Chapter III: Letter III (2)

But Ronayne says maliciously that Mrs. Malise has resigned me to obscurity and the fossil period; not because it was hopeless--the winning me--but because, after all, it didn't seem worth while. True I had broken from the ranks, set up in business for myself, and earned my bread for a while--but then how dreadfully ignorant I am. It was bad enough when I didn't know who Margaret Fuller was, and had never read Mill on "Liberty"; but the day I owned to a pocket dictionary, and my unaided helplessness as to double consonants and such vicious words as _separate_, _niece_, _ascension_, and so on, finished the business.

And no wonder. What do you suppose my Mabel will say, grown tall and wise like her father, to a mother who knows more about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table than about the real kings and bygone personages of her own or any other country--a mother puzzled always as to whether it was Alfred the Great or Sir Humphrey Davy who burnt the cakes; a mother loving Glastonbury better than almost any spot of English ground, and believing devoutly that there Joseph of Arimathea planted his staff that became the winter thorn, blossoming at Christmas, "mindful of our Lord"; that there in the church-yard of the first hurdle-built church he and King Arthur and Queen Guinevere all mouldered away to dust; a mother who knew no more than sufficed to wield crayon and brush indifferently, and to love what she loves with her whole heart?

And I'm writing her life, her little life, with all its tiny unfoldings--a story of her being and doings, illustrated profusely with sketches and photographs--writing it for the Mabel of by and by. Will she forget the tenderness that's in every line and stroke when she comes upon such a sinful juxtaposition as this which Ronayne laughed at the other day. "Flanel peticoat?" Yes, "flanel peticoat"; it _does_ look rather queer, but that's only because we're used to the wicked lavishness of the common fashion--and double consonants are only so much crinoline. When I worry sometimes as to what baby'll think of her mother being such a goose, Ronayne says the spelling and all the other stupidities are only piquant, and that he asks of heaven nothing better than a daughter only half as much to his taste as his wife is, which would be very dear of him to think and tell me if he had not rather upset it by admitting that if he had a son who persisted in spelling warm after his mother's eccentric fashion--wharm--he, my husband, would certainly "wharm" that boy--my boy.

And I'd sooner Mabel should laugh even unkindly at her mother's ignorance than ever see her turning over the leaves of a set of books wherein her mother's hand had carefully cut away every allusion to Christian belief, every repetition of God's name--such a set as I saw Mrs. Malise scissoring when I called upon her last.

"These are books that are accumulating for Mill," she explained--"presents from one and another--and I'm cutting out every word that can suggest to him the idea of any life or any world than the only one of which he can gain a certainty through his senses; childish impressions are so tenacious, and I mean him to be utterly free from influence or superstition; open to believe or disbelieve in immortality when his faculties are trained, and he can judge evidence fairly. The Christian scheme seems to me to rest on a mass of unworthy fables; but he is not to be taught in the sense of my conclusion. I shall guard him from my atheism as carefully as from accepted forms of faith. Surely no more can be exacted from a mother than to rear a child unbiassed, and let him make his own experiences, shape his own belief. I believe there are text-books in which no reference to any possible personal Creator of the universe is to be found, and we hope such are in use at the Genevan kindergarten, and Mr. Malise means, in some of his leisure time, to write a series of stories for children in which there shall be no hint of the supernatural; stories that shall deal only with this living, breathing world we know; with no pretty fiction concerning a life and personages generations of men have invented details for"--and I--

I seemed to move among a world of ghosts,
And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

But Geneva and these dreary story-books are two or three years off, let us hope. Meanwhile baby and I are grown very fond of the patient, lonely little man, and I have him here as often as Johanna is pleased to bring him. Great comfort, I see and hear, he has in Mabel's large, sunny day nursery, gay with birds and pictures, well stocked with playthings, and possessing an extraordinary wooden construction which our little guest beholds with the eye of faith, naming it rapturously gee-gee, and worshipping it as the king of beasts. When we are alone at dinner I have the mites down for a few minutes at dessert, and it is really pathetic to watch little Malaise's shy delight at getting a little fruit and an innocent sweet or two.

