Neighbours on the Green; My Faithful Johnny

Ellen’s eyes sparkled. She gave a glance round upon the room, which was a great deal bigger and handsomer than the little parlour in Pleasant Place, taking in the pictures and the piano and myself in so many distinct perceptions, yet one look. Her face was so expressive that I recognized all these different details of her pleasure with the distinctest certainty. She wanted John to see it all, and to hear the piano, which was much better than her little piano at home; and also to behold how much at home she was, and how everybody liked her. Her eyes shone out upon me like two stars. And her big English ‘Oh!’ of delight had her whole breath in it, and left her speechless for the moment. ‘There is nothing in the world I would like so much,’ she cried at last: then paused, and, with a sobered tone, added, ‘If mother can spare me’—a little cloud coming over her face.

‘I am sure your mother will spare you. You never have any parties or amusements, my good little Ellen. You must tell her I will take no denial. You never go anywhere.’

‘Where should I go?’ said Ellen. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere, there is always so much to do at home. But for this once—And John would so like to come. He would like to thank you. He says, if you will not think him too bold, that you have been his friend for years.’

‘It is quite true,’ I said; ‘I have looked for him almost every day for years. But it is not much of a friendship when one can do nothing for the other–’

‘Oh, it is beautiful!’ cried Ellen. ‘He says always we are in such different ranks of life. We could never expect to have any intercourse, except to be sure by a kind of happy accident, like me. It would not do, of course, visiting or anything of that sort; but just to be friends for life, with a kind look, such as we might give to the angels if we could see them. If there only could be a window in heaven, here and there!’ and she laughed with moisture in her eyes.

‘Ah!’ I said, ‘but windows in heaven would be so crowded with those that are nearer to us than the angels.’

‘Do you think they would want that?’ said Ellen in a reverential low tone; ‘don’t you think they must see somehow? they would not be happy if they could not see. But the angels might come and sit down in an idle hour, when they had nothing to do. Perhaps it would grieve them, but it might amuse them too, to see all the crowds go by, and all the stories going on, like a play, and know that, whatever happened, it would all come right in the end. I should not wonder a bit if, afterwards, some one were to say, as you did about John, “I have seen you passing for years and years–”’

I need not repeat all the rest of our talk. When two women begin this kind of conversation, there is no telling where it may end. The conclusion however was that next evening John was to be brought to make my acquaintance; and Ellen went away very happy, feeling, I think, that a new chapter was about to begin in her life. And on our side we indulged in a great many anticipations. The male part of the household assured us that, ‘depend upon it,’ it would be a mistake; that John would be a mere clerk, and no more; a man, perhaps, not very sure about his h’s; perhaps over-familiar, perhaps frightened; that most likely he would feel insulted by being asked to tea—and a great deal more, to all of which we, of course, paid no attention. But it was not till afterwards that even I realized the alarming business it must have been to John to walk into a room full of unknown people—dreadful critical children, girls and boys half grown up—and to put to the test a friendship of years, which had gone on without a word spoken, and now might turn out anything but what it had been expected to be. He was a little fluttered and red when Ellen, herself very nervous, brought him in, meeting all the expectant faces, which turned instinctively towards the door. Ellen herself had never come in the evening before, and the aspect of the house, with the lamps lighted, and the whole family assembled, was new to her. She came in without saying a word, and led her love, who for his part moved awkwardly and with shy hesitation, through the unknown place, threading his way among the tables and chairs, and the staring children, to where I sat. I have always said my little Chatty was the best bred of all my children. There was no one so much interested as she; but she kept her eyes upon her work, and never looked up till they were seated comfortably and beginning to look at their ease. John faltered forth what I felt sure was intended to be a very pretty speech to me, probably conned beforehand, and worthy of the occasion. But all that came forth was, ‘I have seen you often at the window.’ ‘Yes, indeed,’ I said hurriedly, ‘for years; we are old friends: we don’t require any introduction,’ and so got over it. I am afraid he said ‘ma’am.’ I see no reason why he should not say ma’am; people used to do it; and excepting us rude English, everybody in the world does it. Why should not John have used that word of respect if he chose? You say ma’am yourself to princesses when you speak to them, if you ever have the honour of speaking to them; and he thought as much of me, knowing no better, as if I had been a princess. He had a soft, refined voice. I am sure I cannot tell whether his clothes were well made or not—a woman does not look at a man’s clothes—but this I can tell you, that his face was well made. There was not a fine feature in it; but He who shaped them knew what He was about. Every line was good—truth and patience and a gentle soul shone through them. In five minutes he was at home, not saying much, but looking at us all with benevolent, tender eyes. When Chatty brought him his tea and gave him her small hand, he held it for a moment, saying, ‘This is Ellen’s pupil,’ with a look which was a benediction. ‘I should have known her anywhere,’ he said. ‘Ellen has a gift of description—and then, she is like you.’

