Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  “Mamma, will it soon be tea-time?”

  There was no answer.

  “Didn’t you hear, mamma? Carry asked if it would soon be tea-time. What were you thinking about?”

  She heard this time, and started out of her reverie. “Very soon now, Willy dear. Thinking? Oh, I was thinking about your papa.”

  Her thoughts were by no means bright ones. That her husband’s health and powers were failing, she felt as sure of as though she could foresee the ending that was soon to come. How he went on and did his work was a marvel: but he could not give it up, or bread would fail.

  The week’s rest in the country had set Mr. Marks up for some months. Until the next autumn he worked on better than he had been able to do for some time past. And then he failed again. There was no particular failing outwardly, but he felt all too conscious that his overtaxed brain was getting worse than it had ever been. He struggled on; making no sign. That he should have to resign part of his work was an inevitable fact: he must give up the evening book-keeping to enable him to keep his more important place. “Once let me get Christmas work over,” thought he, “and as soon as possible in the New Year, I will resign.”

  He got the Christmas work over. Very heavy it was, at both places, and nearly did for him. It is the last straw, you know, that breaks the camel’s back: and that work broke James Marks. Towards the end of January he was laid up in bed with a violent cold that settled on his chest. Brown and Co. had to do without him for eleven days: a calamity that — so far as Marks was concerned — had never happened in Brown and Co.’s experience. Then he went back to the city again, feeling shaken; but the evening labour was perforce given up.

  No one knew how ill he was: or, to speak more correctly, how unfit for work, how more incapable of it he was growing day by day. His wife suspected a little. She knew of his sleepless nights, the result of overtaxed nerves and brain, when he would toss and turn and get up and walk the room; and dress himself in the morning without having slept.

  “There are times,” he said to her in a sort of horror, “when I cannot at all collect my thoughts. I am as long again at my work as I used to be, and have to go over it again and again. There have been one or two mistakes, and old Brown asks what is coming to me. I can’t help it. The figures whirl before me, and I lose my power of mind.”

  “If you could only sleep well!” said Mrs. Marks.

  “Ay, if I could. The brain is as much at work by night as by day. There are the figures mentally before me, and there am I, adding them up.”

  “You should see a clever physician, James. Spare the guinea, and go. It may be more than the guinea saved.”

  Mr. Marks took the advice. He went to a clever doctor; explained his position, the kind of work he had to do, and described his symptoms. “Can I be cured?” he asked.

  “Oh yes, I think so,” said the doctor, cheerfully, without telling him that he had gone on so far as to make it rather doubtful. “The necessary treatment is very simple. Take change of scene and perfect rest.”

  “For how long?”

  “Twelve months, at least.”

  “Twelve months!” repeated Marks, in a queer tone.

  “At least. It is a case of absolute necessity. I will write you a prescription for a tonic. You must live well. You have not lived well enough for the work you have to do.”

  As James Marks went out into the street he could have laughed a laugh of bitter mockery. Twelve months’ rest for him? The doctor had told him one thing — that had he taken rest in time, a very, very much shorter period would have sufficed. “I wonder how many poor men there are like myself in London at this moment,” he thought, “who want this rest and cannot take it, and who ought to live better and cannot afford to do it!”

  It was altogether so very hopeless that he did nothing, except take the tonic, and he continued to go to the City as usual. Some two or three weeks had elapsed since then: he of course growing worse, though there was nothing to show it outwardly: and this was the end of February, and Mrs. Marks sat thinking of it all over the fire; thinking of what she knew, and guessing at what she did not know, and her children were building houses at the table.

  The servant came in with the tea-things, and took the little girl. Only one servant could be kept — and hardly that. Mrs. Marks had made her own tea and was pouring out the children’s milk-and-water, when they heard a cab drive up and stop at the door. A minute after Mr. Marks entered, leaning on the arm of one of his fellow-clerks.

  “Here, Mrs. Marks, I have brought you an invalid,” said the latter gaily, making light of it for her sake. “He seems better now. I don’t think there’s much the matter with him.”

