
of a murderer? This was the sort of thing that Sigismund was doing all
day and every day--upon paper; and when the day's work was done, he was
very well contented to loll in a garden-chair and smoke his cigar, while
enthusiastic Isabel talked to him about Byron, and Shelley, and Napoleon
the First; for the two poets and the warrior were her three idols, and
tears came into her eyes when she talked of the sorrowful evening after
Waterloo, or the wasted journey to Missolonghi, just as if she had known
and loved these great men.

       *       *       *       *       *

The lower windows of the house were lighted by this time, and Mrs.
Sleaford came to the back-parlour window to call the young people to
supper. They kept primitive hours at Camberwell, and supper was the
pleasantest meal in the day; for Mrs. Sleaford's work was done by that
time, and she softened into amiability, and discoursed plaintively of
her troubles to Sigismund and her children. But to-night was to be a
kind of gala, on account of the young man from the country. So there was
a lobster and a heap of lettuces,--very little lobster in proportion to
the green-stuff,--and Sigismund was to make a salad. He was very proud
of his skill in this department of culinary art, and as he was generally
about five-and-twenty minutes chopping, and sprinkling, and stirring,
and tasting, and compounding, before the salad was ready, there was
ample time for conversation. To-night George Gilbert talked to Isabel;
while Horace enjoyed the privilege of sitting up to supper chiefly
because there was no one in the house strong enough to send him to bed,
since he refused to retire to his chamber unless driven there by force.
He sat opposite his sister, and amused himself by sucking the long
feelers of the lobster, and staring reflectively at George with his
elbows on the table, while Sigismund mixed the salad.

They were all very comfortable and very merry, for Isabel forgot her
heroes, and condescended to come down temporarily to George's level, and
talk about the Great Exhibition of the previous year, and the pantomime
she had seen last Christmas. He thought her very pretty, as she smiled
at him across the table; but he fell to wondering about her again, and
wondered why it was she was so different from Miss Sophronia Burdock and
the young ladies of Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, whom he had known all
his life, and in whom he had never found cause for wonder.

The salad was pronounced ready at last, and the "six ale," as Horace
called it, was poured out into long narrow glasses, and being a light
frisky kind of beverage, was almost as good as champagne. George had
been to supper-parties at Graybridge at which there had been real
champagne, and jellies, and trifles, but where the talk had not been
half so pleasant as at this humble supper-table, on which there were not
two forks that matched one another, or a glass that was free from flaw
or crack. The young surgeon enjoyed his first night at Camberwell to his
heart's content; and Sigismund's spirits rose perceptibly with the six
ale. It was when the little party was gayest that Horace jumped up
suddenly with the empty lobster-shell in his hand, and told his
companions to "hold their noise."

"I heard him," he said.

A shrill whistle from the gate sounded as the boy spoke.

"That's him again!" he exclaimed, running to the door of the room. "He's
been at it ever so long, perhaps; and won't he just give it me if he
has!"

Everybody was silent; and George heard the boy opening the hall-door and
going out to the gate. He heard a brief colloquy, and a deep voice with
rather a sulky tone in it, and then heavy footsteps coming along the
paved garden-walk and counting the steps before the door.

"It's your pa, Izzie," Mrs. Sleaford said. "He'll want a candle: you'd
better take it out to him; I don't suppose he'll care about coming in
here."

George Gilbert felt a kind of curiosity about Isabel's father, and was
rather disappointed when he learnt that Mr. Sleaford was not coming into
the parlour. But Sigismund Smith went on eating bread and cheese, and
fishing pickled onions out of a deep stone jar, without any reference to
the movements of the barrister.

Isabel took a candle, and went out into the hall to greet her father.
She left the door ajar, and George could hear her talking to Mr.
Sleaford; but the barrister answered his daughter with a very ill grace,
and the speech which George heard plainest gave him no very favourable
impression of his host.

"Give me the light, girl, and don't bother!" Mr. Sleaford said. "I've
been worried this day until my head's all of a muddle. Don't stand
staring at me, child! Tell your mother I've got some work to do, and
mayn't go to bed all night."

"You've been worried, papa?"

"Yes; infernally. And I don't want to be bothered by stupid questions
now I've got home. Give me the light, can't you?"

The heavy footsteps went slowly up the uncarpeted staircase, a door
opened on the floor above, and the footsteps were heard in the room over
the parlour.

Isabel came in, looking very grave, and sat down, away from the table.

George saw that all pleasure was over for that night; and even Sigismund
came to a pause in his depredations on the cheese, and meditated, with a
pickled onion on the end of his fork.

He was thinking that a father who ill-used his daughter would not be a
bad subject for penny numbers; and he made a mental plan of the plot for
a new romance.

If Mr. Sleaford had business which required to be done that night, he
seemed in no great hurry to begin his work; for the heavy footsteps
tramped up and down, up and down the floor overhead, as steadily as if
the barrister had been some ascetic Romanist who had appointed a penance
for himself, and was working it out in the solitude of his own chamber.
A church clock in the distance struck eleven presently, and a Dutch
clock in the kitchen struck three, which was tolerably near the mark for
any clock in Mr. Sleaford's house. Isabel and her mother made a stir, as
if about to retire; so Sigismund got up, and lighted a couple of candles
for himself and his friend. He undertook to show George to the room that
had been prepared for him, and the two young men went up-stairs
together, after bidding the ladies good night. Horace had fallen asleep,
with his elbows upon the table, and his hair flopping against the
flaring tallow-candle near him. The young surgeon took very little
notice of the apartment to which he was conducted. He was worn out by
his journey, and all the fatigue of the long summer day; so he undressed
quickly, and fell asleep while his friend was talking to him through the
half-open door between the two bedrooms. George slept, but not soundly;
for he was accustomed to a quiet house, in which no human creature
stirred after ten o'clock at night; and the heavy tramp of Mr.
Sleaford's footsteps in a room near at hand disturbed the young man's
slumbers, and mixed themselves with his dreams.

It seemed to George Gilbert as if Mr. Sleaford walked up and down his
room all night, and long after the early daylight shone through the
dingy window-curtains. George was not surprised, therefore, when he was
told at breakfast next morning that his host had not yet risen, and was
not likely to appear for some hours. Isabel had to go to the Walworth
Road on some mysterious mission; and George overheard fragments of a
whispered conversation between the young lady and her mother in the
passage outside the parlour-door, in which the word "poor's rates," and
"summonses," and "silver spoons," and "backing," and "interest," figured
several times.

Mrs. Sleaford was busy about the house, and the boys were scattered; so
George and Sigismund took their breakfast comfortably together, and read
Mr. Sleaford's "Times," which was not as yet required for that
gentleman's own use. Sigismund made a plan of the day. He would take a
holiday for once in a way, he said, and would escort his friend to the
Royal Academy, and divers other picture-galleries, and would crown the
day's enjoyment by a French dinner.

The two young men left the house at eleven o'clock. They had seen
nothing of Isabel that morning, nor of the master of the house. All that
George Gilbert knew of that gentleman was the fact that Mr. Sleaford had
a heavy footstep and a deep sulky voice.

       *       *       *       *       *

The 21st of July was a blazing summer's day, and I am ashamed to confess
that George Gilbert grew very tired of staring at the pictures in the
Royal Academy. To him the finest works of modern art were only "pretty
pictures," more or less interesting according to the story they told;
and Sigismund's disquisitions upon "modelling," and "depth," and
"feeling," and tone, and colour, and distance, were so much
unintelligible jargon; so he was glad when the day's work was over, and
Mr. Smith led him away to a very dingy street a little way behind the
National Gallery.

"And now I'm going to give you a regular French dinner, George, old
fellow;" Sigismund said, in a triumphant tone.

Mr. Gilbert looked about him with an air of mystification. He had been
accustomed to associate French dinners with brilliantly lighted cafés
and gorgeous saloons, where the chairs were crimson velvet and gold, and
where a dozen vast sheets of looking-glass reflected you as you ate your
soup. He was a little disappointed, perhaps, when Sigismund paused
before a narrow doorway, on each side of which there was an
old-fashioned window with queer-shaped wine and liqueur bottles neatly
ranged behind the glass. A big lantern-shaped lamp hung over the door,
and below one of the windows was an iron grating, through which a subtle
flavour of garlic and mock-turtle soup steamed out upon the summer air.

"This is Boujeot's," said Mr. Smith. "It's the jolliest place; no
grandeur, you know, but capital wine and first-rate cooking. The Emperor
of the French used to dine here almost every day when he was in England;
but he never told any one his name, and the waiters didn't know who he
was till they saw his portrait as President in the 'Illustrated News.'"

It is a popular fiction that the Prince Louis Napoleon was in the habit
of dining daily at every French restaurant in London during the years of
his exile; a fiction which gives a romantic flavour to the dishes, and
an aroma of poetry to the wines. George Gilbert looked about him as he
seated himself at a little table chosen by his friend, and he wondered
whether Napoleon the Third had ever sat at that particular table, and
whether the table-cloth had been as dirty in his time. The waiters at
Boujeot's were very civil and accommodating, though they were nearly
harassed off their legs by the claims of desultory gentlemen in the
public apartments, and old customers dining by pre-arrangement in the
private rooms up-stairs. Sigismund pounced upon a great sheet of paper,
which looked something like a chronological table, and on the blank
margins of which the pencil records of dinners lately consumed and paid
for had been hurriedly jotted down by the harassed waiters. Mr. Smith
was a long time absorbed in the study of this mysterious document; so
George Gilbert amused himself by staring at some coffee-coloured marine
views upon the walls, which were supposed to represent the Bay of Biscay
and the Cape of Good Hope, with brown waves rolling tempestuously under
a brown sky. George stared at these, and at a gentleman who was engaged
in the soul-absorbing occupation of paying his bill; and then the
surgeon's thoughts went vagabondizing away from the little coffee-room
at Boujeot's to Mr. Sleaford's garden, and Isabel's pale face and
yellow-black eyes, glimmering mysteriously in the summer twilight. He
thought of Miss Sleaford because she was so unlike any other woman he
had ever seen, and he wondered how his father would like her. Not much,
George feared; for Mr. Gilbert senior expected a young woman to be very
neat about her back-hair, which Isabel was not, and handy with her
needle, and clever in the management of a house and the government of a
maid-of-all-work; and Isabel could scarcely be that, since her favourite
employment was to loll in a wicker-work garden-chair and read novels.

The dinner came in at last, with little pewter covers over the dishes,
which the waiter drew one by one out of a mysterious kind of wooden
oven, from which there came a voice, and nothing more. The two young men
dined; and George thought that, except for the fried potatoes, which
flew about his plate when he tried to stick his fork into them, and a
flavour of garlic, that pervaded everything savoury, and faintly hovered
over the sweets, a French dinner was not so very unlike an English one.
But Sigismund served out the little messes with an air of swelling
pride, and George was fain to smack his lips with the manner of a
connoisseur when his friend asked him what he thought of the _filets de
sole à la maître d'hôtel_, or the _rognons à la_ South African sherry.

Somehow or other, George was glad when the dinner was eaten and paid
for, and it was time to go home to Camberwell. It was only seven o'clock
as yet, and the sun was shining on the fountains as the young men went
across Trafalgar Square. They took an omnibus at Charing Cross, and rode
to the turnpike at Walworth, in the hope of being in time to get a cup
of tea before Mrs. Sleaford let the fire out; for that lady had an
aggravating trick of letting out the kitchen-fire at half-past seven or
eight o'clock on summer evenings, after which hour hot water was an
impossibility; unless Mr. Sleaford wanted grog, in which case a kettle
was set upon a bundle of blazing firewood.

George Gilbert did not particularly care whether or not there was any
tea to be procured at Camberwell, but he looked forward with a faint
thrill of pleasure to the thought of a stroll with Isabel in the twilit
garden. He thought so much of this, that he was quite pleased when the
big, ill-looking house and the dead wall that surrounded it became
visible across the barren waste of ground that was called a common. He
was quite pleased, not with any fierce or passionate emotion, but with a
tranquil sense of pleasure. When they came to the wooden door in the
garden-wall, Sigismund Smith stooped down and gave his usual whistle at
the keyhole; but he looked up suddenly, and cried:

"Well, I'm blest!"

"What's the matter?"

"The door's open."

Mr. Smith pushed it as he spoke, and the two young men went into the
front garden.

"In all the time I've lived with the Sleafords, that never happened
before," said Sigismund. "Mr. Sleaford's awfully particular about the
gate being kept locked. He says that the neighbourhood's a queer one,
and you never know what thieves are hanging about the place; though,
_inter nos_, I don't see that there's much to steal hereabouts," Mr.
Smith added, in a confidential whisper.

The door of the house, as well as that of the garden, was open.
Sigismund went into the hall, followed closely by George. The parlour
door was open too, and the room was empty--the room was empty, and it
had an abnormal appearance of tidiness, as if all the litter and rubbish
had been suddenly scrambled together and carried away. There was a scrap
of old frayed rope upon the table, lying side by side with some
tin-tacks, a hammer, and a couple of blank luggage-labels.

George did not stop to look at these; he went straight to the open
window and looked out into the garden. He had so fully expected to see
Isabel sitting under the pear-tree with a novel in her lap, that he
started and drew back with an exclamation of surprise at finding the
garden empty; the place seemed so strangely blank without the girlish
figure lolling in the basket-chair. It was as if George Gilbert had been
familiar with that garden for the last ten years, and had never seen it
without seeing Isabel in her accustomed place.

"I suppose Miss Sleaford--I suppose they're all out," the surgeon said,
rather dolefully.

"I suppose they _are_ out," Sigismund answered, looking about him with a
puzzled air; "and yet, that's strange. They don't often go out; at
least, not all at once. They seldom go out at all, in fact, except on
errands. I'll call the girl."

He opened the door and looked into the front parlour before going to
carry out this design, and he started back upon the threshold as if he
had seen a ghost.

"What is it?" cried George.

"My luggage and your portmanteau, all packed and corded; look!"

Mr. Smith pointed as he spoke to a couple of trunks, a hatbox, a
carpet-bag, and a portmanteau, piled in a heap in the centre of the
room. He spoke loudly in his surprise; and the maid-of-all-work came in
with her cap hanging by a single hair-pin to a knob of tumbled hair.

