Neighbours on the Green; My Faithful Johnny

‘I thought you could not spare her,’ I said with perhaps some cruelty in my intention. She wrung her hands, and looked piteously in my face.

‘You think it is all my fault! I never thought it would come to this; I never thought he would go away. Oh, if I had only let them marry at first! I often think if she had been happy in her own home, coming to see her father every day, it would have been more of a change for him, more company than having her always. Oh! if one could only tell what is going to happen. She might have had a nice family by this time, and the eldest little girl big enough to run in and play at his feet and amuse her grandpa. He always was fond of children. But we’ll never see Ellen’s children now!’ cried the poor woman. ‘And you think it is my fault!’

I could not reproach her; her black cap with the flowers, her little woollen shawl about her shoulders, grew tragic as she poured forth her trouble. It was not so dignified as the poet’s picture, but yet, like him, she

Saw the unborn faces shine
Beside the never lighted fire;

and with a groan of misery felt herself the slayer of those innocents that had never been. The tragic and the comic mingled in the vision of that ‘eldest little girl,’ the child who would have amused her grandpa had she been permitted to come into being; but it was all tragic to poor Mrs. Harwood. She saw no laugh, no smile, in the situation anywhere.

We went to Mentone, and stayed there till the bitterness of the winter was over, then moved along that delightful coast, and were in Genoa in April. To speak of that stately city as a commercial town seems insulting—and yet so it is now-a-days. I recognized at once the type I had known in other days when I sat at the window of the hotel and watched the people coming and going. It reminded me of my window in the Road, where, looking out, I saw the respectable City people—clerks like John Ridgway, and merchants of the same cut though of more substantial comfort—wending their way to their business in the morning, and to their suburban homes in the evening. I do not know that I love the commercial world; but I like to see that natural order of life—the man ‘going forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.’ The fashion of it is different in a foreign town, but still the life is the same. We changed our quarters however after we had been for some time in that city, so-called of palaces, and were lodged in a suite of rooms very hard to get up to (though the staircase was marble), but very delightful when one was there; rooms which overlooked the high terrace which runs round a portion of the bay between the inns and the quays. I forget what it is called. It is a beautiful promenade, commanding the loveliest view of that most beautiful bay and all that is going on in it. At night, with all its twinkling semicircle of lights, it was a continual enchantment to me; but this or any of my private admirations are not much to the purpose of my story. Sitting at the window, always my favourite post, I became acquainted with various individual figures among those who haunted this terrace. Old gentlemen going out to sun themselves in the morning before the heat was too great; children and nursemaids, Genoese women with their pretty veils, invalids who had got up the stairs, I cannot tell now, and sat panting on the benches, enjoying the sea air and the sunshine. There was one however among this panorama of passing figures, which gave me a startled sense of familiarity. It was too far off to see the man’s face. He was not an invalid; but he was bent, either with past sickness or with present care, and walked with a dropping head and a languid step. After watching him for a time, I concluded (having always a great weakness for making out other people’s lives, how they flow) that he had some occupation in the town from which he escaped, whenever he had leisure, to rest a little and refresh himself upon the terrace. He came very regularly, just at the time when Italian shops and offices have a way of shutting up, in the middle of the day—very regularly, always, or almost always, at the same hour. He came up the steps slowly and languidly, stopped a little to take breath, and then walked half way round the terrace to a certain bench upon which he always seated himself. Sometimes he brought his luncheon with him and ate it there. At other times, having once gained that place, he sat quite still in a corner of it, not reading, nor taking any notice of the other passers-by. No one was with him, no one ever spoke to him. When I noticed him first he startled me. Who was he like? His bent figure, his languid step, resembled no one I could think of; but yet I said to myself, He is like somebody. I established a little friendship with him, though it was a friendship without any return; for though I could see him he could not see me, nor could I distinguish his face; and we never saw him anywhere else, neither at church, nor in the streets, not even on the festas when everybody was about; but always just there on that one spot. I looked for him as regularly as the day came. ‘My mother’s old gentleman,’ Chatty called him. Everybody is old who is not young to these children; but though he was not young he did not seem to me to be old. And he puzzled as much as he interested me. Who was he like? I never even asked myself, Who was he? It would be no one I had any chance of acquaintance with. Some poor employé in a Genoa office; how should I know him? I could not feel at all sure, when I was cross-examined on the subject, whether I really remembered any one whom he was like; but yet he had startled me more than I can say.

