Chapter IV: Jenny’s Visitor

Another blazing July afternoon, and all the cornfields baking under the ripening sunshine. Jenny Faunthorpe lolls in her favourite arm-chair--a dreadfully dilapidated arm-chair it is, with a faded chintz cover which is always grimy--in the surgery window. She is very fond of sitting in the surgery, chiefly because it is against her uncle’s household laws--if any man so easy-going and mild as Dr. Faunthorpe can be said to be a law-giver in his household--that she should sit there. It is not an attractive apartment. It is dirtier than any other room in the house, Hester being strictly forbidden to interfere with things in this sacred chamber, or, in other words, to sweep, dust, or scour. Its atmosphere is odoriferous with compound rhubarb pills, colocynth, and pounded aloes. Its counter is sticky with the traces of divers medicines which have been compounded upon it. But there are attractions for Jenny in the room notwithstanding, and she infinitely prefers it to the family parlour. There is the syrup of poppies yonder on the second shelf from the top, in the dusty recess where the spiders have such a good time of it, and Jenny often indulges herself with a few sips of that soporific decoction. If she has a surreptitious novel in her possession she hides it on one of the lower shelves, behind the delf jar of leeches, perhaps. Sometimes she takes the leeches out and plays with them. At other times, when she is quite sure of not being disturbed by Dr. Faunthorpe, she amuses herself by taking down sundry bottles and making up prescriptions of her own. Thus:--

Syrup poppies, 1 oz.
Honey, lots.
Cons. roses, ½ oz.
Peppermint, 1 drachm.
Tamarinds, 2 oz.
Aqua pura, 4 oz.

This afternoon, however, she has a particular reason for preferring the surgery to her usual happy hunting-grounds among the gooseberry bushes. Faithful to her promise to Sibyl, she makes the surgery window her post of observation, so that if the young man she expects should approach by the front door she may be ready to receive him, and cut off all communication with Hester. Should he come to the garden wall, on the other hand, as on his previous visit, there can be no harm done, as the wall adjoining the lane is beyond Hester’s ken. With infinite diplomacy Jenny has contrived to get Marion out of the way for the whole day by persuading her to take the train to Krampston and visit her old schoolfellow, Maria Harrison, the Krampston Wesleyan minister’s daughter, with whom Marion has kept up some semblance of friendship, although the tastes of the two young ladies are widely at variance, Miss Harrison being, as becomes her, of a serious turn of mind, while Marion is to the last degree frivolous. If there is one thing which Marion enjoys more than another in Maria’s society it is the opportunity which it gives her to talk over Sibyl, whose goings on, gay apparel, and chariots and horses, Miss Harrison contemplates with the disapproving eye of the Hebrew prophets. Jeremiah himself did not denounce the foolish daughters of Israel with more vigour than Miss Harrison exhibits towards her old schoolfellow.

Thus it is that whenever Marion is particularly offended with Sibyl she is always in the humour for a visit to Miss Harrison, whose home, though unpretentious in its character, and situated in an obscure by way of the busy port of Krampston, is comfortable in its arrangements, and of a hospitable turn. The five o’clock tea at the minister’s table is a plentiful and substantial meal, which makes an excellent substitute for dinner, and renders supper a superfluity.

Jenny, turning to account this idiosyncrasy of her elder sister’s, has persuaded Marion that she owes Miss Harrison a visit, and that to-day is a good opportunity for the settlement of that debt. Marion has allowed herself to be persuaded, has put on her best bonnet, and departed for Krampston in the one o’clock train, meaning to have a good look at the shops, which means a two hours’ perambulation of the principal streets, before proceeding to Miss Harrison’s paternal dwelling.

‘You needn’t expect me till you see me,’ says Marion at departing. ‘For if there’s an evening service at Little Bethel I shall be obliged to go, though if there are two people in the Scriptures I dislike more than another it’s Ahab and Jezebel, and they always crop up in Mr. Harrison’s sermons.’

Jenny has thus made the coast clear. It is Hester’s day for cleaning the kitchen and outhouses, a day upon which the Miss Faunthorpes must either open the door to patient or casual visitor, or encounter Hester’s wrath, that faithful servant having a temper which is aggravated by hearthstoning difficult corners and awkward steps, and exasperated to fever point by scrubbing worm-eaten old floors, which ‘never do one no credit.’

Jenny is quite sure that Hester will not appear till she brings in the tea-tray, scarlet of visage and perspiring, and puts it on the table with a bang and a clatter, exclaiming, ‘There now, you’ve got your tea, and don’t come worrying for anything else.’

It is between three and four--the sleepiest hour in the slumberous balmy day, and Jenny basks in the sunshiny surgery window, with folded arms, watching the wasps and vagabond bees bouncing their stupid heads against the roses in the dusty front garden. It is the very hour in which Sibyl and Mr. Trenchard are returning from the How, and the first day of Jenny’s watch.

