Neighbours on the Green; My Faithful Johnny

‘Ellen ought to judge for herself,’ I said, ‘and you ought to judge for yourself; you are of full age; you are not boy and girl. No parents have a right to separate you now. And that old man may go on just the same for the next dozen years.’

‘Did you see him?’ John asked. He had a languid, wearied look, scarcely lifting his eyes.

‘I saw only her; but I know perfectly well what kind of man he is. He may live for the next twenty years. There is no end to these tyrannical, ill-tempered people; they live for ever. You ought to judge for yourselves. If they had their daughter settled near, coming to them from her own pleasant little home, they would be a great deal happier. You may believe me or not, but I know it. Her visits would be events; they would be proud of her, and tell everybody about her family, and what a good husband she had got, and how he gave her everything she could desire.’

‘Please God,’ said John, devoutly; his countenance had brightened in spite of himself. But then he shook his head. ‘If we had but got as far as that,’ he said.

‘You ought to take it into your own hands,’ cried I in all the fervour of a revolutionary. ‘If you sacrifice your happiness to them, it will not do them any good; it will rather do them harm. Are you going now to tell your news?’

He had got up on his feet, and stood vaguely hovering over me with a faint smile upon his face. ‘She will be pleased,’ he said; ‘no advancement, but no separation. I have not much ambition; I think I am happy too.’

‘Then, if you are all pleased,’ I cried, with annoyance which I could not restrain, ‘why did you send me on such an errand? I am the only one that seems to be impatient of the present state of affairs, and it is none of my business. Another time you need not say anything about it to me.’

‘There will never be a time when we shall not be grateful to you,’ said John; but even his mild look of appealing reproach did not move me. It is hard to interest yourself in people and find after all that they like their own way best.

CHAPTER VI

He was quite right in thinking Ellen would be pleased. And yet, after it was all over, she was a little wounded and disappointed, which was very natural. She did not want him to go away, but she wanted him to get the advancement all the same. This was foolish, but still it was natural, and just what a woman would feel. She took great pains to explain to us that it was not hesitation about John, nor even any hesitation on the part of John in going—for Ellen had a quick sense of what was desirable and heroic, and would not have wished her lover to appear indifferent about his own advancement, even though she was very thankful and happy that in reality he was so. The reason of the failure was that the firm had sent out a nephew, who was in the office, and had a prior claim. ‘Of course he had the first chance,’ Ellen said, with a countenance of great seriousness; ‘what would be the good of being a relation if he did not have the first chance?’ And I assented with all the gravity in the world. But she was disappointed, though she was so glad. There ought not to have been any one in the world who had the preference over John! She carried herself with great dignity for some time afterwards, and with the air of a person superior to the foolish and partial judgments of the world; and yet in her heart how thankful she was! from what an abyss of blank loneliness and weary exertion was her life saved! For now that I knew it a little better I could see how little that was happy was in her home. Her mother insisted that she should have that hour’s leisure in the evening. That was all that any one thought of doing for her. It was enough to keep her happy, to keep her hopeful. But without that, how long would Ellen’s brave spirit have kept up? Perhaps had she never known John, and that life of infinite tender communion, her natural happy temperament would have struggled on for a long time against all the depressing effects of circumstances, unaided. But to lose is worse than never to have had. If it is

 
Better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all,
 

yet it is at the same time harder to lose that bloom of existence out of your lot, than to have struggled on by mere help of nature without it. She had been so happy—making so little go such a long way!—that the loss of her little happiness would have been appalling to her. And yet she was dissatisfied that this heartbreak did not come. She had strung herself up to it. It would have been advancement, progress, all that a woman desires for those belonging to her, for John. Sacrificing him for the others, she was half angry not to have it in her power to sacrifice herself to his ‘rise in life.’ I think I understood her, though we never talked on the subject. She was dissatisfied, although she was relieved. We have all known these mingled feelings.

This happened at the beginning of summer; but all its agitations were over before the long sweet days and endless twilights of the happy season had fully expanded upon us. It seems to me as I grow older that a great deal of the comfort of our lives depends upon summer—upon the weather, let us say, taking it in its most prosaic form. Sometimes indeed to the sorrowful the brightness is oppressive; but to all the masses of ordinary mortals who are neither glad nor sad, it is a wonderful matter not to be chilled to the bone; to be able to do their work without thinking of a fire; without having a sensation of cold always in their lives never to be got rid of. Ellen and her lover enjoyed that summer as people who have been under sentence of banishment enjoy their native country and their home.

