A Search For A Secret: A Novel. Volume 3

CHAPTER VII

A BROKEN LIFE

And so I returned to dear old Canterbury. I had so many friends there, and the town itself, which I loved better than them all, that as I looked out of the window of the fly as I drove through its well-remembered streets, it seemed to me as if the events of the last four years were all obliterated from my mind, and that I was coming back after only a short absence to my dear old home. Mrs. Mapleside, with whom, as I have said, I was going to stay, was an elderly lady when I was a young girl. She was then known as Miss Mapleside; but she had now taken brevet rank, and was grievously displeased if she were addressed in any other way; she was now more than seventy-five, but was still brisk and lively, and her heart was kindness itself. She was short, but very upright, and generally dressed in brown plum-coloured, or black silk. She inclined to bright colours in her bonnet, and rather prided herself upon her taste in dress. Personally she was the reverse of vain, and wore the most palpable wig I ever saw, and a pair of spectacles, with tortoiseshell rims of an immense thickness. She had besides a pair of heavy gold double eye-glasses, which hung upon her chain on state occasions, and which she sometimes put on; but I think this was merely from a little harmless pride in their possession, for whenever she had really to look at anything, she always pulled out her tortoiseshell spectacles, and not unfrequently tried to put them on, forgetful that the gold spectacles were already fixed on her nose.

Mrs. Mapleside lived in a pretty little house on the terrace overlooking the market-place; and when I arrived that evening, she received me with an almost motherly affection and interest. She would hardly allow me to go upstairs, to take my things off. She was sure that I must be so terribly fatigued, for to her a three hours' journey by rail was an undertaking not to be lightly entered upon, and involving immense risk and fatigue. The old lady had once when a girl made a journey to London, and the coach had been snowed up, and they had been two days on the road; and she still retained a vivid remembrance of her sufferings. For the last fifty years she had never been beyond Whitstable or Ramsgate, to one or other of which places she made an expedition for a fortnight or so every two years; always going in the coach, as long as coaches ran, and after that in some friend's carriage; for the railway to her was a terrible monster, and nothing would convince her that collisions and catastrophes of all sorts were not its normal state of being. She expressed her gratitude to Providence most warmly that I should have been preserved from destruction on the way, and seemed to think that an almost special dispensation had taken place in my favour.

Mrs. Mapleside read the Times regularly, getting it on the third day from the library, and her principal object of interest in it was to search for railway accidents; and as few days pass without some mishap of greater or less importance being recorded, she was constantly quoting them in support of her pet theory. It was in vain that I assured her that the number of accidents was as nothing in proportion to the immense number of trains which ran daily. This was a light in which she would not look at it; but had an argument, quite original to herself, with which she always triumphantly confuted anything I could urge on the opposite side of the question.

"Now, my dear," she would say, "this accident happened by the train which left York at ten o'clock in the morning. Will you be kind enough to look in Bradshaw, which I never can understand, and see by which train we must have left Canterbury, to have reached York in time to have gone on by that ten-o'clock train?"

I would get the book and find that if we had gone up to London by the four o'clock train the evening before, and then on by the night mail to York, and had slept there for a few hours, we could have gone on by the ten o'clock train to which the accident happened.

"There, my dear," she would exclaim triumphantly, "you see we have had a wonderful escape. If we had started by that four o'clock train on our way to Scotland we should have been very likely killed, and if you remember, if we had gone by the twelve o'clock train the day before to Bath, we should have been in that dreadful accident at the bridge, where so many people were killed. No, no, my dear, there is hardly a day passes when if we had taken our places by one of the trains from here, and gone on a journey to some part of England or other, we should not have met with some accident or other; perhaps only run over a signalman, but even that would have been very unpleasant to the feelings. You may say what you like, my dear, but nothing will persuade me that we do not have almost daily the most providential escapes from destruction."

This was Mrs. Mapleside's great hobby. She had only one other curious conviction; and that was that the population of London was composed almost exclusively of bad characters, and that an inhabitant there must expect, as an ordinary occurrence, to have his house destroyed by fire. The columns of the Times afforded her an immense array of facts in support of this theory; and as some one had unfortunately once told her, that not one in fifty of the cases before the London magistrates were reported, the argument that these cases were as nothing in proportion to the population, carried no weight with her whatever. She was absolutely pathetic in her description of the fires.

"There, my dear," she would say, "four fires on last Tuesday night: only think, Agnes, what a terrible spectacle to look out of one's window and see the town blazing in four directions all at once; the clank of the engines – I saw a fire once my dear, and I shall never forget it, – and the roaring of the flames, and the cries of the lookers on; and the poor people getting their furniture out of the next houses, and the water running down the street; and only think of seeing all this in four directions at once."

