Without Kith or Kin

Chapter I

A GIRL was sitting at a window reading, her face bent down, and her forehead leaning on her hands. It was a window looking out upon a little strip of garden, and then there was a dusty road, and beyond that a dank planta tion or small wood, shut in by iron gates. The place was a country place, and the month was April, but as yet the spring time had not made it green. Spring always came here with a tardy step, unwillingly, as if she felt that her gladness was out of harmony with the sad severity of these black ilex trees, VOL. II. B these stunted oaks, these masses of dark ever green. Just within the iron gates, where the sunlight penetrated — it never pierced in far — there was a little strip of grass on which some scattered primrose plants were growing that the girl had watched from their first peeping up till they had opened gradually into leaf and flower.

If she had lifted up her head now these pale little messengers of spring, with their golden starry faces, were the sole bits of brightness, the only blossom ing things that she would have seen. She had been afraid of that dark little wood once — long ago — nine years ago, when she had come first as a child into this house. The silence of the place, its mournful sombre foliage, the great iron gates that closed it in, and that no one ever seemed to open; — all these things had excited her imagination, and inspired her with a sort of weird fear. For many a day it had been a haunted place to her. From early childhood she had been a weaver of stories, and she made many a ghostly story out of this wood : strange forms had peopled it for her ; dark things had been done in it ; she had imagined it the entrance to a mighty forest that stretched away far, far into the land of spectres and evil spirits and unearthly things.

It had been in a large degree a horror to her, and even yet the sense of horror had not wholly passed away ; for she could laugh at her old imaginations, but yet, to some extent, the old imaginations still held her in a sort of thraldom. She did not believe in ghosts now, but if there were ghosts any where, it seemed to her that they must be behind those iron gates. The wind used to make a strange wild moaning there on winter nio-hts : the branches of the trees used to creak as they swayed. " I think there must be spirits shut up inside them, and that they are wailing to get out," she said to some one once, thereby bringing down a grave lecture on her head, — all things that savoured of superstition, and an unruly and unorthodox imagination, being to the lady to B whom she spoke an abomination of a most unqualified kind.

" How can spirits be shut up in trees, Elizabeth ?" was the reply she got. " If you really supposed that they could be, your igno rance might be an excuse for your saying so ; but, as you cannot believe it possible, why, for mere effect, do you say such a thing ? This is the result of reading the ' Fairy Queen,' and filling your mind with grotesque imaginations. Books of that sort are not books for the young, Elizabeth. You ought at present to do every thing in your power to counteract your natural tendency to romance by cultivating sobriety, both of thought and expression. Never indulge in false and in flated language, my dear, but try to express yourself with calmness, and, above all, with common sense." But I am afraid that, long before this time, let her order her speech in anyway she might, it had ceased to be possible for Elizabeth — if it had ever been possible — to confine her thoughts within such limits as would to Mrs. Brand have seemed in any wise the limits of sober sense.

For, indeed, the girl was essentially a dreamer, and born, too, with a touch of poetic imagination in her, so that, beyond this actual and visible world, there was always for her another shadowy world, in which she lived a separate life from that which she lived here ; a world in which common sense was far, indeed, I fear, from being the ruling element ; where great, heroic deeds were done, and strange, sweet, passionate stories acted themselves. This was the world in which she truly lived ; more real a hundred times, because more full of life and colour, than that other — sombre, grey, monotonous — where the ilex trees moved their dark branches, and the sunshine lay upon the dusty road, and she sat n the formal par lour in her sad-coloured dress, working a Berlin pattern in a frame, or reading aloud some book of close-packed facts, or listening to the not unkind but dry and unsympathetic voice of the only companion that she had.

I say that her dream-world was a more living world to her than this, but yet I do not mean that she found this other hard to live in, or that she hated it, or was impatient of it. She was the sort of girl whose heart could cling easily to the things she was familiar with — with whom long habit gave to almost any thing a sort of consecration. She had felt desolate enough nine years ago, on the first day when she had been brought into the dim fight of the grey parlour, and Mrs. Brand had come forward to meet her with her cold and formal welcome. Mrs. Brand was a hard-featured widow of about five and forty then, who in early life had been a governess, and being left poor at her husband's death had taken to teaching again to eke out her slender means. She was the kind of woman whom people describe as " an excellent disciplinarian," shuddering a little sometimes inwardly as they pronounce the words, yet uttering them in a tone of studied commendation.