"Oh, sir!" she said, "they're all gone; they went at six o'clock this
evenin'; and they're going to America, missus says; and she packed all
your things, and she thinks you'd better have 'em took round to the
greengrocer's immediant, for fear of being seized for the rent, which is
three-quarters doo; but you was to sleep in the house to-night, if you
pleased, and your friend likewise; and I was to get you your breakfastes
in the morning, before I take the key round to the Albany Road, and tell
the landlord as they've gone away, which he don't know it yet."

"GONE AWAY!" said Sigismund; "GONE AWAY!"

"Yes, sir, every one of 'em; and the boys was so pleased that they would
go shoutin' 'ooray, 'ooray, all over the garding, though Mr. Sleaford
swore at 'em awful, and did hurry and tear so, I thought he was a-goin'
mad. But Miss Isabel, she cried about goin' so sudden and seemed all
pale and frightened like. And there's a letter on the chimbley-piece,
please, which she put it there."

Sigismund pounced upon the letter, and tore it open. George read it over
his friend's shoulder. It was only two lines.

"DEAR MR. SMITH,--Don't think hardly of us for going away so suddenly.
Papa says it must be so.

"Yours ever faithfully,

"ISABEL."

"I should like to keep that letter," George said, blushing up to the
roots of his hair. "Miss Sleaford writes a pretty hand."




CHAPTER IV.

THE END OF GEORGE GILBERT'S HOLIDAY.


The two young men acted very promptly upon that friendly warning
conveyed in Mrs. Sleaford's farewell message. The maid-of-all-work went
to the greengrocer's, and returned in company with a dirty-looking
boy--who was "Mrs. Judkin's son, please, sir"--and a truck. Mrs.
Judkin's son piled the trunks, portmanteau, and carpet-bag on the truck,
and departed with his load, which was to be kept in the custody of the
Judkin family until the next morning, when Sigismund was to take the
luggage away in a cab. When this business had been arranged, Mr. Smith
and his friend went out into the garden and talked of the surprise that
had fallen upon them.

"I always knew they were thinking of leaving," Sigismund said, "but I
never thought they'd go away like this. I feel quite cut up about it,
George. I'd got to like them, you know, old boy, and to feel as if I was
one of the family; and I shall never be able to partial-board with any
body else."

George seemed to take the matter quite as seriously as his friend,
though his acquaintance with the Sleafords was little more than
four-and-twenty hours old.

"They must have known before to-day that they were going," he said.
"People don't go to America at a few hours' notice."

Sigismund summoned the dirty maid-of-all-work, and the two young men
subjected her to a very rigorous cross-examination; but she could tell
them very little more than she had told them all in one breath in the
first instance.

"Mr. Sleaford 'ad 'is breakfast at nigh upon one o'clock, leastways she
put on the pertaturs for the boys' dinner before she biled 'is egg; and
then he went out, and he come tarin' 'ome agen in one of these 'ansom
cabs at three o'clock in the afternoon; and he told missus to pack up,
and he told the 'ansom cabman to send a four-wheeler from the first
stand he passed at six o'clock precise; and the best part of the luggage
was sent round to the greengrocer's on a truck, and the rest was took on
the roof of the cab, and Master 'Orace rode alongside the cabman, and
would smoke one of them nasty penny pickwicks, which they always made
'im bilious; and Mr. Sleaford he didn't go in the cab, but walked off as
cool as possible, swinging his stick, and 'olding his 'ead as 'igh as
hever."

Sigismund asked the girl if she had heard the address given to the
cabman who took the family away.

"No," the girl said. Mr. Sleaford had given no address. He directed the
cabman to drive over Waterloo Bridge, and that was all the girl heard.

Mr. Smith's astonishment knew no bounds. He walked about the deserted
house, and up and down the weedy pathways between the espaliers, until
long after the summer moon was bright upon the lawn, and every trailing
branch and tender leaflet threw its sharp separate shadow on the
shining ground.

"I never heard of such a thing in all my life," the young author cried;
"it's like penny numbers. With the exception of their going away in a
four-wheeler cab instead of through a sliding panel and subterranean
passage, it's for all the world like penny numbers."

"But you'll be able to find out where they've gone, and why they went
away so suddenly," suggested George Gilbert; "some of their friends will
be able to tell you."

"Friends!" exclaimed Sigismund; "they never had any friends--at least
not friends that they visited, or anything of that kind. Mr. Sleaford
used to bring home some of his friends now and then of an evening, after
dark generally, or on a Sunday afternoon. But we never saw much of them,
for he used to take them up to his own room; and except for his wanting
French brandy and cigars fetched, and chops and steaks cooked, and
swearing at the girl over the balusters if the plates weren't hot
enough, we shouldn't have known that there was company in the house. I
suppose his chums were in the law, like himself," Mr. Smith added,
musingly; "but they didn't look much like barristers, for they had
straggling moustachios, and a kind of would-be military way; and if they
hadn't been Sleaford's friends, I should have thought them
raffish-looking."

Neither of the young men could think of anything or talk of anything
that night except the Sleafords and their abrupt departure. They roamed
about the garden, staring at the long grass and the neglected
flower-beds; at the osier arbour, dark under the shadow of a trailing
vine, that was half-smothered by the vulgar luxuriance of wild
hops,--the osier arbour in which the spiders made their home, and where,
upon the rotten bench, romantic Izzie had sat through the hot hours of
drowsy summer days, reading her favourite novels, and dreaming of a life
that was to be like the plot of a novel.

They went into the house, and called for candles, and wandered from room
to room, looking blankly at the chairs and tables, the open drawers, the
disordered furniture, as if from those inanimate objects they might
obtain some clue to the little domestic mystery that bewildered them.
The house was pervaded by torn scraps of paper, fragments of rag and
string, morsels of crumpled lace and muslin, bald hair-brushes lying in
the corners of the bedrooms, wisps of hay and straw, tin-tacks, and old
kid-gloves. Everywhere there were traces of disorder and hurry, except
in Mr. Sleaford's room. That sanctuary was wide open now, and Mr. Smith
and his friend went into it and examined it. To Sigismund a
newly-excavated chamber in a long-buried city could scarcely have been
more interesting. Here there was no evidence of reckless haste. There
was not a single fragment of waste paper in any one of the half-dozen
open drawers on either side of the desk. There was not so much as an old
envelope upon the floor. A great heap of grey ashes upon the cold
hearthstone revealed the fact that Mr. Sleaford had employed himself in
destroying papers before his hasty departure. The candlestick that
Isabel had given him upon the previous night stood upon his desk, with
the candle burnt down to the socket. George remembered having heard his
host's heavy footsteps pacing up and down the room; and the occasional
opening and shutting of drawers, and slamming of the lids of boxes,
which had mixed with his dreams all through that brief summer's night.
It was all explained now. Mr Sleaford had of course been making his
preparations for leaving Camberwell--for leaving England; if it was
really true that the family were going to America.

Early the next morning there came a very irate gentleman from the Albany
Road. This was the proprietor of the neglected mansion, who had just
heard of the Sleaford hegira, and who was in a towering passion because
of those three quarter's rent which he was never likely to behold. He
walked about the house with his hands in his pockets, kicking the doors
open, and denouncing his late tenants in very unpleasant language. He
stalked into the back parlour, where George and Sigismumd were taking
spongy French rolls and doubtful French eggs, and glared ferociously at
them, and muttered something to the effect that it was like their
impudence to be making themselves so "jolly comfortable" in his house
when he'd been swindled by that disreputable gang of theirs. He used
other adjectives besides that word "disreputable" when he spoke of the
Sleafords; but Sigismund got up from before the dirty table-cloth, and
protested, with his mouth full, that he believed in the honesty of the
Sleafords; and that, although temporarily under a cloud, Mr. Sleaford
would no doubt make a point of looking up the three quarter's rent, and
would forward post-office orders for the amount at the earliest
opportunity. To this the landlord merely replied, that he hoped
his--Sigismund's--head would not ache till Mr. Sleaford _did_ send the
rent; which friendly aspiration was about the only civil thing the
proprietor of the mansion said to either of the young men. He prowled
about the rooms, poking the furniture with his stick, and punching his
fist into the beds to see if any of the feathers had been extracted
therefrom. He groaned over the rents in the carpets, the notches and
scratches upon the mahogany, the entire absence of handles and knobs
wherever it was possible for handles or knobs to be wanting; and every
time he found out any new dilapidation in the room where the two young
men were taking their breakfast, he made as if he would have come down
upon them for the cost of the damage.

"Is that the best teapot you're a-having your teas out of? Where's the
Britannia metal as I gave thirteen-and-six for seven year ago? Where did
that twopenny-halfpenny blown-glass sugar-basin come from? It ain't
mine; mine was di'mond-cut. Why, they've done me two hundred pound
mischief. I could afford to forgive 'em the rent. The rent's the least
part of the damage they've done me."

And then the landlord became too forcible to be recorded in these pages,
and then he went groaning about the garden; whereupon George and
Sigismund collected their toilet-apparatus, and such trifling
paraphernalia as they had retained for the night's use, and hustled them
into a carpet-bag, and fled hastily and fearfully, after giving the
servant-maid a couple of half-crowns, and a solemn injunction to write
to Sigismund at his address in the Temple if she should hear any tidings
whatever of the Sleafords.

So, in the bright summer morning, George Gilbert saw the last of the old
house which for nearly seven years had sheltered Mr. Sleaford and his
wife and children, the weedy garden in which Isabel had idled away so
many hours of her early girlhood; the straggling vines under which she
had dreamed bright sentimental dreams over the open leaves of her
novels.

The young men hired a cab at the nearest cab-stand, and drove to the
establishment of the friendly greengrocer who had given shelter to their
goods. It was well for them, perhaps, that the trunks and portmanteau
had been conveyed to that humble sanctuary; for the landlord was in no
humour to hesitate at trifles, and would have very cheerfully impounded
Sigismund's simple wardrobe, and the bran-new linen shirts which George
Gilbert had brought to London.

They bestowed a small gratuity upon Mrs. Judkin, and then drove to
Sigismund's chambers, where they encamped, and contrived to make
themselves tolerably comfortable, in a rough gipsy kind of way.

"You shall have Morgan's room," Sigismund said to his friend, "and I can
make up a bed in the sitting-room; there's plenty of mattresses and
blankets."

They dined rather late in the evening at a celebrated tavern in the near
neighbourhood of those sacred precincts where law and justice have their
head-quarters, and after dinner Sigismund borrowed the "Law List."

"We may find out something about Mr. Sleaford in that," he said.

But the "Law List" told nothing of Mr. Sleaford. In vain Sigismund and
George took it in turn to explore the long catalogue of legal
practitioners whose names began with the letter S. There were St. Johns
and Simpsons, St. Evremonds and Smitherses, Standishes and Sykeses.
There was almost every variety of appellation, aristocratic and
plebeian; but the name of Sleaford was not in the list: and the young
men returned the document to the waiter, and went home wondering how it
was that Mr. Sleaford's name had no place among the names of his
brotherhood.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have very little to tell concerning the remaining days which the
conditions of George Gilbert's excursion ticket left him free to enjoy
in London. He went to the theatres with his friend, and sat in stifling
upper boxes, in which there was a considerable sprinkling of the "order"
element, during these sunshiny summer evenings. Sigismund also took him
to divers _al fresco_ entertainments, where there were fireworks, and
"polking," and bottled stout; and in the daytime George was fain to
wander about the streets by himself, staring at the shop-windows, and
hustled and frowned at for walking on the wrong side of the pavement; or
else to loll on the window-seat in Sigismund's apartment, looking down
into the court below, or watching his friend's scratching pen scud
across the paper. Sacred as the rites of hospitality may be, they must
yet give way before the exigencies of the penny press; and Sigismund was
rather a dull companion for a young man from the country who was bent
upon a week's enjoyment of London life.

For very lack of employment, George grew to take an interest in his
friend's labour, and asked him questions about the story that poured so
rapidly from his hurrying pen.

"What's it all about, Sigismund?" he demanded. "Is it funny?"

"Funny!" cried Mr. Smith, with a look of horror; "I should think not,
indeed. Who ever heard of penny numbers being funny? What the penny
public want is plot, and plenty of it; surprises, and plenty of 'em;
mystery, as thick as a November fog. Don't you know the sort of thing?
'The clock of St. Paul's had just sounded eleven hours;'--it's generally
a translation, you know, and St. Paul's stands for Notre Dame;--'a man
came to appear upon the quay which extends itself all the length between
the bridges of Waterloo and London.' There isn't any quay, you know; but
you're obliged to have it so, on account of the plot. 'This man--who had
a true head of vulture, the nose pointed, sharp, terrible; all that
there is of the most ferocious; the eyes cavernous, and full of a sombre
fire--carried a bag upon his back. Presently he stops himself. He
regards with all his eyes the quay, nearly desert; the water, black and
shiny, which stretches itself at his feet. He listens, but there is
nothing. He bends himself upon the border of the quay. He puts aside the
bag from his shoulders, and something of dull, heavy, slides slowly
downwards and falls into the water. At the instant that the heavy
burthen sinks with a dull noise to the bottom of the river, there is a
voice, loud and piercing, which seems to elevate itself out of the
darkness: 'Philip Launay, what dost thou do there with the corpse of thy
victim?'--That's the sort of thing for the penny public," said Mr.
Smith; "or else a good strong combination story."

"What do you call a combination story?" Mr. Gilbert asked, innocently.

