by Grant Allen
The poor fragile little mother gazed with a long, wistful glance at her child as the nurse held it up before her clouded eyes.
‘It’s a beautiful baby,’ she said slowly in very measured tones. ‘Oh, what a beautiful, beautiful baby! How I wish I could have nursed it! Is it a boy or a girl, nurse?’
‘A boy, ma’am,’ the nurse answered, holding it before her eyes. ‘As fine a boy as ever was seen or heard in England.’
Woodbine lay still in one devouring gaze, and smiled a wan smile at that unconscious little mortal.
‘A beautiful boy!’ she murmured half to herself again and again. ‘A beautiful baby!’
For many minutes more, then, she lay as if dreaming, with that placid smile yet irradiating her poor pinched face, and a pallor as of death creeping gradually over her. At last she opened her eyes convulsively, and asked, with a sudden flicker of her ebbing life:
‘Where’s Sabine? I want her.’
‘Here, dear,’ Sabine sobbed out, just pushing aside the curtain, and taking her other hand tenderly in her own. ‘Is there anything you want to say to me, Woodbine?’
‘Before I die? Yes. Hold my hand hard, Sabine. Let me feel you’re holding it. I think I’m going. I feel as if I must be. But for my sake, dear, promise me this one thing — you’ll be a mother to my baby?’
Sabine bent over her, half speechless with remorse, her eyes all blinded, and her voice choking.
‘Yes, dearest,’ she answered, with a terrible wave of conscience almost drowning her speech. ‘You may trust him to me. I’ll watch over him, and take care of him. I’ll never move from his side. I’ll give up my very life for him.’
As she spoke she pressed Woodbine’s hand hard in hers. Woodbine felt the solemn earnestness of that pressure, and smiled once more. It was a long, long smile, that died away faintly. The doctor took her wrist from Sabine’s grasp between his finger and thumb. Sabine gazed across at him through her tears with a glance of awe-struck inquiry. The doctor nodded.
‘All over,’ he said slowly, in a very low voice. ‘She’s gone, poor lady!’
Sabine fell upon the bed, and hardly knew what followed. She had fainted as she fell, beside poor dead Woodbine. The doctor lifted her up, and carried her to a couch.
‘Get some sal volatile,’ he murmured in a very quiet tone, turning round to Miss Pomeroy.
But the maid stood transfixed, with tears rolling down her cheeks, slowly, slowly.
‘I can’t — I daren’t,’ she cried, in a tremulous voice, all quivering with emotion. ‘It’s in Miss Venables’ room. But I couldn’t go up to get it. Call one of the men-servants, please. He won’t be afraid. With her lying dead there, poor soul! on her bed, I daren’t go up to the room to get it.’
CHAPTER XIX.
A RELAPSE.
Next day all Leatherhead was agog with the news how many things had happened together at Hurst Croft in the small hours of Wednesday morning. A son and heir had been born to the house of Venables, and the mother that bore him had died shortly after. Those trivial occurrences, however, made small stir in the town. The higher education of women, that fashionable Moloch and Juggernaut of our time, slays its annual holocaust so regularly nowadays that nobody is astonished when one more Girton girl, unequal to her self-imposed task of defying with impunity all the laws of nature, breaks down and dies in her first futile attempt to fulfil the natural functions of motherhood. The event that agitated the public mind of Surrey to its profoundest depths was a far more uncommon one. At the very moment when Mrs. Venables breathed her last, as Miss Sabine lay fainting on the couch by her side, the butler, despatched post haste to her room for a restorative, had discovered that thieves from London — most expert thieves, so the constable surmised — had taken the opportunity of this most eventful night to break into the house and steal Miss Venables’ jewels.
