CHAPTER XXIV.
LALLY FINDS A NEW HOME.
Nearly six weeks had intervened between Rufus Black’s proposal of marriage to Neva Wynde on the road-side bank and his final rejection by her in the music-room at Hawkhurst.
It will be remembered that there had been a hidden witness to the half-despairing, half-loving, proposal of Rufus, and that this hidden witness, seeing, but unseen, was no other than the wronged young wife whom Rufus Black mourned as dead, and whom in his soul he loved a thousand-fold better than the beautiful young heiress.
During the six weeks that had passed, what had become of Lally—poor, heart-broken, despairing Lally?
We have narrated how she staggered away in the night gloom, after seeing Rufus and Neva together in the square of light from the home windows upon the marble terrace, not knowing whither she went, but hurrying as swiftly as she might from her young husband, from happiness, and from hope itself.
She had no thought of suicide. She had learned many lessons by the bedside of her old friend the seamstress, whose dying hours she had cheered. She had learned that life may be very bitter and hard to bear, but that it may not be thrown aside, or flung back in anger or despair to the Giver. Its burdens must be borne, and he who bears them with earnest patience, and in humble obedience to the divine will, shall some day exchange the cross of suffering for the crown of a great reward. No; Lally, weak and frail as she was, deserted by humanity, would never again seriously think of suicide.
She wandered on in the soft starlight and moonlight, a helpless, homeless, hopeless creature, with nowhere to go, as we have said. She had no money in her pocket, no food, and her shoes were worn out, and her clothes were patched and darned and pitiably frayed and worn. The very angels must have pitied her in her utter forlornness.
For an hour or two she tottered on, but at last wearied to exhaustion, she sank down in the shelter of a way-side hedge, and sobbed and moaned herself to sleep.
She was awake again at daybreak, and hurried up and on, as if flying from pursuit. About eleven o’clock she came to a hop-garden, divided from the road by wooden palings. There were men and women, of the tramp species, busy at work here under the supervision of the hop farmer. Lally halted and clung to the palings with both hands, and looked through the interstices upon the busy groups with dilating eyes.
She was worn with anguish, but even her mental sufferings could not still the demands of nature. She was so hungry that it seemed as if a vulture were gnawing at her vitals. She felt that she was starving.
The hop-pickers, many of them tramps who lived in unions and alms-houses in the winter, and who stray down into Kent during the hop season, presently discovered the white and hungry face pressed against the palings, and jeered at the girl, and called her names she could not understand, making merry at her forlornness.
The hop raiser heard them, and discovering the object of their rude merriment, came forward, opened a gate in the palings, and hailed the girl. He was short of hands, he said, and would give her sixpence a day, and food and drink, if she chose to help in the hop picking.
Lally nodded assent, and crept into the gate, and into the presence of those who mocked at her. Her eyes were so wild, her manner so strange and still, that the workers stared at her in wonder, whispered among themselves, discovering that she was not of their kind, and turned their backs upon her.
It was taken for granted that the new hand had had her breakfast, and not a crust was offered to her. The hop raiser had doubts about her sanity, and observed her narrowly, but a dozen times that day he mentally congratulated himself on his acquisition. Lally worked with feverish energy, trying—ah, how vainly—to escape from her thoughts, and she did the work of two persons. She had bread and cheese and a glass of ale at noon, and a similar allowance of food for supper.
That night she slept in a barn with the women tramps, but chose a remote corner, where she buried herself in the hay, and slept peacefully.
The next day she would have wandered on in her unrest, but the farmer, discovering her intention, offered her a shilling a day, and she consented to remain. That night she again slept in her remote corner of the barn, and no one spoke to her or molested her.
She made no friends among the tramps, not even speaking to them. They were rude, vicious, quarrelsome. She was educated and refined, had been the teacher and companion of ladies, and was herself a lady at heart. She went among these rude companions by the soubriquet of “The Lady,” and this was the only name by which the hop farmer knew her.
For a week Lally kept up this toil, laboring in the hop-fields by day, and sleeping in a barn at night. At the end of that period, the work being finished, she was no longer wanted, and she went her way, resuming her weary tramp, with six shillings and sixpence in her pocket.