‘Ellen has a great many gifts, Mr. Ridgway—the house is sure to be a bright one that has her for its mistress.’

He assented with a smile that lit up his face like sunshine; then shook his head, and said, ‘I wish I could see any prospect of that. The house has been built, and furnished, and set out ready for her so long. That is, alas! only in our thoughts. It is a great pleasure to imagine it; but it seems always to recede a little further—a little further. We have need of patience.’ Then he paused, and added, brightening a little, ‘Fortunately we are not impatient people, either of us.’

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘It is a great deal to take upon me—a stranger as I am.’

‘You forget,’ he said, with a bow that would not have misbecome a courtier, ‘that you were so kind as to say that we were not strangers but old friends.’

‘It is quite true. Then I will venture to speak as an old friend. I wish you were not so patient. I wish you were a hot-headed person, and would declare once for all that you would not put up with it.’

He reddened, and turned to me with a look half of alarm, half, perhaps, of incipient, possible offence. ‘You think I am too tame, too easy—not that I don’t desire with my whole heart—’

‘Not that you are not as true as the heavens themselves,’ I said, with the enthusiasm of penitence. His face relaxed and shone again, though once more he shook his head.

‘I think—I am sure—you are quite right. If I could insist I might carry my point, and it would be better. But what can I say? I understand her, and sympathize with her, and respect her. I cannot oppose her roughly, and set myself before everything. Who am I, that she should desert what she thinks her duty for me?’

‘I feel like a prophet,’ I said. ‘In this case to be selfish is the best.’

He shook his head again. ‘She could not be selfish if she tried,’ he said.

