Johnny Ludlow, Third Series

I

We found her out through Mr. Brandon’s nephew, Roger Bevere, a medical student, who gave his people trouble, and one day got his arm and head broken. Mr. Brandon and the Squire were staying in London at the Tavistock Hotel. I, Johnny Ludlow, was also in London, visiting Miss Deveen. News of the accident was brought to Mr. Brandon; the young man had been carried into No. 60, Gibraltar Terrace, Islington, and a doctor named Pitt was attending him.

We went to see him at once. A narrow, quiet street, as I recollected well, this Gibraltar Terrace, the dwellings it contained facing each other, thirty in a row. No. 60 proved to be the same house to which we had gone once before, when inquiring about the illness of Francis Radcliffe, and Pitt was the same doctor. It was the same landlady also; I knew her as soon as she opened the door; a slender, faded woman, long past middle life, with a pink flush on her thin cheeks, and something of the lady about her.

“What an odd thing, Johnny!” whispered the Squire, recognizing the landlady as well as the house. “Mapping, I remember her name was.”

Mr. Brandon went upstairs to his nephew. We were shown by her into the small parlour, which looked as faded as it had looked on our last visit, years before: as faded as she was. While relating to us how young Bevere’s accident occurred, she had to run away at a call from upstairs.

“Looks uncommonly careworn, doesn’t she, Johnny!” remarked the Squire. “Seems a nice sort of person, though.”

“Yes, sir. I like her. Does it strike you that her voice has a home-ring in it? I think she must be from Worcestershire.”

“A home-ring—Worcestershire!” retorted he. “It wouldn’t be you, Johnny, if you did not get up some fancy or other. Here she comes! You are not from Worcestershire, are you, ma’am?” cried the Squire, going to the root of the question at once, in his haste to convict my fancy of its sins.

“Yes, I am, sir,” she replied; and I saw the pink flush on her cheeks deepen to crimson. “I knew you, sir, when I was a young girl, many years ago. Though I should not have recognized you when you were last here, but that you left your card. We lived at Islip, sir; at that pretty cottage with the yellow roses round the porch. You must remember Dolly Grape.”

“But you are not Dolly Grape!” returned the Squire, pushing up his spectacles.

“Yes, sir, I was Dolly Grape. Your mother knew us well; so did you.”

“Goodness bless my heart!” softly cried the Squire, gazing at her as if the news were too much for him. And then, starting up impulsively, he grasped her hand and gave it a hearty shake. A sob seemed to take her throat. The Squire sat back again, and went on staring at her.

“My father disappeared mysteriously on one of his journeys; you may remember us by that, sir.”

“To be sure I remember it—Robert Grape!” assented the Squire. “Had to do with the post-horse duty. Got as far as Bridgenorth, and was never heard of again. And it is really you—Dolly Grape! And you are living here—letting lodgings! I’m afraid the world has not been overkind to you.”

She shook her head; tears were running down her faded cheeks.

“No, it has not, sir,” she answered, as she wiped them away with her handkerchief. “I have had nothing but ups and downs in life since leaving Worcester: sad misfortunes: sometimes, I think, more than my share. Perhaps you heard that I married, sir—one Mr. Mapping?”

The Squire nodded slightly. He was too busy gazing at her to pay attention to much else.

“I am looking at you to see if I can trace the old features of the old days,” he said, “and I do now; they grow upon my memory; though you were but a slip of a girl when I used to see you. I wonder I did not recognize you at first.”

“And I wonder that you can even recognize me now, sir,” she returned: “trouble and grief have so much altered me. I am getting old, too.”

“Have you lived in this house long?”

“Nearly ten years, sir. I live by letting my rooms.”

The Squire’s voice took a tone of compassion.

“It can’t be much of a living, once the rent and taxes are paid.”

Mrs. Mapping’s mild blue eyes, that seemed to the Squire to be of a lighter tinge than of yore, wore a passing sadness. Any one able to read it correctly might have seen she had her struggles.

“Are you a widow?”

“I—call myself one, sir,” she replied, with hesitation.

“Call yourself one!” retorted the Squire, for he liked people to be straightforward in their speech. “My good woman, you are a widow, or you are not one.”

“I pass for one, sir.”