For the next fortnight she worked in various hop-fields, paying nothing for food or lodging. Her pay was better too, she earning a sovereign in the two weeks.
Three weeks after overhearing Rufus solicit the hand of Miss Wynde in marriage, Lally found herself at Canterbury, shoeless and ragged, a very picture of destitution. Her first act was to purchase a pair of shoes, a ready-made print dress and a thin shawl. Her purchases were all of the cheapest description, not costing her over five shillings. She added to the list a round hat of coarse straw, around which she tied a dark blue ribbon.
She found a cheap lodging in the town; and here put on her new clothes. The lodging was an attic room, with a dormer window, close up under the slates of a humble brick dwelling. There was no carpet on her floor, and the furniture comprised only an iron bed-stead, a chair and a table. The house was rented by a tailor, who used the ground floor for his shop and residence, and sub-let the upper rooms to a half dozen different families. The three attic rooms were let to women, Lally being one, and two thin, consumptive seamstresses occupying the others.
It was necessary for Lally to find employment without delay, and she inserted an advertisement in one of the local papers, soliciting a position as nursery governess. She had the written recommendation of her former employers, the superintendents of a ladies’ school, and with this she hoped to secure a situation.
Her advertisement was repeated for three days without result. Upon the fourth day, as she was counting her slender store of money, and wondering what she was to do when that was gone, the postman’s knock was heard on the private door below, and presently the tailor’s little boy came to Lally’s room bringing a letter.
She tore it open eagerly. It was dated Sandy Lands, and was written in a painfully minute style of penmanship, with faint and spidery letters. The writer was a lady, signing herself Mrs. Blight. She stated that she had a family of nine children, five of whom were young enough to require the services of a nursery governess. If “L. B.”—the initials Lally had appended to her advertisement—could give satisfactory references, was an accomplished musician, spoke French and German, and was well versed in the English branches, she might call at Sandy Lands upon the following morning at ten o’clock.
Accordingly the next morning Lally set out in a cab for Sandy Lands, whose location Mrs. Blight had described with sufficient accuracy. It was situated in one of the fashionable suburbs of the old cathedral town. Lally expected from the grandeur of its name to find a large and handsome estate, but found instead a pert little villa, close to the road, and separated from it by a high brick wall in which was a wooden gate. The domain of Sandy Lands comprised a half-acre of rather sterile soil, in which a few larches struggled for existence, and an acacia and a lime tree led a sickly life.
The little villa, with plate-glass windows, green parlor shutters drawn half-way up, a gabled roof, from which three saucy little dormer windows protruded, was unmistakably the house of which Lally was in search, for on one side of the gate, over a slit in the wall required for the use of the proper letter-box, was the legend in bright gilt letters, “Sandy Lands.”
The cabman alighted and rang the garden bell. A smart looking housemaid with white cap and white apron answered the call. Lally alighted and asked if Mrs. Blight were at home. The smart housemaid eyed the humbly clad stranger rather contemptuously, and remarked that she could not be sure; Mrs. Blight might be at home, and then again she might not.
“I received a letter from her telling me to call at this hour,” said Lally, with what dignity she could summon. “I am seeking a situation as nursery governess.”
“Oh, then Missus is at home,” replied the housemaid. “You can come in, Miss.”
Bidding the cabman wait, Lally followed the servant across the garden to a rear porch and was ushered into a small over-furnished reception room.
“What name shall I say, Miss?” asked the maid, pausing in the act of withdrawal.
“Miss Bird,” answered poor Lally, who had relinquished her young husband’s name, believing that she had no longer any right to it.
The maid went out, and was absent nearly twenty minutes. Lally began to think herself forgotten, and grew nervous, and engaged in a mental computation of her cabman’s probable charges. The maid finally appeared, however, and announced that “Missus was in her boudoir, and would see the young person.”
Lally was conducted up stairs to a front room overlooking the road. This room, like the one below, was over-furnished. The wide window opened upon a balcony, and before it, half-reclining upon a silken couch, was a lady in a heavy purple silk gown, and a profusion of jewelry—a lady, short, stout, and red-visaged, with a nose much turned up at the end, and so ruddy as to induce one to think it in a state of inflammation.