Genoa, where we had friends and family reasons for staying, became very hot as the spring advanced into early summer, and we removed to one of the lovely little towns on the coast at a little distance, Santa Margherita. When we had been settled there for a few days, Chatty came in to me one evening with a pale face. ‘I have just seen your old gentleman,’ she said. ‘I think he must live out here; but I saw by the expression of her eyes that there was more to say. She added after a moment, ‘And I know who he is like.’

‘Ah! you have seen his face,’ I said; and then, before she had spoken, it suddenly flashed on myself in a moment, ‘John Ridgway!’ I cried.

‘Mother,’ said Chatty, quite pale, ‘I think it is his ghost.’

I went out with her instantly to where she had seen him, and we made some inquiries, but with no success. When I began to think it over, he was not like John Ridgway. He was bent and stooping, whereas John was erect; his head drooped, whereas how well I recollected poor John’s head thrown back a little, his hat upon the back of it, his visionary outlook rather to the skies than to the ground. No, no, not like him a bit; but yet it might be his ghost, as Chatty said. We made a great many inquiries, but for the moment with no success, and you may suppose that I watched the passers-by from my window with more devotion than ever. One evening in the sudden nightfall of the Italian skies, when darkness comes all at once, I was seated in my usual place, scarcely seeing however the moving figures outside, though all the population of the place seemed to be out, sitting round the doors, and strolling leisurely along enjoying the heavenly coolness and the breeze from the sea. At the further end of the room Chatty was at the piano, playing to me softly in the dark which she knows is what I like, and now and then striking into some old song such as I love. She was sure to arrive sooner or later at that one with which we now had so many associations; but I was not thinking of the song, nor for the moment of Ellen or her faithful (as I was sure he was still) lover at all. A woman with so many children has always plenty to think of. My mind was busy with my own affairs. The windows were open, and the babble of the voices outside—high pitched, resounding Italian voices, not like the murmur of English—came in to us as the music floated out. All at once, I suddenly woke up from my thinking and my family concerns. In the dusk one figure detached itself from among the others with a start, and came forward slowly with bent head and languid step. Had he never heard that song since he heard Ellen break off, choked with tears unshed, and a despair which had never been revealed? He came quite close under the window where I could see him no longer. I could not see him at all; it was too dark. I divined him. Who could it be but he? Not like John Ridgway, and yet John; his ghost, as Chatty had said.

I did not stop to think what I was to do, but rose up in the dark room where the child was singing, only a voice, herself invisible in the gloom. I don’t know whether Chatty saw me go; but, if so, she was inspired unawares by the occasion, and went on with her song. I ran down-stairs and went out softly to the open door of the inn, where there were other people standing about. Then I saw him quite plainly by the light from a lower window. His head was slightly raised towards the place from which the song came. He was very pale in that pale, doubtful light, worn and old and sad; but as he looked up, a strange illumination was on his face. His hand beat the air softly, keeping time. As she came to the refrain his lips began to move as if he were repeating after his old habit those words, ‘I will come again.’ Then a sudden cloud of pain seemed to come over his face—he shook his head faintly, then bowed it upon his breast.

