Chapter I: ‘plunged in the Depth of Helpless Poverty.’

A girl-woman alone on Battersea Bridge, reading a letter in the December sunset--one of those mild autumnal afternoons which hang upon the skirts of winter. A girl in years--a woman in cares. Dark brown eyes set in a pale, sharply set face; mouth rosy and beautiful in form, but too firm in its lines to be altogether lovely in a woman. A girl whom the passers by look at interrogatively, wondering that so much beauty should go alone, and so poorly clad. Her clothes are not common, but shabby--a black silk dress that has once been handsome and fashionable; a black felt hat trimmed with threadbare velvet; a sealskin jacket worn bald at the edges, and dull with exposure to hard weather; gloves which indicate that to be gloved at all has cost the wearer a struggle; boots whose decay is no less evident than the symmetry of the slender feet they cover. She walks listlessly up and down the pavement of the bridge--just the one quiet promenade to be found in this neighbourhood--reading a letter from home, or the place which was her home two years ago. She has seen much of the world during these two years,--in her own opinion too much, for she has seen not the fair and shining fabric in life’s loom, but the ragged sleave thereof.

This is the letter which she reads, not once, but three times over, with deepest attention, as she paces up and down the quiet old bridge, while the sunset fades from the cold gray river, and from that Dutch picture of old red roofs and water-side shanties on the Middlesex shore, which painters have loved, and which the Thames Embankment may perchance have blotted out by this time:--

‘_Redcastle, December 11th, 186-._

‘MY DEAR SIBYL,

‘An event has happened which I think likely to exercise a
wonderful influence for good upon all our lives. Stephen
Trenchard, your mother’s brother, the uncle Stephen you have all
talked about as children, and whose wealth was your poor mother’s
boast, has returned to England, after nearly thirty years’
absence, yellow, wrinkled, withered, and eccentric in manners and
habits, but I think not unkindly disposed to any of us. He has
taken a house at Redcastle, and is anxious to have his nieces
about him, as he calls it. Marion has already exchanged the
discomforts and deprivations of a parish doctor’s household for
the Oriental luxuries of Lancaster Lodge. I dare say you remember
the house, a square stone building with two tall iron gates, and
two lodges within thirty yards of the hall door. Some people
will have grandeur at the sacrifice of consistency. He seems--I
mean your uncle Stephen--to have taken a great fancy to Marion.
I meet her lolling in his barouche, trying to look as if she had
been accustomed to ride in a three hundred guinea carriage all
her life, and really doing it very well. Jenny has also been to
see her uncle, but he thought her rough and uncultivated, and I
fear that, with her present deficiency of manners, she has little
chance of pleasing him. I have sent her to Miss Mercer’s, as a
day scholar, since Michaelmas, but as she _will_ talk to the boys
going and returning, I really think the change is doing her more
harm than good. I have dined with Mr. Trenchard, and can assure
you that the splendour of his table is something to remember. I
don’t pretend to be a judge of wines, though I could give you
a lecture upon tannic acid, alcohol, and so on--experience, to
my mind, being better than theory, and my opportunities of the
rarest--but I know that after dining with Stephen Trenchard I
felt as if my veins ran quicksilver. Well, my dear, I want you
to have your chance as well as Marion, and I think the best and
wisest course for you will be to beg a month’s holiday from your
employer, Mrs. Hazleton, and come to spend Christmas with your
poor old uncle Robert. No doubt if you do, your rich old uncle
Stephen will ask you to transfer your society to Lancaster Lodge,
and then you and Marion will have equal chances. I dare say it
will end by his asking one or both of you to live with him and
keep his house. He has, I believe, something like a million to
leave behind him, and you three girls are his nearest relations,
and his natural heirs. He has spoken very kindly of your mother.

‘Let me know what Mrs. Hazleton says about a holiday. If a month
is too much you might ask for a fortnight. I should think it most
unlikely that you need ever return to her. With such a man as old
Trenchard for your uncle, and well disposed towards you, your
teaching days ought to be over.

‘Your affectionate Uncle,
‘ROBERT FAUNTHORPE.’

‘My teaching days,’ repeats the young woman, bitterly. ‘He little knows that they were the height of luxury compared to what has come after them.’

The letter is addressed to--

MISS FAUNTHORPE,
AT MRS. HAZLETON’S, 19, LOWTHER STREET,
ECCLESTON SQUARE.