“Miss Bird!” announced the maid abruptly, flinging in the words like a discharge of shot, and retired precipitately.
Mrs. Blight turned her gaze upon Lally in a languid curiosity, and waved her hand condescendingly, as an intimation that the “young person” might be seated.
Lally sat down.
Mrs. Blight then raised a pair of gold-mounted eye-glasses to her nose, and scrutinized Lally more closely, after what she deemed a very high-bred and nonchalant fashion indeed.
She beheld a humbly dressed girl, not past seventeen, but looking younger, with a face as brown as a berry and velvet-black eyes, which were strangely pathetic and sorrowful—a girl who had known trouble evidently, but who was pure and innocent as one might see at a glance.
“Ah, is your name Bird?” asked Mrs. Blight languidly. “Seems as if I had heard the name somewhere, but I can’t be sure. Of course you have brought references, Miss Bird?”
“I have only a recommendation signed by ladies in whose service I have been,” said Lally. “I have been a music-teacher, but I possess the other accomplishments you require.”
She drew forth the little worn slip of paper which she had guarded as of more value to her than money, because it declared her respectable and a competent music-teacher, and gave it into the lady’s fat hands.
“It is not dated very lately,” said Mrs. Blight. “How am I to know that this recommendation is not a forgery? People do forge such things, I hear. Why, a friend of mine took a footman on a forged recommendation, and he ran away and took all her silver.”
Lally’s honest cheeks flushed, and her heart swelled. She would have arisen, but that the lady motioned to her to retain her seat, and so long as there was a prospect that she might secure the situation Lally would remain.
“The recommendation looks all right,” continued Mrs. Blight, scanning it with her glass, while she held it afar off, and daintily between two fingers, as if it were a thing unclean. “You look honest too, but appearances are so deceiving! I had a nurse girl once who looked like a Madonna, and as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but she turned out a perfect minx, artful as a cat. What salary do you expect?”
“I—I don’t know, Madam. I have never been employed as nursery governess.”
“My husband allows me forty pounds a year for the salary of the governess,” said Mrs. Blight. “But, of course, forty pounds ought to get a governess with the very best of references. You are inexperienced, as you confess. Now I will take the risk of you turning out bad, if you should decide to remain with me as governess to my five children, at a salary of twenty pounds a year, board and washing, lights and fuel, included.”
It was “Hobson’s choice—that or none”—to poor Lally. Twenty pounds a year, and to be sheltered and fed and warmed besides, seemed very liberal after her recent terrible struggle with the vulture of starvation.
“I will accept it, Mrs. Blight,” she said, her voice trembling—“that is, if you will take me when you know that I have only the clothes I stand in, and that for a few weeks I shall need my pay weekly to provide me with decent garments.”
“Oh, as to that,” said Mrs. Blight, “your clothes are poor, beggarly, I might say. They will have to be improved at once. I will advance you a quarter’s salary, five pounds, if you are quite sure you will use it for clothes, and that you do not intend to cheat me out of my money. You see I always speak plainly. My governesses are not pampered. They have to earn their money, but that you probably expect to do. I don’t know of another lady in Canterbury who would do as I am doing, lending money to a perfect stranger, on a recommendation you may have written yourself. But I am different from other ladies. I am a judge of physiognomy, and am not often deceived in my estimate of people. Why are you out of clothes?”
“I have been out of a situation as a teacher for some time,” said Lally. “I have the present addresses of the ladies who signed my recommendation, and I beg you to write to them to assure yourself that I have spoken the truth. The addresses are written on the recommendation itself.”
“I noticed them, and shall write this very morning,” declared Mrs. Blight. “Go now for your clothes, and be back to luncheon. I want to introduce you to the children, who are running wild.”
She waved her hand, and Lally, with her five pounds in her hand, took her departure. She had found a new home, and one not likely to be pleasant, but it would afford her shelter, and she believed she could bear all things rather than to pass again through the poverty and misery she had known. She little knew that it was the hand of Providence that had brought her to Sandy Lands, and that the acceptance of her present situation was destined to change the entire future current of her existence, and even to affect that of her young husband.