Miriam May : a romance of real life

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Chapter I. The Woekhouse Dooe

It certainly was the night-bell that rang.

Little things not unfrequently contribute to significant conclusions, and although the music of a doctor's bell can hardly call for any very special chronicles, in this instance it may well evidence a resisting power on the part of a member of the College of Surgeons, who was not the less at all points a man, because he was an accoucheur at all seasons.

Harvey Mountaigne neither swore nor went on sleeping when he heard that bell.

It is not all of us who could affirm that, under the circumstances, we should have done neither. The more demonstrative amongst us would very well accomplish both. And it must be a harsh judgment which could say that Harvey Mountaigne, in his bed there, lay wholly unprovoked. Over night he had made many good resolutions ; and these good resolutions had been in the main confirmed by his wife. He had had a hard week's work, and a harder day's labour, and he struggled

MIRIAM MAY.

to no very great purpose with a very bad cold. Mrs. Mountaigne thought the town might better yield up her husband for the night, than part with its doctor — as was possible — >at once and for ever. So Harvey Mountaigne took his own counsel, and prescribed for himself, and very clearly defined in that diagnosis was his wife's authority to soak his feet, get into a perspiration, and go to bed.

Thither he had gone at half-past nine, and within the hour there had he been joined by Mrs. Mountaigne, who had builded her hopes high on the power of mustard and water, and a long night's rest for her husband. Indeed, there was no probability of his being disturbed. The town just then was unusually healthy, and his earliest lady patient was calculated at Wednesday week. He was in his first sleep, with a moist skin ; that was all good Mrs. Mountaigne had hoped for, when the bell rang, and announced that the calculations of hypothesis are at all times liable to various and unaccountable influences.

It was but to little purpose that that excellent lady had encased his swathing limbs in flannel. Harvey Mountaigne in the face of a large and increasing practice, forgot that by the desire of his wife he should be an invalid for that particular night, and sneezing afresh as he crossed the room, he approached the window, and with considerable caution drew aside the curtains. Harvey Mountaigne' s night-bell did not alone ring when Harvey Mountaigne was in request, as a licensed practitioner. The lads of Glastonbury and its neighbourhood were, for the most part, like those other lads who live in all other neighbourhoods. On more than one occasion Mr. Mountaigne' s nights had been quite unnecessarily disturbed. His bell had been rung as though he were in instant request, whilst there was no one in sight when Mr. Mountaigne in his dressing-gown had appeared to answer it. The doctor of Glastonbury was not behindhand in appreciating all local humour, but this was a pointless liberty to take with a man who was a licentiate in medicine, and had a pathological reputation that was not by any means local.

Twice, and I believe thrice, did the doctor's bell ring for nought. Mr. Mountaigne was in all respects a man of resources, and if there was any joke in pulling his wires, he determined to cultivate the acquaintance of the joker. One evening, some three weeks before the night that we are now concerned with, the doctor of Glastonbury had with infinite gusto prepared an infamous compound of salts and senna, that could hardly have been without result upon the liver of the most confirmed dyspeptic. So much of his revenge completed, Harvey Mountaigne waited for the enemy behind a large tree that stood before his house.

It was the week after Christmas, and the seasons then contributed frost and snow, instead of the almost melon-ripening mildness of our more modern winters. It was midnight, and the doctor, who was dozing while he watched,, fancied that he heard a step ; and about what he fancied there soon was no mistake.

Harvey Mountaigne, withal a man who struck b 2 hard when he did strike, had been so long in expectancy in the cold, that he could look on anything with calmness. It was not long before the senna decoction was unwittingly challenged.

A young man had come in sight, and seized the night-bell with something of that familiarity which seemed to indicate that he knew its whereabouts, and having rung the bell, walked on to Glastonbury as though he had rung no bell at all. Harvey Mountaigne stood in his path, and the recognition was mutual. The venue of the next act was the surgery, where the young man, who now saw nothing in the joke, was on his back between the doctor's knees.

The elixir, distilled with all regard to its being remembered, was held aloft, as one alternative in the hands of the avenging doctor.

When the potion had all but reached the lips of the joker, who only cared for his realization of a practical joke, there was an aggressive movement from below the doctor's knees, that well-nigh spilled the senna.

" It's not gentlemanly of you to do that," said Mr. Mountaigne with mock seriousness, to the grocer's assistant — for it was he — with a twinkle in his eye, which showed that he was now having his innings.

