The air felt close and heavy—oh, so heavy, the girls thought, after the fresh, pure breezes of Invermay! In fact, there seemed to be no air at all.
Their sweetness and gentleness of manner, together with their undeniable beauty, attracted and won the—at first suspicious—landlady, who bustled about and prepared tea for them. She, however, put great weight upon an introduction coming through her nephew Joe; and her confidence grew apace when she found Mary scrupulously correct in her weekly payments, and others of every kind, and thus she complacently tolerated the presence of Jack in her household. To have parted with him would have stricken Mary's heart.
Ere the first day of their residence with her was past, they were in full possession of Mrs. Fubsby's personal history, which she thrust upon them with that loquacious communicativeness peculiar to the English lower orders—at least so much of it as she cared to tell—how her maiden name was Seraphina-Mary-Ann—how she had married a gentleman, who, however, did not behave as such in the end, as he had left her years ago, and she was now reduced to have lodgers or boarders, and so forth.
Coming from a secluded country place like their Perthshire parish, Mary and Ellinor had no real idea of the world or of life, as it is called—more than all, the bustling, busy, tearing, selfish, and suspicious life of London, or the mighty and close race for existence there. They knew not yet that without friends and introductions employments in teaching music or drawing were all but unattainable.
A few days passed on. Advertisements were studied daily and replied to sedulously; but no answer came. They could not know that for each of these employments there might be two thousand applicants! So their poor hearts grew hopeless and weary—often sick with alarm as money dwindled away; and day by day they looked out, either on the frowsy churchyard, where not a blade of grass grew between the closely packed tombstones, or the equally frowsy canal, with its barges cleaving the muddy water and oozy slime; and as they were totally ignorant of London, for a time, the poor girls supposed it must be all like their then sordid surroundings.
Paddington, where Francois Thurot, the famous corsair, won the bride in whose arms he died in battle, and where in the last century the Guards coming from Hounslow were wont to halt for the night, prior to marching for the little London of George II., was, some fifty years ago, a kind of suburban village, a rural and pretty place, with its grassy green and the old 'Wheatsheaf' Tavern, where Ben Jonson drank his beer, even after its quaint Gothic church, where the Sheldons were entombed by its solemn yew-tree, was replaced by the present hideous square edifice, with its pillared portico and trumpery cupola starting from amid that veritable stoneyard of graveslabs, among which lie the remains of the beautiful Mrs. Siddons and of the luckless painter Haydon—an odious and festering place, where, Dr. Ashburner tells us in his work on 'The Dynamics,' his nervous patients were wont to see nightly the pale and lambent dead-lights rising from the corrupted soil.
Whether it was the result of all she had undergone of late, or that the atmosphere of the place affected Ellinor, Mary never knew; but her colour faded out—the ruddy tint left her lips, and her dark hazel eyes grew dull as she became prostrated by a nervous illness, which added sorely to the cares, the troubles, and expenses of the latter, for Ellinor required wine and many little luxuries.
Energy seemed to have left her. Ellinor was but twenty, but already her life seemed over and done with!
And now that her secret love affair was apparently a thing completely of the past, Ellinor showed Mary the gift of Sir Redmond, and bursting into a flood of hysterical tears told her all—of the baffled elopement; and then Mary, catching up Jack, covered the dog with kisses.
There were at least two reasons why no letters ever reached Dr. Wodrow, and that, to him, the movements of the sisters seemed involved in painful mystery.