The Two Marys

“Oh, why can’t I provide for it?” I cried. “Why can’t I die too? That would be the best way.”

And then she was angry – half angry – as much as it was in her nature to be. And presently I found myself alone, and had to sit down and think it over, and make up my mind to it, as one has so often to do in this life. I had to teach myself to see how good it was. And I did. I made up my mind to it. What was there else in heaven or earth – as I could not die with my only friend, or compel her to live, what was there else that I could do?

CHAPTER IX

NEXT morning when I woke, the impression on my mind was, that Mrs Tufnell must have died in the night. I cannot tell why I thought so, but I woke with such a horror in my mind, that I threw a shawl over my shoulders and rushed to her door to ask how she was, before I could take breath. She was not up; but smiled at me from her bed, where she lay with all the pictures and the portraits of her friends about her, the centre of a silent company. “I am quite well – better than usual,” she said; but I think she knew the meaning of my terror, and felt that after all that had been said it was natural I should be afraid. This perhaps threw just a little cloud upon her serenity too, during the morning, for however calmly one may think of dying, I suppose it must startle one to see that others are thinking of it. I suppose so – it seems natural. She was very grave, thoughtful, and somewhat silent during the forenoon; and when I went and sat down by her, and asked her to forgive me, and said I was ready to do whatever she thought best, she took me into her arms and cried and kissed me. “Oh, that it should be necessary to change!” she said. “I do not feel as if I could face the change – but, Mary, for your good – ”

It was about noon as we thus sat talking it over. It comforted me to see that she liked it as little as I did; that she would rather have kept me with her to the last moment of her life. But then what should I have done? – this was what she thought of. We were talking it all over very seriously, with more pain than either of us would show. It was a chilly winter morning. The room was bright, to be sure, with a good fire burning, and all the comforts that so many poor people are without; but there was a chill that went to one’s heart – the chill of the grave for her, which she thought near; and the chill of the outside world, from which she had sheltered me so long, for me. I remember the look of that morning – there was a black frost outside which bound all the dry street, and seemed to hold the naked trees in the square so fast that they dared not rustle, though an icy wind was blowing through them. There were traces still on the windows, notwithstanding the fire, of the frosty network of the night. The sun had begun to shine as it approached noon, but even the sun was white and cold, and seemed rather to point out how chilly the world was, than to warm it. After we had got through all our explanations and said all that was to be said, and arranged that Mary was to be invited to the Square with her child to spend a week of the holidays and arrange everything, we still kept sitting together holding each other’s hands, not saying much. I could not pretend that I liked it even to please her, and she did not like it, though she thought it right; but all the same it was settled, and there was nothing more to say.

It was all settled by twelve o’clock, fixed and decided with that double certainty which is given by pain. If we had liked it we should not have felt half so sure. At half-past twelve the mid-day post came in, and I was still sitting by my dear old lady, holding her hand, feeling my heart sink lower and lower every moment, thinking how I should have to leave her when she wanted me most – when Mrs Tufnell’s maid came in with the letters. She gave some to her mistress, and she gave one to me. I do not think I recognised the writing at first. But I got few letters, and it gave me a little thrill of agitation, I could not quite tell why. It was a foreign letter, with a number of unintelligible postmarks. I got up and went to the window, partly because my heart began to beat very loud, and partly to leave Mrs Tufnell at liberty to read her letters. I recollect looking out unconsciously and seeing the dried-up, dusty, frosty look of everything, the ice-wind sweeping the dust round the corners, the bare shivering trees – with a momentary thrill of sensation that my life was like that, dried-up, frost-bound, for ever and ever. And then, with my fingers trembling and my heart beating, and a consciousness of something coming, I could not tell what, I opened the envelope and found – This was what I found; without any preface or introduction – without anything to soften the difference between what was before my eyes and what was going to be.

