Pen

Chapter I. Motherless

I CAN begin my story as country folk, in old times, used to begin their laborious letters : " I now take up my pen " ; the pen in this case, not being a finely crusted, old nib, stuck in a much nibbled holder, and held in inky country fingers, but a very tear-stained, sobbing, little Pen, in a large and rather ragged arm-chair, situated in a shabby little front parlour in Dalston. Penelope Brand is just motherless, only just, for half an hour, out in the cold world, without a mother's wing, and she and little Tre are clinging together, with arms round necks, and wet cheek pressed to wet cheek. v, Pen, 2 Tre will soon get over it ; she is only six, and has that blessed, but rather startling power of rapid recovery that is granted to children; even now, I think, her tears are more in sympathy with Ten than expressive of her own sorrow, and she is even conscious that it is tea time and that the kitten is playing with the reels in mother's work basket ; while as for Pen, who is fifteen, the grim presence of death in the house seems to have swept away all times and seasons and objects for doing anything, and power to move or speak or do anything but sit there with Tre, cuddled close to her sad, sore, little heart, and cry, and cry, and cry, and wish for mother, and listen to strange footsteps in the room above, where a gloomy, old woman in a black bonnet had ap peared mysteriously on the scene, and had insisted on Tre leaving that place by the bedside which had been hers by right for so long.

If it had been still mother lying there, no power on earth could have moved Pen ; but that still, silent, solemn form was not mother, hardly so much mother to Pen's mind as the worn, shabby, old dress hanging against the Motherless. 3 door, or the shawl that lay still on the sofa ; so she was persuaded to go away, and found her way, dazzled and shaking, down stairs, where the daylight seemed to have an unnatural glare, and all the old familiar things to look strange and impossible. Father was locked into the little room at the back of the house which he called his studio, and where his painting things lay about, not often disturbed from their picturesque confusion by the exertions of their master. There is no knowing how long Pen would have sat there, sunk in a sort of stupor of grief, if the sound of horses' feet had not penetrated even to her poor, dulled, little brain and brought her suddenly back to the consciousness of a very rough head and crumpled collar on her own part, and a ragged pinafore and smeared face on the part of Tre ; and she got up mechanically and made a weary, ineffectual little effort to improve matters, and to poke up the ashy fire and straighten the disordered furniture, which bore unmistakable signs of having been turned into a very satisfactory railway, while the attention of B Pen 4 elders was absorbed up stairs and Tre had it all her own way below.

There seemed no immediate reason why the even trotting of a pair of horses and the soft roll of carriage wheels should have roused Pen to the con sciousness of the general untidiness ; many other vehicles had passed since she first came down from mother's room, and she had taken no note of them ; the heavy prison van that the children called " Black Maria " had lumbered by and none of them had even cast a look or wondered what burden of sin or sorrow it was carrying off to justice ; one of the red Parcels Post carts had pulled up at the house opposite, and there had been a long discussion over a wrongly directed parcel, which at another time would have roused great interest, and convictions that the parcel was really intended for number 37, but was now unnoticed ; some big waggons loaded to a giddy height with chair frames had darkened the room; a milk cart had zig-zagged along the road, dis pensing small tin cans to its various customers ; half a dozen other carts of one sort or another had passed, Motherless. 5 all with a noise and a rattle that were wanting in the clean, even trot of this particular pair of horses and the light roll of the wheels that followed ; and yet these brought Pen hurriedly to her feet, trying with trembling hands to remedy rough hair and rumpled frocks and displaced furniture.

That carriage was not unknown in Purton Street ; for the last month it had frequently been seen there, almost as often lately as the doctor's shabby brougham, whose broken-kneed horse pulled up of its own accord at No. 2,7- But, before proceeding further, I had better explain how it was that this apparition of sleek, well-groomed horses and fashionably built brougham, every inch of whose glossy coats and shining panels and silver plated harness told of West End affluence, was to be seen in the sordid, shabby little street in Dalston, and I will take advantage of the few moments occupied by the coachman in drawing up his horses with that beautiful precision on exactly the right spot, an art so difficult to arrive at by amateur coachmen, who generally hit the fiuste milieu between the house Pen they aim at and the next to right or left, and either grate against the curb or steer so clear of it that they have to hail the servant who opens the door, with a quarter-deck shout from the middle of the road.

