Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  “Of course he did.”

  “And to pay his debts with it; as far as it would go.”

  “Pay his debts with it!” exclaimed Mr. Foliott. “Why, my good sir, it would take thirty thousand to pay them. He would just have squandered it away in Paris, at his gaming-tables, and what not; and then have asked you to keep him. Miss Whitney is well quit of him: and I’m thankful I came back in time to save her.”

  Great news to disclose to Helen! Deeply mortifying to have ordered a wedding-breakfast and wedding things in general when there was no wedding to be celebrated! The tears were running down Lady Whitney’s homely cheeks, as Miss Deveen drove up.

  Mr. Foliott asked to see Helen. All he said to her we never knew — but there’s no doubt he was as kind as a father.

  “He is a wicked, despicable man,” sobbed Helen.

  “He is all that, and more,” assented Mr. Foliott. “You may be thankful your whole life long for having escaped him. And, my dear, if it will at all help you to bear the smart, I may tell you that you are not the first young lady by two or three he has served, or tried to serve, in precisely the same way. And to one of them he behaved more wickedly than I care to repeat to you.”

  “But,” ruefully answered poor Helen, quietly sobbing, “I don’t suppose it came so near with any of them as the very morning.”

  And that was the end of Helen Whitney’s wedding.

  HELEN’S CURATE.

  I.

  A summons from Mr. Brandon meant a summons. And I don’t think I should have dared to disobey one any more than I should those other summonses issued by the law courts. He was my guardian, and he let me know it.

  But I was hardly pleased that the mandate should have come for me just this one particular day. We were at Crabb Cot: Helen, Anna, and William Whitney had come to it for a week’s visit; and I did not care to lose a day with them. It had to be lost, however. Mr. Brandon had ordered me to be with him as early as possible in the morning: so that I must be off betimes to catch the first train.

  It was a cold bleak day towards the end of February: sleet falling now and then, the east wind blowing like mad, and cutting me in two as I stood at the hall-door. Nobody else was down yet, and I had swallowed my breakfast standing.

  Shutting the door after me, and making a rush down the walk between the evergreens for the gate, I ran against Lee, the Timberdale postman, who was coming in, with the letters, on his shaky legs. His face, shaded by its grey locks, straggling and scanty, had a queer kind of fear upon it.

  “Mr. Johnny, I’m thankful to meet you; I was thinking what luck it would be if I could,” said he, trembling. “Perhaps you will stand my friend, sir. Look here.”

  Of the two letters he handed to me, one was addressed to Mrs. Todhetley; the other to Helen Whitney. And this last had its envelope pretty nearly burnt off. The letter inside could be opened by anybody, and some of the scorched writing lay exposed.

  “If the young lady would only forgive me — and hush it up, Mr. Johnny!” he pleaded, his poor worn face taking a piteous hue. “The Miss Whitneys are both very nice and kind young ladies; and perhaps she will.”

  “How was it done, Lee?”

  “Well, sir, I was lighting my pipe. It is a smart journey here, all the way from Timberdale — and I had to take the long round to-day instead of the Ravine, because there was a newspaper for the Stone House. The east wind was blowing right through me, Mr. Johnny; and I thought if I had a bit of a smoke I might get along better. A spark must have fallen on the letter while I was lighting my pipe, and I did not see it till the letter was aflame in my hand. If — if you could but stand my friend, sir, and — and perhaps give the letter to the young lady yourself, so that the Squire does not see it — and ask her to forgive me.”

  One could only pity him, poor worn man. Lee had had pecks of trouble, and it had told upon him, making him old before his time. Now and then, when it was a bad winter’s morning, and the Squire caught sight of him, he would tell him to go into the kitchen and get a cup of hot coffee. Taking the two letters from him to do what I could, I carried them indoors.

  Putting Helen’s with its tindered cover into an envelope, I wrote a line in pencil, and slipped it in also.

  “Dear Helen,

  “Poor old Lee has had a mishap and burnt your letter in lighting his pipe. He wants you to forgive it and not to tell the Squire. No real damage is done, so please be kind.

  “J. L.”

  Directing this to her, I sent it to her room by Hannah, and made a final start for the train.

