Of course there was a Great House at Allington. How otherwise should there have been a Small House? Our story will, as its name imports, have its closest relations with those who lived in the less dignified domicile of the two; but it will have close relations also with the more dignified, and it may be well that I should, in the first instance, say a few words as to the Great House and its owner.
The squires of Allington had been squires of Allington since squires, such as squires are now, were first known in England. From father to son, and from uncle to nephew, and, in one instance, from second cousin to second cousin, the sceptre had descended in the family of the Dales; and the acres had remained intact, growing in value and not decreasing in number, though guarded by no entail and protected by no wonderful amount of prudence or wisdom. The estate of Dale of Allington had been coterminous with the parish of Allington for some hundreds of years; and though, as I have said, the race of squires had possessed nothing of superhuman discretion, and had perhaps been guided in their walks through life by no very distinct principles, still there had been with them so much of adherence to a sacred law, that no acre of the property had ever been parted from the hands of the existing squire. Some futile attempts had been made to increase the territory, as indeed had been done by Kit Dale, the father of Christopher Dale, who will appear as our squire of Allington when the persons of our drama are introduced. Old Kit Dale, who had married money, had bought outlying farms,—a bit of ground here and a bit there,—talking, as he did so, much of political influence and of the good old Tory cause. But these farms and bits of ground had gone again before our time. To them had been attached no religion. When old Kit had found himself pressed in that matter of the majority of the Nineteenth Dragoons, in which crack regiment his second son made for himself quite a career, he found it easier to sell than to save—seeing that that which he sold was his own and not the patrimony of the Dales. At his death the remainder of these purchases had gone. Family arrangements required completion, and Christopher Dale required ready money. The outlying farms flew away, as such new purchases had flown before; but the old patrimony of the Dales remained untouched, as it had ever remained.
It had been a religion among them; and seeing that the worship had been carried on without fail, that the vestal fire had never gone down upon the hearth, I should not have said that the Dales had walked their ways without high principle. To this religion they had all adhered, and the new heir had ever entered in upon his domain without other encumbrances than those with which he himself was then already burdened. And yet there had been no entail. The idea of an entail was not in accordance with the peculiarities of the Dale mind. It was necessary to the Dale religion that each squire should have the power of wasting the acres of Allington,—and that he should abstain from wasting them. I remember to have dined at a house, the whole glory and fortune of which depended on the safety of a glass goblet. We all know the story. If the luck of Edenhall should be shattered, the doom of the family would be sealed. Nevertheless I was bidden to drink out of the fatal glass, as were all guests in that house. It would not have contented the chivalrous mind of the master to protect his doom by lock and key and padded chest. And so it was with the Dales of Allington. To them an entail would have been a lock and key and a padded chest; but the old chivalry of their house denied to them the use of such protection.
I have spoken something slightingly of the acquirements and doings of the family; and indeed their acquirements had been few and their doings little. At Allington, Dale of Allington had always been known as a king. At Guestwick, the neighbouring market town, he was a great man—to be seen frequently on Saturdays, standing in the marketplace, and laying down the law as to barley and oxen among men who knew usually more about barley and oxen than did he. At Hamersham, the assize town, he was generally in some repute, being a constant grand juror for the county, and a man who paid his way. But even at Hamersham the glory of the Dales had, at most periods, begun to pale, for they had seldom been widely conspicuous in the county, and had earned no great reputation by their knowledge of jurisprudence in the grand jury room. Beyond Hamersham their fame had not spread itself.
They had been men generally built in the same mould, inheriting each from his father the same virtues and the same vices,—men who would have lived, each, as his father had lived before him, had not the new ways of the world gradually drawn away with them, by an invisible magnetism, the upcoming Dale of the day,—not indeed in any case so moving him as to bring him up to the spirit of the age in which he lived, but dragging him forward to a line in advance of that on which his father had trodden. They had been obstinate men; believing much in themselves; just according to their ideas of justice; hard to their tenants but not known to be hard even by the tenants themselves, for the rules followed had ever been the rules on the Allington estate; imperious to their wives and children, but imperious within bounds, so that no Mrs Dale had fled from her lord’s roof, and no loud scandals had existed between father and sons; exacting in their ideas as to money, expecting that they were to receive much and to give little, and yet not thought to be mean, for they paid their way, and gave money in parish charity and in county charity. They had ever been steady supporters of the Church, graciously receiving into their parish such new vicars as, from time to time, were sent to them from King’s College, Cambridge, to which establishment the gift of the living belonged,—but, nevertheless, the Dales had ever carried on some unpronounced warfare against the clergyman, so that the intercourse between the lay family and the clerical had seldom been in all respects pleasant.
Such had been the Dales of Allington, time out of mind, and such in all respects would have been the Christopher Dale of our time, had he not suffered two accidents in his youth. He had fallen in love with a lady who obstinately refused his hand, and on her account he had remained single; that was his first accident. The second had fallen upon him with reference to his father’s assumed wealth. He had supposed himself to be richer than other Dales of Allington when coming in upon his property, and had consequently entertained an idea of sitting in Parliament for his county. In order that he might attain this honour he had allowed himself to be talked by the men of Hamersham and Guestwick out of his old family politics, and had declared himself a Liberal. He had never gone to the poll, and, indeed, had never actually stood for the seat. But he had come forward as a liberal politician, and had failed; and, although it was well known to all around that Christopher Dale was in heart as thoroughly conservative as any of his forefathers, this accident had made him sour and silent on the subject of politics, and had somewhat estranged him from his brother squires.
In other respects our Christopher Dale was, if anything, superior to the average of the family. Those whom he did love he loved dearly. Those whom he hated he did not ill-use beyond the limits of justice. He was close in small matters of money, and yet in certain family arrangements he was, as we shall see, capable of much liberality. He endeavoured to do his duty in accordance with his lights, and had succeeded in weaning himself from personal indulgences, to which during the early days of his high hopes he had become accustomed. And in that matter of his unrequited love he had been true throughout. In his hard, dry, unpleasant way he had loved the woman; and when at least he learned to know that she would not have his love, he had been unable to transfer his heart to another. This had happened just at the period of his father’s death, and he had endeavoured to console himself with politics, with what fate we have already seen. A constant, upright, and by no means insincere man was our Christopher Dale,—thin and meagre in his mental attributes, by no means even understanding the fullness of a full man, with power of eyesight very limited in seeing aught which was above him, but yet worthy of regard in that he had realised a path of duty and did endeavour to walk therein. And, moreover, our Mr Christopher Dale was a gentleman.
Such in character was the squire of Allington, the only regular inhabitant of the Great House. In person, he was a plain, dry man, with short grizzled hair and thick grizzled eyebrows. Of beard, he had very little, carrying the smallest possible grey whiskers, which hardly fell below the points of his ears. His eyes were sharp and expressive, and his nose was straight and well formed,—as was also his chin. But the nobility of his face was destroyed by a mean mouth with thin lips; and his forehead, which was high and narrow, though it forbad you to take Mr Dale for a fool, forbad you also to take him for a man of great parts, or of a wide capacity. In height, he was about five feet ten; and at the time of our story was as near to seventy as he was to sixty. But years had treated him very lightly, and he bore few signs of age. Such in person was Christopher Dale, Esq., the squire of Allington, and owner of some three thousand a year, all of which proceeded from the lands of that parish.
And now I will speak of the Great House of Allington. After all, it was not very great; nor was it surrounded by much of that exquisite nobility of park appurtenance which graces the habitations of most of our old landed proprietors. But the house itself was very graceful. It had been built in the days of the early Stuarts, in that style of architecture to which we give the name of the Tudors. On its front it showed three pointed roofs, or gables, as I believe they should be called; and between each gable a thin tall chimney stood, the two chimneys thus raising themselves just above the three peaks I have mentioned. I think that the beauty of the house depended much on those two chimneys; on them, and on the mullioned windows with which the front of the house was closely filled. The door, with its jutting porch, was by no means in the centre of the house. As you entered, there was but one window on your right hand, while on your left there were three. And over these there was a line of five windows, one taking its place above the porch. We all know the beautiful old Tudor window, with its stout stone mullions and its stone transoms, crossing from side to side at a point much nearer to the top than to the bottom. Of all windows ever invented it is the sweetest. And here, at Allington, I think their beauty was enhanced by the fact that they were not regular in their shape. Some of these windows were long windows, while some of them were high. That to the right of the door, and that at the other extremity of the house, were among the former. But the others had been put in without regard to uniformity, a long window here, and a high window there, with a general effect which could hardly have been improved. Then above, in the three gables, were three other smaller apertures. But these also were mullioned, and the entire frontage of the house was uniform in its style.