It has been re-addressed by an humble friend of Miss Faunthorpe’s, in the person of Mrs. Hazleton’s housemaid, who has enclosed the letter in an envelope directed to--

MRS. STANMORE,
AT MRS. BONNY’S, 11, DIXON STREET,
CHELSEA.

An address which indicates a descent in the social scale from the semi-Belgravian gentility of Lowther Street, Eccleston Square. And how comes Miss Faunthorpe to be Mrs. Stanmore, while her affectionate uncle, Robert Faunthorpe, remains unaware of a transmutation which must needs have some influence for good or evil on his niece’s future career? Marriage is one of those inadvertences which can hardly go for nothing even in the easiest life.

‘So Marion is exhibiting herself about Redcastle in a three hundred guinea barouche,’ says Mrs. Stanmore, putting the letter in her pocket, ‘while I have hardly shoes to my feet. I--who was supposed to be the handsome sister, and the clever sister, and the lucky sister! And I dare not show my face in Redcastle, not even if half a million of money is to be lost by my absence. To think that uncle Stephen should choose just this particular time for his return; to think that he should return at all, when Marion and I made up our minds ever so long ago that he was little better than a myth, and was sure to have married a begum without telling anybody, and to die in India, leaving all his money to horrid copper-coloured children. Lucky for Marion!’

Then, after a pause, leaving the bridge and entering the shabby street leading to Cheyne Walk, she continues her self-communing thus:--

‘What shall I say to uncle Robert? Suppose he were to come to town and call at Mrs. Hazleton’s. He may have money now to pay for the journey. It was safe enough before. Poor uncle Robert never had a spare pound, or ever wasted a shilling, except the shillings he had to pay for summonses because of being behindhand with the taxes. If he should come up to London? Or if uncle Stephen should be in town and call in Lowther Street? More likely that. Anglo-Indians are such active creatures. What am I to do?’

Thus disjointedly run her thoughts, as she walks--very quickly now--along the narrow, shabby street, past the fried-fish shop, and the pork butcher’s, and the emporium for second-hand goods--from a picture of the Holy Family, after Raffaelle, very much framed, to a flat iron, or a pair of bluchers--the greengrocer’s, also coal merchant, the cook-shop, with its steam-tarnished windows and reeking odour of boiled beef and stick-jaw pudding.

‘That reminds me,’ Mrs. Stanmore says to herself, as the reek of cooked provisions salutes her nostrils, ‘there’s nothing for dinner.’

She pauses and takes counsel with herself. Her eye wanders from the cook-shop to the fishmonger’s, thence ranges to the pork butcher’s. Her election lies among these. Cambridge sausages are savoury, but dear; and Mrs. Bonny, the landlady, has a trick of overdoing all things entrusted to her culinary art. A pound of Cambridge sausages, reduced to grounds and grease, are hardly worth the shilling they cost. Boiled beef is expensive and weighs heavy. For a cheap relish, a zest which shall make bread and butter supply the place of dinner, your fishmonger is your best friend. Mrs. Stanmore patronizes the finny tribe. She selects an eight-penny haddock, dried and salted, from the merchant’s store, and carries it home with her, rolled up in brown paper. She stops at the cheap baker’s for a half-quartern loaf, with which the bit over is not unacceptable. ‘I wonder what Marion would think if she could see me now?’ she asks herself; ‘Marion who always complained of my pride, and called herself the Cinderella of the family. Her Cinderella-ship never brought her so low as this.’

Home! bitter mockery of a sweet word. She turns out of the shabby street into a street still shabbier, narrow, dirty, and out at elbows. Yet at its worst not quite so bad as a modern street under the same conditions, for the red brick houses are substantial and roomy, and the worm-eaten oaken window-frames shut out the wind better than the speculative builder’s warped and shrunken deal.

The house which Mrs. Stanmore enters is dark and gloomy. The wail of a fretful child sounds from the basement as she lets herself in at the street door with a convenient latch-key. A glimmer from the kitchen stairs is the only light visible, and to this glimmer Mrs. Stanmore seems to address herself.

‘I’ve brought home a haddock, Mrs. Bonny. Will you be kind enough to broil it at six o’clock?’