  Had it come? Had what she had been dreading come — that he was going to have an illness, she wondered. But she was a trump of a wife, and showed herself calm and comforting.

  “You shall both of you have some tea at once,” she said, cheerfully. “Willy, run and get more tea-cups.”

  It appeared that Mr. Marks had been, as the clerk expressed it, very queer that day; more so than usual. He could not do his work at all; had to get assistance continually from one or the other, and ended by falling off his stool to the floor, in what he called, afterwards, a “sensation of giddiness.” He seemed fit for nothing, and Mr. Brown said he had better be taken home.

  That day ended James Marks’s work. He had broken down. At night he told his wife what the physician had said; which he had not done before. She could scarcely conceal her dismay.

  A twelvemonth’s rest for him! What would become of them? Failing his salary, they would have no means whatever of living.

  “Oh, if my father had only acted by us as he ought!” she mentally cried. “James could have taken rest in time then, and all would have been well. Will he help us now it has come to this? Will she let him? — for it is she who holds him in subjection and steels his heart against us.”

  Mr. Stockleigh, the father, lived at Sydenham. She, the new wife, had taken him off there from his residence in Pimlico as soon as might be after the marriage; and the daughter had never been invited inside the house. But she resolved to go there now. Saying nothing to her husband, Mrs. Marks started for Sydenham the day after he was brought home ill, and found the place without trouble.

  The wife, formerly the cook, was a big brawny woman with a cheek and a tongue of her own. When Mrs. Marks was shown in, she forgot herself in the surprise; old habits prevailed, and she half dropped a curtsey.

  “I wish to see papa, Mrs. Stockleigh.”

  “Mr. Stockleigh’s out, ma’am.”

  “Then I must wait until he returns.”

  Mrs. Stockleigh did not see her way clear to turn this lady from the house, though she would have liked to do it. She made a show of hospitality, and ordered wine and cake to be put on the table. Of which wine, Mrs. Marks noticed with surprise, she drank four glasses. “Now and then we used to suspect her of drinking in the kitchen!” ran through Mrs. Marks’s thoughts. “Has it grown upon her?”

  The garden gate opened, and Mr. Stockleigh came through it. He was so bowed and broken that his daughter scarcely knew him. She hastened out and met him in the path.

  “Caroline!” he exclaimed in amazement. “Is it really you? How much you have changed?”

  “I came down to speak to you, papa. May we stay and talk here in the garden?”

  He seemed glad to see her, rather than not, and sat down with her on the garden bench in the sun. In a quiet voice she told him all: and asked him to help her. Mrs. Stockleigh had come out and stood listening to the treason, somewhat unsteady in her walk.

  “I — I would help you if I could, Caroline,” he said, in hesitation, glancing at his wife.

  “Yes, but you can’t, Stockleigh,” she put in. “Our own expenses is as much as iver we can manage, Mrs. Marks. It’s a orful cost, living out here, and our two servants is the very deuce for extravigance. I’ve changed ’em both ten times for others, and the last lot is always worse than the
first.”

  “Papa, do you see our position?” resumed Mrs. Marks, after hearing the lady patiently. “It will be a long time before James is able to do anything again — if he ever is — and we have not been able to save money. What are we to do? Go to the workhouse? I have four little children.”

  “You know that you can’t help, Stockleigh,” insisted Mr. Stockleigh’s lady, taking up the answer, her face growing more inflamed. “You’ve not got the means to do anything: and there’s an end on’t.”

  “It is true, Caroline; I’m afraid I have not,” he said — and his daughter saw with pain how tremblingly subject he was to his wife. “I seem short of money always. How did you come down, my dear?”

  “By the train, papa. Third class.”

  “Oh dear!” cried Mr. Stockleigh. “My health’s broken, Caroline. It is, indeed, and my spirit too. I am sure I am very sorry for you. Will you come in and take some dinner?”

