CHAPTER V.

LUCY’S FAREWELL TO THE STAGE.

FOR Lucy Alford life’s outlook seemed very dreary after that chill day in February, when her father’s bones were laid in their last resting-place. He had not been a good father--if measured by the ordinary standard of parental duty--but he had been a kind and gentle one, and his daughter lamented him with profound regret. He had allowed her to grow up very much as she pleased, taking no pains to educate her, but suffering her to pick up such stray crumbs of learning as fell from the table of the professional crammer; but by reason of this very neglect Tristram Alford had seemed to his child the very centre of love and indulgence. And, beyond this, he had believed in her, and admired her, and sustained her fainting spirit, when the theatrical horizon was darkest--when managers were unkind, and sister-actresses malevolent--by such prophetic visions of future triumphs, and such glowing anticipations of coming happiness, as the man of sanguine temperament can always evolve from his inner consciousness and a gin-bottle. The poor child had found comfort and hope in those shadowy dreams, happily unconscious that her father’s fancies were steeped in alcohol; and now that he was gone, the hopes and dreams seemed to have perished with him.

Thus it was that Lucy shrank from the idea of recommencing her theatrical labours as from a hopeless and a dreary prospect. Nor were her feelings on this subject uninfluenced by the sentiments of those two persons who were now her sole earthly friends. Laurence Desmond’s shuddering horror of the “Cat’s-meat Man,” his furtive glance at the little red-satin boots in which she was to have danced the famous comic dance so much affected of late years, had been keenly noted, and remembered with cruel pain.

“How can he be so prejudiced against the profession?” she asked herself. And then she thought of Shakspeare, and of the Greek dramatists, whose every syllable and every comma had been so laboriously studied in the cramming season at Henley--and was slow to perceive that the more a man loves his Shakspeare and his Sophocles, the less indulgence is he likely to show to the “Cat’s-meat Man.”

Mrs. Jerningham contemplated the dramatic profession from the stand-point of a woman who had known poverty, but had never found herself in the streets of London without an escort, or her brougham, and who had spent her life in a circle where every woman’s movements are regulated by severe and immutable laws.

“How will you pursue your professional career, now that your poor papa is gone, my dear?” she asked, kindly, when she came to discuss Miss Alford’s future. “You cannot possibly travel about the country without a _chaperone_--some nice elderly person, who could take great care of you, and whose respectability would be a kind of guarantee for your safety. It is quite out of the question that you should go from town to town _without_ some such person.”

Lucy blushed as she thought of the many damsels who did go from town to town unattended by this ideal representative of the proprieties; of Miss Gloucester, the walking-lady, who had walked in that ladylike capacity for the last fifteen years, and knew every town in the United Kingdom, and every _fit-up_ or temporary temple of the drama in the British Islands--and who had supported her bed-ridden old mother in a comfortable lodging at Walworth, and had dressed herself with exquisite neatness, and preserved a reputation without spot or blemish, during the whole period, on a salary averaging twenty-five shillings per week. She thought, with a deeper blush, of the two ballet-dancers, Mademoiselle Pasdebasque and Miss May Zourka, who wandered over the face of the earth together, loud, and reckless, and riotous as a couple of medical students, and who were dimly suspected of having given suppers--suppers of oysters, and pork-pies, and bottled-beer--to the officers of different garrisons, in the course of their wanderings. Of these, and of many other unprotected strollers--some bright, pure, gentle girls, of good lineage and careful education; many honest, hardworking, and self-sacrificing bread-winners; others painted and disreputable wanderers, who made their profession a means to their unholy ends--did Lucy think, as Mrs. Jerningham laid down the law about the respectable elderly _chaperone_.

“Do you know any one of unblemished respectability with whom you could travel?” Mrs. Jerningham asked, after a pause.

