Kept (5 page)

“Delighted to see you, Mr. Carstairs. I hope I find you well?”

John Carstairs’s health, which was excellent, having been disposed of, Mr. Crabbe pressed on.

“And is there some way in which I may be of service?”

“As to that, Mr. Crabbe, I—well, in fact, I have come about my cousin, Miss Brotherton.”

“Miss Brotherton?”

“That is—Mrs. Ireland.”

“Indeed? Mrs. Ireland.” Mr. Crabbe’s face as he said this was quite without expression, so that Mr. Carstairs, who had assured himself when the conversation began that at any rate the old gentleman could not eat him, now feared that he might be devoured on the spot. “What is it that you wish to know about Mrs. Ireland?”

And here John Carstairs felt that he was placed in a quandary. He too believed that there was some mystery surrounding his cousin’s whereabouts, and yet this belief was not something that he could exactly put into words. Indeed he scarcely knew what he did believe, or suspect, about Mrs. Ireland’s apparent disappearance, other than it was a subject of popular remark and had excited the general curios
ity. So he contented himself by saying rather lamely, “My mother and I—my father is dead, you know—would be very glad to hear the terms of Mr. Ireland’s will.”

“Mr. Ireland’s will?” Mr. Crabbe, who had hitherto been standing, now seated himself in a chair on the further side of a large deal table littered with documents and pieces of paper bound up with coloured tapes, hooked one black-clothed leg over the other and stared at his visitor as if the question of Mr. Henry Ireland’s will was quite the gravest matter to have come before him in fifty years of legal practice.

“Well, as probate has been granted, I think I may say something of Mr. Ireland’s will. But in which particular?”

“Well—in the provisions made for his wife, let us say.”

Mr. Crabbe—wholly disingenuously, it may be said, for he remembered the terms of Henry Ireland’s will almost as well as he remembered the names of his children—took a file from the shelf that ran behind him and made a pretence of examining it.

“Mr. Carstairs. Do not think me impertinent”—John Carstairs shook his head, as if he could not for the life of him imagine Mr. Crabbe guilty of impertinence—“but are you at all acquainted with Mrs. Ireland’s state of health?”

“We had heard that she was not well.”

“Not well! That is one way of putting it. I regret to say that the last doctor who examined her pronounced her…mad.”

“Mad, you say?”

“At the time of her husband’s death and for some months previously, I am reliably informed, she had lost her reason to the extent of being unable to recognise him when he entered a room. Naturally this state of affairs was foremost in her husband’s mind when he made his will.”

“Naturally.”

“At present she is residing with her husband’s kinsman, Mr. Dixey, who is responsible for her care. You will appreciate that she is not at all able to appear in society.”

“I feared it was so.”

There was a silence in the room so profound that each of the other sounds that had formerly run in counterpoint to Mr. Crabbe’s voice—a
church clock striking the hour in the distance, the old clerk scuttling up the stair—seemed magnified and made unreal by it.

“And really, Mr. Carstairs, that is all I am prepared to say about Henry Ireland’s will. But perhaps you have some other question?”

John Carstairs shook his head; he had no other question. He was aware that what the old lawyer had said had been perfectly reasonable, and yet he was conscious, too, that in some way he could not perfectly fathom Mr. Crabbe had had the better of him, that he had failed to extract certain pieces of information that, through skill and persistence, another man might have been able to acquire. All this irked him, for he felt himself placed at a disadvantage—feared, too, that all the business with Mr. Crabbe’s files was a sham. But he was a man who was disposed to accept what was told to him, especially when the teller was so lofty an authority as Mr. Crabbe.

At the same time, he was now definitely oppressed by the atmosphere of the room—Mr. Crabbe’s dusty papers, his damask hangings, his dinner invitations, the framed testimonies to Mr. Crabbe’s juvenile accomplishments dating from ever so many years ago—and determined that he would take his leave. Consequently, he picked up his hat, shook hands with his host, escaped down Mr. Crabbe’s staircase through the gate of Lincoln’s Inn and had himself driven away to the Board of Trade.

And Mr. Crabbe, having watched him go across the square, stalked around his chamber pulling first one book from his shelves and then another but always failing to discover whatever it was that he wanted from them, then summoned his old clerk and informed him that he would see no callers, sat in apparent abstraction for half an hour and finally slipped away down the staircase to his club, as demure and confidential a shadow as ever passed beneath the portals of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and out into the City beyond.

MR. DIXEY

Easton Hall

Dear Sir,

This is a line as requested to notify you that the young woman as was spoken of has been put into my care.

She may be collected from this house at any time convenient.

The sum of four guineas in respect of her board and lodging would be gratefully received.

