Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, August, 1878

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CONCERNING SISSY

Percival had announced the fact of the Lisles' presence in Bellevue street to Sissy in a carefully careless sentence. Sissy read it, and shivered sadly. Then she answered in a peculiarly bright and cheerful letter. "I'm not fit for him," she thought as she wrote it. "I don't understand him, and I'm always afraid. Even when he loved me best I felt as if he loved some dream-girl and took me for her in his dream, and would be angry with me when he woke. Miss Lisle would not be afraid. It is the least I can do for Percival, not to stand in the way of his happiness—the least I can do, and oh, how much the hardest!" So she gave Thorne to understand that she was getting on remarkably well.

It was not altogether false. She had fallen from a dizzy height, but she had found something of rest and security in the valley below. And as prisoners cut off from all the larger interests of their lives pet the plants and creatures which chance to lighten their captivity, so did Sissy begin to take pleasure in little gayeties for which she had not cared in old days. She could sleep now at night without apprehension, and she woke refreshed. There was a great blank in her existence where the thunderbolt fell, but the cloud which hung so blackly overhead was gone. The lonely life was sad, but it held nothing quite so dreadful as the fear that a day might come when Percival and his wife would know that they stood on different levels—that she could not see with his eyes nor understand his thoughts—when he would look at her with sorrowful patience, and she would die slowly of his terrible kindness. The lonely life was sad, but, after all, Sissy Langton would not be twenty-one till April.

Percival read her letter, and asked Godfrey Hammond how she really was. "Tell me the truth," he said: "you know all is over between us. She writes cheerfully. Is she better than she was last year?"

Hammond replied that Sissy was certainly better. "She has begun to go out again, and Fordborough gossip says that there is something between her and young Hardwicke. He is a good fellow, and I fancy the old man will leave him very well off. But she might do better, and there are two people, at any rate, who do not think anything will come of it—myself and young Hardwicke."

Percival hoped not, indeed.

A month later Hammond wrote that there was no need for Percival to excite himself about Henry Hardwicke. Mrs. Falconer had taken Sissy and Laura to a dance at Latimer's Court, and Sissy's conquests were innumerable. Young Walter Latimer and a Captain Fothergill were the most conspicuous victims. "I believe Latimer rides into Fordborough every day, and the captain, being stationed there, is on the spot. Our St. Cecilia looks more charming than ever, but what she thinks of all this no one knows. Of course Latimer would be the better match, as far as money goes—he is decidedly better-looking, and, I should say, better-tempered—but Fothergill has an air about him which makes his rival look countrified, so I suppose they are tolerably even. Neither is overweighted with brains. What do you think? Young Garnett cannot say a civil word to either of them, and wants to give Sissy a dog. He is not heart-whole either, I take it."

Hammond was trying to probe his correspondent's heart. He flattered himself that he should learn something from Percival, let him answer how he would. But Percival did not answer at all. The fact was, he did not know what to say. It seemed to him that he would give anything to hear that Sissy was happy, and yet—

Nor did Sissy understand herself very well. Her grace and sweetness attracted Latimer and Fothergill, and a certain gentle indifference piqued them. She was not sad, lest sadness should be a reproach to Percival. In truth, she hardly knew what she wished. One day she came into the room and overheard the fag-end of a conversation between Mrs. Middleton and a maiden aunt of Godfrey Hammond's who had come to spend the day. "You know," said the visitor, "I never could like Mr. Percival Thorne as much as—"

Sissy paused on the threshold, and Miss Hammond stopped short. The color mounted to her wintry cheek, and she contrived to find an opportunity to apologize a little later: "I beg your pardon, my dear, for my thoughtless remark just as you came in. I know so little that my opinion was worthless. I really beg your pardon."

"What for?" said Sissy. "For what you said about Percival Thorne? My dear Miss Hammond, people can't be expected to remember that. Why, we agreed that it should be all over and done with at least a hundred years ago." She spoke with hurried bravery.

The old lady looked at her and held out her hands: "My dear, is the time always so long since you parted?"

Sissy put the proffered hands airily aside and scoffed at the idea. They had a crowd of callers that afternoon, but the girl lingered more than once by Miss Hammond's side and paid her delicate little attentions. This perplexed young Garnett very much when he had ascertained from one of the company that the old woman had nothing but an annuity of three hundred a year. He hoped that Sissy Langton wasn't a little queer, but, upon his word, it looked like it.