"Let me go ! " roared the young man, who had now smelt what was offered in undoubted quality, in at least an imperial pint, and struggling to get clear of the purgative, without much result.

"You will swallow this, or I shall call in a policeman," said the doctor, with much inward satisfaction, for he knew in which form his ulti-

MIRIAM MAY. b

matum would be most agreeable. And tbe young man drank to the dregs what warred with his stomach, and called at the dispensary the next day to beg a bit of ginger — and that was the beginning and the end in Glastonbury of loose lads ringing the doctor's night-bell.

It was under circumstances such as these, circumstances which certainly warranted considerable caution, that Mr. Mountaigne drew aside the curtains, and looked out into the dark night.

Beneath the window there stood a servant in livery, holding two horses, and it was at once evident to the doctor that the message was from none other than his friends at Glastonbury Grange.

A few words soon put him in possession of all the facts.

Mrs. Trevor had been seized with symptoms that no loving 01 sagacious husband could treat with indifference.

Those were not the days of " telegrams;" most things came by arrangement, or it was not surprising that they came not at all.

Mr. Mountaigne, as he hurriedly drew on his clothes, was reminded that this was but the 23rd of January, and that Mrs. Trevor had at the earliest a place in his journals for the 5th proximo.

It was not because the Trevors of Glastonbury Grange were great people in those parts, that Harvey Mountaigne put aside all personal considerations and prepared for a ride of five miles, with his every pore provoking cold.

He knew that Mrs. Trevor had been taken in her great sorrow suddenly ; and although he looked very properly upon all those nurses "who infest the lying-in room as the " devil's own sisters," he had reason to know that the wife of Charles Trevor felt comfort in her nurse, and that nurse was miles away.

In the face of a snow-storm, and a frost that has no counterpart in these days, Harvey Mountaigne was soon in the saddle on his way to Glastonbury Grange.

I don't know any man that I would sooner ask to see my wife through her' troubles than the good doctor of Glastonbury. I have always believed the friendship of Harvey Mountaigne to be one of my most inestimable possessions. Although he neither wore a frill, nor was at all given to saying those soft nothings which to most women come kindly, and which but few absolutely hate, no more genial presence ever gave brightness to those who were sometimes like to despair, or lent a kindlier glow to a sick-room. Harvey Mountaigne is not introduced here inasmuch as on that particular night he was taken from his bed to Glastonbury Grange, indispensable because a woman's hour was come, and that over, to be sent back forgotten to his drugs.

I must maintain that I have produced him at a moment when he becomes as it were the centre of whatever action this history may lay claim to, and of whatever interest it may in any way give birth to.

I was as yet unborn when the night-bell rang on that 23rd of January, but it was my coming that took Harvey Mountaigne from his bed that night. As I shall have much to say upon being very generally misunderstood, the explanation of what I have had to suffer may perhaps be found in the fact, which all Glastonbury can attest, that whilst I was arranged for on the 5th of February, I was born before my time.

Had it been a summons from the pauper mother of the idiot girl, who was so long in dying, in that hovel to the left of the doctor's house, and who was much given to break blood-vessels, that threatened dissolution — when there was so little blood to escape, and profit by the opportunity — long before the last lingering change was felt to be at hand, Harvey Mountaigne would have gone just as he went to the Trevors when I was born; or as he would go to the great blaspheming man, who was once on " the turf," and who was just then so nearly under it, cursing and dying in the county town.

When the cry came, no matter from whom, Harvey Mountaigne heard it. He had been educated where there was no respect of persons, and I must really some day find out where that was.

It would be neither the truth, nor would it be justice to imagine that under these circumstances which — if not special, as I must hold them to be — were of no ordinary import, Harvey Mountaigne tarried by the way. The roads were very slippery, and like much that looks smooth in this world of ours, very treacherous, and the cold such as could hardly profit his own health much.

But the doctor was not lightly esteemed at Glastonbury Grange, and he felt towards the family all the warmth that was so reciprocated.

Premising that we shall not have to wait long for his coming, I must ask those who will follow me to anticipate his visit ; and, as the patient can be yet under no orders not to see us, enter with me into my mother's room.

I feel naturally anxious that my arrival — which was then so imminent — shall not be one without some interest. I shall have much to say to those who may continue this narrative upon the Trevors of Glastonbury, and on Glastonbury Grange ; but as I see Mrs. Trevor is just now disinclined to make the introduction, I must crave leave to make public the circumstances under which — whilst being yet unborn — I set aside the grave arrangements which I feel I was bound to respect.

