Home and the Homeless; a novel

Chapter I

No sooner had old Judy disappeared from the cellar, than Lily, whose slumber had been in part at least assumed in order to escape from her importunities, began to weep most piteously, while Esther continued to lavish silently upon her, every act of loving sympathy that her woman's heart suggested. Naturally selfish, however, and accustomed all her life time to exact kindness as a right, Lily neither showed nor felt much gratitude for the attention of her companion; but continued to lament and bemoan herself, as one deserted undeservedly by all the world, and ill-treated beyond endurance. And yet, the very presence of Esther at her bedside mis-lit have suggested a different train of O OO thought, even to such an inconsequent mind as hers. It might have whispered to her of that kind Providence of God, which would not leave her to endure alone the consequences of her own ill deeds ; but had sent to her aid and comfort one, who if more desolate and sinful than herself, was, perhaps, for that very reason, better calculated than any one else to lead her to better feelings.

So wonderful are His hidden ways, and so little do they correspond with our human ideas of fitness and propriety, when He regulates the destinies of the creatures He has made ! Had any one been asked to choose an adviser calculated to lead Lily to better thoughts and feelings, he would undoubtedly have chosen for the pur pose (he must have done so by the ordinary laws of human foresight,) a person endowed alike with wisdom sufficient to convince by reason, and virtue enough to persuade by example. Yet such a one would undoubtedly have failed ; and, Lily, in her present mood, would have obstinately closed her eyes and ears, and locked her heart in pride, had she found herself in presence of any one, whose life and maxims could have seemed like a censure on her own. In such a case she would probably have endeavoured either to justify her guilt, or to deny it, either have asserted herself and her mode of thinking, blame less at any cost, or have sought refuge in sullen silence from everything approaching disapproba tion or reproof.

We do not mean to assert that all persons in her situation would have acted thus, or that Esther would have been in all cases the most efficient adviser for their welfare. We only mean to say, that Providence ever ap portions the means to the end ; and that in this instance, the very contempt which Lily felt for the poor girl who waited on her, enabled her to listen to her with patience, where she would have turned from a more respectable adviser in anger and disgust. Accustomed, in fact, as Esther had been from infancy to find her good and evil fortune in the disposition of those in whose company chance or choice had thrown her, she possessed an intuitive knowledge of character which enabled her to divine at once, and without any previous consideration, the best method of softening Lily's angry feelings.

A single observation indicative of curiosity as to the past would, she felt certain, by alarming the pride of the fallen girl, at once repel her; therefore, for a long time, she was content to occupy herself in those silent arrangements for her bodily comfort which appeal all the more strongly to the gratitude of invalids, that they feel utterly incapable of obtaining them by any efforts of their own. She bathed her burning hands and brow in water — dressed the wound on her temple with soft rags — smoothed down the rumpled bed clothes, and succeeded in giving such an air of neatness to everything about her, that Lily felt soothed and comforted in spite of her previous determination to be neither. Her child-like complainings died gradually away, and at last she fell fast asleep. Scarcely however had she slept ten minutes before the same harrassing recollections which had made her slumber almost delirious in the night time, again aroused her, and she woke up shrieking " Frederick !

Frederick ! how could you strike me? " " To strike a woman," muttered Esther, less in answer to the sick girl than from her habit of pursuing her own thoughts aloud, " that is wicked, almost as wicked as to strike a infant on its mother's breast ; for God help us ! some of we are well nigh as defenceless, and them as isn't are mostly worse than nature made 'em." " Worse then nature made them? " Lily snap pishly replied. " What nonsense you talk ! As if nature ever meant us to be anything but what she made us, or as if the brain were not re sponsible for all our actions, quite independent of any good or bad in the business at all." " I don't understand," said Esther, simply. " But asking your pardon all the same, that sounds to me werry like nonsense." " We do good or evil, just as the formation of the brain prompts us to the one or to the other.

The brain, therefore, is accountable for all our actions, and we ourselves being mere machines B beneath its impulse, can claim neither praise or blame for anything we do." Lily spoke these few words with tbe air and emphasis of one, who felt she had advanced a proposition beyond the power of argument to assail. Yet, never until she found herself in her pre sent position, had she even thought of adopting it herself, for so long as her life was, at least, in its outward seeming pure, so long she had in dulged in dreams of the beauty and fitness of virtue, which were quite incompatible with the doctrine of irresponsibility, as she proclaimed it now. " Then," said Esther, (quite innocent of any satirical intentions, and merely endeavouring to make Lily's real meaning more palpable to her own understanding by an illustration,) " Then, if your young man did strike you, as you says he did, it were only because he couldn't help it, and therefore, in course, you have no right to blame him."

