“What if the mother’s heart has been yearning for her lost lamb in all these years, and by bringing her back I might make two lives happy?”
“Let the mother come to the child. Let her who has something to forgive be the one to make the advance. It is so hard for the sinner to go back. She must be helped back. If the mother were a woman with a motherly heart, she would have been searching for her lost child in all those years, instead of wrapping herself up in her sorrow at home.”
“I own I have thought that.”
“Of course you have. You can’t think otherwise as a sensible man. I have no patience with such a mother. As for Marian, I think she may get on very well as she is. I am fond of her, and I believe she is fond of me. She earns from twelve to fourteen shillings a week. She pays five shillings for her room, and she lives upon eightpence a day. I needn’t tell you that the teapot is her pièce de résistance. Her most substantial meal on some days consists of a couple of scones from the Scotch baker’s, or a penny loaf and a hard-boiled egg; but when I go to see her she gives me an admirable cup of tea, and positively delicious bread and butter. Her room is the very pink and pattern of neatness. All the instincts of a lady show themselves in that poor little two-pair back. She has curtained the iron bedstead and the window with white dimity, which is always clean and fresh, for she washes and irons it with her own hands. She generally contrives to have a bunch of flowers upon her work-table, and, hard as she works, her room is always free from litter. She has about half a dozen books of her own upon the mantelshelf, her Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Charles Lamb’s Essays, Goldsmith’s Poems, and the ‘Idyls of the King’—well-worn volumes, which have been her companions for years. She borrows other books from the Free Library, and her mind is always being cultivated. I really believe she is happy. She is one of those rare individuals who can afford to live alone. Do not disturb her lightly.”
“You are right perhaps. The mother struck me as by no means a pleasant character, always supposing that Mrs. Porter is her mother, of which I myself have very little doubt.”
Theodore made no further effort to bring mother and daughter together, but he met Marian from time to time at Miss Newton’s tea-parties, and acquaintance ripened into friendship. Her refinement and her musical talent sustained his interest in her. He talked to her of books sometimes when they happened to be sitting side by side at the tea-table, and he was surprised at the extent of her reading. She confessed, when he questioned her, that she was in the habit of stealing two or three hours from the night for her books.
“I find that I can do with a few hours’ sleep,” she said, “if I lie down happy in my mind after being absorbed in a delightful book. My books are my life. They give me the whole universe for my world, though I have to live in one room, and to follow a very monotonous calling.”
He admired the refinement of that purely intellectual nature, but he admired still more that admirable tact which regulated her intercourse with Miss Newton’s homelier friends. Never by word or tone or half-involuntary glance did Marian betray any consciousness of superiority to the uncultivated herd. She shared their interests, she sympathized with their vexations, she neither smiled nor shuddered at Cockney twang or missing aspirate.
Winter brightened into spring, with all its varieties of good and evil; east winds rushing round street-corners, and cutting into the pedestrian like a knife; west winds enfolding him like a balmy caress, and bringing the perfume of violets, the vivid yellow of daffodils into the wilderness of brick and stone; rainy days, grey, monotonous, dismal, hanging on the soul like a curtain of gloom and hopelessness. These made up the sum of Theodore’s outer life. Within he had his books, his ambition, and his faithful love. He told himself that it was a hopeless love; but there are many things which a man tells himself, and tries to believe, and yet does not believe. The very human longing for blessedness is too strong for human wisdom. Where there is love, there is always hope.
He had grown accustomed to his life in chambers; and albeit he was much attached to his father, and was amiably tolerant of his brother and sisters, he could but feel that this solitary existence better suited his temper than residence in a family circle. At Dorchester it had been very difficult for him to be alone. Out of business hours his sisters considered that they had a claim upon him, a right to waste his life in the most trivial amusements and engagements. If he withdrew himself from their society, and that of their numerous dearest friends, they accused him of grumpiness, and thought themselves ill-treated. He had chafed against the waste of life, the utter futility of those engagements which prevented his keeping level with the intellectual growth of the age. He felt that his youth was slipping from under him, leaving him stationary, when every pulse of his being beat impatiently for progress. And now it was pleasant to him to be his own master, free to make the best possible use of his days. He found a few friends in London whose society suited him, and only a few. Among these the man of whom he saw most was Cuthbert Ramsay, a young Scotchman, who had been his chief companion at Cambridge, who had studied medicine for three years in Leipsic and Paris with Ludwig and Pasteur, and who was now at St. Thomas’s. The two young men ran up against each other in that main artery of London life, the Strand, in the January twilight, and renewed the friendly intimacy of that bygone time when Ramsay had been at Trinity and Dalbrook at Trinity Hall. They dined together at a restaurant on the evening of that first meeting, and after dinner Theodore took his friend to his chambers, where the two sat late into the night talking over college reminiscences of hall and river.