" My angel," said Mr. Trevor to my mother, as they sat at breakfast on the morning of the 23rd, " do you feel quite sure that you are equal to dine at the McGrabs to-night."

My mother, whose reply rested upon certain contingencies that might well arise between that and the 5th proximo, was quite sure she could " go through it." My father, who was very much her senior, and had married her entirely from a love that no one else had ever shared, looked into her beautiful and anxious face, and said from his very soul " Bless you ! " with that ineffable tenderness which spoke at my birth through a chain of time, and stood on his lips when he was parted from me in that long February frost now years ago. I do not know when my mother reckoned so much on her powers of patient endurance, that there was any very special significance in her determination to "go through" the ordeal of what in its seeming was in every way a " friendly dinner."

I have nothing beyond this to offer in explanation.

Mr. McGrab, who was a very distant relation of my father's family, had long felt, not only generally, that it was not good for man to be alone, but that there was an isolation even in a career so unexceptionably irreproachable as his. His bowels yearned after a manner that was not to his comfort towards a being whose charms had often been canvassed but scarcely ever criticised. This lady, in her unselfishness, had been even as a daughter to my father ever since his widowhood ; but it is possible that, beside her paramount feelings of disinterestedness and devotion, she, at certain seasons of temptation, felt that the very evident interest my father took in her was but reasonably likely to leave substantial evidences behind.

There is something strikingly coherent in the little attentions of such quasi young persons to an old one, when their sole and becoming occupation leads to their becoming the sole heir. Nor were these speculations that had not, at times, entered into the head of Arabella Chilly. But I should not say that my father had at all guile sufficient for the occasion. He only knew that Miss Chilly was always at his side ; that she was a monstrous fine woman ; that she brought him much comfort ; that her bust was in much request by every sculptor, and that she did not quarrel with his cook. Beyond this my father believed that she had the mind and the heart to administer aright the fortune he had it in his heart to leave her.

When my father, without any consultation with Miss Chilly — a freedom which she poutingly resented by tearfully declaring that she felt " quite hurt " — announced to that young lady that her administration of affairs was likely to have an end, it is not probable that the prevailing feeling in the breast of Miss Chilly towards my father's selection was one of undivided love. It would be indeed unjust to Miss Chilly were it not said, without reserve, that upon the occasion she felt in every way a very woman. But whilst not the heartiest of her affections were devoted to the interloper, she reasoned much within herself whether she had done wisely and well in refusing the very honourable offers of Mr. McGrab ; until, in truth, that gentleman was well-nigh wearied with repeating the question. She was quite prepared to be critical towards Mrs. Trevor, but was she yet quite prepared to be conciliatory towards Mr. McGrab ?

Whether that which followed assisted her materially in the solution of the difficulty — for it never once entered into her head to doubt that Mr, McGrab would ask the one question that indeed he asked every day — I am not prepared to say ; but under the acacia- tree, where they had so often met, Mr. McGrab, with an interrogatory on his lips that he knew by heart, was waiting for his idol.

Much of that lady's character was apt to develop itself in a sort of coyness of maturer years ; and that evening was Mr. McGrab led on by an unusual attitude on her part, to ask again a question that had been so often answered one way. So she waited for him in the full heat of his coming around the acacia-tree, and kissed her hand in a manner that made him perfectly giddy. He was soon doing all he knew ; but, truth to say, she, with much tact, kept the tree between her and the exhausted figure. Mr. McGrab, in his warmth, waited until, by a masterly double on his part, he had brought Miss Chilly to terms.

Now, Miss Chilly — who was in no way under the law of minors, and whose heart, in the main, was set on marriage — gave Mr. McGrab to understand that, in short, he was received in mercy to his loneliness.

I believe I shall have summed up this part of my history, when I say that the lady who was to have received a fortune that would have been much coveted, was left an annuity that was not contemptible.

But — I am unwillingly reminded that I am writing history ; would that I could turn aside to fiction when my evidence is not agreeable — the second wife of Charles Trevor was not welcomed as she might have been by Arabella McGrab had not the first wife of Mr. McGrab been a woman.

Now, Mrs. Trevor made allowances. Not those allowances which, amongst women, are well known to mean the gratification of feeling " very superior." But she felt that Mrs. McGrab, who had been all but lost to Mr. McGraVs wooing, must be very gently won. After a while, very satisfactory was the intimacy which grew up. Mrs. McGrab was friendly just so far as that she did not hate aloud, and was confidential to the extent of confiding nothing that was confidential; still the families behaved as many families do that understand one another.