Just as the old minster clock with its mellow tongue chimes the half-hour a dusty wayfarer comes in sight, and Jenny cries out loud,--

‘It’s the very man, by all that’s wonderful! but dressed like a gentleman this time; and oh, how nice he looks!’

Yes, it is the man she saw in the lane two winters ago, tired, footsore, out at elbows. To-day he is as well clad as any man in Redcastle, and he walks as if he had only come from the station.

He looks about him doubtfully for a minute or so, as if unfamiliar with the front of Dr. Faunthorpe’s house, then sees the name upon the brass plate, and approaches boldly, opens the gate, and comes in.

‘If Marion or Hester were in the way now it would be all UP,’ Jenny says to herself.

Before the stranger can ring she has opened the door, and stands face to face with him upon the threshold.

‘You’re the very person I wanted to see,’ exclaims Alexis Secretan as Jenny confronts him, her big round eyes staring their hardest; ‘I’m lucky in finding you in the way.’

‘Luckier than you know of,’ thinks Jenny. ‘Are you a patient?’ she demands aloud. ‘If you are, uncle’s out, and you can’t have any medicine till after seven o’clock. Between seven and nine in the evening are his hours, or before nine in the morning.’

‘Nonsense, child! You must remember me, surely.’

Jane Faunthorpe’s face expresses a total blankness. She shakes her head stolidly.

‘Perhaps I look a little more decent to-day than I did one winter afternoon two years and a half ago,’ says Alexis, with a laugh, ‘but I’m the man who spoke to you across the garden wall. Do you remember now?’

‘I have a faint recollection,’ replies Jenny, with a languid _hauteur_, which is very fairly imitated from Sibyl. ‘Come into the surgery, young man, if you please.’

Alexis laughs at the mode of address, and follows her down a step into that temple of the healing art.

Jenny enjoys the situation, and means to make the most of it. She looks at the stranger critically, as he drops into one of the frayed horsehair chairs, where parish patients are accustomed to sit awaiting Dr. Faunthorpe’s opinion as the fiat of fate--the opinion rarely going beyond the statement that the patient is not so well as he might be, and that his condition will be improved by the medicine which Dr. Faunthorpe is about to give him. If, after this, the patient goes home and dies, it is his lookout. The parish has done all it can for him.

‘I want to know all about your sister Sibyl,’ says Alexis, looking round the shabby room, and thinking that this home of his wife’s uncle’s is not much better than Mrs. Bonny’s one pair front in Dixon Street, Chelsea. ‘Is she at home?’

Jane shakes her head dolefully, and heaves a sigh which would do credit to an actress of transpontine melodrama.

‘I was in hopes you had come to tell us something about her,’ she says, ‘for it’s a hard thing to have one’s eldest sister wandering about the world no one knows where.’

‘You mean to tell me that you don’t know where she is at this present time!’ exclaims Alexis.

‘That’s precisely the fact. She was governessing in Jersey when we heard from her last, but that’s full ten months ago, and she’s too much of a rolling stone to have stayed as long as that in one place. Especially as she told us that the lady had red hair and used to fly into passions,’ adds Jenny, with a graphic touch that she thinks will give reality to her narrative.

‘What was the lady’s name?’

‘Mrs. Yokohama Gray,’ says Jenny on the spur of the moment, reminiscent of the advertisement of a certain dress fabric which she has perused with keenest interest.

‘Yokohama,’ repeats Alexis, ‘that’s rather a queer surname.’

‘Well, it was very _like_ that, if not that exactly.’

‘Jersey,’ says Alexis, thoughtfully, ‘when last you heard of your sister she was in Jersey, and that was ten months ago?’

Jenny counts her fingers meditatively, and appears to enter upon an abstruse calculation.

‘Exactly ten months,’ she answers finally.

‘Could you show me your sister’s letter?’

‘It’s torn up. Uncle Robert never keeps his letters.’

‘But is not Dr. Faunthorpe anxious about your sister? It seems such a strange thing for him to be ignorant of her fate.’

‘Of course it is. But Sibyl’s a strange girl. Uncle Robert has had many a sleepless night on her account. I dare say we shall get a letter from her some day, telling us that she has gone with a lady to Peru, or Kamstchatka, or some of those hot climates where mosquitoes devour you all night, and alligators hide themselves under your bolster.’

Alexis sighs wearily.

‘I should like to see your uncle,’ he says, ‘he might tell me more.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ replies Jenny, who has posed herself gracefully on a corner of the surgery table and swings her leg to and fro, as if rather admiring the shabby leather boot at the end of it, deficient of every alternate button. ‘Uncle Robert couldn’t tell you a word more than I’ve told you. In fact, he mightn’t tell you quite as much.’