These are Mrs. Mapleside's peculiarities, and nothing will shake her faith in her view of the subjects; on all other points she is the most easy old lady possible, hardly having any opinion of her own, and ready to do, or say anything to give pleasure to others. On the whole she is one of the kindest and most cheerful old ladies in the world.

Her welcome to me was, as I have said, most affectionate, and when tea was over, she made me sit down in a large easy chair by the fire – for although it was hardly cold enough for one, she had it lighted because she was sure I should come in perished with cold from my journey.

I sat there, contented and snug, listening and yet hardly hearing Mrs. Mapleside as she ran on, telling me all the changes which had taken place in Canterbury in those four years that I had been away. The old names sounded very pleasant to me, and called up many happy memories of the past; and that night, when I had gone up to my own room, I threw up the window, and looked out; and as I heard the old cathedral bells chiming the hour, I felt once more at home again, and that my life, although it could no longer be bright and happy as I had hoped, might yet be a very contented and cheerful one.

In a day or two all my old friends called upon me, and in a week I felt completely at home. The place itself was so perfectly unchanged, the very goods in the shop windows seemed arranged in precisely the same order in which they had been when I had last walked down the High Street. I found my acquaintances and friends exactly as I had left them; I had changed so much that it seemed almost strange to me that they should have altered so little. I had at seventeen been as merry and as full of fun as any of them. My separation from Percy and my ill health, had certainly changed me a good deal a year and a half after that; but in the three years before papa's death I had again recovered my spirits, and had been able to take my place again with my old playfellows and friends. Only two months back I had been as merry and perhaps more happy than any of them, but now how changed I was! they were still lively girls, I was a quiet sad woman. It was not of course in feature that I was so much altered, it was in expression. I think sometimes now, when I look in the glass, that if I could but laugh again, and if my eyes could once more light up, I should not be so much changed from what I was seven years ago; but I know that can never be again. I have fought my fight for happiness, and have lost; I staked my whole life upon one throw, and after so many years weary waiting, when it seemed as if the prize would soon be mine, the cup was dashed in an instant from my lips; and henceforth I know that I am no longer an actor in the long drama of life, but a mere spectator – content to look on at the play, and to feel, I hope, an interest in the success of others.

So I told all my friends who came to see me on my first arrival – and who were proposing little schemes of pleasure and amusement – that I should not, at any rate for some time, enter into any society even of the quietest kind; but that I should be glad, very glad if they would come and sit with me, and talk to me, and make me a confidant in their hopes and plans, as they had done long ago. At first my old playfellows were rather shy of me, I seemed so different to themselves, so grave and sad in my deep mourning, that they could hardly feel at home with me. They knew that I had gone through some great sorrow, and perhaps guessed at its nature, but they had heard no particulars, nor who it was that I mourned; for although my engagement with Percy had been generally known, it had been supposed by every one – from my illness after the will was lost, and from Percy's departure for India – that it had been broken off; and we had never deemed it necessary to tell any one how the matter really stood, as a long engagement like ours is such a very uncertain affair, even at the best. So every one supposed that I had become engaged in London, and that death had in someway broken it off, and I have never given any further explanation of it.

Now that six months have passed, and my friends are more accustomed to my changed appearance and manners – and now that I am, perhaps, a little more cheerful – their timidity has worn off, and few days pass that one of them does not bring in her work and come and sit for an hour and chat with me.

But if my old playmates find me strangely quiet and old, I see but little alteration in them. They are all girls still, as merry and genial as of old. Even those who were many years older than I, who had been elder girls at our children's parties when I was one of the youngest of the little ones, are still quite young women, and have by no means ceased to consider themselves as eligible partners at a ball. These sometimes try to rally me out of my determination never again to go into society. They tell me that I am only a little over twenty-five, a mere child yet, and that I shall think better of it some day. But I know that it will never be otherwise. My heart is dead, and I have neither thought nor hope of any change as long as my life lasts. But, of course, they cannot know this, and I let them prophecy and predict as they please, knowing that their anticipations can never turn out true.