Your respectful servant,

SARAH FARTHING

 

JAS. DIXEY, ESQ.

Easton Hall

Nr. Watton

Norfolk

Dear Sir,

I am commanded to inform you that a bill bearing your signature in favour of Mr. Jabez Zangwill of Leadenhall Street, to the value of five hundred pounds, due on the 17th ult., is in our possession, and that we should be glad of either a prompt settlement or any terms that you may care to propose.

Most faithfully yours,

R. GRACE
Clerk to Mr. Pardew

 

J
AS
. D
IXEY
, E
SQ.

Easton Hall

Nr. Watton

Norfolk

Dear Sir,

I am commanded by Mr. Pardew to inform you that he is in receipt of your letter of the 14th inst., and will communicate with you at his earliest convenience.

Most faithfully yours,

R. GRACE
Clerk to Mr. Pardew

 

J
AS
. D
IXEY
, E
SQ.

Easton Hall

Nr. Watton

Norfolk

Dear Dixey,

I have your cheque for two hundred pounds. Come now, it won’t do! The bill was picked up from Zangwill in our usual way, as you well know. And here is some more paper with your name on it for three hundred pounds drawn on our mutual friend Mr. Ruen! Look here—I must have specie: another two hundred pounds and your promise to pay at six weeks. That’s about the strength of it.

Yours, &c.,

R. PARDEW

 

J
AS
. D
IXEY
, E
SQ.

Easton Hall

Nr. Watton

Norfolk

Dear Sir,

We regret to have to inform you that as you decline to communicate with us in regard to settlement of the two bills bearing your signature in our possession, the total value of which plus interest now stands at £660, we are reluctantly compelled to place the matter in the hands of our legal representatives.

Most faithfully yours,

PARDEW
&
CO.
Bill brokers, Carter Lane, EC

 

J
AS
. D
IXEY
, E
SQ.

My dear Sir,

In accordance with your instructions, received by letter and stated verbally on the occasion that we met, I have taken the opportunity of observing the patient in the manner that you suggested. This period of observation, I may say, occupied the greater part of a forenoon, during which time I was able to satisfy myself, I believe, of the lady’s innate condition, as opposed to any vagary of expression caused by the novelty of my presence before her.

A prolonged maniacal attack is not infrequently characterised by continual activity and a most ingenious disposition to mischief. In the case of Mrs. Ireland I think it may safely be said that the majority of these symptoms have passed, notwithstanding a constant restlessness, eagerness to move about the room & so forth. From the strict medical point of view, the lady is somewhat emaciated and suffering from disorder of the stomach and bowels. I believe these afflictions to be consequent upon her mental state and not the result of any organic disease.

Her articulation is, I suspect, much impaired by her malady. She will begin a sentence and then break off at some quite arbitrary point. Her conversation, additionally, is disconnected—almost rambling: the Queen, her late father, the names of persons unknown to me, memories of her girlhood, &c. She seems conscious of this failing yet unable to correct it. She is reliably informed—could name several of Mr. Dickens’s novels, the Archbishop and his predecessor—but could do nothing with the information. Her recreations, while confined, have been of the most primitive cast. Thus I heard (from her attendant) that she will from time to time sing, not unmelodiously, to herself, or attempt to fashion small drawings on the sheets of paper that are provided for her. Examples of the latter, which I have seen, are incomprehensible. On one occasion, I believe, she asked to sit at a pianoforte, and, there being one available, looked longingly at the keys as if they stirred some recollection within her on which she could not quite bring herself to act.

I append a list of her responses to such questions as I put:

Q: What is your name?

A:
Mrs. Ireland.

Q: Your age?

A:
I have passed my twenty-seventh year. (In fact, as I am led to believe, she is twenty-eight.)

Q: Who came before the present monarch?

A:
The Hanoverian Elector.

Q: What is the bird that sits in the tree beyond the window?

A:
A sparrow. (In fact it was a magpie.)

Q: Have you living relatives?

A:
I have a husband.

Q: Where is he?

A:
He is dead.

 

In the course of my examination I placed a number of objects before the patient with the aim of gauging her reaction. In a book—a volume of children’s tales—she took no interest,
yet the fastening of a horse’s bridle, which I happened to have in my pocket, she shrank from, saying that it awakened in her the darkest fears and apprehensions. A handkerchief she received with the gravest solemnity, balancing it on the palm of her hand and inspecting it as if it were some rare token whose significance she appreciated without comprehending its function. A very sorrowful look came upon her as she did this.