‘Oh, very well,’ answers a querulous voice from unseen depths below. ‘You can put the ’addock on the window-sill. I’ll come and fetch it when I’ve got time; but I can’t say nothink about its being done by six, for my fire’s got low after ironin’. The parlour has gone out to tea.’

This last remark has a reproachful sound, as who should say, ‘You never spare me trouble by going out visiting.’

Mrs. Stanmore deposits the dried fish, and ascends the dark, old-fashioned staircase, smelling of mice, whose hurried scamper is audible behind the mouldering wainscot. One room, the first-floor front, comprises Mr. and Mrs. Stanmore’s share of number eleven, Dixon Street. It is happily a rather large room, with three windows, provided with old-fashioned window-seats. The furniture is old like the house, worn and dingy, but solid furniture that has served several generations of housekeepers and a ragged regiment of lodgers. In the glow of a cheery little fire the dim old room has a homely, not unfriendly look. The old tent bedstead has been pushed into the most obscure corner. There are two arm-chairs, with faded chintz covers, a sofa, large and ponderous. There is a round table opposite the wide old fireplace, and another table against the wall, surmounted by a japanned iron tea-tray of a bright red ground with a landscape in the middle, a rosewood tea-caddy, a pair of blown glass decanters, empty, a family Bible--the landlady’s--a ragged copy of Byron’s ‘Don Juan,’ and two odd duodecimo volumes of ‘Tom Jones,’ in brown calf--the lodger’s.

Mrs. Stanmore lights a small paraffine lamp, takes off jacket and hat, and proceeds to prepare the evening meal. She has tea-things and tea-kettle to her hand in the roomy and mousey old closet beside the fireplace--such a closet as is only to be found in old houses, large enough for half a dozen burglars to hide in, or a whole nursery of children to play in, and with all manner of odd corners and shelves, and perchance an inner cupboard lurking mysteriously in its paneled recesses.

Mrs. Stanmore fills the kettle, and sets out the tea-things on the red japanned tray, and cuts a plate of bread and butter, and makes a round of toast deftly enough, though a year ago she was about the least handy of her sex in such small domestic offices. That stern schoolmistress, necessity, has taught her many things. How young she looks in the ruddy light of the fire, as she kneels on the hearth-rug toasting that round of bread for the poor meal that is to be dinner, tea, and supper, all in one for Mrs. Bonny’s first-floor lodgers!--how young and how pretty! every feature so daintily fashioned, eyes so darkly lustrous, colouring so delicate; young, and with much need of love and sympathy, of comfort and careful tendance.

‘And so uncle Stephen has really come home--richer than we ever made him in our dreams when we were children--and Marion is tasting all the pleasures his wealth can buy for her, Marion whom I pitied so when I left her behind me at Redcastle. She might pity me now, from the depth of her heart, if she could see me. She might have written to tell me the change in her fortunes--selfish thing. I suppose it is on account of my not answering her last two letters--such stupid letters as they were too--full of “I hope you are free from cold,” and “I trust you are enjoying the nice autumn weather”--and Uncle Robert’s rheumatic gout.’

She lapses into deeper meditation, looking into a red cavern in the heart of the fire, forgetful of the toast which hangs despondently upon the twopenny tin toasting-fork, shaped like Neptune’s trident. Meditation full of rue, for she has done the most foolish thing a woman can do, except one, which is to repent too late of her folly; and she is fast coming to that ultimate stage of foolishness, vain regret for an irrevocable act.

She is still kneeling in front of the fire, absent-minded, absorbed, when the door opens, and a young man comes in, slowly, heavily, like one who brings no gladness with him, and has no hope of finding comfort at home. He comes quietly to the hearth, lays his hand upon Sibyl’s shoulder, and addresses her not unkindly, but with little warmth in his tone.

‘Well, little old woman, brooding over the fire as usual? What’s the matter now?’

‘Not much more than usual,’ his wife answers, without looking up. ‘You’ve had your customary luck, I suppose?’ she inquires, after a pause, during which her husband has taken off his shabby overcoat, and flung himself into one of the arm-chairs.