Round the house there were trim gardens, not very large, but worthy of much note in that they were so trim,—gardens with broad gravel paths, with one walk running in front of the house so broad as to be fitly called a terrace. But this, though in front of the house, was sufficiently removed from it to allow of a coach-road running inside it to the front door. The Dales of Allington had always been gardeners, and their garden was perhaps more noted in the county than any other of their properties. But outside the gardens no pretensions had been made to the grandeur of a domain. The pastures round the house were but pretty fields, in which timber was abundant. There was no deer-park at Allington; and though the Allington woods were well known, they formed no portion of a whole of which the house was a part. They lay away, out of sight, a full mile from the back of the house; but not on that account of less avail for the fitting preservation of foxes.
And the house stood much too near the road for purposes of grandeur, had such purposes ever swelled the breast of any of the squires of Allington. But I fancy that our ideas of rural grandeur have altered since many of our older country seats were built. To be near the village, so as in some way to afford comfort, protection, and patronage, and perhaps also with some view to the pleasantness of neighbourhood for its own inmates, seemed to be the object of a gentleman when building his house in the old days. A solitude in the centre of a wide park is now the only site that can be recognised as eligible. No cottage must be seen, unless the cottage orné of the gardener. The village, if it cannot be abolished, must be got out of sight. The sound of the church bells is not desirable, and the road on which the profane vulgar travel by their own right must be at a distance. When some old Dale of Allington built his house, he thought differently. There stood the church and there the village, and, pleased with such vicinity, he sat himself down close to his God and to his tenants.
As you pass along the road from Guestwick into the village you see the church near to you on your left hand; but the house is hidden from the road. As you approach the church, reaching the gate of it which is not above two hundred yards from the high road, you see the full front of the Great House. Perhaps the best view of it is from the churchyard. The lane leading up to the church ends in a gate, which is the entrance into Mr Dale’s place. There is no lodge there, and the gate generally stands open,—indeed, always does so, unless some need of cattle grazing within requires that it should be closed. But there is an inner gate, leading from the home paddock through the gardens to the house, and another inner gate, some thirty yards farther on, which will take you into the farmyard. Perhaps it is a defect at Allington that the farmyard is very close to the house. But the stables, and the straw-yards, and the unwashed carts, and the lazy lingering cattle of the homestead, are screened off by a row of chestnuts, which, when in its glory of flower, in the early days of May, no other row in England can surpass in beauty. Had any one told Dale of Allington,—this Dale or any former Dale,—that his place wanted wood, he would have pointed with mingled pride and disdain to his belt of chestnuts.
Of the church itself I will say the fewest possible number of words. It was a church such as there are, I think, thousands in England—low, incommodious, kept with difficulty in repair, too often pervious to the wet, and yet strangely picturesque, and correct too, according to great rules of architecture. It was built with a nave and aisles, visibly in the form of a cross, though with its arms clipped down to the trunk, with a separate chancel, with a large square short tower, and with a bell-shaped spire, covered with lead and irregular in its proportions. Who does not know the low porch, the perpendicular Gothic window, the flat-roofed aisles, and the noble old grey tower of such a church as this? As regards its interior, it was dusty; it was blocked up with high-backed ugly pews; the gallery in which the children sat at the end of the church, and in which two ancient musicians blew their bassoons, was all awry, and looked as though it would fall; the pulpit was an ugly useless edifice, as high nearly as the roof would allow, and the reading-desk under it hardly permitted the parson to keep his head free from the dangling tassels of the cushion above him. A clerk also was there beneath him, holding a third position somewhat elevated; and upon the whole things there were not quite as I would have had them. But, nevertheless, the place looked like a church, and I can hardly say so much for all the modern edifices which have been built in my days towards the glory of God. It looked like a church, and not the less so because in walking up the passage between the pews the visitor trod upon the brass plates which dignified the resting-places of the departed Dales of old.
Below the church, and between that and the village, stood the vicarage, in such position that the small garden of the vicarage stretched from the churchyard down to the backs of the village cottages. This was a pleasant residence, newly built within the last thirty years, and creditable to the ideas of comfort entertained by the rich collegiate body from which the vicars of Allington always came. Doubtless we shall in the course of our sojourn at Allington visit the vicarage now and then, but I do not know that any further detailed account of its comforts will be necessary to us.
Passing by the lane leading to the vicarage, the church, and to the house, the high road descends rapidly to a little brook which runs through the village. On the right as you descend you will have seen the “Red Lion,” and will have seen no other house conspicuous in any way. At the bottom, close to the brook, is the post-office, kept surely by the crossest old woman in all those parts. Here the road passes through the water, the accommodation of a narrow wooden bridge having been afforded for those on foot. But before passing the stream, you will see a cross street, running to the left, as had run that other lane leading to the house. Here, as this cross street rises the hill, are the best houses in the village. The baker lives here, and that respectable woman, Mrs Frummage, who sells ribbons, and toys, and soap, and straw bonnets, with many other things too long to mention. Here, too, lives an apothecary, whom the veneration of this and neighbouring parishes has raised to the dignity of a doctor. And here also, in the smallest but prettiest cottage that can be imagined, lives Mrs Hearn, the widow of a former vicar, on terms, however, with her neighbour the squire which I regret to say are not as friendly as they should be. Beyond this lady’s modest residence, Allington Street, for so the road is called, turns suddenly round towards the church, and at the point of the turn is a pretty low iron railing with a gate, and with a covered way, which leads up to the front door of the house which stands there, I will only say here, at this fag end of a chapter, that it is the Small House at Allington. Allington Street, as I have said, turns short round towards the church at this point, and there ends at a white gate, leading into the churchyard by a second entrance.
So much it was needful that I should say of Allington Great House, of the Squire, and of the village. Of the Small House, I will speak separately in a further chapter.
“But Mr Crosbie is only a mere clerk.”
This sarcastic condemnation was spoken by Miss Lilian Dale to her sister Isabella, and referred to a gentleman with whom we shall have much concern in these pages. I do not say that Mr Crosbie will be our hero, seeing that that part in the drama will be cut up, as it were, into fragments. Whatever of the magnificent may be produced will be diluted and apportioned out in very moderate quantities among two or more, probably among three or four, young gentlemen—to none of whom will be vouchsafed the privilege of much heroic action.
“I don’t know what you call a mere clerk, Lily. Mr Fanfaron is a mere barrister, and Mr Boyce is a mere clergyman.” Mr Boyce was the vicar of Allington, and Mr Fanfaron was a lawyer who had made his way over to Allington during the last assizes. “You might as well say that Lord De Guest is a mere earl.”
“So he is—only a mere earl. Had he ever done anything except have fat oxen, one wouldn’t say so. You know what I mean by a mere clerk? It isn’t much in a man to be in a public office, and yet Mr Crosbie gives himself airs.”
“You don’t suppose that Mr Crosbie is the same as John Eames,” said Bell, who, by her tone of voice, did not seem inclined to undervalue the qualifications of Mr Crosbie. Now John Eames was a young man from Guestwick, who had been appointed to a clerkship in the Income-tax office, with eighty pounds a year, two years ago.
“Then Johnny Eames is a mere clerk,” said Lily; “and Mr Crosbie is— After all, Bell, what is Mr Crosbie, if he is not a mere clerk? Of course, he is older than John Eames; and, as he has been longer at it, I suppose he has more than eighty pounds a year.”
“I am not in Mr Crosbie’s confidence. He is in the General Committee Office, I know; and, I believe, has pretty nearly the management of the whole of it. I have heard Bernard say that he has six or seven young men under him, and that—; but, of course, I don’t know what he does at his office.”
“I’ll tell you what he is, Bell; Mr Crosbie is a swell.” And Lilian Dale was right; Mr Crosbie was a swell.
