Johnny Ludlow, First Series

To her surprise her father kissed her; kissed her with quivering lips. “I will open the gate for you, my dear,” he said, hastening on to it. As she was going through, he slipped a sovereign into her hand.

“It will pay for your journey, at least, my dear. I am sorry to hear of your travelling third class. Ah, times have changed. It is not that I won’t help you, child, but that I can’t. She goes up to receive the dividends, and keeps me short. I should not have had that sovereign now, but it is the change out of the spirit bill that she sent me to pay. Hush! the money goes in drink. She drinks like a fish. Ah, Caroline, I was a fool—a fool! Fare you well, my dear.”

“Fare you well, dear papa, and thank you,” she answered, turning away with brimming eyes and an aching heart.

After resting for some days and getting no better, James Marks had to give it up as a bad job. He went to the City house, saw Mr. Brown, and told him.

“Broken down!” cried old Brown, hitching back his wig, as he always did when put out. “I never heard such nonsense. At your age! The thing’s incomprehensible.”

“The work has been very wearing to the brain, sir; and my application to it was close. During the three-and-twenty years I have been with you I have never had but one week’s holiday: the one last spring.”

“You told me then you felt like a man breaking down, as if you were good for nothing,” resentfully spoke old Brown.

“Yes, sir. I told you that I believed I was breaking down for want of a rest,” replied Marks. “It has proved so.”

“Why, you had your rest.”

“One week, sir. I said I feared it would not be of much use. But—it was not convenient for you to allow me more.”

“Of course it was not convenient; you know it could not be convenient,” retorted old Brown. “D’you think I keep my clerks for play, Marks? D’you suppose my business will get done of itself?”

“I was aware myself, sir, how inconvenient my absence would be, and therefore I did not press the matter. That one week’s rest did me a wonderful amount of service: it enabled me to go on until now.”

Old Brown looked at him. “See here, Marks—we are sorry to lose you: suppose you take another week’s change now, and try what it will do. A fortnight, say. Go to the sea-side, or somewhere.”

Marks shook his head. “Too late, sir. The doctors tell me it will be twelve months before I am able to work again at calculations.”

“Oh, my service to you,” cried Mr. Brown. “Why, what are you going to do if you cannot work?”

“That is a great deal more than I can say, sir. The thought of it is troubling my brain quite as much as work ever did. It is never out of it, night or day.”

For once in his screwy life, old Brown was generous. He told Mr. Marks to draw his salary up to the day he had left, and he added ten pounds to it over and above.

During that visit I paid to Miss Deveen’s in London, when Tod was with the Whitneys, and Helen made her first curtsey to the Queen, and we discovered the ill-doings of that syren, Mademoiselle Sophie Chalk, I saw Marks. Mrs. Todhetley had given me two or three commissions, as may be remembered: one amongst them was to call in Pimlico, and see how Marks was getting on.

Accordingly I went. We had heard nothing, you must understand, of what I have told above, and did not know but he was still in his situation. It was a showery day in April: just a twelvemonth, by the way, since his visit to us at Dyke Manor. I found the house out readily; it was near Ebury Street; and I knocked. A young lad opened the door, and asked me to walk into the parlour.

“You are Mr. Marks’s son,” I said, rubbing my feet on the mat: “I can tell by the likeness. What’s your name?”

“William. Papa’s is James.”

“Yes, I know.”

“He is ill,” whispered the lad, with his hand on the door handle. “Mamma’s downstairs, making him some arrowroot.”

Well, I think you might have knocked me down with a feather when I knew him—for at first I did not. He was sitting in an easy-chair by the fire, dressed, but wrapped round with blankets: and instead of being the James Marks we had known, he was like a living skeleton, with cheek-bones and hollow eyes. But he was glad to see me, smiled, and held out his hand from the blanket.

It is uncommonly awkward for a young fellow to be taken unawares like this. You don’t know what to say. I’m sure I as much thought he was dying as I ever thought anything in this world. At last I managed to stammer a word or two about being sorry to see him so ill.

“Ay,” said he, in a weak, panting voice, “I am different from what I was when with your kind people, Johnny. The trouble I foresaw then has come.”

“You used sometimes to feel then as though you would not long keep up,” was my answer, for really I could find nothing else to say.