THE LABURNUMS, } HENLEY-ON-THAMES, } July 16, 1876. }

Changed quarters, you see, my Susie. It was so cold all June I thought we should be able to hold out until the end of the session at No. 18; but July came in flaming; so more for Mabel's sake than our own we've taken a pretty villa here at pretty Henley, for six weeks, and then we're off for Biarritz, where we mean to settle ourselves comfortably, and thence explore, at our leisure, all the lovely yet almost unknown near-by country. The grandpapa paternal has written begging that we'll leave Mabel, whom he calls "Tramp No. 3, and too small for the work," at Castle Starched-stiff-O; but Tramps 1 and 2 think they couldn't possibly fare on comfortably without that small golden head bobbing along beside them, up the hills and down the dales. Nurse is even more gypsyish than her master and mistress, and Mabel has spent the greater part of all her waking hours since she was two months old out of doors; so I think we shall always have in her the hardiest of small comrades.

Miss Hedges goes with us, and we mean, she and I, to bring back between us the entire Basque country in our portfolios.

"I'm thankful we're going to a region of picturesque men," says Ronayne, "for I think my lot in life likely to be a little less afflictive than it was last year. I don't much mind leading contrary minded horses up and down by the hour, coaxing suspicious or aggressive goats; I might even put another bull as savage as that fellow at Twickenham through his paces; but as to posing myself, in any possible fashion, even as a snoring shepherd, please to consider, ladies, that it's not down in our summer programme.

"Talk of the miseries of a man with a literary wife! What are they, I should like to be told, beside those of the unlucky mortal who's married a 'fair artist,' and can never so much as yawn in peace again, without being perpetuated in the act?"

"I had an eye to business when I married you, sir!" I retort. "You see you're a fine, tall, well-made animal, and since I own you, why should I go pay away my money for some other model who wouldn't be half so good-looking, and whom I couldn't frighten so well into minding me? Not pose indeed! Perhaps you would even choose to be bow-legged if so you could escape doing your duty? And I think you're maliciously trying to get stout. In our rides lately, I notice you puff a good deal if we have a bit of a race, and you're really getting a quite perceptible little bulge!"

And Ronayne, who knows very well that he's a capital figure, and whom I accuse of keeping the lowest button of his coat fastened in order to display his slender waist, gives an alarmed glance down at himself, and I see, to my great amusement, that no Bass is uncorked at luncheon, my lord consenting himself with a glass of sherry instead--a needless self-denial, I hasten to add, for he's really no more bulging than a greyhound! But he deserves the little scare for his attempt at rebellion. Fancy my husband having any will of his own about stopping in any attitude I choose him to take, and for as long as I choose! I knew such a queer artist in London, a rather coarse, wholly uneducated woman, but with a streak of real genius. She married the commonest, stupidest man, a pink-and-white young idiot of a tailor, grown now to be the "heavy father"--red, fat, lazy, letting his wife earn all the money. Somebody scolded about him to the poor, over-worked wife. "Yes, I know I have to keep the pot boiling," she answered, "but then Dave saves a model, he's the kindest father to the children, and he does all the sewing!" _He_ doesn't object to pose, not he! And how proud he is of his wife! I found him alone in her studio one day. I looked over some engravings after Titian while waiting, and the man said, "Them engravings o' Titian's, now, ma'am, they're out o' drawing! But here's a picture o' my wife's that's more the real thing," putting on the easel, with affectionate pride, a painting in which two or three of their children were grouped--a trashy, tawdry, grinning thing, and yet with unmistakable touches of power. And this is a tale my husband has reason to know by heart, I'm sure! Not pose! I wish he had Miss Hedges for a wife! Anything like that girl's utter devotion to her work I've never seen in a woman. Rain or shine, cold or heat, are all one to her; she never has spiritually gray days when the grasshopper's a burden, and Capua itself wouldn't have unnerved her arm and purpose. Work! work! And everything turned to account.

Last summer when she was with us I fainted at some horrible tale or other. She came into the room where I lay stretched flat upon the floor, too miserable to speak, but conscious again. I must do her the justice to say she had heard there was no serious cause for my condition; but her first exclamation was,

"Oh, Lilian, what a color you are! Blue-white, ghastly, your face all drawn, pinched--magnificent! Let me see your hands and nails. Ah, capital! Capital! Poor little Lilian! But if you must faint, what a chance for me! I couldn't think how I was to get the right tint for my dying soldier. I never saw any one dead or wounded, and I am much too stolid ever to faint myself. Crossing the channel I took my hand-mirror and studied my face when I was desperately sick--but it was all green and pathos--no good! But your color's the very thing--only you get pink so fast! Oh, Lilian, if ever you faint again, have me called the very instant you feel yourself going off!"

