Read the book: «Hopes and Fears or, scenes from the life of a spinster», page 50
‘Ah!’ said Owen, gravely, ‘you have suffered too much through me for me to talk to you in this fashion. Forgive me, Lucy; I am not up to any other, just yet.’
Whatever Lucilla might have said in the first relief of recovering Mr. Prendergast, she could not easily have made up her mind to leave her brother in his present condition, and flattered herself that the ‘at once’ could not possibly be speedy, since Mr. Prendergast must give notice of his intention of leaving Wrapworth.
But when he came the next morning, it proved that things were in a far greater state of forwardness than she had thought possible. So convinced were both the curate and Robert of the need of her avoiding the winter cold, that the latter had suggested that one of his own curates, who was in need of change and country air, should immediately offer himself as a substitute at Wrapworth, either for a time or permanently, and Lucy was positively required to name a day as early as possible for the marriage, and told, on the authority of the physician, that it might almost be called suicide to linger in the English frosts.
The day which she chose was the 1st of December, the same on which Mervyn was to be married. There was a purpose in thus rendering it impracticable for any Fulmort to be present; ‘And,’ said Owen, ‘I am glad it should be before I am about. I could never keep my countenance if I had to give her away to brother Peter!’
‘Keeping his countenance’ might have two meanings, but he was too feeble for agitation, and seemed only able to go through the time of preparation and parting, by keeping himself as lethargic and indifferent as possible, or by turning matters into a jest when necessarily brought before him. Playing at solitaire, or trifling desultory chat, was all that he could endure as occupation, and the long hours were grievously heavy. His son, though nearly four years old, was no companion or pleasure to him. He was, in his helpless and morbid state, afraid of so young a child, and little Owen was equally afraid of him; each dreaded contact with the other, and more than all the being shut into a room together; and the little boy, half shy, half assured, filled by the old woman with notions of his own grandeur, and yet constrained by the different atmosphere of Woolstone-lane, was never at ease or playful enough before him to be pleasant to watch. And, indeed, his Cockney pronunciation and ungainly vulgar tricks had been so summarily repressed by his aunt, that his fear of both the ladies rendered him particularly unengaging and unchildlike. Nevertheless, Honora thought it her duty to take him home with her to the Holt, and gratified Robert by engaging a nice little girl of fourteen, whom Lucilla called the crack orphan, to be his attendant when they should leave town. This was to be about a fortnight after the wedding, since St. Wulstan’s afforded greater opportunities for privacy and exemption from bustle than even Hiltonbury, and Dr. Prendergast and his daughter could attend without being in the house.
The Prendergasts of Southminster were very kind and friendly, sending Lucilla warm greetings, and not appearing at all disconcerted at welcoming their former governess into the family. The elders professed no surprise, but great gladness; and Sarah, who was surprised, was trebly rejoiced. Owen accused his sister of selecting her solitary bridesmaid with a view to enhancing her own beauty by force of contrast; but the choice was prompted by real security of the affectionate pleasure it would confer. Handsome presents were sent both by the Beaumonts and Bostocks, and Lucilla, even while half fretted, half touched by Mrs. Bostock’s patronizing felicitations, could not but be pleased at these evidences that her governess-ship had not been an utter failure.
Her demeanour in the fortnight before her marriage was unlike what her friends had ever seen, and made them augur better for Mr. Prendergast’s venture. She was happy, but subdued; quiet and womanly, gentle without being sad, grave but not drooping; and though she was cheerful and playful, with an entire absence of those strange effervescences that had once betrayed acidity or fermentation. She had found the power of being affectionately grateful to Honor, and the sweetness of her tender ways towards her and Owen would have made the parting all the sadder to them if it had not been evident that, as she said, it was happiness that thus enabled her to be good. The satisfied look of rest that had settled on her fair face made it new. All her animation and archness had not rendered it half so pleasant to look upon.
The purchaser of Castle Blanch proved to be no other than Mr. Calthorp! Lucilla at first was greatly discomfited, and begged that nothing might be said about the picture; but the next time Mr. Prendergast arrived, it was with a request from Mr. Calthorp that Miss Sandbrook would accept the picture as a wedding gift! There was no refusing it—indeed, the curate had already accepted it; and when Lucilla heard that ‘the Calthorp’ had been two years married to what Mr. Prendergast called ‘a millionairess, exceedingly hideous,’ she still had vanity enough to reflect that the removal of her own resemblance might be an act of charity! And the sum that Honor had set apart for the purchase was only too much wanted for the setting up housekeeping in Spain, whither the portrait was to accompany her, Mr. Prendergast declared, like the Penates of the pious Æneas!