A WELSH WATERING-PLACE

On the eastern shore of that stretch of land which forms the extreme south-western point of Wales stands the stony little seaport town of Tenby. It is an old, old town, rich in historical legends, an important place in the twelfth century and down to Queen Elizabeth's reign. Soon after her time it fell into woeful decay, and for years of whose number there is no record Tenby existed as a poor fishing-village and mourned its departed glories. That it would ever again be a place of interest to anybody but people of fishy pursuits was an idea Tenby did not entertain concerning itself; but, lo! in the present century there arose a custom among genteel folk of going down to the sea in bathing-machines. It was discovered that Tenby was a spot favored of Neptune (or whatever god or goddess regulates the matter of surf-bathing), and Tenby was taken down from the shelf, as it were, dusted, mended and set on its legs again. The fashionables smiled on it. Away off in the depths of wild Wales the knowing few set up their select and choice summer abode, and vaunted its being so far away from home; for Tenby was farther from London in those old coaching days than New York is in these days of steamships. Even years after railroads found their way into Wales, Tenby remained remote and was approachable only by coach; but now you can step into your railway-carriage in London and trundle to Tenby without change between your late breakfast and your late dinner.

Probably no seaside watering-place known to the polite world contrasts so strongly with the typical American watering-place as does this Welsh resort. Not at Brighton, not at Biarritz, not at any German spa, will the tourist find so complete a contrast in every respect to Long Branch or Newport. Tenby is almost sui generis. A watering-place without a wooden building in it would of itself be a novelty to an American. Our summer cities consist wholly of wooden buildings, but Tenby, from the point of its ponderous pier, where the waves break as on a rock, to the tip of its church-spire, which the clouds kiss, is every inch of stone. Welshmen will not build even so insignificant a structure as a pig-sty out of boards if there are stones to be had. I have seen stone pig-sties in Glamorganshire with walls a foot thick and six hundred years old. There is not a wooden building in Tenby. The station-buildings are "green" (as the Welsh say of a new house), but they are solid stone.

Alighting from the railway-carriage in which you have come down from London, you are greeted with no clamor of bawling hack-drivers and hotel-omnibus men roaring in stentorian tones the names of their various houses. Three or four quiet serving-men in corduroy small-clothes and natty coats touch their hats to you and look in your face inquiringly. They represent the various hotels in Tenby, and at a gesture of assent from you one of them takes your bags, your wraps, whatever you are burdened with, and conducts you to a somewhat antiquated vehicle which bears you to your chosen inn through some gray stony streets, under an ivy-green archway of the ancient town-wall; and as the vehicle draws up at the inn-door the beauty of Tenby lies spread suddenly before you—the lovely bay, the cliffs, the sands, the ruined castle on the hill, the restless sea beyond. A handsome young person in an elaborate toilet as regards her back hair, but not otherwise impressive in attire, comes to the door of the hotel to meet you, and gently inquires concerning your wishes: that you have come to stay in the house is a presumption which no properly constituted young person in Tenby would venture upon without express warrant in words. Receiving information on this point from you, the probability is that she imparts to you in return the information that the house is full. Such, indeed, is the chronic condition of the hotels at Tenby in the season; and unless you have written beforehand and secured accommodations, you are not likely to find them. In the life of a Welsh watering-place hotels do not fill the important place they do in American summer resorts. Nobody lives at an hotel in Tenby. If their stay be longer than a day or two (and very few indeed are they who come to-day and are off to-morrow), visitors inevitably go into lodgings. Such is the custom of the country, and there is no provision for any other, no encouragement to a prolonged stay at an hotel. The result is, that the hotels are in an incessant state of bustle and change: there is a never-intermitting stream of arrivals, who only ask to be made comfortable for a night or two while they are looking for lodgings, and then make way for the next squad. Tenby abounds in lodging-houses, the expenses of which are smaller than hotel expenses, while their comforts are greater, their cares actually less and their good tone unquestionable. The various lodging-house quarters vie with each other in genteel cognomens and aristocratic flavor. The Esplanade is but a row of lodging-houses. The various Terraces, each with a prenomen more graceful than the other, are the same. The windows of Tudor Square and Victoria street, Paragon Place and Glendower Crescent, bloom with invitations to "inquire within." A handsome parlor and bedroom may be had for two pounds a week, and the cost of food and sundries need not exceed two pounds more for two persons moderately fond of good living; which means, at Tenby, the fattest and whitest of fowls, the freshest and daintiest salmon and john dories, the reddest and sweetest of lobsters and prawns. Those who prefer to take a house have every encouragement to do so. A bijou of a furnished cottage, all overrun with vines and flowers, may be had for three pounds a month, the use of plate and linen included. These things are fatal to hotel ambition, for although the hotels are not expensive, from an American point of view, they cannot compete with such figures as these. Hence there is nothing to induce a change in the customs of Tenby, which have prevailed ever since it became a watering-place. Britons do not change their habits without good and valid cause therefor, and no Americans ever come to Tenby, so far as I can learn.

