Part 2

I had been frightened enough before, lest she should die suddenly and quietly without my knowing it, while we were alone together; but I got into a perfect agony now for fear this last worst affliction should take me by surprise. I don’t suppose five minutes passed all that woeful night through, without my getting up and putting my cheek close to her mouth, to feel if the faint breaths still fluttered out of it. They came and went just the same as at first, though the fright I was in often made me fancy they were stilled for ever. Just as the church clocks were striking four, I was startled by seeing the room door open. It was only Dusty Sal (as they call her in the house) the maid-of-all-work. She was wrapped up in the blanket off her bed; her hair was all tumbled over her face; and her eyes were heavy with sleep, as she came up to the bedside where I was sitting.

“I’ve two hours good before I begin to work,” says she, in her hoarse, drowsy voice, “and I’ve come to sit up and take my turn at watching her. You lay down and get some sleep on the rug. Here’s my blanket for you--I don’t mind the cold--it will keep me awake.”

“You are very kind--very, very kind and thoughtful, Sally,” says I, “but I am too wretched in my mind to want sleep, or rest, or to do anything but wait where I am, and try and hope for the best.”

“Then I’ll wait, too,” says Sally. “I must do something; if there’s nothing to do but waiting, I’ll wait.”

And she sat down opposite me at the foot of the bed, and drew the blanket close round her with a shiver.

“After working so hard as you do, I’m sure you must want all the little rest you can get,” says I.

“Excepting only you,” says Sally, putting her heavy arm very clumsily, but very gently at the same time, round Mary’s feet, and looking hard at the pale, still face on the pillow. “Excepting you, she’s the only soul in this house as never swore at me, or give me a hard word that I can remember. When you made puddings on Sundays, and give her half, she always give me a bit. The rest of ’em calls me Dusty Sal. Excepting only you, again, she always called me Sally, as if she knowed me in a friendly way. I ain’t no good here, but I ain’t no harm neither; and I shall take my turn at the sitting up--that’s what I shall do!”

She nestled her head down close at Mary’s feet as she spoke those words, and said no more. I once or twice thought she had fallen asleep, but whenever I looked at her, her heavy eyes were always wide open. She never changed her position an inch till the church clocks struck six; then she gave one little squeeze to Mary’s feet with her arm, and shuffled out of the room without a word. A minute or two after, I heard her down below, lighting the kitchen fire just as usual.

A little later, the doctor stepped over before his breakfast time, to see if there had been any change in the night. He only shook his head when he looked at her, as if there was no hope. Having nobody else to consult that I could put trust in, I showed him the end of the cravat, and told him of the dreadful suspicion that had arisen in my mind, when I found it in her hand.

“You must keep it carefully, and produce it at the inquest,” he said. “I don’t know though, that it is likely to lead to anything. The bit of stuff may have been lying on the pavement near her, and her hand may have unconsciously clutched it when she fell. Was she subject to fainting fits?”

“Not more so, sir, than other young girls who are hard-worked and anxious, and weakly from poor living,” I answered.

“I can’t say that she may not have got that blow from a fall,” the doctor went on, looking at her temple again. “I can’t say that it presents any positive appearance of having been inflicted by another person. It will be important, however, to ascertain what state of health she was in last night. Have you any idea where she was yesterday evening?”

I told him where she was employed at work, and said I imagined she must have been kept there later than usual.

“I shall pass the place this morning,” said the doctor, “in going my rounds among my patients, and I’ll just step in and make some inquiries.”

I thanked him, and we parted. Just as he was closing the door, he looked in again.

“Was she your sister?” he asked.

“No, sir, only my dear friend.”

He said nothing more; but I heard him sigh, as he shut the door softly. Perhaps he once had a sister of his own, and lost her? Perhaps she was like Mary in the face?