Did he mean the words for himself, too? They were neither of them selfish. I don’t want to say a word that is wicked, that may discourage the good—they were neither of them strong enough to be selfish. Sometimes there is wisdom and help in that quality which is so common. I will explain after what I mean. It does not sound true, I am well aware, but I think it is true: however in the meantime there was nothing more to be said. We began to talk of all sorts of things; of books, with which John seemed to be very well acquainted, and of pictures, which he knew too—as much, at least, as a man who had never been out of England, nor seen anything but the National Gallery, could know. He was acquainted with that by heart, knowing every picture and all that could be known about it, making me ashamed, though I had seen a great deal more than he had. I felt like one who knows other people’s possessions, but not his own. He had never been, so to speak, out of his own house; but he knew every picture on the walls there. And he made just as much use of his h’s as I do myself. If he was at first a little stiff in his demeanour, that wore off as he talked. Ellen left him entirely to me. She went off into the back drawing-room with the little ones, and made them sing standing round the piano. There was not much light, except the candles on the piano, which lighted up their small fresh faces and her own bright countenance; and this made the prettiest picture at the end of the room. While he was talking to me he looked that way, and a smile came suddenly over his face—which drew my attention also. ‘Could any painter paint that?’ he said softly, looking at them. As the children were mine, you may believe I gazed with as much admiration as he. The light seemed to come from those soft faces, not to be thrown upon them, and the depth of the room was illuminated by the rose-tints, and the whiteness, and the reflected light out of their eyes. ‘Rembrandt, perhaps,’ I said; but he shook his head, for he did not know much of Rembrandt. When they finished their little store of songs I called to Ellen to sing us something by herself. The children went away, for it was their bedtime; and all the time the good-nights were being said she played a little soft trill of prelude, very sweet, and low, and subdued. There was a harmonizing influence in her that made everything appropriate. She did things as they ought to be done by instinct, without knowing it; while he, with his gaze directed to her, felt it all more than she did—felt the softening of that undertone of harmonious accompaniment, the sweet filling up of the pause, the background of sound upon which all the little voices babbled out like the trickling of brooks. When this was over Ellen did not burst into her song all at once, as if to show how we had kept her waiting; but went on for a minute or two, hushing out the former little tumult. Then she chose another strain, and, while we all sat silent, began to sing—the song I had heard her sing to him when they were alone that summer evening. Was there a little breath in it of consciousness, a something shadowing from the life to come—‘I will come again?’ We all sat very silent and listened: he with his face turned to her, a tender smile upon it—a look of admiring pleasure. He beat time with his hand, without knowing it, rapt in the wistful, tender music, the longing sentiment, the pervading consciousness of her, in all. I believe they were both as happy as could be while this was going on. She singing to him, and knowing that she pleased him, while still conscious of the pleasure of all the rest of us, and glad to please us too; and he so proud of her, drinking it all in, and knowing it to be for him, yet feeling that he was giving us this gratification, making an offering to us of the very best that was his. Why was it, then, that we all, surrounding them, a voiceless band of spectators, felt the hidden meaning in it, and were sorry for them, with a strange impulse of pity—sorry for those two happy people, those two inseparables who had no thought but to pass their lives together? I cannot tell how it was; but so it was. We all listened with a little thrill of sympathy, as we might have looked at those whose doom we knew, but who themselves had not yet found out what was coming upon them. And at the end, Ellen too was affected in a curious sympathetic way by some mysterious invisible touch of our sympathy for her. She came out of the half-lit room behind, with trembling, hurried steps, and came close to my side, and took in both hers the hand I held out to her. ‘How silly I am!’ she cried, with a little laugh. ‘I could have thought that some message was coming to say he must go and leave me. A kind of tremor came over me all at once.’ ‘You are tired,’ I said. And no doubt that had something to do with it; but why should the same chill have crept over us all?

CHAPTER IV

The time passed on very quietly during these years. Nothing particular happened; so that looking back now—now that once more things have begun to happen, and all the peaceful children who cost me nothing but pleasant cares have grown up and are setting forth, each with his and her more serious complications, into individual life—it seems to me like a long flowery plain of peace. I did not think so then, and no doubt from time to time questions arose that were hard to answer and difficulties that cost me painful thought. But now all seems to me a sort of heavenly monotony and calm, turning years into days. In this gentle domestic quiet six months went by like an afternoon; for it was, I think, about six months after the first meeting I have just described when Ellen Harwood rushed in one morning with a scared face, to tell me of something which had occurred and which threatened to break up in a moment the quiet of her life. Mr. Ridgway had come again various times—we had daily intercourse at the window, where, when he passed, he always looked up now, and where I seldom failed to see him and give him a friendly greeting. This intercourse, though it was so slight, was also so constant that it made us very fast friends; and when Ellen, as I have said, rushed in very white and breathless one bright spring morning, full of something to tell, my first feeling was alarm. Had anything happened to John?

‘Oh, no. Nothing has happened. At least, I don’t suppose you would say anything had happened—that is, no harm—except to me,’ said Ellen, wringing her hands, ‘except to me! Oh, do you recollect that first night he came to see you, when you were so kind as to ask him, and I sang that song he is so fond of? I took fright then; I never could tell how—and now it looks as if it would all come true–’

‘As if what would come true?’

‘Somebody,’ said Ellen, sitting down abruptly in the weariness of her dejection, ‘somebody from the office is to go out directly to the Levant. Oh, Chatty, dear, you that are learning geography and everything, tell me where is the Levant? It is where the currants and raisins come from. The firm has got an establishment, and it is likely—oh, it is very likely: they all think that John, whom they trust so much—John—will be sent–’

She broke off with a sob—a gasp. She was too startled, too much excited and frightened, to have the relief of tears.

