Some of our girls. A novel

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Chapter I. Intkoduces Our Heroines

There were four of them : two in the kitchen, one in the drawing-room, and one in a large, untidy room at the top of the house, formerly the nursery, and now called the school-room. Four girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two ; and, excepting for the fact that they were girls, that all spoke the same language more or less grammatically, owned the same nationality, and had skins of the same color, there seemed not a single tie or connecting link between them ; four girls all in the morning of their lives, all, it may be supposed, actuated by something like the same hopes and fears as to what their lives would bring forth, all living under the same roof, and all as far apart as if each separate girl was surrounded by a wall of ice that shut her in from her fellows.

It was not such a very large house either in which the four were located. It stood at the corner of one of those quiet, dull, respectable streets that diverge from the nest of squares situated between the Euston Road and Holborn. There was a brass-plate on the door, with “ Mr. Williams, Surgeon and Accoucheur,’' on it. There was a red lamp suspended from the iron that arched over the steps, and at the sideuf the house was a small room built out on a portion of the back garden, with “ Surgery ” on the door.

The street had been a good one, but it was going down now. People who wanted tenements of the size of those to be found in it preferred going a little further from the metropolitan center and taking villas, where, in spring at least, the grass would look green and the leaves show freshly. More than half of Wurtemburg Street was let out in lodgings. People did it so boldly too, much to the annoyance of poor Mrs. Williams, who said they had no consideration for the character of the street; they might at least advertise or go to an agent, but, instead of doing:;either, they put bills over the fan-lights, and in the front parlor windows, announcing that they had “ Apartments,” so that the solidly-respectable tone of the street was altogether gone from it.

Mr. Williams could not move from the street, though it had

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deteriorated so much since he commenced practice in it. His patients were all in the immediate neighborhood, and they would not be likely to follow him if he went to the West End. Neither was he in a position to take a higher rented house than the one he now occupied) He had enough to do to make both ends meet at the end of the year, and it taxed his wife’s ingenuity to the utmost to keep up appearances, and prevent the world at large — the little world of the two or three adjoining squares and streets— finding out how straitened were the means of the doctor’s household.

There were four children to teach and be attended to; it was done very cheaply — how cheaply we shall see presently; and there was a carriage to be maintained — it would never do for the doctor to visit his patients on foot, or he might lose half of them ; and there was the house to be kept in order, the steps to be hearthstoned, the brass-plate kept brightly polished; and for all such services “cook’' and “housemaid” were indispensable. And though cook and housemaid were kept as cheaply as possible, and paid as little as might be, still it was a diflBcult task sometimes to provide the funds even for the plain food and scanty wages which Mrs. Williams gave her domestics.

“ Cook ” and “housemaid ” were two of the girls with whom we have to deal, and so we will go to the lower region's first, and visit them in their own domain.

“ Cook ” was Susan Smith, and she was sitting by the kitchen fire this dull November evening with her crochet-hook in her hand, manufacturing, of all things .in the world, an antimacassar such as young ladies make to save the drawing-room furniture. It was not likely that Susan would ever have any furniture worth such saving, and it was certain that her mother’s cane-seated, wooden-backed chairs were little in need of such an article. Still the work was pretty and “genteel;” Susan felt herself almost a lady while she did it; so, though her stockings were out both at heels and toes, aMd she had not a single garment but was in need of repair, Susan went on counting her trebles and long stitches, with as calm a sense of enjoyment in the progress of her work as if, when completed, it was likely to be of the slightest use to any created being.

Susan was a born Londoner. Nobody could mistake her for anything else. The sallow complexion, that breeze had never freshened nor sun embrowned ; the dull, dark, straight hair, that owed all its luster to cheap pomade, and none to the sheen and the gloss that spring from a healthy, vigorous organization;, the narrow chest, the slight, ^pare frame; the keen, pert, lustrous eyes; the flippant, half -defiant manner, by which both master and mistress were taught that their handmaiden was as good as they, unless on those points where she was decidedly better; the dresS) which in its flounces and frills was such a wretched, slatternly mockery of the prevailing fashion of the day,— all proclaimed the daughter of the crow^ded streets and narrow alleys of our great Babel.