In a moment I had him by the arm. ‘John,’ I said in my excitement; ‘John Ridgway! we have found you.’ For the moment, I believe, he thought it was Ellen who had touched him; his white face seemed to leap into light; then paled again. He took off his hat with his old formal, somewhat shy politeness—‘I thought it must be you, madame,’ he said. He said ‘madame’ instead of the old English madam, which he had always used: this little concession to the changed scene was all the difference. He made no mystery about himself, and showed no reluctance to come in with me, to talk as of old. He told me he had a situation in an office in Genoa, and that his health was bad. ‘After that fiasco in the Levant, I had not much heart for anything. I took the first thing that was offered,’ he said, with his old vague smile; ‘for a man must live—till he dies.’ ‘There must be no question of dying—at your age,’ I cried. This time his smile almost came the length of a momentary laugh. He shook his head, but he did not continue the subject He was very silent for some time after. Indeed, he said nothing, except in reply to my questions, till Chatty left, the room and we were alone. Then all at once, in the middle of something I was saying—‘Is she—married again?’ he said.

‘Married—again!’

‘It is a foolish question. She was not married to me; but it felt much the same: we had been as one for so long. There must have been some—strong inducement—to make her cast me off so at the end.’

This he said in a musing tone, as if the fact were so certain, and had been turned over in his mind so often that all excitement was gone from it. But after it was said, a gleam of anxiety came into his half-veiled eyes. He raised his heavy, tired eyelids and looked at me. Though he seemed to know all about it, and to be resigned to it when he began to speak, yet it seemed to flash across him, before he ended, that there was an uncertainty—an answer to come from me which would settle it, after all. Then he leaned forward a little, in this sudden sense of suspense, and put his hand to his ear as if he had been deaf, and said ‘What?’ in an altered tone.

‘There is some terrible mistake,’ I said. ‘I have felt there was a mistake all along. She has lost her hold on life altogether because she believes you to be changed.’

‘Changed!’ His voice was quite sharp and keen, and had lost its languid tone. ‘In what way—in what way? how could I be changed?’

‘In the only way that could matter between her and you. She thought, before you left the Levant, that you had got to care for some one else—that you had ceased to care for her. Your letter,’ I said, ‘your letter!’—half frightened by the way in which he rose, and his threatening, angry aspect—‘would bear that interpretation.’

‘My letter!’ He stood before me for a moment with a sort of feverish, fierce energy; then he began to laugh, low and bitterly, and walk about as if unable to keep still. ‘My letter!’ The room was scarcely lighted—one lamp upon the table, and no more; and the half-darkness, as he paced about, made his appearance more threatening still. Then he suddenly came and stood before me as if it had been I that had wronged him. ‘I am a likely man to be a gay Lothario,’ he cried, with that laugh of mingled mockery and despair which was far more tragical than weeping. It was the only expression that such an extreme of feeling could find. He might have cried out to heaven and earth, and groaned and wept; but it would not have expressed to me the wild confusion, the overturn of everything, the despair of being so misunderstood, the miserable sum of suffering endured and life wasted for nothing, like this laugh. Then he dropped again into the chair opposite me, as if with the consciousness that even this excitement was vain.

‘What can I say? What can I do? Has she never known me all along?—Ellen!’ He had not named her till now. Was it a renewal of life in his heart that made him capable of uttering her name?

‘Do not blame her,’ I cried. ‘She had made up her mind that nothing could ever come of it, and that you ought to be set free. She thought of nothing else but this; that for her all change was hopeless—that she was bound for life; and that you should be free. It became a fixed idea with her; and when your letter came, which was capable of being misread–’

‘Then the wish was father to the thought,’ he said, still bitterly. ‘Did she show it to you? did you misread it also? Poor cheat of a letter! My heart had failed me altogether. Between my failure and her slavery– But I never thought she would take me at my word,’ he went on piteously, ‘never! I wrote, don’t you know, as one writes longing to be comforted, to be told it did not matter so long as we loved each other, to be bidden come home. And there never came a word—not a word.’

‘She wrote afterwards, but you were gone; and her letter was returned to her.’

‘Ah!’ he said, in a sort of desolate assent. ‘Ah! was it so? then that was how it had to be, I suppose; things were so settled before ever we met each other. Can you understand that?—all settled that it was to end just so in misery, and confusion, and folly, before ever we met.’

‘I do not believe it,’ I cried. ‘There is no need that it should end so, even now; if—if you are unchanged still.’

