Part 52 (1/2)
No!--Eleanor's!
Gently she touched my hand--I sank down into soft, weary happy sleep.
The spell was snapped. My fever and my dreams faded away together, and I woke to the twittering of the sparrows, and the scent of the poplar leaves, and the sights and sounds of childhood, and found Eleanor and her uncle sitting by my bed, and with them Crossthwaite's little wife.
I would have spoken, but Eleanor laid her finger on her lips, and taking her uncle's arm, glided from the room. Katie kept stubbornly a smiling silence, and I was fain to obey my new-found guardian angels.
What need of many words? Slowly, and with relapses into insensibility, I pa.s.sed, like one who recovers from drowning, through the painful gate of birth into another life. The fury of pa.s.sion had been replaced by a delicious weakness. The thunder-clouds had pa.s.sed roaring down the wind, and the calm bright holy evening was come. My heart, like a fretful child, had stamped and wept itself to sleep. I was past even grat.i.tude; infinite submission and humility, feelings too long forgotten, absorbed my whole being. Only I never dared meet Eleanor's eye. Her voice was like an angel's when she spoke to me--friend, mother, sister, all in one. But I had a dim recollection of being unjust to her--of some bar between us.
Katie and Crossthwaite, as they sat by me, tender and careful nurses both, told me, in time, that to Eleanor I owed all my comforts. I could not thank her--the debt was infinite, inexplicable. I felt as if I must speak all my heart or none; and I watched her lavish kindness with a sort of sleepy, pa.s.sive wonder, like a new-born babe.
At last, one day, my kind nurses allowed me to speak a little. I broached to Crossthwaite the subject which filled my thoughts. ”How came I here? How came you here? and Lady Ellerton? What is the meaning of it all?”
”The meaning is, that Lady Ellerton, as they call her, is an angel out of heaven. Ah, Alton! she was your true friend, after all, if you had but known it, and not that other one at all.”
I turned my head away.
”Whisht--howld then, Johnny darlint! and don't go tormenting the poor dear sowl, just when he's comin' round again.”
”No, no! tell me all. I must--I ought--I deserve to bear it. How did she come here?”
”Why then, it's my belief, she had her eye on you ever since you came out of that Bastille, and before that, too; and she found you out at Mackaye's, and me with you, for I was there looking after you. If it hadn't been for your illness, I'd have been in Texas now, with our friends, for all's up with the Charter, and the country's too hot, at least for me. I'm sick of the whole thing together, patriots, aristocrats, and everybody else, except this blessed angel. And I've got a couple of hundred to emigrate with; and what's more, so have you.”
”How's that?”
”Why, when poor dear old Mackaye's will was read, and you raving mad in the next room, he had left all his stock-in-trade, that was, the books, to some of our friends, to form a workmen's library with, and 400 he'd saved, to be parted between you and me, on condition that we'd G.T.T., and cool down across the Atlantic, for seven years come the tenth of April.”
So, then, by the lasting love of my adopted father, I was at present at least out of the reach of want! My heart was ready to overflow at my eyes; but I could not rest till I had heard more of Lady Ellerton. What brought her here, to nurse me as if she had been a sister?
”Why, then, she lives not far off by. When her husband died, his cousin got the estate and t.i.tle, and so she came, Katie tells me, and lived for one year down somewhere in the East-end among the needlewomen; and spent her whole fortune on the poor, and never kept a servant, so they say, but made her own bed and cooked her own dinner, and got her bread with her own needle, to see what it was really like. And she learnt a lesson there, I can tell you, and G.o.d bless her for it. For now she's got a large house here by, with fifty or more in it, all at work together, sharing the earnings among themselves, and putting into their own pockets the profits which would have gone to their tyrants; and she keeps the accounts for them, and gets the goods sold, and manages everything, and reads to them while they work, and teaches them every day.”
”And takes her victuals with them,” said Katie, ”share and share alike. She that was so grand a lady, to demane herself to the poor unfortunate young things! She's as blessed a saint as any a one in the Calendar, if they'll forgive me for saying so.”
”Ay! demeaning, indeed! for the best of it is, they're not the respectable ones only, though she spends hundreds on them--”
”And sure, haven't I seen it with my own eyes, when I've been there charing?”
”Ay, but those she lives with are the fallen and the lost ones--those that the rich would not set up in business, or help them to emigrate, or lift them out of the gutter with a pair of tongs, for fear they should stain their own whitewash in handling them.”
”And sure they're as dacent as meself now, the poor darlints! It was misery druv 'em to it, every one; perhaps it might hav' druv me the same way, if I'd a lot o' childer, and Johnny gone to glory--and the blessed saints save him from that same at all at all!”
”What! from going to glory?” said John.
”Och, thin, and wouldn't I just go mad if ever such ill luck happened to yees as to be taken to heaven in the prime of your days, asth.o.r.e?”
And she began sobbing and hugging and kissing the little man; and then suddenly recollecting herself, scolded him heartily for making such a ”whillybaloo,” and thrust him out of my room, to recommence kissing him in the next, leaving me to many meditations.
CHAPTER x.x.xVII.
THE TRUE DEMAGOGUE.