Robert brought in his gift on the last day of November, just before setting off for Sutton. It was an unornamented, but exquisitely-bound Bible and Prayer Book, dark-brown, with red-edged leaves.
‘Good-bye, Lucilla,’ he said; ‘you have been the brightest spot to me in this life. Thank you for all you have done for me.’
‘And for all I never intended to do?’ said Lucilla, smiling, as she returned his pressure of the hand.
He was gone, not trusting her to speak, nor himself to hear a word more.
‘Yes, Robin,’ proceeded Lucy, half aloud, ‘you are the greater man, I know very well; but it is in human nature to prefer flesh and blood to mediæval saints in cast-iron, even if one knows there is a tender spot in them.’
There was a curious sense of humiliation in her full acquiescence in the fact that he was too high, too grand for her, and in her relief, that the affection, that would have lifted her beyond what she was prepared for, had died away, and left her to the more ordinary excellence and half-paternal fondness of the man of her real choice, with whom she could feel perfect ease and repose. Possibly the admixture of qualities that in her had been called fast is the most contrary to all real aspiration!
But there was no fault to be found with the heartfelt affection with which she loved and honoured her bridegroom, lavishing on him the more marks of deference and submission just because she knew that her will would be law, and that his love was strong enough to have borne with any amount of caprice or seeming neglect. The sacrifices she made, without his knowledge, for his convenience and comfort, while he imagined hers to be solely consulted, the concessions she made to his slightest wish, the entire absence of all teasing, would not have been granted to a younger man more prepossessing in the sight of others.
It was in this spirit that she rejected all advice to consult health rather than custom in her wedding dress. Exactly because Mr. Prendergast would have willingly received her in the plainest garb, she was bent on doing him honour by the most exquisite bridal array; and never had she been so lovely—her colour such exquisite carnation, her eyes so softened, and full of such repose and reliance, her grace so perfect in complete freedom from all endeavour at attracting admiration.
The married pair came back from church to Owen’s sitting-room—not bear and monkey, not genie and fairy, as he had expected to see; but as they stood together, looking so indescribably and happily one, that Owen smiled and said, ‘Ah! Honor, if you had only known twenty years ago that this was Mrs. Peter Prendergast, how much trouble it would have saved.’
‘She did not deserve to be Mrs. Peter Prendergast,’ said the bride.
‘See how you deserve it now.’
‘That I never shall!’
Brother and sister parted with light words but full hearts, each trying to believe, though neither crediting Mr. Prendergast’s assurance that the two Owens should come and be at home for ever if they liked in Santa Maria de X–. Neither could bear to face the truth that henceforth their courses lay apart, and that if the sister’s life were spared, it could only be at the sacrifice of expatriation for many years, in lands where, well or ill, the brother had no call. Nor would Lucilla break down. It was due to her husband not to let him think she suffered too much in resigning home for him; and true to her innate hatred of agitation, she guarded herself from realizing anything, and though perfectly kind and respectful to Honora, studiously averted all approaches to effusion of feeling.
Only at the last kiss in the hall, she hung round her friend with a vehement embrace, and whispered, ‘Forgive! You have forgiven!’
‘Forgive me, Lucilla!’
‘Nay, that I have forgiven you for all your pardon and patience is shown by my enduring to leave Owen to you now.’
Therewith surged up such a flood of passionate emotions that, fleeing from them as it were, the bride tore herself out of Honor’s arms, and sprang hastily into the carriage, nervously and hastily moving about its contents while Mr. Prendergast finished his farewells.
After all, there was a certain sense of rest, snugness, and freedom from turmoil, when Honor dried her eyes and went back to her convalescent. The house seemed peaceful, and they both felt themselves entering into the full enjoyment of being all in all to one another.