This may be called devotion to one's work? But grand work she's going to do. She's full of genius, and has only to get over the niminy-piminy-izing of the South Kensington School, and work abroad a few years, to have a far more justly grounded fame than Rosa Bonheur's.

Already a few first great drops of her shower are falling. She's a picture in the Academy, her first, and _on the line_--a picture to which the hanging committee themselves took off their hats, and gave a cheer for the artist; and a regular ovation she had on the private view day--nobility and clergy, fellow artists and journalists, army and navy--such a day as she says can never come again for her, let the future have what success in store for her it may.

She has sold the picture for a thousand guineas, and her sketch in the Black and White Exhibition has appeared in one of the illustrated papers, the same paper offering her _carte-blanche_ for illustrations. How I feel like swinging her in triumph before the faces of Mesdames Malise and her friends!--a simple, frank, good girl, who never in her life thought of crying out about a career, and a smoothing of her way, or declared her right to devote herself to art, and to such an unwomanly branch of it as the drawing of horses and soldiers, but set herself obscurely at work, and toiled as faithfully as if she hadn't a spark of genius in her--to win what she has already done, and yet will do!

Mrs. Malise. That reminds me of that household. Our latest news from it, through Mr. Feldwick, who belongs to a "Sordello" club, for which my liege had a hankering, only they made him an Irish member, and so he'd no time (you wonder what a Sordello club may be? A society of ladies and gentlemen, dear, who read Sordello with a key, and try to find out whatever it's all about!), and Mr. Feldwick is good enough to keep him _au courant_ of their discoveries and interpretations, and gossips with me about the Domestic Club. About this Mr. Feldwick is concerned. In losing Mrs. Stainton and Miss Hedges, the house lost much in his eyes, and there have been other changes, and all so much for the worse, that Mr. F. is seriously debating whether the place can long continue sufficiently respectable to be honored by the presence of himself and Smut--his pug dog. The people whom Lady ---- brings about the place get queerer and queerer, and the ideas and schemes they broach are----"I'm a man of the world, and something of a philosopher myself," says Mr. F., "and I know human nature has plenty of shady corners; but, aw, really, aw, you know there must be _some_ limit!"--which I was glad to hear from the Truth-Seeker. Young ----'s gone off to see if the Fiji islanders or some other outlandish creatures haven't more morality and tenderness and general virtues than the men and women of civilization; and when I tell you he sailed just after the death by diphtheria of three of poor Mimi's children, leaving her to bear that, as all things, unhelped by him, you'll wish with me, that some coppery, tough old savage'll eat him for his investigating pains! If anything can cure her infatuation, one would think this last stroke of barbarity might, and perhaps then there would be some hope for the singer lover, who has taken care of her, shared her grief--borne all the burden that the miserable new Rousseau refused.

The food-reforming trio are gone from the associate household. "The Food-Regenerator" has not the circulation it deserves. Its editor threw up a secretaryship that was profitable, but cramping to a soaring, unmercenary spirit. So the emoluments of the journal were insufficient for the club life, and they've retired to a poor lodging where that weary white cat, I suppose, is trying to keep the heroic little man and all her hungry progeny--ravens, I of course meant to say, only I'd called their mother a cat!--on broad beans and porridge and next to nothing a week, and do the work of an office-boy besides!

The third member of the trio, the young girl who told me she was to be a "healer," has had a sad fate. She had, it seems, some liabilities to lung disease which she determined to starve out; so the great rations of bran bread and prunes, which distressed Ronayne at the dinner-party, dwindled, months ago, to two or three ounces of bread daily, and a little fruit--the quantity becoming so small that her mother piteously declared they could not understand how she lived at all.

Reducing her food day by day, she went, in June, to Aberystwith for some weeks. While there, she fell asleep while reading one afternoon in a cave on the coast, and when she wakened it was night, the rain falling heavily, the tide risen so that all egress from the cave was cut off, and she a prisoner. At that season of the year there was no danger beyond that of fright and exposure to damp and chill so many hours; for the water only rises high in the cave during great storms; but even if she had been told this, who remembers or reasons clearly in such sudden, awful moments? But she came out so soon as morning and the ebbing water released her, walked the two or three miles back to her lodging, told her story with apparent calmness, and before night was a raving maniac, so wild and uncontrollable that her family were obliged to place her in a lunatic asylum, and as yet there is nothing favorable to report in her case.