Susan was not the most favorable specimen of a London servant. Born Londoners rarely are. She had had no specific training for her present duties beyond that involved in serving for a year or two in a small lodging-house when she first entered on her teens. Then Susan had taken to slopwork as more “genteel,” and lived with

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her 'motlier and a sister whose spine was injured, in one small room, where the three subsisted on weak tea without milk, bread-and-butter, saveloys, and red herrings, but where Susan could wear both her chignons and crinolines as large as she pleased. This lasted for two or three years, during which she had the pleasure of styling herself “ Miss Smith.'’ She would have starved sooner than have given up that Miss; but something worse than starvation seemed likely to befall her. She lost her appetite, and her ability to work; she had a cough and a headache; and then her mother took her to one of the hospitals, where she had advice and medicine gratuitotisly. The medicine did her little good; the advice was that she should give up needle-work and take to service again.

Susan and her mother had implicit faith in “ the doctor;" and as the doctor said he could do nothing for Susan if she still chose to work at her needle, to service she submitted to go. It cost her a struggle at first. Susan had a soul above service. She had to give up her liberty, her evenings out, and her Sundays, and to wear a scrap of dirty net which she called a cap, and be called by her Christian name. She had to take an inferior situation at first, and at the end of three months changed it for one very little better. She averaged five situations in a twelvemonth, and before long became one of those girls who haunt servants’ offices, and make the unhappy ladies who frequent them eat very humble-pie before they can prevail on one of the independent damsels to enter their service.

Susan might have drifted to worse evil, as many another girl like her has done ; but she was free from any tendency to the coarser and darker sins, and her mother, in her way, was a respectable* woman. So she did nothing worse than try the patience of one unhappy mistress after another, and disarranged every successive household she entered, leaving each situation on the slightest provocation, and sometimes for no provocation at all. She had now been six weeks installed in Mrs. Williams’s kitchen, and had made up her mirid to give warning at the end of another fortnight ; and as, with the month of her notice, she would have a thre^ months’ character, Susan had very little fear of not getting another place as soon as it would suit her convenience to look for one, especially with the very excellent reason that she would have for leaving.

That reason stood before her on the other side of the*fireplace. A low-browed, heavy-faced girl of sixteen, with an awkward, ungainly figure, tall, angular, and bony, dressed with a neatness that was an eyesore and affront to Susan, inasmuch as her clothes, being bought and paid for by “ missis,’’ the contrast they made to her own was, in Susan’s opinion, a reflection on her own taste. Susan felt herself affronted by having such a “ partner ’’ in the kitchen. She camC of decent people. Hadn’t her own father at one time rented an eightroomed house, and, living in the front kitchen and back attic, let off the rest of the mansion, and paid taxes and poor-rates, out of which such as Margaret Timbs, her present fellow-servant, were supported? For Mrs. Williams, from economical motives, had taken Margaret from the workhouse, and was doing her best to turn her into a tidy hand-maiden. She had been in the house a month, and had smashed, as Susan triumphantly averred, more glass and crockery than a quarter’s wages of a accent servant would pay for.

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She was sullen and selfish as an untamed animal, and stupid as few animals are, — a girl whose workhouse life had been admirably calculated to deaden everything in her but the mere"capacity of living.

She had grown up from babyhood within the Union walls, a creature who had never known caresses or fondling, to whom the baby nonsense mothers and nurses so delight to utter to their little 'Ones was an unknown tongue, to whom kisses were things out of all experience, who had no idea of home or of what it was to have a father and mother. She had learned her Catechism, and knew it by rote — a human parrot. She could read a little, ar^d sew tolerably, and had some notion of the first rudiments of household work.

Beyond this, she knew little of what was good, and had a plentiful knowledge of evil. The vagrant children passing through the workhouse, spending their month or two there while their parents recruited their strength or waited for better times, had given her this knowledge. They were the most amusing companions she had ever known. No wonder that she learned readily all they had to teach.

Some day she might turn this knowledge to account. There were other ways of getting a living than by going to service. If she got tired of Mrs. Williams’s place, she might^try these ways, — see a little more of the big world of London than Wurtemburg Street would show her. And when she was tired of that, or was in want of food, there was always the workhouse to return to — the workhouse which had been home land parent,’ to her, and would mark her, and claim her, and keep her as its own, with the pauper taint in her blood, and the pauper brand on her name, till her death.

Susan looked up from her crochet. “ Why don’t you sit down and do something?” she said, impatiently. You’ve got holes as big as taters in them new stockings o’ yourn.” Susan’s own deficiencies in stocking mending did not make her less inclined to play the part of mentor to Margaret. “An’ you know Mrs. Williams said you was to hem them new tea-cloths she gave you. I hate to see people loblolly ing about. You’ll catch it finely, an’ you’ll deserve to.”