‘But that would be a very good thing, surely—it would be the very best thing for him. I don’t see any cause for alarm. My dear Ellen, he would do his work well; he would be promoted; he would be made a partner–’

‘Ah!’ She drew a long breath: a gleam of wavering light passed over her face. ‘I said you would think it no harm,’ she said mournfully, ‘no harm—except to me.’

‘It is on the Mediterranean Sea,’ said Chatty over her atlas, with a great many big round ‘Oh’s’ of admiration and wonder, ‘where it is always summer, always beautiful. Oh, Ellen, I wish I were you! but you can send us some oranges,’ the child added philosophically. Ellen gave her a rapid glance of mingled fondness and wrath.

‘You think of nothing but oranges!’ she cried (quite unjustly, I must say); then putting her hands together and fixing her wistful eyes upon me, ‘I feel,’ she said in the same breath, ‘as if the world were coming to an end.’

‘You mean it is just about beginning—for of course he will not go without you—and that is the very best thing that could happen.’

‘Oh, how can you say so? it cannot happen; it is the end of everything,’ Ellen cried, and I could not console her. She would do nothing but wring her hands and repeat her plaint, ‘It is the end of everything.’ Poor girl, apart from John her life was dreary enough, though she had never felt it dreary. Music lessons in the morning, and after that continual attendance upon an exacting fiery invalid. The only break in her round of duty had been her evening hours, her little walk and talk with John. No wonder that the thought of John’s departure filled her with a terror for which she could scarcely find words. And she never took into account the other side of the question, the solution which seemed to me so certain, so inevitable. She knew better—that, at least, whatever other way might be found out of it, could not be.

Next day in the evening, when he was going home, John himself paused as he was passing the window, and looked up with a sort of appeal. I answered by beckoning to him to come in, and he obeyed the summons very rapidly and eagerly. The spring days had drawn out, and it was now quite light when John came home. He came in and sat down beside me, in the large square projecting window, which was my favourite place. There was a mingled air of eagerness and weariness about him, as if, though excited by the new prospect which was opening before him, he was yet alarmed by the obstacles in his way, and reluctant, as Ellen herself was, to disturb the present peaceful conditions of their life. ‘I do not believe,’ he said, ‘that they will ever consent. I don’t know how we are to struggle against them. People of their age have so much stronger wills than we have. They stand to what they want, and they have it, reason or no reason.’

‘That is because you give in; you do not stand to what you want,’ I said. He looked away beyond me into the evening light, over the heads of all the people who were going and coming so briskly in the road, and sighed.

‘They have such strong wills. What can you say when people tell you that it is impossible, that they never can consent? Ellen and I have never said that, or even thought it. When we are opposed we try to think how we can compromise, how we can do with as little as possible of what we want, so as to satisfy the others. I always thought that was the good way, the nobler way,’ he said with a flush coming over his pale face. ‘Have we been making a mistake?’

‘I fear so—I think so; yes, I am sure,’ I cried. ‘Yours would be the nobler way if—if there was nobody but yourself to think of.’

He looked at me with a wondering air. ‘I think I must have expressed myself wrongly,’ he said; ‘it was not ourselves at all that we were thinking of.’

‘I know; but that is just what I object to,’ I said. ‘You sacrifice yourselves, and you encourage the other people to be cruelly selfish, perhaps without knowing it. All that is virtue in you is evil in them. Don’t you see that to accept this giving up of your life is barbarous, it is wicked, it is demoralizing to the others. Just in so much as people think well of you they will be forced to think badly of them.’

He was a little startled by this view, which, I confess, I struck out on the spur of the moment, not really seeing how much sense there was in it. I justified myself afterwards to myself, and became rather proud of my argument; but for a woman to argue, much less suggest, that self-sacrifice is not the chief of all virtues, is terrible. I was half frightened and disgusted with myself, as one is when one has brought forward in the heat of partisanship a thoroughly bad, yet, for the moment, effective argument. But he was staggered, and I felt the thrill of success which stirs one to higher effort.

