Ellen Middleton—A Tale

After this answer I did not feel courage to speak to her of Henry, of her own relations, of the circumstances attending her marriage, of anything, in short, that could cause her pain or disturbance, and I therefore asked her how she spent her time in London.

"That will be easily described," she said; "for in London one day exactly resembles another, – in its employment, at least."

"Does it really?" I exclaimed; for this was certainly not my idea of a London life.

"Yes," she replied. "I get up every day at six o'clock; and, after attending to some of my household concerns, I walk to Church, at St. Margaret's, where there is a service every morning. It feels almost like the country to walk at that hour."

"You must have found it piercingly cold in the winter?"

"It was cold enough sometimes; but lately it has been so mild that I walk slowly by the balconies to smell longer the mignonette which fills them. After Church comes breakfast; and then I go to the square."

"To walk there?"

"Yes; a kind of a walk."

"Alone?"

"Oh, no; I have plenty of companions – but never mind that. I will tell it you all another time."

"No; tell it me now; it interests me so much."

"It will make you think me a child still, though we said I was a woman just now. Well, then, first there are the birds, – the black, starved, unhappy-looking London birds; you cannot think how pleased they are with the seed and the crumbs which I take them every morning. I have chosen a particular old thorn-tree for our meeting-place; its leaves are beginning now to peep out, and it will be a great day for the birds and me when its white blossoms appear. As it is, they flock to it quick enough when I come into the square, and seem almost to call to me to make haste."

"You love them, Alice, as you used to love your Passion

Flower?"

"Not exactly; I loved my Passion Flower because it did me good; my birds I love because I do them good. But I have greater friends than these in the square; friends that run to me too when I come in – the darling children."

"How do you love them, Alice?"

"Oh, as God's own chosen ones, whose Angels behold his face in Heaven. They seem so very near Heaven. Will you come some day into the square with me, Miss Middleton?"

"Call me Ellen, and I will go with you wherever you like."

"Well, then, dear Ellen, you must come and see those I love best. There is one so like Johnny!" (her eyes filled with tears as she said this) "only that he looks as if he belonged to some noble race, like those that the verses talk about; and another looks like the picture in my prayer-book of young David going to fight Goliath. I am so happy with them that I sometimes forget myself, and stay longer in the square than I ought."

"Why, what have you to do afterwards?"

"Oh, then, it is time to go to the hospital."

"What do you mean? What hospital?"

"The hospital in – Place. I go there every day for five or six hours."

"What to do?"

"Whatever they give me to do."

"I don't understand you, Alice."

"You mean how I got leave to go there? I will tell you; – one of the nurses, sisters they call them now, knew me when we lived at Bromley, and two or three times I had met her in the street, and talked with her. She took me one day with her into the hospital to see a poor woman who had broken her leg; she was in sad distress of mind, and could not bear to be left alone, and, as the sisters had too much to do to sit much by her bed-side, they were glad enough to leave me with her. Ever since, I have gone there almost every day, and they always find something or other for me to do."

"And when you leave the hospital, what do you do?"

"Generally I go to the square again for an hour, and then to evening prayers; but sometimes, if Mr. Henry is at home, he walks with me for a little while."

"And does Mr. Henry," I said with a smile, "approve of your long visits to the hospital, and your walks in the square, and all your solitary proceedings? He must be rather lonely at home all the morning without you?"

"He gets up late," answered Alice, "and always goes out immediately after breakfast."

"And then at dinner, or in the evening, I suppose, you give him an account of the proceedings of the day?"

"No, Mr. Henry does not care for birds and flowers, or children. He is very kind to poor people; twice, when I have asked him, he has given me some money for them, but he does not like to hear about them."

"Mrs. Middleton wishes very much to see you to-day, Alice."

"Does she? I shall be so glad to see her. When may I go to her? Is she like Mr. Henry?"

"In some ways she is, but you will find that she does care for birds and flowers" (I was going to add children, but something at my heart stopped me). "Come, dear Alice, put on your bonnet, and we will go to her immediately if you will come with me."

While she was tying on her bonnet, I went up to the book-case, and, looking over it said, "I do not see any new books here. I should have thought you would have added to your stock in London?"

"Mr. Henry has plenty of books in his study," answered Alice; "and when I was first married, as he had given me leave to take them when I liked, I read some of them."

"And liked them?"

"Some not enough – some too much."

When we were in the carriage I aske Alice which of the books that she had read she liked too much.

"Some books of verses," she answered. "I do love verses so much. They give me the same sort of feeling as a fine day, or like the birds when they sing more sweetly than usual, or when in a storm the thunder is very loud."

"Whose poems are you speaking of?"

"Lord Byron's; and as I read them, I felt all this more than I had ever done before, and it was very pleasant. He writes such beautiful things about the sky and the fields, and the country and children, that it made me quite happy to read them and think about them. But then I found that he wrote too of terrible and wicked things, things that made one tremble and shudder to think of, so I put that book away, and read it no more."

"And what did you try next?"

"Some long stories written by Sir Walter Scott."

"You must have liked them?"

"Yes, indeed I did; they are full of good and right things; and I spent many pleasant hours in reading them. But then, Ellen, somehow they made me think too much. They gave me thoughts that were not wrong perhaps, but which were not good for me. Thoughts that did not help to make me, what St. Paul says we ought to be, 'content with that state of life in which God has put us.'"

"So then you left off reading altogether?"

"No, I read my own old books again; I picked out verses and stories for the happy children in the square, and hymns and chapters in the Bible for the sick people at the hospital, and all was right again."