And here I may perhaps best explain who Bernard was, and who was Mr Crosbie. Captain Bernard Dale was an officer in the corps of Engineers, was the first cousin of the two girls who have been speaking, and was nephew and heir presumptive to the squire. His father, Colonel Dale, and his mother, Lady Fanny Dale, were still living at Torquay—an effete, invalid, listless couple, pretty well dead to all the world beyond the region of the Torquay card-tables. He it was who had made for himself quite a career in the Nineteenth Dragoons. This he did by eloping with the penniless daughter of that impoverished earl, the Lord De Guest. After the conclusion of that event circumstances had not afforded him the opportunity of making himself conspicuous; and he had gone on declining gradually in the world’s esteem—for the world had esteemed him when he first made good his running with the Lady Fanny—till now, in his slippered years, he and his Lady Fanny were unknown except among those Torquay Bath chairs and card-tables. His elder brother was still a hearty man, walking in thick shoes, and constant in his saddle; but the colonel, with nothing beyond his wife’s title to keep his body awake, had fallen asleep somewhat prematurely among his slippers. Of him and of Lady Fanny, Bernard Dale was the only son. Daughters they had had; some were dead, some married, and one living with them among the card-tables. Of his parents Bernard had latterly not seen much; not more, that is, than duty and a due attention to the fifth commandment required of him. He also was making a career for himself, having obtained a commission in the Engineers, and being known to all his compeers as the nephew of an earl, and as the heir to a property of three thousand a year. And when I say that Bernard Dale was not inclined to throw away any of these advantages, I by no means intend to speak in his dispraise. The advantage of being heir to a good property is so manifest,—the advantages over and beyond those which are merely fiscal,—that no man thinks of throwing them away, or expects another man to do so. Moneys in possession or in expectation do give a set to the head, and a confidence to the voice, and an assurance to the man, which will help him much in his walk in life—if the owner of them will simply use them, and not abuse them. And for Bernard Dale I will say that he did not often talk of his uncle the earl. He was conscious that his uncle was an earl, and that other men knew the fact. He knew that he would not otherwise have been elected at the Beaufort, or at that most aristocratic of little clubs called Sebright’s. When noble blood was called in question he never alluded specially to his own, but he knew how to speak as one of whom all the world was aware on which side he had been placed by the circumstances of his birth. Thus he used his advantage, and did not abuse it. And in his profession he had been equally fortunate. By industry, by a small but wakeful intelligence, and by some aid from patronage, he had got on till he had almost achieved the reputation of talent. His name had become known among scientific experimentalists, not as that of one who had himself invented a cannon or an antidote to a cannon, but as of a man understanding in cannons and well fitted to look at those invented by others; who would honestly test this or that antidote; or, if not honestly, seeing that such thin-minded men can hardly go to the proof of any matter without some prejudgment in their minds, at any rate with such appearance of honesty that the world might be satisfied. And in this way Captain Dale was employed much at home, about London; and was not called on to build barracks in Nova Scotia, or to make roads in the Punjaub.
He was a small slight man, smaller than his uncle, but in face very like him. He had the same eyes, and nose, and chin, and the same mouth; but his forehead was better,—less high and pointed, and better formed about the brows. And then he wore moustaches, which somewhat hid the thinness of his mouth. On the whole, he was not ill-looking; and, as I have said before, he carried with him an air of self-assurance and a confident balance, which in itself gives a grace to a young man.
He was staying at the present time in his uncle’s house, during the delicious warmth of the summer,—for, as yet, the month of July was not all past; and his intimate friend, Adolphus Crosbie, who was or was not a mere clerk as my readers may choose to form their own opinions on that matter, was a guest in the house with him. I am inclined to say that Adolphus Crosbie was not a mere clerk; and I do not think that he would have been so called, even by Lily Dale, had he not given signs to her that he was a “swell.” Now a man in becoming a swell,—a swell of such an order as could possibly be known to Lily Dale,—must have ceased to be a mere clerk in that very process. And, moreover, Captain Dale would not have been Damon to any Pythias of whom it might fairly be said that he was a mere clerk. Nor could any mere clerk have got himself in either at the Beaufort or at Sebright’s. The evidence against that former assertion made by Lily Dale is very strong; but then the evidence as to her latter assertion is as strong, Mr Crosbie certainly was a swell. It is true that he was a clerk in the General Committee Office. But then, in the first place, the General Committee Office is situated in Whitehall; whereas poor John Eames was forced to travel daily from his lodgings in Burton Crescent, ever so far beyond Russell Square, to his dingy room in Somerset House. And Adolphus Crosbie, when very young, had been a private secretary, and had afterwards mounted up in his office to some quasi authority and senior-clerkship, bringing him in seven hundred a year, and giving him a status among assistant secretaries and the like, which even in an official point of view was something. But the triumphs of Adolphus Crosbie had been other than these. Not because he had been intimate with assistant secretaries, and was allowed in Whitehall a room to himself with an armchair, would he have been entitled to stand upon the rug at Sebright’s and speak while rich men listened,—rich men, and men also who had handles to their names! Adolphus Crosbie had done more than make minutes with discretion on the papers of the General Committee Office. He had set himself down before the gates of the city of fashion, and had taken them by storm; or, perhaps, to speak with more propriety, he had picked the locks and let himself in. In his walks of life he was somebody in London. A man at the West End who did not know who was Adolphus Crosbie knew nothing. I do not say that he was the intimate friend of many great men; but even great men acknowledged the acquaintance of Adolphus Crosbie, and he was to be seen in the drawing-rooms, or at any rate on the staircases, of Cabinet Ministers.
Lilian Dale, dear Lily Dale—for my reader must know that she is to be very dear, and that my story will be nothing to him if he do not love Lily Dale—Lilian Dale had discovered that Mr Crosbie was a swell. But I am bound to say that Mr Crosbie did not habitually proclaim the fact in any offensive manner; nor in becoming a swell had he become altogether a bad fellow. It was not to be expected that a man who was petted at Sebright’s should carry himself in the Allington drawing-room as would Johnny Eames, who had never been petted by any one but his mother. And this fraction of a hero of ours had other advantages to back him, over and beyond those which fashion had given him. He was a tall, well-looking man, with pleasant eyes and an expressive mouth,—a man whom you would probably observe in whatever room you might meet him. And he knew how to talk, and had in him something which justified talking. He was no butterfly or dandy, who flew about in the world’s sun, warmed into prettiness by a sunbeam. Crosbie had his opinion on things,—on politics, on religion, on the philanthropic tendencies of the age, and had read something here and there as he formed his opinion. Perhaps he might have done better in the world had he not been placed so early in life in that Whitehall public office. There was that in him which might have earned better bread for him in an open profession.
But in that matter of his bread the fate of Adolphus Crosbie had by this time been decided for him, and he had reconciled himself to fate that was now inexorable. Some very slight patrimony, a hundred a year or so, had fallen to his share. Beyond that he had his salary from his office, and nothing else; and on his income, thus made up, he had lived as a bachelor in London, enjoying all that London could give him as a man in moderately easy circumstances, and looking forward to no costly luxuries,—such as a wife, a house of his own, or a stable full of horses. Those which he did enjoy of the good things of the world would, if known to John Eames, have made him appear fabulously rich in the eyes of that brother clerk. His lodgings in Mount Street were elegant in their belongings. During three months of the season in London he called himself the master of a very neat hack. He was always well dressed, though never overdressed. At his clubs he could live on equal terms with men having ten times his income. He was not married. He had acknowledged to himself that he could not marry without money; and he would not marry for money. He had put aside from him, as not within his reach, the comforts of marriage. But— We will not, however, at the present moment inquire more curiously into the private life and circumstances of our new friend Adolphus Crosbie.
After the sentence pronounced against him by Lilian, the two girls remained silent for awhile. Bell was, perhaps, a little angry with her sister. It was not often that she allowed herself to say much in praise of any gentleman; and, now that she had spoken a word or two in favour of Mr Crosbie, she felt herself to be rebuked by her sister for this unwonted enthusiasm. Lily was at work on a drawing, and in a minute or two had forgotten all about Mr Crosbie; but the injury remained on Bell’s mind and prompted her to go back to the subject. “I don’t like those slang words, Lily.”