You may think there is not much beauty in a London suburb to tempt any one: and there is not for those who can retire to the beautiful fresh country when they will, and surround themselves with waving woods and green lawns, or taste the freshness of the mountains or the saltness of the sea. We, who go away every year in July, pined and longed for the moment of our removal; and my neighbour in the great house which shut out the air from Pleasant Place, panted in her great garden (which she was proud to think was almost unparalleled for growth and shade in London), and declared herself incapable of breathing any longer in such a close and shut up locality. But the dwellers in Pleasant Place were less exacting. They thought the long suburban road very pleasant. Where it streamed off into little dusty houses covered with brown ivy and dismal trellis work, and where every unfortunate flower was thick with dust, they gazed with a touch of envy at the ‘gardens,’ and felt it to be rural. When my pair of lovers went out for their walk they had not time to go further than to the ‘Green Man,’ a little tavern upon the roadside, where one big old elm tree, which had braved the dust and the frost for more years than any one could recollect, stood out at a corner at the junction of two roads, with a bench round it, where the passing carters and cabmen drank their beer, and a trough for the horses, which made it look ‘quite in the country’ to all the inhabitants of our district. Generally they got as far as that, passing the dusty cottages and the little terrace of new houses. A great and prolonged and most entertaining controversy went on between them as they walked, as to the kind of house in which they should eventually settle down. Ellen, who was not without a bit of romance in her, of the only kind practicable with her upbringing, entertained a longing for one of the dusty little cottages. She thought, like all inexperienced persons, that in her hands it would not be dusty. She would find means of keeping the ivy green. She would see that the flowers grew sweet and clean, and set blacks and dust alike at defiance. John, for his part, whose lodging was in one of those little houses, preferred the new terrace. It was very new—very like a row of ginger-bread houses—but it was very clean, and for the moment bright, not as yet penetrated by the dust. Sometimes I was made the confidante of these interminable, always renewed, always delightful discussions. ‘They are not dusty yet,’ Ellen would say, ‘but how long will it be before they are dusty? whereas with the villas’ (they had a great variety of names—Montpellier Villas, Funchal Villas, Mentone Mansions—for the district was supposed to be very mild) ‘one knows what one has to expect; and if one could not keep the dust and the blacks out with the help of brushes and dusters, what would be the good of one? I should sow mignonette and Virginia stock,’ she cried with a firm faith; ‘low-growing flowers would be sure to thrive. It is only roses (poor roses!) and tall plants that come to harm.’ John, for his part, dwelt much upon the fact that in the little front parlours of the terrace houses there were shelves for books fitted into a recess. This weighed quite as much with him as the cleanness of the new places. ‘The villas are too dingy for her,’ he said, looking admiringly at her fresh face. ‘She could never endure the little gray, grimy rooms.’ That was his romance, to think that everything should be shining and bright about her. He was unconscious of the dinginess of the parlour in Ellen’s home. It was all irradiated with her presence to him. These discussions however all ended in a sigh and a laugh from Ellen herself. ‘It is all very fine talking,’ she would say.

And so the summer went on. Alas! and other summers after it. My eldest girl married. My boys went out into the world. Many changes came upon our house. The children began to think it a very undesirable locality. Even Chatty, always the sweetest, sighed for South Kensington, if not for a house in the country and a month in London in the season, which was what the other girls wished for. This common suburban road, far from fashion, far from society—what but their mother’s inveterate old-fashionedness and indifference to appearances could have kept them there so long? The great house opposite with the garden had ceased to be. The high wall was gone from Pleasant Place, and instead of it stood a fresh row of little villakins like the terrace which had once been John Ridgway’s admiration. Alas! Ellen’s forebodings had been fully realized, and the terrace was as dingy as Montpellier Villas by this time. The whole neighbourhood was changing. Half the good houses in the road—the houses, so to speak, of the aristocracy, which to name was to command respect from all the neighbourhood—had been built out and adorned with large fronts of plate glass and made into shops. Omnibuses now rolled along the dusty way. The station where they used to stop had been pushed out beyond the ‘Green Man,’ which once we had felt to be ‘quite in the country.’ Everything was changing; but my pair of lovers did not change. Ellen got other pupils instead of Chatty and her contemporaries who were growing up and beyond her skill, and came out at ten o’clock every morning with as fresh a face as ever, and her little roll of music always in her hand. And every evening, though now he was set down at his lodgings from the omnibus, and no longer passed my window on his way home, John made his pilgrimage of love to Pleasant Place. She kept her youth—the sweet complexion, the dew in her eyes, and the bloom upon her cheek—in a way I could not understand. The long waiting did not seem to try her. She had always his evening visit to look for, and her days were full of occupation. But John, who had naturally a worn look, did not bear the probation so well as Ellen. He grew bald; a general rustiness came over him. He had looked older than he was to begin with: his light locks, his colourless countenance, faded into a look of age. He was very patient—almost more patient than Ellen, who, being of a more vivacious temper, had occasioned little outbursts of petulant despair, of which she was greatly ashamed afterwards; but at the same time this prolonged and hopeless waiting had more effect upon him than upon her. Sometimes he would come to see me by himself for the mere pleasure, it seemed to me, though we rarely spoke on the subject, of being understood.