Mrs. Stainton still at Bournemouth, but writing often either to Miss Hedges or to me. In one of her last notes she says, "Do you remember that little story I told you of Ste. Colette, the Saint who was walled up? I think of her so often, so anxiously; I think, I almost think, it will come to that--walling up, I'm afraid not the sanctity?--with me. What a harbor it looks--the cloistered life! And there never seemed to be any place for me in the world. Everything has turned to ashes in my grasp and on my lips. Perhaps it was that the religious life was always calling me. I repeat Pere La Cordaire's saying over and over to myself, 'When we Frenchmen become religious, we do it meaning to be religious up to the neck.'

"I should not enter an active order. I have not the strength. But the contemplative ones draw me, draw me. Pray for me!"

Mrs. Stainton, Sybarite of Sybarites, a Carmelite, a poor Clare sleeping on a plank, washing herself with cold water and sand, living on begged bits, bad herrings, and limp cabbages! Shall we indeed see that?

20th July.

Susie! Susie! what an ending I must give my letter. Little Malaise is dead!

"Have you read the papers to-day, Lil?" Ronayne asked me as he was dressing for dinner two days ago.

"No, they're so stupid these days; nothing but Wimbledon and padding. Why? Is there anything to-day?"

"No, no; nothing," he answered, and though I thought his manner a little odd, I had forgotten all about it later when Archdeacon Ryder, who was dining with us, suddenly asked:

"Did you notice the account of that painful accident in Westbourne Grove in this morning's 'News'? Those terrible perambulators! I wish they could be abolished. Maid servants' arms were stouter in my day. This stupid German nurse seems to have got dazed, or was staring everywhere but where her business lay. An only child, the paper stated, an editor's, but I don't remember the name. It was not one familiar to me. Did you know it?"

"I've heard it," Ronayne answered, and would have changed the subject, but I broke in:

"Oh, Ronayne, a German nurse! Can anything have happened to Mrs. Malise's baby? You needn't be silent. Oh, I'm sure it's he!"

And then it all came out--the fact that the child was killed while his nurse was trying to wheel him across the road in Westbourne Grove--but Ronayne wouldn't have any details told me.

The poor little man! My own baby's age, and such a sweet-tempered, patient little fellow! What a life! To come where he had but grudging welcome, to have no real mother, no warm little places of fond sunshine, and to go away from all this world's possibilities in that sudden cruelty! It wrung my heart, the hardness of it all. But could I really grieve, remembering how chill was the brief life, and remembering, above all, the scheme that was to make of him, so helpless and undefended, a spiritual outcast and foundling?

And since I saw his mother--I went yesterday, having first sacked Henley of white flowers, heliotrope, and fragrant leaves--and found her unshaken in composure, untouched by any sense of duty missed--since then I think I have been only glad that the little soul has taken flight.

Very white and peaceful he looked lying in his crib, and I heaped my flowers all about him.

"How much you loved him!" Mrs. Malise said, as she stood beside me looking at him.

"And how pretty and happy he looks! I wonder if he is happy--if he _is_ anywhere?"

"Well, some time we shall know! And perhaps it is better for him as it is. Often and often his father and I were perplexed as to what we ought to do for him by and by. At any rate he's past our marring! And I hope we shall have no more children to deal with--be responsible for."

Ronayne says I ought to add what I have only told him under my breath, that it completes my sketch of this "advanced" woman, a mother despite herself.

On leaving I said to her something as to where the boy would be buried.

"It is not quite settled," she replied, "but Kensal Green, I suppose. We are both strong advocates of cremation, and wish so much that it were a present possibility. If it were, and even a difficult one, we should certainly bear our practical testimony to the more sanitary way of disposing of our dead. But----"

"Heaven help you!" I interrupted; "and farewell!"

We dare not tell this to nurse, who, though she was the little fellow's fast friend, cried out at the first news of his death:

"Oh, I am glad he is gone, the poor dear! But he was too good for them, and I'm glad he didn't live to have his heart quite broken."

* * * * *

And so ends my going forth after new lights. I'm the richer for my foray in two friends, and the certainty that, Bohemian as I am, I am but a fossil too, and that nature fitted me exactly to my place in making me only the contentedly obscure wife of an Irish member and your

Loving Lil.

S. F. HOPKINS.

MISS MISANTHROPE.

BY JUSTIN MCCARTHY.