“What slang words?”
“You know what you called Bernard’s friend.”
“Oh; a swell. I fancy I do like slang. I think it’s awfully jolly to talk about things being jolly. Only that I was afraid of your nerves I should have called him stunning. It’s so slow, you know, to use nothing but words out of a dictionary.”
“I don’t think it’s nice in talking of gentlemen.”
“Isn’t it? Well, I’d like to be nice—if I knew how.”
If she knew how! There is no knowing how, for a girl, in that matter. If nature and her mother have not done it for her, there is no hope for her on that head. I think I may say that nature and her mother had been sufficiently efficacious for Lilian Dale in this respect.
“Mr Crosbie is, at any rate, a gentleman, and knows how to make himself pleasant. That was all that I meant. Mamma said a great deal more about him than I did.”
“Mr Crosbie is an Apollo; and I always look upon Apollo as the greatest—you know what—that ever lived. I mustn’t say the word, because Apollo was a gentleman.”
At this moment, while the name of the god was still on her lips, the high open window of the drawing-room was darkened, and Bernard entered, followed by Mr Crosbie.
“Who is talking about Apollo?” said Captain Dale.
The girls were both stricken dumb. How would it be with them if Mr Crosbie had heard himself spoken of in those last words of poor Lily’s? This was the rashness of which Bell was ever accusing her sister, and here was the result! But, in truth, Bernard had heard nothing more than the name, and Mr Crosbie, who had been behind him, had heard nothing.
“‘As sweet and musical as bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair,’“ said Mr Crosbie, not meaning much by the quotation, but perceiving that the two girls had been in some way put out and silenced.
“What very bad music it must have made,” said Lily; “unless, indeed, his hair was very different from ours.”
“It was all sunbeams,” suggested Bernard. But by that time Apollo had served his turn, and the ladies welcomed their guests in the proper form.
“Mamma is in the garden,” said Bell, with that hypocritical pretence so common with young ladies when young gentlemen call; as though they were aware that mamma was the object specially sought.
“Picking peas, with a sun-bonnet on,” said Lily.
“Let us by all means go and help her,” said Mr Crosbie; and then they issued out into the garden.
The gardens of the Great House of Allington and those of the Small House open on to each other. A proper boundary of thick laurel hedge, and wide ditch, and of iron spikes guarding the ditch, there is between them; but over the wide ditch there is a foot-bridge, and at the bridge there is a gate which has no key; and for all purposes of enjoyment the gardens of each house are open to the other. And the gardens of the Small House are very pretty. The Small House itself is so near the road that there is nothing between the dining-room windows and the iron rail but a narrow edge rather than border, and a little path made with round fixed cobble stones, not above two feet broad, into which no one but the gardener ever makes his way. The distance from the road to the house is not above five or six feet, and the entrance from the gate is shut in by a covered way. But the garden behind the house, on to which the windows from the drawing-room open, is to all the senses as private as though there were no village of Allington, and no road up to the church within a hundred yards of the lawn. The steeple of the church, indeed, can be seen from the lawn, peering, as it were, between the yew-trees which stand in the corner of the churchyard adjoining to Mrs Dale’s wall. But none of the Dale family have any objection to the sight of that steeple. The glory of the Small House at Allington certainly consists in its lawn, which is as smooth, as level, and as much like velvet as grass has ever yet been made to look. Lily Dale, taking pride in her own lawn, has declared often that it is no good attempting to play croquet up at the Great House. The grass, she says, grows in tufts, and nothing that Hopkins, the gardener, can or will do has any effect upon the tufts. But there are no tufts at the Small House. As the squire himself has never been very enthusiastic about croquet, the croquet implements have been moved permanently down to the Small House, and croquet there has become quite an institution.
And while I am on the subject of the garden I may also mention Mrs Dale’s conservatory, as to which Bell was strenuously of opinion that the Great House had nothing to offer equal to it—”For flowers, of course, I mean,” she would say, correcting herself; for at the Great House there was a grapery very celebrated. On this matter the squire would be less tolerant than as regarded the croquet, and would tell his niece that she knew nothing about flowers. “Perhaps not, Uncle Christopher,” she would say. “All the same, I like our geraniums best;” for there was a spice of obstinacy about Miss Dale,—as, indeed, there was in all the Dales, male and female, young and old.
It may be as well to explain that the care of this lawn and of this conservatory, and, indeed, of the entire garden belonging to the Small House, was in the hands of Hopkins, the head gardener to the Great House; and it was so simply for this reason, that Mrs Dale could not afford to keep a gardener herself. A working lad, at ten shillings a week, who cleaned the knives and shoes, and dug the ground, was the only male attendant on the three ladies. But Hopkins, the head gardener of Allington, who had men under him, was as widely awake to the lawn and the conservatory of the humbler establishment as he was to the grapery, peach-walls, and terraces of the grander one. In his eyes it was all one place. The Small House belonged to his master, as indeed did the very furniture within it; and it was lent, not let, to Mrs Dale. Hopkins, perhaps, did not love Mrs Dale, seeing that he owed her no duty as one born a Dale. The two young ladies he did love, and also snubbed in a very peremptory way sometimes. To Mrs Dale he was coldly civil, always referring to the squire if any direction worthy of special notice as concerning the garden was given to him.
All this will serve to explain the terms on which Mrs Dale was living at the Small House,—a matter needful of explanation sooner or later. Her husband had been the youngest of three brothers, and in many respects the brightest. Early in life he had gone up to London, and there had done well as a land surveyor. He had done so well that Government had employed him, and for some three or four years he had enjoyed a large income, but death had come suddenly on him, while he was only yet ascending the ladder; and, when he died, he had hardly begun to realise the golden prospects which he had seen before him. This had happened some fifteen years before our story commenced, so that the two girls hardly retained any memory of their father. For the first five years of her widowhood, Mrs Dale, who had never been a favourite of the squire’s, lived with her two little girls in such modest way as her very limited means allowed. Old Mrs Dale, the squire’s mother, then occupied the Small House. But when old Mrs Dale died, the squire offered the place rent-free to his sister-in-law, intimating to her that her daughters would obtain considerable social advantages by living at Allington. She had accepted the offer, and the social advantages had certainly followed. Mrs Dale was poor, her whole income not exceeding three hundred a year, and therefore her own style of living was of necessity very unassuming; but she saw her girls becoming popular in the county, much liked by the families around them, and enjoying nearly all the advantages which would have accrued to them had they been the daughters of Squire Dale of Allington. Under such circumstances it was little to her whether or no she were loved by her brother-in-law, or respected by Hopkins. Her own girls loved her, and respected her, and that was pretty much all that she demanded of the world on her own behalf.
And Uncle Christopher had been very good to the girls in his own obstinate and somewhat ungracious manner. There were two ponies in the stables of the Great House, which they were allowed to ride, and which, unless on occasions, nobody else did ride. I think he might have given the ponies to the girls, but he thought differently. And he contributed to their dresses, sending them home now and again things which he thought necessary, not in the pleasantest way in the world. Money he never gave them, nor did he make them any promises. But they were Dales, and he loved them; and with Christopher Dale to love once was to love always. Bell was his chief favourite, sharing with his nephew Bernard the best warmth of his heart. About these two he had his projects, intending that Bell should be the future mistress of the Great House of Allington; as to which project, however, Miss Dale was as yet in very absolute ignorance.
We may now, I think, go back to our four friends, as they walked out upon the lawn. They were understood to be on a mission to assist Mrs Dale in the picking of the peas; but pleasure intervened in the way of business, and the young people, forgetting the labours of their elder, allowed themselves to be carried away by the fascinations of croquet. The iron hoops and the sticks were fixed. The mallets and the balls were lying about; and then the party was so nicely made up! “I haven’t had a game of croquet yet,” said Mr Crosbie. It cannot be said that he had lost much time, seeing that he had only arrived before dinner on the preceding day. And then the mallets were in their hands in a moment.
“We’ll play sides, of course,” said Lily. “Bernard and I’ll play together.” But this was not allowed. Lily was well known to be the queen of the croquet ground; and as Bernard was supposed to be more efficient than his friend, Lily had to take Mr Crosbie as her partner. “Apollo can’t get through the hoops,” Lily said afterwards to her sister; “but then how gracefully he fails to do it!” Lily, however, had been beaten, and may therefore be excused for a little spite against her partner. But it so turned out that before Mr Crosbie took his final departure from Allington he could get through the hoops; and Lily, though she was still queen of the croquet ground, had to acknowledge a male sovereign in that dominion.