“ Don’t care,” said Margaret, slowly shifting from one foot to the other as she stood by the fireplace. “ Don’t care a mossel.”

don’t believe you do,'' said Susan, indignantly. “ I don’t believe you care for a single thing in this world ; no, nor a single creature either.”

“Nobody never cared for me, why should I care for them?” asked Margaret, calmly.

“ You’re as unnatural as a brute beast. I never saw anything like it. Why, even a cat cares for its kittens, and a [dog has his friends an’ his likin’s; but you — why you don’t seem to have a bit of human feelin’ in you. Now, is there anything in this world you do care for?” asked Susan, laying down her crochet, and looking up at her companion with some show of interest.

Margaret looked back at her with a little faint amazement breaking through the heavy shadows of her face. Susan’s excitement seemed to puzzle her a little. What was there for her to get angry about? Then she said, slowly and deliberately, — “1 likes my Tittles— barrin’ skilley.”

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‘^An’ nothing else, I do believe,” said Susan, looking on the form— which waS that of a girl — before her, and wondering how any creature that wore such a shape could have a soul that cared for nothing but “vittles.” Susan was faulty enough herself, — vain, flippant, forward, pert, not too fond of work, and, as has been said, apt to change her places on the slightest provocation, or without any provocation whatever. But, at least, she was a human being, fond of her mother, and would go without a ribbon or a new bonnet to take Mrs. Smith home some tea, or her sister some oranges; and would have thought her outing at Easter or Whitsuntide incomplete if she could not have both of them with her; and had once stayed a whole five months in one service to be able to pay for all the party. The thing that stood before her, and had the look of a girl, and as much sense of human kindness or relationship as a machine, as much idea of purity and self-respect as a brute, was incomprehensible to the girl who had, at least, been reared in a home, and to whom the words father and mother were the earliest realities she remembered. .

“I think you’re right there,” she continued. “ You’re the oddest girl, if you are a girl, I ever knew. You don’t seem even to care for the children, an’ they’re not a bad lot here. Miss Brooke keeps them in good order, I will say that. Now, I never could abide a place where there was no children. It makes me downright low sperity to be with nothing but grown-up people.”

‘ ‘ Never had nought to do with kids, ” said Margaret Timbs. “Not since I was one myself. They keep the big girls away from the little uns at the Union. Them that’s in the schools ain’t aught to do with them that’s in the nurseries. We’ve all our reg’lar places in the Union. Don’t know that I ever handled a babby in my life, exceptin’ Mary Green’s, an’ 1 met her, the last Sunday I was out, wdth it. She was goin’ back to the workhus. Couldn’t manage no how to keep it any longer. Hadn’t been out of the house a twelvemonth. Said she didn’t know as she should jcare to come oul again. The grub isn’t very first-rate in the Union, but it’s sure, an^ the work isn’t so hard as it is in service ; an’ when you’ve lived all your days there, it seems nateral-like to go back to it. Dessay I shall myself some day, but I should like to have my fling first.. Mary’s had her fling an’ seen something of life, an’ anyway the workhus is the best place for her now she’s got her babby.”

“ And where’s her husband?” said Susan, severely. “ What’s he doin’ to let her go back to a place like that? I should be ashamed o’ namin’ on it.”

“ Husband!” said the girl, with a strange look, half cunning, half something worse, in her face. “ We make no count o’ husbands, we don’t, when we come from the workhus — thev ain’t for the likeso’ us.”

“More shame for you!” said Susan, sternly. “A pretty bringing up you’ve had! All I know is, I like respectable partners wherever I go, an’ if you stays here I shall just tell Mrs. Williams she may suit herself with another cook— I’m not used to workhus company.”

Margaret took no notice of this outburst. The most “ aggravatin’^ thing” about her, Susan sometimes said, was, that she seemed to o^OME OF OUR GIRLS.

Lave “ no feelin’s.” There was no moving her. After a while she shifted her position, then seemed to think that she might as w’ell sit down as stand, and, taking a chair, was in a few minutes fast asleep. Susan looked at her contemptuously.

“ She’s good company. I never had to do with anything so bad in my days. Well, the same place won’t hold us much longer, I’m thinkin’. There she’ll sit and snore till she has her supper, an’ then she’ll go upstairs to prayers; an’ what the prayers is for I don’t believe she knows no more nor a heathen. I never had to do with one of her sort before, an’ I won’t much longer now, if 1 can help it.”