  “We’ve got nothing but a bit of ‘ashed beef,” cried Mrs. Stockleigh, as if to put a damper upon the invitation. “Him and me fails in our appetites dreadful: I can’t think what’s come to ‘em.”

  Mrs. Marks declined dinner: she had to get back to the children. That any sort of pleading would be useless while that woman held sway, she saw well. “Good-bye, papa,” she said. “I suppose we must do the best we can alone. Good morning, Mrs. Stockleigh.”

  To her surprise her father kissed her; kissed her with quivering lips. “I will open the gate for you, my dear,” he said, hastening on to it. As she was going through, he slipped a sovereign into her hand.

  “It will pay for your journey, at least, my dear. I am sorry to hear of your travelling third class. Ah, times have changed. It is not that I won’t help you, child, but that I can’t. She goes up to receive the dividends, and keeps me short. I should not have had that sovereign now, but it is the change out of the spirit bill that she sent me to pay. Hush! the money goes in drink. She drinks like a fish. Ah, Caroline, I was a fool — a fool! Fare you well, my dear.”

  “Fare you well, dear papa, and thank you,” she answered, turning away with brimming eyes and an aching heart.

  After resting for some days and getting no better, James Marks had to give it up as a bad job. He went to the City house, saw Mr. Brown, and told him.

  “Broken down!” cried old Brown, hitching back his wig, as he always did when put out. “I never heard such nonsense. At your age! The thing’s incomprehensible.”

  “The work has been very wearing to the brain, sir; and my application to it was close. During the three-and-twenty years I have been with you I have never had but one week’s holiday: the one last spring.”

  “You told me then you felt like a man breaking down, as if you were good for nothing,” resentfully spoke old Brown.

  “Yes, sir. I told you that I believed I was breaking down for want of a rest,” replied Marks. “It has proved so.”

  “Why, you had your rest.”

  “One week, sir. I said I feared it would not be of much use. But — it was not convenient for you to allow me more.”

  “Of course it was not convenient; you know it could not be convenient,” retorted old Brown. “D’you think I keep my clerks for play, Marks? D’you suppose my business will get done of itself?”

  “I was aware myself, sir, how inconvenient my absence would be, and therefore I did not press the matter. That one week’s rest did me a wonderful amount of service: it enabled me to go on until now.”

  Old Brown looked at him. “See here, Marks — we are sorry to lose you: suppose you take another week’s change now, and try what it will do. A fortnight, say. Go to the sea-side, or somewhere.”

  Marks shook his head. “Too late, sir. The doctors tell me it will be twelve months before I am able to work again at calculations.”

  “Oh, my service to you,” cried Mr. Brown. “Why, what are you going to do if you cannot work?”

  “That is a great deal more than I can say, sir. The thought of it is troubling my brain quite as much as work ever did. It is never out of it, night or day.”

  For once in his screwy life, old Brown was generous. He told Mr. Marks to draw his salary up to the day he had left, and he added ten pounds to it over and above.

  During that visit I paid to Miss Deveen’s in London, when Tod was with the Whitneys, and Helen made her first curtsey to the Queen, and we discovered the ill-doings of that syren, Mademoiselle Sophie Chalk, I saw Marks. Mrs. Todhetley had given me two or three commissions, as may be remembered: one amongst them was to call in Pimlico, and see how Marks was getting on.

  Accordingly I went. We had heard nothing, you must understand, of what I have told above, and did not know but he was still in his situation. It was a showery day in April: just a twelvemonth, by the way, since his visit to us at Dyke Manor. I found the house out readily; it was near Ebury Street; and I knocked. A young lad opened the door, and asked me to walk into the parlour.

  “You are Mr. Marks’s son,” I said, rubbing my feet on the mat: “I can tell by the likeness. What’s your name?”

  “William. Papa’s is James.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “He is ill,” whispered the lad, with his hand on the door handle. “Mamma’s downstairs, making him some arrowroot.”

  Well, I think you might have knocked me down with a feather when I knew him — for at first I did not. He was sitting in an easy-chair by the fire, dressed, but wrapped round with blankets: and instead of being the James Marks we had known, he was like a living skeleton, with cheek-bones and hollow eyes. But he was glad to see me, smiled, and held out his hand from the blanket.