There was one guest at the Sutton wedding whose spirit was at St. Wulstan’s. In those set eyes, and tightly-closed lips, might be traced abstraction in spite of himself. Were there not thoughts and prayers for another bride, elsewhere kneeling? Was not the solitary man struggling with the last remnants of fancies at war with his life of self-devotion, and crushing down the few final regrets, that would have looked back to the dreams of his youth. No marvel that his greatest effort was against being harsh and unsympathizing, even while his whole career was an endeavour to work through charities of deed and word into charities of thought and judgment.
CHAPTER XXX
Untouched by love, the maiden’s breast
Is like the snow on Rona’s crest
High seated in the middle sky,
In bright and barren purity;
But by the sunbeam gently kissed,
Scarce by the gazing eye ’tis missed,
Ere down the lonely valley stealing,
Fresh grass and growth its course revealing;
It cheers the flock, revives the flower,
And decks some happy shepherd’s bower.
—Scott
Slow to choose, but decided in her choice, Phœbe had always been, and her love formed no exception to this rule. She was quite aware that her heart had been given away, and never concealed it from herself, though she made it a principle not to indulge in future castle buildings, and kept a resolute guard over her attention. It was impossible to obviate a perpetual feeling of restlessness and of tedium in whatever she was about; but she conquered oftener than she gave way, and there was an indescribable sense of peace and sweetness in a new and precious possession, and an undefined hope through all.
Miss Fennimore, who came the day after the girls’ return from Sutton, saw only the fuller development of her favourite pupil, and, in truth, Maria and Bertha had so ineffably much to narrate, that her attention would have been sufficiently engrossed to hinder her observation of the symptoms, even had the good lady been as keen and experienced in love as in science.
Poor little Phœbe! equable as she was, she was in a great perturbation when, four days before Christmas, she knew that Miss Charlecote, with Owen Sandbrook and Humfrey Randolf, had arrived at the Holt. What was so natural as for her to go at once to talk over the two weddings with her dear old friend? Yes, but did her dear old friend want her, when these two young men had put an end to her solitude? Was she only making Miss Charlecote an excuse? She would wait in hopes that one of the others would ask if she were going to the Holt! If so, it could not but be natural and proper—if not— This provoking throbbing of her heart showed that it was not only for Honor Charlecote that she wished to go.
That ring at the bell! What an abominable goose she was to find a flush of expectation in her cheek! And after all it was only Sir John. He had found that his son had heard nothing from the Holt that morning, and had come in to ask if she thought a call would be acceptable. ‘I knew they were come home,’ he said, ‘for I saw them at the station yesterday. I did not show myself, for I did not know how poor young Sandbrook might like it. But who have they got with them?’
‘Mr. Randolf, Owen Sandbrook’s Canadian friend.’
‘Did I not hear he was some sort of relation?’
‘Yes; his mother was a Charlecote.’
‘Ha! that accounts for it. Seeing him with her, I could almost have thought it was thirty years ago, and that it was my dear old friend.’
Phœbe could have embraced Sir John. She could not conceal her glow of delight so completely that Bertha did not laugh and say, ‘Mr. Charlecote is what the Germans would call Phœbe’s Bild. She always blushes and looks conscious if he is mentioned.’
Sir John laughed, but with some emotion, and Phœbe hastily turned her still more blushing face away. Certainly, if Phœbe had had any prevision of her present state of mind, she never would have bought that chiffonier.
When Sir John had sufficiently admired the details of the choice little drawing-room, and had been shown by the eager sisters all over the house, he asked if Phœbe would walk up with him to the Holt. He had hoped his eldest son, who had ridden over with him, would have come in, and gone up with them, but he supposed Charlie had seized on him. (Poor Sir John, his attempt at match-making did not flourish.) However, he had secured Phœbe’s most intense gratitude by his proposal, and down she came, a very pretty picture, in her dark brown dress, scarlet cloak, and round, brown felt hat, with the long, curly, brown feather tipped with scarlet, her favourite winter robin colouring. Her cheeks were brilliant, and her eyes not only brighter, but with a slight drooping that gave them the shadiness they sometimes wanted. And it was all from a ridiculous trepidation which made it well-nigh impossible to bring out what she was longing to say—‘So you think Mr. Randolf like Mr. Charlecote.’
Fortunately he was beforehand with her, for both the likeness and the path through the pine woods reminded him strongly of his old friend, and he returned to the subject. ‘So you are a great admirer of dear old Charlecote, Phœbe: you can’t remember him?’