Lily did not much like this application of her own theory. She had forgotten that sin justified in one case by such an argument, is, in fact, sin justified in all, but as this conclusion did not tally with her present feelings, she remained silent, while Esther continued in a puzzled tone. *' But why is it called good or bad, if it ainit good or bad in earnest? Or, why is it that summut in our 'arts is always telling we to do a thing or let it be, if we really carn't help our selves, but whether or no, must do it?" " Do you really ever feel like that?" asked Lily, in some surprise ; for having attributed her own remorseful feelings in the commission of sin, merely to the loss of position it had entailed upon her, it never occurred to her to imagine that such a girl as Esther, born as it were, to her present calling, could be troubled with a conscience.

" I used to, in the beginning, though I well nigh lost the feeling, as I growed older," the girl answered thoughtfully. " It corned back to me of late, howsomdever, and so I am often gloomy now, where I used to be gay and careless." " And what brought it back again?" asked O *- Lily, interested in spite of herself in this glimpse into the mental history of the other. "Why it coined back agin?" asked Esther thoughtfully. "It corned back when I seed that which I'd never seed before, and which was not only unsinful in itself, but which didn't know sin, even by its name. I seed a innocent child, Lily ! And while I stood face to face before her, I felt crushed, and shamed to the wery dust, to think how she'd have shrunk from me, as if I war a sarpint, if she'd know'd of the life I lead ; — or how, which is far more likely, she never could ha' knowed it, even if I telled it to her word for word, since her werry innocence would have perwented she understanding."

Lily groaned aloud. Time was, when she would gladly have seized on such a theme, 1o ring changes on its beauty, but now, alas! she was mute perforce. Too well she knew, though she would not acknowledge it, even to herself, that the glory of innocence had gone out from her, and that its beauty had departed; too deeply she felt, and too thoroughly comprehended, why it was, that while the street girl at her side spoke, with hushed reverence, of a little child, because of its unconscious purity, she addressed her kindly indeed, but carelessly, as she would have any other fallen sister, and with just such a change in look and manner, as we might ex pect in one who had stept from the consecrated precincts of a church, suddenly, into unhallowed ground. No wonder that she groaned aloud, or that while cursing in the very depth and bitterness of her soul the day, the hour, and more than all the rest, the man, who had been the cause and prompter of her fall, she covered her face with both her hands, and burst into a passionate fit of tears.

Esther saw that she had wounded her com panion deeply, and partly guessing at the cause, (for the look of angry shame on Lily's face, in the one brief moment that she had suffered it to be seen was not to be mistaken,) she tried to repair her blunder by saying humbly : " As I were a saying, I felt all this, and more, that I carn't altogether put rightly into words just now, whenever that lone little one was near me; and in some sort I feel it still as I sit beside you, and listen to your soft voice and pretty words, such as I never heard before except from she — " " Beside me," cried Lily, passionately. "And do you not know that the world esteems me fallen and degraded as yourself?" " The world is more nor half wrong then," replied Esther, checking the angry emotion of pride which beneath Lily's contemptuous words had sent the blood crimson to her forehead.

" More nor half wrong, as it always is, when it ain't out and out wrong altogether, which may happen it is the oftenest. You have fallen, you says, and that may be, for you wern't bringed up to wot you are that's certain; but fallen I ain't, and carn't be, since I never were anything but wot I am this moment." Esther paused, for her mind was struggling a * OO o amid thoughts and feelings to which she had neither sufficient knowledge, nor sufficient range of language to give utterance in words. Perhaps it would be a true translation of those thoughts to say, that Lily seemed to her as an angel newly fallen, the brightness of whose aspect had been dimmed indeed, but not as yet entirely destroyed by sin ; for if the interior beauty of the soul had vanished, the grace and refinement which it had conferred, still clung round the outward form, and regulated all its movements.

But for her self, the poor street girl felt more bitterly than ever, that her lot must have been cast from the first in the ways of sin, so impossible did she find it to recall a time when she had been less degraded than she was at present. Life, had in fact, commenced for her at that lowest point towards which Lily was only tending, slowly tending perhaps, yet not for that less surely; if nothing should interpose between her and the downward movement. It may seem like a libel upon our race to say it, yet surely there is often something in this poor human heart of ours which is not dis pleased at the avowed inferiority of another. Crushed and conscious of being crushed, as Lily no doubt was, yet did she feel somewhat raised in her own esteem by Esther's candid confession to a deeper degradation still.

