Into the Highways and Hedges Part 50

"He has need of his hopefulness," said Laura drily. She had just made up her mind to tell Meg of the arrest; but the nurse came in at that moment, and she put off breaking the news a little longer.

Meg gave up the baby reluctantly, and they went down into the lamp-lit dining-room; Laura very full of thought. This fanatical preacher, with his mania for "converting," with his pernicious views about the intrinsic evil of wealth, had done plenty of harm, she considered; and yet she allowed to herself that his influence was for good too. Margaret was morally a stronger woman now than she had been in her variable and emotional girlhood. Laura remarked also that, though no one could call her sister "pretty" in these days, yet the distinction which she had always possessed was hers still and in larger measure. Meg looked like a queen in disguise in her shabby dress. Alas! alas! and it was all wasted on a street "tuborator," who, at the best, was a mad enthusiast, and, at the worst, a shameful rogue!

Laura's meditations made her unusually silent. Mr. Ashford talked on somewhat pompously, and pressed Meg to eat with rather patronising warmth, for "it was not every day that Mrs. Thorpe got such a meal"; and Meg herself did her best to rise to the occasion and converse pleasantly with her host.

The silver, and the cut gla.s.s, and the flowers pleased her eye; for pretty things were to Margaret, as they had been to her father, very sweet. She had spoken the truth when she had said she could not have borne to live in luxury now; yet for a breathing s.p.a.ce she enjoyed it.

In nine cases out of ten it is the people with the keenest senses who take to asceticism. He who has never been intoxicated by the scent of flowers has never known the necessity of retiring into a wilderness.

Dinner was half over when Laura saw Meg's colour change. "It is only the man from the bonnet shop. It cannot be any one for you, Meg," she said quickly. Indeed, she fancied that she had good reason to know that it could not possibly be Barnabas Thorpe. Was he not in Newgate?

"It is not Barnabas. It is--_Tom_!" cried Margaret.

She rose hastily from her chair; and Laura, following the direction of her eyes, saw Tom's queer deformed figure through the open door. He had been standing in the hall; but when Margaret's exclamation reached him, he walked into the dining-room, thinking she had meant to call him.

To Laura this extraordinary person seemed a threatening embodiment from that outside world which claimed her sister. To Mr. Ashford he was a most impertinent intruder; but Meg made a quick step towards him. "Oh, Tom, is anything wrong at the farm?" she asked. And then turning to Laura: "This is my brother-in-law."

"I should ask your pardon for disturbing you, ma'am," said Tom, looking at Laura; "but I ha' need of a word with Barnabas' wife."

The accent, and still more the decided way in which he stated what he wanted, reminded Laura of the preacher.

He spoke quite civilly, but the peremptoriness jarred on her. Tom Thorpe was possessed by a sort of defiant repulsion, and glowered indignantly on Margaret and her fine relatives. So she was here in this grand room feasting and amusing herself? but she was "Barnabas' wife" all the same, and he was in prison!

"You shall have as many words as you like with me at once," said Margaret. "May I take him into the library, Laura? Oh, I hope that _your_ father is not ill?"

Tom glanced at the bit of c.r.a.pe on her sleeve and answered, softened: "No, no, la.s.s. Naught o' that kind's happened. Dad's right enough.

There's naught but what ye must know already."

"But she does not know!" Laura murmured faintly.

Ten minutes later they heard Meg's visitor go.

"Dear me! Your poor sister will hardly like to appear again to-night,"

Mr. Ashford said compa.s.sionately. "She must be terribly ashamed of her scamp of a husband, though that kind of thing is what she must expect after having----Oh, here she is!"

Margaret's head was very erect, and there was a bright spot of colour on each cheek.

"My brother-in-law has been telling me that my husband has been arrested on Mr. Sauls' charge, and taken to gaol," she said. And there was a prouder ring than usual in her generally low voice. "Mr. Sauls' brain must have suffered! I am sorry for him."

"You are angry with him, you mean!" remarked Laura.

"No," said Mrs. Thorpe. "Any one who is so mad as to think it possible that Barnabas could have done such a thing is not worth being angry with. He knows no better, I suppose, poor thing!"

Laura looked at her husband with a momentary gleam of fun.

"I must get a room close to Newgate, so that I can go in and out as often as I am allowed," continued Meg. "Tom is going to take me to the prison to-morrow. Will you excuse me if I go and put my things together now?"

Laura laughed, albeit a little sadly, when the door closed behind her.

"It has been a queer story from first to last," she said. "But do you think, after that, that she is ashamed of him?"

"She doesn't care much for him," said Mr. Ashford. "If she did, she would be more anxious."

An hour later Margaret had finished packing her clothes into a small bundle, and stood considering a leathern box she held in her hands: should she take it with her or not?

She opened it with the reverent touch a woman gives to relics. There was the pearl ring that her mother, another Margaret, had worn; Laura's first baby socks tenderly treasured; and an unfinished silk purse that had been in process of making when death took that, as well as all other tasks, from the pretty hands that had been so p.r.o.ne to give.

There also was a faded bundle of letters tied with ribbon. The last that Meg unfolded had been penned two days before the writer's death. No one had imagined that she was in any danger; but there was an undercurrent of foreboding, sounding through the overflowing tender happiness which the letter expressed, a foreboding which, as Meg remembered to have heard, had wakened Mr. Deane's anxiety and brought him home just in time.

"Indeed, sweetheart, an' I were to die to-morrow, I should want you only to remember that no woman was ever happier than I have been, and I think none other was ever so happy, seeing that none other was your wife. I long to make up to those not so fortunate as I; but I cannot. I would pray for a long life, only not beyond yours; but if it is not given me"

(again that iteration of warning, mingling with her pa.s.sionate satisfaction in her married life), "I shall yet have been more blessed than any other woman. It will have been worth while to have lived only to have loved you--and----"

Meg put the letter down--surely this was too sacred for any eyes but his to whom it was written; a shame came over her that she had read so much.

Some one else had once said to her: "It is worth while". This dead voice, that was yet so instinct with life, now, after all these years, reiterated it.

She gave Laura the box the next morning, before she left.

"It wouldn't be safe to carry jewels with me to the part of London I am going to," she explained. "Will you take care of them for me? They are best left behind."

She turned the key in the lock, and put the box in Laura's hands.

"There are letters there too," she said. "They are so alive, that, I suppose, father could not bear to burn them. I began to read one; but I did not finish it--I felt as if I oughtn't to."

"Ought not? Why, he left them to you especially!" said Laura. "Who has a better right?"

"I felt as if _I_ had no right to them," said Meg.

CHAPTER V.

Even more than knowledge, pain is power.

--_Illingworth._

And on his brest a bloudie crosse he bore, The deare remembrance of his dying Lord For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore, And dead as living ever Him ador'd.

--_Spenser._

It was on a close breathless day in September that Meg first saw Newgate.

Nearly fifty years have wrought many changes for the better (as well as some few for the worse) in London.

The Holborn Tom and Meg Thorpe walked down was more unsavoury, noisier, and far less regulated as to traffic than the Holborn of to-day.

The immense flow of people, the street cries, the jostling and bustling, were new to Meg; for, though she had lived in London half her life, she had never seen this side of it before.