"Why, you see, when you're doing four great stories a week for a public
that must have a continuous flow of incident, you can't be quite as
original as a strict sense of honour might prompt you to be; and the
next best thing you can do, if you haven't got ideas of your own, is to
steal other people's ideas in an impartial manner. Don't empty one man's
pocket, but take a little bit all round. The combination novel enables a
young author to present his public with all the brightest flowers of
fiction neatly arranged into every variety of garland. I'm doing a
combination novel now--the 'Heart of Midlothian' and the 'Wandering
Jew.' You've no idea how admirably the two stories blend. In the first
place, I throw my period back into the Middle Ages--there's nothing like
the Middle Ages for getting over the difficulties of a story. Good
gracious me! why, what is there that isn't possible if you go back to
the time of the Plantagenets? I make Jeannie Deans a dumb girl,--there's
twice the interest in her if you make her dumb,--and I give her a goat
and a tambourine, because, you see, the artist likes that sort of thing
for his illustrations. I think you'd admit that I've very much improved
upon Sir Walter Scott--a delightful writer, I allow, but decidedly a
failure in penny numbers--if you were to run your eye over the story,
George; there's only seventy-eight numbers out yet, but you'll be able
to judge of the plot. Of course I don't make Aureola,--I call my Jeannie
'Aureola;' rather a fine name, isn't it? and entirely my own
invention,--of course I don't make Aureola walk from Edinburgh to
London. What would be the good of that? why, anybody _could_ walk it if
they only took long enough about it. I make her walk from London to
ROME, to get a Papal Bull for the release of her sister from the Tower
of London. That's something like a walk, I flatter myself; over the
Alps--which admits of Aureola's getting buried in the snow, and dug out
again by a Mount St. Bernard's dog; and then walled up alive by the
monks because they suspect her of being friendly to the Lollards; and
dug out again by Cæsar Borgia, who happens to be travelling that way,
and asks a night's lodging, and heard Aureola's tambourine behind the
stone wall in his bedroom, and digs her out and falls in love with her;
and she escapes from his persecution out of a window, and lets herself
down the side of the mountain by means of her gauze scarf, and dances
her way to Rome, and obtains an audience of the Pope, and gets mixed up
with the Jesuits:--and that's where I work into the 'Wandering Jew,'"
concluded Mr. Smith.

George Gilbert ventured to suggest that in the days when the Plantagenet
ruled our happy isle, Ignatius Loyola had not yet founded his wonderful
brotherhood; but Mr. Smith acknowledged this prosaic suggestion with a
smile of supreme contempt.

"Oh, if you tie me down to facts," he said, "I can't write at all."

"But you like writing?"

"For the penny public? Oh, yes; I like writing for them. There's only
one objection to the style--it's apt to give an author a tendency
towards bodies."

Mr. Gilbert was compelled to confess that this last remark was
incomprehensible to him.

"Why, you see, the penny public require excitement," said Mr. Smith;
"and in order to get the excitement up to a strong point, you're obliged
to have recourse to bodies. Say your hero murders his father, and buries
him in the coal-cellar in No. 1. What's the consequence? There's an
undercurrent of the body in the coal-cellar running through every
chapter, like the subject in a fugue or a symphony. You drop it in the
treble, you catch it up in the bass; and then it goes sliding up into
the treble again, and then drops down with a melodious groan into the
bass; and so on to the end of the story. And when you've once had
recourse to the stimulant of bodies, you're like a man who's accustomed
to strong liquors, and to whose vitiated palate simple drinks seem flat
and wishy-washy. I think there ought to be a literary temperance pledge
by which the votaries of the ghastly and melodramatic school might bind
themselves to the renunciation of the bowl and dagger, the midnight
rendezvous, the secret grave dug by lantern-light under a black grove of
cypress, the white-robed figure gliding in the grey gloaming athwart a
lonely churchyard, and all the alcoholic elements of fiction. But, you
see, George, it isn't so easy to turn teetotaller," added Mr. Smith,
doubtfully; "and I scarcely know that it is so very wise to make the
experiment. Are not reformed drunkards the dullest and most miserable of
mankind? Isn't it better for a man to do his best in the style that is
natural to him than to do badly in another man's line of business? 'Box
and Cox' is not a great work when criticised upon sternly æsthetic
principles; but I would rather be the author of 'Box and Cox,' and hear
my audience screaming with laughter from the rise of the curtain to the
fall thereof, than write a dull five-act tragedy, in the unities of
which Aristotle himself could find no flaw, but from whose performance
panic-stricken spectators should slink away or ere the second act came
to its dreary close. I think I should like to have been Guilbert de
Pixérécourt, the father and prince of melodrama, the man whose dramas
were acted thirty thousand times in France before he died (and how many
times in England?); the man who reigned supreme over the playgoers of
his time, and has not yet ceased to reign. Who ever quotes any passage
from the works of Guilbert de Pixérécourt, or remembers his name? But to
this day his dramas are acted in every country theatre; his persecuted
heroines weep and tremble; his murderous scoundrels run their two hours'
career of villany, to be dragged off scowling to subterranean dungeons,
or to die impenitent and groaning at the feet of triumphant virtue.
Before nine o'clock to-night there will be honest country-folks
trembling for the fate of Theresa, the Orphan of Geneva, and simple
matrons weeping over the peril of the Wandering Boys. But Guilbert de
Pixérécourt was never a great man; he was only popular. If a man can't
have a niche in the Walhalla, isn't it something to have his name in big
letters in the play-bills on the boulevard? and I wonder how long my
friend Guilbert would have held the stage, if he had emulated Racine or
Corneille. He did what it was in him to do, honestly; and he had his
reward. Who would not wish to be great? Do you think I wouldn't rather
be the author of the 'Vicar of Wakefield' than of 'Colonel Montefiasco?'
I _could_ write the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' too, but--"

George stared aghast at his excited friend.

"But not Oliver Goldsmith's 'Vicar of Wakefield,'" Sigismund explained.

He had thrown down his pen now, and was walking up and down the room
with his hands thrust deep down in his pockets, and his face scarlet
with fierce excitement.

"I should do the Vicar in the detective pre-Raphaelite style. Moses
knows a secret of his father's--forged accommodation-bills, or something
of that kind; sets out to go to the fair on a drowsy summer morning, not
a leaf stirring in the vicarage garden. You hear the humming of the bees
as they bounce against the vicarage-windows; you see the faint light
trembling about Olivia's head, as she comes to watch her brother riding
along the road; you see him ride away, and the girl watching him, and
feel the hot sleepy atmosphere, and hear the swoop of the sickle in the
corn-fields on the other side of the road; and the low white gate
swings-to with a little click, and Miss Primrose walks slowly back to
the house, and says, 'Papa, it's very warm;' and you know there's
something going to happen.

"Then the second chapter comes, and Mr. Primrose has his dinner, and
goes out to visit his poor; and the two girls walk about the garden with
Mr. Burchell, watching for Moses, who NEVER COMES BACK. And then the
serious business of the story begins, and Burchell keeps his eye upon
the Vicar. Nobody else suspects good Mr. Primrose; but Burchell's eye is
never off him; and one night, when the curtains are drawn, and the girls
are sitting at their work, and dear Mrs. Primrose is cutting out
comfortable flannels for the poor, the Vicar opens his desk, and begins
to write a letter. You hear the faint sound of the light ashes falling
on the hearth, the slow ticking of an eight-day clock in the hall
outside the drawing-room door, the sharp snap of Mrs. Primrose's
scissors as they close upon the flannel. Sophia asks Burchell to fetch a
volume from the bookcase behind the Vicar's chair. He is a long time
choosing the book, and his eye looks over the Vicar's shoulder. He takes
a mental inventory of the contents of the open desk, and he sees amongst
the neatly-docketed papers, the receipted bills, and packets of
envelopes--what? a glove, a green kid-glove sewn with white, which he
distinctly remembers to have seen worn by Moses when he started on that
pleasant journey from which he never returned. Can't you see the Vicar's
face, as he looks round at Burchell, and knows that his secret is
discovered? I can. Can't you fancy the awful silent duel between the two
men, the furtive glances, the hidden allusions to that dreadful mystery,
lurking in every word that Burchell utters?

"That's how _I_ should do the 'Vicar of Wakefield,'" said Sigismund
Smith, triumphantly. "There wouldn't be much in it, you know; but the
story would be pervaded by Moses's body lying murdered in a ditch half a
mile from the vicarage, and Burchell's ubiquitous eye. I dare say some
people would cry out upon it, and declare that it was wicked and
immoral, and that the young man who could write about a murder would be
ready to commit the deed at the earliest convenient opportunity. But I
don't suppose the clergy would take to murdering their sons by reason of
my fiction, in which the rules of poetical justice would be sternly
adhered to, and Nemesis, in the shape of Burchell, perpetually before
the reader."

Poor George Gilbert listened very patiently to his friend's talk, which
was not particularly interesting to him. Sigismund preached "shop" to
whomsoever would listen to him, or suffer him to talk; which was pretty
much the same to this young man. I am afraid there were times when his
enthusiastic devotion to his profession rendered Mr. Smith a terrible
nuisance to his friends and acquaintance. He would visit a pleasant
country-house, and receive hospitable entertainment, and enjoy himself;
and then, when all that was morbid in his imagination had been
stimulated by sparkling burgundy and pale hochheimer, this wretched
young traitor would steal out into some peaceful garden, where dew-laden
flowers flung their odours on the still evening air, and sauntering in
the shadowy groves where the nightingale's faint "jug-jug" was beginning
to sound, would plan a diabolical murder, to be carried out in
seventy-five penny numbers. Sometimes he was honourable enough to ask
permission of the proprietor of the country mansion; and when, on one
occasion, after admiring the trim flower-gardens and ivied walls, the
low turreted towers and grassy moats, of a dear old place that had once
been a grange, he ventured to remark that the spot was so peaceful it
reminded him of slow poisoning, and demanded whether there would be any
objection to his making the quiet grange the scene of his next
fiction,--the cordial cheery host cried out, in a big voice that
resounded high up among the trees where the rooks were cawing, "People
it with fiends, my dear boy! You're welcome to people the place with
fiends, as far as I'm concerned."




CHAPTER V.

GEORGE AT HOME.


The young surgeon went home to Midlandshire with his
fellow-excursionists, when the appointed Monday came round. He met Miss
Burdock and her sister on the platform in Euston Square, and received
those ladies from the hands of their aunt. Sophronia did not blush now
when her eyes met George Gilbert's frank stare. She had danced twice
with a young barrister at the little quadrille-party which her aunt had
given in honour of the maltster's daughters; a young barrister who was
tall and dark and stylish, and who spoke of Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne
as a benighted place, which was only endurable for a week or so in the
hunting season. Miss Sophronia Burdock's ideas had expanded during that
week in Baker Street, and she treated her travelling companion with an
air of haughty indifference, which might have wounded George to the
quick had he been aware of the change in the lady's manner. But poor
George saw no alteration in the maltster's daughter; he watched no
changes of expression in the face opposite to him as the rushing engine
carried him back to Midlandshire. He was thinking of another face, which
he had only seen for a few brief hours, and which he was perhaps never
again to look upon; a pale girlish countenance, framed with dense black
hair; a pale face, out of which there looked large solemn eyes, like
stars that glimmer faintly through the twilight shadows.

Before leaving London, George had obtained a promise from his friend
Sigismund Smith. Whatever tidings Mr. Smith should at any time hear
about the Sleafords, he was to communicate immediately to the young
surgeon of Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne. It was, of course, very absurd of
George to take such an interest in this singular family; the young man
admitted as much himself; but, then, singular people are always more or
less interesting; and, having been a witness of Mr. Sleaford's abrupt
departure, it was only natural that George should want to know the end
of the story. If these people were really gone to America, why, of
course, it was all over; but if they had not left London, some one or
other of the family might turn up some day, and in that case Sigismund
was to write and tell his friend all about it.

George Gilbert's last words upon the platform at Euston Square had
relation to this subject; and all the way home he kept debating in his
mind whether it was likely the Sleafords had really gone to America, or
whether the American idea had been merely thrown out with a view to the
mystification of the irate landlord.

       *       *       *       *       *

Life at Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne was as slow and sleepy as the river
which widened in the flat meadows outside the town; the dear old river
which crept lazily past the mouldering wall of the churchyard, and
licked the moss-grown tombstones that had lurched against that ancient
boundary. Everything at Graybridge was more or less old and quaint and
picturesque; but the chief glory of Graybridge was the parish church; a
grand old edifice which was planted beyond the outskirts of the town,
and approached by a long avenue of elms, beneath whose shadow the
tombstones glimmered whitely in the sun. The capricious Wayverne, which
was perpetually winding across your path wheresoever you wandered in
pleasant Midlandshire, was widest here; and on still summer days the
grey towers of the old church looked down at other phantasmal towers in
the tranquil water.

George used to wander in this churchyard sometimes on his return from a
trout-fishing expedition, and, lounging among the tombstones with his
rod upon his shoulder, would abandon himself to the simple day-dreams he
loved best to weave.

But the young surgeon had a good deal of work to do, now that his father
had admitted him to the solemn rights of partnership, and very little
time for any sentimental musings in the churchyard. The parish work in
itself was very heavy, and George rode long distances on his
steady-going grey pony to attend to captious patients, who gave him
small thanks for his attendance. He was a very soft-hearted young man,
and he often gave his slender pocket-money to those of his patients who
wanted food rather than medicine. Little by little people grew to
understand that George Gilbert was very different from his father, and
had a tender pity for the sorrows and sufferings it was a part of his
duty to behold. Love and gratitude for this young doctor may have been
somewhat slow to spring up in the hearts of his parish patients; but
they took a deep root, and became hardy, vigorous plants before the
first year of George's service was over. Before that year came to a
close the partnership between the father and son had been irrevocably
dissolved, without the aid of legal practitioners, or any legal formulas
whatsoever; and George Gilbert was sole master of the old house with the
whitewashed plaster-walls and painted beams of massive oak.

The young man lamented the loss of his father with all that
single-minded earnestness which was the dominant attribute of his
character. He had been as obedient to his father at the last as he had
been at the first; as submissive in his manhood as in his childhood. But
in his obedience there had been nothing childish or cowardly. He was
obedient because he believed his father to be wise and good, reverencing
the old man with simple, unquestioning veneration. And now that the
father was gone, George Gilbert began life in real earnest. The poor of
Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne had good reason to rejoice at the change
which had given the young doctor increase of means and power. He was
elected unanimously to the post his father's death had left nominally
vacant; and wherever there was sickness and pain, his kindly face seemed
to bring comfort, his bright blue eyes seemed to inspire courage. He
took an atmosphere of youth and hope and brave endurance with him
everywhere, which was more invigorating than the medicines he
prescribed; and, next to Mr. Neate the curate, George Gilbert was the
best-beloved and most popular man in Graybridge.

He had never had any higher ambition than this. He had no wish to strive
or to achieve; he only wanted to be useful; and when he heard the
parable of the Talents read aloud in the old church, a glow of gentle
happiness thrilled through his veins as he thought of his own small
gifts, which had never yet been suffered to grow rusty for lack of
service.