  It is uncommonly awkward for a young fellow to be taken unawares like this. You don’t know what to say. I’m sure I as much thought he was dying as I ever thought anything in this world. At last I managed to stammer a word or two about being sorry to see him so ill.

  “Ay,” said he, in a weak, panting voice, “I am different from what I was when with your kind people, Johnny. The trouble I foresaw then has come.”

  “You used sometimes to feel then as though you would not long keep up,” was my answer, for really I could find nothing else to say.

  He nodded. “Yes, I felt that I was breaking down — that I should inevitably break down unless I could have rest. I went on until February, Johnny, and then it came. I had to give up my situation; and since then I have been dangerously ill from another source — chest and lungs.”

  “I did not know your lungs were weak, Mr. Marks.”

  “I’m sure I did not,” he said, after a fit of coughing. “I had one attack in January through catching a cold. Then I caught another cold, and you see the result: the doctor hardly saved me. I never was subject to take cold before. I suppose the fact is that when a man breaks down in one way he gets weak in all, and is more liable to other ailments.”

  “I hope you will get better as the warm weather comes on. We shall soon have it here.”

  “Better of this cough, perhaps: I don’t know: but not better yet of my true illness that I think most of — the overtaxed nerves and brain. Oh, if I could only have taken a sufficient rest in time!”

  “Mr. Todhetley said you ought to have stayed with us for three months. He says it often still.”

  “I believe,” he said, solemnly lifting his hand, “that if I could have had entire rest then for two or three months, it would have set me up for life. Heaven hears me say it.”

  And what a dreadful thing it now seemed that he had not!

  “I don’t repine. My lot seems a hard one, and I sometimes feel sick and weary when I dwell upon it. I have tried to do my duty: I could but keep on and work, as God knows. There was no other course open to me.”

  I supposed there was not.

  “I am no worse off than many others, Johnny. There are men breaking down every day from incessant application and want of needful rest. Well for them if their hearts don’t break with it!”

  And, to judge by the tone
he spoke in, it was as much as to say that his heart had broken.

  “I am beginning to dwell less on it now,” he went on. “Perhaps it is that I am too weak to feel so keenly. Or that Christ’s words are being indeed realized to me: ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ God does not forsake us in our trouble, Johnny, once we have learnt to turn to Him.”

  Mrs. Marks came into the room with the cup of arrowroot. The boy had run down to tell her I was there. She was very pleasant and cheerful: you could be at home with her at once. While he was waiting for the arrowroot to cool, he leant back in his chair and dropped into a doze.

  “It must have been a frightful cold that he caught,” I whispered to her.

  “It was caught the day he went into the City to tell Mr. Brown he must give up his situation,” she answered. “There’s an old saying, of being penny wise and pound foolish, and that’s what poor James was that day. It was a fine morning when he started; but rain set in, and when he left Mr. Brown it was pouring, and the streets were wet. He ought to have taken a cab, but did not, and waited for an omnibus. The first that passed was full; by the time another came he had got wet and his feet were soaking. That brought on a return of the illness he had had in January.”

  “I hope he will get well.”

  “It lies with God,” she answered.

  They made me promise to go again. “Soon, Johnny, soon,” said Mr. Marks with an eagerness that was suggestive. “Come in the afternoon and have some tea with me.”

  I had meant to obey literally and go in a day or two; but one thing or other kept intervening, and a week or ten days passed. One Wednesday Miss Deveen was engaged to a dinner-party, and I took the opportunity to go to Pimlico. It was a stormy afternoon, blowing great guns one minute, pouring cats and dogs the next. Mrs. Marks was alone in the parlour, the tea-things on the table before her.

  “We thought you had forgotten us,” she said in a half-whisper, shaking hands. “But this is the best time you could have come; for a kind neighbour has invited all the children in for the evening, and we shall be quiet. James is worse.”