“That’s not the way we played at—” said Crosbie, at one point of the game, and then stopped himself.
“Where was that?” said Bernard.
“A place I was at last summer,—in Shropshire.”
“Then they don’t play the game, Mr Crosbie, at the place you were at last summer,—in Shropshire,” said Lily.
“You mean Lady Hartletop’s,” said Bernard. Now, the Marchioness of Hartletop was a very great person indeed, and a leader in the fashionable world.
“Oh! Lady Hartletop’s!” said Lily. “Then I suppose we must give in;” which little bit of sarcasm was not lost upon Mr Crosbie, and was put down by him in the tablets of his mind as quite undeserved. He had endeavoured to avoid any mention of Lady Hartletop and her croquet ground, and her ladyship’s name had been forced upon him. Nevertheless, he liked Lily Dale through it all. But he thought that he liked Bell the best, though she said little; for Bell was the beauty of the family.
During the game Bernard remembered that they had especially come over to bid the three ladies to dinner at the house on that day. They had all dined there on the day before, and the girls’ uncle had now sent directions to them to come again. “I’ll go and ask mamma about it,” said Bell, who was out first. And then she returned, saying, that she and her sister would obey their uncle’s behest; but that her mother would prefer to remain at home. “There are the peas to be eaten, you know,” said Lily.
“Send them up to the Great House,” said Bernard.
“Hopkins would not allow it,” said Lily. “He calls that a mixing of things. Hopkins doesn’t like mixings.” And then when the game was over, they sauntered about, out of the small garden into the larger one, and through the shrubberies, and out upon the fields, where they found the still lingering remnants of the haymaking. And Lily took a rake, and raked for two minutes; and Mr Crosbie, making an attempt to pitch the hay into the cart, had to pay half-a-crown for his footing to the haymakers; and Bell sat quiet under a tree, mindful of her complexion; whereupon Mr Crosbie, finding the hay-pitching not much to his taste, threw himself under the same tree also, quite after the manner of Apollo, as Lily said to her mother late in the evening. Then Bernard covered Lily with hay, which was a great feat in the jocose way for him; and Lily in returning the compliment, almost smothered Mr Crosbie,—by accident.
“Oh, Lily,” said Bell.
“I’m sure I beg your pardon, Mr Crosbie. It was Bernard’s fault. Bernard, I never will come into a hayfield with you again.” And so they all became very intimate; while Bell sat quietly under the tree, listening to a word or two now and then as Mr Crosbie chose to speak them. There is a kind of enjoyment to be had in society, in which very few words are necessary. Bell was less vivacious than her sister Lily; and when, an hour after this, she was dressing herself for dinner, she acknowledged that she had passed a pleasant afternoon, though Mr Crosbie had not said very much.
As Mrs Dale, of the Small House, was not a Dale by birth, there can be no necessity for insisting on the fact that none of the Dale peculiarities should be sought for in her character. These peculiarities were not, perhaps, very conspicuous in her daughters, who had taken more in that respect from their mother than from their father; but a close observer might recognise the girls as Dales. They were constant, perhaps obstinate, occasionally a little uncharitable in their judgment, and prone to think that there was a great deal in being a Dale, though not prone to say much about it. But they had also a better pride than this, which had come to them as their mother’s heritage.
Mrs Dale was certainly a proud woman,—not that there was anything appertaining to herself in which she took a pride. In birth she had been much lower than her husband, seeing that her grandfather had been almost nobody. Her fortune had been considerable for her rank in life, and on its proceeds she now mainly depended; but it had not been sufficient to give any of the pride of wealth. And she had been a beauty; according to my taste, was still very lovely; but certainly at this time of life, she, a widow of fifteen years’ standing, with two grownup daughters, took no pride in her beauty. Nor had she any conscious pride in the fact that she was a lady. That she was a lady, inwards and outwards, from the crown of her head to the sole of her feet, in head, in heart, and in mind, a lady by education and a lady by nature, a lady also by birth in spite of that deficiency respecting her grandfather, I hereby state as a fact—meo periculo. And the squire, though he had no special love for her, had recognised this, and in all respects treated her as his equal.
But her position was one which required that she should either be very proud or else very humble. She was poor, and yet her daughters moved in a position which belongs, as a rule, to the daughters of rich men only. This they did as nieces of the childless squire of Allington, and as his nieces she felt that they were entitled to accept his countenance and kindness, without loss of self-respect either to her or to them. She would have ill done her duty as a mother to them had she allowed any pride of her own to come between them and such advantage in the world as their uncle might be able to give them. On their behalf she had accepted the loan of the house in which she lived, and the use of many of the appurtenances belonging to her brother-in-law; but on her own account she had accepted nothing. Her marriage with Philip Dale had been disliked by his brother the squire, and the squire, while Philip was still living, had continued to show that his feelings in this respect were not to be overcome. They never had been overcome; and now, though the brother-in-law and sister-in-law had been close neighbours for years, living as one may say almost in the same family, they had never become friends. There had not been a word of quarrel between them. They met constantly. The squire had unconsciously come to entertain a profound respect for his brother’s widow. The widow had acknowledged to herself the truth of the affection shown by the uncle to her daughters. But yet they had never come together as friends. Of her own money matters Mrs Dale had never spoken a word to the squire. Of his intention respecting the girls the squire had never spoken a word to the mother. And in this way they had lived and were living at Allington.
The life which Mrs Dale led was not altogether an easy life,—was not devoid of much painful effort on her part. The theory of her life one may say was this—that she should bury herself in order that her daughters might live well above ground. And in order to carry out this theory, it was necessary that she should abstain from all complaint or show of uneasiness before her girls. Their life above ground would not be well if they understood that their mother, in this underground life of hers, was enduring any sacrifice on their behalf. It was needful that they should think that the picking of peas in a sun-bonnet, or long readings by her own fireside, and solitary hours spent in thinking, were specially to her mind. “Mamma doesn’t like going out.” “I don’t think mamma is happy anywhere out of her own drawing-room.” I do not say that the girls were taught to say such words, but they were taught to have thoughts which led to such words, and in the early days of their going out into the world used so to speak of their mother. But a time came to them before long,—to one first and then to the other, in which they knew that it was not so, and knew also all that their mother had suffered for their sakes.
And in truth Mrs Dale could have been as young in heart as they were. She, too, could have played croquet, and have coquetted with a haymaker’s rake, and have delighted in her pony, ay, and have listened to little nothings from this and that Apollo, had she thought that things had been conformable thereto. Women at forty do not become ancient misanthropes, or stern Rhadamanthine moralists, indifferent to the world’s pleasures—no, not even though they be widows. There are those who think that such should be the phase of their minds. I profess that I do not so think. I would have women, and men also, young as long as they can be young. It is not that a woman should call herself in years younger than her father’s family Bible will have her to be. Let her who is forty call herself forty; but if she can be young in spirit at forty, let her show that she is so.
I think that Mrs Dale was wrong. She would have joined that party on the croquet ground, instead of remaining among the pea-sticks in her sun-bonnet, had she done as I would have counselled her. Not a word was spoken among the four that she did not hear. Those pea-sticks were only removed from the lawn by a low wall and a few shrubs. She listened, not as one suspecting, but simply as one loving. The voices of her girls were very dear to her, and the silver ringing tones of Lily’s tongue were as sweet to her ears as the music of the gods. She heard all that about Lady Hartletop, and shuddered at Lily’s bold sarcasm. And she heard Lily say that mamma would stay at home and eat the peas, and said to herself sadly that that was now her lot in life.
“Dear darling girl—and so it should be!”
It was thus her thoughts ran. And then, when her ear had traced them, as they passed across the little bridge into the other grounds, she returned across the lawn to the house with her burden on her arm, and sat herself down on the step of the drawing-room window, looking out on the sweet summer flowers and the smooth surface of the grass before her.
