Johnny Ludlow, Second Series

He was not loud. He did not fly into a passion as Helen Whitney did. He just took the unfortunate letter in his hand, and looked at it, and looked at Lee, and spoke quietly and coldly.

“This is, I believe, the second time you have burnt the letters?” and Lee dared not deny it.

“And in direct defiance of orders. You are not allowed to smoke when on your rounds.”

“I’ll never attempt to smoke again, when on my round, as long as I live, sir, if you’ll only be pleased to look over it this time,” gasped Lee, holding up his hands in a piteous way. But the Rector was one who went in for “duty,” and the appeal found no favour with him.

“No,” said he, “it would be to encourage wrong-doing, Lee. Meet me at eleven o’clock at Salmon’s.”

“Never again, sir, so long as I live!” pleaded Lee. “I’ll give you my word of that, sir; and I never broke it yet. Oh, sir, if you will but have pity upon me and not report me!”

“At eleven o’clock,” repeated Herbert Tanerton decisively, as he turned indoors again.

“What an old stupid you must be!” cried Tod to Lee. “He won’t excuse you; he’s the wrong sort of parson to do it.”

“And a pretty kettle of fish you’ve made of it,” added Tom Coney. “I wouldn’t have minded much, had it been my letter; but he is different, you know.”

Poor Lee turned his eyes on me: perhaps remembering that he had asked me, the other time, to stand his friend with Miss Whitney. No one could be his friend now: when the Rector took up a grievance he did not let it drop again; especially if it were his own. Good-hearted Jack, his sailor-brother, would have screened Lee, though all the letters in the parish had got burnt.

At eleven o’clock precisely the Reverend Herbert Tanerton entered Salmon’s shop; and poor Lee, not daring to disobey his mandate, crept in after him. They had it out in the room behind. Salmon was properly severe; told Lee he was not sure but the offence involved penal servitude, and that he deserved hanging. A prosperous tradesman in his small orbit, the man was naturally inclined to be dictatorial, and was ambitious of standing well with his betters, especially the Rector. Lee was suspended there and then; and Spicer was informed that for a time, until other arrangements were made, he must do double duty. Spicer, vexed at this, for it would take him so much the more time from his legitimate business, that of horse doctor, told Lee he was a fool, and deserved not only hanging but drawing and quartering.

“What’s up?” asked Ben Rymer, crossing the road from his own shop to accost Lee, as the latter came out of Salmon’s. Ben was the chemist now—had been since Margaret’s marriage—and was steady; and Ben, it was said, would soon pass his examination for surgeon. He had his hands in his pockets and his white apron on, for Mr. Ben Rymer had no false pride, and would as soon show himself to Timberdale in an apron as in a dress-coat.

Lee told his tale, confessing the sin of the morning. Mr. Rymer nodded his head significantly several times as he heard it, and pushed his red hair from his capacious forehead.

“They won’t look over it this time, Lee.”

“If I could but get some one to be my friend with the Rector, and ask him to forgive me,” said Lee. “Had your father been alive, Mr. Rymer, I think he would have done it for me.”

“Very likely. No good to ask me—if that’s what you are hinting at. The Rector looks upon me as a black sheep, and turns on me the cold shoulder. But I don’t think he is one to listen, Lee, though the king came to ask him.”

“What I shall do I don’t know,” bewailed Lee. “If the place is stopped, the pay stops, and I’ve not another shilling in the world, or the means of earning one. My wife’s ailing, and Mamie gets worse day by day; and there are the two little ones. They are all upon me.”

“Some people here say, Lee, that you should have sent Mamie and her young one to the workhouse, and not have charged yourself with them.”

“True, sir, several have told me that. But people don’t know what a father’s feelings are till they experience them. Mary was my own child that I had dandled on my knee, and watched grow up in her pretty ways, and I was fonder of her than of any earthly thing. The workhouse might not have taken her in.”

“She has forfeited all claim on you. And come home only to break your heart.”

“True,” meekly assented Lee. “But the Lord has told us we are to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven. If I had turned her adrift from my door and heart, sir, who knows but I might have been turned adrift myself at the Last Day.”

Evidently it was of no use talking to one so unreasonable as Lee. And Mr. Ben Rymer went back to his shop. A customer was entering it with a prescription and a medicine-bottle.

One morning close upon Christmas, Mrs. Todhetley despatched me to Timberdale through the snow for a box of those delectable “Household Pills,” which have been mentioned before: an invention of the late Mr. Rymer’s, and continued to be made up by Ben. Ben was behind the counter as usual when I entered, and shook the snow off my boots on the door-mat.

