“WHERE shall we go first? that is the only question. I know there are a hundred places to go to. Westminster and Whitehall, and the Tower, and St Paul’s, and to see the pictures, and the river, and the Temple, and Cheapside. We cannot, of course,” cried the eager girl, half regretfully, half pleased with the certainty of so much excitement, “see them all in one day.”
“Considering that they are at different points of the compass, no,” said the father, a serious man, who rarely relaxed even with his children. They were seated round a breakfast table in a London hotel—not one of the great caravansaries of the present day, but a small, grey, comfortable, quiet, very dear hotel in a little London street not far from Piccadilly. The houses opposite seemed almost within reach of their hands to the two girls, fresh and young and eager, who had for the first time that morning opened their eyes upon England. England! The thought made the blood dance in their veins. It was a little disenchanting, no doubt, to look out upon those grey houses opposite; but the fog through which the said houses loomed vaguely had an attraction of its own. A London fog: it was the right medium through which to see the metropolis of the world: they were almost as much interested in it as in Hyde Park or St Paul’s. They were interested in everything; the very names of the streets made their hearts beat. They had arrived from Canada in the great steamboat the day before, had travelled up from Liverpool through a country veiled in the early and lingering dusk of a winter afternoon—for, though it was nominally spring, it was still winter—and entered London in the dark. When they opened their eyes this morning it had been, as they thought, upon a new world. They could hear the noise of wheels in Piccadilly, and that sound also went to their hearts. All England was before them. They had heard of it all their lives, and this arrival had been before them for months, a sensation keenly anticipated, and experienced now with a commotion of their whole being. Notwithstanding, it was a very ordinary table at which they sat, scarcely able to eat anything for sheer excitement. The room was somewhat dingy. The fog pressed upon the window like something palpable, the houses opposite looming grimly through it. There was very little in their external surroundings to justify the sublimated state of their feelings; but Grace and Milly Yorke wanted nothing to justify their feelings. These sentiments sustained themselves. They had never been out of Canada before, but England, as long as they could recollect, had been called “home” to them. They had said, “We are going home,” when they communicated the great news to their friends. And now the moment had come to which they had looked forward for years.
Their father was not moved by the same ecstatic sentiments. He was not Canadian born, as they were. He had left England about thirty years before, and probably his return had recalled some feelings that were not altogether delightful. He was an angular, tall man, not unlike the commonly received type of an American, with a long face, somewhat sunken cheeks, a very resolute and determined mouth—altogether grey and rugged, like a gnarled tree. His eyes were deep-set and apt to get a fiery sparkle in them on occasions. He was a man of hot temper and inflexible obstinacy, not easy to deal with. But he was never ill-tempered to his children. The boys, indeed, were often more or less in conflict with their father; but to the girls he was always gentle and kind. Perhaps they knew better how to glide over all shoals and reefs, and find the safe channel to his favour. They and their mother knew very well what subjects it was best to avoid. They had put up danger signals on every side, and warned each other off this and that difficulty with a glance. They did this without intention, only half conscious of their own diplomacy. But so it was, that the girls were on the best of terms with their father, and to them he never said a hasty or unkind word. He sat very gravely between them, his countenance taking no reflection from the light in theirs. He was disposed rather to say, Confound the fog. He thought London just as dingy and disagreeable as it always had been; but he said nothing. The girls! The girls had their heads turned, poor children. He would not say anything to disturb their illusion. Let them entertain it as long as they could. But he had other things to think of. His mind was thronged with recollections. England was not to him a historical country, a place full of poetry, full of great events; but a very real world, with his own past in it, and many a thought and intent of which the girls knew nothing. He sat between them, scarcely hearing their eager chatter, but recalling with all the force of reality, as if they had happened yesterday, the circumstances which had attended his going away. He had not been very many years older than Grace, he recollected, with a sort of wondering half amusement; but how clear it was! Yesterday was not clearer—not so clear, indeed—for yesterday was nothing very important in his life; whereas that day——
“It is quite true what Mr Winthrop said. I never saw anything so poetical,” said Grace; “such a wonderful dreamy vista!—don’t you think so, papa? When you look out to the end of the street you can’t tell what it is you see. The light is just like a dull topaz—wasn’t that what Mr Winthrop said? and you can’t tell what is beyond; it might be palaces or mountains, or one can’t tell what. And to think it is England! and then that sort of roar of the carriages. It is not like the sea; it is like—— Oh, why should one try for similes?—it is like—just London, I suppose.”
“Wait till you know a little more about London,” said the father, “before you pronounce what it’s like.”
“One knows,” said Grace, with a little solemnity. “One does not need to wait. I suppose London is like no other place in the world.”
“Perhaps not,” Yorke said with a half laugh; “but you will never know what it is if you should live a hundred years.”
He spoke in one sense, they responded in another.
“I can believe that,” said Grace, with the same gravity. “It is a mystery. We cannot know, but we can divine.”
“God forbid!” her father said, and then he changed his tone. “Westminster is one way and St Paul’s another,” he said. “You can’t go both ways at once. You had better make up your minds which you will have.”
