GATHERING A FEW THREADS.
Is there a more melancholy place than the street in which you have lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the "banquet-hall deserted:" than the empty chair; than the bed where Death found the friend you loved?
The Rue Millevoye is all this to me. I avoid it. If any cabman wants to make a short cut that way I stop him. Mrs. Rowe rests at last, in the same churchyard with the Whytes of Battersea: her faults forgiven; that dark story which troubled all her afterlife and made her son the terror of every hour, ended and forgotten.
If hers was a sad life, even cheered by the consolations of Mr. Mohun given over refreshing rounds of buttered toast; what was the gloom upon the head of Emily Sharp, whom the child of shame (was it in revenge) brought to shame? I never tread the deck of a Boulogne steamer without thinking of her sweet, loving face; I never wait for my luggage in the chilly morning at the Chemin de Fer du Nord terminus, without seeing her agony as the deserted one.
The Cockayne girls are prospering in all the comfort of maternal dignity in the genteel suburbs; and yet were they a patch upon forlorn Emmy Sharp? Miss Sophonisba, with her grand airs, in her critical letters from Paris—what kind of a heart had she? Miss Theodosia was a flirt of the vulgarest type who would have thrown up John Catt as she would throw away a two-button glove for a three-button pair, had not the Vicomte de Gars given her father to understand that he must have a very substantial dot with her. Mademoiselle Cockayne without money was not a thing to be desired, according to "his lordship."
John Catt was a rough diamond, as the reader has perceived, given to copious draughts of beer, black pipes, short sticks, prodigious shirt-collars, and music-halls. But he was a brave, honest, chivalrous lad in his coarse way. He loved Miss Theodosia Cockayne, and was seriously stricken when he left Paris, although he had tried to throw off the affair with a careless word or two. He hid his grief behind his bluntness; but she had no tears to hide. It was only when the Vicomte, after a visit to Clapham (paid much against Mr. Cockayne's will) had come to business in the plumpest manner, that the young lady had been brought to her senses by the father's observation that he was not prepared to buy a foreign viscount into the family on his own terms, and that "his lordship" would not take the young lady on her own merits, aroused Miss Theodosia's pride;—and with it the chances of John Catt revived. He took her renewed warmth for repentance after a folly. He said to himself, "She loved me all the time; and even the Vicomte was not, in the long run, proof against her affection for me." Miss Theodosia, having lost the new love, was fortunate enough to get on with the old again, and she is, I hear, reasonably happy—certainly happier than she deserves to be, as Mrs. John Catt.
I am told she is very severe upon Emma Sharp, and wonders how her sister Carrie can have the creature's portrait hung up in her morning room. But there are a few things she no longer wonders at. Carrie speaks to Lucy Rowe; kisses Lucy Rowe; puts her arm round Lucy Rowe's neck; and tumbles her baby upon Lucy Rowe's knees; and Mrs. John Catt wonders no longer. Not, I suspect, because she is fonder of Lucy now than she was in the Rue Millevoye, but because—well, I married her, as the reader, who is not a goose, has suspected long ago.
And a little Lucy writes for me, in big round hand, her mother guiding the pen—
THE END.
LONDON:
SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.