“Anything else?” he asked me presently, wrapping up the box.

“Not to-day. There goes old Lee! How thin he looks!”

“Starvation,” said Ben, craning his long neck to look between the coloured globes at Lee on the other side the way. “Lee has nothing coming in now.”

“What do they all live upon?”

“Goodness knows. Upon things that he pledges, and the vegetables in the garden. I was in there last night, and I can tell you it was a picture, Mr. Johnny Ludlow.”

“A picture of what?”

“Misery: distress: hopelessness. It is several weeks now since Lee earned anything, and they have been all that time upon short commons. Some days on no commons at all, I expect.”

“But what took you there?”

“I heard such an account of the girl—Mamie—yesterday afternoon, of her cough and her weakness, that I thought I’d see if any of my drugs would do her good. But it’s food they all want.”

“Is Mamie very ill?”

“Very ill indeed. I’m not sure but she’s dying.”

“It is a dreadful thing.”

“One can’t ask too many professional questions—people are down upon you for that before you have passed,” resumed Ben, alluding to his not being qualified. “But I sent her in a cordial or two, and I spoke to Darbyshire; so perhaps he will look in upon her to-day.”

Ben Rymer might have been a black sheep once upon a time, but he had not a bad heart. I began wondering whether Mrs. Todhetley could help them.

“Is Mamie Lee still able to do any sewing?”

“About as much as I could do it. Not she. I shall hear what Darbyshire’s report is. They would certainly be better off in the workhouse.”

“I wish they could be helped!”

“Not much chance of that,” said Ben. “She is a sinner, and he is a sinner: that’s what Timberdale says, you know. People in these enlightened days are so very self-righteous!”

“How is Lee a sinner?”

“How! Why, has he not burnt up the people’s letters? Mr. Tanerton leads the van in banning him, and Timberdale follows.”

I went home, questioning whether our folk would do anything to help the Lees. No one went on against ill-doings worse than the Squire; and no one was more ready than he to lend a helping hand when the ill-doers were fainting for want of it.

It chanced that just about the time I was talking to Ben Rymer, Mr. Darbyshire, the doctor at Timberdale, called at Lee’s. He was a little, dark man, with an irritable temper and a turned-up nose, but good as gold at heart. Mamie Lee lay back in a chair, her head on a pillow, weak and wan and weary, the tears slowly rolling down her cheeks. Darbyshire was feeling her pulse, and old Mrs. Lee pottered about, bringing sticks from the garden to feed the handful of fire. The two children sat on the brick floor.

“If it were not for leaving my poor little one, I should be glad to die, sir,” she was saying. “I shall be glad to go; hope it is not wrong to say it. She and I have been a dreadful charge upon them here.”

Darbyshire looked round the kitchen. It was almost bare; the things had gone to the pawnbroker’s. Then he looked at her.

“There’s no need for you to die yet. Don’t get that fallacy in your head. You’ll come round fast enough with a little care.”

“No, sir, I’m afraid not; I think I am past it. It has all come of the trouble, sir; and perhaps, when I’m gone, the neighbours will judge me more charitably. I believed with all my heart it was a true marriage—and I hope you’ll believe me when I say it, sir; it never came into my mind to imagine otherwise. And I’d have thought the whole world would have deceived me sooner than James.”

“Ah,” says Darbyshire, “most girls think that. Well, I’ll send you in some physic to soothe the pain in the chest. But what you most want, you see, is kitchen physic.”

“Mr. Rymer has been very good in sending me cordials and cough-mixture, sir. Mother’s cough is bad, and he sent some to her as well.”

“Ah, yes. Mrs. Lee, I am telling your daughter that what she most wants is kitchen physic. Good kitchen physic, you understand. You’d be none the worse yourself for some of it.”

Dame Lee, coming in just then in her pattens, tried to put her poor bent back as upright as she could, and shook her head before answering.

“Kitchen physic don’t come in our way now, Dr. Darbyshire. We just manage not to starve quite, and that’s all. Perhaps, sir, things may take a turn. The Lord is over all, and He sees our need.”

“He dave me some pep’mint d’ops,” said the little one, who had been waiting to put in a word. “Andy, too.”

“Who did?” asked the doctor.

“Mr. ’Ymer.”

Darbyshire patted the little straw-coloured head, and went out. An additional offence in the eyes of Timberdale was that the child’s fair curls were just the pattern of those on the head of James the deceiver.