Had not God done well for her to place her where she was? Had not her lines been set for her in pleasant places? Was she not happy in her girls,—her sweet, loving, trusting, trusty children? As it was to be that her lord, that best half of herself, was to be taken from her in early life, and that the springs of all the lighter pleasures were to be thus stopped for her, had it not been well that in her bereavement so much had been done to soften her lot in life and give it grace and beauty? ‘Twas so, she argued with herself, and yet she acknowledged to herself that she was not happy. She had resolved, as she herself had said often, to put away childish things, and now she pined for those things which she so put from her. As she sat she could still hear Lily’s voice as they went through the shrubbery,—hear it when none but a mother’s ears would have distinguished the sound. Now that those young men were at the Great House it was natural that her girls should be there too. The squire would not have had young men to stay with him had there been no ladies to grace his table. But for her,—she knew that no one would want her there. Now and again she must go, as otherwise her very existence, without going, would be a thing disagreeably noticeable. But there was no other reason why she should join the party; nor in joining it would she either give or receive pleasure. Let her daughters eat from her brother’s table and drink of his cup. They were made welcome to do so from the heart. For her there was no such welcome as that at the Great House,—nor at any other house, or any other table!
“Mamma will stay at home to eat the peas.”
And then she repeated to herself the words which Lily had spoken, sitting there, leaning with her elbow on her knee, and her head upon her hand.
“Please, ma’am, cook says, can we have the peas to shell?” and then her reverie was broken.
Whereupon Mrs Dale got up and gave over her basket. “Cook knows that the young ladies are going to dine at the Great House?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“She needn’t mind getting dinner for me. I will have tea early.” And so, after all, Mrs Dale did not perform that special duty appointed for her.
But she soon set herself to work upon another duty. When a family of three persons has to live upon an income of three hundred a year, and, nevertheless, makes some pretence of going into society, it has to be very mindful of small details, even though that family may consist only of ladies. Of this Mrs Dale was well aware, and as it pleased her that her daughters should be nice and fresh, and pretty in their attire, many a long hour was given up to that care. The squire would send them shawls in winter, and had given them riding habits, and had sent them down brown silk dresses from London,—so limited in quantity that the due manufacture of two dresses out of the material had been found to be beyond the art of woman, and the brown silk garments had been a difficulty from that day to this—the squire having a good memory in such matters, and being anxious to see the fruits of his liberality. All this was doubtless of assistance, but had the squire given the amount which he so expended in money to his nieces, the benefit would have been greater. As it was, the girls were always nice and fresh and pretty, they themselves not being idle in that matter; but their tirewoman in chief was their mother. And now she went up to their room and got out their muslin frocks, and—but, perhaps, I should not tell such tales!— She, however, felt no shame in her work, as she sent for a hot iron, and with her own hands smoothed out the creases, and gave the proper set to the crimp flounces, and fixed a new ribbon where it was wanted, and saw that all was as it should be. Men think but little how much of this kind is endured that their eyes may be pleased, even though it be but for an hour.
“Oh! mamma, how good you are,” said Bell, as the two girls came in, only just in time to make themselves ready for returning to dinner.
“Mamma is always good,” said Lily. “I wish, mamma, I could do the same for you oftener,” and then she kissed her mother. But the squire was exact about dinner, so they dressed themselves in haste, and went off again through the garden, their mother accompanying them to the little bridge.
“Your uncle did not seem vexed at my not coming?” said Mrs Dale.
“We have not seen him, mamma,” said Lily. “We have been ever so far down the fields, and forgot altogether what o’clock it was.”
“I don’t think Uncle Christopher was about the place, or we should have met him,” said Bell.
“But I am vexed with you, mamma. Are not you, Bell? It is very bad of you to stay here all alone, and not come.”
“I suppose mamma likes being at home better than up at the Great House,” said Bell, very gently; and as she spoke she was holding her mother’s hand.
“Well; goodbye, dears. I shall expect you between ten and eleven. But don’t hurry yourselves if anything is going on.” And so they went, and the widow was again alone. The path from the bridge ran straight up towards the back of the Great House, so that for a moment or two she could see them as they tripped on almost in a run. And then she saw their dresses flutter as they turned sharp round, up the terrace steps. She would not go beyond the nook among the laurels by which she was surrounded, lest any one should see her as she looked after her girls. But when the last flutter of the pink muslin had been whisked away from her sight, she felt it hard that she might not follow them. She stood there, however, without advancing a step. She would not have Hopkins telling how she watched her daughters as they went from her own home to that of her brother-in-law. It was not within the capacity of Hopkins to understand why she watched them.
“Well, girls, you’re not much too soon. I think your mother might have come with you,” said Uncle Christopher. And this was the manner of the man. Had he known his own wishes he must have acknowledged to himself that he was better pleased that Mrs Dale should stay away. He felt himself more absolutely master and more comfortably at home at his own table without her company than with it. And yet he frequently made a grievance of her not corning, and himself believed in that grievance.
“I think mamma was tired,” said Bell.
“Hem. It’s not so very far across from one house to the other. If I were to shut myself up whenever I’m tired— But never mind. Let’s go to dinner. Mr Crosbie, will you take my niece Lilian.” And then, offering his own arm to Bell, he walked off to the dining-room.
“If he scolds mamma any more, I’ll go away,” said Lily to her companion; by which it may be seen that they had all become very intimate during the long day that they had passed together.
Mrs Dale, after remaining for a moment on the bridge, went in to her tea. What succedaneum of mutton chop or broiled ham she had for the roast duck and green peas which were to have been provided for the family dinner we will not particularly inquire. We may, however, imagine that she did not devote herself to her evening repast with any peculiar energy of appetite. She took a book with her as she sat herself down,—some novel, probably, for Mrs Dale was not above novels,—and read a page or two as she sipped her tea. But the book was soon laid on one side, and the tray on which the warm plate had become cold was neglected, and she threw herself back in her own familiar chair, thinking of herself, and of her girls, and thinking also what might have been her lot in life had he lived who had loved her truly during the few years that they had been together.
It is especially the nature of a Dale to be constant in his likings and his dislikings. Her husband’s affection for her had been unswerving,—so much so that he had quarrelled with his brother because his brother would not express himself in brotherly terms about his wife; but, nevertheless, the two brothers had loved each other always. Many years had now gone by since these things had occurred, but still the same feelings remained. When she had first come down to Allington she had resolved to win the squire’s regard, but she had now long known that any such winning was out of the question; indeed, there was no longer a wish for it. Mrs Dale was not one of those softhearted women who sometimes thank God that they can love any one. She could once have felt affection for her brother-in-law,—affection, and close, careful, sisterly friendship; but she could not do so now. He had been cold to her, and had with perseverance rejected her advances. That was now seven years since; and during those years Mrs Dale had been, at any rate, as cold to him as he had been to her.
But all this was very hard to bear. That her daughters should love their uncle was not only reasonable, but in every way desirable. He was not cold to them. To them he was generous and affectionate. If she were only out of the way, he would have taken them to his house as his own, and they would in all respects have stood before the world as his adopted children. Would it not be better if she were out of the way?
It was only in her most dismal moods that this question would get itself asked within her mind, and then she would recover herself, and answer it stoutly with an indignant protest against her own morbid weakness. It would not be well that she should be away from her girls,—not though their uncle should have been twice a better uncle; not though, by her absence, they might become heiresses of all Allington. Was it not above everything to them that they should have a mother near them? And as she asked of herself that morbid question,—wickedly asked it, as she declared to herself,—did she not know that they loved her better than all the world beside, and would prefer her caresses and her care to the guardianship of any uncle, let his house be ever so great? As yet they loved her better than all the world beside. Of other love, should it come, she would not be jealous. And if it should come, and should be happy, might there not yet be a bright evening of life for herself? If they should marry, and if their lords would accept her love, her friendship, and her homage, she might yet escape from the deathlike coldness of that Great House, and be happy in some tiny cottage, from which she might go forth at times among those who would really welcome her. A certain doctor there was, living not very far from Allington, at Guestwick, as to whom she had once thought that he might fill that place of son-in-law,—to be well-beloved. Her quiet, beautiful Bell had seemed to like the man; and he had certainly done more than seem to like her. But now, for some weeks past, this hope, or rather this idea, had faded away. Mrs Dale had never questioned her daughter on the matter; she was not a woman prone to put such questions. But during the month or two last past, she had seen with regret that Bell looked almost coldly on the man whom her mother favoured.