Most heartily indeed did she concur in that de cision; for judging herself rather by the refine ments of our nature than by the moral law that is meant to bind it, so long as she could feel that her tastes were still cultivated and her pleasures still refined, so long would she continue to rank herself above Esther. For it never would occur to her that if each were to be judged here after by the opportunities given to each, the child of the slum and back street would probably be held less guilty in the estimation of eternal justice, than she who, bred in ease and luxury, had had no other temptation to depart from virtue than the lawless dictates of her own sinful heart. With this soothing consciousness of superiority in her mind, it was rather from a wish to gratify her vanity by hearing Esther's words repeated, than from any desire to impress a contrary idea on her companion, that she persisted in her first assertion.

" Nevertheless, the world will both think and speak of me as if there were no difference be tween us." " And doen'tthey know then," saidEsther with an earnest sadness in her voice that was very touching. " Doen't they know that a lily as is broken is a lily still; while a weed, for as flourish ing as it seems, is nothin' but a weed for all that! And that is jist the diff'rence atween we. I've growed in rough places till I'm as rough as they, and so I cares nothin' wotever for things as crushes you to atoms. The blow that sent you into the streets in sorrer and dismay, I'd have given back as I got it, and forgiven the next minit." " He had been drinking," said Lily, with that lingering instinct of a true woman, which ever prompts her to extenuate the guilt of the beloved one. "He had been drinking; or surely he could not have done it."

"Drinkin' had he? Then you should ha' let him be," said Esther. " A drunken man is a beast, and should be awoided accordin'. You should ha' let him alone till he had slep' off his licker, Lily." " Let him alone," said Lily. " I would have been glad enough at first, I promise you, if he would have let me alone, instead of forcing two of his drunken, gambling associates on me, in spite of all that I could urge against it." " At first," repeated Esther, with a significant stress upon the last word. "But arterwards; wot then?" " Afterwards," sobbed Lily, with an evident consciousness that she herself had not been altogether guiltless in the matter; "he got angry just because I wouldn't let them drink gin and play chicken hazard in our only sitting room. An angel couldn't have stood it, Esther, and I answered him rather too crossly, I suppose, and he answered me, and so it went on from one thing to another.

The brutes that were with him jeered him on all the time, until at last he grew absolutely like a maniac in his fury, and swear ing that he would leave me, and never come back, made a rush at me that knocked me down. My head struck against the fender, and I was quite stunned by the blow, but when I recovered my reason, it was nearly dark; and oh, Esther, I was alone ! He had gone away, as he said he would — gone quite, quite away ; and there is no one to love or to care for me now, for he was the only one left, and I know he will never come back." " Yes he will, tho'," said Ester, soothingly, " men always says them sort of things to frighten we like; but to do 'em justice they seldom acts as bad as they threatens. He'll come back agin; you'll see him in no time." " He won't," said Lily, in a voice of smothered anguish.

" Oh, Esther, Esther, I have not told you all as yet; I haven't told you that in his drunken rage he taunted me, because there was no abiding tie between us — nothing in short to prevent his casting me from him at a moment's notice. My God ! my God ! who could have thought it," cried the wretched child wringing her hands piteously together. " He whom I trusted so ! He who had so sworn ! He to taunt me with it now ! He to call me — Oh, Esther, that ter rible word he used is still ringing in my ears, and he flung me from him as he said it, as if he felt in truth that I was but a broken plaything — a used up garment. He flung me from him; and when I recovered my senses I felt as I used to do when I was a little child and they left me in the dark alone — trembling all over and afraid to move."

" Poor soul; no wonder," said Esther, soothingly. " But you did move at last, for I corned down the street jist as you left the house, and seeing you look so wildlike, thought it best to foller." "Left the house," repeated Lily. "Yes; I rushed out with some vague notion of throwing myself into the river, I believe; but just as I turned the corner I met my brother, and hardly knowing what I did, flung myself into his arms." " And he?" " He too, flung me off," cried Lily with another burst of passionate emotion. " Flung me off as if I had been a reptile. Oh, Esther, Esther! when I think of it even now, I feel as if I should go mad or die of sorrow." " Poor crittur ! Death or madness be the best thing left for you, I'm afeard," thought Esther; but far from giving utterance to this conviction, she tried to encourage Lily by saying cheerfully — " Who knows ar'ter all but wot he may be werry sorry now for having been so proud-like to you."