“Well, have you seen Mamie Lee?” asked Ben Rymer, who chanced to be standing at his shop-door after his dinner, when Darbyshire was passing by from paying his round of visits.

“Yes, I have seen her. There’s no radical disease.”

“Don’t you think her uncommonly ill?”

Darbyshire nodded. “But she’s not too far gone to be cured. She’d get well fast enough under favourable circumstances.”

“Meaning good food?”

“Meaning food and other things. Peace of mind, for instance. She is just fretting herself to death. Shame, remorse, and all that, have taken hold of her; besides grieving her heart out after the fellow.”

“Her voice is so hollow! Did you notice it?”

“Hollow from weakness only. As to her being too far gone, she is not so at present; at least, that’s my opinion; but how soon she may become so I can’t say. With good kitchen physic, as I’ve just told them, and ease of mind to help me, I’ll answer for it that I’d have her well in a month; but the girl has neither the one nor the other. She seems to look upon coming death in the light of a relief, rather than otherwise; a relief to her own mental trouble, and a relief to the household, in the shape of saving it what she eats and drinks. In such a condition as this, you must be aware that the mind does not help the body by striving for existence; it makes no effort to struggle back to health; and there’s where Mamie Lee will fail. Circumstances are killing her, not disease.”

“Did you try her lungs?”

“Partially. I’m sure I am right. The girl will probably die, but she need not die of necessity; though I suppose there will be no help for it. Good-day.”

Mr. Darbyshire walked away in the direction of his house, where his dinner was waiting: and Ben Rymer disappeared within doors, and began to pound some rhubarb (or what looked like it) in a mortar. He was pounding away like mad, with all the strength of his strong hands, when who should come in but Lee. Lee had never been much better than a shadow of late years, but you should have seen him now, with his grey hair straggling about his meek, wan face. You should have seen his clothes, too, and the old shoes, out at the toes and sides. Burning people’s letters was of course an unpardonable offence, not to be condoned.

“Mamie said, sir, that you were good enough to tell her I was to call in for some of the cough lozenges that did her so much good. But–”

“Ay,” interrupted Ben, getting down a box of the lozenges. “Don’t let her spare them. They won’t interfere with anything Mr. Darbyshire may send. I hear he has been.”

But that those were not the days when beef-tea was sold in tins and gallipots, Ben Rymer might have added some to the lozenges. As he was handing the box to Lee, something in the man’s wan and worn and gentle face put him in mind of his late father’s, whose heart Mr. Ben had helped to break. A great pity took the chemist.

“You would like to be reinstated in your place, Lee?” he said suddenly.

Lee could not answer at once, for the pain at his throat and the moisture in his eyes that the notion called up. His voice, when he did speak, was as hollow and mild as Mamie’s.

“There’s no hope of that, sir. For a week after it was taken from me, I thought of nothing else, night or day, but that Mr. Tanerton might perhaps forgive me and get Salmon to put me on again. But the time for hoping that went by: as you know, Mr. Rymer, they put young Jelf in my place. I shall never forget the blow it was to me when I heard it. The other morning I saw Jelf crossing that bit of waste ground yonder with my old bag slung on his shoulder, and for a moment I thought the pain would have killed me.”

“It is hard lines,” confessed Ben.

“I have striven and struggled all my life long; only myself knows how sorely, save God; and only He can tell, for I am sure I can’t, how I have contrived to keep my head any way above water. And now it’s under it.”

Taking the box, which Ben Rymer handed to him, Lee spoke a word of thanks, and went out. He could not say much; heart and spirit were alike broken. Ben called to his boy to mind the shop, and went over to Salmon’s. That self-sufficient man and prosperous tradesman was sitting down at his desk in the shop-corner, complacently digesting his dinner—which had been a good one, to judge by his red face.

“Can’t you manage to do something for Lee?” began Ben, after looking round to see that they were alone. “He is at a rare low ebb.”

“Do something for Lee?” repeated Salmon. “What could I do for him?”

“Put him in his place again.”

“I dare say!” Salmon laughed as he spoke, and then demanded whether Ben was a fool.

“You might do it if you would,” said Ben. “As to Lee, he won’t last long, if things continue as they are. Better give him a chance to live a little longer.”

“Now what do you mean?” demanded Salmon. “Why don’t you ask me to put a weathercock on yonder malthouse of Pashley’s? Jelf has got Lee’s place, and you know it.”