‘I—changed?’ He laughed at this once more, but not so tragically, with sham ridicule of the foolishness of the doubt. And then all of a sudden he began to sing—oh, it was not a beautiful performance! he had no voice, and not much ear; but never has the loveliest of music moved me more—‘I will come again, my sweet and bonnie: I will come–’ Here he broke down as Ellen had done, and said, with a hysterical sob, ‘I’m ill; I think I’m dying. How am I, a broken man, without a penny, to come again?’

Chatty and I walked with him to his room through the soft darkness of the Italian night. I found he had fever—the wasting, exhausting ague fever—which haunts the most beautiful coasts in the world. I did my best to reassure him, telling him that it was not deadly, and that at home he would soon be well; but I cannot say that I felt so cheerfully as I spoke, and all that John did was to shake his head. As we turned home again through all the groups of cheerful people, Chatty with her arm clasped in mine, we talked, it is needless to say, of nothing else. But not even to my child did I say what I meant to do. I am not rich, but still I can afford myself a luxury now and then. When the children were in bed I wrote a short letter, and put a cheque in it for twenty pounds. This was what I said. I was too much excited to write just in the ordinary way:—

‘Ellen, I have found John, ill, heart-broken, but as faithful and unchanged as I always knew he was. If you have the heart of a mouse in you come out instantly—don’t lose a day—and save him. It may be time yet. If he can be got home to English air and to happiness it will still be time.

‘I have written to your mother. She will not oppose you, or I am much mistaken. Take my word for all the details. I will expect you by the earliest possibility. Don’t write, but come.’

In less than a week after I went to Genoa, and met in the steamboat from Marseilles, which was the quickest way of travelling then, a trembling, large-eyed, worn-out creature, not knowing if she were dead or alive, confused with the strangeness of everything, and the wonderful change in her own life. It was one of John’s bad days, and nobody who was not acquainted with the disease would have believed him other than dying. He was lying in a kind of half-conscious state when I took Ellen into his room. She stood behind me clinging to me, undistinguishable in the darkened place. The flush of the fever was going off; the paleness as of death and utter exhaustion stealing over him. His feeble fingers were moving faintly upon the white covering of his bed; his eyelids half shut, with the veins showing blue in them and under his eyes. But there was a faint smile on his face. Wherever he was wandering in those confused fever dreams, he was not unhappy. Ellen held by my arm to keep herself from falling. ‘Hope! you said there was hope,’ she moaned in my ear, with a reproach that was heart-rending. Then he began to murmur with his almost colourless yet smiling lips, ‘I will come again, my sweet and bonnie; I will come—again.’ And then the fingers faintly beating time were still.

But no, no! Do not take up a mistaken idea. He was not dead; and he did not die. We got him home after a while. In Switzerland, on our way to England, I had them married safe and fast under my own eye. I would allow no more shilly-shally. And, indeed, it appeared that Mrs. Harwood, frightened by all the results of her totally unconscious domestic despotism, was eager in hurrying Ellen off, and anxious that John should come home. He never quite regained his former health, but he got sufficiently well to take another situation, his former employers anxiously aiding him to recover his lost ground. And they took Montpellier Villa after all, to be near Pleasant Place, where Ellen goes every day, and is, Mrs. Harwood allows, far better company for her father, and a greater relief to the tedium of his life, than when she was more constantly his nurse and attendant. I am obliged to say however that the mother has had a price to pay for the emancipation of the daughter. There is nothing to be got for nought in this life. And sometimes Ellen has a compunction, and sometimes there is an unspoken reproach in the poor old lady’s tired eyes. I hope for my own part that when that ‘eldest little girl’ is a little older Mrs. Harwood’s life will be greatly sweetened and brightened. But yet it is she that has to pay the price; for no argument, not even the last severe winter, and many renewed ‘attacks,’ will persuade that old tyrant, invisible in his upper chamber, to die.

A song needs no story perhaps; but a story is always the better for a song: so that after all I need not perhaps apologize to Beethoven and his interpreters as I meant to do for taking their lovely music as a suggestion of the still greater harmonies of life.

THE END