But Lily only shook her head in absolute un belief. " He may ha' been startled like jist at first into doing of an unkindness, or he may ha' been mistaken (who knows) even in his thoughts about you," continued Esther good naturedly, trying to lessen the appearance of deliberate desertion in Frank's conduct. "Dear Lily, I don't want to fret you, but remember you war runnin' like a mad thing — your hair all loose about you, and your face streamin' blood as if you had been a fightin'." " Oh, Esther," cried Lily, in a voice of inex pressible anguish as the picture thus rudely drawn brought a new and yet more harassing idea to her mind. " You don't mean to say — you can't surely think it possible that he imagined I had been drinking." " And what would you've thought yourself, if you had met him in that ere fashion running thro' the streets at night?"

Esther pointedly demanded. Lily groaned aloud — she could not help it. " But if he seed you now," continued Esther, in a low plaintive voice, " if he seed you now, — pale, sick, and full of sorrer as you be — he wouldn't think it of you now— he wouldn't, and he won'not, if you'll only tell me where to seek him, and let me bring him to you. I wouldn't fret you on no account, nor do nothing you don't wish to," she persisted, as Lily for sole reply impatiently shook her bead. " But bethink you well — it ain't too late for you — you ain't a been a trampled and a put upon as I have, till wickedness sits easy on me — easier nor goodness. The flower's a flower still, and might be made to bloom agin, if a brother's hand war stretched to save it. And it would be sure-lie ! Sure-lie it would be, if you'd only let me bring him here.

He never could close his heart aginst you, if he seed you as I do lyin' there this minit." Esther had spoken so rapidly and earnestly that Lily had hitherto been unable to interrupt her; but now at last she started up in bed, her face convulsed with shame and anger, and cried out: — '• Be silent will you ! Be silent if you would not drive me mad ! Esther ! Esther ! " she con tinued, with a vehemence of passion that made fearful contrast to her pale face and child-like features. " If ever you dare to bring my own people here — if you dare so much as to hint at my existence to them, I swear 1 will commit suicide at once. Yes, at the very first sound of their footsteps outside that door, I will kill my self, if I am forced to do it by strangling myself in my own hair. Living, they shall never insult me with their pity ; and they will not be inclined to mock me, I suppose, when they gaze upon me dead !

" So rapidly and incoherently was all this uttered, that it was in vain to attempt explana tion or interruption. Tearing the beautiful hair with which she had threatened to do such an evil deed, Lily went off from one fit of hysterical spasms to another, until terrified at the length and violence of the attack, Esther would gladly have run for a doctor, had she not feared that her patient would have destroyed herself in her absence. Bitterly did she now re gret the words, by which she fancied she had excited this storm of passion in the sick girl's soul. Yet it was not, as she deemed it, her proposal to bring Frank to his sister's bedside only, but her simple admiration of the innocence of Aileen, her bitter self-contempt for her own life of guilt as well, that had given the last impulse to Lily's wakening conscience, and fixed the idea of her own degradation irrevocably in her mind.

All the false reasoning and sophistical delusions, all the fantastical arguments about fate and about necessity, by which she had hitherto endeavoured to palliate her sin, went down before those simple words of truth, so simply and so unconsciously pronounced; and in the first terrible moment of self-convicted guilt she would, as she had said most truly, gladly have destroyed herself. But Esther was a vigilant and judicious nurse, and her eye was never off her patient for a moment. Twice she put back the long hair which the un happy girl was twisting and tightening round her neck in a fearfully threatening manner; twice she held her down, gently but firmly, in her bed, as she tried to spring from it to reach a knife upon the table.' If Lily lived through the madness of remorse and shame that raged in her bosom through the next few hours,, it was to the care and kindness of the girl, whom she had despised as a creature of another order, that she owed the boon of life — 'that boon so valuable at all times; but, above all price or measure, when the stain of unrepented sin is on the soul, and the life to be abandoned may too possibly be ex changed, for that in which the 'worm that dieth not,' is set for ever.

At last, the poor patient's struggles ceased, and exhausted nature found repose in sleep, while Esther sat beside her, amid deeper thoughts than she had ever known before. In this guise many hours passed away, though they hardly seemed to her like minutes, so absorbed was she in her own sad musing. At last, a faint sigh warned her of the awaking of her patient, and immediately afterwards Lily spoke again, but in a voice so changed by weakness, that it seemed like the voice of a little child. VOL. III. C " Esther, I am so faint and weak, I cannot see at all." Weak, indeed, she evidently was, so weak that the terrified Esther flew to old Judy's bottle of reserve, and administered a little of its contents at once. This revived her, and in a few minutes she opened her eyes again. " Esther, I am dying!" she whispered faintly.

