afternoon—that hung like a living misery over the black slush of the Birmingham streets, and would in itself have sufficed to bring the lightest hearted, happiest mortal to the very gates of despair, when Augusta, wet, wearied, and almost crying, at last entered the door of their little sitting-room. She entered very quietly, for the maid-of-all-work had met her in the passage and told her that Miss Jeannie was asleep. She had been coughing very much about dinner-time, but now she was asleep.
There was a fire in the grate, a small one, for the coal was economised by means of two large fire-bricks, and on a table (Augusta’s writing table), placed at the further side of the room, was a paraffin-lamp turned low. Drawn up in front, but a little to one side of the fire, was a sofa, covered with red rep, and on the sofa lay a fair-haired little form, so thin and fragile that it looked like the ghost or outline of a girl, rather than a girl herself. It was Jeannie, her sick sister, and she was asleep. Augusta stole softly up to look at her. It was a sweet little face that her eyes fell on, although it was so shockingly thin, with long, curved lashes, delicate nostrils, and a mouth shaped like a bow. All the lines and grooves which the chisel of Pain knows so well how to carve were smoothed out of it now, and in their place lay the shadow of a smile.
Augusta looked at her and clenched her fists, while a lump rose in her throat, and her grey eyes filled with tears. How could she get the money to save her? The year before a rich man, a man who was detestable to her, had wanted to marry her, and she would have nothing to say to him. He had gone abroad, else she would have gone back to him and married him—at a price. Marry him? yes she would marry him: she would do anything for money to take her sister away! What did she care for herself when her darling was dying—dying for the want of two hundred pounds!
Just then Jeannie woke up, and stretched her arms out to her.
“So you are back at last, dear,” she said in her sweet childish voice. “It has been so lonely without you. Why, how wet you are! Take off your jacket at once, Gussie, or you will soon be as ill as”—and here she broke out into a terrible fit of coughing, that seemed to shake her tender frame as the wind shakes a reed.
Her sister turned and obeyed, and then came and sat by the sofa and took the thin little hand in hers.
“Well, Gussie, and how did you get on with the Printer-devil” (this was her impolite name for the great Meeson); “will he give you any more money?”
“No, dear; we quarrelled, that was all, and I came away.”
“Then I suppose that we can’t go abroad?”
Augusta was too moved to answer; she only shook her head. The child buried her face in the pillow and gave a sob or two. Presently she was quiet, and lifted it again. “Gussie, love,” she said, “don’t be angry, but I want to speak to you. Listen, my sweet Gussie, my angel. Oh, Gussie, you don’t know how I love you! It is all no good, it is useless struggling against it, I must die sooner or later; though I am only twelve, and you think me such a child, I am old enough to understand that. I think,” she added, after pausing to cough, “that pain makes one old: I feel as though I were fifty. Well, so you see I may as well give up fighting against it and die at once. I am only a burden and anxiety to you—I may as well die at once and go to sleep.”
“Don’t, Jeannie! don’t!” said her sister, in a sort of cry; “you are killing me!”
Jeannie laid her hot hand upon Augusta’s arm, “Try and listen to me, dear,” she said, “even if it hurts, because I do so want to say something. Why should you be so frightened about me? Can any place that I can go be worse than this place? Can I suffer more pain anywhere, or be more hurt when I see you crying? Think how wretched it has all been. There has only been one beautiful thing in our lives for years and years, and that was your book. Even when I am feeling worst—when my chest aches, you know—I grow quite happy when I think of what the papers wrote about you: the Times and the Saturday Review, and the Spectator, and the rest of them. They said that you had genius—true genius, you remember, and that they expected one day to see you at the head of the literature of the time, or near it. The Printer-devil can’t take away that, Gussie. He can take the money; but he can’t say that he wrote the book; though,” she added, with a touch of childish spite and vivacity, “I have no doubt that he would if he could. And then there were those letters from the great authors up in London; yes, I often think of them too. Well, dearest old girl, the best of it is that I know it is all true. I know, I can’t tell you how, that you will be a great woman in spite of all the Meesons in creation; for somehow you will get out of his power, and, if you don’t, five years is not all one’s life—at least, not if people have a life. At the worst, he can only take all the money. And then, when you are great and rich and famous, and more beautiful than ever, and when the people turn their heads as you come into the room, like we used to at school when the missionary came to lecture, I know that you will think of me (because you won’t forget me as some sisters do), and of how, years and years before, so long ago that the time looks quite small when you think of it, I told you that it would be so just before I died.”
Here the girl, who had been speaking with a curious air of certainty and with a gravity and deliberation extraordinary for one so young, suddenly broke off to cough. Her sister threw herself on her knees beside her, and, clasping her in her arms, implored her in broken accents not to talk of dying. Jeannie drew Augusta’s golden head down on her breast and stroked it.
“Very well, Gussie, I won’t say any more about it,” she said; “but it is no good hiding the truth, dear. I am tired of fighting against it; it is no good—none at all. Anyhow we have loved each other very much, dear; and perhaps—somewhere else—we may again.”—And the brave little heart again broke down, and, overcome by the prescience of approaching separation, they both sobbed bitterly there upon the sofa. Presently came a knock at the door, and Augusta sprang up and turned to hide her tears. It was the maid-of-all-work bringing the tea; and, as she came blundering in, a sense of the irony of things forced itself into Augusta’s soul. Here they were plunged into the most terrible sorrow, weeping at the inevitable approach of that chill end, and still appearances must be kept up, even before a maid-of-all-work. Society, even when represented by a maid-of-all-work, cannot do away with the intrusion of domestic griefs, or any other griefs, and in our hearts we know it and act up to it. Far gone, indeed, must we be in mental or physical agony before we abandon the attempt to keep up appearances.
Augusta drank a little tea and ate a very small bit of bread-and-butter. As in the case of Mr. Meeson, the events of the day had not tended to increase her appetite. Jeannie drank a little milk but ate nothing. When this form had been gone through, and the maid-of-all-work had once more made her appearance and cleared the table, Jeannie spoke again.
“Gus,” she said, “I want you to put me to bed and then come and read to me out of ‘Jemima’s Vow’—where poor Jemima dies, you know. It is the most beautiful thing in the book, and I want to hear it again.”
Her sister did as she wished, and, taking down “Jemima’s Vow,” Jeannie’s own copy as it was called, being the very first that had come into the house, she opened it at the part Jeannie had asked for and read aloud, keeping her voice as steady as she could. As a matter of fact, however, the scene itself was as powerful as it was pathetic, and quite sufficient to account for any unseemly exhibitions of feeling on the part of the reader. However, she struggled through it till the last sentence was reached. It ran thus:—“And so Jemima stretched out her hand to him and said ‘Good-bye.’ And presently, knowing that she had now kept her promise, and being happy because she had done so, she went to sleep.”
“Ah!” murmured the blue-eyed child who listened. “I wish that I was as good as Jemima. But though I have no vow to keep I can say ‘Good-bye,’ and I can go to sleep.”
Augusta