The young man's life could scarcely have been more sheltered from the
storm and tempest of the world, though the walls of some mediæval
monastery had encircled his little surgery. Could the tumults of passion
ever have a home in the calm breast of these quiet provincials, whose
regular lives knew no greater change than the slow alternation of the
seasons, whose orderly existences were never disturbed by an event? Away
at Conventford there were factory strikes, and political dissensions,
and fighting and rioting now and then; but here the tranquil days crept
by, and left no mark by which they might be remembered.

Miss Sophronia Burdock did not long cherish the memory of the
dark-haired barrister she had met in Baker Street. To do so would have
been as foolish as to "love some bright particular star, and think to
wed it," in the young damsel's opinion. She wisely banished the
barrister's splendid image, and she smiled once more upon Mr. Gilbert
when she met him coming out of church in the cold wintry sunlight,
looking to especial advantage in his new mourning clothes. But George
was blind to the sympathetic smiles that greeted him. He was not in love
with Miss Sophronia Burdock. The image of Isabel's pale face had faded
into a very indistinct shadow by this time; nay, it was almost entirely
blotted out by the young man's grief for his father's death; but if his
heart was empty enough now, there was no place in it for Miss Burdock,
though it was hinted at in Graybridge that a dower of four thousand
pounds would accompany that fair damsel's hand. George Gilbert had no
high-flown or sentimental notions; but he would have thought it no
greater shame to rifle the contents of the maltster's iron safe, than to
enrich himself with the possessions of a woman he did not love.

In the meantime he lived his peaceful life in the house where he had
been born, mourning with simple, natural sorrow for the old father who
had so long sat at the opposite side of the hearth, reading a local
paper by the light of a candle held between his eyes and the small
print, and putting down the page every now and then to descant, at his
ease, upon the degeneracy of the times. The weak, loving, fidgety father
was gone now, and George looked blankly at the empty chair which had
taken the old man's shape; but his sorrow was unembittered by vain
remorse or cruel self-reproach: he had been a good son, and he could
look back at his life with his dead father, and thank God for the
peaceful life that they had spent together.

But he was very lonely now in the old house, which was a bare, blank
place, peopled by no bright inanimate creations by which art fills the
homes of wealthy hermits with fair semblances of life. The empty walls
stared down upon the young man as he sat alone in the dim candlelight,
till he was fain to go into the kitchen, which was the most cheerful
room in the house, and where he could talk to William and Tilly, while
he lounged against the quaint old angle of the high oaken chimney-piece
smoking his cigar.

William and Tilly were a certain Mr. and Mrs. Jeffson, who had come
southwards with the pretty young woman whom Mr. John Gilbert had
encountered in the course of a holiday-trip to a quiet Yorkshire town,
where the fair towers of a minster rose above a queer old street, beyond
whose gabled roofs lay spreading common-lands, fair pasture-farms, and
pleasant market-gardens. It was in the homestead attached to one of
these pasture-farms that John Gilbert had met the bright, rosy-faced
girl whom he made his wife; and Mr. and Mrs. Jeffson were poor relations
of the young lady's father. At Mrs. Gilbert's entreaty they consented to
leave the little bit of garden and meadow-land which they rented near
her father's farm, and followed the surgeon's wife to her new home,
where Matilda Jeffson took upon herself the duties of housekeeper,
general manager, and servant-of-all-work; while her husband looked after
the surgeon's table, and worked in the long, old-fashioned garden, where
the useful element very much preponderated over the ornamental.

I am compelled to admit that, in common with almost all those bright and
noble qualities which can make man admirable, Mr. William Jeffson
possessed one failing. He was lazy. But then his laziness gave such a
delicious, easy-going tone to his whole character, and was so much a
part of his good nature and benevolence, that to wish him faultless
would have been to wish him something less than he was. There are some
people whose faults are better than other people's virtues. Mr. Jeffson
was lazy. In the garden which it was his duty to cultivate, the snails
crawled along their peaceful way, unhindered by cruel rake or hoe; but
then, on the other hand, the toads grew fat in shadowy corners under the
broad dock-leaves, and the empty shells of their slimy victims attested
the uses of those ugly and venomous reptiles. The harmony of the
universe asserted itself in that Midlandshire garden, unchecked by any
presumptuous interference from Mr. Jeffson. The weeds grew high in waste
patches of ground, left here and there amongst the gooseberry-bushes and
the cabbages, the raspberries and potatoes; and William Jeffson offered
little hindrance to their rank luxuriance. "There was room enough for
all he wanted," he said philosophically; "and ground that wouldn't grow
weeds would be good for naught. Mr. Gilbert had more fruit and
vegetables than he could eat or cared to give away; and surely that was
enough for anybody." Officious visitors would sometimes suggest this or
that alteration or improvement in the simple garden; but Mr. Jeffson
would only smile at them with a bland, sleepy smile, as he lolled upon
his spade, and remark, "that he'd been used to gardens all his life, and
knew what could be made out of 'em, and what couldn't."

In short, Mr. Jeffson and Matilda Jeffson his wife did as they liked in
the surgeon's house, and had done so ever since that day upon which they
came to Midlandshire to take friendly service with their second cousin,
pretty Mrs. John Gilbert. They took very small wages from their
kinswoman's husband, but they had their own apartments, and lived as
they pleased, and ordered the lives of their master and mistress, and
idolized the fair-haired baby-boy who was born by-and-by, and who grew
day by day under their loving eyes, when the tender gaze of his mother
had ceased to follow his toddling footsteps, or yearn for the sight of
his frank, innocent face. Mr. Jeffson may have neglected the surgeon's
garden, by reason of that lymphatic temperament which was peculiar to
him; but there was one business in which he never lacked energy, one
pursuit in which he knew no weariness. He was never tired of any labour
which contributed to the pleasure or amusement of Mr. Gilbert's only
son. He carried the child on his shoulders for long journeys to distant
meadows in the sunshiny haymaking season, when all the air was fragrant
with the scent of grass and flowers; he clambered through thorny gaps
amidst the brambly underwood, and tore the flesh off his poor big hands
hunting for blackberries and cob-nuts for Master "Jarge." He persuaded
his master into the purchase of a pony when the boy was five years old,
and the little fellow trotted to Wareham at Mr. Jeffson's side when that
gentleman went on errands for the Graybridge household. William Jeffson
had no children of his own, and he loved the surgeon's boy with all the
fondness of a nature peculiarly capable of love and devotion.

It was a bitter day for him when Master Jarge went to the Classical and
Commercial Academy at Wareham; and but for those happy Saturday
afternoons on which he went to fetch the boy for a holiday that lasted
till Sunday evening, poor William Jeffson would have lost all the
pleasures of his simple life. What was the good of haymaking if George
wasn't in the thick of the fun, clambering on the loaded wain, or
standing flushed and triumphant, high up against the sunlit sky on the
growing summit of the new-made stack? What could be drearier work than
feeding the pigs, or milking the cow, unless Master Jarge was by to turn
labour into pleasure by the bright magic of his presence? William
Jeffson went about his work with a grave countenance during the boy's
absence, and only brightened on those delicious Saturday afternoons when
Master Jarge came hurrying to the little wooden gate in Dr. Mulder's
playground, shouting a merry welcome to his friend. There was no storm
of rain or hail, snow or sleet, that ever came out of the heavens, heavy
enough to hinder Mr. Jeffson's punctual attendance at that little gate.
What did he care for drenching showers, or thunderclaps that seemed to
shake the earth, so long as the little wooden gate opened, and the fair
young face he loved poked out at him with a welcoming smile?

"Our boys laid any money you wouldn't come to-day, Jeff," Master Gilbert
said sometimes; "but I knew there wasn't any weather invented that would
keep you away."

O blessed reward of fidelity and devotion! What did William Jeffson want
more than this?

Matilda Jeffson loved her master's son very dearly in her own way; but
her household duties were a great deal heavier than Mr. Jeffson's
responsibilities, and she had little time to waste upon the poetry of
affection. She kept the boy's wardrobe in excellent order; baked rare
batches of hot cakes on Saturday afternoons for his special
gratification; sent him glorious hampers, in which there were big jars
of gooseberry-jam, pork-pies, plum-loaves, and shrivelled apples. In all
substantial matters Mrs. Jeffson was as much the boy's friend as her
husband; but that tender, sympathetic devotion which William felt for
his master's son was something beyond her comprehension.

"My master's daft about the lad," she said, when she spoke of the two.

George Gilbert taught his companion a good deal in those pleasant
Saturday evenings, when the surgeon was away amongst his patients, and
the boy was free to sit in the kitchen with Mr. and Mrs. Jeffson. He
told the Yorkshireman all about those enemies of boyhood, the classic
poets; but William infinitely preferred Shakespeare and Milton, Byron
and Scott, to the accomplished Romans, whose verses were of the lamest
as translated by George. Mr. Jeffson could never have enough of
Shakespeare. He was never weary of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Romeo, the
bright young Prince who tried on his father's crown, bold Hotspur,
ill-used Richard, passionate Margaret, murderous Gloster, ruined Wolsey,
noble Katharine. All that grand gallery of pictures unrolled its
splendours for this man, and the schoolboy wondered at the enthusiasm he
was powerless to understand. He was inclined to think that practical
Mrs. Jeffson was right, and that her husband was a little "daft" upon
some matters.

The boy returned his humble friend's affection with a steady, honest
regard, that richly compensated the gardener, whose love was not of a
nature to need much recompense, since its growth was as spontaneous and
unconscious as that of the wild flowers amongst the long grass. George
returned William Jeffson's affection, but he could not return it in
kind. The poetry of friendship was not in his nature. He was honest,
sincere, and true, but not sympathetic or assimilative; he preserved his
own individuality wherever he went, and took no colour from the people
amongst whom he lived.

Mr. Gilbert would have been very lonely now that his father was gone,
had it not been for this honest couple, who managed his house and
garden, his stable and paddocks, and watched his interests as earnestly
as if he had been indeed their son. Whenever he had a spare half-hour,
the young man strolled into the old-fashioned kitchen, and smoked his
cigar in the chimney-corner, where he had passed so much of his boyhood.

"When I sit here, Jeff," he said sometimes, "I seem to go back to the
old school-days again, and I fancy I hear Brown Molly's hoofs upon the
frosty road, and my father's voice calling to you to open the gate."

Mr. Jeffson sighed, as he looked up from the mending of a bridle or the
patching of a horse-cloth.

"Them was pleasant days, Master Jarge," he said, regretfully. He was
thinking that the schoolboy had been more to him and nearer to him than
the young surgeon could ever be. They had been children together, these
two, and William had never grown weary of his childhood. He was left
behind now that his companion had grown up, and the happy childish days
were all over. There was a gigantic kite on a shelf in the back-kitchen;
a kite that Mr. Jeffson had made with his own patient hands. George
Gilbert would have laughed now if that kite had been mentioned to him;
but William Jeffson would have been constant to the same boyish sports
until his hair was grey, and would have never known weariness of spirit.

"You'll be marrying some fine lady, maybe now, Master Jarge," Mrs.
Jeffson said; "and she'll look down upon our north-country ways, and
turn us out of the old place where we've lived so long."

But George protested eagerly that, were he to marry the daughter of the
Queen of England, which was not particularly likely, that royal lady
should take kindly to his old servants, or should be no wife of his.

"When I marry, my wife must love the people I love," said, the surgeon,
who entertained those superb theories upon the management of a wife
which are peculiar to youthful bachelors.

George further informed his humble friends that he was not likely to
enter the holy estate of matrimony for many years to come, as he had so
far seen no one who at all approached his idea of womanly perfection. He
had very practical views upon this subject, and meant to wait patiently
until some faultless young person came across his pathway; some
neat-handed, church-going damsel, with tripping feet and smoothly-banded
hair; some fair young sage, who had never been known to do a foolish act
or say an idle word. Sometimes the image of Isabel Sleaford trembled
faintly upon the magic mirror of the young man's reveries, and he
wondered whether, under any combination of circumstances, she would ever
arrive at this standard. Oh, no, it was impossible. He looked back to
the drowsy summer-time, and saw her lolling in the garden-chair, with
the shadows of the branches fluttering upon her tumbled muslin dress,
and her black hair pushed anyhow away from the broad low brow.

"I hope that foolish Sigismund won't meet Miss Sleaford again," George
thought, very gravely; "he might be silly enough to marry her, and I'm
sure she'd never make a good wife for any man."

George Gilbert's father died in the autumn of '52; and early in the
following spring the young man received a letter from his friend Mr.
Smith. Sigismund wrote very discursively about his own prospects and
schemes, and gave his friend a brief synopsis of the romance he had last
begun. George skimmed lightly enough over this part of the letter; but
as he turned the leaf by-and-by, he saw a name that brought the blood to
his face. He was vexed with himself for that involuntary blush, and
sorely puzzled to know why he should be so startled by the unexpected
sight of Isabel Sleaford's name.