But the precision is not the only thing to wonder at and admire in Miss Percival's coachman ; we should also note the wooden expression of in difference and the apparent stiffness of neck which is to be observed in him as in all well-trained coachmen, not turning his head an inch either to the right or left to look at the surroundings, which might be Buckingham Palace or a pig-stye for all that he knows or cares, and likewise being appar ently unconscious or indifferent as to whether the occupant of the carriage, safely piloted through the wild hubbub and confusion of the City, gets out or remains in, that being no concern of his, but the business of the tall footman, in an unbelievably long drab coat, who gets down, touches his hat at the carriage door, and then gives as artistic a perform ance on the knocker of No. 37 as that very inferior instrument will permit, and then comes back with Motherless. 7 another touch of the hat to open the carriage door, and turn back the big lion -skin rug which has been protecting Miss Percival from the inclemency of the weather.

Miss Percival is aunt of Pen and Tre, Aunt Pen elope, though even now they were not sufficiently used to her velvets and furs and clear, cold eyes to venture to call her so, or hardly to believe that she could in any way be of the same order of creation as they were. She was sister too to " mother " — to the white, still mother lying up stairs in the little bedroom, with the calm content of death on her waxen lips. People used to say the two sisters were wonderfully alike, though Pen would deny it angrily, almost fiercely, with tears of indigna tion in her eyes ; though unprejudiced observers would have said it was a great compliment to the wan, weary woman, whatever it might have been when she and Penelope were girls together. Yes, girls together, sisters — only sisters too, with out mother or sister to share the love between Pen 8 them, and yet, till six weeks ago, they had not met for sixteen years.

No doubt the blame was entirely due to Mrs. Brand, and she received it from all right-minded people ; but, dear reader, if you and I are not quite right-minded in this respect, we may shelter our selves under the grim ægis of death — de mortuis nil nisi bonum — and love and pity her instead. There was but one opinion on the subject when Theresa Percival, not quite eighteen, ran away with her drawing master. She had just left school and was to be presented at the next drawing-room, and come out with all the pomp and ceremony which had attended Penelope's debut the year before ; her presentation dress had come home, and the girl had stood, decked out in the " soft sheen of satin and glimmer of pearls," light clouds of tulle and snowy feathers ; and the admiring beholders whispered that no lovelier debutante would kiss her Majesty's hand that season, and no one had noticed the strange, frightened look in the girl's face and the wistful quiver of her lips.

Motherless. 9 But, two days after that rehearsal, she was sought for in vain, and a note, in trembling characters, with more than one blot where a tear had fallen, told how her life's happiness was bound up with Louis Brand ; that she knew it was useless to ask her parents' consent, so she could only ask them to forgive and forget their wretched little daughter, Theresa. There was no doubt the Percivals bore the blow excellently. Society noticed some gray threads in Mrs. Percival's smooth hair that were not there before, and fancied that Colonel Percival stooped a little more than of old, and that Penelope carried her head higher, with a haughty look in her eyes, as if to defy remark on their wounded pride. The Percivals had always been such a proud family, their line went back through generation before generation, with honour unstained and untarnished, and their arms had been quartered with all the best and oldest in the kingdom.

And this miserable girl had brought disgrace on them, and for what ? An artist fellow with a black Pen 10 moustache and a velvet coat and a would-be Italian appearance, when any one who cared to ask knew that his father kept a shop in Bristol. But the Percivals behaved very well ; indeed Mrs. Percival's conduct may be described as heroic, for everything went on just as usual ; with one great exception, the whole briliant programme for the season was carried out to the last iota. Mrs. Percival even went to that very drawing room and presented a niece ; without an outward sign of the sick, wounded mother's heart under the moire" and diamonds, she went through the whole round of balls and dinners and fetes and operas. She never shirked a single engagement ; could any Spartan matron have done more ?

Only Theresa's name was never mentioned again ; when once that little, hastily-scrawled, tear-blotted note was crum pled up and thrown into the fire, no further refer ence was made to her ; her name never passed her mother's lips. No useless efforts were made to re trieve the false step, no bitter reproaches or cruel valedictory words were sent after the culprit ; only Motherless. 11 the curtain of silence was dropped between her and her family, and every belonging of hers that might have recalled her to their minds was swept out of sight, and for sixteen years her name was never mentioned. Did they ever relent ? No, I think not, till it was too late. You see, every one said they were in the right, and they firmly believed it them selves, and perhaps it was so ; and they could not understand that that was the very reason why they could more easily have relented, as it is so much easier for the injured to make the first advances than the injurer.