‘It’s hard to be left in the dark like this,’ says Alexis.

‘It’s hard upon us, but I can’t see that it matters much to you,’ remarks Jenny. ‘If you are ever so deeply in love with Sibyl, she isn’t so much to you as she to us.’

‘Isn’t she?’ exclaims Alexis. ‘Suppose I tell you that she is more to me than she is to any one else in the world, and that I am determined not to be kept in ignorance of her present position. She is my wife, Miss Faunthorpe, and the law of the land, as well as the law of God which preceded that law, gives a husband custody of his wife.’

‘Gracious goodness!’ ejaculates Jenny, slipping off the angle of the table, and recovering her equilibrium with a struggle, ‘do you mean that my sister Sibyl is a married woman?’

‘She is my wife. An unfaithful wife, for she deserted me because I was poor. Yet I am weak enough to love her still, and I will go to the end of the world to find her.’

‘My!’ exclaims Jenny. ‘This is the awfullest thing I ever heard of.’

‘You can understand therefore that I have some right to make inquiries about your sister, and that I am justified in insisting upon seeing your uncle Robert.’

‘Oh, but you mustn’t,’ cries Jenny, with overwhelming energy. ‘You mustn’t breathe one syllable about your marriage to uncle Robert. It would be the ruin of all of us if you did. Don’t you know that we are no better than paupers dependent upon his charity? He’d turn Marion and me out of doors if he knew that Sibyl had married without his consent. You don’t know what a man he is. Our innocence wouldn’t help us. He’d wash his hands of the whole lot of us.’

‘That would be a very vindictive course of action.’

‘Uncle Robert is vindictive,’ exclaims Jenny. ‘He doesn’t know what it is to forgive. Do you suppose he’d ever get over Sibyl’s ingratitude? He never would, and he’d wreak his vengeance upon unoffending Marion and still more unoffending me, for I’m not old enough to go and get married clandestinely, if I wanted to.’

‘I had no idea your uncle was such a Tartar.’

‘Sibyl ought to have told you. I thought when a person married a person they always described their relations to that person.’

‘I had an impression that Dr. Faunthorpe was quite an easy-going little man,’ says Alexis.

‘Ah, Sibyl may have felt it her duty to make the best of him. You see he gives us the bread we eat, and one ought to be thankful for one’s daily bread even if it’s two days old, and scrapy as to butter. We don’t ask for butter in our prayers, you see.’

‘And you expect me to leave this place without making any further inquiries about my wife?’ demands Alexis.

‘What’s the use of inquiring when you’ve had all the information any one can give you here?’ asks Jane, with a practical air. ‘You’d much better go to Jersey and inquire there.’

‘Yet you say Sibyl is likely to have left Jersey by this time.’

‘More than likely. She was always fond of change. She may have gone to Calcutta, or St. Petersburg, or Hong Kong, or Scarborough, or anywhere where governesses are wanted. But you might trace her _from_ Jersey, you know. It would be a good starting-point.’

‘You tell me that she has never been home since she first left this place to go to Mrs. Hazleton.’

‘Never,’ says Jenny, so resolutely that Alexis ought to know she is telling a falsehood.

‘Well, if I can do myself no good by seeing your uncle----’

‘And are sure to do us a lot of harm,’ interjects Jenny.

‘I may as well go away without seeing him, and trust to my own wits for finding your sister.’

‘Decidedly,’ replies Jenny. ‘A clever young man like you can’t be long at a loss.’

‘Good-bye, Miss Faunthorpe.’

‘You’d better call me Jenny, if you’re my brother-in-law.’

‘Good-bye, Jenny; thou hast comforted me marvellous much. I must go and try my luck elsewhere.’

‘If there was anything in this way I could do for you,’ says Jenny, waving her hand in the direction of the shelves, ‘the surgery is at your service. I know the bottles as well as uncle does. Anything from syrup of squills to corrosive supplement. Uncle sends a good deal of that to his parish patients, and I believe it cures them, but I’m not quite sure whether they take it externally or internally.’

‘There’s one little blue bottle up there that might be useful to me,’ says Alexis, with a touch of bitterness.

He points to a dark blue bottle that stands in a corner by itself on the topmost shelf in a recess by the fireplace, and away from the light. A bottle with a gilt label.

‘Gracious!’ cries Jenny. ‘That’s prussic acid--deadly poison.’

‘A short cut out of a man’s troubles, Jenny. But I suppose a man who takes that way is something of a poltroon, and I’m not disposed to try it yet awhile. Good-bye, Jenny.’

‘Good-bye, brother-in-law. I’m really very sorry for you, and I hope things will come right in the end. You may kiss me if you like, as we are such near relatives.’

Thus privileged, Alexis imprints a brotherly kiss upon Jane’s forehead, and with a final sigh of disappointment departs.