Miss Grantley's Girls, and the Stories She Told Them

by Thomas Archer

THE STORY OF A BOOKWORM.

ES, she is dead, and on her snow-strewn grave I left a bunch of winter flowers but yesterday. Ah, me! I never go and wander in that dingy churchyard, where the sound of the great roaring city is hushed to a sleepy murmur, but I seem to leave half my poor life there; would that I could leave it all, I sometimes think, and that when the sexton comes to bring the keys of the church on a Sunday morning he should find the mere body of me lying there, my head leaning on the stone that bears her name—not his name—her name, her one dear name by which I called her last of all.

But these are ill thoughts, and as the poet says "this way madness lies." Let me get to my books, there is comfort and companionship in them; and yet I have held my finger in this page till the light is gone and it's too dark to read.

I suppose I was meant for a bookworm, and yet I didn't like school. At all events I didn't like the Free Grammar School of St. Bothwyn By-Church, to which I had the privilege of being elected when my poor father was clerk of the Company, and lived in the old hall till he bought this little house in Hoxton. Ah me! how I seem to see the old black oaken wainscot of the court room, and the little parlour where the firelight danced in deep crimson flecks and pools in the polished floor, and the shadowy panels! How I can remember going in after dark in winter evenings and sitting there, a lonely motherless boy, and seeming to be lost in some mysterious way to the outside world, as I pored over tales of old romance, or when I grew older traced the origin of some quaint custom in one of the heavy leather-bound volumes that filled the narrow cramped bookcase of the clerk's office!

In the midst of my dreaming one thing was real to me, and I suppose it was a part of my queer character, that what was said to be fancy in other young men was the one fact of my life. I mean love. Apart from the daily routine of the office, which often became mechanical, so that I could pursue it and think of other things even while it was going on, I had no true life in the present—that is to say no strongly conscious life of my own, apart from the region of imagination—except when I was sitting in the deep old escutcheoned bay-window of the Hall, looking out upon the old shaded courtyard, where the sunlight, darting amidst the spreading plane-trees, flecked and chequered the marble pavement, and the little carved fountain trilled and rippled till it incited the canary hanging in its gilded cage to break into song that drowned its splashing murmur, and silenced the sparrows twittering about the heavy woodwork of the old porch. That was my real world, because there was one figure, one face, that held me to it, as though by a spell that I could not, and never sought to break. I scarcely remember the time I did not love her.

Mary never suspected, as I sat watching her at work, or reading to her on those summer evenings, that my heart was ready to break out into words of passionate entreaty. She had been so used to see me sitting there, or to run with me round the little paved courtyard, or the old dingy grass plot in the midst of its prim gravel walks at the side of the hall that I had become an ordinary association of her life. I had left school while she was still learning of a governess, who came four times a week to teach her, for her father was a man of more consideration than mine. But Mary was motherless as I was. Our mothers had been dear friends in their school-girl days and afterwards; and our fathers were old acquaintances; and so it came about that I was often at the Hall for the week round after office hours, and that I seemed to belong as much to the place as the old, fat, wheezy, brown spaniel that stood upon the broad stone step and welcomed me with tail and tongue. But while I remained, as it were, stationary—an old-fashioned boy, an older-fashioned youth, an antiquated man—she altered. Occasionally when I went to see her she had gone out visiting, and I was left to dream away the evening in the old window waiting for her return, or, if I knew which way she came, loitering in the street in case she should be unattended by the maid who was usually sent to meet or to fetch her when her father did not go himself.

It was on one of these evenings that I suddenly understood what was the cause of the undefinable change that I had noticed in her manner some time before. In the previous week the company had held a court dinner, and that was the evening when the alderman introduced his son—"My son, the captain," as he called him—a captain by purchase, and with the right to wear a brilliant uniform and long moustachios. A chuckle-pated fellow, for all his scarlet coat and clanking heels, but with a bullying, insolent air. When the feast was over, and the guests were preparing to go, it was time for me to go too, for I had been late helping to make up some of the accounts in the office; and, after taking my hat off the hook in the passage, turned to the old sitting-room to look for Mary, that I might say, "Good-night."

It was beyond her time for being about, especially on the court nights, but to my surprise, as I opened the door she was standing there with the captain, who was holding her hand. He had no business there, and she knew it. The other diners were already coming down the stairs at the end of the passage. He must have stolen down quickly, and she must have been waiting for him. This all passed through my mind in a moment as I stood looking at him, such an ugly leer upon his face as he bent over her hand that I had to clench my fingers till the blood started in the nails to keep down my rising wrath.

"Hallo! who is this?" he said, as he turned with a swagger, but without dropping her hand.