  And this was what happened afterwards.

  Hannah took the letter to Helen, who was in the last stage of dressing, just putting the finishing touches to her hair. Staring at the state her letter was in, she read the few words I had written, and then went into a passion at what Lee had done. Helen Whitney was as good-hearted a girl as ever lived, but hot and hasty in temper, saying anything that came uppermost when put out. She, by the help of time, had got over the smart left by the summary collapse of her marriage, and had ceased to abuse Mr. Richard Foliott. All that was now a thing of the past. And, not having had a spark of love for him, he was the more easily forgotten.

  “The wicked old sinner!” she burst out: and with emphasis so startling, that Anna, reading by the window, dropped her Prayer-book.

  “Helen! What is the matter?”

  “That’s the matter,” flashed Helen, showing the half-burnt envelope and scorched letter, and flinging on the table the piece of paper I had slipped inside. Anna took the letter up and read it.

  “Poor old man! It was only an accident, Helen; and, I suppose, as Johnny says, no real damage is done. You must not say anything about it.”

  “Must I not!” was Helen’s tart retort.

  “Who is the letter from?”

  “Never you mind.”

  “But is it from home?”

  “It is from Mr. Leafchild, if you must know.”

  “Oh,” said Anna shortly. For that a flirtation, or something of the kind, had been going on between Helen and the curate, Leafchild, and that it would not be likely to find favour at Whitney Hall, she was quite aware of.

  “Mr. Leafchild writes about the school,” added Helen, after reading the letter; perhaps tendering the information as an apology for its having come at all. “Those two impudent girls, Kate and Judith Dill, have been setting Miss Barn at defiance, and creating no end of insubordination.”

  With the last word, she was leaving the room; the letter in her pocket, the burnt envelope in her hand. Anna stopped her.

  “You are not going to show that, are you, Helen? Please don’t.”

  “Mr. Todhetley ought to see it — and call Lee to account for his carelessness. Why, he might have altogether burnt the letter!”

  “Yes; of course it was careless. But I dare say it will be a lesson to him. He is very poor and old, Helen. Pray don’t tell the Squire; he might make so much commotion over it, and then you would be sorry. Johnny asks you not.”

  Helen knitted her brow, but put the envelope into her pocket with the letter: not conceding with at all a good grace, and went down nodding her head in semi-defiance. The cream of the sting lay no doubt in the fact that the letter was Mr. Leafchild’s, and that other eyes than her own might have seen it.

  She did not say anything at the breakfast-table, though Anna sat upon thorns lest she should: Helen was so apt to speak upon impulse. The Squire talked of riding out; Whitney said he would go with him: Tod seemed undecided what he should do. Mrs. Todhetley read to them the contents of her letter — which was from Mary Blair.

  “I shall go for a walk,” announced Helen, when the rest had dispersed. “Come and get your things on, Anna.”

  “But I don’t care to go out,” said Anna. “It is a very disagreeable day. And I meant to help Mrs. Todhetley with the frock she is making for Lena.”

  “You can help her when you come back. I am not going through that Crabb Ravine by myself.”
r />   “Through Crabb Ravine!”

  “Yes. I want to go to Timberdale.”

  It never occurred to Anna that the errand to Timberdale could have any connection with the morning’s mishap. She put her things on without more ado — Helen always domineered over her, just as Tod did over me — and the two girls went out together.

  “Halloa!” cried Tod, who was standing by the pigeon-house. “Where are you off to?”

  “Timberdale,” replied Helen. And Tod turned and walked with them.

  They were well through the Ravine, and close on to the entrance of Timberdale, before Helen said a word of what she had in her mind. Pulling the burnt envelope and the letter out then, she showed them to Tod.

  “What do you think of that for a piece of carelessness!” she asked: and forthwith told him the whole story. Tod, hasty and impulsive, took the matter up as warmly as she had done.

  “Lee ought to be reported for this — and punished. There might have been a bank-note in the letter.”

  “Of course there might,” assented Helen. “And for Johnny Ludlow to want to excuse him, and ask me to hush it up!”

