Johnny Ludlow, Third Series

by Mrs. Henry Wood

The rest was interrupted by Mr. Pitt himself; he came to say we might go up to Mr. Brandon in the sick-room. We had reason to think ill enough of Pitt in regard to the Radcliffe business; but the Squire could not tackle him about the past offhand, this not being just the time or place for it. Later, when he did so, it was found that we had been misjudging the man. Pitt had not joined Stephen Radcliffe in any conspiracy; and the false letter, telling of Frank’s death at Dr. Dale’s, had not been written by him. So we saw that it must have been concocted by Stephen himself.

“Any way, if I did write such a letter, I retained no consciousness of it afterwards,” added Pitt, with candour. “I am sorry to say, Mr. Todhetley, that I gave way to drink at that time, and I know I was often not myself. But I do not think it likely that I wrote it; and as to joining Mr. Radcliffe in any conspiracy against his brother, why, I would not do such a thing, drunk or sober, and I never knew it had been done.”

“You have had the sense to pull up,” cried the Squire, in reference to what Pitt had admitted.

“Yes,” answered Pitt, in a voice hardly above a whisper. “And I never think of what I might have become by this time, but for pulling up, but I thank God.”

These allusions, however, may perhaps only puzzle the reader. And it is not with Mr. Pitt, his virtues or his failings, that this paper concerns itself, but with the history of Dorothy Grape.

We must take it up from the time Dorothy arrived in London with her husband, Alick Mapping, after their marriage at Worcester, as already narrated. The sum of three hundred pounds, owned by Dolly, passed into Mr. Mapping’s possession on the wedding-day, for she never suggested such a thing as that it should be settled on herself. The proceeds, arising from the sale of the furniture, were also transmitted to him later by the auctioneer. Thus he had become the proprietor of Dolly, and of all her worldly goods. After that, he and she faded out of Worcestershire memory, and from the sight of Worcestershire people—except for one brief meeting, to be mentioned presently.

The home in London, to which her husband conveyed her, and of which he had boasted, Dolly found to be lodgings. Lodgings recently engaged by him, a sitting-room and bedroom, in the Blackfriars Road. They were over a shop, kept by one Mrs. Turk, who was their landlady. “I would not fix upon a house, dear, without you,” he said; and Dolly thanked him gratefully. All he did was right to her.

She was, as he had told her she would be, happy as a cricket, though bewildered with the noisy bustle of the great town, and hardly daring to venture alone into its busy streets, more crowded than was Worcester Cathedral on the Sundays Mr. Benson preached. The curious elucidation at Gloucester of what her father’s fate had been was a relief to her mind, rather than the contrary, once she had got over its sadness; though the still more curious doubt about her brother Tom, whispered to her by Elizabeth Deavor on her wedding morning, was rarely absent from her thoughts. But Dolly was young, Dolly was in love, and Dolly was intensely happy. Her husband took her to the theatres, to Vauxhall, and to other places of amusement; and Dolly began to think life was going to be a happy valley into which care would never penetrate.

This happy state of things changed. Mr. Mapping took to be a great deal away from home, sometimes for weeks together. He laid the fault upon his business; travellers in the wine trade had to go all over England, he said. Dolly was not unreasonable and accepted the explanation cheerfully.

But something else happened now and then that was less satisfactory. Mr. Mapping would appear at home in a condition that frightened Dolly: as if he had made the mistake of tasting the wine samples himself, instead of carrying them to his customers. Never having been brought into contact with anything of the kind in her own home, she regarded it with terror and dismay.