He nodded. “Yes, I felt that I was breaking down—that I should inevitably break down unless I could have rest. I went on until February, Johnny, and then it came. I had to give up my situation; and since then I have been dangerously ill from another source—chest and lungs.”

“I did not know your lungs were weak, Mr. Marks.”

“I’m sure I did not,” he said, after a fit of coughing. “I had one attack in January through catching a cold. Then I caught another cold, and you see the result: the doctor hardly saved me. I never was subject to take cold before. I suppose the fact is that when a man breaks down in one way he gets weak in all, and is more liable to other ailments.”

“I hope you will get better as the warm weather comes on. We shall soon have it here.”

“Better of this cough, perhaps: I don’t know: but not better yet of my true illness that I think most of—the overtaxed nerves and brain. Oh, if I could only have taken a sufficient rest in time!”

“Mr. Todhetley said you ought to have stayed with us for three months. He says it often still.”

“I believe,” he said, solemnly lifting his hand, “that if I could have had entire rest then for two or three months, it would have set me up for life. Heaven hears me say it.”

And what a dreadful thing it now seemed that he had not!

“I don’t repine. My lot seems a hard one, and I sometimes feel sick and weary when I dwell upon it. I have tried to do my duty: I could but keep on and work, as God knows. There was no other course open to me.”

I supposed there was not.

“I am no worse off than many others, Johnny. There are men breaking down every day from incessant application and want of needful rest. Well for them if their hearts don’t break with it!”

And, to judge by the tone he spoke in, it was as much as to say that his heart had broken.

“I am beginning to dwell less on it now,” he went on. “Perhaps it is that I am too weak to feel so keenly. Or that Christ’s words are being indeed realized to me: ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ God does not forsake us in our trouble, Johnny, once we have learnt to turn to Him.”

Mrs. Marks came into the room with the cup of arrowroot. The boy had run down to tell her I was there. She was very pleasant and cheerful: you could be at home with her at once. While he was waiting for the arrowroot to cool, he leant back in his chair and dropped into a doze.

“It must have been a frightful cold that he caught,” I whispered to her.

“It was caught the day he went into the City to tell Mr. Brown he must give up his situation,” she answered. “There’s an old saying, of being penny wise and pound foolish, and that’s what poor James was that day. It was a fine morning when he started; but rain set in, and when he left Mr. Brown it was pouring, and the streets were wet. He ought to have taken a cab, but did not, and waited for an omnibus. The first that passed was full; by the time another came he had got wet and his feet were soaking. That brought on a return of the illness he had had in January.”

“I hope he will get well.”

“It lies with God,” she answered.

They made me promise to go again. “Soon, Johnny, soon,” said Mr. Marks with an eagerness that was suggestive. “Come in the afternoon and have some tea with me.”

I had meant to obey literally and go in a day or two; but one thing or other kept intervening, and a week or ten days passed. One Wednesday Miss Deveen was engaged to a dinner-party, and I took the opportunity to go to Pimlico. It was a stormy afternoon, blowing great guns one minute, pouring cats and dogs the next. Mrs. Marks was alone in the parlour, the tea-things on the table before her.

“We thought you had forgotten us,” she said in a half-whisper, shaking hands. “But this is the best time you could have come; for a kind neighbour has invited all the children in for the evening, and we shall be quiet. James is worse.”

“Worse!”

“At least, weaker. He cannot sit up long now without great fatigue. He lay down on the bed an hour ago and has dropped asleep,” she added, indicating the next room. “I am waiting for him to awake before I make the tea.”

He awoke then: the cough betrayed it. She went into the room, and presently he came back with her. No doubt he was worse! my heart sank at seeing him. If he had looked like a skeleton before, he was like a skeleton’s ghost now.

“Ah, Johnny! I knew you would come.”

I told him how it was I had not been able to come before, going into details. It seemed to amuse him to hear of the engagements, and I described Helen Whitney’s Court dress as well as I could—and Lady Whitney’s—and the servants’ great bouquets—and the ball at night. He ate one bit of thin toast and drank three big cups of tea. Mrs. Marks said he was always thirsty.

After tea he had a violent fit of coughing and thought he must lie down to rest for a bit. Mrs. Marks came back and sat with me.

“I hope he will get well,” I could not help saying to her.

