|
|
|
Prev
| Next
| Contents
MARY AKD LETTY.
When her landlady announced a visitor, Letty, not having yet one
friend in London, could not think who it should be. When Mary
entered, she sprang to her feet and stood staring: what with
being so much in the house, and seeing so few people, the poor
girl had, I think, grown a little stupid. But, when the fact of
Mary's presence cleared itself to her, she rushed forward with a
cry, fell into her arms, and burst out weeping. Mary held her
fast until she had a little come to herself, then, pushing her
gently away to the length of her arms, looked at her.
She was not a sight to make one happy. She was no longer the
plump, fresh girl that used to go singing about; nor was she
merely thin and pale, she looked unhealthy. Things could not be
going well with her. Had her dress been only disordered, that
might have been accidental, but it looked neglected--was not
merely dingy, but plainly shabby, and, to Mary's country eyes,
appeared on the wrong side of clean. Presently, as those eyes got
accustomed to the miserable light, they spied in the skirt of her
gown a perfunctory darn, revealing but too evidently that to
Letty there no longer seemed occasion for being particular. The
sadness of it all sunk to Mary's heart: Letty had not found
marriage a grand affair!
But Mary had not come into the world to be sad or to help another
to be sad. Sorrowful we may often have to be, but to indulge in
sorrow is either not to know or to deny God our Saviour. True,
her heart ached for Letty; and the ache immediately laid itself
as close to Letty's ache as it could lie; but that was only the
advance-guard of her army of salvation, the light cavalry of
sympathy: the next division was help; and behind that lay
patience, and strength, and hope, and faith, and joy. This last,
modern teachers, having failed to regard it as a virtue, may well
decline to regard as a duty; but he is a poor Christian indeed in
whom joy has not at least a growing share, and Mary was not a
poor Christian--at least, for the time she had been learning, and
as Christians go in the present aeon of their history. Her whole
nature drew itself together, confronting the destroyer, whatever
he might be, in possession of Letty. How to help she could not
yet tell, but sympathy was already at its work.
"You are not looking your best, Letty," she said, clasping her
again in her arms.
With a little choking, Letty assured her she was quite well, only
rather overcome with the pleasure of seeing her so unexpectedly.
"How is Mr. Helmer?" asked Mary.
"Quite well--and very busy," answered Letty--a little hurriedly,
Mary thought. "--But," she added, in a tone of disappointment,
"you always used to call him Tom!"
"Oh!" answered Mary, with a smile, "one must be careful how one
takes liberties with married people. A certain mysterious change
seems to pass over some of them; they are not the same somehow,
and you have to make your acquaintance with them all over again
from the beginning."
"I shouldn't think such people's acquaintance worth making over
again," said Letty.
"How can you tell what it may be worth?" said Mary, "--they are
so different from what they were? Their friendship may now be one
that won't change so easily."
"Ah! don't be hard on me, Mary. I have never ceased to love you."
"I am so glad!" answered Mary. "People don't generally
take much to me--at least, not to come near me. But you
can be friends without having friends," she added,
with a sententiousness she had inherited.
"I don't quite understand you," said Letty, sadly; "but, then, I
never could quite, you know. Tom finds me very stupid."
These words strengthened Mary's suspicion, from the first a
probability, that all was not going well between the two; but she
shrunk from any approach to confidences with one of a
married pair. To have such, she felt instinctively, would be a
breach of unity, except, indeed, that were already, and
irreparably, broken. To encourage in any married friend the
placing of a confidence that excludes the other, is to encourage
that friend's self-degradation. But neither was this a fault to
which Letty could have been tempted; she loved her Tom too much
for it: with all her feebleness, there was in Letty not a little
of childlike greatness, born of faith.
But, although Mary would make Letty tell nothing, she was not the
less anxious to discover, that she might, if possible, help. She
would observe: side-lights often reveal more than direct
illumination. It might be for Letty, and not for Mrs. Redmain,
she had been sent. He who made time in time would show.
"Are you going to be long in London, Mary?" asked Letty.
"Oh, a long time!" answered Mary, with a loving glance.
Letty's eyes fell, and she looked troubled.
"I am so sorry, Mary," she said, "that I can not ask you to come
here! We have only these two rooms, and--and--you see--Mrs.
Helmer is not very liberal to Tom, and--because they--don't get
on together very well--as I suppose everybody knows--Tom won't--
he won't consent to--to--"
"You little goose!" cried Mary; "you don't think I would come
down on you like a devouring dragon, without even letting you
know, and finding whether it would suit you!--I have got a
situation in London."
"A situation!" echoed Letty. "What can you mean, Mary? You
haven't left your own shop, and gone into somebody else's?"
"No, not exactly that," replied Mary, laughing; "but I have no
doubt most people would think that by far the more prudent thing
to have done."
"Then I don't," said Letty, with a little flash of her old
enthusiasm. "Whatever you do, Mary, I am sure will always be the
best."
"I am glad I have so much of your good opinion, Letty; but I am
not sure I shall have it still, when I have told you what I have
done. Indeed, I am not quite sure myself that I have done wisely;
but, if I have made a mistake, it is from having listened to love
more than to prudence."
"What!" cried Letty; "you're married, Mary?"
And here a strange thing, yet the commonest in the world,
appeared; had her own marriage proved to Letty the most blessed
of fates, she could not have shown more delight at the idea of
Mary's. I think men find women a little incomprehensible in this
matter of their friends' marriage: in their largerheartedness, I
presume, women are able to hope for their friends, even when they
have lost all hope for themselves.