As to whether this derangement betokens an outright imbecility, I am not yet in possession of sufficient facts to judge. I can see no reason for the use of the strait waistcoat, the muff, the leg locks and handcuffs, the restraining chair—or indeed any other form of material restraint. The arrangements that you propose for her seem to be admirable in every respect. The routines that I should additionally suggest are those of seclusion, quiet, repetitive yet undemanding work which may give the brain an opportunity to function without undue distress. A suitable sedative may perhaps be administered in the patient’s food.

If I can be of any further professional assistance, or if a future consultation is thought to be advisable, then by all means apply to my secretary.

I am, my dear sir, yours most cordially,

JOHN CONOLLY,
M.D.
Late resident physician to the Hanwell Asylum

 

J
AS
. D
IXEY
, E
SQ.

Easton Hall

Nr. Watton

Norfolk

Dear Dixey,

Come now, there is a way out of this unpleasantness! Let me have that letter you spoke of (none shall know how I came by
it, that I promise), and all shall be well. Why, you may have another one hundred pounds for all I care, and buy as many gulls’ eggs as you choose!

Yrs., &c.,

R. PARDEW

 

E
arly afternoon in Tite Street, and already the twilight is seeping up through the area steps and out into the grey pavements beyond. A bitter February day here in Tite Street (“that most respectable locality,” as the house agents’ particulars so truly represent it) with a raw fog hanging in the air since dawn, and little flicks of wind agitating the washing hung out in the smoky courts and byways—there is always washing in Tite Street, it will be there when all else has perished—like an unseen hand. Tite Street. King’s Cross Station half a mile away and Somers Town hard by. “Tite Street!” the cabman echoes his passenger, as if to say, “You wouldn’t go
there
if you knew about it.”

Tite Street. Forty stucco houses in varying states of dilapidation, a profusion of polished brass plates (apothecaries, insurance agents, water bailiffs—Tite Street has them all), so many cards offering furnished apartments, pianoforte lessons and the like that to gather them up and deal them out would be to commence an all but interminable game of whist. Tite Street. At the nearer end an undertaker’s parlour, with a couple of great horses, their plumes dyed nearly purple, stamping on the kerb. At the further, the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium, Jno Phelps, prop., the dreariest public house you ever saw, with a couple of smeary windows through which the melancholy figure of a man in a nankeen jacket and side-whiskers, possibly even Mr. Phelps himself, can be seen polishing a row of pewter pots. A shooting gallery, a tobacconist-cum-newspaper-seller and a faded French milliner’s whose door no customer has been seen to enter in the three years of the shop’s existence complete the scope of Tite Street’s amenities. Tite Street. Forty brass doorknobs, forty dark casement windows, for all the world like forty dim aquariums were it not that no fish swim inside them, on a grim, grey day in February and no one at home.

Or not quite no one. For old Mrs. Farthing, seated at present in
her back kitchen with the lamps turned low and the shadows crawling consequently up the pale wall like so many phantoms, is always at home. One might as well expect the Sphinx to pick up its skirts and go hobbling across the desert as to conceive of Mrs. Farthing quitting her roost in Tite Street, where she has squatted these past twenty years and become so much a fixture that were she to depart on a little excursion to Camden Town or Marylebone market, Tite Street would feel itself robbed of an essential part of its character and get up a petition for her swift return.

Who is Mrs. Farthing? To be sure, a queer old woman of seventy-five, with a queer old face whose nose and chin threaten to meet in midair like a pair of nutcrackers, peeping up out of shiny widow’s weeds of black bombazine. There is no Mr. Farthing, has not been for thirty years, and nobody—least of all his relict—has anything to say of him. Perhaps he was a half-pay officer, or a commission agent, or took in lodgers—all occupations with which Tite Street is passingly familiar. Perhaps his is the face, having a pair of muttonchop whiskers and a sprightly blue eye, that gazes from the further wall of the back kitchen, but Tite Street neither knows nor cares.

Had this putative Mr. Farthing the ability to look down on his relict’s back kitchen, what would he see? Well, a monstrous old black-leaded range looking as if half a ton of coals at least were needed to keep it hot, a dreary old mahogany sideboard covered over with cups and plates and what-not, a quantity of copper saucepans, warming pans and chafing dishes piled in a heap, an old white-whiskered cat looking as if she were placed on this earth at approximately the same time as her owner. Everything old, ugly and inconvenient, and sitting amidst them perhaps the oldest, ugliest and most inconvenient article of all, namely Mrs. Farthing, hunched up in a tall rocking chair above a smoky fire, with her face all shiny from the heat and the remains of some genteel refection (Tite Street inclines to pork chops and sweetbreads) lying on the rickety table beside her.

