Читать книгу The Threatening Eye - E. F. Knight - Страница 4

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A street in Brixton—one of those dreary streets of what the house-agent calls eligible eight-roomed residences, in which all the houses are as like each other as so many peas out of one pod: each two-storied; each looking out on the street through six windows; each with its little flight of stone steps leading up to the front door; each with its garden just six yards square; each with its severe respectability of expression. For houses, like men, have their expressions which reflect the characters of their inmates. There is the prim Puritanical house; the dissipated villa with its neglected gate; the ostentatious nouveau riche mansion, turning up its nose at its neighbours; the well-kept pretty cottage, looking contented with itself and all the world, containing as it does the newly-married couple; the cynical abode of crusty old bachelorhood surrounded by whims and fads; and so on, each from palace to slum with a face the meaning of which he who knows how may read.

Now the houses of this Brixton Street were of the respectable-genteel class of houses, not over-wealthy, but very respectable; possibly come down in the world some of them, but all essentially genteel.

Married clerks in banks and merchants' offices, with small salaries and large families, formed the bulk of the occupants of these dwellings. Besides these there were generally one or two retired military men in the street; they also with encumbrances, wives and families, that were rather slip-shod, whereas the military men themselves preserved a certain amount of fashion in their attire. These gallant officers and their belongings were wont, however, to encamp for a while only as it were in the street. They never stayed long, but would vanish unostentatiously without fuss of any kind, leaving behind painful regrets in the memories of sundry rate-collectors and tradesmen. These nomadic warriors alone of all that street's inhabitants were not quite respectable, though distinctly genteel.

It was, in short, a dull Brixton street such as our London suburbs have hundreds of, leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere at all, for it terminated at its further end in a wilderness of "eligible building land," a desert of mud and broken crockery that was only awaiting the advent of the speculative builder to become yet one more excrescence of this swollen metropolis.

Of all the respectable houses of this highly respectable street none were more respectable than No. 22. No grocer hesitated before he permitted Mrs. Grimm to run up a three months' account at his shop; for was not Mr. Grimm known to be a man of substance? He was a lawyer in the city, a solicitor in fair but not clean practice: a Perpetual Commissioner of Oaths too, it was whispered, and to the outside world such a title could not but imply more than respectability, it even savoured of dignity. Again he was wont to come punctually home to his dinner every evening at seven; he had been five years at No. 22, and had always paid his way; and finally, what established his credit more than all else, he was known to own no less than three houses in the street, bringing him in some thirty pounds a year each.

The household of No. 22 consisted of this gentleman, his daughter, who was sixteen years old at the period this story opens, and his second wife.

One maid-servant "did" for the family with the assistance of the daughter. Mrs. Grimm did not condescend to work, but she superintended energetically. Thus it will be seen that though Mr. Grimm was fairly well off he did not waste his means in ostentation, and kept up his establishment on an economical footing.

One of our most distinguished novelists started life as a gambler. He was remarkably successful at play, and was rapidly amassing a fortune; but one day, we are told, he happened to perceive the reflection of his face in a mirror, when he was so horrified at the haggard appearance it presented, that he incontinently threw up his destructive pursuit for that of literature, in which he became even more successful than at the green table.

Even as wise as this great author was Mr. Grimm. At the commencement of his career he too had been a gambler, a dabbler on the stock exchange—with clients' money sometimes; but perceiving that the fierce anxiety was turning his hair grey, he forswore gambling: not for literature though, but for quiet safe swindling. Swindling doesn't age one like play, and so far as results to oneself are concerned, is the most innocent vice of the two. A thief is as often as not a dear amiable fat jovial fellow, with the lightest of consciences. Is your gambler ever anything but the reverse?

Mr. Grimm was not a lovable man. He was that perhaps lowest of all creatures that crawl the earth—a pettifogging attorney, capable of any meanness, any dishonesty, any cruel robbery of orphan and widow, and just sharp enough to know where to draw the line between moral crime and legal crime. He had, it is true, on two occasions run rather close risks of being scratched off the rolls, and had received many a well-earned rebuke from judge in open Court or Master in Chambers; but this "gentleman by Act of Parliament," knew what he was about, and so far had not overreached himself to ruin as do so many of his class, when long impunity has made them careless in their knavery.

Mr. Grimm's first wife was a foolish weak woman of the pale eyes, pale hair, and washed-out complexion type.

She had been sold to the attorney by her father. The poor creature herself, too feeble of will to offer resistance, was led submissively to the altar.

The father, one of those retired officers of the selfish, disreputable, hard-up, red-nosed class, being well entangled in Mr. Grimm's toils, had handed over his daughter to him in discharge of an old debt connected with bill-discounting.

The attractions of the said daughter consisted of an absolute reversion that would some day fall into her possession.

To recite the main points of the transaction, in consideration of the tearing up of the captain's bit of paper, the marriage settlement, which referred solely to the reversion, was drawn up in a way satisfactory to Mr. Grimm, and the aforesaid virgin was duly conveyed to the aforesaid Mr. Grimm, according to the forms which are sanctioned by the Church and the Law.

One daughter, Mary, was the sole child of this marriage.

The unfortunate mother, after a two years' not very agreeable experience of married life, died off, in the quiet uncomplaining manner which had characterised her life, before anyone even realised that she was seriously ill.

From very early youth the life of poor little Mary was rendered miserable. It seemed that her father was incapable of any touch of parental affection; such characters are rare, but his character was a rare one for its unredeemable meanness.

He looked on his child as a nuisance—an expensive interloper in his house that the law obliged him to clothe and feed. He did feed her—badly, and clothed her somewhat better, for the sake of appearances, having a regard for his respectability.

