Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/351

Charles Dickens] to soften, very much to soften, the severity of the blow which so recently fell upon my mother and myself."

"There, indeed, you show me some use in what you are pleased to call my 'position.' It is long since I have experienced such gratification as in being enabled to show some neighbourly civility, to the wife and daughter of my old friend. Even if you had been personally very different to what you are, I should have been pleased to do it in remembrance of him; but your mother is the gentlest and the most amiable creature in the world, while as for you"

He paused for an instant, and her heart beat high. Only for an instant; she resumed her normal respiration as he laid his hand softly on her head, and said: "If I had had a daughter, child, I could have wished her not one whit different from you." She was quite calm again, as she said: "I am so pleased to hear you say that, sir; for as you know, there are but few to give me that affection which you truly describe as being the only thing worth living for. And I am so glad that I have been able to be of use to you, and to have shown you, in a very poor way indeed, how grateful I am to you for all your kindness to us, before we leave you."

"Leave me, Marian? What are you talking of child?"

"The fact," she replied, with a sad smile—"the dire hard fact. We must go, sooner or later; and it is the best for me—for us, I mean—that now it should be sooner. We have remained here longer than we intended, many weeks longer, owing to—to circumstances; and we have been, oh, so happy! Now we must go, and it will be better for us to look the fact in the face, and settle down in Mrs. Swainson's lodgings, and begin our new life."

Mr. Creswell's face had grown very white, and his hands were plucking nervously at his chin. Suddenly a light seemed to break in upon him, and he said: "You won't go until you've finished the balance sheet? Promise me that."

"No," said Marian, looking him straight in the face, "I'll finish that—I promise you."

"Very good. Now leave me, my dear. This unexpected news has rather upset me. I must be alone for a little. Good-bye! God bless you!" And he bent, and for the first time in his life kissed her forehead. "You—you won't forget your promise?"

"You may depend on me," said Marian, as she left the room.

Outside the door, in the bay window where she had held her colloquy with Dr. Osborne on the night of Tom's death, were Maud and Gertrude, seated on the ottoman, one at work, the other reading. Neither of them spoke as Marian passed; but she thought she saw a significant look pass between them, and as she descended the stairs she heard them whispering, and caught Maud's words: "I shouldn't wonder if poor Tom was right about her, after all."

black voyager, perched upon the great hollow globe of gun-metal, that crowns the Beacon at the east end of the Breakwater, looks towards Plymouth and its lusty children, Stonehouse and Devonport. How different now from the time when Haydon took Wilkie to North Corner Dock to see the pigtailed foretopmen, lounging along, smoking their long pipes, cracking jokes at every one they met—men, women, or French prisoners, and jostling their way among the crowd of bearded Jews, salesmen, and soldiers! The crow is bewildered at the variety of roofs which offer him halting places. The Charles the Second citadel bastions invite him; the roof of the Victualling Yard is tempting; the wall of the Dockyard affords good views of Hamoaze. On the Mount Wise telegraph he could rest for a moment; the rope houses of Devonport, the gun wharf, the building slips, all need the observant bird's attention, were his flight not so straight and swift to the Land's End. He glances, however, with delighted eye over the Sound from Penlee Point to Drake's Island, from the Mewstone to the entrance of Catwater, from Stoke Point to the highest terrace of trees crowning the woods of Mount Edgecumbe.

In Henry the Second's time Plymouth is described as "a mene thing, an inhabitation of fishers," but was soon rich enough, in its dangerous conspicuousness, to be worth plundering; so down came the French upon it, like eagles on a fat lamb, in 1377, when Hugh Courtenay, Earl of Devon, drove them off and chased them back to their ships. In 1388 the Gauls were at it again, and burnt part of the town; and in 1400, and 1403 they also plundered it. The part they burned, local antiquarians say, is still called Briton (Breton) side; while Old Town-street represents the uninjured side of the quondam fishing village. The slow Saxon nature at last roused to a sense of danger and the necessity for more security, and in 1439 Henry the Sixth made Plymouth a corporation, and gave it the right to fortify itself. In 1512 the ramparts were still further increased. A gleam of light fell on the town, to which all English eyes turned, when, in 1471, Margaret of Anjou landed here; and in 1501 Catherine