  “Just like Johnny! In such things he is an out-and-out muff. How would the world go on, I wonder, if Johnny ruled it? You ought to have shown it to the Squire at once, Helen.”

  “So I should but for Johnny and Anna. As they had asked me not to, I did not quite like to fly in their faces. But I am going to show it to your postmaster at Timberdale.”

  “Oh, Helen!” involuntarily breathed Anna. And Tod looked up.

  “Don’t mind her,” said Helen. “She and Johnny are just alike — making excuses for every one. Rymer the chemist is postmaster, is he not?”

  “Rymer’s dead — don’t you remember that, Helen? Before he died, he gave up the post-office business. Salmon, the grocer opposite, took to it.”

  This Salmon was brother to the Salmon (grocer and draper) at South Crabb. Both were long-headed men, and flourishing tradesmen in their small way.

  “Poor old Lee!” cried Tod, with a shade of pity. “He is too ailing and feeble; we have often said it. But of course he must be taught not to set fire to the letters.”

  Anna’s eyelashes were wet. “Suppose, by your complaining, you should get him turned out of his post?” she suggested, with the timid deference she might have observed to a royal duke — but in the presence of those two she always lost her courage. Tod answered her gently. When he was gentle to any one, it was to her.

  “No fear of that, Anna. Salmon will blow old Lee up, and there’ll be an end of it. Whose letter was it, Helen?”

  “It was from Mr. Leafchild — about our schools,” answered Helen, turning her face away that he might not see its sudden rush of colour.

  Well, they made their complaint to Salmon; who was properly indignant and said he would look into it, Tod putting in a word for the offender, Lee. “We don’t want him reported to headquarters, or anything of that kind, you know, Salmon. Just give him a reprimand, and warn him to be cautious in future.”

  “I’ll see to him, sir,” nodded Salmon.

  (The final result of the burning of this letter of Helen Whitney’s, and of another person’s letter that got burnt later, was recorded in the last Series, in a paper called “Lee the Letter-Man.”

  It may be as well to remind the reader that these stories told by “Johnny Ludlow” are not always placed consecutively as regards the time of their occurrence, but go backwards or forwards indiscriminately.)

  Being so near, Helen and Anna thought they would call on Herbert Tanerton and Grace at the Rectory; next, they just looked in at Timberdale Court — Robert Ashton’s. Altogether, what with one delay and another, they arrived at home when lunch was nearly over. And who should be sitting there, but Sir John Whitney! He had come over unexpectedly to pass an hour or two.

  Helen Whitney was very clever in her way: but she was apt to be forgetful at times, as all the rest of us are. One thing she had totally and entirely forgotten to-day — and that was to ask Tod not to speak of the letter. So that when the Squire assailed them with reproaches for being late, Tod, unconscious that he was doing wrong, blurted out the truth. A letter from Mr. Leafchild to Helen had been partly burnt by old Lee, and they had been to Timberdale to complain to Salmon.

  “A letter from Leafchild to Helen!” cried Sir John. “That must be a mistake. Leafchild would not presume to write to Helen.”

  She grew white as snow. Sir John had turned from the table to face her, and she dared not run away. The Squire was staring and frowning at the news of old Lee’s sin, denouncing him hotly, and demanding to see the letter.

  “Yes, where is this letter?” asked Sir John. “Let me see it, Helen.”

  “It — it was about the schools, papa.”

  “About the schools! Like his impudence! What have you to do with the schools? Give me the letter.”

  “My gracious me, burn a letter!” cried the Squire. “Lee must be in his dotage. The letter, my dear, the letter; we must see it.”

  Between them both, Helen was in a corner. She might have been capable of telling a white fib and saying she had not the letter, rather than let her father see it. Anna, who knew she had it in her pocket, went for nobody; but Tod knew it also. Tod suspecting no complications, was holding out his hand for her to produce it. With trembling lips, and fingers that shook in terror, she slowly drew it forth. Sir John took the letter from her, the Squire caught hold of the burnt envelope.

  There was not a friendly hole in the floor for Helen to drop through. She escaped by the door to hide herself and her hot cheeks. For this was neither more nor less than a love-letter from the curate, and Sir John had taken it to the window to read it in the stronger light.