‘Yes, the wheel of fortune hasn’t turned the other way yet. It revolves persistently, but always--like the planets--in the same direction. The immutable laws of bad luck are not to be abrogated in my favour. The fellows I wanted to see--butterfly friends of the past, who might lend me a fiver if I could catch them in the right humour--were all out. The situation I applied for has been given to somebody else. They had a hundred and thirty-nine applicants, the principal told me, and gave the berth to the applicant who dotted his i’s with the nearest approach to mathematical precision. “We take a man’s handwriting as the physical expression of his mental bias,” said the principal, “and what we want is precision.” Now you know I never dot my i’s at all, or if I do the dot is so far from the letter as to make my meaning all the more unintelligible. So much for the clerkship. The commission agency we saw advertised turns out a “do.” Agent required to put down fifty pounds as a guarantee of _bona fides_. I applied for an agency in the wine trade, offered to a young gentleman moving in good society and able to push a new brand of champagne; but when the wine merchant saw me, he asked, rather pertinently, if I moved in good society in this coat. I told him I was a gentleman by birth and education, and knew some of the best people in London. “Very likely, my dear sir,” replies the grape-doctor, “but you don’t visit them. We want young men who dress well, and look as if they could afford to drink the wine they recommend; men who have the appearance of wealth with the unscrupulousness of poverty.” Rather neatly put by our friend the gooseberry-fermenter, wasn’t it?’

‘And you have done nothing, earned nothing, are no nearer earning anything than you were yesterday?’ asks Sibyl, without lifting her eyes to his face.

Yet the time was, not a year ago, when to gaze upon that countenance seemed to her like reading a poem, when every turn of the handsome head, every sparkle of the dark eyes--eyes ever of uncertain hue but always dark--was a thing to remember and dream about;--when to watch him across a crowded room was quiet happiness, all-sufficing for an exacting love--when to hear his voice, gay or grave, was sweeter than music.

And now he sits a few paces from her, worn out, weary, dispirited, in sore need of comfort, and she cannot raise her eyes from moody contemplation of the fire. The difference is marked, the reason obvious. A year ago he was an undeclared lover--to-day he is an actual husband. Then there was not a many-petalled flower which did not suggest the question, ‘Loves me, loves me not?’ Now he has loved her and won her, and they have essayed to sail along the river of life together, and found the navigation difficult--ay, hard and bitter as that weedy swamp through which Sir Samuel Baker’s craft was toilfully dragged under Afric’s torrid sky.

‘You couldn’t give a neater definition of my position,’ replies Alex Secretan, otherwise Stanmore. He has striven to hide his destitution under an assumed name, just as his wife has kept the secret of an imprudent marriage by retaining a false address. Either mystery may be discovered at any moment, so various are the accidents of life.

‘Don’t consider me frivolous if I remind you that I haven’t eaten anything since half-past eight this morning, and the perambulation of stony-hearted London is conducive to an inward craving. I won’t call the feeling by so healthy a name as hunger. It’s a compound sensation of sickness and emptiness. Is there anything to eat except bread and butter? It’s a very nice thing in its way, but one comes to object to it on the same ground that Louis the Fourteenth’s confessor took about partridges.’

‘Mrs. Bonny is broiling a haddock,’ replies Sibyl, listlessly.

‘What good Catholics we are! keeping Advent all the week through. We had bloaters yesterday, and dried sprats the day before. All our days are Ember days.’

‘Fish is the cheapest thing I can get, Alex.’

‘No doubt, but it generally entails after expense in the way of an extra half-pint of beer. No matter. Let Mrs. Bonny bring forth the haddock,’ exclaimed Alexis, applying himself diligently to the toast, which Sibyl has just buttered.

She tinkles the bell gently, as a polite hint to Mrs. Bonny. She dare not give a peremptory ring, as she might for a servant whose wages she paid. Mrs. Bonny--when letting her lodgings--professes to give attendance to her lodgers, but that attendance is scanty, and yielded as a favour rather than a right. A lodger who wants extra luxuries, such as onion sauce with a shoulder of mutton, or fried liver and bacon for supper, must make things very sweet to Mrs. Bonny. An order for the theatre, or even an occasional tumbler of grog, has a mollifying effect on her disposition, the loan of a newspaper soothes her sensitive mind. The Stanmores are too poor to offer even these small attentions, and are sometimes backward in the payment of their rent, and thus receive stinted service grudgingly given. Sibyl pours out the tea languidly, and with the air of a person out of health. She eats a little bread and butter, but without appetite, and when the haddock appears at last, borne by a slipshod girl, Mr. Stanmore has that fish all to himself, Sibyl refusing any portion thereof.

Alexis contemplates her pityingly--tenderly even;--that haggard, sickly look in the delicate face touches him.

