By ISABELLA FYVIE MAYO, Author of “Other People’s Stairs,” “Her Object in Life,” etc.
“WHERE IS TRUTH?”
essie appeared. It was marvellous to note how the traces of her recent outbreak had nearly disappeared. She looked almost her old decorous self, save for a slight tearfulness and quivering of the lips, the result of some conversation which had been passing between her and Miss Latimer downstairs.
She and her cousin looked at each other. Jessie’s eyes might fall, shamed, before Lucy, but they met the other woman’s boldly, almost with a scowl.
“Come, Jessie,” said the woman, in a wheedling tone, “I’m sorry to hear what’s happened; and she says you’re to come away with me at once.”
Jessie took no notice of her, but turned to Mrs. Challoner.
“Well, m’m,” she said, “I beg your pardon for anything that’s happened. I’ve often wondered what you thought o’ me speaking so much o’ the master, an’ me never set eyes on him. But ’twas because I was a-thinkin’ o’ you, an’ a-prayin’ you may never know what it is to be a widow-woman. I’d have kep’ all right if I’d got into such a place as this when Alick was took—that I do believe—but there I was, set down with those grumpy old people, with never a pleasant word; and there wasn’t any comfort to be had but just a sip of what they was always a-sippin’ themselves. An’ it was worse when the old lady was left alone.”
“And yet the minister and the lawyer thought so well of you, Jessie,” said Lucy, with grave reproach.
“I was all right so far as the lawyer ever knew,” Jessie answered. “An’ as for the minister, he sipped his drappie too, an’ he never saw me the waur o’ mine, which is mair than I can say o’ him.”
“Hush, Jessie,” said Mrs. Challoner. “But how could you do your duty to your aged mistress if you got into such a state as you were yesterday?”
“I never did that till I went to live with that woman there,” she answered, turning on the cousin with ill-repressed fury. “When they asked me up to London they knew I’d got my nice little legacy. She wouldn’t have let her husband invite me but for that!” she interpolated bitterly. “And they didn’t want me to go till it was all spent, at least she didn’t!” she said, with an acrimonious emphasis on the feminine pronoun. “And she used to treat me plentiful, an’ me just pinin’ with loneliness and homesickness; and then when my money was gone there I was, an’ she run me into debt, and turned up here and bullied my first month’s wages out of me, an’ when you came down on Christmas Eve, like an angel, and put my next month’s wages into my hand, thinks I to myself, somebody’ll turn up to-morrow and get it all away, an’ I thought I’d just run out and buy myself something in case I got a cold, or was too low to get well through my cooking, and then somehow that picture that hangs on the kitchen wall (‘The Empty Chair,’ m’m, it’s called) was just too much for my spirits, and I took a drop and lost my reckoning, and there it was! Oh, m’m, may you never know what it is to be a poor widow-woman!”
How much was merely maudlin, or how much was the incoherent cry of a weak soul that had lost itself in loneliness and neglect, Lucy could not decide. It was possibly less the woman’s words than the chord of Lucy’s own life which they reached, that brought tears to Lucy’s eyes.
“I’m not asking you to give me another trial, m’m,” went on the miserable creature, in a tone which yet had something of a forlorn hope in it.
Lucy could not answer, but her head gave a half-involuntary shake.
“I’m not asking you to give me another trial, m’m,” she repeated. “It’s not for the likes o’ you. I see well enough what your life’s got to be, and you’ve quite enough to do for yourself and the dear little master.”
“Oh, Mrs. Morison,” cried Lucy earnestly, “won’t you make an effort to put this evil thing away? Though you must go out of this house, I will do all I can to help you. I will try to get you into a Home, where they will take care of you and help you to do right.”
Mrs. Morison did not answer at once. Perhaps a good impulse and an evil habit contended within her. The habit conquered, as alas! a habit generally does.
“I don’t need to go into a Home,” she said, with a soft stubbornness. “I’ve just got to make up my mind to keep right. I don’t believe in Homes. I’ve been, in a way, my own mistress all my life, being so much trusted. If I take myself in hand, that’ll do.”
But what a big “if” that was! And what weakened will can ever raise itself effectually, save by its first effort placing it in the good grasp of a stronger will? Yet Lucy could urge no more. She could only remind Mrs. Morison that if she really meant to keep her word and to struggle on in honest sobriety, Lucy would stand her friend, so far as she could, in truth and uprightness, would even recommend her as a worker to any whose circumstances and sense of duty might incline them to extend another chance to her, after hearing of her failing and its possible recurrence.