‘I never thought of that; perhaps there is some truth in it,’ he said. Then, after a pause, ‘I wonder if you, who have been so good to us all, who are fond of Ellen—I am sure you are fond of Ellen—and the children like her.’

‘Very fond of Ellen, and the children all adore her,’ I said with perhaps unnecessary emphasis.

‘To me that seems natural,’ he said, brightening. ‘But yet what right have we to ask you to do more? You have been as kind as it is possible to be.’

‘You want me to do something more? I will do whatever I can—only speak out.’

‘It was this,’ he said, ‘if you would ask—you who are not an interested party—if you would find out what our prospects are. Ellen does not want to escape from her duty. There is nothing we are not capable of sacrificing rather than that she should shrink from her duty. I need not tell you how serious it is. If I don’t take this—in case it is offered to me—I may never get another chance again; but, if I must part from Ellen, I cannot accept it. I cannot; it would be like parting one’s soul from one’s body. But I have no confidence in myself any more than Ellen has. They have such strong wills. If they say it must not and cannot be—what can I reply? I know myself. I will yield, and so will Ellen. How can one look them in the face and say, ‘Though you are her father and mother, we prefer our own comfort to yours?’

‘Do not say another word. I will do it,’ I said, half exasperated, half sympathetic—oh, yes! more than half sympathetic. They were fools; but I understood it, and was not surprised, though I was exasperated. ‘I will go and beard the lion in his den,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they will not let me see the lion, only his attendant. But remember this,’ I said vindictively, ‘if Ellen and you allow yourselves to be conquered, if you are weak and throw away all your hopes, never come to me again. I have made up my mind. You must give up me as well as all the rest. I will not put up with such weakness.’ John stared at me with alarm in his eyes; he was not quite comfortable even when I laughed at my own little bit of tragedy. He shook his head with a melancholy perplexity.

‘I don’t see clearly,’ he said; ‘I don’t seem able to judge. To give in is folly; and yet, when you think—supposing it were duty—suppose her father were to die when she was far away from him?’

‘If we were to consider all these possibilities there never would be a marriage made—never an independent move in life,’ I cried. ‘Parents die far from their children, and children, alas! from their parents. How could it be otherwise? But God is near to us all. If we were each to think ourselves so all-important, life would stand still; there would be no more advance, no progress; everything would come to an end.’

John shook his head; partly it was in agreement with what I said, partly in doubt for himself. ‘How am I to stand up to them and say, “Never mind what you want—we want something else?” There’s the rub,’ he said, still slowly shaking his head. He had no confidence in his own power of self-assertion. He had never, I believe, been able to answer satisfactorily the question, why should he have any special thing which some one else wished for? It was as natural to him to efface himself, to resign his claims, as it was to other men to assert them. And yet in this point he could not give up—he could not give Ellen up, come what might; but neither could he demand that he and she should be permitted to live their own life.

After long deliberation I decided that it would not be expedient to rush across to Pleasant Place at once and get it over while John and Ellen were taking their usual evening walk, which was my first impulse; but to wait till the morning, when all would be quiet, and the invalid and his wife in their best humour. It was not a pleasant errand; the more I thought of it, the less I liked it. If they were people who could demand such a sacrifice from their daughter, was it likely that they would be so far moved by my arguments as to change their nature? I went through the little smoky garden plot, where the familiar London ‘blacks’ lay thick on the grass, on the sweetest May morning, when it was a pleasure to be alive. The windows were open, the little white muslin curtains fluttering. Up-stairs I heard a gruff voice asking for something, and another, with a querulous tone in it, giving a reply. My heart began to beat louder at the sound. I tried to keep up my courage by all the arguments I could think of. Nevertheless, my heart sank down into my very shoes when the little maid, with her apron folded over her arm, and as grimy as ever, opened to me—with a curtsey and a ‘La!’ of delighted surprise—this door of fate.

CHAPTER V