“Now, what on earth do you mean?” demanded he. “Is your husband—Mapping—not dead?”

“He was not dead when I last heard of him, sir; that’s a long while ago. But he is not my husband.”

“Not your husband!” echoed the Squire, pushing up his spectacles again. “Have you and he quarrelled and parted?”

Any countenance more pitifully sad than Mrs. Mapping’s was at that moment, I never wish to see. She stood smoothing down her black silk apron (which had a slit in it) with trembling fingers.

“My history is a very painful one,” she said at last in a low voice. “I will tell it if you wish; but not this morning. I should like to tell it you, sir. It is some time since I saw a home-face, and I have often pictured to myself some kind friendly face of those old happy days looking at me while I told it. Different days from these.”

“These cannot be much to boast of,” repeated the Squire. “It must be a precarious sort of living.”

“Of course it fluctuates,” she said. “Sometimes my rooms are full, at other times empty. One has to put the one against the other and strive to tide over the hard days. Mr. Pitt is very good to me in recommending the rooms to medical students; he is a good-natured man.”

“Oh, indeed! Listen to that, Johnny! Pitt good-natured! Rather a loose man, though, I fancy, ma’am.”

“What, Mr. Pitt? Sir, I don’t think so. He has a surgery close by, and gets a good bit of practice–”

The rest was interrupted by Mr. Pitt himself; he came to say we might go up to Mr. Brandon in the sick-room. We had reason to think ill enough of Pitt in regard to the Radcliffe business; but the Squire could not tackle him about the past offhand, this not being just the time or place for it. Later, when he did so, it was found that we had been misjudging the man. Pitt had not joined Stephen Radcliffe in any conspiracy; and the false letter, telling of Frank’s death at Dr. Dale’s, had not been written by him. So we saw that it must have been concocted by Stephen himself.

“Any way, if I did write such a letter, I retained no consciousness of it afterwards,” added Pitt, with candour. “I am sorry to say, Mr. Todhetley, that I gave way to drink at that time, and I know I was often not myself. But I do not think it likely that I wrote it; and as to joining Mr. Radcliffe in any conspiracy against his brother, why, I would not do such a thing, drunk or sober, and I never knew it had been done.”

“You have had the sense to pull up,” cried the Squire, in reference to what Pitt had admitted.

“Yes,” answered Pitt, in a voice hardly above a whisper. “And I never think of what I might have become by this time, but for pulling up, but I thank God.”

These allusions, however, may perhaps only puzzle the reader. And it is not with Mr. Pitt, his virtues or his failings, that this paper concerns itself, but with the history of Dorothy Grape.

We must take it up from the time Dorothy arrived in London with her husband, Alick Mapping, after their marriage at Worcester, as already narrated. The sum of three hundred pounds, owned by Dolly, passed into Mr. Mapping’s possession on the wedding-day, for she never suggested such a thing as that it should be settled on herself. The proceeds, arising from the sale of the furniture, were also transmitted to him later by the auctioneer. Thus he had become the proprietor of Dolly, and of all her worldly goods. After that, he and she faded out of Worcestershire memory, and from the sight of Worcestershire people—except for one brief meeting, to be mentioned presently.

The home in London, to which her husband conveyed her, and of which he had boasted, Dolly found to be lodgings. Lodgings recently engaged by him, a sitting-room and bedroom, in the Blackfriars Road. They were over a shop, kept by one Mrs. Turk, who was their landlady. “I would not fix upon a house, dear, without you,” he said; and Dolly thanked him gratefully. All he did was right to her.

She was, as he had told her she would be, happy as a cricket, though bewildered with the noisy bustle of the great town, and hardly daring to venture alone into its busy streets, more crowded than was Worcester Cathedral on the Sundays Mr. Benson preached. The curious elucidation at Gloucester of what her father’s fate had been was a relief to her mind, rather than the contrary, once she had got over its sadness; though the still more curious doubt about her brother Tom, whispered to her by Elizabeth Deavor on her wedding morning, was rarely absent from her thoughts. But Dolly was young, Dolly was in love, and Dolly was intensely happy. Her husband took her to the theatres, to Vauxhall, and to other places of amusement; and Dolly began to think life was going to be a happy valley into which care would never penetrate.