‘I went up to my young lady’s room,’ the butler explained to the police, with many circumlocutions, at the station next day, ‘to fetch some salv’lattily. Miss Williams, my young lady’s maid, she arst me to fetch it, as Miss Venables was fainting, o’ course; so I run and I fetched it. When I got up to the door of Miss Venables’ room the door was locked, o’ course. “Hello,” says I to myself, “who’s this inside? Somethin’ wrong somewheres.” So I knocked and knocked, an’ nobody answers. Well, then I gets alarmed, as you may think, and calls out to Robert. Robert he comes and ‘elps me, and what with ‘ammering and what with bangin’ we batters in the door at last. Oh my! such a sight as Miss Venables’ room when we’d bashed it in you never see. This ’ere jemmy was a-lying on the floor all in pieces, promixuous like; and Miss Venables’ drawer was forced open and broke; and not a jule or a valuable was left about the place that the burglars could lay hands on. They must ‘a got in by the first-floor landing while we was all downstairs, and let ‘emselves out again afterwards by the bedroom window. But, bless you! they’d ‘ad time to get all done and clear out with the swag a good twenty minutes, for when Robert an’ me comes up there wasn’t no trace of ’em to be seen anywheres. And it’s my belief they’ve got clear off by this time right away up to London.’
As for Sabine and her father, they were too much preoccupied with more important affairs, as luck would have it, to trouble their heads very much about the theft of the jewels. Mr. Arthur Roper had fallen upon his feet; the head of the profession had chosen an exceptionally favourable date for his Hurst Croft experiment. For some weeks after a formal announcement appeared from time to time in the London papers:— ‘The police are still investigating the loss of Miss Venables’ jewellery, but no arrest has yet been made.’ After awhile, however, editors seemed to find the paragraph a trifle monotonous, so quietly dropped it. And that was all. Mr. Arthur Roper, safe and snug in his luxurious lodgings in town, held fast to his booty; and the police continued to ‘investigate’ the case till everybody else concerned had well-nigh forgotten all about it. They may, not improbably, be still investigating it.
A fortnight later, as Sabine sat in her own private room in her deep mourning, with that unconscious little orphan asleep in his cradle by her side, the door opened, and Miss Pomeroy entered, all respectful attention as usual, but with a curiously painful look upon her impassive countenance.
‘Well, Williams?’ Sabine said inquiringly, for Miss Pomeroy had an air of one who desires to communicate something important.
‘If you please, miss,’ the model upper servant answered, blurting it out as foolishly as the veriest under-housemaid, ‘I’ve come to tell you I’m very sorry, but at the end of a month, if it’s convenient to you, I’d like to go, miss.’
‘To go?’ Sabine echoed, astonished. ‘Why, what on earth’s the matter, Williams? You and I have always got on so well together, and I thought you were so comfortable.’
‘So I am, miss,’ the model upper servant replied with perfect politeness, but in short sharp sentences. ‘And you’ve always been most kind to me, and I’m sorry to leave, and before I go I’d like to thank you very much for all your goodness. But — I feel my nerves are so very much upset’; and with that, to Sabine’s utter amazement, the model upper servant, collapsing into a chair, broke down entirely and gave way to a most genuine fit of hysterical sobbing.
‘Your nerves are upset, Williams!’ Sabine cried, leaning over her, aghast. She had hardly yet realized, to say the truth, that people in her maid’s position in life were provided by nature with such eminently aristocratic anatomical elements as nerves at all. ‘Do you mean to say they’re upset since you’ve been here, then?’
Miss Pomeroy looked up with an appealing look. She wasn’t acting now. It was all pure nature.
‘Yes, miss,’ she answered, through a storm of sobs. ‘It was that night the dear baby was born, and poor Mrs. Venables died. I was so terribly shattered. It all came over me with such a sort of sudden horror like. I’ve felt ever since I wasn’t fit for service, and I couldn’t stop in the house another day as soon as ever my month was up with yo
u.’
‘But what will you do for your living?’ Sabine asked in amazement. ‘You know you’ll have to go somewhere else, of course, Williams, and take another place where your nerves may be just as much tried as they were here. Deaths may happen in any family.’
The maid shook her head. ‘No, no,’ she said with an air of settled determination. ‘I’ll never go out to service at all again. It isn’t necessary for me, and I won’t do it any more, miss. You couldn’t understand me; you couldn’t believe me; you couldn’t enter into it; I could hardly explain to you, even; but the strain on my feelings is more than I can bear.’ She looked away with a sudden burst of uncontrollable tears. ‘Don’t ask me any more,’ she cried piteously. ‘But I can’t endure it, oh! I can’t endure it one day longer.’
