The Gray Sisters

In one of the many little suburbs which cling to the outskirts of London, there is a silent and grass-grown street, of aspect both quiet and quaint. The houses are crazy, old, and brown, of every height and every size; many are untenanted. Some years ago one was internally destroyed by fire. It was not thought worth rebuilding. There it still stands, gaunt and grim, looking for all the world, with its broken or dust-stained windows, like a town deserted after a sacking.

This street is surrounded by populous courts and alleys, by stirring thoroughfares, by roads full of activity and commerce; yet somehow or other, all the noise of life, all its tumult and agitation, here seem to die away to silence and repose. Few people, even amongst the poor, and the neighbourhood is a poor one, care to reside in it, while they can be lodged as cheaply close by, and more to their taste. Some think that the old square at the end, with its ancient, nodding trees, is close and gloomy; others have heard strange noises in the house that has suffered from fire, and are sure it is haunted; and some again do not like the silent, deserted look of the place, and cannot get over the fancy that, if no one will live in it, it must be because it is unlucky. And thus it daily decays more and more, and daily seems to grow more silent.

The appearance of the few houses that are inhabited, says little in favour of this unfortunate street. In one, a tailor has taken up his abode. He is a pale, serious main, who stitches at his board in the window the whole day long, cheered by the occasional song of a thrush, hopping in its osier cage. This tailor, Samuel Hopkins yclept, lives by repairing damaged vestments. He once made a coat, and boasts-with how much truth is known to his own heart-that he likewise cut out, fashioned, and fitted, a pair of blue nether garments. Further on, at the corner of the square, stands the house of Mrs. Adams, an aged widow, who keeps a small school, which, on her brass board, she emphatically denominates her "Establishment for Young Ladies." This house has an unmistakeable air of literary dirt and neglect; the area and kitchen windows are encumbered with the accumulated mud and dust of years; from the attic casement, a little red-haired servant-girl is ever gaping; and on hot summer afternoons, when the parlour windows are left open, there is a glimpse within of a dingy school-mistress, and still more dingy school-room, with a few pupils who sit straggling on half-a-dozen benches, conning their lessons with a murmuring hum.

With one exception, there is no other sign of commerce, trade, or profession in the whole street. For all an outward glance can reveal to the contrary, the people who live there are so very rich that they do not need to work at all, or so very genteel in their decay, that if they do work, they must do it in a hidden, skulking, invisible sort of fashion, or else be irretrievably disgraced.

The solitary exception to which we have alluded, exists, or rather existed, for though we speak in the present, we write in the past by some years, in one of the smallest houses in the street. A little six-roomed house it was, exactly facing the dreary haunted mansion, and exposed to all the noises aforesaid. It was, also, to say the truth, an abode of poor and mean aspect. In the window hung a dress-maker's board, on which was modestly inscribed, with a list of prices, the name of-

"RACHEL GRAY."

It was accompanied with patterns of yellow paper sleeves, trimmed in every colour, an old book of fashions, and beautiful and bright, as if reared in wood or meadow, a pot of yellow crocuses in bloom. They were closing now, for evening was drawing in, and they knew the hour.

They had opened to light in the dingy parlour within, and which we will now enter. It was but a little room, and the soft gloom of a spring twilight half-filled it. The furniture though poor and old-fashioned, was scrupulously clean; and it shone again in the flickering fire-light. A few discoloured prints in black frames hung against the walls; two or three broken china ornaments adorned the wooden mantel-shelf, which was, moreover, decorated with a little dark-looking mirror in a rim of tarnished gold.

By the fire an elderly woman of grave and stern aspect, but who had once been handsome, sat reading the newspaper. Near the window, two apprentices sewed, under the superintendence of Rachel Gray.

A mild ray of light fell on her pale face, and bending figure. She sewed on, serious and still, and the calm gravity of her aspect harmonized with the silence of the little parlour which nothing disturbed, save the ticking of an old clock behind the door, the occasional rustling of Mrs. Gray's newspaper, and the continuous and monotonous sound of stitching.

