THE HOUSE WITH THE VERANDAH.
ByISABELLA FYVIE MAYO, Author of “Other People’s Stairs,” “Her Object in Life,” etc.
THE NEWS THAT CAME AT LAST.
M
rs.Bray’s end did not prove so imminent as her faithful Rachel had feared. She lingered on, though still unable to leave Bath for return to her desolated home. So Florence Brand came back to London, but she and Jem still often took “a week’s end” to run westward and visit the old lady. They never offered to take Lucy with them, and if “Jem” could not go Florence went alone. As for Lucy, she often yearned for those associations with her old easy girlish life which she would have found in Mrs. Bray’s presence. Such associations help to uphold our sense of identity, and often comfort us by revealing our own growth. They keep us tender, too, and tolerant, reviving the consciousness of what we were ourselves before we learned bitter lessons which may not yet have come to others. Also they strengthen us by revealing that not even to regain our old careless joys could we willingly be again our old careless selves. It is the “look backward” which best spurs us to go forward.
But Lucy could not afford any “unnecessaries” of leisure or railway travel. She turned at once to her life of steady labour, knowing that she must be henceforth a working woman, not for any temporary exigency, but as part of the natural and persistent order of things.
Even thus she had problems to solve. Her earned income, more or less uncertain, was not adequate for the reliable upkeep of the home of her married life. Nor could the demands upon it grow less, since Hugh’s education and start in life had to be taken into account.
Lucy could not yet give up all hope of her husband’s return. But her sweet, sane nature speedily realised that whatever hopes she might secretly cherish, she must nevertheless act as though Charlie had indeed “sailed for that other shore” whence he “could not come back to her.”
Yet these secret hopes made it very hard to contemplate the surrender of the home Charlie and she had made together—the sale of the leasehold, the dispersion and shrinkage of the household gods. These seemed almost sacred now when they might be all that remained of the old life.
The Brands warmly advocated giving up the house and selling off the furniture.
“It may not bring in much,” Florence said airily, “but what it does Jem will get well invested in some paying concern. Then you and the boy can board with somebody. You may do that moderately enough, for people who are glad to take boarders can often be screwed down to low terms. Then apart from that definite outlay, you’ll have whatever you can earn for yourself, and you’ll have no more worry with housekeeping. Many would envy such a lot. You see there are compensations in all things.”
Then it struck Florence that Lucy’s hesitancy might arise from reluctance to give up all hope of Charlie’s return, so she added hastily—
“And if what we all hope for should really happen, why, you would still have your capital, and you could buy another leasehold and get new furniture; it would just make a lovely new beginning!”
Lucy shook her head.
“I don’t want to do this if I can find some other way,” she said. “No other house could be to us what this one is, nor any new furniture that which Charlie and I bought bit by bit in our courting days. Practically speaking, too, breakings-up and sales, and buyings again, all mean loss in cash as well as in feelings.”
“Then, too, if you and the boy were boarding,” Florence went on hurriedly, “your wants would be drawn within narrow and defined limits, so that if there was any sort of misfortune, it would not be difficult for us to help you. We are not really rich, Lucy. We live as we do and spend as we do only that we may go on getting more. That is the way with one-half of the people in society. It’s trying. It tells upon Jem, it’s that which makes him take so much wine,” she whispered. “I should not like my family to heap any burdens on Jem.”
“I shall not do that, Florence,” replied Lucy, cool and quiet now, where once she would have been indignant and stung. “I shall certainly not allow myself to get into debt. I will look well ahead. If we have to go to the workhouse, I will make our own arrangements for going there!”
Other people took counsel with Lucy in a far different spirit. Miss Latimer said Lucy might rely on her remaining with her as long as they could possibly share a common home. That added her little income to the household funds. “Little indeed,” she said, but Lucy answered—
“Every little helps. And the greatest help is in the knowledge that one does not bear one’s burden alone.”
“Ay, two are better than one,” rejoined the old governess, “and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”
“I’d like to be the third cord, but I’m only a bit of twine,” said Tom.
Another and stouter strand was soon to be woven into the household coil for that “long pull and strong pull” which Lucy was determined to make. The death of his old landlord had broken up the house where Mr. Somerset had hitherto lived. Diffidently, as if he were asking a great favour, he inquired if Lucy could entertain the idea of allowing him to rent her first floor, for which he was willing to pay a rent which at once made a substantial addition to the household finance.
As for poor Tom Black, he was distressed to think how small his payments were. “If he went away,” he said, “somebody more profitable might occupy his place.” Lucy had to reassure him by her own words and by the sight of Hugh’s tears at the bare thought of “Tom’s going away.”
