Roland Yorke / A Sequel to "The Channings"

by Mrs. Henry Wood

His long legs went flying off in the direction of Gower Street, Jenner having given him the necessary instructions to find it; and he burst clattering in upon Mrs. Jones in her sitting-room without the least ceremony, very much as he used to do in the old days when she was Mrs. Jenkins. Mrs. Jones had been for some time now given to wish that she had not changed her name. Doing very well as the widow Jenkins, years ago, in her little hosier's shop in High Street, Helstonleigh, what was her mortification to find one day that the large and handsome house next door, with its shop-windows of plate-glass, had been opened as another hosier's by a Mr. Richard Jones. Would customers continue to come to her plain and unpretending mart, when that new one, grand, imposing, and telling of an unlimited stock within, was staring them in the face? The widow Jenkins feared not; and fretted herself to fiddle-strings.

The fear might have had no cause of foundation: the show kept up at the adjoining house was perhaps founded on artificial bases, rather than real. Richard Jones (whom the city had already begun to designate as Dicky) turned out to be of a sociable nature; he made her acquaintance whether she would or no, and suddenly proposed to her to unite the two businesses in one, by making herself, and her stock, and her connection, over to him. Mrs. Jenkins's first impulse was to throw at his head the nearest parcel that came to hand. Familiarity with an idea, however, sometimes reconciles the worst adversary; as at length it did Mrs. Jenkins to this. To give her her due, she took no account whatever of Mr. Jones in the matter; he went for nothing, a bale of waste flung in to make weight, she should rule him just as she had ruled Jenkins; her sole temptation was the flourishing shop, à côté, and the good, well-furnished house. So Mrs. Jenkins exchanged her name for that of Jones, and removed, bag and baggage; resigning the inferior home that had so long sheltered her. It was close upon this, that one of the barristers, coming in to the summer assizes at Helstonleigh, took apartments at Mrs. Jones's. That was Mr. Ollivera: and in the following March, when he again came in, occurred his tragical ending.

Before this, long before it, Mrs. Jones had grown to realize to herself the truth of the homely proverb, All's not gold that glitters. Mr. Jones's connection did not prove to be of the most extensive kind; far from it; the large, imposing stock turned out to be three parts dummies; and she grew to believe--to see--that his motive in marrying her was to uphold his newly-established business by beguiling to it her old customers. The knowledge did not tend to soothe her naturally tart temper; neither did the fact that her husband took vast deal of pleasure abroad, spent money recklessly, and left her to do all the work. Mr. Jones's debts came out, one after the other; more than could be paid; and one morning some men of the law walked quietly in and put themselves in possession of the effects. Things had come to a crisis. Mr. Jones, after battling out affairs with the bankruptcy commissioner, started for America; his wife went off to London. Certain money, her own past savings, she had been wise enough to have secured to her separate special use, and that could not be touched. With a portion of it she bought in some of the furniture, and set up as a letter of lodgings in Gower Street.

But that Roland Yorke had not seen the parlour at Helstonleigh (which the reader had the satisfaction of once entering with Mr. Butterby), he would have gone well nigh to think this the same room. The red carpet on the floor, the small book-shelves, the mahogany sideboard with its array of glasses, the horsehair chairs, the red cloth on the centre table, all had been transplanted. When Roland bustled in, he found Mrs. Jones knitting away at lambs' wool socks, as if for her life. In the intervals of her home occupation, or when her house was slack of lodgers, she did these for sale, and realized a very fair profit.

"Now then," said Roland, stirring up the fire of his own accord, and making himself at home, as he liked to do wherever he might be, "I want to know all about everybody."

Mrs. Jones turned her chair towards him with a jerk; and Roland put question after question about the old city, which he had so abruptly quitted more than seven years before. It may be that Mrs. Jones recognized in him a kind of fellow-sufferer. Neither of them cared to see Helstonleigh again, unless under the auspices of a more propitious fate than the present. Anyway, she was gracious to Roland, and gave him information as fast as he asked for it, repeating some things he had heard before. He persisted in calling her Mrs. Jenkins, saying it came more natural than the other name.

Mr. Channing was dead. His eldest son Hamish was living in London. Arthur was Mr. Galloway's right hand; Tom was a clergyman, and just made a minor canon of the old cathedral; Charley Mrs. Jones knew nothing about, except that he was in India. The college school had got a new master. Mr. Ketch was reposing in a damp green nook, side by side with old Jenkins the bedesman. Hamish Channing's bank had come to grief, Mrs. Jenkins did not know how. In the panic, she believed.

"And that beautiful kinsman of mine, William Yorke, reigns at Hazeldon, and old Galloway is flourishing in his office, with his flaxen curls!" burst forth Roland, suddenly struck with a weighty sense of injustice. "The bad people get the luck of it in this world, Mrs. Jenkins; the deserving ones go begging. Hamish Channing's bank come to grief;--bright Hamish! And look at me!--and you! I never saw such a world as this with its miserable ups and downs."

"Ah," said Mrs. Jones with a touch of her native tartness, "it's a good thing there's another world to come after. We may find that a better one."

The prospect (probably from being regarded as rather far-off) did not appear to afford present satisfaction to Roland. He sat pulling at his whiskers, moodily resenting the general blindness of Fortune in regard to merit, and then suddenly wheeled round to his own affairs.