Miss Alford’s mental gaze surveyed the ranks of her acquaintance, and the image of Mrs. M’Grudder arose before her, grim and terrible. Unblemished respectability was the M’Grudder’s strong point. The fact that she was not an immoral person was a boast which she was apt to reiterate at all times and seasons, appropriate or inappropriate; and her spotless fame had furnished her with many a Parthian shaft wherewith to wound helpless evil-doers of the Pasdebasque and May Zourka class, in that Eleusinian temple of theatrical life, the ladies’ dressing-room. Abroad, guilty Pasdebasque has the best of it. She attends race-meetings in her carriage, and flaunts her silks and velvets before the awe-stricken eyes of the little country town. The garrison provides her with bouquets, and applauds her _entrées_ with big noisy hands and a bass roar of welcome; while her benefits are favoured with a patronage seldom accorded to the benefits of innocence. But the Nemesis awaits her in the dressing-room. There the dread Furies avenge the wrongs of their weaker sisterhood, and retribution takes the awful voice of M’Grudder.

Ruthlessly does that lady perform her appointed duty. Loud are her expressions of wonder at the triumphs of _some_ people; her bewilderment on perceiving the superb attire which _some_ people can procure out of a pittance of two guineas per week; her regret that on the occasion of _her_ benefit the 17th Prancers had held themselves disdainfully aloof from the theatre, though her Lady Douglas _had_ been compared to the performance of the same character by the great Siddons, and by judges _quite_ as competent as the Prancers; and anon, in the next breath, her inconsistent avowal of thankfulness to Providence that her dress-circle had been empty, rather than filled as was the dress-circle of Mademoiselle Pasdebasque.

Lucy thought of Mrs. M’Grudder, who had at divers times taken upon herself the chaperonage of some timid young aspirant, and beneath whose ample wing, if rumour was to be trusted, the hapless neophyte had known a hard time. No, the dramatic profession at best had its trials; but life spent in the companionship of Mrs. M’Grudder would have been too bitter a martyrdom.

This was the beginning of the end of Miss Alford’s professional career. She had pondered much upon Laurence Desmond’s evident dislike to her position, and had taken that dislike deeply to heart. The glamour was fast fading from the fairy dream of her childhood. She had played at Electra and Antigone--she had stood before her looking-glass, inspired, and radiant with passionate emotion, fancying herself Juliet or Pauline; and all her dreams had ended in--a page’s dress, and a foolish comic song.

Mrs. Jerningham’s influence speedily completed the work of disenchantment; and before Tristram Alford had been dead a month, his daughter had bidden farewell to the stage--in no brilliant apotheosis of bouquets and clamorous chorus of enraptured dramatic critics, eloquent as Pythoness on tripod, but in the sad silence of her own lonely chamber. She had said her doleful good-bye to the dreams of her youth, and had begun the practical career of a woman who stands quite alone in the world, and who has no hope save in her own patient industry.

“If I had any one to work for,” she thought, sadly, “it would not seem hard to me. But to toil and drudge in order that I may prolong my lonely life, and with no other end or aim----!”

To Mrs. Jerningham she made no piteous confession of her own sadness. It was agreed between them that she was to be a governess. Mrs. Jerningham’s influence would be invaluable in procuring her a situation; and all she had to do was to make herself mistress of the accomplishments which that lady assured her were indispensable. Some of these accomplishments she had already mastered; of others she had a superficial knowledge. Nothing was required but a little patient drudgery; two or three hours a day devoted to the piano, an hour or so to her German grammar. And in the evening she could read _I Promessi Sposi_ to her kind patroness, by way of polishing her Italian.

“You shall stay with us till we have made you a perfect treasure in the way of governesses,” Emily said, kindly, “and then Auntie and I will take pains to get you a situation with nice people, who will give you seventy or eighty pounds a year, and with whom you may be as happy as the day is long; and I am sure that will be better than your dreadful country theatres.

Lucy assented to this proposition; but she thought, with a sigh, of Market Deeping, and her brief triumphs as Pauline. Yes, the dramatic profession was no doubt a hard one, but she had been happy at Market Deeping; and that one night of glory, when she had been called before the curtain after her performance of Pauline, had been a dazzling glimpse of brightness which shone back upon her through the mists of the past with supernal radiance. And instead of such bright brief successes, she was to teach those hideous German declensions, and read _I Promessi Sposi_, and superintend the performance of Cramer’s Exercises, for ever and ever. For ever and ever! She was but just nineteen, and the long blank life before her looked like an eternity.