Perhaps if Theresa Brand had come begging forgiveness and help, it might have been different ; but then she was proud too ; and all the more because she was poor and struggling and not always very happy, and hungered and thirsted after a word or a look from her own people, she kept carefully and scrupulously away, avoiding the barest chance of the meeting, which might so easily have come about even in this great, full world. Once, I think, Mrs. Percival was not very far from relenting, when, Pen 12 one Christmas, a letter arrived with the London post mark and directed . in a hand all the more familiar because it had not been seen for four years — which, I am afraid, sounds Irish, but is true all the same. Inside there was only a curl of the softest, most golden hair, and, on the paper containing it, were the words, " For grandmama from little Pen."

She stood a long time looking at that golden curl, and perhaps her eyes were not quite clear enough to see how soft and bright it was, for there was a troublesome moisture that dimmed them more than once that Christmas morning, the morn ing of all others when mothers' hearts must needs-be soft. But not even that would unlock those closed lips from their four years' silence, and when at last a few years later, those poor lips were trying to frame the daughter's name, the power had been taken away. She was struck with paralysis one morning and died in the evening without recovering power of speech, though the nurse who was with her told how, through that long day, the poor lips tried and tried to form some word, and the eyes Motherless. 13 looked with a terrible appeal into the faces of those by the bed-side, who could not understand what she meant.

Penelope was away in Scotland, and, though she was telegraphed for, arrived too late to see her mother alive ; and as for Colonel Percival he was so entirely unmanned by this sudden blow, that he had to be kept entirely out of the sick-room, where his irrepressible, hysterical grief distressed the patient, even through the numbness of mind and body that was deepening every hour. The arrangements for the funeral all fell upon Penelope, as her father was sunk into a sort of stupor of grief; but if the thought of her sister crossed her mind then, she did not know where to write to her, and perhaps she took it for granted that she would see the notice in the morning papers and would write or come. But the Times and Morning Post were not much in the way of Mrs. Brand, and it was not till nearly three months after, that a lady in mourning arrived at Highfield station and walked up to the little, old church, and found her way to the corner where Pen 14 generation after generation of Percivals rest under the great, ugly, flat tombs.

Near one of these, where the fresh lettering showed that Mary, wife of Philip Percival, had departed this life August ioth, that same year, the stranger sat in the damp November grass for nearly an hour, and, when she went, left a wreath of such costly beauty that many of the Highfield people came to look and wonder, and the Hall gardener himself (and who knew better ? ) wagered that it had cost a pretty penny. No one recognized her, and, if it had not been for that wreath, the few who noticed her would have thought that she was not of much account, for her dress was shabby and she did not take a fly from the station. And after that the time passed on again, and Penelope was mistress at Highfield Hall and her father's right hand ; for the Colonel was never the same man after his wife's death, feeble in body and a little bit childish in mind, needing all the support that his stately, dignified, self-contained daughter was so capable of giving.

And so six- Motherless. 15 teen years passed away and the sisters never met. Think of it, dear reader, sixteen years out of this short life, with all the love and tenderness and comfort they might have given and received ; and the loss in not having given the love is more grievous really than not receiving it, more irre trievable, more disastrous. And when the meeting and reconciliation came it was too late. It was quite by chance — if there is such a thing as chance — that Penelope Percival heard of her sister's illness. It was at one of the winter exhibitions of pictures, when she was spending a few days in London, that her eye was caught by a name among the exhibitors which arrested her attention, Evening in North Devon by Louis Brand. It was quite a small picture and pretty, without any particular talent in it, and the lady who was with Miss Percival, and who was a connoisseur in art and quite a recent acquaintance of Penelope's, wondered at the fixed attention with which she regarded the picture.

" Louis Brand ? " she said. " Ah ! it was about him Pen, that I heard such a sad story the other day : the usual thing, a wife in the last stage of consumption and a large family nearly starving. — Ah ! look at this, No. 340, A Gourma7id. Isn't it fine? the expression of that sweep's face and the dog looking over his shoulder at the mutton pie ! Capital ! capital ! " But that afternoon Miss Percival's carriage first electrified the humble dwellers in Purton Street, Dalston, and the knocker at No. 37 was roused out of its usual indolent habit of giving one bang to announce the milk or the tax collectors, and made its first essay at a West End fantasia. But, even if Mrs. Brand had not been so ill, that reconciliation came too late. But perhaps you may say it is never too late to be reconciled, and in one sense you are right ; but it is very soon too late to get any happiness or pleasure out of a reconciliation.