A stern sort of woman, and yet not without some milk of human kindness in her ; just, conscientious, upright, striving with all her might to do her duty, and doing it according to her light, admi rably ; never sparing herself in any wise, and hating meanness and lying and dishonesty with almost a noble hatred. But of outward attractiveness she had little, and the child's heart had shrunk within her when she first saw her, and felt the first touch upon her shoulder of the chill, bony hand. It is hard to tell what effect a different up bringing; from that which she had would have done for Elizabeth, and whether, if she had had more sunshine round her in her childhood, it would have been the better or the worse for her in the end. She was the sort of shy, reserved child who seems to submit to most things passively, and whom few people — very naturally — take the trouble of trying to understand ; the sort of child who gets pushed into a corner because she shrinks from self-assertion, before whom not unfre quently grown people forget to be careful of what they say or do, because her unobtrusive ness makes them oblivious of her presence ; who is sensitive, and yet so quiet when she is rebuffed that her quickness to feel is rarely suspected, and passionate, but yet so shy of showing' emotion that not one in a hundred ever knows when the little heart is burning, or cares to probe the depths of a nature that looks upon the surface so unimpressible and calm.

If Elizabeth had had more sympathy when she was young, and had met with love instead of only kindness, and had been taught by habit when she admired or trusted to look for trust and admiration in return, and to claim for herself as much as she gave to others, she would probably never in after life have done some of the things she did ; but yet, had she done differently, would she have been the happier for the difference ? For myself, I think she might have done differently, and not, possibly, have been the happier for it, but infinitely the reverse of that. As you read her story you must judge of this, however, for yourselves. You will not all agree with me, perhaps. The first few years of her life had been for the greater part so sad and friendless, that the kind of existence which fell to her lot at Mrs. Brand's did not seem so hard to her as it would have done to many another child.

She had been accustomed to severity and neglect, and in this mournful little house she at least found neither of these things. Instead of them she found strictness, exactitude, a cold and careful kindness. She was expected to work steadily, to speak seldom, to obey implicitly, to play little, if at all ; and, happily for her, she was able to fulfil these expectations more easily than most children could have done. To work steadily ? — she had been accustomed to steady work for many a long day : to speak seldom ? — that was no hardship to her : to obey implicitly ? — what else should she do than obey ? to play little ? — now Joe was dead how should she care for playing ? Mrs. Brand, stern disciplinarian, laid down her trenchant rules, and the child followed them unhesitatingly, without, to all appearance, so much as a moment's thought that she could do any thing else but follow them.

" I find her very tractable," Mrs. Brand wrote a few weeks after her arrival, in rendering an account of her to Mrs. Breton. " Her ignorance is of course deplorable, but I am happy to say that she submits willingly to autho rity." And, undoubtedly, the child deserved this praise. "Whatever passion there might be in her to the knowledge of which Mrs. Brand never reached, and whatever depths her heart had in it that Mrs. Brand never dreamt of, in all common things she was gently and invariably obedient. After the early days were past, and this ignorance that had so much oppressed Mrs. Brand began to lose some of its pristine density, the child even came by degrees to win something from her teacher that at least approached in its nature to affection. She was too stern a woman, and held too deeply to the faith that between mistress and pupil, as between superior and inferior, there lay a natural gulf that nothing could bridge over, ever to admit her to an equality or even to terms of familiarity with herself; but still in a certain way, and to a certain degree, she let her heart open to her, and gave her a lodging in it.

The girl's quiet ways approved themselves to her ; her gentleness, her industry, her calmness, even her outward colourlessness were pleasant to her. As she grew up, the hard, strict woman looked with a silent, half unacknowledged complacency upon her, and thought of her with a sort of pride as of something she had moulded into shape. Obe dience to her rules had made this creature ; she was her product : so much raw material had been given her, and she had fashioned it into — this. So she thought with a quiet, grim, half pride in the result of her work. Nor was it Elizabeth's fault if she formed the idea she did of her, and saw no deeper into her than to believe that her whole character stood declared in these easy, outward signs which anv one who ran could read. Obedient, industrious, modest, quiet; yes, she was all this in truth ; but she was all this upon the surface, and if Mrs. Brand's eyes could read no deeper than the surface, that, indeed, might have been no fault of Mrs. Brand's, but it was at least no fault either of Elizabeth's. Did the girl even so much as know that the impression of herself which she made upon her teacher was an impression so one-sided as to be really false ?