‘No, but Robert does, and I sometimes think I do.’ (Then it came.) ‘You think Mr. Randolf like him?’ Thanks to her hat, she could blush more comfortably now.
‘I did not see him near. It was only something in air and figure. People inherit those things wonderfully. Now, my son Charlie sits on horseback exactly like his grandfather, whom he never saw; and John—’
Oh! was he going to run away on family likenesses? Phœbe would not hear the ‘and John;’ and observed, ‘Mr. Charlecote was his godfather, was he not?’
Which self-evident fact brought him back again to ‘Yes; and I only wish he had seen more of him! These are his plantations, I declare, that he used to make so much of!’
‘Yes, that is the reason Miss Charlecote is so fond of them.’
‘Miss Charlecote! When I think of him, I have no patience with her. I do believe he kept single all his life for her sake: and why she never would have him I never could guess. You ladies are very unreasonable sometimes, Phœbe.’
Phœbe tried to express a rational amount of wonder at poor Honor’s taste, but grew incoherent in fear lest it should be irrational, and was rather frightened at finding Sir John looking at her with some amusement; but he was only thinking of how willingly the poor little heiress of the Mervyns had once been thrown at Humfrey Charlecote’s head. But he went on to tell her of all that her hero had ever been to him and to the county, and of the blank his death had left, and never since supplied, till she felt more and more what a ‘wise’ man truly was!
No one was in the drawing-room, but Honor came down much more cheerful and lively than she had been for years, and calling Owen materially better—the doctors thought the injury to the head infinitely mitigated, and the first step to recovery fairly taken—there were good accounts of the Prendergasts, and all things seemed to be looking well. Presently Sir John, to Phœbe’s great satisfaction, spoke of her guest, and his resemblance, but Honor answered with half-resentful surprise. Some of the old servants had made the same remark, but she could not understand it, and was evidently hurt by its recurrence. Phœbe sat on, listening to the account of Lucilla’s letters, and the good spirits and health they manifested; forcing herself not too obviously to watch door or window, and when Sir John was gone, she only offered to depart, lest Miss Charlecote should wish to be with Owen.
‘No, my dear, thank you; Mr. Randolf is with him, and he can read a little now. We are getting above the solitaire board, I assure you. I have fitted up the little room beyond the study for his bedroom, and he sits in the study, so there are no stairs, and he is to go out every day in a chair or the carriage.’
‘Does the little boy amuse him?’
‘No, not exactly, poor little fellow. They are terribly afraid of each other, that is the worst of it. And then we left the boy too long with the old woman. I hear his lessons for a quarter of an hour a day, and he is a clever child enough; but his pronunciation and habits are an absolute distress, and he is not happy anywhere but in the housekeeper’s room. I try to civilize him, but as yet I cannot worry poor Owen. You can’t think how comfortable we are together, Phœbe, when we are alone. Since his sister went we have got on so much better. He was shy before her; but I must tell you, my dear, he asked me to read my Psalms and Lessons aloud, as I used to do; and we have had such pleasant evenings, and he desired that the servants might still come in to prayers in the study. But then he always was different with me.’
And Phœbe, while assenting, could not silence a misgiving that she thought very cruel. She would believe Owen sincere if Humfrey Randolf did. Honor, however, was very happy, and presently begged her to come and see Owen. She obeyed with alacrity, and was conducted to the study. No Randolf was there, only pen, ink, paper, and algebra. But as she was greeting Owen, who looked much better and less oppressed, Honor made an exclamation, and from the window they saw the young man leaning over the sundial, partly studying its mysteries, partly playing with little Owen, who hung on him as an old playmate.
‘Yes,’ said Owen, ‘he has taken pity on the boy—he is very good to him—has served an apprenticeship.’
Mr. Randolf looked up, saw Phœbe, gave a start of recognition and pleasure, and sped towards the house.
‘Yes, Phœbe, I do see some likeness,’ said Honor, as though a good deal struck and touched.
All the ridiculous and troublesome confusion was so good as to be driven away in the contentment of Humfrey Randolf’s presence, and the wondrous magnetic conviction that he was equally glad to be with her. She lost all restlessness, and was quite ready to amuse Owen by a lively discussion and comparison of the two weddings, but she so well knew that she should like to stay too long, that she cut her time rather over short, and would not stay to luncheon. This was not like the evenings that began with Hiawatha and ended at Lakeville, or on Lake Ontario; but one pleasure was in store for Phœbe. While she was finding her umbrella, and putting on her clogs, Humfrey Randolf ran down-stairs to her, and said, ‘I wanted to tell you something. My stepmother is going to be married.’