In thinking of all this the long evening passed away, and at eleven o’clock she heard the coming steps across the garden. The young men had, of course, accompanied the girls home; and as she stepped out from the still open window of her own drawing-room, she saw them all on the centre of the lawn before her.
“There’s mamma,” said Lily. “Mamma, Mr Crosbie wants to play croquet by moonlight.”
“I don’t think there is light enough for that,” said Mrs Dale.
“There is light enough for him,” said Lily, “for he plays quite independently of the hoops; don’t you, Mr Crosbie?”
“There’s very pretty croquet light, I should say,” said Mr Crosbie, looking up at the bright moon; “and then it is so stupid going to bed.”
“Yes, it is stupid going to bed,” said Lily; “but people in the country are stupid, you know. Billiards, that you can play all night by gas, is much better, isn’t it?”
“Your arrows fall terribly astray there, Miss Dale, for I never touch a cue; you should talk to your cousin about billiards.”
“Is Bernard a great billiard player?” asked Bell.
“Well, I do play now and again; about as well as Crosbie does croquet. Come, Crosbie, we’ll go home and smoke a cigar.”
“Yes,” said Lily; “and then, you know, we stupid people can go to bed. Mamma, I wish you had a little smoking-room here for us. I don’t like being considered stupid.” And then they parted,—the ladies going into the house, and the two men returning across the lawn.
“Lily, my love,” said Mrs Dale, when they were all together in her bedroom, “it seems to me that you are very hard upon Mr Crosbie.”
“She has been going on like that all the evening,” said Bell.
“I’m sure we are very good friends,” said Lily.
“Oh, very!” said Bell.
“Now, Bell, you’re jealous; you know you are.” And then, seeing that her sister was in some slight degree vexed, she went up to her and kissed her. “She shan’t be called jealous; shall she, mamma?”
“I don’t think she deserves it,” said Mrs Dale.
“Now, you don’t mean to say that you think I meant anything?” said Lily. “As if I cared a buttercup about Mr Crosbie.”
“Or I either, Lily.”
“Of course you don’t. But I do care for him very much, mamma. He is such a duck of an Apollo. I shall always call him Apollo; Phoebus Apollo! And when I draw his picture he shall have a mallet in his hand instead of a bow. Upon my word I am very much obliged to Bernard for bringing him down here; and I do wish he was not going away the day after tomorrow.”
“The day after tomorrow!” said Mrs Dale. “It was hardly worth coming for two days.”
“No, it wasn’t,—disturbing us all in our quiet little ways just for such a spell as that,—not giving one time even to count his rays.”
“But he says he shall perhaps come again,” said Bell.
“There is that hope for us,” said Lily. “Uncle Christopher asked him to come down when he gets his long leave of absence. This is only a short sort of leave. He is better off than poor Johnny Eames. Johnny Eames only has a month, but Mr Crosbie has two months just whenever he likes it; and seems to be pretty much his own master all the year round besides.”
“And Uncle Christopher asked him to come down for the shooting in September,” said Bell.
“And though he didn’t say he’d come I think he meant it,” said Lily. “There is that hope for us, mamma.”
“Then you’ll have to draw Apollo with a gun instead of a mallet.”
“That is the worst of it, mamma. We shan’t see much of him or of Bernard either. They wouldn’t let us go out into the woods as beaters, would they?”
“You’d make too much noise to be of any use.”
“Should I? I thought the beaters had to shout at the birds. I should get very tired of shouting at birds, so I think I’ll stay at home and look after my clothes.”
“I hope he will come, because Uncle Christopher seems to like him so much,” said Bell.
“I wonder whether a certain gentleman at Guestwick will like his coming,” said Lily. And then, as soon as she had spoken the words, she looked at her sister, and saw that she had grieved her.
“Lily, you let your tongue run too fast,” said Mrs Dale.
“I didn’t mean anything, Bell,” said Lily. “I beg your pardon.”
“It doesn’t signify,” said Bell. “Only Lily says things without thinking.” And then that conversation came to an end, and nothing more was said among them beyond what appertained to their toilet, and a few last words at parting. But the two girls occupied the same room, and when their own door was closed upon them, Bell did allude to what had passed with some spirit.
“Lily, you promised me,” she said, “that you would not say anything more to me about Dr Crofts.”
“I know I did, and I was very wrong. I beg your pardon, Bell; and I won’t do it again,—not if I can help it.”
“Not help it, Lily!”
“But I’m sure I don’t know why I shouldn’t speak of him,—only not in the way of laughing at you. Of all the men I ever saw in my life I like him best. And only that I love you better than I love myself I could find it in my heart to grudge you his—”
“Lily, what did you promise just now?”
“Well; after tonight. And I don’t know why you should turn against him.”
“I have never turned against him or for him.”
“There’s no turning about him. He’d give his left hand if you’d only smile on him. Or his right either,—and that’s what I should like to see; so now you’ve heard it.”
“You know you are talking nonsense.”
“So I should like to see it. And so would mamma too, I’m sure; though I never heard her say a word about him. In my mind he’s the finest fellow I ever saw. What’s Mr Apollo Crosbie to him? And now, as it makes you unhappy, I’ll never say another word about him.”
As Bell wished her sister goodnight with perhaps more than her usual affection, it was evident that Lily’s words and eager tone had in some way pleased her, in spite of their opposition to the request which she had made. And Lily was aware that it was so.
I have said that John Eames had been petted by none but his mother, but I would not have it supposed, on this account, that John Eames had no friends. There is a class of young men who never get petted, though they may not be the less esteemed, or perhaps loved. They do not come forth to the world as Apollos, nor shine at all, keeping what light they may have for inward purposes. Such young men are often awkward, ungainly, and not yet formed in their gait; they straggle with their limbs, and are shy; words do not come to them with ease, when words are required, among any but their accustomed associates. Social meetings are periods of penance to them, and any appearance in public will unnerve them. They go much about alone, and blush when women speak to them. In truth, they are not as yet men, whatever the number may be of their years; and, as they are no longer boys, the world has found for them the ungraceful name of hobbledehoy.
Such observations, however, as I have been enabled to make in this matter have led me to believe that the hobbledehoy is by no means the least valuable species of the human race. When I compare the hobbledehoy of one or two and twenty to some finished Apollo of the same age, I regard the former as unripe fruit, and the latter as fruit that is ripe. Then comes the question as to the two fruits. Which is the better fruit, that which ripens early,—which is, perhaps, favoured with some little forcing apparatus, or which, at least, is backed by the warmth of a southern wall; or that fruit of slower growth, as to which nature works without assistance, on which the sun operates in its own time,—or perhaps never operates if some ungenial shade has been allowed to interpose itself? The world, no doubt, is in favour of the forcing apparatus or of the southern wall. The fruit comes certainly, and at an assured period. It is spotless, speckless, and of a certain quality by no means despicable. The owner has it when he wants it, and it serves its turn. But, nevertheless, according to my thinking, the fullest flavour of the sun is given to that other fruit,—is given in the sun’s own good time, if so be that no ungenial shade has interposed itself. I like the smack of the natural growth, and like it, perhaps, the better because that which has been obtained has been obtained without favour.
But the hobbledehoy, though he blushes when women address him, and is uneasy even when he is near them, though he is not master of his limbs in a ballroom, and is hardly master of his tongue at any time, is the most eloquent of beings, and especially eloquent among beautiful women. He enjoys all the triumphs of a Don Juan, without any of Don Juan’s heartlessness, and is able to conquer in all encounters, through the force of his wit and the sweetness of his voice. But this eloquence is heard only by his own inner ears, and these triumphs are the triumphs of his imagination.
The true hobbledehoy is much alone, not being greatly given to social intercourse even with other hobbledehoys—a trait in his character which I think has hardly been sufficiently observed by the world at large. He has probably become a hobbledehoy instead of an Apollo, because circumstances have not afforded him much social intercourse; and, therefore, he wanders about in solitude, taking long walks, in which he dreams of those successes which are so far removed from his powers of achievement. Out in the fields, with his stick in his hand, he is very eloquent, cutting off the heads of the springing summer weeds, as he practises his oratory with energy. And thus he feeds an imagination for which those who know him give him but scanty credit, and unconsciously prepares himself for that latter ripening, if only the ungenial shade will some day cease to interpose itself.
