Edina: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

Alfred came in almost as he spoke, a can of milk in his hand. By sending to a dairy half-a-mile off, Edina had discovered that she could get pure milk cheaper than any left by the milkman: so Alfred went for it morning and night.

"It is so jolly hard!" exclaimed he, with a glowing face, alluding to the ice in the roads. "The slides are beautiful."

"Don't get sliding when you are carrying the milk," advised Edina. "Take off your cap and comforter, Alfred."

She was cutting slices of bread for him to toast. Unused to hard fare, the children could not eat dry bread with any relish: so, when there was neither butter nor dripping, neither treacle nor honey in the house, Edina had the bread toasted. Alfred knelt down before the fire—the only fire they had—and began to toast. The kettle was singing on the hob. Edina turned the milk into a jug.

They were sitting down to the tea-table when Charles came in. A glance at his weary and dispirited face told Edina that he had met with no more luck to-day than usual. Putting down a brown-paper parcel that he carried, containing a fresh supply of material to be made into nets, he took his place at the table. How hungry he was, no one but himself knew. And how scanty the food was that he could be supplied with!

But for his later experience, Charles could not have believed that it was so difficult for a young man to obtain a situation in London. Edina, less hopeful than he, would not have believed it. Charles Raynor had not been brought up to work of any sort, had never done any; and this seemed to be one of the stumbling-blocks in his way. Perhaps he looked too much of a gentleman; perhaps his refined manners and tones told against him in the eyes of men of business, betraying that he might prove unfit for work: at any rate, he had not found any one to take him. Another impediment was that no sooner did a situation fall vacant, than a large number of applicants made a rush to fill it. Only one of them could be engaged: and it never happened to be Charles. Charles looked through the Times advertisements every morning, through the friendliness of a neighbouring newsvendor. He would read of a clerk being wanted in some place or other in the great mart of London, and away he would go, to present himself. But he invariably found other applicants before him, and as invariably he never seemed to have the slightest chance.

The disappointment was beginning to tell upon him. There were times when he felt almost maddened. His conscience had been awake these last many bitter weeks, and the prolonged strain often seemed more than he could bear. Had it been only himself! All, then, as it seemed to Charles Raynor, all would have been easy. He could enlist for a soldier; he could join the labourers' emigration society and go out for a term of years to Australia or Canada; he could turn porter at a railway-station. These wild thoughts (though perhaps they could not be called so very wild in his present circumstances) continually passed through his mind: but he had to put them aside as visionary.

Visionary, because his object was, not to support himself alone, but the family. At least to help to support them. Charles Raynor was sensitive to a degree; and every mouthful he was obliged to eat seemed as though it would choke him, because it lessened the portion of those at home. A man cannot quite starve: but it often seemed to Charles that he really and truly would prefer to starve, and to bear the martyrdom of the process, rather than be a burden upon his mother and Edina. Sometimes he came home by way of Frank's and took tea there—and Frank, suspecting the truth of matters, took care to add some substantial dish to the table. But Charles, in delicacy of feeling, would not do this often: the house, in point of fact, was Mr. Max Brown's, not Frank's.

How utterly subdued in spirit his mother had become, Charles did not like to see and note. She kept about, but there could be no mistaking that she was both ill and suffering. Oh, if he could only lift her out of this poverty to a home of ease and plenty! he would say to himself, a whole world of self-reproach at work within him. If this last year or two could be blotted out of time and memory, and they had their modest home again near Bath!

No; it might not be. The events that time brings forth must endure in the memory for ever; our actions in it must remain in the Book of the Recording Angel as facts of the past. The home at Bath had gone; Eagles' Nest had gone; the transient weeks of the school-life had gone: and here they were, hopeless and without prospect, eating hard fare at Laurel Cottage.