This happy state of things changed. Mr. Mapping took to be a great deal away from home, sometimes for weeks together. He laid the fault upon his business; travellers in the wine trade had to go all over England, he said. Dolly was not unreasonable and accepted the explanation cheerfully.

But something else happened now and then that was less satisfactory. Mr. Mapping would appear at home in a condition that frightened Dolly: as if he had made the mistake of tasting the wine samples himself, instead of carrying them to his customers. Never having been brought into contact with anything of the kind in her own home, she regarded it with terror and dismay.

Then another phase of discomfort set in: money seemed to grow short. Dolly could not get from her husband what was needed for their moderate expenses; which were next to nothing when he was away from home. She cried a little one day when she wanted some badly and he told her he had none to give her. Upon which Mr. Mapping turned cross. There was no need of tears, he said: it would all come right if she did not bother. Dolly, in her secret heart, hoped he would not have to break in upon what he called their “nest-egg,” that three hundred pounds in the bank. A nest-egg which, as he had more than once assured her, it was his intention to keep intact.

Only in one thing had Mr. Mapping been arbitrary: he would not allow her to hold any communication with Worcester. When they first came to London, he forbade Dolly to write to any of her former friends, or to give them her address. “You have no relatives there,” he said, “only a few acquaintances, and I would prefer, Dolly, that you dropped them altogether.” Of course she obeyed him: though it prevented her writing to ask Elizabeth Deavor whether she had again seen Tom.

Things, despite Mr. Mapping’s assurances, did not come right. As the spring advanced, his absences became more marked and the money less plentiful. Dolly shed many tears. She knew not what to do; for, as the old song says, not e’en love can live on flowers. It was a very favourite song of Dolly’s, and her tuneful voice might often be heard trilling it through from beginning to end as she sat at work.

Dolly’s love did not fly away, though the ugly witch, Poverty, was certainly showing herself. Mrs. Turk grew uneasy. Dolly assured her there was no occasion for that; that if the worst came to the worst, they must break into the “nest-egg” which they had lying by in the Bank of England—the three hundred pounds left her by her mother.

One bright day in May, Dolly, pining for the outdoor sunshine, betook herself to Hyde Park, a penny roll in her pocket for her dinner. The sun glittered in the blue sky, the air was warm, the birds chirped in the trees and hopped on the green grass. Dolly sat on a bench enjoying the sweetness and tranquillity, thinking how very delightful life might be when no evil stepped in to mar it.

Two Quakeress ladies approached arm-in-arm, talking busily. Dolly started up with a cry: for the younger one was Elizabeth Deavor. She had come to London with a friend for the May meetings. The two girls were delighted to see each other, but Elizabeth was pressed for time.

“Why did thee never write to me, Dorothy? I had but one letter from thee, written at Gloucester, telling me, thee knows, all about thy poor father.” And, to this question, Dolly murmured some lame excuse.

“I wanted to write to thee, but I had not thy address. I promised thee I would look out for Tom—”

“And have you seen him again?” interrupted Dolly in excitement. “Oh, Elizabeth?”

“I have seen the boy again, but it was not Tom: and I am very sorry that my fancy misled me and caused me to excite thy hopes. It was only recently, in Fourth month. I saw the same boy standing in the same place before thy old gate, his arms folded, and looking at the house as before, in the moonlight. I ran out, and caught his arm, and held it while he told me who he was and why he came there. It was not thy brother, Dorothy, but the likeness to him is marvellous.”

“No!—not he?” gasped Dolly, woefully disappointed.

“It is one Richard East,” said Elizabeth; “a young sailor. He lived with his mother in that house before she died, when he was a little boy; and when he comes home from a voyage now, and is staying with his friends in Melcheapen Street, he likes to go up there and have a good look at it. This is all. As I say, I am sorry to have misled thee. We think there cannot be a doubt that poor Tom really lost his life that night in the canal. And art thee nicely, Dorothy?—and is thy husband well? Thee art looking thin. Fare thee well.”

Summer passed, Dolly hardly knew how. She was often reduced to straits, often and often went dinnerless. Mrs. Turk only had a portion of what was due to her by fits and starts. Mr. Mapping himself made light of troubles; they did not seem to touch him much; he was always in spirits and always well dressed.