There was no beginning to the letter; there were a good many blots in it, as if it had been written with a hand which was not very steady. There was not even a date until the end. He who had written it had been as much agitated as she who read it; and she who read it did so as in a dream, not knowing where she was standing, feeling the world and the white curtains and the frosty square to be going round and round with her, making a buzzing in her ears and a thumping against her breast.

What a plunge into a new world – into an old world – into a world not realised, not possible, and yet so strange in its fascination, so bewildering! Was it a dream – or could it be true?

“I have long wanted, and often tried, to write to you again. I do not know now whether I may or whether I ought. If this letter should come to another man’s wife, if it should fall into your hands in such changed circumstances that you will scarcely remember the writer’s name – and I cannot hide from myself that all this may be the case – then forgive me, Mary, and put it in the fire without further thought. It will not be for you, in your new life, but for someone else whom you will have forgotten, though I can never forget her. But if you are still little Mary Peveril as you used to be, oh, read it! and try to throw your thoughts back to the time when you knew me – when we used to meet. You were not much more than a child. How much I have thought of that time; how often and often I have gone over it in my thoughts I need not tell you. You were badly used, dear Mary. I was wrong – I will say it humbly on my knees if you like: having got your promise and your heart – for I did have that, if only for a little while – nothing could have justified me in appearing for one moment to place you otherwise than first in all I did or said. I will not excuse myself by saying how much startled I was by the sight of Miss Martindale, nor how anxious I was to know whether my mother had any share, or what share she had, in her disappearance from our house. I will say nothing about all that, but only that I was wrong, wrong without any excuse. Had I thought of what I was risking by my curiosity, I would have bitten my tongue out sooner than have asked a single question. Do you think, could you think, that I would have sacrificed you to the old foolish business which was over years before? I was an utter fool, I allow, but not such a fool as that. Therefore, Mary dear, dearest, whom I have always thought of, listen to me again; take me back again! I will beg your pardon a hundred and a thousand times. I will humbly do whatever penance you may appoint me; but listen to me now. You would not listen to me at first – and perhaps I was not so ready at first to acknowledge how wrong I was. I have had five long years to think of it, and I see it all. You were rightly angry, dear, and I was wrong; and if ever man repented, I have repented. Mary, Mary! take me back!

“I have been wandering about the world all this time, working and doing well enough. I can offer you something better now than the little cottage we once spoke of, though that would have been Paradise. I am leaving along with this letter, and hope to arrive in England almost as soon. I do not ask you to write – unless indeed you would, of your own sweet kindness – one word – to Chester Street? But even if you don’t do that, I will go to Russell Square in the hope of finding you. Mary! don’t break my heart. You liked me once. If I knew what to say that would move you, I would make this letter miles long; but I don’t know what more to say, except that I love you better than ever, and no one but you; and that I am coming back to England for you, for you only – half hopeless, only determined to try once more. Perhaps by the time you have read this I may be at your door.

“Ever and ever yours,“George Durham.”

“Mary!” cried some one calling me; “Mary, what is the matter? Have you bad news, my dear? Mary! Good gracious, the child will faint! Mary, don’t you hear me?”

“Oh, hush, hush!” I cried, not knowing what I said. “Hark! listen! is that him at the door?”

It was not him just then; and after a little while the curtains stopped going round, and the floor and the Square and everything about grew solid and steady, and I came to myself. To myself, yes – but not to the same self as had been sitting so sadly holding my old lady’s hand. What a change all in a moment! If I had not been so happy, I should have been ashamed to think that a man’s letter could all in a moment make such a change in a woman’s life. It is demoralising to the last degree – it comes in the way of all the proper efforts of education and independent thought, and everything that is most necessary and elevating. If in a moment, without any virtue of yours, without any exertion of yours, you are to have your existence all altered for you – the greyness turned into brightness, the labour into ease, the poverty into wealth – how is it to be supposed that you can be trained aright? It is demoralising: but it is very pleasant. Oh, the change in one half-hour!