Esther thought so too, and did not contradict her. " And, if I am," continued the sick girl — " or when you think I am, take this ring, (stay you had better pull it off at once, for just now I may not have strength to bear it), and go to Hampstead. There you will look for a villa called the 'Ferns.'" Lily could not speak the old familiar word, without an agony of grief that well nigh brought back convulsions. " Ask, there, for Miss de Burghe — for no one else, mind — ask for no one else, and tell no one else your errand — you must swear to me, you will not!" " I swears it," here Esther eagerly interposed, anxious to remove every obstacle to the lost girl's communicating with her family. " Give her this ring," Lily resumed, " and say to her, ' Lily is dying.' And if she will — if she is not too proud — if she will come and say ' Good-bye.' But mind, only when I am dying, Esther — only when I am positively dying."

" Only then," said Esther, tying the ring to a corner of her handkerchief. " And to no one else," repeated Lily, faintly. Then, as if satisfied of Esther's truth, and content to rest upon her promise, she closed her eyes once more, and between weakness and the unusual stimulant she had just received, was soon fast asleep again. The day, was by this time declining, and Esther heard with impatience the old Irish woman's foot upon the stair-case. She feared the bustle of her entrance would awaken Lily, but in this she had miscalculated the kind hearted consideration of poor Judy, who opened the door as cautiously as she could have done herself, and whose habitual "God save all here, and how is the poor colleen now?" were uttered in so low a voice, that it would not have dis turbed the most irritable of sleepers.

" Poor Lily ! Not long for this world, I'm c sore afeard," said Esther sadly. " P'raps you'll sit by her a bit now, while I goes on an errand for her." " Musha then, won't I, and wid a heart and a half besides?" responded the good old creature, forgetting even the usual preparation for her " darlint cup of tay," in her kindly sympathy with a suffering fellow creature. " And it's Lily that they call you, is it?" she muttered to herself, as she gazed on the sick girl after Esther had left the room. " Ochone, my sorrow! but it's crushed and faded Lily that you are. And may the blessed mother of God recaive you this night to glory, for shure it's only in heaven that such lilies as you do blossom rightly, afther wanst they've been crushed and trampled on, in this cowld, hard woreld we live in!"

Chapter II

Evelyn was deep in reverie one morning in the pleasant library of the Ferns, and Mrs. Mont gomerie was seated, as usual, at her knitting beside her, when Denis abruptly entered the room to say there was a person at the hall door, who desired to speak to her. " A person ! What sort of a person ? A man or a woman, Denis?" asked Evelyn, feeling rather surprised at the fact of his having con descended to do the work of them "powdered spalpeens in yallow breeches," as he usually de signated the footmen belonging to the establish ment, by taking on himself this announcement of a visitor. " A young woman, miss. I met her in the avenue, and as she asked to see you particular, I towld her I'd take in her message myself — for a rayson I had," he added, coming closer to Evelyn, and looking mysterious.

"And your reason, Denis?" " Why you see, miss, she's a quare looking bit of a body, with big black eyes, and though not to say so dark in the complixion, yet in every other respect the very moral of that thievin' gipsy we fell in with at Southampton." " Do you mean the fortune teller with the little girl?" cried Evelyn, her interest in her visitor awakened in a moment. " I do, miss. Masther Wyllie was with me in the avenue, and he remembered her the minute he seen her, but I bid him not to let on to do so, for fear of frightenin' her away, because I never can get it out of my head but what she knows more of Masther Frederick's doin's nor we do?" " But what makes you think so, Denis? She was not with him when you thought you saw him at the fair." " Not when first I seen him; but when I cotch sight of him aftherwards, he was walkin' with a man that I'd met with her before.

And if she knows any one as knows Masther Frederick, not a doubt but she knows him likewise, and could tell us if she chose it, what he done with Miss Lily afther we lost sight of them that night." " Perhaps you and Wyllie are both mistaken, after all," observed Evelyn after a moment's thought. " Gipsies have such a general resem blance to each other that you might easily have been misled." " May be," said Denis incredulously. " But such wicked looking eyes as them two big ones of hers dou't grow on every bush, Miss de Burghe. I never seen the likes of them before that day myself, and may I never sin if I wish to see them again, afther once she's towld us all she may happen to know of Miss Lily." " I think you wrong those black eyes when you call them wicked," said Evelyn, speaking rather, however, to herself than Denis, as she tried to measure in her own mind the possible character of one, upon whom, if he had guessed rightly as to her acquaintance with Frederick, so much might be now depending.