She shook her head. “I fear he has not much hope of it himself,” she answered. “Only yesterday I heard him tell Willy—that—that God would take care of them when he was gone.”

She could hardly speak the last words, and broke down with a sob. I wished I had not said anything.

“He has great trust, but things trouble him very much,” she resumed. “Nothing else can be expected, for he knows that our means are almost spent.”

“It must trouble you also, Mrs. Marks.”

“I seem to have so much to trouble me that I dare not dwell upon it. I pray not to, every hour of the day. If I gave way, what would become of them?”

At dark she lighted the candles and drew down the blinds. Just after that, there came a tremendous knock at the front-door, loud and long. “Naughty children,” she exclaimed. “It must be they.”

“I’ll go; don’t you stir, Mrs. Marks.”

I opened the door, and a rush of wind and rain seemed to blow in an old gentleman. He never said a word to me, but went banging into the parlour and sank down on a chair out of breath.

“Papa!” exclaimed Mrs. Marks. “Papa!”

“Wait till I get up my speech, my dear,” said the old gentleman. “She is gone.”

“Who is gone!” cried Mrs. Marks.

“She. I don’t want to say too much against her now she’s gone, Caroline; but she is gone. She had a bad fall downstairs in a tipsy fit some days ago, striking her head on the flags, and the doctors could do nothing for her. She died this morning, poor soul; and I am coming to live with you and James, if you will have me. We shall all be so comfortable together, my dear.”

Perhaps Mrs. Marks remembered at once what it implied—that the pressure of poverty was suddenly lifted and she and those dear ones would be at ease for the future. She bent her head in her hands for a minute or two, keeping silence.

“Your husband shall have rest now, my dear, and all that he needs. So will you, Caroline.”

It had come too late. James Marks died in May.

It was about three or four years afterwards that we saw the death of Mr. Brown in the Times. The newspapers made a flourish of trumpets over him; saying he had died worth two hundred thousand pounds.

“There must be something wrong somewhere, Johnny,” remarked the Squire, in a puzzle. “I should not like to die worth all that money, and know that I had worked my clerks to the bone to get it together. I wonder how he will like meeting poor Marks in the next world?”

XVIII.

REALITY OR DELUSION?

This is a ghost story. Every word of it is true. And I don’t mind confessing that for ages afterwards some of us did not care to pass the spot alone at night. Some people do not care to pass it yet.

It was autumn, and we were at Crabb Cot. Lena had been ailing; and in October Mrs. Todhetley proposed to the Squire that they should remove with her there, to see if the change would do her good.

We Worcestershire people call North Crabb a village; but one might count the houses in it, little and great, and not find four-and-twenty. South Crabb, half a mile off, is ever so much larger; but the church and school are at North Crabb.

John Ferrar had been employed by Squire Todhetley as a sort of overlooker on the estate, or working bailiff. He had died the previous winter; leaving nothing behind him except some debts; for he was not provident; and his handsome son Daniel. Daniel Ferrar, who was rather superior as far as education went, disliked work: he would make a show of helping his father, but it came to little. Old Ferrar had not put him to any particular trade or occupation, and Daniel, who was as proud as Lucifer, would not turn to it himself. He liked to be a gentleman. All he did now was to work in his garden, and feed his fowls, ducks, rabbits, and pigeons, of which he kept a great quantity, selling them to the houses around and sending them to market.

But, as every one said, poultry would not maintain him. Mrs. Lease, in the pretty cottage hard by Ferrar’s, grew tired of saying it. This Mrs. Lease and her daughter, Maria, must not be confounded with Lease the pointsman: they were in a better condition of life, and not related to him. Daniel Ferrar used to run in and out of their house at will when a boy, and he was now engaged to be married to Maria. She would have a little money, and the Leases were respected in North Crabb. People began to whisper a query as to how Ferrar got his corn for the poultry: he was not known to buy much; and he would have to go out of his house at Christmas, for its owner, Mr. Coney, had given him notice. Mrs. Lease, anxious about Maria’s prospects, asked Daniel what he intended to do then, and he answered, “Make his fortune: he should begin to do it as soon as he could turn himself round.” But the time was going on, and the turning round seemed to be as far off as ever.