Three months later Tom got a rise in his salary, and then he insisted on raising his monthly board fee. Lucy was slightly reluctant and almost aggrieved, but when she saw the lad’s face beaming with the power of his new prosperity, she let him have his own way in the matter.
So life settled down. Florence resented that her sister had chosen “to turn into a lodging-house keeper.” Lucy marvelled to note how strangely it “comes natural” to some women to belittle and contemn those ways of honest industry which lie nearest to woman’s true nature—housekeeping, house-serving, the care of the aged, and the young, and the solitary. And, oh, the pity of it! if such belittlement and contempt tend to relegate these high womanly functions only to unworthy “eye-servants”!
Months passed, yet the silence of the seas remained unbroken. Now and then Lucy and the captain’s wife wrote and asked how each fared. There came no day when either drew a line across life and forbade that hope should cross it. They did not put on widow’s mourning, yet when Lucy had to buy a new dress or ribbon, Miss Latimer noticed that she bought it of black or of soberest grey.
Months of such waiting had gone by ere Lucy wonderingly observed that there came to her no more her old nightmare vision of herself struggling lonely between a wild heath and a dead wall against a midnight storm. There was a sense in which the allegory of that vision was converted into fact—the silence as of death on one hand, the great rough world on the other, the storm of sorrow beating on herself. Yet now she realised that God Himself was with her on the dark wild way—she was not alone—and that made all the difference. God does not promise to uphold us in our fears and forebodings. These ought not to be. He has promised to be with us and to comfort us when the dark days shall really come.
Lucy never gave voice to many of her deepest experiences at that time—that secret speech which the Father keeps for each of His children. Sometimes it seemed to her as if shafts of light penetrated her very being, revealing orilluminating the most solemn mysteries of life. Sometimes she thought of Paul’s allusion to being “caught up into the third heaven” and “hearing unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter.”
This fleeting glory would fade out of Lucy’s soul even as sunshine fades off the earth. Yet Lucy felt that those “hours of insight” left her seeing “all things new.”
Lucy began to understand how martyrs can smile and speak cheerfully at their stake, because from that standpoint their developed spiritual stature lifts them to wider horizons than others know. What a message the blue sky must have had for the white depths of the Colosseum! Yet these things can never be told or written. Whoever would know them must learn them for themselves, though it be but “in part.” But it is because of these things that faith and hope and love have never died out of the world, since all the forces of unfaith and despair and cruelty end only in producing them afresh, because they are of the eternal life of God.
Lucy’s picture-dealer felt kindly towards the quiet client who gave so little trouble, showed so little self-conceit, and, while steadily business-like, was never exacting or suspicious. He thought “it would do Mrs. Challoner no harm” if he told her that one or two purchasers had said, “There is something in that lady’s sketches which we miss in many greater artists,” one old lady adding that “when she looked at Lucy’s pictures, she felt as if there was a soft voice beside her whispering something pleasant.”
That brought the tears to Lucy’s eyes and made her feel very humble, possibly because she could not deny to herself that there was truth in the gracious words. Oh, to have Charlie again, and yet to be all that she had grown into since he had gone away—since this awful silence! And an inner voice bade her take cheer, for was not this what was sure to happen here or there—sooner or later?
“What a pitiful bliss we should make for ourselves if we were left to do it without God!” Lucy cried, thinking even of the sweetest dreams of courting days, the best aspirations of married life. For after one taste of “the peace which passeth understanding,” one vision of the joy which has absorbed the strength of sorrow into it, mere “happiness” looks but a poor thing, even as a child’s cheap, pretty toy shows beside a masterpiece of genius.
Lucy’s slumbers now were deep and calm. Almost every morning she awoke with a sense of refreshment, as when one returns to labour after being among kind hearts in lovely places. Sometimes she knew she had dreamed, and such dream memories as lingered, elusive, for a few waking moments, were always bright and cheering. Visions of Charlie had come during the first nights after the great blow. He never seemed to speak, but he was always smiling, always confident that all was well and would be well. His dream form always appeared in positions and in scenes which Lucy could recall as having figured in peculiarly happy times. And yet these scenes had been at the time so slight and evanescent that Lucy had quite forgotten them till the dream revived the remembrance. It was as if, in her sleep, her soul was drawn so near the light and warmth of love that even the invisible records of memory started into view.
After those first few occasions Charlie came no more into any dream which she could recall even at the instant of waking. But the soothing spirit of hope and reassurance remained. If she dreamed of Florence, Florence wore the simple frocks of her girlhood and spoke as she used to do. Jem Brand, too, appeared only on his kind and helpful side. Once she had a curious dream of seeing two Jem Brands exactly alike, save that one was fresh and smiling and friendly, and inclined to nudge his strange dissipated-looking twin, and to ask why he was so grumpy and heavy. In her sleep, too, she saw Mrs. Morison, and Jane Smith, and Clementina, and each was back in her old place and doing well. Lucy could never remember what passed between them and her in the land of sleep, but somehow she knew it was something that explained things, something which made them feel that the past could not have ended otherwise than it had, but which also made her feel that it was quite natural that they should begin again and do better.