Mrs. Morison thanked Lucy for so much “kindness.” But, even as she did so, Lucy felt sadly sure that it would never be claimed. Then Mrs. Morison said “good-bye,” and she and her cousin went away together. It had been arranged that her boxes should be sent after her by a carrier. Despite the acerbity the widow had shown towards her relative, and despite the fact that one or the other of the pair had been telling grievous untruths of the other, Lucy saw that they went down the street laying their heads together in mutual confidences as if nothing had come between them.
She turned from the window, so weary and disheartened that she felt as if she had been beaten, body and soul. It was her first close experience of the baffling contest with natures lacking all bottom of truth and principle—natures like bogs, greened over with sentiment and seeming, luring us to trust our foot upon them only to plunge us in depression and defilement. It seemed to Lucy as if the fruitless arguments and pleas of the last hour had taken more energy out of her than even the long strain of yesterday. She did not yet realise that where the nerves are concerned the whole of the back bill is always added on to each fresh item.
As Lucy turned from the window she felt something at her feet. Stooping in the twilight, she picked up the bright little ball, which Jessie Morison had brought in for Hugh on Christmas Eve!
It was but a trifle, yet it finally overcame the weary lady. Oh, the pity of it! Oh, the waste of poor human nature that still had so many good qualities in it! Oh, the awful mixture of good and evil, of selfishness and kindliness. Talk of the good in evil, and the evil in good—as if there was some compensation in that weird mingling—why, it is this very mingling which tries our fortitude and faith more than anything else, and God sees more of this mingling than any human eye can see. And God can bear it because He is God and is all goodness, and knows the end. We can but lean our staggering strength against His everlasting arm, assured that it can gather up what mortal powers must drop.
Miss Latimer came into the parlour presently and found Lucy sitting in the gathering darkness. The old governess was a wise little woman, and instead of lighting the gas, she stirred the fire into a ruddy, dancing blaze. Then she called Hugh, and sent him in “to talk to mamma.” By-and-by she reappeared again, with the tea-tray and a delicious smell of toast.
That recalled Lucy to her duties. She sprang up, protesting against Miss Latimer having gone to work by herself, and she lit the gas and closed the curtains. They had a cosy little meal, at which, for Hugh’s sake, not a word was said of the recent domestic catastrophe.
When his mother took him off to bed, and heard him—though not without a significant pondering pause—join “Mrs. Morison’s” name in his prayer “for papa and mamma,” she remembered all Charlie had said to her, and felt that the child’s simple affection in its ignorance and blindness may reflect the heart of God more clearly than ours, blurred with inevitable criticisms and repulsions.
When she had kissed him and was leaving the room, he called her back.
“Mamma!”
She turned at once, but he paused a moment. The child’s sensitive nature had realised the moral atmosphere about him sufficiently to feel that storms were there.
“Mamma!” again. Then in a whisper, “Will Mrs. Morison come back to-morrow?”
“No, my dear.”
“Mamma, will she ever come back?”
“I do not know, dear. I fear not. If she gets better I think she will.”
“Is she ill, mamma?”
“Yes, dear; her soul is very ill. We must be very sorry for her.”
When she returned to the parlour Miss Latimer was sitting there. She had taken a sock from Lucy’s work-basket and was darning it.
“Can you stay with me to-night, dear friend?” asked Mrs. Challoner.
“Yes,” she said; “to-night and to-morrow night. Then I shall have to go home.”
There was no need for inquiry why. Miss Latimer was virtually retired as a governess; but her tiny income sorely needed a supplement. She secured this by reading aloud for two hours every morning to a blind lady, whose house was not far from her lodgings, though a long way from the Challoners’. The Christmas holidays, which had brought relatives to visit her blind patroness, had set her free for three days.
“It is terribly hard that the few holidays of your industrious life should be wasted as these have been,” remarked Lucy.
Miss Latimer laughed. She was a quaint little body, with a flashing of energy about her which imparted something youthful to her sixty years.
“As it was bound to happen at all, my dear,” she said, “I am glad it happened in my holidays, so that I have been free to be a little helpful. Make the most of me while you have me. What step are you going to take next?”