“But Jelf does not intend to keep it.”

“Who says he does not?”

“He says it. He told me yesterday that he was sick and tired of the tramping, and meant to resign. He only took it as a convenience, whilst he waited for a clerkship he was trying for at a brewery at Worcester. And he is to get that with the new year.”

“Then what does Jelf mean by talking about it to others before he has spoken to me?” cried Salmon, going into a temper. “He thought to leave me and the letters at a pinch, I suppose! I’ll teach him better.”

“You may teach him anything you like, if you’ll put Lee on again. I’ll go bail that he won’t get smoking again on his rounds. I think it is just a toss-up of life or death to him. Come! do a good turn for once, Salmon.”

Salmon paused. He was not bad-hearted, only self-important.

“What would Mr. Tanerton say to it?”

Ben did not answer. He knew that there, after Salmon himself, was where the difficulty would lie.

“All that you have been urging goes for nonsense, Rymer. Unless the Rector came to me and said, ‘You may put Lee on again,’ I should not, and could not, attempt to stir in the matter; and you must know that as well as I do.”

“Can’t somebody see Tanerton, and talk to him? One would think that the sight of Lee’s face would be enough to soften him, without anything else.”

“I don’t know who’d like to do it,” returned Salmon. And there the conference ended, for the apprentice came in from his dinner.

Very much to our surprise, Mr. Ben Rymer walked in that same evening to Crabb Cot, and was admitted to the Squire. In spite of Mr. Ben’s former ill-doings, which he had got to know of, the Squire treated Ben civilly, in remembrance of his father, and of his grandfather, the clergyman. Ben’s errand was to ask the Squire to intercede for Lee with Herbert Tanerton. And the pater, after talking largely about the iniquity of Lee, as connected with burnt letters, came round to Ben’s way of thinking, and agreed to go to the Rectory.

“Herbert Tanerton’s harder than nails, and you’ll do no good,” remarked Tod, watching us away on the following morning; for the pater took me with him to break the loneliness of the walk. “He’ll turn as cold to you as a stone the moment you bring up the subject, sir. Tell me I’m a story-teller when you come back if he does not, Johnny.”

We took the way of the Ravine. It was a searching day; the wintry wind keen and “unkind as man’s ingratitude.” Before us, toiling up the descent to the Ravine at the other end, and coming to a halt at the stile to pant and cough, went a woebegone figure, thinly clad, which turned out to be Lee himself. He had a small bundle of loose sticks in his hand, which he had come to pick up. The Squire was preparing a sort of blowing-up greeting for him, touching lighted matches and carelessness, but the sight of the mild, starved grey face disarmed him; he thought, instead, of the days when Lee had been a prosperous farmer, and his tone changed to one of pity.

“Hard times, I’m afraid, Lee.”

“Yes, sir, very hard. I’ve known hard times before, but I never thought to see any so cruel as these. There’s one comfort, sir; when things come to this low ebb, life can’t last long.”

“Stuff,” said the Squire. “For all you know, you may be back in your old place soon: and—and Mrs. Todhetley will find some sewing when Mamie’s well enough to do it.”

A faint light, the dawn of hope, shone in Lee’s eyes. “Oh, sir, if it could be! and I heard a whisper to-day that young Jelf refuses to keep the post. If it had been anybody’s letter but Mr. Tanerton’s, perhaps—but he does not forgive.”

“I’m on my way now to ask him,” cried the pater, unable to keep in the news. “Cheer up, Lee—of course you’d pass your word not to go burning letters again.”

“I’d not expose myself to the danger, sir. Once I got my old place back, I would never take out a pipe with me on my rounds; never, so long as I live.”

Leaving him with his new hope and the bundle of firewood, we trudged on to the Rectory. Herbert and Grace were both at home, and glad to see us.

But the interview ended in smoke. Tod had foreseen the result exactly: the Rector was harder than nails. He talked of “example” and “Christian duty;” and refused point-blank to allow Lee to be reinstated. The Squire gave him a few sharp words, and flung out of the house in a passion.

“A pretty Christian he is, Johnny! He was cold and hard as a boy. I once told him so before his stepfather, poor Jacob Lewis; but he is colder and harder now.”

At the turning of the road by Timberdale Court, we came upon Lee. After taking his faggots home, he waited about to see us and hear the news. The pater’s face, red and angry, told him the truth.

“There’s no hope for me, sir, I fear?”