Fancy what that meeting might have been six days or six weeks or even six months after their parting ; think how the two girls would have clung together and kissed and clung again, Motherless. 17 with such a store of sympathy and tender reproach and loving explanation. Even after six years it might have been just possible, but after sixteen years what could you expect when every day had been building up between them, little by little, a wall of separate interests, different experiences, loves and hates, in which the other could have no share, sufferings and pleasures which the other would hardly comprehend, much less sympathize with ? And, added to this, Mrs. Brand was past caring. She had longed with a sickening craving at times to look into her mother's face, to show her bonny little Pen to her grandfather, to hold her sister's hand and feel her kisses on her cheek, but that was long ago, and now she turned away from that sister's kiss, which seemed cold and formal and lifeless, and from the comforts with which Miss Percival would gladly have sur rounded her, to lay her tired head on her husband's shoulder, with its threadbare velvet coat ; for, after all, though he might have been careless and improvident and inconsiderate, he had loved her, C Pen, and his love had been all her happiness during those sixteen years, nearly half her lifetime ; and it was Pen's hand she felt for when sight and sense were failing, and to her, child as she was, that she committed the little sister Tre.

" Take care of her, dear," she whis pered ; and when Penelope would have taken the little, rosy, sleeping child from the bed where she lay by her dying mother's side, she shook her head, with a smile that cut like a sword to that sister's heart. " Don't trouble, dear," she said. " I like to have her here, and when Pen will take care of her."

Chapter II. Aunt Penelope

It has taken so long to explain the presence of Miss Percival's carriage in Purton Street, that if, in the meantime, the door had not been opened and Miss Percival admitted, I think that even the coachman, with his stiff neck and regula tion manner, would have turned his head to see the reason. But Eliza, the maid-of-all-work, with the natural desire of her class to be the first to tell bad news, which seems to have been a character istic of human nature as long ago as the time of David, when Ahimahaz longed to carry the news of Absalom's death, flew to open the door, before the man's hand was off the knocker, and she had the corner of her dirty apron to her eyes, and, on C Pen her lips, the usual hackneyed words by which we try to soften, in our vulgar way, the grim sim plicity of death. There had been nothing in the outside aspect to prepare Miss Percival ; the blinds were not pulled down, except in the upper room, where they were generally so ; and the day before Mrs. Brand had seemed a little better — the last flickering up of the strength that often precedes the final extinguishing.

But 'Liza did not get any of the expected effects, which would have added so much to the interest of the story, when she described the scene after wards ; Miss Percival did not "swound away;" she did not throw up her hands and give a cry " as would have cut you to the heart to hear ; " she did not turn " as white as a sheet " or " tremble like a leaf" but she just swept past the girl in the narrow passage and went into the sitting-room, even drawing away her skirts from contact with the coal-scuttle, which 'Liza had upset in her haste to answer the door. Her coming had startled the children's tears away, and, I am afraid, this was not the first time she had seen Tre with a dirty face, and Pen had no traditions in her young life of the proper authorized behaviour in times of affliction, only an inborn sense of courtesy, and a remembrance of mother's gracious reception of visitors, however untimely ; so she came forward with a little, difficult smile, to extricate for her aunt's use a chair that had been enacting the part of tender in the train, and she made some little mechanical remark about the weather being bad and hoping that her aunt's cold was better.

" But children have no hearts," Miss Percival thought as she sat down by the table, showing by this judgment that she was as ignorant of human nature in one way as 'Liza was in another, the one by expecting stereotyped expressions of grief in children, the other by looking for vulgar and violent manifestations of sorrow in a lady. To be sure she had very little experience of children, except the village school children at Highfield, who bobbed terrified, little courtesies to her, regarding her as Pen 22 a condensed form of the " betters," to whom they were to order themselves lowly and reverently. She also thought she knew a good deal of the mem bers of the Girls' Friendly Society, to whom she gave most excellent advice, which perhaps might have been of more use if she had known anything really of the muddling, young lives with their small, insignificant troubles and foolish pleasures, and could have sympathized in the smallest degree with these stupid, little drudges whom she was desirous of helping to better things.