But I should find it very difficult to explain to anyone how it was that I behaved like a rational creature at this moment, and did not take a bad turn and torture him and myself with objections. It was not wisdom on my part; I think it was the absolute suddenness of the whole transaction. Had he left me more time to think, or prepared me for his reception, my pride and my delicacy would have come in, and probably I should have thrown away both his happiness and my own. But fortunately he arrived that very afternoon, before the first excitement was over, and hearing that Miss Peveril was at home, and that the servants had not been forbidden to admit him, walked upstairs when I was not thinking, and took possession of me as if there had been no doubt on the subject. Mrs Tufnell was begging me to write to him at the very moment. I had shown her my letter, and she was full of excitement about it. “Be an honest girl, Mary,” she was saying: “a girl should not worry a man like that: you ought to be frank and open, and send him a word to meet him when he comes home. Say you are as fond of him as he is of you – ”

“No, I could not – I could not,” I was beginning to say; when suddenly something overshadowed us, and a big, ringing voice said behind me, “How could she? Let us be reasonable.” Reasonable! After that there was no more to say.

But if it had not all passed like a dream; if he had not been so sudden; if he had taken more time and more, care – the chances are, I know, that I should have behaved like a fool, and hesitated and questioned, and been proud and been foolish. As it was, I had to be honest and happy – there was no time for anything else.

This was of course the ending of the whole matter. I have often wondered whether, had my dear old lady been burdened with the anxiety of her charge of me, she would have died. As it is, she has not died. She lives with us often now, and we with her. On my wedding day she talked of departing in peace; but so far from departing in peace, she has been stronger ever since, and has a complexion any girl of twenty might envy. When I look back to Southampton Street and to Russell Square, where I was so unhappy, they all grow delightful and beautiful to me. It was very bad, no doubt (I suppose), while it lasted, but how I smile now at all my dolours! The delightful fact that they are over makes them pleasant. “That is how it will be, Mary,” my dearest old lady says, “with all our sorrows, when we die and get safely out of them. We shall smile – I know it – and wonder how we could have made such a fuss over those momentary woes.” This is a serious way of ending a story, which after all has turned out merely a love-story, a thing I never contemplated when I began to confide my early miseries to you. How miserable I was! and how it all makes me smile now!

As for Mary – the other Mary – we carried out that arrangement for her which had been proposed for me. We bought Grove House for her. I do not know what we could have done better. I never see that she is dull or weary of her life. What languors she may have she keeps from common view. Little Jack has grown a great boy, and she is very happy in him. But she does not give herself up to him, like so many mothers. “I must keep my own life,” she said to me once, when I wanted her to give up, to live quietly at home and devote herself to my little brother alone. “He will go out into the world after a while,” she went on; “he must, he has to make his way – and I, what should I do then? follow him or stay at home all alone? – No! I must keep my own life.” And so she does. Happiness? I cannot tell if she has happiness: so many people get on without that – though some of us, I thank God humbly on my knees, have it without deserving it – without having done anything for it. Mary, I believe, never takes time to ask herself how about that. She said so once; she is not unhappy, and never will be; she has her life.

GROVE ROAD, HAMPSTEAD

CHAPTER I

“WHERE shall we go first? that is the only question. I know there are a hundred places to go to. Westminster and Whitehall, and the Tower, and St Paul’s, and to see the pictures, and the river, and the Temple, and Cheapside. We cannot, of course,” cried the eager girl, half regretfully, half pleased with the certainty of so much excitement, “see them all in one day.”