"You made me promise to tell you anything that turned up about the
Sleafords," Sigismund wrote. "You'll be very much surprised to hear that
Miss Sleaford came to me the other day here in my chambers, and asked me
if I could help her in any way to get her living. She wanted me to
recommend her as a nursery-governess, or companion, or something of that
kind, if I knew of any family in want of such a person. She was staying
at Islington with a sister of her step-mother's, she told me; but she
couldn't be a burthen on her any longer. Mrs. Sleaford and the boys have
gone to live in Jersey, it seems, on account of things being cheap
there; and I have no doubt that boy Horace will become an inveterate
smoker. Poor Sleaford is dead. You'll be as much astounded as I was to
hear this. Isabel did not tell me this at first; but I saw that she was
dressed in black, and when I asked her about her father, she burst out
crying, and sobbed as if heart would break. I should like to have
ascertained what the poor fellow died of, and all about it,--for
Sleaford was not an old man, and one of the most powerful-looking
fellows I ever saw,--but I could not torture Izzie with questions while
she was in such a state of grief and agitation. 'I'm very sorry you've
lost your father, my dear Miss Sleaford,' I said: and she sobbed out
something that I scarcely heard, and I got her some cold water to drink,
and it was ever so long before she came round again and was able to talk
to me. Well, I couldn't think of anybody that was likely to help her
that day; but I took the address of her aunt's house at Islington, and
promised to call upon her there in a day or two. I wrote by that day's
post to my mother, and asked her if she could help me; and she wrote
back by return to tell me that my uncle, Charles Raymond, at
Conventford, was in want of just such a person as Miss Sleaford (of
course I had endowed Isabel with all the virtues under the sun), and if
I really thought Miss S. would suit, and I could answer for the perfect
respectability of her connections and antecedents,--it isn't to be
supposed that I was going to say anything about that three quarters'
rent, or that I should own that Isabel's antecedents were lolling in a
garden-chair reading novels, or going on suspicious errands to the
_jeweller_ ('O my prophetic soul!' _et cetera_) in the Walworth
Road,--why, I was to engage Miss S. at twenty pounds a year salary. I
went up to Islington that very afternoon, although I was a number and a
half behind with 'The Demon of the Galleys' ('The D. of the G.' is a
sequel to 'The Brand upon the Shoulder-blade;' the proprietor of the
'Penny Parthenon' insisted upon having a sequel, and I had to bring
Colonel Montefiasco to life again, after hurling him over a precipice
three hundred feet high),--and the poor girl began to cry when I told
her I'd found a home for her. I'm afraid she's had a great deal of
trouble since the Sleafords left Camberwell; for she isn't at all the
girl she was. Her step-mother's sister is a vulgar woman who lets
lodgings, and there's only one servant--such a miserable slavey; and
Isabel went to the door three times while I was there. You know my uncle
Raymond, and you know what a dear jolly fellow he is; so you may guess
the change will be a very pleasant one for poor Izzie. By the bye, you
might call and see her the first time you're in Conventford, and write
me word how the poor child gets on. I thought she seemed a little
frightened at the idea of going among strangers. I saw her off at Euston
Square the day before yesterday. She went by the parliamentary train;
and I put her in charge of a most respectable family going all the way
through, with six children, and a birdcage, and a dog, and a pack of
cards to play upon a tea-tray on account of the train being slow."

Mr. Gilbert read this part of his friend's letter three times over
before he was able to realize the news contained in it. Mr. Sleaford
dead, and Isabel settled as a nursery-governess at Conventford! If the
winding Wayverne had overflowed its sedgy banks and flooded all
Midlandshire, the young surgeon could have been scarcely more surprised
than he was by the contents of his friend's letter. Isabel at
Conventford--within eleven miles of Graybridge; within eleven miles of
him at that moment, as he walked up and down the little room, with his
hair tumbled all about his flushed good-looking face, and Sigismund's
letter in his waistcoat!

What was it to him that Isabel Sleaford was so near? What was she to
him, that he should think of her, or be fluttered by the thought that
she was within his reach? What did he know of her? Only that she had
eyes that were unlike any other eyes he had ever looked at; eyes that
haunted his memory like strange stars seen in a feverish dream. He knew
nothing of her but this: and that she had a pretty, sentimental manner,
a pensive softness in her voice, and sudden flights and capricious
changes of expression that had filled his mind with wonder.

George went back to the kitchen and smoked another cigar in Mr.
Jeffson's company. He went back to that apartment fully determined to
waste no more of his thoughts upon Isabel Sleaford, who was in sober
truth a frivolous, sentimental creature, eminently adapted to make any
man miserable; but somehow or other, before the cigar was finished,
George had told his earliest friend and confidant all about Mr.
Sleaford's family, touching very lightly upon Isabel's attractions, and
speaking of a visit to Conventford as a disagreeable duty that
friendship imposed.

"Of course I shouldn't think of going all that way on purpose to see
Miss Sleaford," he said, "though Sigismund seems to expect me to do so;
but I must go to Conventford in the course of the week, to see about
those drugs Johnson promised to get me. They won't make a very big
parcel, and I can bring them home in my coat-pocket. You might trim
Brown Molly's fetlocks, Jeff; she'll look all the better for it. I'll go
on Thursday; and yet I don't know that I couldn't better spare the time
to-morrow."

"To-morrow's market-day, Master Jarge. I was thinkin' of goin' t'
Conventford mysen. I might bring t' droogs for thee, and thoo couldst
write a noate askin' after t' young leddy," Mr. Jeffson remarked,
thoughtfully.

George shook his head. "That would never do, Jeff," he said; "Sigismund
asks me to go and see her."

Mr. Jeffson relapsed into a thoughtful silence, out of which he emerged
by-and-by with a slow chuckle.

"I reckon Miss Sleaford'll be a pretty girl," he remarked, thoughtfully,
with rather a sly glance at his young master.

George Gilbert found it necessary to enter into an elaborate explanation
upon this subject. No; Miss Sleaford was not pretty. She had no colour
in her cheeks, and her nose was nothing particular,--not a beautiful
queenlike hook, like that of Miss Harleystone, the belle of Graybridge,
who was considered like the youthful members of the peerage,--and her
mouth wasn't very small, and her forehead was low; and, in short, some
people might think Miss Sleaford plain.

"But thoo doesn't, Master Jarge!" exclaimed Mr. Jeffson, clapping his
hand upon his knee with an intolerable chuckle; "thoo thinkst summoat of
her. I'll lay; and I'll trim Brown Molly's fetlocks till she looks as
genteel as a thoroughbred."

"Thoo'rt an old fondy!" cried Mrs. Jeffson, looking up from her
needlework. "It isn't one of these London lasses as'll make a good wife
for Master Jarge; and he'd never be that soft as to go running after
nursery-governesses at Conventford, when he might have Miss Burdock and
all her money, and be one of the first gentlefolks in Graybridge."

"Hold thy noise, Tilly. Thou knowst nowt aboot it. Didn't I marry thee
for loove, lass, when I might have had Sarah Peglock, as was only
daughter to him as kept t' Red Lion in Belminster; and didn't I come up
to London, where thou wast in service, and take thee away from thy
pleace; and wasn't Sarah a'most wild when she heard it? Master Jarge 'll
marry for loove, or he'll never marry at all. Don't you remember her as
wore the pink sash and shoes wi' sandals at the dancin' school, Master
Jarge; and us takin' her a ploom-loaf, and a valentine, and
sugar-sticks, and oranges, when you was home for th' holidays?"

Mr. Jeffson had been the confidant of all George's boyish love-affairs,
the innocent Leporello of this young provincial Juan; and he was eager
to be trusted with new secrets, and to have a finger once more in the
sentimental pie. But nothing could be more stern than Mr. Gilbert's
denial of any romantic fancy for Miss Sleaford.

"I should be very glad to befriend her in any way," he said gravely;
"but she's the very last person in the world that I should ever dream of
making my wife."

This young man discussed his matrimonial views with the calm grandiosity
of manner with which man, the autocrat, talks of his humble slaves
before he has tried his hand at governing them,--before he has received
the fiery baptism of suffering, and learned by bitter experience that a
perfect woman is not a creature to be found at every street-corner
waiting meekly for her ruler.




CHAPTER VI.

TOO MUCH ALONE.


Brown Molly's fetlocks were neatly trimmed by Mr. Jeffson's patient
hands. I fancy the old mare would have gone long without a clipping, had
it not been George's special pleasure that the animal should be
smartened up before he rode her to Conventford. Clipping is not a very
pleasant labour: but there is no task so difficult that William Jeffson
would have shrunk from it, if its achievement could give George Gilbert
happiness.

Brown Molly looked a magnificent creature when George came home, after a
hurried round of professional visits, and found her saddled and bridled,
at eleven o'clock, on the bright March morning which he had chosen for
his journey to Conventford. But though, the mare was ready, and had been
ready for a quarter of an hour, there was some slight delay while George
ran up to his room,--the room which he had slept in from his earliest
boyhood (there were some of his toys, dusty and forgotten, amongst the
portmanteaus and hat-boxes at the top of the painted deal
wardrobe),--and was for some little time engaged in changing his
neckcloth, brushing his hair and hat, and making other little
improvements in his personal appearance.

William Jeffson declared that his young master looked as if he was going
straight off to be married, as he rode away out of the stable-yard, with
a bright eager smile upon his face and the spring breezes blowing
amongst his hair. He looked the very incarnation of homely, healthy
comeliness, the archetype of honest youth and simple English manhood,
radiant with the fresh brightness of an unsullied nature, untainted by
an evil memory, pure as a new-polished mirror on which no foul breath
has ever rested.

He rode away to his fate, self-deluded, and happy in the idea that his
journey was a wise blending of the duties of friendship and the cares of
his surgery.

I do not think there can be a more beautiful road in all England than
that between Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne and Conventford, and I can
scarcely believe that in all England there is an uglier town than
Conventford itself. I envy George Gilbert his long ride on that bright
March morning, when the pale primroses glimmered among the underwood,
and the odour of early violets mingled faintly with the air. The country
roads were long avenues, which might have made the glory of a ducal
park; and every here and there, between a gap in the budding hedge, a
white-walled country villa or grave old red-brick mansion peeped out of
some nook of rustic beauty, with shining windows winking in the noontide
sun.

Midway between Graybridge and Conventford there is the village of
Waverly; the straggling village street over whose quaint Elizabethan
roofs the ruined towers of a grand old castle cast their protecting
shadows. John of Gaunt was master and founder of the grandest of those
old towers, and Henry the Eighth's wonderful daughter has feasted in the
great banqueting-hall, where the ivy hangs its natural garlands round
the stone mullions of the Tudor window. The surgeon gave his steed a
mouthful of hay and a drink of water before the Waverly Arms, and then
sauntered at a foot-pace into the long unbroken arcade which stretches
from the quiet village to the very outskirts of the bustling
Conventford. George urged Brown Molly into a ponderous kind of canter
by-and-by, and went at a dashing rate till he came to the little
turnpike at the end of the avenue, and left fair Elizabethan
Midlandshire behind him. Before him there was only the smoky, noisy,
poverty-stricken town, with hideous factory chimneys blackening the air,
and three tall spires rising from amongst the crowded roofs high up into
the clearer sky.

Mr. Gilbert drew rein on the green, which was quiet enough to-day,
though such an uproarious spot in fair-time; he drew rein, and began to
wonder what he should do. Should he go to the chemist's in the
market-place and get his drugs, and thence to Mr. Raymond's house, which
was at the other end of the town, or rather on the outskirts of the
country and beyond the town; or should he go first to Mr. Raymond's by
quiet back lanes, which were clear of the bustle and riot of the
market-people? To go to the chemist's first would be the wiser course,
perhaps; but then it wouldn't be very agreeable to have drugs in his
pocket, and to smell of rhubarb and camomile-flowers when he made his
appearance before Miss Sleaford. After a good deal of deliberation,
George decided on going by the back way to Mr. Raymond's house; and
then, as he rode along the lanes and back slums, he began to think that
Mr. Raymond would wonder why he called, and would think his interest in
the nursery-governess odd, or even intrusive; and from that a natural
transition of thought brought him to wonder whether it would not be
better to abandon all idea of seeing Miss Sleaford, and to content
himself with the purchase of the drugs. While he was thinking of this,
Brown Molly brought him into the lane at the end of which Mr. Raymond's
house stood, on a gentle eminence, looking over a wide expanse of grassy
fields, a railway cutting, and a white high-road, dotted here and there
by little knots of stunted trees. The country upon this side of
Conventford was bleak and bare of aspect as compared to that fair
park-like region which I venture to call Elizabethan Midlandshire.

If Mr. Raymond had resembled other people, I dare say he would have been
considerably surprised--or, it may be, outraged--by a young gentleman in
the medical profession venturing to make a morning call upon his
nursery-governess; but as Mr. Charles Raymond was the very opposite of
everybody else in the world, and as he was a most faithful disciple of
Mr. George Combe, and could discover by a glance at the surgeon's head
that the young man was neither a profligate nor a scoundrel, he received
George as cordially as it was his habit to receive every living creature
who had need of his friendliness; and sent Brown Molly away to his
stable, and set her master at his ease, before George had quite left off
blushing in his first paroxysm of shyness.

"Come into my room," cried Mr. Raymond, in a voice that had more
vibration in it than any other voice that ever rang out upon the air;
"come into my room. You've had a letter from Sigismund,--the idea of the
absurd young dog calling himself Sigismund!--and he's told you all about
Miss Sleaford. Very nice girl, but wants to be educated before she can
teach; keeps the little ones amused, however, and takes them out in the
meadows; a very nice, conscientious little thing; cautiousness very
large; can't get anything out of her about her past life; turns pale and
begins to cry when I ask her questions; has seen a good deal of trouble,
I'm afraid. Never mind; we'll try and make her happy. What does her past
life matter to us if her head's well balanced? Let me have my pick of
the young people in Field Lane, and I'll find you an undeveloped
Archbishop of Canterbury; take me into places where the crimes of
mankind are only known by their names in the Decalogue, and I'll find
you an embryo Greenacre. Miss Sleaford's a very good little girl; but
she's got too much Wonder and exaggerated Ideality. She opens her big
eyes when she talks of her favourite books, and looks up all scared and
startled if you speak to her while she's reading."

Mr. Raymond's room was a comfortable little apartment, lined with books
from the ceiling to the floor. There were books everywhere in Mr.
Raymond's house; and the master of the house read at all manner of
abnormal hours, and kept a candle burning by his bedside in the dead of
the night, when every other citizen of Conventford was asleep. He was a
bachelor, and the children whom it was Miss Sleaford's duty to educate
were a couple of sickly orphans, left by a pale-faced niece of Charles
Raymond's,--an unhappy young lady, who seemed only born to be
unfortunate, and who had married badly, and lost her husband, and died
of consumption, running through all the troubles common to womankind
before her twenty-fifth birthday. Of course Mr. Raymond took the
children; he would have taken an accidental chimney-sweep's children, if
it could have been demonstrated to him that there was no one else to
take them. He buried the pale-faced niece in a quiet suburban cemetery,
and took the orphans home to his pretty house at Conventford, and bought
black frocks for them, and engaged Miss Sleaford for their education,
and made less fuss about the transaction than many men would have done
concerning the donation of a ten-pound note.

It was Charles Raymond's nature to help his fellow-creatures. He had
been very rich once, the Conventford people said, in those far-off
golden days when there were neither strikes nor starvation in the grim
old town; and he had lost a great deal of money in the carrying out of
sundry philanthropic schemes for the benefit of his fellow-creatures,
and was comparatively poor in these latter days. But he was never so
poor as to be unable to help other people, or to hold his hand when a
mechanics' institution, or a working-men's club, or an evening-school,
or a cooking-dépôt, was wanted for the benefit and improvement of
Conventford.