‘Poor girl, how pale and ill you look! No appetite too. That’s a bad sign. I wish I could have brought you home something more tempting than this old finnan. A bird, a sweetbread, or something of that kind.’

‘I could not eat the most exquisite dinner that was ever cooked, Alex, so you needn’t trouble yourself to regret that. But I do wish for something, very much.’

‘What is it, darling? You ought to have every wish gratified just now. You would, if you had married a rich cheesemonger, or a wharfinger, or a packer, or a cotton-spinner, or a brass-founder, anything except that lowest animal in the scale of creation, a broken-down swell. What is it, Sibyl?’

‘I want ten pounds, Alex,’ she answers, intently, her elbow on the table, her chin supported by her hand, her eyes upon his face, attitude and expression alike earnest.

‘Ten pounds, my dearest! We have been wanting ten pounds ever since our honeymoon.’

‘Don’t speak of our honeymoon,’ exclaimed Sibyl, fretfully. ‘It maddens me when I think how you squandered money that might have kept us in comfort for a year.’

‘My love, you are so easily maddened,’ remonstrates Alexis, placidly--he has never been seen out of temper. ‘I dare say it was foolish to go the pace quite as fast as we did, but you had never seen Paris, and April in Paris with the woman one loves is the nearest approach that I can imagine to paradise.’

‘You speak as if you had tried it often,’ says Sibyl, with a sneer.

‘Bah, child, a mere _façon de parler_. Do you remember our drives to the Cascade, in the balmy spring nights, when the stars were shining on the Bois, and how we used to sit in the lamplit gardens of the _café_, eating ices and making love? If ever we grow rich, Sibyl, we’ll go back to Paris and have another honeymoon. But how about these ten pounds, little woman? What can you want with ten pounds?’

The young wife rises, glides behind her husband’s chair, and, leaning on his shoulder, whispers something in his ear, a something at which he smiles tenderly, sadly, and turning in his chair, draws the young face--so wan and yet so fair--down to his lips.

‘By Jove!’ he exclaims, ‘poor little woman, I am a brute, never to have thought of it. You want to buy clothes for the poor little beggar who is to make his first appearance upon the stage of life, before the innocent lambkins have begun to bleat in the meadows, undisputed heir to his father’s impecuniosity. The lower animals have the advantage of us in that respect, by the by. The lambkins come into the world amply provided. You shall have the money, Sibyl. Yes, if I have to borrow, beg, rob for it. You shall have it somehow, even if I were driven to beg of my bitterest foe, ay, of Stephen Trenchard himself.’

His arm is round her and he feels her start at the name.

‘Don’t be frightened, little woman. That’s only a figure of speech. I never saw Stephen Trenchard in my life, and as to begging of him, there’s nothing more unlikely, since he is, to the best of my knowledge, an inhabitant of the city of palaces, otherwise Calcutta.’

‘He might have come back to England, Alex, without your knowing anything about it,’ suggests Sibyl.

‘Ay, that might he have done easily, child, seeing that he is a very insignificant person in this big busy world, and that I know nothing whatever about him, except that he did me deadly wrong before I was born.’

‘And you were taught to hate him?’

‘Yes verily, before I learned my catechism I learned to hate Stephen Trenchard with a righteous and a godly hate, for was he not the falsest and meanest of men? and the Scripture does not forbid us to hate falsehood and meanness. If Eve had hated the serpent a little, humanity in general would not have gone wrong. Trenchard was like the serpent, a creature that crawled, a wriggling worm in the guise of a man. He wriggled and wormed himself into the fortune that should have been my father’s; he wriggled and wormed himself into the heart of my father’s first love; and he did all this wrong,--deliberate wrong, mark you, basely conceived, the study of his days and nights, with a smiling face, clasping his victim’s hand in friendship all the while, so that no thunderbolt falling from the skies could have surprised my father more than the discovery that his arch enemy was _there_, hiding under the mask of his humble friend.’

Alexis has risen, and paces the room, fired by this memory of a lesson learned in earliest boyhood. As deeply as he loved his dead father, so deeply does he hate his father’s enemy and betrayer. Sibyl watches him, thoughtful and perplexed. Of all things difficult to impossibility, nothing could seem more so than to reconcile her love and duty to her husband, and her desire to win her uncle’s fortune.