“Considering that they are at different points of the compass, no,” said the father, a serious man, who rarely relaxed even with his children. They were seated round a breakfast table in a London hotel – not one of the great caravansaries of the present day, but a small, grey, comfortable, quiet, very dear hotel in a little London street not far from Piccadilly. The houses opposite seemed almost within reach of their hands to the two girls, fresh and young and eager, who had for the first time that morning opened their eyes upon England. England! The thought made the blood dance in their veins. It was a little disenchanting, no doubt, to look out upon those grey houses opposite; but the fog through which the said houses loomed vaguely had an attraction of its own. A London fog: it was the right medium through which to see the metropolis of the world: they were almost as much interested in it as in Hyde Park or St Paul’s. They were interested in everything; the very names of the streets made their hearts beat. They had arrived from Canada in the great steamboat the day before, had travelled up from Liverpool through a country veiled in the early and lingering dusk of a winter afternoon – for, though it was nominally spring, it was still winter – and entered London in the dark. When they opened their eyes this morning it had been, as they thought, upon a new world. They could hear the noise of wheels in Piccadilly, and that sound also went to their hearts. All England was before them. They had heard of it all their lives, and this arrival had been before them for months, a sensation keenly anticipated, and experienced now with a commotion of their whole being. Notwithstanding, it was a very ordinary table at which they sat, scarcely able to eat anything for sheer excitement. The room was somewhat dingy. The fog pressed upon the window like something palpable, the houses opposite looming grimly through it. There was very little in their external surroundings to justify the sublimated state of their feelings; but Grace and Milly Yorke wanted nothing to justify their feelings. These sentiments sustained themselves. They had never been out of Canada before, but England, as long as they could recollect, had been called “home” to them. They had said, “We are going home,” when they communicated the great news to their friends. And now the moment had come to which they had looked forward for years.

Their father was not moved by the same ecstatic sentiments. He was not Canadian born, as they were. He had left England about thirty years before, and probably his return had recalled some feelings that were not altogether delightful. He was an angular, tall man, not unlike the commonly received type of an American, with a long face, somewhat sunken cheeks, a very resolute and determined mouth – altogether grey and rugged, like a gnarled tree. His eyes were deep-set and apt to get a fiery sparkle in them on occasions. He was a man of hot temper and inflexible obstinacy, not easy to deal with. But he was never ill-tempered to his children. The boys, indeed, were often more or less in conflict with their father; but to the girls he was always gentle and kind. Perhaps they knew better how to glide over all shoals and reefs, and find the safe channel to his favour. They and their mother knew very well what subjects it was best to avoid. They had put up danger signals on every side, and warned each other off this and that difficulty with a glance. They did this without intention, only half conscious of their own diplomacy. But so it was, that the girls were on the best of terms with their father, and to them he never said a hasty or unkind word. He sat very gravely between them, his countenance taking no reflection from the light in theirs. He was disposed rather to say, Confound the fog. He thought London just as dingy and disagreeable as it always had been; but he said nothing. The girls! The girls had their heads turned, poor children. He would not say anything to disturb their illusion. Let them entertain it as long as they could. But he had other things to think of. His mind was thronged with recollections. England was not to him a historical country, a place full of poetry, full of great events; but a very real world, with his own past in it, and many a thought and intent of which the girls knew nothing. He sat between them, scarcely hearing their eager chatter, but recalling with all the force of reality, as if they had happened yesterday, the circumstances which had attended his going away. He had not been very many years older than Grace, he recollected, with a sort of wondering half amusement; but how clear it was! Yesterday was not clearer – not so clear, indeed – for yesterday was nothing very important in his life; whereas that day —

“It is quite true what Mr Winthrop said. I never saw anything so poetical,” said Grace; “such a wonderful dreamy vista! – don’t you think so, papa? When you look out to the end of the street you can’t tell what it is you see. The light is just like a dull topaz – wasn’t that what Mr Winthrop said? and you can’t tell what is beyond; it might be palaces or mountains, or one can’t tell what. And to think it is England! and then that sort of roar of the carriages. It is not like the sea; it is like – Oh, why should one try for similes? – it is like – just London, I suppose.”

“Wait till you know a little more about London,” said the father, “before you pronounce what it’s like.”

“One knows,” said Grace, with a little solemnity. “One does not need to wait. I suppose London is like no other place in the world.”

“Perhaps not,” Yorke said with a half laugh; “but you will never know what it is if you should live a hundred years.”

He spoke in one sense, they responded in another.