  “Bless my heart and mind!” cried he when he had mastered its contents, just such an exclamation as the Squire would have made. “He — he — I believe the fellow means to make love to her! What a false-hearted parson he must be! Come here, Todhetley.”

  To see the two old heads poring over the letter together through their spectacles was something good, Tod said, when he told me all this later. It was just a love-letter and nothing less, but without a word of love in it. But not a bad love-letter of its kind; rather a sensible one. After telling Helen about the tracasserie in the parish school (which must have afforded him just the excuse for writing that he may have wanted), the curate went on to say a little bit about their mutual “friendship,” and finished up by begging Helen to allow him to speak to Sir John and Lady Whitney, for he could not bear to think that by keeping silent they were deceiving them. “As honourable a letter in its way as you could wish to hear read,” observed Tod; for Sir John and the Squire had read it aloud between them for the benefit of the dining-room.

  “This comes of having grown-up daughters,” bewailed poor Sir John. “Leafchild ought to be put in the pillory. And where’s Helen got to? Where is that audacious girl?”

  Poor Helen caught it hot and strong — Sir John demanding of her, for one thing, whether she had not had enough of encouraging disreputable young sparks with that Richard Foliott. Poor Helen sobbed and hid her head, and finally took courage to say that Mr. Leafchild was a saint on earth — not to be as much as named in the same sentence with Richard Foliott. And when I got home at night, everybody, from Helen downwards, was in the dumps, and Sir John had gone home to make mincemeat of the curate.

  Buttermead was one of those straggling parishes that are often found in rural districts. Whitney Hall was situated in it, also the small village of Whitney, also that famous school of ours, Dr. Frost’s, and there was a sprinkling of other good houses. Some farm homesteads lay scattered about; and the village boasted of a street and a half.

  The incumbent of Buttermead, or Whitney, was the Reverend Matthew Singleton: his present curate was Charles Leafchild. Mr. Leafchild, though eight-and-twenty years of age, was only now ordained deacon, and this year was his first in the ministry. At eighteen he had gone out to the West Indi
es, a post having been found for him there. He did not go by choice. Being a steady-minded young fellow, religiously inclined, he had always wished to be a parson; but his father, Dr. Leafchild, a great light among Church dignitaries, and canon residentiary of a cathedral in the North, had set his face against the wish. The eldest son was a clergyman, and of his preferment Dr. Leafchild could take tolerable care, but he did not know that he could do much in that way for his younger sons, and so Charles’s hopes had to go to the wall. Spiritual earnestness, however, at length made itself heard within him to some purpose; and he resolved, come what might, that he would quit money-making for piety. The West Indian climate did not agree with him; he had to leave it for home, and then it was that he made the change. “You would have been rich in time had you stuck to your post,” remonstrated the Reverend Doctor to him: “now you may be nothing but a curate all your life.” “True, father,” was the answer, “but I shall hope to do my duty as one.” So Charles Leafchild made himself into a parson, and here he was at Buttermead, reading through his first year, partially tabooed by his family, and especially by that flourishing divine, the head of it.

  He was a good-looking young man, as men go. Rather tall than not, with a pale, calm face, brown hair that he wore long, and mild brown eyes that had no end of earnestness in their depths. A more self-denying man could not be found; though as a rule young men are not famous for great self-denial. The small stipend given by Mr. Singleton had to suffice for all his wants. Leafchild had never said what this stipend was; except that he admitted one day it was not more than seventy pounds: how much less than that, he did not state.

  Just a few roods out of the village stood a small dwelling called Marigold Cottage. A tidy woman named Bean lived in it with her two daughters, one of whom was the paid mistress of the national girls’-school. Mr. Leafchild lodged here, as the late curate had before him, occupying the spare sitting-room and bedroom. And if Mrs. Bean was to be believed — and she had been a veracious woman all her life — three days out of the seven, at least, Mr. Leafchild went without meat at his dinner, having given it away to some sick or poor creature, who wanted it, he considered, more than he did. A self-denying, earnest, gentle-minded man; that’s what he was: and perhaps it may be forgiven to Helen Whitney that she fell in love with him.