When Mrs. Trevor's first boy was born, Mrs. McGrab could not be said to have been herself for many weeks, mainly on account of the sex of the child. Had the little one been a girl, much of that which had gone from her might have yet in part returned. But my poor mother, who could see none of these things — things, too, which were very plain — had left nothing undone to remove the gathering violence of Mrs. McGrab's indignation, and the first invitation to dinner was accepted, as has been seen, at a moment when there was even danger in the sacrifice.

My mother was taken ill before the great procession of courses was half-exhausted. It was "very, very kind of her to have come," said Mrs. McGrab, in a tone that was half-music, half not — who was in a distressing perspiration over the chances of a boy or a girl; and who was powerfully agitated at the thought whether or not another remove was to separate her from that great and goodly sum which stood in her patron's name in the Consolidated Bank Annuities. Mrs. Trevor assured her, as the carriage was announced, that she would be none the worse for what she had gone through. This reiterated reference to what she had undergone, suggesting, perhaps, whether it bore literally or not on Mrs. McGrab's very liberal entertainment.

Mrs. McGrab, undoubtedly, felt as a displaced woman would feel when she heard of the Trevors'

MI11IAM MAY. 13

carriage — that carriage which she had so gorgeously decorated after her own fancy, with a very direct view to the contingencies of the future. Nor was her irritation at all abated at the recollection of Mr. McGrab's unfeelinglyexpressed inability that very morning to go to the expense of a wheelbarrow for his villa garden.

My mother did well ; and my father, who had heard the cry — which once heard is never forgotten — with a heavy damp upon his forehead, had raised a wild and frenzied prayer for the wife in her agony, and the daughter or the man-child who was then unborn. As he so prayed, the voice of the child of his own loins that he had never yet seen, broke upon his ear, and Harvey Mountaigne, with a bright eye which said that all was doing well, spoke to my father of a " splendid boy;" and my father clasped the hand that was never false, and thanked his God — and I bow my head, for he blessed me — as he blessed his second son.

There was no dawn in the sky when Harvey Mountaigne left the old gray Grange. Mr. Trevor had urged him to take a horse, and the good doctor, at a brisk trot, was soon passing through the town near which he lived.

His way lay by the workhouse, and very close to the workhouse door. The wind blew piercingly, and he drew his cloak the closer round him as he felt the chill. He was passing the pauper's gate, when he fancied the moaning of the wind was strangely like a hollow groan. He checked his impatient horse and listened, and whatever he heard was now less indistinctly repeated. Harvey Mountaigne was not the man, whether the wind blew east or wes*t, to leave a doubt that might concern a human being, unexplained ; and he leaped from his horse and led it up towards the door.

Just within the gate, where, if it did not freeze, it did not thaw, a woman, strangely pale and beautiful, lay with no pillow but the parish flags. Harvey Mountaigne gently knelt and raised her head, and the movement of the lips of that ghastly face were the first signs that it was not a corpse which lay at that workhouse door. The glazed eyes opened wildly, and looked with a long earnest look in their rich beauty full upou him ; and again groan followed groan, the groan that spoke in its great depths of the throes that were to give life to another, and give up a life, perhaps, in the giving. Harvey Mountaigne knew that the woman before him lay in her pangs in the eye of the east wind at that workhouse door. Again the ashy lips were mute, the struggle was nearing to its end, and whilst the child had come to the birth, there was not strength to bring forth. In an instant the doctor knelt, half stripped, by her side, and all that was susceptible of warmth was tenderly wrapped round the still body of that lovely girl. This done, Harvey Mountaigne moistened the open lips with brandy, and, by degrees, the sunken eyes more kindly opened, and she eagerly drank of the reviving stimulant.

" Where am I?" said the girl, with an effort that the doctor in vain endeavoured to repress, grasping the good Mountaigne's supporting arm. "You will not leave me, Geoffrey — will you now?" Had Geoffrey been there, whoever he might be, and had Geoffrey been a man and not a devil, he would have stayed through an eternity by that girl's side. As she opened her eyes, and consciousness returned, the startled smile of trustfulness that had just dawned left her face, for she felt that whilst she had slept alone, she had awakened to find strangers.

She was soon in the good doctor's arms, and as he hurriedly carried her through the door that had been roughly opened, she whom he carried was a mother ; and the little one was crying to the parish in the arms of the parish officer.