For a long time she certainly did not know it. YNQiat she concealed of herself she con cealed unconsciously, not deliberately sup posing that it was worth concealing, nor thinking that she was misunderstood, but simply shrinking into herself in some di rections involuntarily, with a blind but sure instinct. For, happily, she was saved from the misery of being given to much self introspection; and her nature was in most respects a very simple nature, that did not know what it was capable of, nor had any other with which to compare itself, nor knew what its silent imaginings were worth. And, indeed, in this life that she led at Mrs. Brand's there was no room for the display of half her character, for it was a formal life, narrow, severe, monotonous, emo tionless, governed by a strict regularity that admitted voluntarily no break or change, shut up within itself, as that melancholy little wood before their windows stood shut in by its walls and gates.

Upon the child, who, though herself gentle and quiet, had yet in her early years been so little accustomed to regu larity and monotony and dull sobriety in her surroundings, the orderliness, the re straint, the severe respectability of such an existence had been hard to bear at first. She had submitted to it all without even a momentary dream of resistance, but yet it had seemed unutterably strange and dreary and lonely to her in the midst of her acqui escence. Little Joe was gone now, — Joe, whose faults her tenderness had all forgiven, and her heart was aching and bleeding for the loss of the little lad who had been friend, companion, charge, playfellow, all in one. She was very passive on that first evening when they took her into Mrs. Brand's parlour, and Mrs. Brand rose up from her chair, and greeted her with the cold, loose touch of her bony hand; but if her teacher's eyes could have interpreted the wistful eyes that looked up to her from the child's face she would have read a desolate and passionate questioning in, them that might have revealed something to her of the nature that she never learnt either then or since.

For she did not read the plaintive eyes : she wore spectacles and her sight was not good ; nor was it any part of her system to meddle with the dumb meanings either in hearts or faces. She had a plan of education, but her plan did not include the paying of attention to these immaterial things. So Elizabeth was given her supper that first night, and sent to bed, — where, safe in the darkness, she cried herself to sleep. A docile pupil. Patiently and quietly she began next day to do all that she was told. It was the month of September, and wet and blustering; weather. The wind went sig'hing sadly through the wood, the rain beat on their windows, and, except for wind and rain, there was a dead silence in the place. Eliza beth sat propped up before her desk, and wrote her blotted copy, and conned her tasks, and rumpled her smoothed hair, as in her earnest endeavours to take in the meaning of the unaccustomed words she grasped and rubbed her head between her hands.

This learning was hard work at first, — harder to the lonely sad little child who had so little heart yet to give to it than Mrs. Brand ever knew. Mrs. Brand only shook her head gravely over the atrociously-written copy when she came to look at it, and surveyed WITHOUT KITn OR KIN. the disordered locks with eyes that betokened mingled horror and amazement. That roughened head gained Elizabeth her first lecture, — a lecture well deserved, no doubt, curt, trenchant, well to the point ; yet, if, instead of administering it, Mrs. Brand could have laughed at the sight presented to her, and, leading her to a looking glass, could have made the child laugh too — feeling half ashamed also at the same time — -at her unkempt appearance, she might, perhaps, have accomplished her object as successfully as she wished, and have distressed Elizabeth a little less.

But Mrs. Brand was not the sort of weak-minded woman who mingled amusement with instruction. Instruction in her estimation was a pill, whether sweet or bitter, to be swallowed pure. So Elizabeth had her lecture, and flushed and hung her head over it ; and, for the future, I must do Mrs. Brand's system the justice to allow, kept her hands from making a ploughed field of her chevelure. Very quietly and patiently she fell into the dull routine of her new life, setting herself with what earnestness was in her power to the unaccustomed tasks. There was some thing' of the touchingsubmission of a dumb animal in her ; she was so passive, and yet so pathetic in her wistful, sad, unquestioning obedience. Far removed from all this strange new life there was still for ever in her heart the memory of the old life that had ceased to be ; of the days when she and Joe had wan dered homeless, and she had worked, and hoped, and suffered so.