“My first step,” answered Lucy, a hard note sounding in her voice, “is to destroy the last pages of my letter to Charlie. I had not brought ‘Mrs. Morison’ into it till Christmas Eve, so I can let it stand as it is up to that date. I see that I ended my instalment of the 22nd by writing that ‘Miss Latimer, Mr. Somerset, and Tom Black are to spend Christmas with me, and we shall all talk about you and send you our best wishes.’ This just comes to the very end of a page, so I shall put in half a sheet without a date with just my last messages. I will leave Christmas as in the future, where it was when I wrote that. What a mockery it is to read what I wrote on Christmas Eve!” She covered it over hastily, tore the sheet into tiny fragments, and dropped them into the fire.
“Is this the first letter you are sending to your husband?” asked Miss Latimer, to give a turn to Lucy’s bitter thoughts.
“My first letter—yes,” Lucy answered, “because Captain Grant was not quite sure where the ship would touch. But to every port where she may call I have sent postcards just assuring him of our well-being. Then, if he can call for those, he goes on with an easy mind, and if he can’t, why, there is really nothing lost.”
“You have not heard from him yet?” inquired the old lady.
“No,” said Lucy, “not yet. Charlie said he should keep a letter always in progress, and despatch it home whenever that was possible. I begin to look for one every morning now.”
They sat in silence for a while, then Lucy said abruptly—
“That poor woman! Her words haunt me! Perhaps, if she had not been left a widow, she would now be a respected and worthy member of society.”
Miss Latimer looked up surprised. Lucy, who was gazing into the fire, did not catch the expression, but went on—
“Did you have much talk with her? She came up from the kitchen crying. You had made an impression on her. But what will rouse her will? To-day she seemed to have no will—only wilfulness. And it was so awful to have to speak to a woman with white hair as I was obliged to speak to her—a woman who has been through trials and sorrows of which I know nothing.”
“I had some conversation with her,” said Miss Latimer. “She was inclined to be confidential. But what makes you think that, if her husband had lived, she would not have been as she is?”
“Because she said she got into the bad habit through living in loneliness and dulness with people who were inclined to be topers themselves,” answered Lucy. “One can understand how the temptation could come, and how gradually one might slide down too deeply at last to readily recover one’s footing.”
Miss Latimer looked puzzled and hesitated.
“But, my dear,” she said, “she told me that she first took to drinking because her husband was such a terrible drunkard and ill-used her so cruelly. She said to me, ‘Ah, m’m, you single ladies don’t know what misery is, and mustn’t be hard on them that do!’ Then she said she had kept straight for years because she lived with miserly old folks, who never had liquor in their house, and who lived two miles from any licensed premises. She said she thought she’d got such a mastery over herself that she might venture to take “a little support” through her Christmas cooking, but that the old craving came and re-enslaved her before she was aware.”
The two friends’ eyes met, and they looked at each other with the deprecatory, half-alarmed, half-shamed expression which always comes on honest faces at any new discovery of human duplicity.
“What is true? What is false?” wailed Lucy. “It seems to me that she adapted her stories to what she thought would best reach and touch you or me. True, sometimes the same story sounds differently when differently told and differently repeated. But I cannot see how these two versions can have the same original. This awful falseness, Miss Latimer, is even worse than the drunkenness.”
“My dear,” said the old lady, “it is the moral quagmire from which the drunkenness springs, and, therefore, is ‘worse’ just as a quagmire is ‘worse’ than any coarse weed which springs from it—being bound to bear such weeds, if not of one type, then of another.”
“It seems to me as if she was all dramatic impersonation,” Lucy observed; “and still one cannot help loving and yearning over the cheerful-faced working-woman seated knitting before her kitchen fire with her dead husband’s lover-gift of a Bible lying on the dresser behind her.”
Miss Latimer looked at Lucy.
“Just now,” she said, “I found that Bible; it was in the dustpan, with a good many leaves roughly torn out.”
“She must have done that while she was—not herself,” said Lucy.
“No,” Miss Latimer persisted, “it was lying on the dresser all right this morning long after she knew perfectly well what she was doing. It must have been done about noon to-day.”
“But why should she do that?” urged Lucy. “Whatever is amiss with her now, and whatever may be the truth of her history, why should she suddenly and wantonly destroy something which she has evidently cherished for so many years?”
Miss Latimer shook her head.
“My dear,” she answered, “I begin to suspect that this poor Bible may have been but one of the ‘properties’ belonging to what you aptly call her ‘dramatic impersonation’ of the respectable, faithful widow. I would not be at all surprised if she picked it up at a second-hand bookstall, and matched her story to its names and dates. Don’t think me cynical. As a governess, I have lived in many houses, and have come across some strange adventurers. How do we know that her name was ever Jessie Milne, or that she was really a Mrs. Morison?”