After Midsummer, a niece of the schoolmistress’s, Miss Timmens, had come to the school to stay: her name was Harriet Roe. The father, Humphrey Roe, was half-brother to Miss Timmens. He had married a Frenchwoman, and lived more in France than in England until his death. The girl had been christened Henriette; but North Crabb, not understanding much French, converted it into Harriet. She was a showy, free-mannered, good-looking girl, and made speedy acquaintance with Daniel Ferrar; or he with her. They improved upon it so rapidly that Maria Lease grew jealous, and North Crabb began to say he cared for Harriet more than for Maria. When Tod and I got home the latter end of October, to spend the Squire’s birthday, things were in this state. James Hill, the bailiff who had been taken on by the Squire in John Ferrar’s place (but a far inferior man to Ferrar; not much better, in fact, than a common workman, and of whose doings you will hear soon in regard to his little step-son, David Garth) gave us an account of matters in general. Daniel Ferrar had been drinking lately, Hill added, and his head was not strong enough to stand it; and he was also beginning to look as if he had some care upon him.

“A nice lot, he, for them two women to be fighting for,” cried Hill, who was no friend to Ferrar. “There’ll be mischief between ’em if they don’t draw in a bit. Maria Lease is next door to mad over it, I know; and t’other, finding herself the best liked, crows over her. It’s something like the Bible story of Leah and Rachel, young gents, Dan Ferrar likes the one, and he’s bound by promise to the t’other. As to the French jade,” concluded Hill, giving his head a toss, “she’d make a show of liking any man that followed her, she would; a dozen of ’em on a string.”

It was all very well for surly Hill to call Daniel Ferrar a “nice lot,” but he was the best-looking fellow in church on Sunday morning—well-dressed too. But his colour seemed brighter; and his hands shook as they were raised, often, to push back his hair, that the sun shone upon through the south-window, turning it to gold. He scarcely looked up, not even at Harriet Roe, with her dark eyes roving everywhere, and her streaming pink ribbons. Maria Lease was pale, quiet, and nice, as usual; she had no beauty, but her face was sensible, and her deep grey eyes had a strange and curious earnestness. The new parson preached, a young man just appointed to the parish of Crabb. He went in for great observances of Saints’ days, and told his congregation that he should expect to see them at church on the morrow, which would be the Feast of All Saints.

Daniel Ferrar walked home with Mrs. Lease and Maria after service, and was invited to dinner. I ran across to shake hands with the old dame, who had once nursed me through an illness, and promised to look in and see her later. We were going back to school on the morrow. As I turned away, Harriet Roe passed, her pink ribbons and her cheap gay silk dress gleaming in the sunlight. She stared at me, and I stared back again. And now, the explanation of matters being over, the real story begins. But I shall have to tell some of it as it was told by others.

The tea-things waited on Mrs. Lease’s table in the afternoon; waited for Daniel Ferrar. He had left them shortly before to go and attend to his poultry. Nothing had been said about his coming back for tea: that he would do so had been looked upon as a matter of course. But he did not make his appearance, and the tea was taken without him. At half-past five the church-bell rang out for evening service, and Maria put her things on. Mrs. Lease did not go out at night.

“You are starting early, Maria. You’ll be in church before other people.”

“That won’t matter, mother.”

A jealous suspicion lay on Maria—that the secret of Daniel Ferrar’s absence was his having fallen in with Harriet Roe: perhaps had gone of his own accord to seek her. She walked slowly along. The gloom of dusk, and a deep dusk, had stolen over the evening, but the moon would be up later. As Maria passed the school-house, she halted to glance in at the little sitting-room window: the shutters were not closed yet, and the room was lighted by the blazing fire. Harriet was not there. She only saw Miss Timmens, the mistress, who was putting on her bonnet before a hand-glass propped upright on the mantel-piece. Without warning, Miss Timmens turned and threw open the window. It was only for the purpose of pulling-to the shutters, but Maria thought she must have been observed, and spoke.

“Good evening, Miss Timmens.”

“Who is it?” cried out Miss Timmens, in answer, peering into the dusk. “Oh, it’s you, Maria Lease! Have you seen anything of Harriet? She went off somewhere this afternoon, and never came in to tea.”

“I have not seen her.”

“She’s gone to the Batleys’, I’ll be bound. She knows I don’t like her to be with the Batley girls: they make her ten times flightier than she would otherwise be.”

Miss Timmens drew in her shutters with a jerk, without which they would not close, and Maria Lease turned away.