And all this time,--while he was the moving spirit of half-a-dozen
committees, while he distributed cast-off clothing, and coals, and
tickets for soup, and orders for flannel, and debated the solemn
question as to whether Betsy Scrubbs or Maria Tomkins was most in want
of a wadded petticoat, or gave due investigation to the rival claims of
Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Green to the largess of the soup kitchen,--he was an
author, a philosopher, a phrenologist, a metaphysician, writing grave
books, and publishing them for the instruction of mankind. He was fifty
years of age; but, except that his hair was grey, he had no single
attribute of age. That grey hair framed the brightest face that ever
smiled upon mankind, and with the liberal sunshine smiled alike on all.
George Gilbert had seen Mr. Raymond several times before to-day.
Everybody in Conventford, or within a certain radius of Conventford,
knew Mr. Charles Raymond; and Mr. Charles Raymond knew everybody. He
looked through the transparent screen which shrouded the young surgeon's
thoughts: he looked down into the young man's heart, through depths that
were as clear as limpid water, and saw nothing there but truth and
purity. When I say that Mr. Raymond looked into George Gilbert's heart,
I use a figure of speech, for it was from the outside of the surgeon's
head he drew his deductions; but I like the old romantic fancy, that a
good man's heart is a temple of courage, love, and piety--an earthly
shrine of all the virtues.

Mr. Raymond's house was a pretty Gothic building, half villa, half
cottage, with bay windows opening into a small garden, which was very
different from the garden at Camberwell, inasmuch as here all was trimly
kept by an indefatigable gardener and factotum. Beyond the garden there
were the meadows, only separated from Mr. Raymond's lawn by a low privet
hedge; and beyond the meadows the roofs and chimneys of Conventford
loomed darkly in the distance.

Charles Raymond took George into the drawing-room by-and-by, and from
the bay window the young man saw Isabel Sleaford once more, as he had
seen her first, in a garden. But the scene had a different aspect from
that other scene, which still lingered in his mind, like a picture seen
briefly in a crowded gallery. Instead of the pear-trees on the low
disorderly grass-plat, the straggling branches green against the yellow
sunshine of July, George saw a close-cropped lawn and trim flower-beds,
stiff groups of laurel, amid bare bleak fields unsheltered from the
chill March winds. Against the cold blue sky he saw Isabel's slight
figure, not lolling in a garden-chair reading a novel, but walking
primly with two pale-faced children dressed in black. A chill sense of
pain crept through the surgeon's breast as he looked at the girlish
figure, the pale joyless face, the sad dreaming eyes. He felt that some
inexplicable change had come to Isabel Sleaford since that July day on
which she had talked of her pet authors, and glowed and trembled with
childish love for the dear books out of whose pages she took the joys
and sorrows of her life.

The three pale faces, the three black dresses, had a desolate look in
the cold sunlight. Mr. Raymond tapped at the glass, and beckoned to the
nursery-governess.

"Melancholy-looking objects, are they not?" he said to George, as the
three girls came towards the window. "I've told my housekeeper to give
them plenty of roast meat, not too much done; meat's the best antidote
for melancholy."

He opened the window and admitted Isabel and her two pupils.

"Here's a friend come to see you, Miss Sleaford," he said; "a friend of
Sigismund's; a gentleman who knew you in London."

George held out his hand, but he saw something like terror in the girl's
face as she recognized him; and he fell straightway into a profound gulf
of confusion and embarrassment.

"Sigismund asked me to call," he stammered. "Sigismund told me to write
and tell him how you were."

Miss Sleaford's eyes filled with tears. The tears came unbidden to her
eyes now with the smallest provocation.

"You are all very good to me," she said.

"There, you children, go out into the garden and walk about," cried Mr.
Raymond. "You go with them, Gilbert, and then come in and have some
stilton cheese and bottled beer, and tell us all about your Graybridge
patients."

Mr. Gilbert obeyed his kindly host. He went out on to the lawn, where
the brown shrubs were putting forth their feeble leaflets to be blighted
by the chill air of March. He walked by Isabel's side, while the two
orphans prowled mournfully here and there amongst the evergreens, and
picked the lonely daisies that had escaped the gardener's scythe. George
and Isabel talked a little; but the young man was fain to confine
himself to a few commonplace remarks about Conventford, and Mr. Raymond,
and Miss Sleaford's new duties; for he saw that the least allusion to
the old Camberwell life distressed and agitated her. There was not much
that these two could talk about as yet. With Sigismund Smith, Isabel
would have had plenty to say; indeed, it would have been a struggle
between the two as to which should do all the talking; but in George
Gilbert's company Isabel Sleaford's fancies folded themselves like
delicate buds whose fragile petals are shrivelled by a bracing northern
breeze. She knew that Mr. Gilbert was a good young man kindly disposed
towards her, and, after his simple fashion, eager to please her; but she
felt rather than knew that he did not understand her, and that in that
cloudy region where her thoughts for ever dwelt he could never be her
companion. So, after a little of that deliciously original conversation
which forms the staple talk of a morning call amongst people who have
never acquired the supreme accomplishment called small-talk, George and
Isabel returned to the drawing-room, where Mr. Raymond was ready to
preside over a banquet of bread-and-cheese and bottled ale; after which
refection the surgeon's steed was brought to the door.

"Come and see us again, Gilbert, whenever you've a day in Conventford,"
Mr. Raymond said, as he shook hands with the surgeon.

George thanked him for his cordial invitation, but he rode away from the
house rather depressed in spirit, notwithstanding. How stupid he had
been during that brief walk on Mr. Raymond's lawn; how little he had
said to Isabel, or she to him! How dismally the conversation had died
away into silence every now and then, only to be revived by some lame
question, some miserable remark apropos to nothing,--the idiotic
emanation of despair!

Mr. Gilbert rode to an inn near the market-place, where his father had
been wont to take his dinner whenever he went to Conventford. George
gave Brown Molly into the ostler's custody, and then walked away to the
crowded pavement, where the country people were jostling each other in
front of shop-windows and open stalls; the broad stony market-place,
where the voices of the hawkers were loud and shrill, where the brazen
boastings of quack-medicine vendors rang out upon the afternoon air. He
walked through the crowd, and rambled away into a narrow back street
leading to an old square, where the great church of Conventford stood
amidst a stony waste of tombstones, and where the bells that played a
hymn tune when they chimed the hour were booming up in the grand old
steeple. The young man went into the stony churchyard, which was lonely
enough even on a market-day, and walked about among the tombs, whiling
away the time--for the benefit of Brown Molly, who required considerable
rest and refreshment before she set out on the return journey--and
thinking of Isabel Sleaford.

He had only seen her twice, and yet already her image had fastened
itself with a fatal grip upon his mind, and was planted there--an
enduring picture, never again to be blotted out.

That evening at Camberwell had been the one romantic episode of this
young man's eventless life; Isabel Sleaford the one stranger who had
come across his pathway. There were pretty girls, and amiable girls, in
Graybridge: but then he had known them all his life. Isabel came to him
in her pale young beauty, and all the latent sentimentality--without
which youth is hideous--kindled and thrilled into life at the magic
spell of her presence. The mystic Venus rises a full-blown beauty from
the sea, and man the captive bows down before his divine enslaver. Who
would care for a Venus whose cradle he had rocked, whose gradual growth
he had watched, the divinity of whose beauty had perished beneath the
withering influence of familiarity?

It was dusk when George Gilbert went to the chemist and received his
parcels of drugs. He would not stop to dine at the White Lion, but paid
his eighteenpence for Brown Molly's accommodation, and took a hasty
glass of ale at the bar before he sprang into the saddle. He rode
homeward through the solemn avenue, the dusky cathedral aisle, the
infinite temple, fashioned by the great architect Nature. He rode
through the long ghostly avenue, until the twinkling lights at Waverly
glimmered on him faintly between the bare branches of the trees.

Isabel Sleaford's new life was a very pleasant one. There was no butter
to be fetched, no mysterious errands to the Walworth Road. Everything
was bright and smooth and trim in Mr. Raymond's household. There was a
middle-aged housekeeper who reigned supreme, and an industrious
maidservant under her sway. Isabel and her sickly charges had two
cheerful rooms over the drawing-room, and took their meals together, and
enjoyed the delight of one another's society all day long. The children
were rather stupid, but they were very good. They too had known the
sharp ills of poverty, the butter-fetching, the blank days in which
there was no bright oasis of dinner, the scraps of cold meat and
melancholy cups of tea. They told Isabel their troubles of an evening;
how poor mamma had cried when the sheriff's officer came in, and said he
was very sorry for her, but must take an inventory, and wouldn't leave
even papa's picture or the silver spoons that had been grandmamma's.
Miss Sleaford put her shoulder to the wheel very honestly, and went
through Pinnock's pleasant abridgments of modern and ancient history
with her patient pupils. She let them off with a very slight dose of the
Heptarchy and the Normans, and even the early Plantagenet monarchs; but
she gave them plenty of Anne Boleyn and Mary Queen of Scots,--fair
Princess Mary, Queen of France, and wife of Thomas Brandon,--Marie
Antoinette and Charlotte Corday.

The children only said "Lor'!" when they heard of Mademoiselle Corday's
heroic adventure; but they were very much interested in the fate of the
young princes of the House of York, and amused themselves by a
representation of the smothering business with the pillows on the
school-room sofa.

It was not to be supposed that Mr. Charles Raymond, who had all the
interests of Conventford to claim his attention, could give much time or
trouble to the two pupils or the nursery-governess. He was quite
satisfied with Miss Sleaford's head, and was content to entrust his
orphan nieces to her care.

"If they were clever children, I should be afraid of her exaggerated
ideality," he said; "but they're too stupid to be damaged by any
influence of that kind. She's got a very decent moral region--not equal
to that young doctor at Graybridge, certainly--and she'll do her duty to
the little ones very well, I dare say."

So no one interfered with Isabel or her pupils. The education of
association, which would have been invaluable to her, was as much
wanting at Conventford as it had been at Camberwell. She lived alone
with her books and the dreams which were born of them, and waited for
the prince, the Ernest Maltravers, the Henry Esmond, the Steerforth--it
was Steerforth's proud image, and not simple-hearted David's gentle
shadow, which lingered in the girl's mind when she shut the book. She
was young and sentimental, and it was not the good people upon whom her
fancy fixed itself. To be handsome and proud and miserable, was to
possess an indisputable claim to Miss Sleaford's worship. She sighed to
sit at the feet of a Byron, grand and gloomy and discontented, baring
his white brow to the midnight blast, and raving against the baseness
and ingratitude of mankind. She pined to be the chosen slave of some
scornful creature, who should perhaps ill-treat and neglect her. I think
she would have worshipped an aristocratic Bill Sykes, and would have
been content to die under his cruel hand, only in the ruined chamber of
some Gothic castle, by moonlight, with the distant Alps shimmering
whitely before her glazing eyes, instead of in poor Nancy's unromantic
garret. And then the Count Guilliaume de Syques would be sorry, and put
up a wooden cross on the mountain pathway, to the memory of--, ÂNÁTKH;
and he would be found some morning stretched at the foot of that
mysterious memorial, with a long black mantle trailing over his
king-like form, and an important blood-vessel broken.

There is no dream so foolish, there is no fancy however childish, that
did not find a lodgment in Isabel Sleaford's mind during the long idle
evenings in which she sat alone in her quiet school-room, watching the
stars kindle faintly in the dusk, and the darkening shadows gathering in
the meadows, while feeble lights began to twinkle in the distant streets
of Conventford. Sometimes, when her pupils were fast asleep in their
white-curtained beds, Izzie stole softly down, and went out into the
garden to walk up and down in the fair moonlight; the beautiful
moonlight in which Juliet had looked more lovely than the light of day
to Romeo's enraptured eyes; in which Hamlet had trembled before his
father's ghostly face. She walked up and down in the moonlight, and
thought of all her dreams; and wondered when her life was going to
begin. She was getting quite old; yes--she thought of it with a thrill
of horror--she was nearly eighteen! Juliet was buried in the tomb of the
Capulets before this age, and haughty Beatrix had lived her life, and
Florence Dombey was married and settled, and the story all over.

A dull despair crept over this foolish girl as she thought that perhaps
her life was to be only a commonplace kind of existence, after all; a
blank flat level, along which she was to creep to a nameless grave. She
was so eager to be _something_. Oh, why was not there a revolution, that
she might take a knife in her hand and go forth to seek the tyrant in
his lodging, and then die; so that people might talk of her, and
remember her name when she was dead?

I think Isabel Sleaford was just in that frame of mind in which a
respectable, and otherwise harmless, young person aims a bullet at some
virtuous sovereign, in a paroxysm of insensate yearning for distinction.
Miss Sleaford wanted to be famous. She wanted the drama of her life to
begin, and the hero to appear.

Vague, and grand, and shadowy, there floated before her the image of the
prince; but, oh, how slow he was to come! Would he ever come? Were there
any princes in the world? Were there any of those Beings whose manners
and customs her books described to her, but whose mortal semblances she
had never seen? The Sleeping Beauty in the woods slumbered a century
before the appointed hero came to awaken her. Beauty must wait, and wait
patiently, for the coming of her fate. But poor Isabel thought she had
waited so long, and as yet there was not even the distant shimmer of the
prince's plumes dimly visible on the horizon.

There were reasons why Isabel Sleaford should shut away the memory of
her past life, and solace herself with visions of a brighter existence.
A little wholesome drudgery might have been good for her, as a homely
antidote against the sentimentalism of her nature; but in Mr. Raymond's
house she had ample leisure to sit dreaming over her books, weaving
wonderful romances in which she was to be the heroine, and the hero--?