The doctor was hours gone away. I began to feel unspeakably forlorn and helpless. So much so, as even to wish selfishly that Robert might really have sailed from America, and might get to London in time to assist and console me. No living creature came into the room but Sally. The first time she brought me some tea; the second and third times she only looked in to see if there was any change, and glanced her eye towards the bed. I had never known her so silent before; it seemed almost as if this dreadful accident had struck her dumb. I ought to have spoken to her, perhaps, but there was something in her face that daunted me; and, besides, the fever of anxiety I was in began to dry up my lips as if they would never be able to shape any words again. I was still tormented by that frightful apprehension of the past night, that she would die without my knowing it--die without saying one word to clear up the awful mystery of this blow, and set the suspicions at rest for ever which I still felt whenever my eyes fell on the end of the old cravat.

At last the doctor came back.

“I think you may safely clear your mind of any doubts to which that bit of stuff may have given rise,” he said. “She was, as you supposed, detained late by her employers, and she fainted in the work-room. They most unwisely and unkindly let her go home alone, without giving her any stimulant, as soon as she came to her senses again. Nothing is more probable, under these circumstances, than that she should faint a second time on her way here. A fall on the pavement, without any friendly arm to break it, might have produced even a worse injury than the injury we see. I believe that the only ill-usage to which the poor girl was exposed was the neglect she met with in the work-room.”

“You speak very reasonably, I own, sir,” said I, not yet quite convinced. “Still, perhaps she may----”

“My poor girl, I told you not to hope,” said the doctor, interrupting me. He went to Mary, and lifted up her eyelids, and looked at her eyes while he spoke, then added: “If you still doubt how she came by that blow, do not encourage the idea that any words of hers will ever enlighten you. She will never speak again.”

“Not dead! O, sir, don’t say she’s dead!”

“She is dead to pain and sorrow--dead to speech and recognition. There is more animation in the life of the feeblest insect that flies, than in the life that is left in her. When you look at her now, try to think that she is in Heaven. That is the best comfort I can give you, after telling the hard truth.”

I did not believe him. I could not believe him. So long as she breathed at all, so long I was resolved to hope. Soon after the doctor was gone, Sally came in again, and found me listening (if I may call it so) at Mary’s lips. She went to where my little hand-glass hangs against the wall, took it down, and gave it to me.

“See if the breath marks it,” she said.

Yes; her breath did mark it, but very faintly. Sally cleaned the glass with her apron, and gave it back to me. As she did so, she half stretched out her hand to Mary’s face, but drew it in again suddenly, as if she was afraid of soiling Mary’s delicate skin with her hard, horny fingers. Going out, she stopped at the foot of the bed, and scraped away a little patch of mud that was on one of Mary’s shoes.

“I always used to clean ’em for her,” said Sally, “to save her hands from getting blacked. May I take ’em off now, and clean ’em again?”

I nodded my head, for my heart was too heavy to speak. Sally took the shoes off with a slow, awkward tenderness, and went out.

An hour or more must have passed, when, putting the glass over her lips again, I saw no mark on it. I held it closer and closer. I dulled it accidentally with my own breath, and cleaned it. I held it over her again. O, Mary, Mary, the doctor was right! I ought to have only thought of you in Heaven!

Dead, without a word, without a sign,--without even a look to tell the true story of the blow that killed her! I could not call to anybody, I could not cry, I could not so much as put the glass down and give her a kiss for the last time. I don’t know how long I had sat there with my eyes burning, and my hands deadly cold, when Sally came in with the shoes cleaned, and carried carefully in her apron for fear of a soil touching them. At the sight of that----

I can write no more. My tears drop so fast on the paper that I can see nothing.

March 12th. She died on the afternoon of the eighth. On the morning of the ninth, I wrote, as in duty bound, to her stepmother, at Hammersmith. There was no answer. I wrote again: my letter was returned to me this morning, unopened. For all that woman cares, Mary might be buried with a pauper’s funeral. But this shall never be, if I pawn everything about me, down to the very gown that is on my back. The bare thought of Mary being buried by the workhouse gave me the spirit to dry my eyes, and go to the undertaker’s, and tell him how I was placed. I said, if he would get me an estimate of all that would have to be paid, from first to last, for the cheapest decent funeral that could be had, I would undertake to raise the money. He gave me the estimate, written in this way, like a common bill:

A walking funeral complete 1 13 8 Vestry 0 4 4 Rector 0 4 4 Clerk 0 1 0 Sexton 0 1 0 Beadle 0 1 0 Bell 0 1 0 Six feet of ground 0 2 0 --------- Total £2 8 4

If I had the heart to give any thought to it, I should be inclined to wish that the Church could afford to do without so many small charges for burying poor people, to whose friends even shillings are of consequence. But it is useless to complain; the money must be raised at once. The charitable doctor--a poor man himself, or he would not be living in our neighbourhood--has subscribed ten shillings towards the expenses; and the coroner, when the inquest was over, added five more. Perhaps others may assist me. If not, I have fortunately clothes and furniture of my own to pawn. And I must set about parting with them without delay; for the funeral is to be to-morrow, the thirteenth. The funeral--Mary’s funeral! It is well that the straits and difficulties I am in, keep my mind on the stretch. If I had leisure to grieve, where should I find the courage to face to-morrow?

Thank God, they did not want me at the inquest. The verdict given--with the doctor, the policeman, and two persons from the place where she worked, for witnesses--was Accidental Death. The end of the cravat was produced, and the coroner said that it was certainly enough to suggest suspicion; but the jury, in the absence of any positive evidence, held to the doctor’s notion that she had fainted and fallen down, and so got the blow on her temple. They reproved the people where Mary worked for letting her go home alone, without so much as a drop of brandy to support her, after she had fallen into a swoon from exhaustion before their eyes. The coroner added, on his own account, that he thought the reproof was thoroughly deserved. After that, the cravat-end was given back to me, by my own desire; the police saying that they could make no investigations with such a slight clue to guide them. They may think so, and the coroner, and doctor, and jury may think so; but, in spite of all that has passed, I am now more firmly persuaded than ever that there is some dreadful mystery in connection with that blow on my poor lost Mary’s temple which has yet to be revealed, and which may come to be discovered through this very fragment of a cravat that I found in her hand. I cannot give any good reason for why I think so; but I know that if I had been one of the jury at the inquest, nothing should have induced me to consent to such a verdict as Accidental Death.

BIRD HISTORY.

A certain learned physician, named Peter Belon, a native of the town of Le Mans, the capital of what was then the province of Maine, but is now the department of the river Sarthe, in France, bethought him that very little was known in his native country at the time he lived--the middle of the sixteenth century--of Natural History; and, being moved by the example of Aristotle (at the trifling distance of nearly nineteen hundred years) he resolved, having been a great traveller and eke a great observer (two persons not always united) to give his fellow-citizens and the world, the benefit of his experience and opportunities, and take away the reproach which lay like a shadow over the land.

Prepared by much study for the cultivation of his favourite pursuits, he left France in the year fifteen hundred and forty-seven, being at that time twenty-nine years of age, and travelled successively through Germany, Bohemia, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, and Asia Minor, returning to Paris after three years absence with a large and valuable collection of plants and specimens of natural history, which he then occupied himself in arranging, preparatory to the publication of the knowledge he had acquired. The first work which he produced was a history of strange fishes and serpents, under the title “De Aquatilibus;” but, tempting as the subject is, I do not at present intend to examine it, having another of his productions before me, which (from the fact of its being a borrowed book, and liable, therefore, to sudden seizure by its owner, who otherwise would never get it back), more immediately claims my attention.

This coveted volume is the celebrated History of the Nature of Birds, with their descriptions and lively portraits, taken from Nature, and written in seven books, and is, perhaps, the principal work on which is founded Peter Belon’s claim to be considered the father of modern natural history. In the preface to it he promises--and he keeps his word far better than might have been expected--that nothing shall appear in these books which is not perfectly true; there shall be no false descriptions or portraits of suppositious animals; nothing, in short, that is not to be found in nature. Appropriate to the publication of a work on ornithology, Peter Belon caused this volume to be printed, in the year fifteen hundred and fifty-five, by William Cavellat, in front of the college of Cambray, in Paris, at the sign of the Fat Hen (a sure sign that Peter Belon came from Le Mans, a city famous for its poultry); and that there should be no doubt of the latter fact, the title-page also bore the living portraiture of a domestic fowl in very high condition, enclosed within a circle, on the outer rim of which was inscribed the legend “Gallina in pingui,” an inscription that need not again be translated. A portrait of Peter Belon, as he appeared to the justly-admiring world, at the age of thirty-six, also embellished the volume. The learned physician appears to have been a man with a good, sensible, honest countenance, wearing a large Crimean beard, and having a cap on his head, the shape of which, fortunately, has not yet been adopted for the British army.