It was all ended now ; yet, in the monotony of these pre sent days, how she lived over those again, and dreamt of the things that might have been and had not been — of the things that might have been, if only so little had been changed ! Did Joe know where she was now ? she used to wonder, lying awake often in the long nights ; and sometimes, sobbing passionately, she would stretch out her arms to him, as if by calling to him, and trying to reach him so, VOL. II. • c OB KIN. she could touch him in the dark. Feeble little Joe, whose deserts had been so small, whose gain in one poor heart so great ! She never thought of him as other people did, nor knew, even when she grew into a woman, of how little worth the vanished life had been. Some thing1 higher than his own worth had shrined him in her memory.

He lived there, made beautiful by the love she gave him. " He was so weak, — that was why I had to do so much for him," she said to some one once, when he had been dead for nearly twenty years. " He could not bear the rough things that I could bear. He was more finely made than I was in every way ; but I did not un derstand that then. I wish I had understood it better : perhaps I might have saved him if I had." " I think, from all I have heard, you went pretty far in trying to save him," the person quietly answered to whom she said this. " What more you could have done I do not know, unless you had starved yourself entirely ; and, you see, we, who never knew the little fellow, can hardly be expected to regret that you did not do that. We could not spare our Elizabeth." And then she did not answer this, for the speaker's last words had made the happy colour come into her face.

As the first days passed into months, and the months slowly lengthened into years, she grew into a tall, slim girl, not pretty — she was never pretty — yet pleasant to look at, with a certain grace about her. A quiet girl, yet ready and observant. You did her injustice if, in looking at her first, you thought she was not quick. She had a very gentle manner ; she was diffident of herself to a fault; but set her a thing to do, rely upon her, leave her unaided in a strait, and instantly and instinctively she proved her capacity ; she showed herself able, clear-sighted, practical. Behind a certain outward apparent backwardness, which was in reality not backwardness but timidity, there c was, indeed, always in her a reserve of energy and passion and power. Very faintly and dimly, as the years passed on, Mrs. Brand came at moments to perceive this; but she never perceived it otherwise than dimly, nor tried nor desired to prove it.

For she had striven so hard to make of Elizabeth a model of well balanced and measured propriety — all virtues present in her in their due degree, and in certain rigidly-weighed quantities, yet none predominating over, or over-topping the rest — that to have found out of a surety that beneath the surface which she had so care fully rounded, with so much pains smoothing the angles away, there dwelt an inner fire that might at any moment break its bounds, and mar her even work, was no discovery that she desired to make. If such a fire existed she had no wish except to quench it. Har mony, propriety, refinement, efficiency — these things she advocated and sedulously incul cated; but passion and enthusiasm were in her sight inventions of the evil one, terms that her mind associated only with the name of licence, that her whole strait-laced soul re jected with horror, as things unlady-like and unfeminine.

" Do all that you have to do quietly and gently," was what she always said to Elizabeth; and so Elizabeth came to do things very quietly and gently indeed, and, to outer appearance, was altogether drilled into a beautiful har mony. To some extent, of course, that harmony was artificial, but yet to be quiet was a lesson that the girl learnt easily ; that, indeed, she scarcely required to learn at all, quietness coming to her very naturally. She was too much of a dreamer to be any thing but silent. Besides, she had no companions nor playfellows. In the house, except Mrs. Brand, there was no other living creature save one servant— an ancient maiden, who had seen many years and many sorrows, and bore a face as sour as an unripe apple. She used to treat the child with a sort of grim kindness, but it was kindness of a very taciturn sort.

From the world outside the house she was almost wholly separated. Sometimes a rare visitor would come, and a hum of talk would stir the dingy parlour for an hour; but, except for this, no creature broke upon their solitude, no change came in the long monotony of their days. She grew up with out companions or friends ; quiet of necessity; doing her tasks, learning her lessons, dreaming her dreams. She learnt obediently, as she was bidden to learn, and formally, — both touching the things of this world and the next. She was given instruction in religious doctrines, she read her Bible, said her cate chism, went to church on Sundays. What else she knew about religion I think she had to find out for herself, without assistance — dimly, uncertainly, groping in a semi-darkness. Sitting dreaming by the fire-light on those winter Sunday evenings when, the pious duties of the day being ended, a little pious idleness was allowed — sitting dream ing by fire-light in the winter, in twilight OE KIN. when the days were long, vague spiritual intuitions used to come to the girl some times — dim yearnings after something that she seemed to know nearto her,yet which she could not grasp.