He was cruel as well as mean. When he went down to the city he would lock up his infant child, keeping her a pallid prisoner within doors, all through the long summer day.

But meanness as well as cruelty prompted this treatment. He would not go to the expense of engaging a nurse for his daughter, and the little maid-of-all-work, as she said herself, had "quite enough to do without lugging that child out for an airing." Again it would not at all do for the child of respectable Mr. Grimm to be seen by the neighbours playing about the streets by herself like any little street arab—the street arabs whom she so soon learned to envy; for though starved, cold, beaten by drunken parents, they were free, free to romp about the gutters with other children, having luckily parents who had no respectability to keep up.

I do not know how Mary learned to read and write: in after years she could not say herself; but, at any rate, before she was seven, her father found that he could make his daughter useful. Her small hands, far whiter and thinner, alas! than they should have been, were employed all day in copying deeds and legal documents for him, in the round hand of a solicitor's clerk.

In the bright summer afternoons, while other children played, her little brown head was bowed over the dismal folios of chicanery.

When Mary was about ten years old a stepmother was introduced into the establishment. Why Grimm married her, what pecuniary or other inducement was present on this occasion, I do not know.

But now it came to pass that he—the mean, cowardly, foxy, little man with the red hair and the shifty eyes—met his match. The second Mrs. Grimm was a big woman with a purple face, a loud voice, and an almost Papuan mop of faded-straw coloured hair, a woman who ever overawed the solicitor. In this couple the offensive qualities of the two sexes were reversed. She was the more masculine of the two. The little man's readiest weapon was the feminine needle of nagging; hers the male bludgeon of blustering brutality.

Mrs. Grimm number two, without delay, conceived a violent dislike for her husband's little girl.

It was on this second marriage that the highly respectable family moved to No. 22 in the genteel street in Brixton.

And now the child's position was a more unhappy one than ever; and her inner life became one of hate, a terrible hate—and children can hate even more bitterly than their elders—against her father and step-mother, a hate ever aggravated by the abominable treatment she received at the hands of both.

Hers indeed was a miserable childhood, made up of blows, imprisonment, hard work, no play, no sunshine, no companion, and worse than all, taunts and insults that made her writhe—hasty words of that description which rankle deeply in an infant's heart, and are remembered through life in some cases: a fact some parents do not seem to realize.

So it was that all childishness was being driven out of the child and all womanliness out of the woman.

Before her father's second marriage she had sometimes made friends of the maids-of-all-work of the house, but now this was no longer to be. The stepmother not approving of such association was ever on the watch for it, and on any signs of intimacy between the daughter and the drudge declaring themselves, the latter was immediately packed off and some stern and quite unsympathetic person substituted.

The little girl toiled on at the law-copying and the domestic work, silent, moody, with a stern expression gathering on her face that made it look so old for her age. She became—who would not?—a liar and a hater. But she was brave, she could hate, she could not fear; she gave up crying before she was twelve years old.

Her only pleasure, her sole consolation after the blows and insults, was to lie awake at night and brood revenge. Child-like, she would build castles in the air, complicated little stories of which she herself was the central figure; but not the castles in the air of other children, dreams of fairy-land and happy adventure. No; the plot of all her fancies was revenge, punishment of her father and stepmother.

These were her day-dreams too when she sat mechanically copying the deeds—dreams always of hatred, of torturing her torturers; and at times she would smile, oh! so strange a smile for a child! when some more ingeniously terrible mode of repaying that debt of ill would occur to her infant mind.

Hate, suppressed but intense HATE! such was the education of Mary Grimm; so things went on until the period at which this story opens, when Mary was sixteen.

She looked a few years older than her age. In spite of her unwholesome training she was beautiful. She was tall and graceful. Her small head was well-set on her shoulders. Her features were regular—too regular perhaps if anything.

When she went out on an errand, wrapped in her faded shawl, walking fast, looking neither to the right nor to the left, meeting with cold and impassive glance, the stare of the passing stranger, how many men, and women too, would turn and look after the girl, struck by her pale quiet face.

It was a face that haunted one. There was something in it that puzzled, something mysterious in the expression that one could not explain at first, something inconsistent.

Inconsistent—that was it. For in the first place her brown hair was out in a fringe over her forehead. The vulgar boldness of that objectionable fashion, though it could not make her ugly, was singularly inappropriate to that Grecian face and head.

But that was not all: even had her hair been tied up, as it should have been, in the classic knot, the something inconsistent would still have been present. It lay in the strange difference of expression between the eyes and mouth. Looking into her eyes, those large violet long-lashed eyes that are perhaps the most beautiful of all, one could read in them delightful possibilities of love, womanly tenderness, the desire for sympathy, indeed the look that attracts man to woman.

But looking from the eyes to the mouth a chill would come over the observer, a disappointment, a feeling as if a barrier were set up between him and her, an obstacle that kept off love and sympathy.

For that mouth, beautiful in its moulding, was yet so firm, so hard, not a sad mouth in any way, but stern, almost cruel.

It was on the mouth that the demon of strong hate, which the father had conjured up to his daughter, had placed his mark.

The woman, the angel in her, looked out of those pathetic eyes.

One could easily foretell that hers would be a life of suffering—the suffering of the strong, of fierce conflict between good and evil.

The signs of battle were already on that young face. Would the tender eyes come to look cold and hard, and the mouth wax firmer and wickeder, or would the good angel win the day? would the eyes become tenderer still, and the mouth soften to lines of sweetness and womanly kindness?

As with women from the beginning, so with her—the victory depended upon the MAN; upon whether when he came he threw his strong alliance with the powers of good or evil.

So far it was an equal battle. Mary at sixteen wanted but little to make of her either a devil as only woman can be, or an angel as only woman can be—which would she become?