‘Is this to go on for ever?’ I said. ‘Is it never to come to an end?’

‘It looks like it,’ said John, somewhat drearily. ‘We always talk about our little house. I have got three rises since then. I doubt if I shall ever have any more; but we don’t seem a bit nearer–’ and he ended with a sigh—not of impatience, like those quick sighs mixed up with indignant, abrupt little laughs in which Ellen often gave vent to her feelings—but of weariness and despondency much more hard to bear.

‘And the father,’ I said, ‘seems not a day nearer the end of his trouble. Poor man, I don’t wish him any harm.’

This, I fear, was a hypocritical speech, for in my heart I should not have been at all sorry to hear that his ‘trouble’ was coming to an end.

Then for the first time a gleam of humour lighted in John’s eye. ‘I am beginning to suspect that he is—better,’ he said; ‘stronger at least. I am pretty sure he has no thought of coming to an end.’

‘All the better,’ I said; ‘if he gets well, Ellen will be free.’

‘He will never get well,’ said John, falling back into his dejection, ‘and he will never die.’

‘Then it will never come to anything. Can you consent to that?’ I said.

He made me no reply. He shook his head; whether in dismal acceptance of the situation, whether in protest against it, I cannot tell. This interview filled me with dismay. I spent hours pondering whether, and how, I could interfere. My interference had not been of much use before. And my children began to laugh when this lingering, commonplace little romance was talked of. ‘My mother’s lovers,’ the boys called them—‘My mother’s turtle-doves.’

The time had almost run on to the length of Jacob’s wooing when one day Ellen came to me, not running in, eager and troubled with her secret as of old, but so much more quietly than usual, with such a still and fixed composure about her, that I knew something serious had happened. I sent away as quickly as I could the other people who were in the room, for I need not say that to find me alone was all but an impossibility. I gave Chatty, now a fine, tall girl of twenty, a look, which was enough for her; she always understood better than any one. And when at last we were free I turned to my visitor anxiously. ‘What is it?’ I said. It did not excite her so much as it did me.

She gave a little abstracted smile. ‘You always see through me,’ she said. ‘I thought there was no meaning in my face. It has come at last. He is really going this time, directly, to the Levant. Oh, what a little thing Chatty was when I asked her to look in the atlas for the Levant; and now she is going to be married! What will you do,’ she asked abruptly, stopping short to look at me, ‘when they are all married and you are left alone?’

I had asked myself this question sometimes, and it was not one I liked. ’“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,”’ I said; ‘the two little ones of all have not so much as thought of marrying yet.’

Ellen answered me with a sigh, a quickly drawn impatient breath. ‘He is to sail in a fortnight,’ she said. ‘Things have gone wrong with the nephew. I knew he never could be so good as John; and now John must go in a hurry to set things right. What a good thing that it is all in a hurry! We shall not have time to think.’

‘You must go with him—you must go with him, Ellen!’ I cried.

She turned upon me almost with severity in her tone. ‘I thought you knew better. I—go with him! Look here,’ she cried very hurriedly, ‘don’t think I don’t face the full consequences—the whole matter. He is tired, tired to death. He will be glad to go—and after—after! If he should find some one else there, I shall never be the one to blame him.’

‘Ellen! you ought to ask his pardon on your knees—he find some one else! What wrong you do to the faithfullest—the truest–’

‘He is the faithfullest,’ she said; then, after a moment, ‘but I will never blame him. I tell you beforehand. He has been more patient than ever man was.’

Did she believe what she was saying? It was very hard to know. The fortnight flew by like a day. The days had been very long before in their monotony, but now these two weeks were like two hours. I never quite knew what passed. John had taken his courage in both hands, and had bearded the father himself in his den: but, so far as I could make out, it was not the father but the mother with her tears who vanquished him. ‘When I saw what her life was,’ he said to me when he took leave of me, ‘such a life! my mouth was closed. Who am I that I should take away her only comfort from her? We love each other very dearly, it is our happiness, it is the one thing which makes everything else sweet: but perhaps, as Ellen says, there is no duty in it. It is all enjoyment. Her duty is to them; it is her pleasure, she says, her happiness to be with me.’