Her chief consolation daring the patient, laborious days was the thought that Mr. Desmond would approve her efforts; her secondary motive was the desire to be duly grateful for Mrs. Jerningham’s kindness. Nor were her days all drudgery. Her patroness was too kind to allow this. There were long drives through the bright pastoral landscape that lies around sleepy, river-side Hampton; a little, very little, quiet society; an occasional novel; and a rare--ah, too rare--visit from the editor of the _Areopagus_.

The relations existing between that gentleman and Mrs. Jerningham were quite beyond poor inexperienced Lucy’s comprehension, and they formed the subject of her wondering meditations.

Between Mr. Desmond and Mrs. Jerningham there was no tie of kindred--_that_ fact had long ago transpired; nor could Mr. Desmond be affianced to a lady whose husband’s existence was a notorious fact. And yet Mr. Desmond was obviously the especial property, the moral goods and chattels, of Mrs. Jerningham. Miss Alford knew something of Plato, but very little of that figment of the modern brain, entitled Platonic attachment. Friendship between these two persons would in no manner have surprised her; but, innocent as she was, her instinct told her that in this association there was something more than common friendship. If she had been blind to every subtle shade of tone and manner that prevailed between these two, she would have perceived the one fact, that Mr. Desmond’s manner to herself in Emily’s presence was not what it had been in the Islington lodging-house, where he had first come to her relief. The tender, half-fatherly familiarity was exchanged for a ceremonious courtesy that chilled her to the heart. Beyond a few kind but measured sentences of inquiry or solicitude when he first saw her, he scarcely addressed her at all during his visits of many hours. She sat far away from the chess-table or the reading-desk by which Emily’s low easy-chair was placed, and the subdued murmur of the two voices only came to her at intervals from the spot where Mrs. Jerningham and her guest conversed.

At dinner Mr. Desmond’s talk was of that western London, which was stranger to her than Egypt or Babylon; the music which Mrs. Jerningham played after dinner was from modern operas, whose every note was familiar to those two, but of which she knew no more than the names. The books, the people, the places they talked of were all alike strange to her. She was with them, but not of them. The sense of her strangeness and loneliness weighed upon her like a physical oppression. Every day of Mr. Desmond’s absence she found herself thinking of--nay, even hoping for--his coming; and when he came she was miserable, and felt her solitary, hopeless position more keenly than in his absence.

“Oh, why did I ever see him?” she asked herself. “I should have struggled on, somehow, at such places as Market Deeping, and might in the end have succeeded in my profession. And now I have given up all my hopes to please him--and he does not care! What can it matter to him whether I am an actress or a governess? I am nothing to _him_.”

He does not care! This was the note, the dominant of all Miss Alford’s sad reveries. She toiled on patiently, always anxious to please her patroness; but it seemed to her very hard that in gaining this new friend, she should have so utterly lost that old sweet friendship which had begun in the days when she wore holland pinafores, and fished for bream and barbel with a wretched worm impaled upon a crooked pin.

Once, when her sad thoughts were saddest, a faint sigh escaped her lips as she bent over her work, in her accustomed seat by one of the windows, remote from the spot affected by Mrs. Jerningham; and, looking up some minutes afterwards, she saw Laurence Desmond’s eyes fixed upon her, with a look that penetrated her heart. Ah, what did it mean, that tender, deeply-mournful look? This inexperienced girl dared not trust her own translation of its meaning. But that sad regard touched her heart with a new feeling.

“He thinks of me; he is sorry for me,” she said to herself. More than this she dared not hope; but in her dreams that night, and in her thoughts and dreams of many days and nights to come, the look was destined to haunt her. In the next minute she heard Mrs. Jerningham announce her desire for a game of chess, with the tone of an extremely proper Cleopatra to an unmartial Antony.

The weeks and months went by, and Mrs. Jerningham was still a kind and hospitable friend to the helpless girl whom Mr. Desmond had cast upon her compassion.

“I am very glad you introduced her to me,” Emily said sometimes to the editor of the _Areopagus_. “She is really a dear little thing; and I am growing quite attached to her.”

“Yes, she is a good little girl,” replied Mr. Desmond, in a careless tone.

“And as to jealousy,” resumed Emily, “of course that is quite out of the question with such a dear, harmless little creature.”