So the two in the kitchen spent their evening, waiting for the bell that would summon them to the family worship, and the two girls upstairs were spending theirs, each after her own fashion, but each alone and apart from all the household, and especially apart from those other girls, with whom their common youth and common womanhood should, one would have thought, have made her, in some sort at least, akin.

Mrs. Williams’ drawing-room was not a luxurious or a very pretty room. The doctor had done his best to furnish it suitably for her when he married, and she tried hard to keep it in some degree of order. There was a round table, which had formerly been in the center of the apartment ; but, that arrangement being now voted unfashionable, it was consigned to a corner. ^ There were six w^alnut chairs, with green rep covers, and a couch to match, a rosewood piano, and one or two smaller articles of furniture. There was a card-case and a stand of wax-flowers on the table, and two or three show- books. There were no fresh floTvers — they were a luxury beyond Mrs. Williams’ means, and the books had not been renewed since her marriage. Everything looked straight, and spare, and formal, excepting the figure of the one occupant.

This was Millicent Pembury, who was just turned twenty, and heiress to a good house and a landed estate that brought in between three and four thousand a-j^ear, and altogether, as she was not only a wealthy but a beautiful girl, a person of considerable social importance— of such importancd, indeed, as to make her seem out of her place in the bare, meager drawing-room of Mrs. Williams.

But Millicent had had a great trouble — a trouble of such a sort as does sometimes befall girls in their teens, or out of them, even if they are beautiful and heiresses ; and this trouble had affected her health — so much so, that it was thought advisable she should be placed under the charge of a certain great London physician, famed for his skill in lung diseases, whether they arise from the heart being affected or otherwise ; arid this had led to her taking up her residence with Mrs. Williams. That lady having been a hanger-on and poor relative of the Pembury family in her youth, Millicent’s great-aunt remembered the fact of her existence, when it was convenient to do so. ^ ,

It was out of the question that she should come to London herself. At her time of life the journey would kill her. And Millicent Pembury, though so well portioned a young lady, had scarcely any relations left but this great-aunt— who only lived to take care of herself, as it seemed — and the poor doctor’s wife in Wurtemburg

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Street. Mrs. Danvers, the rich relation, thought the poor one would do very well in the emergency, and the little practitioner could S(;e that the great practitioner’s prescriptions and directions were all duly carried out. Mrs. Williams was very ready to be use- ' ful ; the sum she was to receive for Millicent’s board would be very acceptable; and she went herself to Hertfordshire and brought MiUicent up, only thankful that Millicent was ready to dispense with the services of her maid.

Millicent had been in Wurtemburg Street now about two months. It was her first visit to London, and it had been but a dreary one. There had been no society. W hat could there be for Miss Pembury, of Pembury Hall, Radley, in Wurtemburg Street, even if she had been well enough for it? There had been no sight-seeing, although, of late, she had been quite well enough for anything of the kind that could have been performed in the daytime, and Mrs, Williams had made a point of telling her repeatedly that “the carriage ” was always at her service whenever she would care to use it. There had been no shopping. Millicent had more dresses than she wanted already. There seemed nothing, literally nothing, in all London worth the exertion of lifting up her languid eyes to look upon.

She was better than when she came. There could be no question about that. Her cough had gone ; she ate, not as much as a healthy girl should do, but yet enough to account for the fact of her still being in existence, which had not been the case when she first came to Wurtemburg Street. Indeed, Dr. Crane said that she required nothing but change. A winter in the south of France or Algeria would do more for her now than he could. Millicent negatived the idea. Ciiange would be nothing but a trouble — even the journey to London had required more effort than it was worth. She should go back home at Christmas. If Mrs. Williams would be troubled with her, she would prefer staying where she was till then. Mr. Williams told his wife in confidence that nothing ailed the girl but the having too little to do, and too much to do it with. “ If she had to work for her living, like poor Miss Brooke, it would be a great deal better for her.”

“ But the Pemburys never did have to work for their living,” said Mrs. Williams. She had been a Pembury herself, and she had to work hard enough now — quite as hard, in her way, as either of her servants or her governess ; but then it was not for money, which made all the difference. She did not like the manner in which her husband spoke of her cousin. If she had been the daughter of the butcher or the grocer, tainted with would-be fine-ladyism, he could not have spoken more brusquely. But hrusquerie was Mr. Williams’s great fault, in his wife’s opinion. He would never rise above the butchers and the grocers, never obtain a really aristocratic connection, so long as he spoke so freely and so plainly.