And then a little argument ensued. The girls had read a great deal, and they had good memories. One of them espoused the cause of St Paul’s and the other that of Westminster: the one going over the glorious inhabitants of the Abbey, demanding, with Milton—
“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in pilèd stones?”
though I hope they knew that Shakespeare was not there—while the other launched herself upon Tennyson’s ode—
“Mighty Seaman, this is he,
Was great by land as thou by sea.”
The father remained quite silent in the midst of it all. It seemed, indeed, as if he had betrayed them into this fanciful controversy on purpose that he might be able to take refuge in his own thoughts. What was Westminster or St Paul’s to him? His mind was busy with events which no poet had ever celebrated, which had never been put into history. Neither wife nor children knew of them—only some people at home, people who might be dead long ago, whom he had not heard of, and who had not heard of him for thirty years. He got the required leisure and quiet to think this all over while the others were busy with their poetry. They appealed to him, and he gave them a little nod and half smile, one of those smiles that are but for a moment, a gleam of enforced attention instantly falling back into the gravity of prevailing thought. The decision finally was for Westminster. As for these young people, they did not know the difference between St Paul’s and the Abbey. They were both old, reverend, glorious structures to Grace and Milly; but what it might be that made the difference between them they did not know. One meant Poets’ Corner, the other that about the mighty Seaman. They had never seen a Gothic cathedral in their lives.
And perhaps it is not ignorance so profound as this that is qualified to see and understand what is best. The girls read the names on the monuments with a kind of silent ecstasy of wonder. To think that they, two little girls from Canada, should actually be treading the storied pavement in Poets’ Corner, and should be able to read with their own eyes the names upon those monuments, and see the Kings and Queens lying in marble, in solemn state, and touch with their little living modern fingers the chair in which the Confessor had sat! Could anything be more wonderful? They went through it all as if they were in a dream, looking at the monuments, reading all the names, thinking it was their own want of clear historical knowledge that made them at a loss about one here and there. But the Abbey itself was above their comprehension. They thought the Houses of Parliament finer, and were a little shocked that everything should be so grey and old. When you have seen nothing that is not new, all your life, it is difficult to understand the darkening of ages. But they spent the entire morning in one dream of pleasure, their hearts standing still as they came upon name after name, which they had heard of all their lives. There too was Whitehall, and that gloomy window, of which, perhaps, it is not true that from thence King Charles stepped to his execution; but they were not too critical; and they walked up the Mall to St James’s Palace with a little thrill of easier admiration (which they thought rather vulgar in themselves, and were disposed to blush at) for the Lifeguardsmen on their horses. The little dingy old palace wounded their feelings somewhat, and brought down the bewildering splendour of imagination into very shabby limits; but they got over that. When they were not silent with awe, or with the shock of trying to reconcile to their own ideal something that fell short of it, they were talking all the way, calling upon each other to see this or that, reading out even the names of the streets to each other with many an “Oh, Milly!” and “Oh, Grace!” They were so absorbed in their sight-seeing that they never noticed the people who looked after them, the amused admiring looks with which the passers-by would contemplate their fresh faces. They were very fresh faces, delicate in colour, clear and animated, and so full of interest that their superabundant life brightened the foggy street. But fortunately the fog had lifted a little, and all the ghostly houses round the park, and the leafless trees, became more real under the mid-day radiance of a veiled sun doing his best to break through; and if they had thought the fog poetical before, you may imagine what they thought it now, with those rays streaming into it. It could not be real, they said to each other; by-and-by they would wake up and find themselves, let us say, in that other London which is on the farther side of the Atlantic. It could not be real; it was too wonderful to be true.
Meantime the father went on responding a little, but only a little, to the constant claim made upon his attention. He said “Yes” and “No,” or even “Very pretty,” “Very nice,” “Very interesting” on occasion. For his part he did not care very much about the monuments. Sometimes his eye would wander away among the aisles, or through the lovely tracery and carved work of the roofs, to where the faint red sun caught a painted window, and threw a rosy oblique ladder of many colours across the grey. He understood the Abbey better than the girls did; but what he saw in the Abbey was, scenes of the past—the past, not of Shakespeare or the old Kings, but his own. He had been there in his youth, and he had been in other places which were recalled and suggested by this, and he remembered and mused in his heart. His companions were not surprised, because he was always a man of few words; though afterwards it gave them many thoughts, and the question, what he had been thinking of, what fancies might have been rising unconsciously in his mind, was often discussed by them; but at the present moment, as was natural, they did not realise that there was anything out of the way in his silence. They went back to their hotel late for their luncheon; they were tired in body, but not in their minds, which flowed over with wonder and pleasure. “Are you the least little bit disappointed?” said Milly to Grace. “No, not the least. Disappointed!” cried Grace with enthusiasm, though the next moment she was conscious of that little chill in her soul about St James’s, and even felt that she had missed something in Westminster. This being the case with Grace, Milly cleared up in a moment from the slightest little cloud that had fallen upon her, and felt that neither was she disappointed, oh, not the least in the world! It was like walking with Shakespeare, they both said. And Mr Yorke gave a little nod across the table, and lifted his eyebrows at them. It was almost as much as he ever did when they were in full tide of enthusiasm. Papa was always quiet; though perhaps, indeed, he was more preoccupied than usual to-day. The winterly spring afternoon was beginning to close in a little before their meal was over. They were preparing, however, to go out again when their father called them to the window where he was sitting, looking more grave even than he was accustomed to look.