The hero was the veriest chameleon, inasmuch as he took his colour from
the last book Miss Sleaford had been reading. Sometimes he was Ernest
Maltravers, the exquisite young aristocrat, with violet eyes and silken
hair. Sometimes he was Eugene Aram, dark, gloomy, and intellectual, with
that awkward little matter of Mr. Clarke's murder preying upon his mind.
At another time he was Steerforth, selfish and haughty and elegant,
Sometimes, when the orphans were asleep. Miss Sleaford let down her long
black hair before the little looking-glass, and acted to herself in a
whisper. She saw her pale face, awful in the dusky glass, her lifted
arms, her great black eyes, and she fancied herself dominating a
terror-stricken pit. Sometimes she thought of leaving friendly Mr.
Raymond, and going up to London with a five-pound note in her pocket,
and coming out at one of the theatres as a tragic actress. She would go
to the manager, and tell him that she wanted to act. There might be a
little difficulty at first, perhaps, and he would be rather inclined to
be doubtful of her powers; but then she would take off her bonnet, and
let down her hair, and would draw the long tresses wildly through her
thin white fingers--so; she stopped to look at herself in the glass as
she did it,--and would cry, "I am not mad; this hair I tear is mine!"
and the thing would be done. The manager would exclaim, "Indeed, my dear
young lady, I was not prepared for such acting as this. Excuse my
emotion; but really, since the days of Miss O'Neil, I don't remember to
have witnessed anything to equal your delivery of that speech. Come
to-morrow evening and play Constance. You don't want a rehearsal?--no,
of course not; you know every syllable of the part. I shall take the
liberty of offering you fifty pounds a night to begin with, and I shall
place one of my carriages at your disposal." Isabel had read a good many
novels in which timid young heroines essay their histrionic powers, but
she had never read of a dramatically-disposed heroine who had not burst
forth a full-blown Mrs. Siddons without so much as the ordeal of a
rehearsal.

Sometimes Miss Sleaford thought that her Destiny--she clung to the idea
that she had a destiny--designed her to be a poet, an L.E.L.; oh, above
all she would have chosen to be L.E.L.; and in the evening, when she had
looked over the children's copy-books, and practised a new style of
capital B, in order to infuse a dash of variety into the next day's
studies, she drew the candles nearer to her, and posed herself, and
dipped her pen into the ink, and began to pour forth some melancholy
plaint upon the lonely blankness of her life, or some vague invocation
of the unknown prince. She rarely finished either the plaint or the
invocation, for there was generally some rhythmical difficulty that
brought her poetic musings to a dead lock; but she began a great many
verses, and spoiled several quires of paper with abortive sonnets, in
which "stars" and "streamlets," "dreams" and "fountains," recurred with
a frequency which was inimical to originality or variety of style.

The poor lonely untaught child looked right and left for some anchorage
on the blank sea of life, and could find nothing but floating masses of
ocean verdure, that drifted her here and there at the wild will of all
the winds of heaven. Behind her there was a past that she dared not look
back upon or remember; before her lay the unknown future, wrapped in
mysterious shadow, grand by reason of its obscurity. She was eager to
push onward, to pierce the solemn veil, to tear aside the misty curtain,
to penetrate the innermost chamber of the temple.

Late in the night, when the lights of Conventford had died out under the
starlit sky, the girl lay awake, sometimes looking up at those mystical
stars, and thinking of the future; but never once, in any dream or
reverie, in any fantastic vision built out of the stories she loved, did
the homely image of the Graybridge surgeon find a place.

George Gilbert thought of her, and wondered about her, as he rode Brown
Molly in the winding Midlandshire lanes, where the brown hedge-rows were
budding, and the whitethorn bursting into blossom. He thought of her by
day and by night, and was angry with himself for so thinking; and then
began straightway to consider when he could, with any show of grace,
present himself once more before Mr. Raymond's Gothic porch at
Conventford.




CHAPTER VII.

ON THE BRIDGE.


While George Gilbert was thinking of Isabel Sleaford's pale face and
black eyes; while, in his long rides to and fro among the cottages of
his parish patients, he solemnly debated as to whether he ought to call
upon Mr. Raymond when next he went to Conventford, or whether he ought
to go to Conventford for the express purpose of paying his respects to
Mr. Raymond,--the hand of Fate turned the wavering balance; and the
makeweight which she threw into the scale was no heavier than the
ordinary half-ounce of original composition which Government undertakes
to convey, not exactly from Indus to the Pole, but from the Land's End
to the Highlands, for the small charge of a penny. While George Gilbert
hesitated and doubted, and argued and debated with himself, after the
manner of every prudent home-bred young man who begins to think that he
loves well, and sadly fears that he may not love wisely,--Destiny, under
the form of a friend, gave him a push, and he went souse over head and
ears into the roaring ocean, and there was nothing left for him but to
swim as best he might towards the undiscovered shore upon the other
side.

The letter from Sigismund was dated Oakbank, Conventford, May 23rd,
1853.

"Dear George," wrote the author of "The Brand upon the Shoulder-blade,"
"I'm down here for a few days with my uncle Charles; and we've arranged
a picnic in Lord Hurstonleigh's grounds, and we want you to join us. So,
if your patients are not the most troublesome people in the world, you
can give yourself a holiday, and meet us on Wednesday morning, at
twelve, if fine, at the Waverly Road lodge-gate to Hurstonleigh Park.
Mrs. Pidgers--Pidgers is my uncle's housekeeper; a regular old dear, and
_such_ a hand at pie-crusts!--is going to pack up a basket,--and I know
what Pidgers's baskets are,--and we shall bring plenty of sparkling,
because, when my uncle does this sort of thing, he _does_ do it; and
we're to drink tea at one of Lord Hurstonleigh's model cottages, in his
model village, with a model old woman, who's had all manner of prizes
for the tidiest dust-holes, and the whitest hearth-stones, and the
neatest knife-boards, and all that kind of thing; and we're going to
make a regular holiday of it; and I shall forget that there's such a
creature as 'the Demon of the Galleys' in the world, and that I'm a
number behind with him,--which I am,--and the artist is waiting for a
subject for his next cut.

"The orphans are coming, of course, and Miss Sleaford; and, oh, by the
bye, _I_ want you to tell me all about poisoning by strychnine, because
I think I shall do a case or two in 'The D. of the G.'

"Twelve o'clock, sharp time, remember! We come in a fly. You can leave
your horse at Waverly.--Yours, S.S."

       *       *       *       *       *

Yes; Fate, impatient perhaps of any wavering of the balance in so
insignificant a matter as George Gilbert's destiny, threw this
penny-post letter into the scale, and, lo! it was turned. The young man
read the letter over and over again, till it was crumpled and soiled
with much unfolding and refolding, and taking out of, and putting back
into, his waistcoat-pocket. A picnic! a picnic in the Hurstonleigh
grounds, with Isabel Sleaford! Other people were to be of the party; but
George Gilbert scarcely remembered that. He saw himself, with Isabel by
his side, wandering along the winding pathways, straying away into
mysterious arcades of verdure, where the low branches of the trees would
meet above their heads, and shut them in from all the world. He fancied
himself talking to Mr. Sleaford's daughter as he never had talked, nor
was ever likely to talk, with any voice audible to mortal ears; he laid
out and arranged that day as we are apt to arrange the days that are to
come, and which--Heaven help our folly and presumption!--- are so
different when they do come from the dreams we have dreamed about them.
Mr. Gilbert lived that May holiday over and over again between the
Monday afternoon on which he received Sigismund's letter, and the
appointed Wednesday morning. He lay awake at night, when his day's work
was done, thinking of Isabel, and what she would say to him, and how she
would look at him, until those fancied words and looks thrilled him to
the heart's core, and he was deluded by the thought that it was all a
settled thing, and that his love was returned. His love! Did he love
her, then, already--this pale-faced young person, whom he had only seen
twice; who might be a Florence Nightingale, or a Madame de Laffarge, for
all that he knew either one way or the other? Yes, he loved her; the
wondrous flower that never yet "thrived by the calendar" had burst into
full bloom. He loved this young woman, and believed in her, and was
ready to bring her to his simple home whenever she pleased to come
thither; and had already pictured her sitting opposite to him in the
little parlour, making weak tea for him in a Britannia-metal teapot,
sewing commonplace buttons upon his commonplace shirts, debating with
Mrs. Jeffson as to whether there should be roast beef or boiled mutton
for the two o'clock dinner, sitting up alone in that most uninteresting
little parlour when the surgeon's patients were tiresome and insisted
upon being ill in the night, waiting to preside over little suppers of
cold meat and pickles, bread-and-cheese and celery. Yes; George pictured
Miss Sleaford the heroine of such a domestic story as this, and had no
power to divine that there was any incongruity in the fancy; no fineness
of ear to discover the dissonant interval between the heroine and the
story. Alas, poor Izzie! and are all your fancies, all the pretty
stories woven out of your novels, all your long day-dreams about Marie
Antoinette and Charlotte Corday, Edith Dombey and Ernest
Maltravers,--all your foolish pictures of a modern Byron, fever-stricken
at Missolonghi, and tended by you; a new Napoleon, exiled to St. Helena,
and followed, perhaps liberated, by you,--are they all come to this? Are
none of the wonderful things that happen to women ever to happen to you?
Are you never to be Charlotte Corday, and die for your country? Are you
never to wear ruby velvet, and diamonds in your hair, and to lure some
recreant Carker to a foreign hostelry, and there denounce and scorn him?
Are all the pages of the great book of life to be closed upon you--you,
who seem to yourself predestined, by reason of so many dreams and
fancies, to such a wonderful existence? Is all the mystic cloudland of
your dreams to collapse and shrivel into this,--a commonplace
square-built cottage at Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, with a commonplace
country surgeon for your husband?

George Gilbert was waiting at the low white gate before the ivy-coloured
lodge on the Waverly Road when the fly from Conventford drove up, with
Sigismund Smith sitting beside the coachman, and questioning him about a
murder that had been committed in the neighbourhood ten years before;
and Mr. Raymond, Miss Sleaford, and the orphans inside. The surgeon had
been waiting at the gate for a quarter of an hour, and he had been up
ever since six o'clock that morning, riding backwards and forwards
amongst his patients, doing a day's work in a few hours. He had been
home to dress, of course, and wore his newest and most fashionable
clothes, and was, in fact, a living realization of one of the figures in
a fly-blown fashion-plate for June 1852, still exhibited in the window
of a Graybridge tailor. He wore a monthly rosebud in his button-hole,
and he carried a bunch of spring flowers,--jonquils and polyanthuses,
pink hawthorn, peonies, and sweet-brier,--which Mr. Jeffson had gathered
and tied up, with a view to their presentation to Isabel,--although
there were better flowers in Mr. Raymond's garden, as George reminded
his faithful steward.

"Don't thee tew thyself about that, Master Jarge," said the
Yorkshireman; "th' young wench 'll like the flowers if thoo givest 'em
til her."

Of course it never for a moment entered into Mr Jeffson's mind that his
young master's attentions could be otherwise than welcome and agreeable
to any woman living, least of all to a forlorn young damsel who was
obliged to earn her bread amongst strangers.

"I'd like to see Miss Sleaford, Master Jarge," Mr. Jeffson said, in an
insinuating manner, as George gathered up the reins and patted Brown
Molly's neck, preparatory to riding away from the low white gate of his
domain.

George blushed like the peonies that formed the centre of his nosegay.

"I don't know why you should want to see Miss Sleaford any more than
other girls, Jeff," he said.

"Well, never you mind why, Master Jarge; I _should_ like to see her; I'd
give a deal to see her."

"Then we'll try and manage it, Jeff. We're to drink tea at Hurstonleigh;
and we shall be leaving there, I suppose, as soon as it's dark--between
seven and eight o'clock, I dare say. You might ride the grey pony to
Waverly, and bring Brown Molly on to Hurstonleigh, and stop at the
alehouse--there's an alehouse, you know, though it _is_ a model
village--until I'm ready to come home; and you can leave the horses with
the ostler, you know, and stroll about the village,--and you're sure to
find us."

"Yes, yes, Master Jarge; I'll manage it."

So George was at his post a quarter of an hour before the fly drove up
to the gate. He was there to open the door of the vehicle, and to give
his hand to Isabel when she alighted. He felt the touch of her fingers
resting briefly on his arm, and trembled and blushed like a girl as he
met the indifferent gaze of her great black eyes. Nobody took any notice
of his embarrassment. Mr. Raymond and his nephew were busy with the
hampers that had been stowed under the seats of the fly, and the orphans
were employed in watching their elders,--for to them the very cream of
the picnic was in those baskets.

There was a boy at the lodge who was ready to take the basket
whithersoever Mr. Raymond should direct; so all was settled very
quickly. The driver received his instructions respecting the return
journey, and went rumbling off to Hurstonleigh to refresh himself and
his horse. The lad went on before the little party, with the baskets
swinging on either side of him as he went; and in the bustle of these
small arrangements George Gilbert found courage to offer Isabel his arm.
She took it without hesitation, and Sigismund placed himself on the
other side of her. Mr. Raymond went on before with the orphans, who
affected the neighbourhood of the baskets; and the three young people
followed, walking slowly over the grass.

Isabel had put off her mourning. She had never had but one black dress,
poor child; and that being worn out, she was fain to fall back upon her
ordinary costume. If she had looked pretty in the garden at Camberwell,
with tumbled hair and a dingy dress, she looked beautiful to-day, in
clean muslin, fresh and crisp, fluttering in the spring breezes as she
walked, and with her hair smoothly banded under a broad-leaved straw
hat. Her face brightened with the brightness of the sunshine and the
charm of the landscape; her step grew light and buoyant as she walked
upon the springing turf. Her eyes lit up by-and-by, when the little
party came to a low iron gate, beyond which there was a grove, a winding
woodland patch, and undulating glades, and craggy banks half hidden
under foliage, and, in a deep cleft below, a brawling waterfall for ever
rushing over moss-grown rockwork, and winding far away to meet the
river.

"Oh, how beautiful it is!" cried Isabel; "how beautiful!"

She was a Cockney, poor child, and had spent the best part of her life
amidst the suburban districts of Camberwell and Peckham. All this
Midlandshire beauty burst upon her like a sudden revelation of Paradise.
Could the Garden of Eden have been more beautiful than this woodland
grove?--where the ground was purple with wild hyacinths that grew under
beeches and oaks centuries old; where the sunlight and shadows flickered
on the mossy pathways; where the guttural warble of the blackbirds made
perpetual music in the air. George looked wonderingly at the girl's rapt
countenance, her parted lips, that were faintly tremulous with the force
of her emotion.

"I did not think there could be any place in England so beautiful," she
said by-and-by, when George disturbed her with some trite remark upon
the scene. "I thought it was only in Italy and in Greece, and those sort
of places--where Childe Harold went--that it was beautiful like this. It
makes one feel as if one could never go back to the world again, doesn't
it?" she asked naïvely.