‘But—but you have been engaged for years. No doubt it is your happiness—but surely there is duty too.’

‘She says not. My mind is rather confused. I don’t seem to know. Duty, you know, duty is a thing that it is rather hard to do; something one has to raise one’s self up to, and carry through with it, whether we like it or whether we don’t like it. That’s her definition; and it seems right—don’t you think it is right? But to say that of us would be absurd. It is all pleasure—all delight,’ his tired eyelids rose a little to show a gleam of emotion, then dropped again with a sigh; ‘that is her argument; I suppose it is true.’ ‘Then, do you mean to say–’ I cried, and stopped short in sheer bewilderment of mind, not knowing what words to use.

‘I don’t think I mean to say anything. My head is all confused. I don’t seem to know. Our feeling is all one wish to be together; only to see one another makes us happy. Can there be duty in that? she says. It seems right, yet sometimes I think it is wrong, though I can’t tell how.’

I was confused too and silenced. I did not know what to say. ‘It depends,’ I said faltering, ‘upon what you consider the object of life.’

‘Some people say happiness; but that would not suit Ellen’s theory,’ he said. ‘Duty—I had an idea myself that duty was easily defined; but it seems it is as difficult as everything is. So far as I can make out,’ he added with a faint smile, ‘I have got no duties at all.’

‘To be faithful to her,’ I said, recollecting the strange speech she had made to me.

He almost laughed outright. ‘Faithful! that is no duty; it is my existence. Do you think I could be unfaithful if I were to try?’

These were almost the last words he said to me. I suppose he satisfied himself that his duty to his employer required him to go away. And Ellen had a feverish desire that he should go away, now that the matter had been broached a second time. I am not sure that when the possibility of sacrifice on his part dawned upon her, the chance that he might relinquish for her this renewed chance of rising in the world, there did not arise in her mind a hasty impatient wish that he might be unfaithful, and give her up altogether. Sometimes the impatience of a tired spirit will take this form. Ellen was very proud; by dint of having made sacrifices all her life, she had an impetuous terror of being in her turn the object for which sacrifices should be made. To accept them was bitterness to her. She was eager to hurry all his preparations, to get him despatched, if possible, a little earlier than the necessary time. She kept a cheerful face, making little jokes about the Levant and the people he would meet there, which surprised everybody. ‘Is she glad that he is going? Chatty asked me, with eyes like two round lamps of alarmed surprise. The last night of all they spent with us—and it seemed a relief to Ellen that it should be thus spent, and not tête-à-tête as so many other evenings had been. It was the very height and flush of summer, an evening which would not sink into darkness and night as other evenings do. The moon was up long before the sun had gone reluctantly away. We sat without the lamp in the soft twilight, with the stream of wayfarers going past the windows, and all the familiar sounds, which were not vulgar to us, we were so used to them. They were both glad of the half light. When I told Ellen to go and sing to us, she refused at first with a look of reproach; then, with a little shake of her head, as if to throw off all weakness, changed her mind and went to the piano. It was Chatty who insisted upon Mr. Ridgway’s favourite song, perhaps out of heedlessness, perhaps with that curious propensity the young often have to probe wounds and investigate how deep a sentiment may go. We sat in the larger room, John and myself, while behind, in the dim evening, in the distance, scarcely visible, Ellen sat at the piano and sang. What the effort cost her I would not venture to inquire. As for him, he sat with melancholy composure listening to every tone of her voice. She had a very sweet refined voice—not powerful, but tender, what people call sympathetic. I could not distinguish his face, but I saw his hand beat the measure accompanying every line, and when she came to the burden of the song he said it over softly to himself. Broken by all the babble outside, and by the music in the background, I yet heard him, all tuneless and low, murmuring this to himself: ‘I will come again, I will come again, my sweet and bonnie.’ Whether his eyes were dry I cannot tell, but mine were wet. He said them with no excitement, as if they were the words most simple, most natural—the very breathing of his heart. How often, I wonder, would he think of that dim room, the half-seen companions, the sweet and tender voice rising out of the twilight? I said to myself, ‘Whoever may mistrust you, I will never mistrust you,’ with fervour. But just as the words passed through my mind, as if Ellen had heard them, her song broke off all in a moment, died away in the last line, ‘I will come a–’ There was a sudden break, a jar on the piano—and she sprang up and came towards us, stumbling, with her hands put out, as it she could not see. The next sound I heard was an unsteady little laugh, as she threw herself down on a sofa in the corner where Chatty was sitting. ‘I wonder why you are all so fond of that old-fashioned nonsense,’ she said.

And next day the last farewells were said, and John went away.