“Not at the Batleys’, not at the Batleys’, but with him,” she cried, in bitter rebellion, as she turned away from the church. From the church, not to it. Was Maria to blame for wishing to see whether she was right or not?—for walking about a little in the thought of meeting them? At any rate it is what she did. And had her reward; such as it was.

As she was passing the top of the withy walk, their voices reached her ear. People often walked there, and it was one of the ways to South Crabb. Maria drew back amidst the trees, and they came on: Harriet Roe and Daniel Ferrar, walking arm-in-arm.

“I think I had better take it off,” Harriet was saying. “No need to invoke a storm upon my head. And that would come in a shower of hail from stiff old Aunt Timmens.”

The answer seemed one of quick accent, but Ferrar spoke low. Maria Lease had hard work to control herself: anger, passion, jealousy, all blazed up. With her arms stretched out to a friendly tree on either side,—with her heart beating,—with her pulses coursing on to fever-heat, she watched them across the bit of common to the road. Harriet went one way then; he another, in the direction of Mrs. Lease’s cottage. No doubt to fetch her—Maria—to church, with a plausible excuse of having been detained. Until now she had had no proof of his falseness; had never perfectly believed in it.

She took her arms from the trees and went forward, a sharp faint cry of despair breaking forth on the night air. Maria Lease was one of those silent-natured girls who can never speak of a wrong like this. She had to bury it within her; down, down, out of sight and show; and she went into church with her usual quiet step. Harriet Roe with Miss Timmens came next, quite demure, as if she had been singing some of the infant scholars to sleep at their own homes. Daniel Ferrar did not go to church at all: he stayed, as was found afterwards, with Mrs. Lease.

Maria might as well have been at home as at church: better perhaps that she had been. Not a syllable of the service did she hear: her brain was a sea of confusion; the tumult within it rising higher and higher. She did not hear even the text, “Peace, be still,” or the sermon; both so singularly appropriate. The passions in men’s minds, the preacher said, raged and foamed just like the angry waves of the sea in a storm, until Jesus came to still them.

I ran after Maria when church was over, and went in to pay the promised visit to old Mother Lease. Daniel Ferrar was sitting in the parlour. He got up and offered Maria a chair at the fire, but she turned her back and stood at the table under the window, taking off her gloves. An open Bible was before Mrs. Lease: I wondered whether she had been reading aloud to Daniel.

“What was the text, child?” asked the old lady.

No answer.

“Do you hear, Maria! What was the text?”

Maria turned at that, as if suddenly awakened. Her face was white; her eyes had in them an uncertain terror.

“The text?” she stammered. “I—I forget it, mother. It was from Genesis, I think.”

“Was it, Master Johnny?”

“It was from the fourth chapter of St. Mark, ‘Peace, be still.’”

Mrs. Lease stared at me. “Why, that is the very chapter I’ve been reading. Well now, that’s curious. But there’s never a better in the Bible, and never a better text was taken from it than those three words. I have been telling Daniel here, Master Johnny, that when once that peace, Christ’s peace, is got into the heart, storms can’t hurt us much. And you are going away again to-morrow, sir?” she added, after a pause. “It’s a short stay?”

I was not going away on the morrow. Tod and I, taking the Squire in a genial moment after dinner, had pressed to be let stay until Tuesday, Tod using the argument, and laughing while he did it, that it must be wrong to travel on All Saints’ Day, when the parson had specially enjoined us to be at church. The Squire told us we were a couple of encroaching rascals, and if he did let us stay it should be upon condition that we did go to church. This I said to them.

“He may send you all the same, sir, when the morning comes,” remarked Daniel Ferrar.

“Knowing Mr. Todhetley as you do Ferrar, you may remember that he never breaks his promises.”

Daniel laughed. “He grumbles over them, though, Master Johnny.”

“Well, he may grumble to-morrow about our staying, say it is wasting time that ought to be spent in study, but he will not send us back until Tuesday.”

Until Tuesday! If I could have foreseen then what would have happened before Tuesday! If all of us could have foreseen! Seen the few hours between now and then depicted, as in a mirror, event by event! Would it have saved the calamity, the dreadful sin that could never be redeemed? Why, yes; surely it would. Daniel Ferrar turned and looked at Maria.