‘She must be hysterical,’ Sabine thought to herself in her severe, cold way. ‘This is pure hysteria. But what a pity it is, too, for a girl in her position! for she’s the best and handiest and most obliging maid I’ve ever had. Nobody else ever did my back hair as nicely as she does.’
For Sabine was still at that primitive barbaric stage of thought when all the rest of the world is of importance only in so far as it directly subserves one’s own convenience, use, and comfort.
Still, as there was no help for it, she nodded assent with a very bad grace, and said, ‘Very well, Williams.’
It was just a month from that day, accordingly, that Elizabeth Pomeroy, alias Williams, sat in a neatly furnished London room once more with Mr. Arthur Roper, the head of his profession. Mr. Roper was preparing his favourite prescription of ‘a thimbleful of brandy neat’ to restore Elizabeth Pomeroy’s shattered nerves, and regarding her out of his terrier eyes with a curious mixture of sympathy, contempt, uneasiness, and suspicion.
‘It won’t do, Bess, my girl,’ the professional gentleman remarked in a brisk, sharp tone, as he handed her across the thimbleful (a very liberal allowance indeed at that), and shook his head slowly with a candid air of a paternal Mentor. ‘It won’t do at all. This is just pure sentimental stuff and nonsense. That’s the worst of your character, you see. You’re so devilish uncertain. You ain’t to be depended upon. I always said you were a sentimentalist at bottom. For brains and for nous you lick the whole lot of ’em, I grant you that. But you’re liable to these unaccountable revulsions of feeling, which is a weakness which almost counterbalances all your many good points and makes you at a pinch next door to useless. Hang me if I don’t think one of these fine days you’ll get a fit of remorse and split upon me for everything!’
Miss Pomeroy drank off the brandy and sobbed like a child.
‘Arthur,’ she cried, between the sobs, in very genuine distress, ‘when I get taken like this, do you know, I almost hate you!’
‘So I observe,’ Mr. Roper replied with philosophic calm. ‘That’s what makes me say that in this sort of mood you’re a dangerous animal, Bess, and a menace to society. You should have more stability.’ He assumed a charming didactic tone. ‘It’s essential to anything worth calling character,’ he observed, with the profound air of a moral preacher, ‘that it should be calculable, calculable — that you should be able to say for certain beforehand how it’s going to act under any given circumstances. That’s George Eliot. Now, the bother of it is that your character ain’t calculable. A fellow never knows what you’ll be up to next. He don’t know how to treat you, you’re so confounded changeable.’
‘I can’t help it, Arthur,’ Miss Pomeroy cried vehemently. ‘It’s all your own fault. It’s you that have brought me to it. You’ve only yourself to blame for it. You moulded me and trained me when I was an innocent girl, and might have been made into anything, for good or for evil; for as you say yourself, I’m plastic, plastic. If a good man had got a hold of me, he might have made me into a saint; but it was you that got a hold of me, and you saw I was a clever girl that’d suit your purpose, and, as far as you could, you made me into a devil. The other side comes out in me a bit now and again; but I’m mostly what you’ve made of me, and that’s a devil.’
‘Not enough of a one quite,’ Mr. Roper retorted, with musing regret. ‘The old Adam comes out in you too strong still. That’s the worst of women. One can never quite depend upon ’em. Women are a long way too emotional for the profession, that’s where it is. You take a man and you educate him to his trade, and you teach him his notions, and you train him up in the way he should go; and jiggered if he don’t throw himself into it, body and soul, without ever having any of these blue devils, and fits of remorse, and twinges of conscience, and all that sort of ridiculous feminine nonsense. He’ll see a girl die, or a babby either, while he’s engaged on his rounds, and think nothing of it at all, except so far as it affects the way of business. He’ll take it as it comes, and make the best of it. But a woman ain’t built that way. She can’t keep her feelings under proper control. You may mould her and train her, and educate her as much as you like, but I’m blowed if you can educate out this confounded fal-lal about babbies and so forth. It’s innate in ’em, I suppose. Evolution, evolution — the survival of the fittest! Nature meant ’em to be mothers; and there’s a sort of sneaking hankering after respectability, and morals, and a quiet life, and honest livelihood, and all that sort of rot, in the very best of ’em. It can’t be helped, I suppose; it’s hereditary in the sex; but still it is disheartening. When you’ve devoted yourself for years to the task of eradicating that ridiculous rubbish in a very promising girl, it is disappointing to find it crops up again, the moment your back’s turned, on the very first convenient opportunity.’