George was fain to confess that, although the grove was very beautiful,
it inspired him with no desire to turn hermit, and take up his abode
therein. But Isabel hardly heard what he said to her. She was looking
away into mysterious vistas of light and shadow, and thinking that in
such a spot as this the hero of a woman's life might appear in all his
shining glory. If she could meet him now, this wonderful unknown
being--the Childe Harold, the Lara, of her life! What if it was to be
so? what if she was to meet him now, and the story was appointed to
begin to-day,--this very day,--and all her life henceforth was to be
changed? The day was like the beginning of a story, somehow, inasmuch as
it was unlike the other days of her life. She had thought of the
holiday, and dreamt about it even more foolishly than George had done;
for there had been some foundation for the young man's visions, while
hers had been altogether baseless. What if Lord Hurstonleigh should
happen to be strolling in his grove, and should see her and rescue her
from death by drowning, or a mad bull, or something of that sort, and
thereupon fall in love with her? Nothing was more life-like or likely,
according to Izzie's experience of three-volume novels. Unhappily she
discovered from Mr. Raymond that Lord Hurstonleigh was an elderly
married man, and was, moreover, resident in the south of France; so
_that_ bright dream was speedily shattered. But there is no point of the
compass from which a hero may not come. There was hope yet; there was
hope that this bright spring-day might not close as so many days had
closed upon the same dull record, the same empty page.

Mr. Raymond was in his highest spirits to-day. He liked to be with young
people, and was younger than the youngest of them in his fresh enjoyment
of all that is bright and beautiful upon earth. He devoted himself
chiefly to the society of his orphan _protégées_, and contrived to
impart a good deal of information to them in a pleasant easy-going
manner, that took the bitterness out of those Pierian waters, for which
the orphans had very small affection. They were stupid and
unimpressionable; but, then, were they not the children of that unhappy
consumptive niece of his, who had acquired, by reason of her many
troubles, a kind of divine right to become a burden upon happy people?

"If she had left me such an orphan as that girl Isabel, I would have
thanked her kindly for dying," Mr. Raymond mused "That girl has mental
imitation,--the highest and rarest faculty of the human
brain,--ideality, and comparison. What could I not make of such a girl
as that? And yet--"

Mr. Raymond only finished the sentence with a sigh. He was thinking
that, after all, these bright faculties might not be the best gifts for
a woman. It would have been better, perhaps, for Isabel to have
possessed the organ of pudding-making and stocking-darning, if those
useful accomplishments are represented by an organ. The kindly
phrenologist was thinking that perhaps the highest fate life held for
that pale girl with the yellow tinge in her eyes was to share the home
of a simple-hearted country surgeon, and rear his children to be honest
men and virtuous women.

"I suppose that _is_ the best," Mr. Raymond said to himself.

He had dismissed the orphans now, and had sent them on to walk with
Sigismund Smith, who kindly related to them the story of "Lilian the
Deserted," with such suppressions and emendations as rendered the
romance suitable to their tender years. The philosopher of Conventford
had got rid of the orphans, and was strolling by himself in those
delicious glades, swinging his stick as he went, and throwing up his
head every now and then to scent all the freshness of the warm spring
air.

"Poor little orphan child!" he mused, "will anybody ever fathom her
fancies or understand her dreams? Will she marry that good, sheepish
country surgeon, who has fallen in love with her? He can give her a home
and a shelter; and she seems such a poor friendless little creature,
just the sort of girl to get into some kind of mischief if she were left
to herself. Perhaps it's about the best thing that could happen to her.
I should like to have fancied a brighter fate for her, a life with more
colour in it. She's so pretty--_so_ pretty; and when she talks, and her
face lights up, a sort of picture comes into my mind of what she would
be in a great saloon, with clusters of lights about her, and masses of
shimmering colour, making a gorgeous background for her pale young
beauty; and brilliant men and women clustering round her, to hear her
talk and see her smile. I can see her like this; and then, when I
remember what her life is likely to be, I begin to feel sorry for her,
just as if she were some fair young nun, foredoomed to be buried alive
by-and-by. Sometimes I have had a fancy that if _he_ were to come home
and see her--but that's an old busybody's dream. When did a matchmaker
ever create anything but matrimonial confusion and misery? I dare say
Beatrice kept her word, and _did_ make Benedick wretched. No; Miss
Sleaford must marry whom she may, and be happy or miserable, according
to the doctrine of averages; and as for _him_--"

Mr. Raymond stopped; and seeing the rest of the party happily engaged in
gathering hyacinths under the low branches of the trees, he seated
himself upon a clump of fallen timber, and took a book out of his
pocket. It was a book that had been sent by post, for the paper wrapper
was still about it. It was a neat little volume, bound in glistening
green cloth, with uncut edges, and the gilt-letter title on the back of
the volume set forth that the book contained "An Alien's Dreams." An
alien's dreams could be nothing but poetry; and as the name of the poet
was not printed under the title, it was perhaps only natural that Mr.
Raymond should, not open the book immediately, but should sit turning
and twisting the volume about in his hands, and looking at it with a
contemptuous expression of countenance.

"An alien!" he exclaimed; "why, in the name of all the affectations of
the present day, should a young man with fifteen thousand a year, and
one of the finest estates in Midlandshire, call himself an alien? 'An
Alien's Dreams'--and such dreams! I had a look at them this morning,
without cutting the leaves. It's always a mistake to cut the leaves of
young people's poetry. Such dreams! Surely no alien could have been
afflicted with anything like them, unless he was perpetually eating
heavy suppers of underdone pork, or drinking bad wine, or neglecting the
ventilation of his bedroom. Imperfect ventilation has a good deal to do
with it, I dare say. To think that Roland Lansdell should write such
stuff--such a clever young man as he is, too--such a generous-hearted,
high-minded young fellow, who might be--"

Mr. Raymond opened the volume in a very gingerly fashion, almost as if
he expected something unpleasant might crawl out of it, and looked in a
sideways manner between the leaves, muttering the first line or so of a
poem, and then skipping on to another, and giving utterance to every
species of contemptuous ejaculation between whiles.

"Imogen!" he exclaimed; "'To Imogen!' As if anybody was ever called
Imogen out of Shakespeare's play and Monk Lewis's ballad! 'To Imogen:'

     'Do you ever think of me, proud and cruel Imogen,
       As I think, ah! sadly think, of thee--
     When the shadows darken on the misty lea, Imogen,
       And the low light dies behind the sea?'

'Broken!' 'Shattered!' 'Blighted!' Lively titles to tempt the general
reader! Here's a nice sort of thing:

         'Like an actor in a play,
            Like a phantom in a dream,
          Like a lost boat left to stray
            Rudderless adown the stream,--
     This is what my life has grown, Ida Lee,
     Since thy false heart left me lone, Ida Lee.
     And I wonder sometimes when the laugh is loud,
     And I wonder at the faces of the crowd,
     And the strange fantastic measures that they tread,
     Till I think at last I must be dead--
     Till I half believe that I am dead.'

And to think that Roland Lansdell should waste his time in writing this
sort of thing! And here's his letter, poor boy!--his long rambling
letter,--in which he tells me how he wrote the verses, and how writing
them was a kind of consolation to him, a safety-valve for so much
passionate anger against a world that doesn't exactly harmonize with the
Utopian fancies of a young man with fifteen thousand a year and nothing
to do. If some rightful heir would turn up, in the person of one of
Roland's gamekeepers, now, and denounce my young friend as a wrongful
heir, and turn him out of doors bag and baggage, and with very little
bag and baggage, after the manner of those delightful melodramas which
hold the mirror up to nature so exactly, what a blessing it would be for
the author of 'An Alien's Dreams!' If he could only find himself without
a sixpence in the world, what a noble young soldier in the great battle
of life, what a triumphant hero, he might be! But as it is, he is
nothing better than a colonel of militia, with a fine uniform, and a
long sword that is only meant for show. My poor Roland! my poor Roland!"
Mr. Raymond murmured sadly, as he dropped the little volume back into
his pocket; "I am so sorry that you too should be infected with the
noxious disease of our time, the fatal cynicism that transforms youth
into a malady for which age is the only cure."

But he had no time to waste upon any regretful musings about Mr Roland
Lansdell, sole master of Lansdell Priory, one of the finest seats in
Midlandshire, and who was just now wandering somewhere in Greece, upon a
Byronic kind of tour that had lasted upwards of six months, and was
likely to last much longer.

It was nearly three o'clock now, and high time for the opening of the
hampers, Mr. Raymond declared, when he rejoined the rest of the party,
much to the delight of the orphans, who were always hungry, and who ate
so much, and yet remained so pale and skeleton-like of aspect, that they
presented a pair of perpetual phenomena to the eye of the physiologist.
The baskets had been carried to a little ivy-sheltered arbour, perched
high above the waterfall; and here Mr. Raymond unpacked them, bringing
out his treasures one after another; first a tongue, then a pair of
fowls, a packet of anchovy sandwiches, a great poundcake (at sight of
which the eyes of the orphans glistened), delicate caprices in the way
of pastry, semi-transparent biscuits, and a little block of Stilton
cheese, to say nothing of sundry bottles of Madeira and sparkling
Burgundy.

Perhaps there never was a merrier party. To eat cold chicken and drink
sparkling Burgundy in the open air on a bright May afternoon is always
an exhilarating kind of thing, though the scene of your picnic may be
the bleakest of the Sussex Downs, or the dreariest of the Yorkshire
Wolds; but to drink the sparkling wine in that little arbour of
Hurstonleigh, with the brawling of the waterfall keeping time to your
laughter, the shadows of patriarchal oaks sheltering you from all the
outer world, is the very acme of bliss in the way of a picnic. And then
Mr. Raymond's companions were so young! It was so easy for them to leave
all the Past on the threshold of that lovely grove, and to narrow their
lives into the life of that one bright day. Even Isabel forgot that she
had a Destiny, and consented to be happy in a simple girlish way,
without a thought of the prince who was so long coming.

It may be that the sparkling Burgundy had something to do with George
Gilbert's enthusiasm; but, by and bye, after the débris of the dinner
had been cleared away, and the little party lingered round the rustic
table, talking with that expansion of thought and eloquence of language
which is so apt to result from the consumption of effervescing wines in
the open air, the young surgeon thought that all the earth could
scarcely hold a more lovely creature than the girl who sat opposite to
him, with her head resting against the rustic wood-work of the arbour,
and her hat lying on her knee. She did not say very much, in comparison
with Sigismund and Mr. Raymond, who were neither of them indifferent
hands at talking; but when she spoke, there was generally something
vague and dreamy in her words,--something that set George wondering
about her anew, and made him admire her more than ever. He forgot all
the dictates of prudence now; he was false to all the grand doctrines of
young manhood; he only remembered that Isabel Sleaford was the loveliest
creature upon earth; he only knew that he loved her, and that his love,
like all true love, was mingled with modest doubtfulness of his own
merits, and exaggerated deference for hers. He loved her as purely and
truly as if he had been able to express his passion in the noblest poem
ever written; but not being able to express it, his love and himself
seemed alike tame and commonplace.

I must not dwell too long on this picnic, though it seemed half a
lifetime to George Gilbert, for he walked with Isabel through the lanes
between Hurstonleigh grove and Hurstonleigh village, and he loitered
with her in the little churchyard at Hurstonleigh, and stood upon the
bridge beneath which the Wayverne crept like a riband of silver, winding
in and out among the rushes. He lingered there by her side while the
orphans and Sigismund and Mr. Raymond were getting tea ready at the
model cottage, and putting the model old woman's wits into such a state
of "flustrification," as she herself expressed it, that she could
scarcely hold the tea-kettle, and was in imminent peril of breaking one
of her best "chaney" saucers, produced from a corner cupboard in honour
of her friend and patron, Charles Raymond.

George loitered on the little stone bridge with Isabel, and somehow or
other, still emboldened by the sparkling Burgundy, his passion all of a
sudden found a voice, and he told her that he loved her, and that his
highest hope upon earth was the hope of winning her for his wife.

I suppose that simple little story must be a pretty story, in its way;
for when a woman hears it for the first time, she is apt to feel kindly
disposed to the person who recites it, however poorly or tamely he may
tell his tale. Isabel listened with a most delightful complacency; not
because she reciprocated George's affection for her, but because this
was the first little bit of romance in her life, and she felt that the
story was beginning all at once, and that she was going to be a heroine.
She felt this; and with this a kind of grateful liking for the young man
at her side, through whose agency all these pleasant feelings came to
her.

And all this time George was pleading with her, and arguing, from her
blushes and her silence, that his suit was not hopeless. Emboldened by
the girl's tacit encouragement, he grew more and more eloquent, and went
on to tell her how he had loved her from the first; yes, from that first
summer's afternoon--when he had seen her sitting under the pear-trees in
the old-fashioned garden, with the low yellow light behind her.

"Of course I didn't know then that I loved you, Isabel--oh, may I call
you Isabel? it is such a pretty name. I have written it over and over
and over on the leaves of a blotting-book at home, very often without
knowing that I was writing it. I only thought at first that I admired
you, because you are so beautiful, and so different from other beautiful
women; and then, when I was always thinking of you, and wondering about
you, I wouldn't believe that it was because I loved you. It is only
to-day--this dear, happy day--that has made me understand what I have
felt all along; and now I know that I have loved you from the first,
Isabel, dear Isabel, from the very first."

All this was quite as it should be. Isabel's heart fluttered like the
wings of a young bird that essays its first flight.

"This is what it is to be a heroine," she thought, as she looked down at
the coloured pebbles, the floating river weeds, under the clear rippling
water; and yet knew all the time, by virtue of feminine second-sight,
that George Gilbert was gazing at her and adoring her. She didn't like
_him_, but she liked him to be there talking to her. The words she heard
for the first time were delightful to her because of their novelty, but
they took no charm from the lips that spoke them. Any other
good-looking, respectably-dressed young man would have been quite as
much to her as George Gilbert was. But then she did not know this. It
was so very easy for her to mistake her pleasure in the "situation;" the
rustic bridge, the rippling water, the bright spring twilight, even the
faint influence of that one glass of sparkling Burgundy, and, above all,
the sensation of being a heroine for the first time in her life--it was
so terribly easy to mistake all these for that which she did not
feel,--a regard for George Gilbert.

While the young man was still pleading, while she was still listening to
him, and blushing and glancing shyly at him out of those wonderful
tawny-coloured eyes, which seemed black just now under the shado

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