“I can believe that,” said Grace, with the same gravity. “It is a mystery. We cannot know, but we can divine.”

“God forbid!” her father said, and then he changed his tone. “Westminster is one way and St Paul’s another,” he said. “You can’t go both ways at once. You had better make up your minds which you will have.”

And then a little argument ensued. The girls had read a great deal, and they had good memories. One of them espoused the cause of St Paul’s and the other that of Westminster: the one going over the glorious inhabitants of the Abbey, demanding, with Milton —

“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bonesThe labour of an age in pilèd stones?”

though I hope they knew that Shakespeare was not there – while the other launched herself upon Tennyson’s ode —

“Mighty Seaman, this is he,Was great by land as thou by sea.”

The father remained quite silent in the midst of it all. It seemed, indeed, as if he had betrayed them into this fanciful controversy on purpose that he might be able to take refuge in his own thoughts. What was Westminster or St Paul’s to him? His mind was busy with events which no poet had ever celebrated, which had never been put into history. Neither wife nor children knew of them – only some people at home, people who might be dead long ago, whom he had not heard of, and who had not heard of him for thirty years. He got the required leisure and quiet to think this all over while the others were busy with their poetry. They appealed to him, and he gave them a little nod and half smile, one of those smiles that are but for a moment, a gleam of enforced attention instantly falling back into the gravity of prevailing thought. The decision finally was for Westminster. As for these young people, they did not know the difference between St Paul’s and the Abbey. They were both old, reverend, glorious structures to Grace and Milly; but what it might be that made the difference between them they did not know. One meant Poets’ Corner, the other that about the mighty Seaman. They had never seen a Gothic cathedral in their lives.

And perhaps it is not ignorance so profound as this that is qualified to see and understand what is best. The girls read the names on the monuments with a kind of silent ecstasy of wonder. To think that they, two little girls from Canada, should actually be treading the storied pavement in Poets’ Corner, and should be able to read with their own eyes the names upon those monuments, and see the Kings and Queens lying in marble, in solemn state, and touch with their little living modern fingers the chair in which the Confessor had sat! Could anything be more wonderful? They went through it all as if they were in a dream, looking at the monuments, reading all the names, thinking it was their own want of clear historical knowledge that made them at a loss about one here and there. But the Abbey itself was above their comprehension. They thought the Houses of Parliament finer, and were a little shocked that everything should be so grey and old. When you have seen nothing that is not new, all your life, it is difficult to understand the darkening of ages. But they spent the entire morning in one dream of pleasure, their hearts standing still as they came upon name after name, which they had heard of all their lives. There too was Whitehall, and that gloomy window, of which, perhaps, it is not true that from thence King Charles stepped to his execution; but they were not too critical; and they walked up the Mall to St James’s Palace with a little thrill of easier admiration (which they thought rather vulgar in themselves, and were disposed to blush at) for the Lifeguardsmen on their horses. The little dingy old palace wounded their feelings somewhat, and brought down the bewildering splendour of imagination into very shabby limits; but they got over that. When they were not silent with awe, or with the shock of trying to reconcile to their own ideal something that fell short of it, they were talking all the way, calling upon each other to see this or that, reading out even the names of the streets to each other with many an “Oh, Milly!” and “Oh, Grace!” They were so absorbed in their sight-seeing that they never noticed the people who looked after them, the amused admiring looks with which the passers-by would contemplate their fresh faces. They were very fresh faces, delicate in colour, clear and animated, and so full of interest that their superabundant life brightened the foggy street. But fortunately the fog had lifted a little, and all the ghostly houses round the park, and the leafless trees, became more real under the mid-day radiance of a veiled sun doing his best to break through; and if they had thought the fog poetical before, you may imagine what they thought it now, with those rays streaming into it. It could not be real, they said to each other; by-and-by they would wake up and find themselves, let us say, in that other London which is on the farther side of the Atlantic. It could not be real; it was too wonderful to be true.