As we drove into Brook-street, I told Alice that we were now close to Mrs. Middleton's house; but I did not see in her the least sign of nervousness or agitation at the idea of the approaching interview. I felt calmer myself than I had expected, for it seemed to me that, in her presence, Henry must forget the past; that her husband could not be the Henry I had known, and whom I so much dreaded to meet again; and yet, at the same time, I hardly felt as if she was his wife. As it generally happens when one has speculated much before-hand, on a person's probable conduct and appearance under certain circumstances, Alice, as a wife, though exactly like herself, was quite unlike the various pictures which my imagination had drawn of her during the last few months. At times I had fancied her beaming with happiness, loving and beloved, and in the full enjoyment of those early days of bliss which a young wife so often dreams away in enviable unconsciousness of its transient nature. At other times, and oftener, I had feared that her cheek might be pale, and her spirits broken; that disappointment might have fastened its poisonous fang in her heart; and that I should read in her eyes the fatal secret of an unhappy marriage. But I had found her calm as the surface of a summer sea; and no Virgin Martyr walking with a firm step to the fiery trial: no dying saint closing his eyes in the joyful hope of a certain resurrection, ever seemed more free from earthly passions, earthly cares, or earthly hopes, than the beautiful bride of eighteen who sat by my side.

When we entered the drawing-room in Brook-street, Henry was sitting by his sister. She got up hastily, came up to Alice, and kissing her affectionately, drew her to a couch at the end of the room, and entered into conversation with her, in that kind and eager manner which was peculiar to her. Henry made a step towards them, and then turned back; and, holding out his hand to me, said in a low voice, "You are very kind to her, and so you ought to be."

I returned the pressure of his hand, and answered in the same tone, "Who in the world could be otherwise than kind to her?"

"Poor Alice!" he said, and drew his hand across his brow, as if in pain.

He was pale, and he had grown very thin since I last had seen him. He drew me to the furthest window by some insignificant question, and then told me that his father was expected in town the next day; and now that his sister had seen Alice, he supposed that he would do so too.

"I am glad, very glad of it, Henry; I am not sure if he will appreciate her thoroughly; but I know she will," I said looking at Mrs. Middleton.

"She will do her harm," he muttered.

"Harm!"

"Yes, as she has done you harm."

"What harm has she ever done me?"

"Made you what you are, – too good to be bad, and …"

"Too bad to be good? True; but that has not been her doing."

"Has it not?" he retorted, and fixed his eyes upon me, as if he would have read into my soul.

After a pause, he said, glancing at Alice, "Take care what you do with her. She lives in a dream; and if you show her but once life as it is – as it ought to have been for her, – she will wake, break her heart, if she has one, or that of someone else, if she has not."

I could hardly command myself sufficiently to speak; but, laying my head against the window pane, and without looking at him, I said in a low voice, "Surely, Henry, you try to make her happy – you must feel affection for her?"

"Enough to wish, with all my soul, that I had never set eyes on her, or on you. – Don't go – don't stir from where you are. Once for all, hear it – you must listen to whatever I may choose to say to you. Once you would not believe me, when I told you that, by your obstinacy, you would sacrifice the happiness of three persons. You have done it; for mine" (he said this with a bitter laugh) "and your own and hers hang upon a thread. If you think to brave me, do so; go away now, and never speak to me again; but then, by Heaven, the thread snaps; and you will believe me this time, I hope!"

I did not stir; and that mute ackowledgment of Henry's secret power, which my soul rebelled against, but dared not defy, humbled me more bitterly than anything I had yet gone through.

After a few minutes of this speaking silence, – for, alas! how much the compliance of that hour revealed, – he himself walked away, joined his sister and his wife; and, after a few moments' conversation, he took his leave, and Alice went home in our carriage.

It was settled before they went, that on the next day they should dine in Brook-street; and Mrs. Middleton told me afterwards that she had arranged with Henry to use her best endeavours to persuade Mr. Lovell to meet them. He had charged her not to say before Alice that there would be any difficulty in obtaining this, as she had not the slightest idea that their marriage had been disapproved of by his family.

"Nothing seems to me so useless," added Mr. Middleton, "as to reproach, to remonstrate, or even to wonder, over an act which is past recall; but it is impossible to see Henry look so miserable, to hear him speak so coldly of that beautiful young wife of his, and at the same time conceal from her with nervous anxiety that it was a step which nothing but the most violent passion could justify, without feeling bewildered at the strangeness of the whole affair."

"What has he said to you, Ellen? and what impression has your visit to her left upon your mind?"

"I think," was my answer, "what I always have thought of her; that she is more like an angel, in spirit as well as in face, than any other human being I ever saw; she seems happy, but it is hardly the happiness of this world which she seems to enjoy; but, whether it is that of the saint who has built upon a rock, or that of a child which a breath can destroy, I hardly know."

"I felt," said Mrs. Middleton, "while I was talking to her, as if she hardly belonged to this world. Do you know, Ellen," she continued, with a smile, "I could not have asked her if she was in love with Henry. I should have feared to see her vanish away like that beautiful apparition in the German Legend, which dissolved into air, if a word of mortal love reached her ears. But this is all nonsense," she said with a sigh; "I hope they are happy; yet, after having looked forward so much to seeing them, I now have a more vague feeling of discomfort about them than I had before."

My uncle came in just then; and I was glad to leave the room, and thus escape a repetition of the question which I bad left unanswered with respect to Henry's conversation with me.