From The Literary Workman.
JENIFER'S PRAYER.
BY OLIVER CRANE.
IN THREE PARTS.
I.
He and she stood in a room in an inn in the town of Hull--and how she wept! Crying as a child cries, with a woman's feelings joining exquisite pain to those tears; which tears, in a way wonderful and peculiar to beautiful women, scarcely disordered her face, or gave anything worse to her countenance than an indescribably pathetic tenderness.
He was older than she was by full ten years. He only watched her. And if the most acute of my readers had watched him, they would have been no wiser for their scrutiny.
At last she left the room; he had opened the door and offered his hand to her. It was night; and she changed her chamber-candle from her right hand to her left, and gave that right hand to him. He held it, while he said: "I spoke because I dread the influence of the house we are going to, and of those whom you will meet there."
"Thank you. Good night" And so she got to a great dark bed-room, and knelt down, like a good girl as she was, and cried no more, but was in bed and asleep before he had left the place he had taken by the side of the sitting-room fire, leaning thoughtfully against the mantel-shelf, when her absence had made the room lonely.
Then he ran down stairs and rushed out into the streets of the kingly Hull--Kingston of the day of Edward I. The man we speak of was no antiquary, and he troubled himself neither with the Kingston of the royal Edward nor the Vaccaria of the abbot from whom the place was bought; he walked at a quick pace through streets dim and streets lighted, toward the ships, or among the houses; to where he could see the great headland of Holderness, or behold nothing at all but the brick wall that prevented his going further, and told him by strong facts that he had lost his way. So he wandered, walking fast often--again, walking slowly; his head bowed down, his features working, and his eyes flashing--clenched hands, or hands clasped on his breast, as if to keep down the surging waves of memory, which carried on their crests many things which now he could only gnash his teeth at in withering vexation.
He and she had come from Scotland. I have said that she was beautiful--she was English, too; but he was Scotch born and bred, and not dark and stem, or really wild or poetic, as a Scotchman in a story ought to be. He was simply a strong, well-formed man, of dark, ruddy complexion, and fine, thick, waving brown hair. He might have been a nobleman, or a royal descendant of Hull's own king. He looked it all, without being downright handsome. But he was, in fact, only one of the many men who have come into a thousand a year too soon for the preservation of prudence. Between sixteen, when he succeeded to it, and twenty-one, when he could spend it, he had committed many follies, and found friends who turned out worse than declared enemies--since twenty-one he had fallen [{18}] in love more than once. He had been praised, blamed, accused, acquitted. But whether or not this man was good or bad, no living soul could tell. He was well off, well looking, well read, and in good company. He re-entered the inn at Hull that April night, stood by the fire smoking, asked for a cup of strong coffee, went to bed.
The next morning the two met at breakfast They were going south. No matter where. Whether to the dreamy vales of Devonshire, to verdant Somersetshire, or the gardens of Hampshire--no matter. They were going to what the north Britons call the south. And it did not mean Algeria. Railways were not everywhere then as railways are now. They had to travel nearly all day, then to "coach it" to a great town, in whose history coaches have now long been of the past. Then to get on a second day by the old "fast four-horse," and to arrive about five o'clock at a little quiet country town, where a carriage would take them to the friends and the house whose influence he dreaded.
In fact, that night, in the inn sitting-room, he had offered marriage to the girl whom he had in charge for safe guardianship on so long a journey to her far-off home where he was to be a guest. She had felt that he had abused his trust and taken an unfair advantage of her; also, she was in that peculiarly feminine state of mind which is neither expressed by no nor by yes. She had upbraided him. He, pleading guilty in his soul, was in a horror at the thought of losing her; losing her in that way too, because he had done wrong. Being miserable, he had shown his misery as a strong man may. He spoke, and self-reproachfully; but, as he pleaded, he betrayed all he felt. The girl saw his clasped hands, his bent form, as he leaned down from the chair on which he sat in the straggling attitude which expressed a disordered mind. He spoke, looking at the carpet, not loud nor long, but with a terrible earnestness that frightened the girl, and then she cried all the more, and seemed to shrink away as if in alarm, and yet almost angrily. Why would he speak so fiercely--why had he taken this advantage of her?