With head aloft, nor ever turns her eyes
On lackeys2 who attend her; now she dwells
Grim-clad, up darksome alleys3, breathes hot gin,
And screams in pauper4 riot.
But to these
She came a frugal5 matron, neat and deft6,
With cheerful morning thoughts and quick device
To find the much in little.
Mrs. Meyrick’s house was not noisy: the front parlor7 looked on the river, and the back on gardens, so that though she was reading aloud to her daughters, the window could be left open to freshen the air of the small double room where a lamp and two candles were burning. The candles were on a table apart for Kate, who was drawing illustrations for a publisher; the lamp was not only for the reader but for Amy and Mab, who were embroidering8 satin cushions for “the great world.”
Outside, the house looked very narrow and shabby, the bright light through the holland blind showing the heavy old-fashioned window-frame; but it is pleasant to know that many such grim-walled slices of space in our foggy London have been and still are the homes of a culture the more spotlessly free from vulgarity, because poverty has rendered everything like display an impersonal9 question, and all the grand shows of the world simply a spectacle which rouses petty rivalry10 or vain effort after possession.
The Meyricks’ was a home of that kind: and they all clung to this particular house in a row because its interior was filled with objects always in the same places, which, for the mother held memories of her marriage time, and for the young ones seemed as necessary and uncriticised a part of their world as the stars of the Great Bear seen from the back windows. Mrs. Meyrick had borne much stint11 of other matters that she might be able to keep some engravings specially12 cherished by her husband; and the narrow spaces of wall held a world history in scenes and heads which the children had early learned by heart. The chairs and tables were also old friends preferred to new. But in these two little parlors13 with no furniture that a broker14 would have cared to cheapen except the prints and piano, there was space and apparatus15 for a wide-glancing, nicely-select life, opened to the highest things in music, painting and poetry. I am not sure that in the times of greatest scarcity16, before Kate could get paid-work, these ladies had always had a servant to light their fires and sweep their rooms; yet they were fastidious in some points, and could not believe that the manners of ladies in the fashionable world were so full of coarse selfishness, petty quarreling, and slang as they are represented to be in what are called literary photographs. The Meyricks had their little oddities, streaks17 of eccentricity18 from the mother’s blood as well as the father’s, their minds being like mediæval houses with unexpected recesses19 and openings from this into that, flights of steps and sudden outlooks.
But mother and daughters were all united by a triple bond—family love; admiration20 for the finest work, the best action; and habitual21 industry. Hans’ desire to spend some of his money in making their lives more luxurious22 had been resisted by all of them, and both they and he had been thus saved from regrets at the threatened triumphs of his yearning23 for art over the attractions of secured income—a triumph that would by-and-by oblige him to give up his fellowship. They could all afford to laugh at his Gavarni-caricatures and to hold him blameless in following a natural bent24 which their unselfishness and independence had left without obstacle. It was enough for them to go on in their old way, only having a grand treat of opera-going (to the gallery) when Hans came home on a visit.
Seeing the group they made this evening, one could hardly wish them to change their way of life. They were all alike small, and so in due proportion to their miniature rooms. Mrs. Meyrick was reading aloud from a French book; she was a lively little woman, half French, half Scotch25, with a pretty articulateness of speech that seemed to make daylight in her hearer’s understanding. Though she was not yet fifty, her rippling26 hair, covered by a quakerish net cap, was chiefly gray, but her eyebrows27 were brown as the bright eyes below them; her black dress, almost like a priest’s cassock with its rows of buttons, suited a neat figure hardly five feet high. The daughters were to match the mother, except that Mab had Hans’ light hair and complexion28, with a bossy29, irregular brow, and other quaintnesses that reminded one of him. Everything about them was compact, from the firm coils of their hair, fastened back à la Chinoise, to their gray skirts in Puritan nonconformity with the fashion, which at that time would have demanded that four feminine circumferences30 should fill all the free space in the front parlor. All four, if they had been wax-work, might have been packed easily in a fashionable lady’s traveling trunk. Their faces seemed full of speech, as if their minds had been shelled, after the manner of horse-chestnuts, and become brightly visible. The only large thing of its kind in the room was Hafiz, the Persian cat, comfortably poised31 on the brown leather back of a chair, and opening his large eyes now and then to see that the lower animals were not in any mischief32.
The book Mrs. Meyrick had before her was Erckmann-Chatrian’s Historie d’un Conscrit. She had just finished reading it aloud, and Mab, who had let her work fall on the ground while she stretched her head forward and fixed33 her eyes on the reader, exclaimed,
“I think that is the finest story in the world.”
“Of course, Mab!” said Amy, “it is the last you have heard. Everything that pleases you is the best in its turn.”
“It is hardly to be called a story,” said Kate. “It is a bit of history brought near us with a strong telescope. We can see the soldiers’ faces: no, it is more than that—we can hear everything—we can almost hear their hearts beat.”
“I don’t care what you call it,” said Mab,
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