She thought to herself once as she awoke—
“I feel as if wherever Charlie is I am in his every thought, and that his every thought is a prayer always ascending on every way by which it can bring back blessing.”
It was about this time that it struck Lucy that strangers very often spoke to her. She scarcely ever entered an omnibus or a railway carriage without somebody appealing to her for some trifling assistance, or confiding to her some little difficulty which they seemed to think might grow clearer if it were talked over. Once or twice she noticed that old folks or little children let ever so many people pass them by and then asked her to ring a stiff bell for them or to decipher an address.
Sometimes she caught herself softly repeating Adelaide Proctor’s lines—
“Who is the angel that cometh?Pain!Let us arise and go forth to greet him.Not in vainIs the summons gone for us to meet him;He will stay and darken our sun;He will stayA desolate night, a weary day.Since in that shadow our work is done,And in that shadow our crowns are won,Let us say still, while his bitter chaliceSlowly into our heart is poured—‘Blessed is he that comethIn the name of the Lord!’”
“Who is the angel that cometh?Pain!Let us arise and go forth to greet him.Not in vainIs the summons gone for us to meet him;He will stay and darken our sun;He will stayA desolate night, a weary day.Since in that shadow our work is done,And in that shadow our crowns are won,Let us say still, while his bitter chaliceSlowly into our heart is poured—‘Blessed is he that comethIn the name of the Lord!’”
“Who is the angel that cometh?Pain!Let us arise and go forth to greet him.Not in vainIs the summons gone for us to meet him;He will stay and darken our sun;He will stayA desolate night, a weary day.Since in that shadow our work is done,And in that shadow our crowns are won,Let us say still, while his bitter chaliceSlowly into our heart is poured—‘Blessed is he that comethIn the name of the Lord!’”
“Who is the angel that cometh?
Pain!
Let us arise and go forth to greet him.
Not in vain
Is the summons gone for us to meet him;
He will stay and darken our sun;
He will stay
A desolate night, a weary day.
Since in that shadow our work is done,
And in that shadow our crowns are won,
Let us say still, while his bitter chalice
Slowly into our heart is poured—
‘Blessed is he that cometh
In the name of the Lord!’”
Of course beneath all this high experience ran the undercurrent of simple daily living. Lucy was in no danger of losing hold of the practical. She had her regular duties at the Institute, and many little opportunities for the exercise of tact and common sense at home. The little household had a real organic unity in its common service of true friendship, but that did not rub off all the little human angles. Sometimes Pollie would say that “Mrs. May was more particular than a real mistress.” Sometimes Miss Latimer found a trial in the romps of Hugh and Tom Black. Mr. Somerset adopted vegetarianism and puzzled Mrs. May by desiring her to concoct dishes which seemed to her unsatisfactory and uncanny. But each trusted the other. Everybody knew that everybody meant well. If a sharp word were spoken unwarily, a kind word followed hard upon it. Each understood that all joys and trials were common property; shares therein might differ, but everybody had a share.
So the weeks grew into months, and the months completed a year. One evening Lucy was sitting in the dining-room glancing over her completed balance sheet with its tiny “surplus,” when suddenly it seemed to her that there was a new sound in the very rumble of the cab which was depositing Mr. Somerset as usual at the door, after his day’s study at the British Museum. She looked up, her pen in her hand listening.
Mr. Somerset generally went straight to his own apartments. Occasionally, however, when he had any news to tell or any request to make, he looked in upon the little party in the dining-room.
He did so now.
He sat down on the sofa and said abruptly—
“Mrs. Challoner, do you think joy ever hurts anybody?”
“Surely not,” she said, looking up with wide eyes. “The Bible says that hope deferred maketh the heart sick, but that when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.”
“Do you feel sure, dear friend, that you could bear——”
She had risen from her seat with clasped hands.
“Mr. Somerset, Mr. Somerset!” she gasped.
He rose too.
“Trust me,” he said, gently leading her mind to its new attitude. “I would not stir expectation ever so lightly for nothing. To-day I have received a message from the shipping office to deliver to you. Listen! The long looked-for word has come at last. Charlie lives! Charlie is quite well! Charlie is coming home! He is on his way!”
Lucy did not faint. She did not cry out. She sat quite quiet for a moment, and then broke into a peal of low happy laughter, which died away in a flood of soft healing tears, from which she looked up and said—
“Is it all true? Is it quite true? I can scarcely believe it!”
(To be continued.)