WAITING.
Podbury-street, a small and narrow street of unimportant houses, in the south-western postal district of London, has seen various mutations of fortune. Twenty years ago, it was Podbury-street, Pimlico, and the unimportant houses were for the most part occupied by persons who contented themselves with the basement floor, and let the rest of the rooms in lodgings. The tenants of these lodgings were generally young men who were engaged in qualifying themselves for the medical profession by 'walking' the near-lying St. George's Hospital; young men of convivial temperament, who attended lectures with regular irregularity, and never thought of giving up to study or sleep the hours which they apparently imagined should be devoted to comic singing. It was the perpetual presence of these gentlemen, no doubt, which caused the private residences of Podbury-street to be dotted here and there with public-houses and tobacconists' shops. A procession of slatternly maids-of-all-work, with the door-key in one hand, and a jug either dependent from the finger or firmly grasped by the other hand, was perpetually filing through Podbury-street; and the drivers of the Royal Blue omnibuses, which at that time used it as a thoroughfare, were, from the altitude of the box, enabled to peer into the drawing-room floors, or to gaze down into the parlours, in both of which localities the same spectacle of a table covered with pewter vessels, and flanked by half-a-dozen gentlemen in their shirt-sleeves, who, using it as a leg-rest, lay back in their armchairs with clay pipes in their mouths, invariably presented itself.
The lapse of time, and the enterprise of the late Mr. Cubitt, effected a wondrous change in the condition of Podbury-street. When its denizens saw themselves gradually surrounded by squares, terraces, and crescents of enormous mansions, which were each year springing up, and converting into a suburb of palaces what had recently been a dismal swamp, they unerringly perceived that the opportunity had arrived for changing the scale of their prices and the style of their lodgings. The medical students packed up their Lares and Penates, their preparations and tobacco-jars, and moved off with them to more distant quarters; the omnibuses went round another way; the beer-shops and tobacconists disappeared as the leases fell in; finally, the name of Pimlico became unsavoury in the nostrils of the neighbourhood, and the lodging-house letters had 'Podbury-street, Eaton-square,' imprinted on their cards; for they let lodgings still, but to a very different class of tenants. Gentlemen in the government offices, who invariably put on evening-dress even if they only dined at their club, who stuck the looking-glass full of the cards of invitation which they received from great people, and who smoked dainty Russian cigarettes, but would have fainted at the notion of anything so low as a pipe; managing mammas, who brought their marriageable daughters to London during the season; rich valetudinarians, who came up to town to consult famous physicians,--such were the persons of gentility who now found a temporary abode in Podbury-street. No slatternly maids-of-all-work were to be seen now; nearly every house boasted a page, a youth whose waiting at table would have been more pleasant had he been able to rid himself of the scent of the blacking which hung around him from his early domestic duties; and during the season, when some of the managing mammas gave little dinners or small musical evenings in return for the hospitality which they had experienced, and in the hope of making a special coup for their marriageable daughters, the little passage, called by courtesy the 'hall,' would be so filled up by two footmen, that the other attendant giants in plush would have to cool their calves in the open air.
In a drawing-room floor in Podbury-street, Lady Forestfield had taken up her abode, and was living in seclusion, awaiting the result of her husband's application to the Divorce Court. After the scene with Mr. Bristow, and the degradation which she had suffered before her own servants, she felt it impossible to stay on in Seamore-place, and accordingly the next day, as soon as she was able to contemplate the immediate future with some degree of calmness, and to make up her mind as to the course she should best pursue, she had removed to these lodgings, accompanied only by a young girl who had been a housemaid at Seamore-place, had always shown a strong attachment for her mistress, and now refused to be separated from her. This girl's mother, a respectable woman, was the landlady of the house in Podbury-street, and everything was done as far as possible to insure Lady Forestfield's comfort.
As far as possible indeed, but, under the circumstances, worthy Mrs. Wilson's possible went but a little way. For the first fortnight of her tenancy, May Forestfield scarcely tasted food, scarcely lifted her head from the pillow, but lay there passing the bygone days of her life in review before her, and silently bemoaning her hard fate. The loss of wealth and position--the position, that is, which her rank had given her--affected her but little; she took no heed of them, she had no time to give them a thought, nor did she trouble herself in regard to the future; her whole time was occupied in thinking over the details of her early acquaintance with her husband, and in wondering at the infatuation which had induced her to prefer the other man to him. Not that she ignored or attempted to deceive herself in regard to his heartless cynicism and savage brutality. Every bitter word seemed burnt into her brain, each cruel deed seemed to rise before her fresh as at the time of its perpetration; and yet in her present mood she found excuses for them all, and ascribed to herself the provocation of epithets which a 'beggar in his drink' would not have fouled his mouth with.
Do you wonder at this conduct? I take it, it is common enough. May Forestfield was no peculiar character, and in some things had a certain clearness of sense and strength of mind; but she was a woman, and consequently when she found she had been deprived of something which up to this point she did not value, but which it was impossible to regain, she set about grieving after and bewailing its loss with all her strength. Never even in the early days of her acquaintance with Lord Forestfield, when uncertainty of his regard for her rendered her doubly keen in the chase, had she felt that worship, that hungering after him which now beset her.
While she was lying in this state she received the following letter, dated from Spa:
'You will have been surprised at my silence and apparent desertion of you, but I waited until I could learn what steps that scoundrel who calls himself your husband was about to take. I knew him to be too great a coward to ask satisfaction of me, but I doubted whether, knowing with what a character he himself must come into court, he would venture to claim the aid of the law. I learn now that he has done so, and that in a short time you are likely to be free. His plots were too skilfully concocted, his spies too carefully trained, to allow of there being any doubt in the matter; the court will pronounce for the divorce, and he will be at liberty to carry to its end a pursuit in which he has been long engaged.
'Blinded by my passion for you, I have done you a grievous wrong, for which there is but one reparation. That reparation I offer you now. One line from you will bring me at once to your feet, and I swear on my honour and my name that so soon as the decree of the court is pronounced I will make you my wife.
'GUSTAVE DE TOURNEFORT.'