" My poor girl," said the doctor, as he laid her exhausted in a bed, " you may do well yet ; " and at the sound of his genial voice, the girl opened her soft lustrous eyes, and gave him her thin, white hand, whereon there certainly was no wedding ring; but Harvey Mountaigne, who had never yet by baby lips been called a father, knelt by the bedside of the girl as though she were his own, and he gently placed his finger on her lips when she fain would have spoken in her great thankfulness, staying there until she slept, and waiting there until she woke.

It was eight o'clock and past, when she turned her eyes again upon him, with a warm and balmy smile.

" Tell me who you are," she said, as she threw her thin arms around his neck, and her hot tears fell upon a face that my father rightly said was worth a fortune in a sick-room. " Where am I, and who are you ? Is it very wrong for me to love you?" Now Harvey Mountaigne did not think it was, but he would not just then let her speak ; and having seen her drink a pint of tea, went home for that which the workhouse stores could not so well provide.

Within an hour he had returned with such things in a jug — which he carried under his arm — as he knew would be for her well-doing, and which he stayed to see her take. He then left, to make better arrangements for her reception elsewhere, as soon as was expedient ; and Harvey Mountaigne crossed the threshold of that pauper's house where death had been so nearly crowned where life began.

Chapter II. Evelyn Meevtn

It would have been a matter of no little difficulty some years before this history begins to have known Glastonbury, and its indwellers, without knowing Farmer Mervyn. Indeed, it is quite probable that the first and prevailing impression of the stranger on entering into those parts, would have been that Farmer Mervyn was ubiquitous; whilst it would have been as undeniably evident, that his character and influence were as much above depreciation as the fatted beasts that took off the medals with monotonous regularity at Christmas-time.

It would not be in the least credible, were I to say that amongst those who knew him best, there were no tongues that could witness falsely ; for I am in no wise certain that Stephen Mervyn lived in any exceptional sphere.

Glastonbury, so far as I know, is neither better nor worse than any other communities ; it would at times say evil with much heartiness where it could, and where it could not, Glastonbury was disciplined with the discipline of years, to make a virtue of the necessity of saying nothing. For a long time, whilst those around him were burying their dead, Stephen Mervyn knew not what it was to see death sitting at his own hearth ; but its dark presence one May day stood with lifted finger face to face with him at his own door, and Stephen Mervyn, while he sorrowed none the less, thanked his God that the child of the dear dead one was left.

As months rolled on, and another May came round, so desirable in every way was the widower held to be, that it was much marvelled at in Glastonbury that no second mother was chosen out of the many ones that offered for the farmer's only child.

It would have been strange had he heard nothing of all the demonstrative interest with which others viewed his present state. But it was now clear that the neighbourhood thought too much of the farmer, and knew too little of the man.

Stephen Mervyn was a great deal too tenderly and too truly the father, to think of any such compromise between his own convenience and his little one's happiness, as was suggested to him by

c those who were inclined to give advice to every one. Nor did he care to be unfaithful to the memory of her in whose image the blue-eyed child about him daily grew. But — as amongst all orders and degrees of women — the ladies of Glastonbury took abundant care that the interests of the good father were in no way prejudiced ; and if there was no inclination on his part to take to himself such a second partner as they could well and affectionately recommend from among themselves, it was at least necessary that one undivided effort should be made to save what was so humanely known as the " dear child."

Now, Stephen Mervyn had but one child born to him, and when the little nestling crept on to his knee for its kiss when bed-time came round, the good farmer, who had heard much in his day of those schools where great inducements are held out in prospectuses for great considerations, he would — let me hope only after the manner of farmers who could well know no better — kiss the sweet lips that would lisp of a future which he alone was to share, and feel that, God helping him, slie should at least escape the pollution of a school. " Pollution " might have been, or it might not, a stronger word than the occasion and the disease warranted ; but when Farmer Mervyn's spinster sister came to live with him, the ladies of Glastonbury, who were much cumbered about what they called the prospects of the child, talked the matter over really as though it very much concerned themselves, and laid out many little plans whereby it was believed that Evelyn Mervyn might be got into " the groove."

One lady went so far as to leave a tinted prospectus of a pension in the Pyrenees that personally she could highly recommend, and out of which nothing but good had been known to come. Another, in her research and experience, could introduce the farmer to a lady in the neighbourhood, who had just resolved to open her house for " the reception of a limited number of the daughters of noblemen and gentlemen," and whom she even believed could be persuaded unreservedly to open up these privileges to Miss Mervyn.