“I am going out,” he said. “Can you manage for yourselves till dinner? I have something to do—out.”
“Can’t we go with you, papa?” they both said in a breath.
There was a kind of embarrassment on his face. “Not to-day, I think. After—perhaps: I have a call to make.”
“Oh, it is about business!” said Milly, wondering, yet apologetic, looking at Grace.
“If it is not about business,” said Grace promptly, “you ought to take us with you, papa. It is the right thing in England. In England girls don’t go about by themselves; and then we want some friends, we want to know the people as well as the place.”
A half smile went over his face. “You shall get the benefit of all the introductions,” he said. “Don’t be afraid; but you must not expect to be taken much notice of in London, just on the edge of the season, you know. People are very busy here; and then there are so many to be looked after—people of more pretensions than you. You must not expect too much; but I am not going to deliver any of the letters. I am going—to see an—old friend.”
“Oh, then, bring him here—will you please bring him here? Do, papa, do! If it is an old friend, so much the more reason that we should know him. Is it a friend you had before you went to Canada? Why has he never come to see us? We have always wondered that you never had any old friends come to see you, papa.”
Yorke did not make any direct reply. He said only, “What will you do with yourselves while I am away?”
The two girls looked at each other somewhat blankly.
“We can’t stay in here,” cried Milly, while Grace drew herself up with youthful dignity.
“As for staying in every time you have any business to do or any calls to make,” she said, with serious emphasis, “you must see that is impossible, papa. English girls may stop in-doors if they please, but we cannot. We are Canadian girls; we are used to take care of ourselves. Milly and I can surely take care of each other wherever we go. It would be too humbling,” she cried, “in the country of Shakespeare, to think two girls couldn’t go out without—what was it, Milly?—unpleasantness. I don’t believe a word of it. Mrs Bidwell is only a vulgar Englishwoman. Unpleasantness! I don’t believe it; and even if I did believe it I shouldn’t allow it to be true.”
“Come,” said her father, “you must not talk so of vulgar Englishwomen—you who are such enthusiasts for England. No, I don’t see any harm in it. Come with me so far, I’ll take you to where the shops are. Of course you would like to look into the shops.”
They would have liked a great deal better to go with him upon this mysterious call, but he would not permit it, and accordingly they were taken to Regent Street, where he left them with a beautiful confidence. It might not be the best place in the world to leave young girls alone on a spring afternoon, no doubt; but what did they know of that? They were innocent, proud, modest girls, to whom no one had ever said a disrespectful word, and who were afraid of nobody. Nor did they get any new light upon the subject from that walk. The innocent do not even suspect the dangers which the knowing see all about them. Nobody molested Grace and Milly: they walked along in their armour of honest maidenhood, knowing no evil; and were as safe as in their own rooms. It was true, however, that their rapture waned a little, and a touch of local patriotism came over them.
“I don’t think so very much of the shops,” said Milly doubtfully.
Milly was often the first to start an opinion, but she never was quite sure whether she held it or not till she had the support of Grace’s authority, which this time, as so often, was unhesitatingly given.
“I don’t think anything of the shops,” said Grace. “Of course one doesn’t come to England to look at shops. Paris for that, I suppose; but it is England all the same.”
“Oh yes,” said Milly, “certainly it is England all the same. I wish the houses were a little bigger and cleaner-looking, and the streets broader. I wish there were some trees——”
“Trees! in the heart of London,” said Grace with high contempt. “Trees are the things that show how new a place is. Where you have nothing else you have trees. But think how many people must have walked about here. If we only could see them all strolling up and down this pavement—people you would give your head to see.”
“But Shakespeare—and people like that—could not have walked about Regent Street: it is not old enough.”
“No; not Shakespeare, perhaps. I don’t know—he might have walked about here, though it was not Regent Street then.”
“I wonder,” said Milly suddenly, “where papa can have gone. I never heard him talk of any old friends before; nor relations. By the way, isn’t it very funny that we have no relations in England, Grace?”
“It is strange,” said Grace thoughtfully.
It was not a subject which had occurred to them till now. Their father they were aware had been thirty years in Canada without ever going “home;” and he had no family correspondence, nobody belonging to him that they knew of except themselves. Their mother was a Canadian born, and she had relations in plenty; and cousins on their father’s side had not seemed a necessity before. But as they thought of it, a little additional chill came into the air. England—so dear and delightful as it was, the home of all their traditions—they had begun to make acquaintance with. But to think that they had not a relation in England, nothing to justify their fond identification of themselves with this old country! The idea was somewhat alarming as it burst upon them. It increased the little shade of disappointment which had crept over them against their will, and sent them to their hotel, which was all that answered for home at this moment, with a little heaviness at their hearts.