Like most other old authors, Peter Belon takes some time before he can get fairly under weigh. There are, first, the dedication to the most Christian king--Henry the Second of the name--whose humble scholar the author declares himself to be. Then follows a homily addressed to the reader, chiefly for the purpose of assuring him that, in the lively portraits of the birds which he presents (Ah, could we but reproduce some of them!), he is not practising on his credulity, but that, such as he represents them, the fowls are themselves, and that, where he cannot get an authentic likeness he has refused to invent one.

The royal privilege to publish, sealed with yellow wax--like a bottle of good old wine--comes next, and finally appear several copies of verses in praise of the author, by certain of his friends, which latter had better be skipped, that Peter Belon’s volume, which has in it a great deal that is worth reading, may unfold its pages for our gratification. It is not, however, a resumé of the work, or anything like it, that I intend to make, but simply a dip into it--here and there--extending some of the quaint fancies, curious digressions, and sound opinions with which it is interspersed, always desiring our reader to bear in mind that the author was a physician as well as a naturalist.

A word or two, before he fairly enters on his theme, may be allowed him to describe the pains he was in the habit of taking to obtain correct information. “It was my custom,” he says, “during my sojourn in Padua, to go down the Brenta every Thursday evening, voyaging all night in order to reach Venice on Friday morning, and to remain there on Saturday and Sunday, as much for the convenience of seeing birds as well as fishes; and after having conferred with fowlers and fishermen, to return from thence on Sunday evening, thus losing no time by taking the night-boat, and being ready to continue my studies on Monday morning. During which time, on the aforesaid days of Friday and Saturday, there was not a single fowler or fisherman who did not bring to show me every rare creature he had been able to procure.”

Commencing, then, “ab ovo,” Peter Belon discusses the properties of eggs; but into the processes of fecundation and hatching which he describes, I do not propose to enter, the gastronomic view of the question presenting more novelty. After apologising for the puerility of the subject, he tells us that in his time the French way of eating eggs (they have six hundred and eighty-five ways now, if the Almanach des Gourmands speaks sooth) was by breaking them at the small end and carefully replacing the shell when emptied into the platter; while the Germans, on the other hand--reminding us of Blefuscu and Lilliput--opened their eggs at the side and finished by smashing the shell; in which latter practice, says Belon, they followed the example of the ancients, who held it a thing of evil augury to leave the shells unbroken. Belon then proceeds to discourse on the numerous varieties of eggs, considering those of pigeons, ostriches, pea-hens, geese, and swans are ill-flavoured and indigestible,--not objecting to the eggs of the tortoise or turtle,--but giving the preference, like a person of taste, to those of the domestic fowl, which, he says, “are supposed by many in France to assist greatly in prolonging life;” and he instances the case of Pope Paul the Third, who used, with that end in view, to eat two new-laid eggs for breakfast every morning. As to their shape, he remarks that long eggs are supposed to be much better eating than round ones; but without insisting on this point, he has no hesitation in declaring that all are highly invigorating, as truffles are, and artichokes, and raw oysters. Artichokes, indeed, were so much esteemed in Belon’s time, that “no great nobleman feeling himself unwell would finish his dinner without them,”--eating them by way of dessert. Belon objects to hard boiled eggs, or such as are too much fried, “on account of their engendering bad humours,” but upon poached eggs (œufs pochéz) he looks with considerable favour. In all cases he prefers plain boiled eggs (time--three minutes and a quarter) to those which are roasted; notwithstanding the well-known proverb: “There’s wisdom in the roasting of eggs.” The best way of preserving eggs, he says, is to keep them in a cool place, bury them in salt, or dip them in brine.