Rachel Gray looked upwards of thirty, yet she was younger by some years. She was a tall, thin, and awkward woman, sallow and faded before her time. She was not, and had never been handsome, yet there was a patient seriousness in the lines of her face, which, when it caught the eye, arrested it at once, and kept it long. Her brow, too, was broad and intellectual; her eyes were very fine, though their look was dreamy and abstracted; and her smile, when she did smile, which was not often, for she was slightly deaf and spoke little, was pleasant and very sweet.

She sewed on, as we have said, abstracted and serious, when gradually, for even in observation she was slow, the yellow crocuses attracted her attention. She looked at them meditatively, and watched them closing, with the decline of day. And, at length, as if she had not understood, until then, what was going on before her, she smiled and admiringly exclaimed:

"Now do look at the creatures, mother!"

Mrs. Gray glanced up from her newspaper, and snuffed rather disdainfully.

"Lawk, Rachel!" she said, "you don't mean to call crocuses creatures-do you? I'll tell you what though," she added, with a doleful shake of the head, "I don't know what Her Majesty thinks; but I say the country can't stand it much longer."

Mrs. Gray had been cook in a Prime Minister's household, and this had naturally given her a political turn.

"The Lord has taught you," murmured Rachel, bending over the flowers with something like awe, and a glow spread over her sallow cheek, and there came a light to her large brown eyes.

Of the two apprentices-one a sickly, fretful girl of sixteen, heard her not; she went on sewing, and the very way in which she drew her needle and thread was peevish. The other apprentice did hear Rachel, and she looked, or rather stared at the dress-maker, with grim wonder. Indeed, there was something particularly grim about this young maiden-a drear stolidity that defies describing. A pure Saxon she was-no infusion of Celtic, or Danish, or Norman blood had lightened the native weight of her nature. She was young, yet she already went through life settling everything, and living in a moral tower of most uninviting aspect. But though Jane settled everything, she did not profess to understand everything; and when, as happened every now and then, Rachel Gray came out with such remarks as that above recorded, Jane felt confounded. "She couldn't make out Miss Gray-that she couldn't."

"I'm so tired!" peevishly said Mary, the fretful apprentice.

At once Rachel kindly observed: "Put by your work, dear."

Again Mrs. Gray snuffed, and came out with: "Lawk! she's always grummy!"

Mary tossed away her work, folded her arms, and looked sullen. Jane, the grim apprentice, drew her needle and thread twice as fast as before. "Thank Heaven!" she piously thought, "I am not lazy, nor sickly, and I can't see much difference between the two-that I can't."

Rachel's work lay in her lap; she sat looking at the crocuses until she fell in a dream far in the past.

For the past is our realm, free to all, high or low, who wish to dwell in it. There we may set aside the bitterness and the sorrow; there we may choose none but the pleasing visions, the bright, sunny spots where it is sweet to linger. The Future, fair as Hope may make it, is a dream, we claim it in vain. The Present, harsh or delightful, must be endured, yet it flies from us before we can say "it is gone." But the Past is ours to call up at our will. It is vivid and distinct as truth. In good and in evil, it is irrevocable; the divine seal has been set upon it for evermore.

In that Book-a pure and holy one was hers-though not without a few dark and sad pages-Rachel Gray often read. And now, the sight of the yellow flower of spring took her back, to a happy day of her childhood. She saw herself a little girl again, with her younger sister Jane, and the whole school to which they belonged, out on a holiday treat in a green forest. Near that forest there was a breezy field; and there it was that Rachel first saw the yellow crocuses bloom. She remembered her joy, her delight at the wonderful beauty of the wild field flowers-how she and Jane heaped their laps with them, and sat down at the task; and how, when tired with the pleasant labour, they rested, as many yellow crocuses as before seemed to blow and play in the breeze around them. And she remembered, too, how, even then, there passed across her childish mind, a silent wonder at their multitude, an undefined awe for the power of the Almighty Hand who made the little flower, and bade it bloom in the green fields, beneath the misty azure of a soft spring sky.

And then swiftly followed other thoughts. Where was little, blue-eyed Jane, her younger sister, her little companion and friend? Sleeping in a London grave, far from the pleasant and sunny spots where God's wild flowers bloom. And she-why she was pursuing her path in life, doing the will of God Almighty.

"And what more," thought Rachel, "can I hope or wish for?"

"Now, Rachel, what are you moping about?" tartly asked her mother, who, though half blind, had a quick eye for her daughter's meditative fits.