She had not felt attracted to these children of her sister's, they could not exactly be treated as friendly girls or national school children, and she had made up her mind long ago as to what Louis Brand's children were likely to be, and all through her life Miss Percival's conclusions had been right ; and no one, herself least of all, had ever doubted the O. E. D. that followed her deductions, or, at any rate, had ever convinced her that she was in the wrong ; so that not even Pen's delicate, little face and gentle voice, or Tre's sweet, childish grace could quite convince her that they were not the undcr-bred, common, little creatures she had imagined. Louis Brand's children were not likely to have deep feelings, and, after the first rather mechanical kiss on the cheeks, where, if she had noticed it, she might have found the tears were scarcely dry, she sat down by the table, involuntarily straightening the table-cloth and stroking out the creases in a way that conveyed a keen reproach to Pen for its untidyness, though indeed Miss Percival was quite unconscious of her act or of the shabby, disordered room or of Pen's anxious, little face or of Tre, with a firm hold on her sister's protecting frock, gazing at her with big eyes full of awe and reverence.

Her thoughts had gone back to old days at High field, when she and her sister were all in all to one another ; to happy, girlish, light-hearted days, before life had settled down into the dignified monotony it had gradually assumed. Those days did not seem so far off now as they had done when her sister was living, and when every word and look reminded Pen, 24 her of the gulf those sixteen years had made be tween them. The Theresa who was just dead was the girl-sister, the play-fellow, the confidante who had shared everything with her, and been in such perfect sympathy that she had seemed a second self; and not the weary, worn-out woman, who had seen so much trouble and poverty and loneliness, and who had a drawing master artist husband, and rough, troublesome children. Presently she got up and went up stairs, up the narrow, steep staircase.

She gave a little, irritable shudder as she passed a door from which the sound of men's voices and the smell of tobacco smoke proceeded. It would have been odious to her to come across Louis Brand making a pretence of grief over his dead wife ; but at any rate he might have had the decency to keep up appearances, and not to be smoking, and, probably, drinking with some of his boon companions, within an hour or two of his wife's death. She hastened on to the bedroom, where the disorder of a sick room had given place to the chill tidiness of death. " It is not mother," little Pen had said, as they led her away from the room ; but Miss Percival gave a low cry of glad recognition — " Theresa ! " — as she came to the bedside ; for the still, white face had regained so much of the youth that it had lost in life, that it might almost have been the young sister who had passed out of Penelope's life sixteen years ago.

Those ten minutes by her sister's side made nearly as great a difference in the living as death had done in the dead face ; for though years had not dealt harshly with Penelope Percival, and though many of her friends maintained that she was handsomer now than she had been at eighteen, she had seemed as changed to the eyes of her sister as Theresa had done to her, and if, as some people love to think, the souls of the departed linger yet a little beside their mortal habitations, perhaps Theresa Brand may have gazed into her sister's altered face, and recognized the Penelope Pen of old, happy days. But for me, dear reader, I would rather think of glad souls rising up quickly and going as Mary did, when they said, " The Master is come, and calleth for thee." I would rather think that the rest of the souls of the righteous, which are in the hand of the Lord, is not disturbed by the clamour of mourning and bitter lamenta tion, any more than it can be disquieted by the lack of them, for " there shall no torment touch them."

But whether or no the soul of one sister could see the other's face, certainly the sight of the dead face spoke to Penelope's heart, and inspired a gentler feeling for the children below, who seemed now more the dead sister's children, with the blood of the Percivals running in their veins, and so with possibilities about them, than the children of Louis Brand, of whom, of course, nothing could be expected ; and, as she stooped to kiss the cold forehead, she whispered, " They shall be my children, Theresa. I will be a mother to them." The feeling was very warm in her heart just then, so warm that it was not to be chilled by passing that door, from which came renewed puffs of tobacco smoke and voices which seemed to rise above the natural, subdued tones of sorrow. It was certainly unfortunate that 'Liza's pity for the children should have taken the form of shrimps for tea, and those of a rather strongly flavoured sort ; and also that shrimps being a very unusual luxury with Tre, and tea-time having, that day, been delayed to the extremest limits of human endurance, she was discovered, when Miss Percival opened the door, entirely engrossed in stripping off rather limp brown shells, and consuming very thick bread and butter, and rapidly becoming indued with stickiness and shrimpiness in all sorts . of unexpected places, such as her elbows and the back of her neck.