With hardly an exception, nearly all my young friends are there still, and all are like myself, single. Indeed, it cannot well be otherwise, for there is literally no one for them to marry. The boys, as they have grown up, have left the town, and are seen no more; and of them all – of all those rude, unruly boys who used to go to our parties, and blow out the lights and kiss us, hardly one remains. Many are dead. Rivers was killed at the Cape; Jameson died of fever in India; Smithers, Lacy, and Marsden, all sleep far away from their English homes, under the rich soil of the Crimea; Thompson was drowned at sea. Many of them are in the army and navy, and scattered all over the world. Two or three have emigrated to Australia. Hampton is a rising young barrister on the Northern circuit. Travers is a struggling curate in London; and Douglas, more fortunate, has a living in Devonshire. Two of the Hoopers are clerks in the Bank of Ireland, and one of them a medical man of good position near Reigate. Many of them have married; but they have chosen their wives in the neighbourhoods where their profession had thrown them. Anyhow, none of them had taken Canterbury girls; and these – pretty, amiable, and ladylike, as many of them are – seemed doomed to remain unmarried. One or two of them only, frightened at the hopeless look-out, have recklessly taken up with marching subalterns from the garrison; but the rest look but gravely upon such doings, for the Canterbury girls are far too properly brought up to regard a red coat with anything but a pious horror, as a creature of the most dangerous description, very wild, and generally very poor; but withal exceedingly fascinating, to be approached with great caution, and to be flirted with demurely at the race-ball, and during the cricket-week, but at other times to be avoided and shunned; and it is an agreed thing among them, supported by the general experience of the few who have tried the experiment, that even a life of celibacy at Canterbury is preferable to the lot of a sub.'s wife in a marching regiment.

Thus it happens that all my old schoolfellows were still single, and indeed we have a riddle among ourselves, "Why is Canterbury like heaven? Because we neither marry nor are given in marriage."

Before I had been long in Canterbury I found myself so comfortable with Mrs. Mapleside, that I was convinced that any change must be for the worse. I therefore suggested to the dear old lady that we should enter into an arrangement for me to take up my abode permanently with her. To this she assented very willingly; for, she said, she found it far more cheerful than living by herself; besides which my living would not add very much to her expenses, and the sum I proposed to pay, sixty pounds a year, would enable her to indulge in many little additional luxuries; for her income, although just sufficient to live upon in the way she was accustomed to, was still by no means large.

Thus the arrangement would be mutually beneficial to us, and when it was settled, I looked with increased pleasure at my beautifully neat little bedroom, where before I had only been as a guest, but which I could now look upon as my own sanctuary – my home.

I am very comfortable now, more even than when I had been a visitor; for then the good old lady fussed a little about my comforts, and I could seldom leave her and get up to my room in quiet; but now that I am a permanent inmate of the house, I am able to mark out my own day, and to pursue my course while Mrs. Mapleside keeps hers.

Mrs. Mapleside keeps one servant, a tidy, cheerful-looking young woman of about seven-and-twenty. She has been thirteen years with her, Mrs. Mapleside having taken her from the national school, and trained her into a perfect knowledge of all her little ways. Her name is Hannah, but Mrs. Mapleside always addressed her as "child."

My life here is not eventful, but on the other hand it is not dull. I am never unoccupied, and time passes away in an easy, steady flow, which is very tranquillizing and soothing to me. The first thing after breakfast I read the Times aloud to Mrs. Mapleside, and then whenever there is an accident I look out the train in Bradshaw, and she is always devoutly thankful for another hairbreadth escape which she insists we have had. About eleven, either one or other of my friends comes in with her work and sits with us until lunch-time, or else I myself go out to call upon one of them. After lunch we go for a walk, or at least I do, and Mrs. Mapleside makes calls – to which she is very partial, and of which I confess I have quite a horror. Indeed, I never pay regular visits, preferring much to take my work and sit for a while of a morning at the houses where I am intimate. After dinner, Mrs. Mapleside dozes, and I go up into my room – for it has been summer – and write my story. I have now been here six months, and in that time have, between dinner and tea, written this little history of the principal events in my life, and in the lives of those dear to me; and the exercise has been a great solace and amusement to me. I have nearly come to an end now.

After I had been down here for four months I yielded to Polly's entreaties, and made my first half-yearly visit to them, from which I have only returned a fortnight. I confess that I had rather dreaded this meeting, but now that it is over I am very glad that I made it. It is so pleasant to think of Polly in her happy home, for it is a very happy one. Charley is such a capital fellow, so thoroughly good and hearty, and I am sure he would cut off his little finger if he thought it would give Polly pleasure. I tell her that I think she has her own way too much, more than it is good that a wife should, but Polly only laughs, and says, "That her dear old bear is quite contented with his chain, but that if he were to take it into his head to growl, and pull his own way, that he would find the chain only a flimsy pretence after all."