Anthony John

by Jerome K. Jerome

“You needn’t worry about me,” he said. “I’d have hated taking their confounded charity in any case. We must let the dad down as gently as possible. Leave it to me to break it to him. He must be used to disappointments, poor old buffer. Thank the Lord we haven’t got to worry about the mater. Tell her all that about Monk Anthony. She will love all that. Never mind the millionaire business and the House of Lords.”

Lady Coomber was a curiously shy, gentlelady, somewhat of an enigma to those who did not know her history; they included her two children. Her name had been Edith Trent. She came of old Virginia stock. Harry Coomber, then a clerk in the British Embassy, had met her in Washington where she was living with friends, both her parents being dead. They had fallen in love with one another, and the marriage was within a day or two of taking place when the girl suddenly disappeared.

Young Harry, making use of all the influence he could obtain, succeeded in tracing her. She was living in the negro quarter of New Orleans, earning her living as a school teacher. She had discovered on evidence that had seemed to her to admit of no doubt that her grandmother had been a slave. It was difficult to believe. She was a beautiful, olive-skinned girl with wavy, dark brown hair and finely chiselled features. Young Harry Coomber, madly in love with her, had tried to persuade her that even if true it need not separate them. Outside America it would not matter. He would take her abroad or return with her to England. His entreaties were unavailing. She regarded herself as unclean. She had been bred to all the Southern American’s hatred and horror of the negro race. Among her people the slightest taint of the “tar brush” was sufficient to condemn man or woman to life-long ostracism. She would have inflicted the same fate upon another, and a sense of justice compelled her not to shirk the punishment in her own case.

Five years later a circumstance came to light that proved the story false, and the long-delayed marriage took place quietly at the Sheriff’s office of a small town in Pennsylvania.

But the memory of those five years of her life, passed in what to her had been a living grave, had changed her whole character. An outcast among outcasts, she had drunk to the dregs their cup of terror and humiliation. In that city of shame, out of which for five years she had never once emerged, she had met men and women like herself: refined, cultured, educated. She had shared their long-drawn martyrdom. For her, the veil had been lifted from their tortured souls.

As a girl, she had been proud, haughty, exacting. It had been part of her charm. She came back to life a timid, gentle, sorrowful woman with a pity that would remain with her to the end for all creatures that suffered.

Left to herself, she would have joined some band of workers, as missionary, nurse or teacher—as servant in any capacity. It would not have mattered to her what so that she could have felt she was doing something towards lessening the world’s pain. She had yielded to her lover’s insistence from a sense of duty, persuaded that she owed herself to him for his faithfulness and patience. The marriage had brought disappointment to them both. She had hoped some opportunity would be afforded her of satisfying her craving to be of help if only to some few in some small corner of the earth. But her husband’s straitened means had always kept her confined to the bare struggle for existence. Another, in her place, might have been able to give at least sympathy and kindliness. But she was a woman broken in spirit. All her strength went out in her endeavours to be a good wife and mother. And even here she failed. She was of no assistance to her husband, as she knew. For business she had neither heart nor head. In society she was silent and colourless. On her husband’s accession to the baronetcy and what was left of the estate, she had made a last effort to play her part. But the solitary years on the ranch had tended to increase her shyness, and secretly she was glad of the need for economy that compelled them to live abroad more or less in seclusion. The one joy she had was in her love of birds. To gather them about her, feed them, protect them by cunning means against their host of enemies, had become the business of her life. Even in the days of poverty she had been able to do that. She had come to love The Abbey even in the short time they had occupied it. She had made of its neglected gardens a bird sanctuary. Rare species, hunted and persecuted elsewhere, had found there a shelter. At early morning and late evening her little grey-clad figure could be seen stealing softly among the deep yew hedges and the tangled shrubberies that she would not have disturbed. One could always tell her whereabouts by the fluttering of wings above her in the air—the babel of sweet voices that heralded her coming.

Her children had never been told her story. She had exacted that as a promise. Though her reason had been satisfied that the rumour told against her had been false, the haunting fear that it yet might be true remained with her. She would not have it passed on to them lest it should shadow their lives as it had darkened hers. Rather than that she was content that they should grow up wondering at the difference between her and other mothers, at her lack of interest in their youthful successes and ambitions; at her strange aloofness from the things that excited their fears and hopes.

As Jim had said, Eleanor’s marrying a blacksmith’s son would not trouble her. The story of Monk Anthony she would love. The wrong done to him would probably bring tears into the still childish eyes. The prophecy of his millions and his seat in the House of Lords would not interest her.