The capital’s actor managers, did they know of this Tite Street faery’s existence, would probably subscribe a respectable sum to induce her onto the London stage, so professed is her ability to reproduce the symptoms of inward agitation. There is no one in the room save the
cat, but curiously Mrs. Farthing’s attitude suggests that she believes there to be a burglar, say, concealed under the fender, or a bailiff with an eye on the mahogany sideboard sat at the breakfast table before her. Twice in the course of ten minutes Mrs. Farthing starts up in her chair and reaches forward, with who knows what constriction of her old bones, to stir the fire irons and administer a wholly unnecessary prod to the slumbering fire with the poker. Twice, again, she rises to her feet, makes a halfhearted sally in the direction of the parlour door, thinks better of it and retires. A man delivering circulars comes and pushes one through the letter box, and Mrs. Farthing pops her old head into the passage, catches sight of the white paper fitfully descending and mutters something scornful and unintelligible under her breath. Another glance at the parlour door, another rattle of the fire irons, and Mrs. Farthing resumes her seat.

Fast approaching four o’clock in Tite Street and the twilight is no longer a hint or a plausible speculation but an irrevocable fact. A few children, home early from the variety of select establishments in which the neighbourhood abounds, venture out to play at ninepins on the area steps or make cockshies in the corners of gloomy courtyards and are swiftly routed out and brought back by their nursemaids. A muffin man marches up Tite Street clanging his bell, to depart a few moments later with ever so few pence for his trouble. A mad old lady with a rolling eye and a ragged umbrella lingers before the door of the French milliner’s, thereby awakening all kinds of unreasonable hopes in the breast of its proprietress, before skipping girlishly away in the direction of Somers Town.

Within the walls of the back kitchen, now practically drowning in a sea of inky shadows, Mrs. Farthing, who has spent the past ten minutes staring very vigilantly into the fire, as if it formed an additional door to the premises, rises once more to her feet and begins to shake out her skirts in a way that suggests thoroughgoing ill-humour, one ear cocked like a bad-tempered old fox hearing the huntsman’s horn borne up on the wind. What is it that Mrs. Farthing hears? A footstep creaking this way and that on an uncarpeted floor? A voice—a female voice, by the sound of it—murmuring ever so softly somewhere? Whatever it is, Mrs. Farthing doesn’t mean to put up with it. Taking a last angry
glance at the clock face, in whose powers she has long since ceased to believe, Mrs. Farthing steams off in the direction of the parlour door like a fearful old battleship, pushes it half open and stands balefully under the lintel.

“No good will come of it, ma’am.”

The noise, which might be that of a person—a female person—walking up and down, ceases abruptly. Surer now of her ground, Mrs. Farthing, in what she imagines—heaven knows why—to be a kindlier tone, extemporises further: “No good at all, ma’am, in taking on so. There is nothing to be done.” The silence is by now so absolute that the ticking of the grandfather clock a dozen feet distant, very tall and ominous in the dark, seems to run away like some mechanical demon capering off in pursuit of an inventor’s prize plate.

“Nothing to be done, ma’am,” Mrs. Farthing remarks, darting sharp little glances at the room’s interior, at the shadows wreathed around the principal armchair, and the solitary hand—very pale and delicate and tremulous—tapping restlessly away on its edge. “Will you take anything? A glass of sherry or a biscuit?”

The hand taps a little less feverishly, but there is no reply. Thoroughly disgusted, Mrs. Farthing bustles back into her kitchen, chivvies away the cat, which impetuous and foolhardy creature has taken possession of her rocking chair, seizes a taper and lights a pair of tall wax candles that very soon begin to gutter and fizz, and settles down to brood. There is a letter lying on the kitchen table with a scarlet seal on its reverse side, and Mrs. Farthing takes it up and reads for the thirtieth time the assurances of a certain legal gentleman that this day evening Mrs. F.’s services—for which his friend Mr. D. is very grateful—will be at an end. But what if Mr. D. don’t come? Mrs. Farthing wonders. What if nobody comes? These are disagreeable thoughts, and Mrs. Farthing doesn’t care to entertain them.

Outside in Tite Street the evening draws on. Lights go on in upstairs windows; smoke rises from the ancient chimneys to mingle with the darkening air. The faint melodious clatter of a pianoforte can be heard somewhere, as if to say “Why, d——, despite it all we
can
still be comfortable.” Cats begin to appear around the area steps and athwart the chimney pots, their eyes full of nocturnal purpose.
Meek papas, thither conveyed from clerking offices in High Holborn and Fleet Street, are met at their front doors, relieved of their gloves and clerkly appurtenances, regaled with mutton chops brought in hot and hot and given babies to dandle while their supper beer is fetching. Such is the press of servant girls and stout matrons around the door of the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium that Little Sills, the celebrated comic tenor, engaged that evening to delight the company with the ballad “Villikins and His Dinah,” and arriving early in a tall hat and a sateen waistcoat, grows suddenly sanguine of his prospects and imagines a roseate future in which he is summoned to Windsor, appears before the Lord Mayor’s banquet and can introduce Mrs. Sills (at present with the children in Hoxton) to, as he puts it, “the kind of society that a woman of her refinement, sir, demands.”