‘You are glad?’
‘Very glad. It is to a merchant whom she met at Buffalo, well off, and speaking most kindly of the little boys.’
‘That must be a great load off your mind.’
‘Indeed it is, though the children must still chiefly look to me. I should like to have little George at a good school. However, now their immediate maintenance is off my hands, I have more to spend in educating myself. I can get evening lessons now, when my day’s work is over.’
‘Oh! do not overstrain your head,’ said Phœbe, thinking of Bertha.
‘Heads can bear a good deal when they are full of hope,’ he said, smiling.
‘Still after your out-of-doors life of bodily exercise, do you not find it hard to be always shut up in London?’
‘Perhaps the novelty has not worn off. It is as if life had only begun since I came into the city.’
‘A new set of faculties called into play?’
‘Faculties—yes, and everything else.’
‘I must go now, or my sisters will be waiting for me, and I see your dinner coming in. Good-bye.’
‘May I come to see you?’
‘O yes, pray let me show you our cottage.’
‘When may I come?’
‘To-morrow, I suppose.’
She felt, rather than saw him watching her all the way from the garden-gate to the wood. That little colloquy was the sunshiny point in her day. Had the tidings been communicated in the full circle, it would have been as nothing compared with their reservation for her private ear, with the marked ‘I wanted to tell you.’ Then she came home, looked at Maria threading holly-berries, and her heart fainted within her. There were moments when poor Maria would rise before her as a hardship and an infliction, and then she became terrified, prayed against such feelings as a crime, and devoted herself to her sister with even more than her wonted patient tenderness.
The certainty that the visit would take place kept her from all flutterings and self-debate, and in due time Mr. Randolf arrived. Anxiously did Phœbe watch for his look at Maria, for Bertha’s look at him, and she was pleased with both. His manner to Maria was full of gentleness, and Bertha’s quick eyes detected his intellect. He stood an excellent examination from her and Miss Fennimore upon the worn channel of Niagara, which had so often been used as a knockdown argument against Miss Charlecote’s cosmogony; and his bright terse powers of description gave them, as they agreed, a better idea of his woods than any travels which they had read.
It was no less interesting to observe his impression of the English village-life at Hiltonbury. To him, the aspect of the country had an air of exquisite miniature finish, wanting indeed in breadth and freedom, but he had suffered too much from vain struggling single-handed with Nature in her might, not to value the bounds set upon her; and a man who knew by personal experience what it was to seek his whole live stock in an interminable forest, did not complain of the confinement of hedges and banks. Nay, the ‘hedgerow elms and hillocks green’ were to him as classical as Whitehall; he treated Maria’s tame robins with as much respect as if they had been Howards or Percies; holly and mistletoe were handled by him with reverential curiosity; and the church and home of his ancestors filled him with a sweet loyal enthusiasm, more eager than in those to whom these things were familiar.
Miss Charlecote herself came in for some of these feelings. He admired her greatly in her Christmas aspect of Lady Bountiful, in which she well fulfilled old visions of the mistress of an English home, but still more did he dwell upon her gentleness, and on that shadowy resemblance to his mother, which made him long for some of that tenderness which she lavished upon Owen. He looked for no more than her uniformly kind civility and hospitality, but he was always wishing to know her better; and any touch of warmth and affection in her manner towards him was so delightful that he could not help telling Phœbe of it, in their next brief tête-à-tête.