“Not a bit of it,” growled the Squire. “Mr. Tanerton won’t listen to reason. Perhaps we can find some other light post for you, my poor fellow, when the winter shall have turned. You had better get indoors out of this biting cold; and here’s a couple of shillings.”

So hope went clean out of Andrew Lee.

Christmas Day and jolly weather. Snow on the ground to one’s heart’s content. Holly and ivy on the walls indoors, and great fires blazing on the hearths; turkeys, and plum-puddings, and oranges, and fun. That was our lucky state at Crabb Cot and at Timberdale generally, but not at Andrew Lee’s.

The sweet bells were chiming people out of church, as was the custom at Timberdale on high festivals. Poor Lee sat listening to them, his hand held up to his aching head. There had been no church for him: he had neither clothes to go in nor face to sit through the service. Mamie, wrapped in an old bed-quilt, lay back on the pillow by the fire. The coal-merchant, opening his heart, had sent a sack each of best Staffordshire coal to ten poor families, and Lee’s was one. Except the Squire’s two shillings, he had had no money given to him. A loaf of bread was in the cupboard; and a saucepan of broth, made of carrots and turnips out of the garden, simmered on the trivet; and that would be their Christmas dinner.

Uncommonly low was Mamie to-day. The longer she endured this famished state of affairs the weaker she grew; it stands to reason. She felt that a few days, perhaps hours, would finish her up. The little ones were upstairs with their grandmother, so that she had an interval of rest; and she lay back, her breath short and her chest aching as she thought of the past. Of the time when James West, the handsome young man in his gay regimentals, came to woo her, as the soldier did the miller’s daughter. In those happy days, when her heart was light and her song blithe as a bird’s in May, that used to be one of her songs, “The Banks of Allan Water.” Her dream had come to the same ending as the one told of in the ballad, and here she lay, deserted and dying. Timberdale was in the habit of prosaically telling her that she had “brought her pigs to a fine market.” Of the market there could be no question; but when Mamie looked into the past she saw more of romance there than anything else. The breaking out of the church bells forced a rush of tears to her heart and eyes. She tried to battle with the feeling, then turned and put her cheek against her father’s shoulder.

“Forgive me, father!” she besought him, in a sobbing whisper. “I don’t think it will be long now; I want you to say you forgive me before I go. If—if you can.”

And the words finished up for Lee what the bells had only partly done. He broke down, and sobbed with his daughter.

“I’ve never thought there was need of it, or to say it, child; and if there had been—Christ forgave all. ‘Peace on earth and goodwill to men.’ The bells are ringing it out now. He will soon take us to Him. Mamie, my forlorn one: forgiven; yes, forgiven; and in His beautiful world there is neither hunger, nor disgrace, nor pain. You are dying of that cold you caught in the autumn, and I shan’t be long behind you. There’s no longer any place for me here.”

“Not of the cold, father; I am not dying of that, but of a broken heart.”

Lee sobbed. He did not answer.

“And I should like to leave my forgiveness to James, should he ever come back here,” she whispered: “and—and my love. Please tell him that I’d have got well if I could, if only for the chance of seeing him once again in this world; and tell him that I have thought all along there must be some mistake; that he did not mean deliberately to harm me. I think so still, father. And if he should notice little Mima, tell him–”

A paroxysm of coughing interrupted the rest. Mrs. Lee came downstairs with the children, asking if it was not time for dinner.

“The little ones are crying out for it, Mamie, and I’m sure the rest of us are hungry enough.”

So they bestirred themselves to take up the broth, and take seats round the table. All but Mamie, who did not leave her pillow. Very watery broth, the carrots and turnips swimming in it.

“Say grace, Andy,” cried his grandmother.

For they kept up proper manners at Lee’s, in spite of the short commons.

“For what we are going to receive,” began Andy: and then he pulled himself up, and looked round.

Bursting in at the door, a laugh upon his face and a white basin in his hands, came Mr. Ben Rymer. The basin was three parts filled with delicious slices of hot roast beef and gravy.

“I thought you might like to eat a bit, as it’s Christmas Day,” said Ben. “And here’s an orange or two for you youngsters.”

Pulling the oranges out of his pocket, and not waiting to be thanked, Ben went off again. But he did not tell them what he was laughing at, or the trick he had played his mother—in slicing away at the round of beef, and rifling the dish of oranges, while her back was turned, looking after the servant’s doings in the kitchen, and the turning-out of the pudding. For Mrs. Rymer followed Timberdale in taking an exaggerated view of Lee’s sins, and declined to help him.