We are Americans ourselves, of course, and we are going to do as Americans do—viz. make a very brief stay, and that in an hotel. We obtain accommodations at last through a happy fortune, and presently find ourselves installed in the grandest suite of hotel-apartments at Tenby—a large parlor, handsomely furnished, with a piano, books, objets d'art, etc., and a bedroom off it. At Long Branch, were there such an apartment there—which there is not—twenty dollars a day would be charged for it, without board and without compunction. Here we pay nineteen shillings. There is a magnificent view from our front windows. The hotel stands close to the cliff, with only a narrow street between its doorstep and the edge of the precipice. The night is falling, and the scene is like Fairy Land. We look from our windows straight down upon the sands, a dizzy distance below (but to which it were easy to toss a pebble), and out over the glassy waters, where small craft float silently, with the gray old stone pier and the dark ivy-hung ruin on Castle Hill, the one reflected in the waves, the other outlined against the sky—a lovely picture. Tenby covers the ridge of a long and narrow promontory rising abruptly out of the sea, its stone streets running along the dizzy limestone cliffs. From the highest point eastward—where is presented toward the sea a front of rugged precipices which would not shame a mountain-range—the promontory slopes gradually lower and lower till the streets of the town run stonily down sidewise through an ancient gate and debouch upon the south beach. Then, as if repenting its condescension, the promontory takes a fresh start, and for a brief spurt climbs again, but quickly plunges into the sea. This spurt, however, creates the picturesque hill on which of old stood a powerful Norman fortress, whose ruins we see. Local enterprise has now laid out the hill as a public pleasure-ground, with gravelled paths and rustic seats, and glorified it with a really superb statue of the late Prince Albert, who, the Welsh inscription asserts, was Albert Dda, Priod Ein Gorhoffus Frenhines Victoria.

We find upon inquiry that our hotel so far infringes upon primitive Welsh manners as to provide a table-d'hôte dinner at six. This is most welcome news, and we become at once part of the company which sits down to the table d'hôte. There are ten people besides ourselves, and not a commonplace or colorless character among them. My left-hand neighbor is a somewhat slangy young gentleman in a suit of chequered clothes, who carves the meats, being at the head of the table; and my happy propinquity secures me the honor of selection by the young gentleman as the recipient of his observations: a toughish round of beef which he is called upon to carve evokes from him an aside to the effect that it is "rather a dose." The foot of the table is held by an old gentleman in a black stock, with a tuft of wiry hair on the front part of his head, and none whatever on any other part, who carves a fowl, and in asking the diners which part they severally prefer accompanies the question with a brisk sharpening of his knife on his fork, but without making the least noise in doing it. My chequered neighbor having advertised the toughness of the beef, everybody murmurs a purpose of indulging in fowl, at which my neighbor observes aside to me that he is "rather jolly glad," and the butler takes the beef away. The dish next set before him proving a matter of spoons merely, his relief at not being obliged to carve finds vent in a whispered "Hooray!" for my exclusive amusement. One unfortunate individual has accepted a helping of beef, however—a bald-headed man in spectacles, not hitherto unaccustomed to good living, if one might judge by his rounded proportions. It is painful to witness his struggles with the beef, which he maintains with the earnestness of a man who means to conquer or perish in the endeavor. Opposite sits as fair a type of a ripe British beauty of the middle class as I have anywhere seen—with a complexion of snow, a mouth like a red bud and eyes as beautiful and expressive as those of a splendid large wax doll, her hair drawn tensely back and rolled into billowy puffs, with a rose atop. It is sad, in looking on a picture like this—superb in its suggestions of pure rich blood and abounding health—to reflect that such a rose will develop into a red peony in ten years. I do not say the peony will not have her own strong recommendings to the eye: we may not despise a peony, but it is impossible not to regret that a rose should turn into one. There is a very good example of the peony sort near the foot of the table—quite a magnificent creature in her way. Her husband, who sits next her, is a fiercely-bearded man, but has a strange air of being in his wife's custody nevertheless. The lady is apparently forty-five, red to a fault, full in the neck, and with a figure which necessitates a somewhat haughty pose of the head unless one would appear gross and piggish. There is much to admire in this lady, peony though she be. The fiercely-bearded husband is smaller than his wife, and, in spite of her commanding air and his subdued aspect, I have not a doubt he rules her with a rod of iron. Appearances are very deceptive in this direction. I have known so many large ladies married to little men who (the ladies) carried themselves in public like grenadiers or drum-majors, and in private doted on their little lords' shoe-strings! Next the fiercely-bearded husband sits a very pretty girl, whom he finds his entertainment in constantly observing with the air of a connoisseur. She is modesty itself; her eyes are never off her plate; and from the at-ease manner in which he contemplates her it is clear he no more expects her to return his gaze than he expects a torpedo to go off under his chair.