He was able to render a great service to Miss Charlecote. Mr. Brooks’s understanding had not cleared with time, and the accounts that had been tangled in summer were by the end of the year in confusion worse confounded. He was a faithful servant, but his accounts had always been audited every month, and in his old age, his arithmetic would not carry him farther, so that his mistress’s long absence abroad had occasioned such a hopeless chaos, that but for his long services, his honesty might have been in question. Honora put this idea away with angry horror. Not only did she love and trust the old man, but he was a legacy from Humfrey, and she would have torn the page from her receipts rather than rouse the least suspicion against him. Yet she could not bear to leave any flaw in Humfrey’s farm books, and she toiled and perplexed herself in vain; till Owen, finding out what distressed her, and grieving at his own incapacity, begged that Randolf might help her; when behold! the confused accounts arranged themselves in comprehensible columns, and poor old Brooks was proved to have cheated himself so much more than his lady as to be entirely exonerated from all but puzzle-headedness. The young man’s farmer life qualified him to be highly popular at the Holt. He was curious about English husbandry, talked to the labourers, and tried their tools with no unpractised hand, even the flail which Honor’s hatred of steam still kept as the winter’s employment in the barn; he appreciated the bullocks, criticized the sheep, and admired the pigs, till the farming men agreed ‘there had not been such an one about the place since the Squire himself.’
Honora might be excused for not having detected a likeness between the two Humfreys. Scarcely a feature was in the same mould, the complexion was different, and the heavily-built, easy-going Squire, somewhat behind his own century, had apparently had nothing in common with the brisk modern colonial engineer; yet still there was something curiously recalling the expression of open honesty, and the whole cast of countenance, as well as the individuality of voice, air, and gestures, and the perception grew upon her so much in the haunts of her cousin, where she saw his attitudes and habits unconsciously repeated, that she was almost ready to accept Bertha’s explanation that it was owing to the influence of the Christian name that both shared. But as it had likewise been borne by the wicked disinherited son who ran away, the theory was somewhat halting.
Phœbe’s intercourse with Humfrey the younger was much more fragmentary than in town, and therefore, perhaps, the more delicious. She saw him on most of the days of his fortnight’s stay, either in the mutual calls of the two houses, in chance meetings in the village, or in walks to or from the holy-day services at the church, and these afforded many a moment in which she was let into the deeper feelings that his first English Christmas excited. It was not conventional Christmas weather, but warm and moist, thus rendering the contrast still stronger with the sleighing of his prosperous days, the snowshoe walk of his poorer ones. A frost hard enough for skating was the prime desire of Maria and Bertha, who both wanted to see the art practised by one to whom it was familiar. The frost came at last, and became reasonably hard in the first week of the new year, one day when Phœbe, to her regret, was forced to drive to Elverslope to fulfil some commissions for Mervyn and Cecily, who were expected at home on the 8th of January, after a Christmas at Sutton.
However, she had a reward. ‘I do think,’ said Miss Fennimore to her, as she entered the drawing-room, ‘that Mr. Randolf is the most good-natured man in the world! For full three-quarters of an hour this afternoon did he hand Maria up and down a slide on the pond at the Holt!’
‘You went up to see him skate?’
‘Yes; he was to teach Bertha. We found him helping the little Sandbrook to slide, but when we came he sent him in with the little maid, and gave Bertha a lesson, which did not last long, for she grew nervous. Really her nerves will never be what they were! Then Maria begged for a slide, and you know what any sort of monotonous bodily motion is to her; there is no getting her to leave off, and I never saw anything like the spirit and good-nature with which he complied.’
‘He is very kind to Maria,’ said Phœbe.
‘He seems to have that sort of pitying respect which you first put into my mind towards her.’
‘Oh, are you come home, Phœbe?’ said Maria, running into the room. ‘I did not hear you. I have been sliding on the ice all the afternoon with Mr. Randolf. It is so nice, and he says we will do it again to-morrow.’
‘Ha, Phœbe!’ said Bertha, meeting her on the stairs, ‘do you know what you missed?’
‘Three children sliding on the ice,’ quoted Phœbe.
‘Seeing how a man that is called Humfrey can bear with your two sisters making themselves ridiculous. Really I should set the backwoods down as the best school of courtesy, but that I believe some people have that school within themselves. Hollo!’
For Phœbe absolutely kissed Bertha as she went up-stairs.
‘Ha?’ said Bertha, interrogatively; then went into the drawing-room, and looked very grave, almost sad.
Phœbe could not but think it rather hard when, on the last afternoon of Humfrey Randolf’s visit, there came a note from Mervyn ordering her up to Beauchamp to arrange some special contrivances of his for Cecily’s morning-room—her mother’s, which gave it an additional pang. It was a severe, threatening, bitterly cold day, not at all fit for sliding, even had not both the young ladies and Miss Fennimore picked up a suspicion of cold; but Phœbe had no doubt that there would be a farewell visit, and did not like to lose it.