“Of course.”

And then Mrs. Jerningham looked at Mr. Desmond, and Mr. Desmond looked at Mrs. Jerningham, with the air of accomplished, swordsmen on guard.

Was Mrs. Jerningham jealous of this “dear, harmless little creature”? She watched Miss Lucy very closely when Laurence was present, and had a sharp eye for Laurence when he gave Miss Lucy good-day; but if she had been jealous, she would scarcely have kept Lucy at the villa, where Laurence saw her very often; on the other hand, if Lucy had not been at the villa, Laurence might have seen her even more often, and Mrs. Jerningham could not have been present at their meetings; so there may have been some alloy of self-interest mingled with the pure gold of womanly kindness.

The spring ripened into early summer, and the Hampton villa looked its brightest; but neither spring nor summer saw the end of Emily Jerningham’s family cough. She insisted upon making light of the matter, and as, unhappily, those about her were inexperienced in illness, the slight but perpetual cough gave little uneasiness. Before Laurence she made a point of appearing at her best. Excitement gave colour to her cheeks and light to her eyes. The outline of her patrician face was little impaired by some loss of roundness, and her elegant demi-toilettes concealed the fact that she was growing alarmingly thin. Her maid alone knew the extent of the change, which she and the housekeeper discussed, with much solemn foreboding of coming ill.

“I had to line the sleeves of her last dress with wadding,” said the abigail; “such a beautiful arm she had, too, when I first came to her; but she’s been going off gradual-like for the last three years, poor thing! and as to talking to her about her ’ealth, it would be as much as my place is worth, for a prouder lady, nor a more reserved in her ways, I never lived with. You might as well stand behind a statue, and brush _its_ hair, till you’re ready to drop, for anything like conversation you can get out of _her_; and when I think of my last lady--which was a countess, as you know, Wilcox, and the things _she’d_ tell me, and the way she loved a bit of gossip--it turns my blood to ice like to wait upon Mrs. Jerningham. And yet as generous a lady as ever I served; and as kind and civil-spoken, in her own cold way.”

Mrs. Jerningham paid several visits to Dr. Leonards; but as she obstinately or apathetically ignored that distinguished physician’s counsels, she was no better for those drives to Great George Street.

Laurence questioned her closely as to these interviews, and would fain have questioned Dr. Leonards himself, had his position authorized him to do so.

Lucy, who knew absolutely nothing of illness, believed her kind patroness’s cough to be the merest nervous irritation of the throat; nor was Mrs. Colton in any manner alarmed. No one but Mrs. Jerningham herself knew of her feverish nights, and daily hours of suffering and languor, endured in the solitude of her pretty morning-room. Even the patient herself had no apprehension of danger. The languor had crept upon her by such slow degrees, the fever had so long been a chronic disorder.

“If I were happy, I should soon be well, I dare say,” she said to herself; “the fever and the weakness are of the mind rather than the body.”

In the first week of summer Mr. Desmond gave himself a brief respite from the cares of the _Areopagus_, and secured bachelor lodgings at Sunbury, where he kept his boat, and whence he rowed to and from River Lawn.

“And this week you are really going to give to me?” said Mrs. Jerningham.

“To you and to Father Thames. I hope you are as fond of the river as you were last summer.”

“Oh yes. The river has been my companion upon many a lonely summer day. I have reason to be fond of the river.”

She glanced with something of sadness to her favourite seat under the drooping boughs of a Spanish chestnut. Her summer days had been very lonely, lacking all those elements which make the lives of women sweet and happy. For her had been no murmur of children’s voices, no pleasant cares of household, no daily expectation of a husband’s return from club or senate, office or counting-house; no weekly round of visits among the poor; no sense of duty done; only a dull, listless blank, and the last new novel, and the last new colour in _gros de Lyons_, and the last new monster in scentless, gaudy horticulture, a chocolate-coloured calceolaria, a black dahlia, a sea-green camellia japonica.

“You are going to give me the whole week,” she said. “Oh, Laurence, I will try to be happy!”