“There were her credentials from Edinburgh,” explained Lucy; and then she told Miss Latimer all about the lawyer’s letter and the minister’s testimonial.
Miss Latimer sat and pondered.
“I may be wrong,” she said, “I may be carrying my suspicions too far. We are all apt to do that when all firm ground of confidence is taken from our feet. But, my dear Lucy, you should have never taken her in on the strength of written characters of however fair seeming.”
“But how unjust that would be!” pleaded Lucy. “It would mean that if a woman left the neighbourhood where she had worked, or if employers themselves left it, then she would not be able to get another place.”
“No, no, Lucy,” explained the old lady, “there is a difference. A personal interview between past and future employers is always best, because, apart from the easiness with which questions are asked and answered, it has an environment which tells a tale of itself. But it is quite true that this cannot always be. Then the new mistress should always address herself directly to the people willing to give ‘the character.’ Even that leaves some opening for chicanery; but it is small indeed compared with that which attends ready-made certificates. You yourself should have written to the doctor and the lawyer.”
“I did not like the idea of the written character,” said Lucy, in self-excuse. “I think I might have hesitated to take it from a supposed former mistress. But these were professional men; they might not have cared to be troubled with letters of inquiry in such matters; and then, too, when she left Scotland, she had not thought of going at once in quest of a situation. I assure you those letters seemed to be the productions of educated men, and the paper they were on was stamped with the lawyer’s address and with the name of the minister’s manse.”
“As I tell you, my dear, I may be going too far,” said Miss Latimer; “but I assure you my experience in other cases justifies it. Do you remember the addresses given?”
“No, I do not,” answered poor Lucy, who began to feel that she had been woefully unwary. “And oh, if you had only seen how nice this Mrs. Morison looked among all those other women, I’m sure you too would have felt ready to trust her! How can one understand such people, who know so well what ought to be, and who have it in them to simulate it so perfectly when it suits them for a time, but who keep their other nature all the same, always ready to spring to the front? How are we to realise which is really they? Is it possible that they themselves are not quite sure? Why, I really thought that the only fault to be detected in Mrs. Morison was just a touch of self-satisfaction, a little turning of the Pharisee’s nose returning thanks for superiority over others.”
Miss Latimer shook her head.
“Ah, my dear,” she said, “you are diving deep into the abysses of human nature. The questions you ask may be also put concerning very different people from this poor woman. Perhaps such questions might be asked, in a degree, concerning all of us—at least, until we begin to put them to ourselves and to know all that is meant by God’s desiring ‘truth in the inward parts.’ Mrs. Morison tells lies. She is, according to my belief, a very deliberate and skilful deceiver; but far be it from me to say that her hypocrisies may not reveal what was once her ideal—ay, and that, in some vague way, she may still mean to live up to it—only foredoomed to failure because she begins with false pretences. My dear, we talk about criminals and weak and fallen people of all sorts as ‘having our common human nature’; but, talk as we may, we rarely realise it. The temptations they have are so different that this difference blinds us to the truth that their thoughts and feelings and failures are made of the same stuff as our own. Mrs. Morison is a deceiver of others; but it is quite possible that she is also a self-deceiver.”
“I cannot see what interest such a capable woman could have in taking trouble to lay deliberate plots of deception to get into such a place, and then taking no more trouble to keep up the deception, and so losing it in two months,” said Lucy. “What has she made by it? She has done lots of work, and has earned less than three pounds.”
“There it is!” cried Miss Latimer. “You must remember we are looking at it from what you have believed and from what has happened. From all that transpires of the cousin’s lack of truthfulness, it is quite likely that Mrs. Morison had not been out of a place for many days when you took her. We will, for convenience’ sake, grant that the Edinburgh story is true; then if she gets another place to-morrow (as with her appearance she easily may) she will simply tell the same story she told you, and will ignore her experience of your place as if it had never been. And it is quite likely she will go to the new place—as it is likely she came to you—believing that she means to turn over a new leaf and to be what she seems. In the meantime we must leave off talking about her and consider what you are to do next. You must get another servant as soon as possible. You cannot be without help in this house, apart from the engagements that begin with the New Year.”
“I won’t go back to that registry office,” said Lucy stoutly. “Shall I advertise?”
Miss Latimer mused.
(To be continued.)