^ \ Millicent Pembury was altogether out of keeping with her surroundings. She had a rich dark-brown silk, flounced and frilled and trimmed as dresses are now-a-days. Her small, white hands were covered with rings, some of them of great value; but the dress had been bought when Millicent Pembury attached more importance to her personal adornings than she was ever likely to do again ; and On one of the hands so listlessly clasped there was one old-world ring of

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gold, twisted in the form of a serpent, with a small ruby in the head, for which not a pawnbroker in the kingdom would have given flveand-twenty shillings, that Millicent valued more than all the precious stones and goldsmith’s work which had come down to her as heirlooms.

She had beautiful hair, a dark, silky brown, almost black, but with threads of gold gleaming through it — hair of the kind that is ready to break out into curls on the slightest provocation; but it was not arranged in any of the complicated fashions so prevalent no'w — just twisted up in a great coil, as if its luxuriance was a trouble to its possessor. Not ungracefully disposed, however. Millicent could do nothing ungraceful or awkward. She had some wonderful charm, some innate, unconscious tact about her, which made whatever she did or wore seem the best and fittest thing to be done or worn. Her attitude now, listless, despondent as it was, would have delighted a painter. And it was in keeping with her beauty, which, at its best, was of a fragile, delicate type; with the eyes, that were always subdued in their brightness ; with the cheeks, which never warmed into color. She was always pale and shadowy, and looked a creature who would rather endure any amount of suffering than seek a way out of it for herself.

There was a lamp on the table near her : a book Tvhich she had been making believe to read ; some tatting, at which sometimes she made a pretense of working ; and there was a letter which had come by that evening’s post, and which she had not yet opened. She took it up now, and glanced at its contents, then laid it down.

“ The old, old story. Get well and strong for the sake of others, and the duty I owe myself. If I could please myself, I would just lay my head on my pillow to-night, never to wake up again. Why does one have to live at all when life is so little worth the living? Why didn’t I die six months ago, when — when I first knew what I had lost? Get over it! Aunt Danvers’s pet phrase. Do girls ever get over such things, and care, or make believe to care, a second time for any one else, and marry, and go through it all, as she would have me? Oh! to feel young, and to know that one must live on, though all the zest and the pleasure of life are taken from it !

“ I wonder,” she continued, after a pause, whether I shall tone down and marry, according to my friends’ advice, as Aunt Danvers says she did ! Aunt Danvers has had her disappointments too,” she added, scornfully; “ but she has made the best of her life in spite of them, and not found it, in her own opinion, such a bad thing, after all. It’s worth while living fifty years more to be another Aunt Danvers ! Do people’s hearts die, or do some never have hearts at all? Perhaps that was how it was with Aunt Danvers; but for me — for me to live to be like her! As if one could forget all that has been, and all that one thought might be, and settle down to an old age of punctilio and physic ! I suppose that doctor thinks he has earned my everlasting gratitude by giving me another lease of life. If it hadn’t been that it was too much trouble to refuse, I would never have come to London at all. Why should I care to live? What will there be for me when I go back to Radley? It will be as monotonous as it is here, and more fatiguing. One day

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Upstairs, in the school-room, sat Polly Brooke — Pauline, if one were to give her her proper designation, but nobody did. She was too bright, too pleasant-looking to be called anything but Polly, if she had a name that could by any possibility be turned into that abbreviation. Polly, or Pauline, was rather beneath the middle height, as plump as a girl should be without giving rise to uncomfortable misgivings as to what she might develop into at forty. She had bright eyes, gray or green, of an indeterminate color, a fresh, clear complexion, a nondescript nose, and a mouth that would have been too large if it were not that when she laughed, a very common thing for Polly to do, she showed the whitest and finest of teeth.

The first thing that in Polly Brooke struck an observer was that she looked one of the most sensible and best tempered of girls; and there was an appearance of capability about her, of general handiness and efficiency. She seemed the first person to turn to on any emergency whatever, from a cut finger to a house on fire. The next thing that an observer might see, if with eyes that looked below the surface, would be that, under all Polly’s common sense and general efficiency, there was a certain depth of feeling, and a fair share of something very akin to romance: She was shrewd, quickwitted, clever, but with all the potentialities of passion beneath these common-place attributes.