She said this with unwonted earnestness, and with eyes that were dim with unshed tears. And she kept her word. She did honestly try to be happy, and she succeeded in being--gay. If the gaiety were somewhat feverish, if her harmonious laugh bordered on that laughter whereof Solomon said “it was mad,” she did for the moment contrive to escape thought. This was something, for of late, thought had been only another name for care.

Mr. Desmond had rowed stroke in the University Eight, and shared the Oxonian fallacy that to scull from ten to twenty miles under a broiling sun is the intellectual man’s best repose. He rested his brain from the labours of the _Areopagus_, and spent his days in pulling a roomy wherry to and fro between Hampton and Maidenhead, with Mrs. Jerningham and Lucy Alford for his passengers, and a dainty little hamper of luncheon for his cargo.

The weather was lovely. The landscape through which the river winds between Hampton and Chertsey, between Chertsey and Maidenhead, is a kind of terrestrial paradise, and a paradise peopled with classic shades; and all along those pastoral, villa-dotted banks, nestled little villages and trimly-furnished inns, within whose hospitable shade the wanderers might repose, while the smart, maple-painted boat bobbed up and down at anchor in the sun. These peaceful rovers kept no count of the hours. They left River Lawn at early morning, lunched among the reedy shores below Chertsey, took their five-o’clock tea at Staines, and went home with the tide to a compound collation, which combined the elements of dinner, tea, and supper.

Mrs. Colton was but too glad to forego the delights of these water-parties in favour of Lucy; nor was Laurence sorry to resign a passenger who weighed some twelve or thirteen stone, who at every lurch of the boat entertained fears of drowning; to whom every weir seemed perilous as Niagara, and every lock a descent into Hades; and whose shawls and wraps, and carriage-rugs and foot-muffs, were insufferable to behold under the summer sun.

To Lucy, the delight of these excursions was a single ineffable pleasure. She knew that this bright, brief existence in _his_ company was to occur once in her life, and once only. Again and again she told herself this; but she could not help being dangerously happy. The river, the sunshine, the landscape, the perfumed air that crept over banks of wild-thyme,--for, thank Heaven, in spite of the builder, the wild-thyme does still blow on banks we know, not twenty miles from London,--all these things of themselves would have made her happy; but to these things Laurence Desmond’s presence, his low, kind voice, his ever-thoughtful care, lent a new sweetness.

In plain truth, this penniless orphan-girl had most innocently and unconsciously fallen in love--or learned to love the man who had befriended her. Of that kindly, compassionate assistance which Mr. Desmond had given in all singleness of heart, _this_ was the fatal fruit. From the first he had felt a vague consciousness that danger might lurk in this association; but the full extent of that peril he had never foreseen. It was danger to himself he had dreaded. The girl’s helplessness had touched him, her gratitude had melted him, her pretty, innocent, almost reverential looks and tones had flattered him.

He knew now that the hazard of his own feelings had been less than the peril of hers. By signs and tokens, too subtle and too delicate for translation into words, the fatal secret had been revealed to him. He knew that he was beloved; that this affectionate, innocent heart was his; that this fresh young life might be taken into his keeping to-morrow, to brighten and bless his own until the end of his earthly pilgrimage. Yes; this dear little creature, with her soft, winning ways, and dove-like eyes, he might have claimed for his wife to-morrow: if he had been free. But on him there was a tie more binding than marriage, a chain that no divorce could break--the bondage of his honour. As Lancelot sadly bade farewell to the lily maid of Astolat, so Laurence, in the silence of his heart, put away from him the dream and the hope that he would fain have cherished.

And all the time he thought of his bondage, the oars dipped gaily into the water, and the editor and Mrs. Jerningham talked of literature and art, and fashion and horticulture; and Lucy was satisfied with the delight of hearing that one dear voice which made the most commonplace conversation a kind of poetry. There are no limits to the sentimentality of inexperienced girlhood. Young ladies in society had calculated Mr. Desmond’s income to a sixpence, and had assessed all the advantages of his position, his chances of a seat in Parliament by and by, with every remote contingency of his career. But if he had indeed been Lancelot, and herself Elaine the fair, Lucy Alford could scarcely have regarded him with more reverent affection. And all this he had won for himself by a little Christianlike compassion, and an expenditure of something under fifty pounds.