The dinner proceeds most decorously. If it were a funeral, indeed, it could hardly be less given to anything approaching hilarity. There is now and then a little conversation, but the gaps are frightful —yawning chasms of silence of the sort in which you are moved to wild thoughts of running away, for fear you may suddenly commit some act of horrible impropriety, like whistling in church. In one of these gaps—during which the whole company, having finished the course, is waiting gloomily for the victim of tough beef (who is still struggling) to have done—my chequered neighbor remarks, in an aside which makes every one start as if a pistol had been fired off, "Goodish-sized pause, eh?"

But with the dessert we begin to unbend. We are still exceedingly decorous, but our tongues are loosened a little, and we exchange amiable remarks, under whose genial influence we begin to feel that the worst is over. Unfortunately, however, with the spread of sunshine among us there is the muttering of a storm at our backs: the butler pushes his female assistant aside with deep rumbling growls, and presently explodes with open rage at her stupidity. The diners turn and stare incredulous and amazed. The butler rushes madly from the room. The female assistant, agitated but obstinate, seizes the blanc-mange and the cream and proceeds to serve them. I shall not be believed, I fear, but I am relating simple truth: in her agitation this incredible female spills the cream in a copious shower-bath over me and my chequered neighbor, and excitedly falls to mopping it off us with her napkin, like a pantomime clown. Fortunately, we are in our travelling suits, and come out of this baptism unharmed. The incident nearly suffocates the company, for there is not a soul among them who would not sooner suffer the pangs of dissolution than laugh outright. As for me, I am nearly expiring with the merriment that consumes me and my efforts to prevent indecorous explosion. The young woman, after having wiped me dry, once more presents the cream-jug, this time with both hands, but I can only murmur faintly in my trouble, "Thanks, no—no more cream." This appears to be quite too much for the young person, who throws up her arms in despair and rushes after the butler. What tragic encounter there may have been in the servants' hall I know not. Another servant comes and carries the dinner through.

It is entertainment enough for the first morning of your stay at Tenby just to sit at the windows and observe what is there before you—the street with its passers, the beach with its strange rock-formations, the ocean thickly dotted with fishing-craft. The tide is out, and the huge black block of compact limestone called God's Rock, with its almost perpendicular strata, lies all uncovered in the morning sun—a vast curiosity-shop where children clamber about and search for strange creatures of the sea. In the pools left here and there by the receding tide are found not only crabs and periwinkles in great number, but polyps, sea-anemones, star-fishes, medusæ and the like in almost endless variety. Naturalists—who are but children older grown, with all a child's capacity for being amused by Nature—get rages of enthusiasm on them as they search the crevices of this and other like rocks at Tenby. A floor of hard yellow sand stretches away into the distance, visible for miles, owing to the circular sweep of the beach and the height from which we are looking out, and it is dotted with strollers appearing like black mice moving slowly about. The long stretch of the cliff, from its crescent shape, is clearly seen—sometimes a sheer, bare stone precipice, sometimes a steep slope covered with woods and hanging gardens and zigzag, descending walled paths.

Among those who make up the human panorama of the street under your window are types of character peculiar to Wales. One such is the peddling fisher-woman who strolls by with a basketful of bright pink prawns, which she holds out to you temptingly, looking up. The fisher-women of Tenby wear a costume differing in some respects from that of all other Welsh peasants. Instead of the glossy and expensive "beaver" worn in other parts, the Tenby women sport a tall hat of straw or badly-battered felt. Another favorite with them is a soft black slouch hat like a man's, but with a knot of ribbon in front. One of the neatest of the fisher-women is an old girl of fifty or so, who haunts your windows incessantly, and greets you with a quick-dropped courtesy whenever you walk out. She is never seen to stand still, except for the purpose of talking to a customer, but trots incessantly about; and either for this reason, or from her constant journeys to and fro between her home and the town, is given the nickname of Dame Trudge. She usually has on her back a coarse oyster-basket called a "creel," and in her hands another basket containing cooked prawns, lobsters or other temptation to the gourmand. Her dress, though it is midsummer, is warm and snug, particularly about the head and neck, as a protection against the winds of ocean; and her stout legs are encased in jet-black woollen stockings (visible below her short check petticoat), while her feet are shod with huge brogans whose inch-thick soles are heavily plated with iron. She lives ten miles from Tenby, walks to and fro always, and sleeps under her own roof every night, yet you never fail to see her there in the street when you get up in the morning. There are many other oyster-women to be seen at Tenby, but none so trim as good Dame Trudge. Here and hereabout grow the largest, if not the sweetest, oysters in Great Britain, and their cultivation is chiefly the work of the gentler sex. They do not look very gentle—or at least very frail—as you come upon a group of oyster-women in their masculine hats and boots munching their bread and cheese under a wall, but they are a good-natured race, and most respectful to their betters. Anything less suggestive of Billingsgate than the language of these Welsh fisher-women could hardly be, considering their trade.