It turns colder, and a flake or two of snow—grey snow, soiled by the reek of a thousand chimneys, but snow nonetheless—drifts down over the street, where it is seen from out of the window of the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium by Mr. Phelps as he descends to the kitchen to relay orders for beefsteaks and whisky-punch, and by the ancient proprietress of the milliner’s shop, now retired to a comfortable back bedroom with her hair done up in curl papers and a copy of the
St. James’s Chronicle
in her ancient hand, and by Mrs. Farthing, who, knowing that it means wet underfoot, and pattens and footbaths, and all manner of inconveniences which Mrs. Farthing isn’t prepared to countenance, drats it with all her heart.

The person concealed in Mrs. Farthing’s parlour sees it and twists her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and thinks—but who knows what she thinks?—of certain former passages in her life, in which predominate the figure of a pleasant-faced old gentleman wielding a quill pen above a sheet of paper quite as if he means to stab it through and through, until her thoughts altogether sail away with her, go running up the wallpaper of Mrs. Farthing’s parlour—which is all coy shepherdesses and their bucolic swains—to take sanctuary on the curtain pole.

It is at a late hour, unconscionably late for Tite Street—the meek papas, arrayed now in nightshirts and slippers, are yawning crossly
for the candles while their wives wonder how it is that the winter nights
do
go on so; Little Sills, his engagement concluded and the landlord’s half sovereign clinking against the farthings in his breast pocket, is riding home to Hoxton on the top of a twopenny omnibus (it is a triumphal carriage in Little Sills’s imagination, with a phantom crowd huzzaing at the street corner)—when a cab comes briskly into view at that thoroughfare’s nearer end. So muted is its passage through the receding slush—the snow has vanished now, gone to fall on Clerkenwell and Whitechapel and Wapping Old Stairs—that no one in Tite Street hears it except Mrs. Farthing, who, like an old bloodhound taking the scent, sees it from her front door and steps out into the road almost before the vehicle pulls up and an oldish gentleman in a wide hat and an ulster begins to descend laboriously onto the pavement.

“D——d cold for the time of the year, I should say,” the gentleman remarks, and Mrs. Farthing bridles, as if to say, “This is not language I would use, but the sentiment is, at any rate, sound.” A casual observer, overhearing them, would perhaps deduce that the gentleman and Mrs. Farthing were formerly acquainted. Certainly, Mrs. Farthing gives a little bob, hinting at great things in the curtseying line were further encouragement to be offered, while the gentleman gives her a glance that might be interpreted to mean “I would not dream of being so impolite as to suggest that I never met you before.” This impression is reinforced in Mrs. Farthing’s hallway, an immensely gloomy passage lit by a single lantern. Here the gentleman, having declined Mrs. Farthing’s offer of refreshment, fixes her with a look and presumes that the patient—the young lady—has passed a pretty comfortable day.

“Pretty comfortable, sir,” Mrs. Farthing assures him. “Leastways, nothing
I
would complain of.”

“She has been quiet, has she?” the gentleman continues.

“Quite quiet, sir. Except that she took on once or twice, sir, which I never could abide, sir, and told her plainly that I would not.”

“Took on, has she?” The gentleman’s voice is very low now, very low and confidential.

“Crying, sir! Walking about the room! Not answering when spoken
to!” Mrs. Farthing particularises these failings as if each of them should be dealt with at Snow Hill by Mr. Ketch in front of a baying crowd.

“Indeed? Well, I am obliged to you, Mrs….”

“Farthing, sir,” says Mrs. Farthing eagerly, as if to say that she knows this game exactly. “And now, sir, perhaps you would care to come inside?”

The gentleman duly comes. The parlour door shuts behind him. Mrs. Farthing lingers hesitantly before it for a moment, like a duenna uncertain what the young people are up to, before stumping off to the kitchen with the thought that it is no business of hers, which indeed it is not. Presently the parlour door creaks open, the gentleman and his companion—her shawl drawn up very tight over her face—are borne away (it is very late now, and the lights in the surrounding houses are all but extinguished) and Mrs. Farthing slips out of our story and back into the cramped and melancholy annals of Tite Street.