Her instinctive love of mystery always gave the unseen and infinite a pro found attraction for her ; things that were hidden from her — things that lay behind the veil, — the unearthly and immaterial — upon all these her keen imagination fastened with a deep sense of awe and fascination. But these unallowed thoughts were always silent thoughts; instinctively she never told them to Mrs. Brand, nor turned to her for either enlightenment or sympathy. No answer had ever come to Mrs. Breton's advertisements; no clue was ever found to the mystery which enveloped her early years. After a little while aU expectation of her being claimed passed away, and most of those who knew about her finding ceased to speculate as to her previous history. She herself alone, as she grew older, brooded over it, dreaming over the dim, blurred story, yearning for the unknown things that she should never find.

How many an hour did she not spend in vain, vague thoughts about the home that she had lost; — about the un known mother who might be mourning for her still ! No more fruitful source for endless speculation and invention could fall to the lot of an imaginative girl than the mysterious beginning of a life such as hers had been ; those three lost years — should she never be able to lift the veil that covered them P — should she never be able to pierce through the darkness that parted them from her ? Her present life, in its even monotony, seemed often enough chill and dreary to this girl with her passionate longings : some where, hidden from her — somewhere, thoug-h she might never find it, — was there not some other life than this waiting for her — waiting with eager welcome, if only she could reach to it ?

But the years passed on, and she never reached it. That lost life remained a thing to brood over, a thing to rouse endless hopes and yearnings, to give birth to a thousand dreams, but never on earth to be reached and realized. Instead of that life that might have been so sweet (might have been ! — yet possibly, too, might have had some other ingredients in it than those of sweetness), she had these calm, long days, with their dull routine, their quiet work, their colourless re pose, their slight and feeble flavour of affection. Monotonous, however, as it was, even this placid existence could boast of certain land marks by whose aid she could count after wards how the years had flowed on. These landmarks were the visits two or three times she paid to the Clock House. " You shall come here occasionally, that I may see what progress you make," Mrs. Breton had said to her when she bade her good-bye on first committing her to Mrs. Brand's care ; and every two or three years the promise had been fulfilled.

Elizabeth had gone to the Clock House, and spent a few shyly happy weeks there — weeks that were dearer to her than any one imagined at the time, as the timid child sat silent and apart, seeming as if she always shrank from notice, flushing if she was suddenly spoken to, stealing away from the companionship of others of her own age. " I am so sorry for that poor little sen sitive creature," Mabel used to say at the first ; "I am afraid she is really very miserable here." But once, when she said this to Elizabeth herself, the child's eyes hurriedly opened, the colour sprang to her face, and she made a broken, impetuous reply that at once and for ever closed Mabel's lips upon that point. " Miserable here I Oh, how could I be ? — with every thing so beautiful— with you to look at ! " This was what she answered, half inaudibly ; and Mabel, taken wholly by surprise, coloured a little, and then laughed, and laid her hand upon the child's shoulder.

OE KIN. " I am very glad if you are not dull ; but, you foolish little thing," she said, " you must not take it into your head that I am any thing worth looking at. Come out with me into the garden, and we'll pick roses toge ther, and admire them ; and that will be much better for you than thinking about me." And then th ey went hand in hand into the garden, and picked their roses ; but Eliza beth, in spite of Mabel's speech, held to her admiration; and presently the other, per ceiving that, came passively to acquiesce in it, and, perhaps, in time, came even to like it a little. For Mabel's own life, you know, had been marred and saddened by that early trouble of hers, and loveable as she was, her nature had begun to gain something of a thin, starved character, and she was often weary, and in want of interests to occupy her.

Her heart began, after a time, to open a little to the child who sat so often worshipping her with her silent eyes. " Do you know that Elizabeth has fallen in love with me, mamma ?" she said, half in jest, to Mrs. Breton once ; " that is why I put this green ribbon in my hair. It is a pretty ribbon, isn't it? I thought it would suit me, and that Elizabeth would like to see it. You know, mamma, I have loved to be admired ever since I was two years old, when I used to be proud of my red shoes, and the bows upon my shoulders." And then she laughed, but the laugh had a sort of sadness in it ; and she stood before the glass, arranging the pale ribbons in her golden hair, and thinking, perhaps, of something far away from either her own childhood or Elizabeth. She was little more than twenty at that time, and hope of what she longed for, though it had sunk low in her, was not yet gone.