Miss Pomeroy looked up at him with an appealing glance.
‘If you’d seen it yourself, Arthur,’ she cried, ‘as bad as you are — and, I think, you’re about as bad as they make ’em — I do believe even you’d have been moved by it. To see that poor little mother — no better than a girl herself — with her small white face lying there dying, all so frail and thin; and leaving that dear little innocent baby, in the nurse’s arms, with nobody on earth to take care of it but the Cassowary, and even the Cassowary herself crying and fainting, and the poor old man broken down like a child — and then to think of myself and the life I was leading — to think I was there for nothing on earth but to rob them and prey upon them — to think at the very minute when that poor white thing was passing away with a smile on her lips, looking her last look at her baby that never knew her — you were in the Cassowary’s room, with the mask on your face, at your wicked work, breaking open the jewel case; and I was there to help you and cover your retreat — oh, it was too horrible, too horrible! I couldn’t have gone up to fetch the sal volatile if you’d offered me the world for it. Oh, I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t!’
‘Well, this is disheartening!’ Mr. Arthur Roper observed, running his hand through his front hair with a despondent air, and gazing at her as one gazes at a hopelessly naughty child. ‘It’s downright disheartening, ‘pon my soul! It’s almost enough to make a man despair of ever getting a woman that’s really a helpmeet for him. Here have I been training you, Bess, for years and years, and explaining to you and reasoning with you, and now for a twelvemonth and more you’ve never had one of these relapses, as I may call it — not a symptom, or a threat of one — but were going on as nice and smooth as a piece of clockwork; and just at the end of that time, when we’ve succeeded in pulling off between us a really big coup, and things are beginning to look up a bit in the cut diamond market — hanged if you don’t come home with a fit of the shivers, like a man with D.T., and talk morality in my ears as if you were a street preacher! It’s just disheartening! Women are all of ’em respectable in their hearts — respectable to the core — and you never can tell when it’s going to burst out in a fresh place, like rheumatism or erysipelas.’
Miss Pomeroy rocked herself up and down in her chair.
‘Well, I don’t mind stopping at home and helping you in the business as far as one can do with shops and that,’ she sa
id, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘I don’t want to be rough upon you, Arthur; but I’ll never go out to service any more, to introduce myself like a snake into a private house, and then turn against ’em and rob ’em when they’re least expecting it. It goes against my nature. Oh! you may say what you like about stability and that, but you never can help my being taken this way. It’s part of my character. If I weren’t built so I wouldn’t be half the use to you. I know I’m a clever one, and I know I’m lady-like, and I know I can get in where nobody else’d have a chance, and I know I can make ’em take me for a regular Methodist. But why? I’ll tell you why. Because I’m finer grained to start with than any of your common lodging-house thief girls. Because with good training I might have been turned into something better and honester than I am. Because it’s only you that have corrupted me, and made me wicked. The more of a lady I was to start with, the more useful can I be to you as a decoy and a confederate. You’ve counted on what was truest and best within me, to twist it aside into a bait for your own bad purposes, and you must put up with the consequences.’
She spoke passionately, remorsefully, with one of those sudden outbursts of unwonted emotion which always come when a woman lets the floodgates of her heart stand open.
Mr. Roper gazed at her, and nodded his head.
‘Very true,’ he said soothingly. ‘Very ... true ... indeed. You’ve been extremely useful to me; and you wouldn’t have been half the use if it weren’t for your refinement, your education, and your delicacy of perception. I admit it all. I allow my indebtedness to you. You and I are just suited to pull together. The worst of it is, there are drawbacks as well. Your temperament, though good on the whole, has its moments of uncertainty. I never know what you may do in one of these sentimental fits. Perhaps’ — and he drew his hand rapidly across his throat— ‘but there! no matter.’