"No," replied Mary, amused at having thus misled her. "It is
neither so bad nor so good as that. But I was far from
comfortable in the shop without my father, and kept thinking how
to find a life, more suitable for me. It was not plain to me that
my lot was cast there any longer, and one has no right to choose
difficulty; for, even if difficulty be the right thing for you,
the difficulty you choose can't be the right difficulty. Those
that are given to choosing, my father said, are given to
regretting. Then it happened that I fell in love--not with a
gentleman--don't look like that, Letty--but with a lady; and, as
the lady took a small fancy to me at the same time, and wanted to
have me about her, here I am."
"But, surely, that is not a situation fit for one like you,
Mary!" cried Letty, almost in consternation; for, notwithstanding
her opposition to her aunt's judgment in the individual case of
her friend, Letty's own judgments, where she had any, were mostly
of this world. "I suppose you are a kind of--of--companion to
your lady-friend?"
"Or a kind of lady's-maid, or a kind of dressmaker, or a kind of
humble friend--something like a dog, perhaps--only not to be
quite so much loved and petted; In truth, Letty, I do not know
what I am, or what I am going to be; but I shall find out before
long, and where's the use of knowing, any more than anything else
before it's wanted?"
"You take my breath away, Mary! The thing doesn't seem at all
like you! It's not consistent!--Mary Marston in a menial
position! I can't get a hold of it!"
"You remind me," said Mary, laughing, "of what my father said to
Mr. Turnbull once. They were nearer quarreling then than ever I
saw them. You remember my father's way, Letty--how he would say a
thing too quietly even to smile with it? I can't tell you what a
delight it is to me to talk to anybody that knew him!--Mr.
Turnbull imagined he did not know what he was about, for the
thoughts my father was thinking could not have lived a moment in
Mr. Turnbull. 'You see, John Turnbull,' my father said, 'no man
can look so inconsistent as one whose principles are not
understood; for hardly in anything will that man do as his friend
must have thought he would.'--I suppose you think, Letty," Mary
went on, with a merry air, "that, for the sake of consistency, I
should never do anything but sell behind a counter?"
"In that case," said Letty, "I ought to have married a milkman,
for a dairy is the only thing I understand. I can't help Tom ever
so little!--But I suppose it wouldn't be possible for two to
write poetry together, even if they were husband and wife, and
both of them clever!"
"Something like it has been tried, I believe," answered Mary,
"but not with much success. I suppose, when a man sets himself to
make anything, he must have it all his own way, or he can't do
it."
"I suppose that's it. I know Tom is very angry with the editor
when he wants to alter anything he has written. I'm sure Tom's
right, too. You can't think how much better Tom's way always is!-
-He makes that quite clear, even to poor, stupid me. But then,
you know, Tom's a genius; that's one thing there's no
doubt of!--But you haven't told me yet where you are."
"You remember Miss Mortimer, of Durnmelling?"
"Quite well, of course."
"She is Mrs. Redmain now: I am with her."
"You don't mean it! Why, Tom knows her very well! He has been
several times to parties at her house."
"And not you, too?" asked Mary.
"Oh, dear, no!" answered Letty, laughing, superior at Mary's
ignorance. "It's not the fashion in London, at least for
distinguished persons like my Tom, to take their wives to
parties."
"Are there no ladies at those parties, then?"
"Oh, yes!" replied Letty, smiling again at Mary's ignorance of
the world, "the grandest of ladies--duchesses and all. You don't
know what a favorite Tom is in the highest circles!"
Now Mary could believe almost anything bearing on Tom's being a
favorite, for she herself liked him a great deal more than she
approved of him; but she could not see the sense of his going to
parties without his wife, neither could she see that the
height of the circle in which he was a favorite made any
difference. She had old-fashioned notions of a man and his wife
being one flesh, and felt a breach of the law where they were
separated, whatever the custom--reason there could be none. But
Letty seemed much too satisfied to give her any light on the
matter. Did it seem to her so natural that she could not
understand Mary's difficulty? She could not help suspecting,
however, that there might be something in this recurrence of a
separation absolute as death--for was it not a passing of one
into a region where the other could not follow?--to account for
the change in her.--The same moment, as if Letty divined what was
passing in Mary's thought, and were not altogether content with
the thing herself, but would gladly justify what she could not
explain, she added, in the tone of an unanswerable argument:
"Besides, Mary, how could I get a dress fit to wear at such
parties? You wouldn't have me go and look like a beggar! That
would be to disgrace Tom. Everybody in London judges everybody by
the clothes she wears. You should hear Tom's descriptions of the
ladies' dresses when he comes home!"
Mary was on the verge of crying out indignantly, "Then, if he
can't take you, why doesn't he stop at home with you?" but she
bethought herself in time to hold her peace. She settled it with
herself, however, that Tom must have less heart or yet more
muddled brains than she had thought.
"So, then," reverted Letty, as if willing to turn definitively
from the subject, "you are actually living with the beautiful
Mrs. Redmain! What a lucky girl you are! You will see no end of
grand people! You will see my Tom sometimes--when I can't!" she
added, with a sigh that went to Mary's heart.
"Poor thing!" she said to herself, "it isn't anything much out of
the way she wants--only a little more of a foolish husband's
company!"
It was no wonder that Tom found Letty dull, for he had just as
little of his own in him as she, and thought he had a great
store--which is what sends a man most swiftly along the road to
that final poverty in which even that which he has shall be taken
from him.
Mary did not stay so long with Letty as both would have liked,
for she did not yet know enough of Hesper's ways. When she got
home, she learned that she had a headache, and had not yet made
her appearance.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|
|
|