Such hobbledehoys receive but little petting, unless it be from a mother; and such a hobbledehoy was John Eames when he was sent away from Guestwick to begin his life in the big room of a public office in London. We may say that there was nothing of the young Apollo about him. But yet he was not without friends—friends who wished him well, and thought much of his welfare. And he had a younger sister who loved him dearly, who had no idea that he was a hobbledehoy, being somewhat of a hobbledehoy herself. Mrs Eames, their mother, was a widow, living in a small house in Guestwick, whose husband had been throughout his whole life an intimate friend of our squire. He had been a man of many misfortunes, having begun the world almost with affluence, and having ended it in poverty. He had lived all his days in Guestwick, having at one time occupied a large tract of land, and lost much money in experimental farming; and late in life he had taken a small house on the outskirts of the town, and there had died, some two years previously to the commencement of this story. With no other man had Mr Dale lived on terms so intimate; and when Mr Eames died Mr Dale acted as executor under his will, and as guardian to his children. He had, moreover, obtained for John Eames that situation under the Crown which he now held.
And Mrs Eames had been and still was on very friendly terms with Mrs Dale. The squire had never taken quite kindly to Mrs Eames, whom her husband had not met till he was already past forty years of age. But Mrs Dale had made up by her kindness to the poor forlorn woman for any lack of that cordiality which might have been shown to her from the Great House. Mrs Eames was a poor forlorn woman,—forlorn even during the time of her husband’s life, but very woebegone now in her widowhood. In matters of importance the squire had been kind to her; arranging for her little money affairs, advising her about her house and income, also getting for her that appointment for her son. But he snubbed her when he met her, and poor Mrs Eames held him in great awe. Mrs Dale held her brother-in-law in no awe, and sometimes gave to the widow from Guestwick advice quite at variance to that given by the squire. In this way there had grown up an intimacy between Bell and Lily and the young Eames, and either of the girls was prepared to declare that Johnny Eames was her own and well-loved friend. Nevertheless, they spoke of him occasionally with some little dash of merriment,—as is not unusual with pretty girls who have hobbledehoys among their intimate friends, and who are not themselves unaccustomed to the grace of an Apollo.
I may as well announce at once that John Eames, when he went up to London, was absolutely and irretrievably in love with Lily Dale. He had declared his passion in the most moving language a hundred times; but he had declared it only to himself. He had written much poetry about Lily, but he kept his lines safe under double lock and key. When he gave the reins to his imagination, he flattered himself that he might win not only her but the world at large also by his verses; but he would have perished rather than exhibit them to human eye. During the last ten weeks of his life at Guestwick, while he was preparing for his career in London, he hung about Allington, walking over frequently and then walking back again; but all in vain. During these visits he would sit in Mrs Dale’s drawing-room, speaking but little, and addressing himself usually to the mother; but on each occasion, as he started on his long, hot walk, he resolved that he would say something by which Lily might know of his love. When he left for London that something had not been said.
He had not dreamed of asking her to be his wife. John Eames was about to begin the world with eighty pounds a year, and an allowance of twenty more from his mother’s purse. He was well aware that with such an income he could not establish himself as a married man in London, and he also felt that the man who might be fortunate enough to win Lily for his wife should be prepared to give her every soft luxury that the world could afford. He knew well that he ought not to expect any assurance of Lily’s love; but, nevertheless, he thought it possible that he might give her an assurance of his love. It would probably be in vain. He had no real hope, unless when he was in one of those poetic moods. He had acknowledged to himself, in some indistinct way, that he was no more than a hobbledehoy, awkward, silent, ungainly, with a face unfinished, as it were, or unripe. All this he knew, and knew also that there were Apollos in the world who would be only too ready to carry off Lily in their splendid cars. But not the less did he make up his mind that having loved her once, it behoved him, as a true man, to love her on to the end.
One little word he had said to her when they parted, but it had been a word of friendship rather than of love. He had strayed out after her on to the lawn, leaving Bell alone in the drawing-room. Perhaps Lily had understood something of the boy’s feelings, and had wished to speak kindly to him at parting, or almost more than kindly. There is a silent love which women recognise, and which in some silent way they acknowledge,—giving gracious but silent thanks for the respect which accompanies it.
“I have come to say goodbye, Lily,” said Johnny Eames, following the girl down one of the paths.
“Goodbye, John,” said she, turning round. “You know how sorry we are to lose you. But it’s a great thing for you to be going up to London.”
“Well, yes. I suppose it is. I’d sooner remain here, though.”
“What! stay here, doing nothing! I am sure you would not.”
“Of course, I should like to do something. I mean—”
“You mean that it is painful to part with old friends; and I’m sure that we all feel that at parting with you. But you’ll have a holiday sometimes, and then we shall see you.”
“Yes; of course, I shall see you then. I think, Lily, I shall care more about seeing you than anybody.”
“Oh, no, John. There’ll be your own mother and sister.”
“Yes; there’ll be mother and Mary, of course. But I will come over here the very first day,—that is, if you’ll care to see me?”
“We shall care to see you very much. You know that. And—dear John, I do hope you’ll be happy.”
There was a tone in her voice as she spoke which almost upset him; or, I should rather say, which almost put him up upon his legs and made him speak; but its ultimate effect was less powerful. “Do you?” said he, as he held her hand for a few happy seconds. “And I’m sure I hope you’ll always be happy. Goodbye, Lily.” Then he left her, returning to the house, and she continued her walk, wandering down among the trees in the shrubbery, and not showing herself for the next half hour. How many girls have some such lover as that,—a lover who says no more to them than Johnny Eames then said to Lily Dale, who never says more than that? And yet when, in after years, they count over the names of all who have loved them, the name of that awkward youth is never forgotten.
That farewell had been spoken nearly two years since, and Lily Dale was then seventeen. Since that time, John Eames had been home once, and during his month’s holiday had often visited Allington. But he had never improved upon that occasion of which I have told. It had seemed to him that Lily was colder to him than in old days, and he had become, if anything, more shy in his ways with her. He was to return to Guestwick again during this autumn; but, to tell honestly the truth in the matter, Lily Dale did not think or care very much for his coming. Girls of nineteen do not care for lovers of one-and-twenty, unless it be when the fruit has had the advantage of some forcing apparatus or southern wall.
John Eames’s love was still as hot as ever, having been sustained on poetry, and kept alive, perhaps, by some close confidence in the ears of a brother clerk; but it is not to be supposed that during these two years he had been a melancholy lover. It might, perhaps, have been better for him had his disposition led him to that line of life. Such, however, had not been the case. He had already abandoned the flute on which he had learned to sound three sad notes before he left Guestwick, and, after the fifth or sixth Sunday, he had relinquished his solitary walks along the towing-path of the Regent’s Park Canal. To think of one’s absent love is very sweet; but it becomes monotonous after a mile or two of a towing-path, and the mind will turn away to Aunt Sally, the Cremorne Gardens, and financial questions. I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover’s mind if she knew the whole of it.
“I say, Caudle, I wonder whether a fellow could get into a club?”
This proposition was made, on one of those Sunday walks, by John Eames to the friend of his bosom, a brother clerk, whose legitimate name was Cradell, and who was therefore called Caudle by his friends.
“Get into a club? Fisher in our room belongs to a club.”
“That’s only a chess-club. I mean a regular club.”
“One of the swell ones at the West End?” said Cradell, almost lost in admiration at the ambition of his friend.
“I shouldn’t want it to be particularly swell. If a man isn’t a swell, I don’t see what he gets by going among those who are. But it is so uncommon slow at Mother Roper’s.” Now Mrs Roper was a respectable lady, who kept a boarding-house in Burton Crescent, and to whom Mrs Eames had been strongly recommended when she was desirous of finding a specially safe domicile for her son. For the first year of his life in London John Eames had lived alone in lodgings; but that had resulted in discomfort, solitude, and, alas! in some amount of debt, which had come heavily on the poor widow. Now, for the second year, some safer mode of life was necessary. She had learned that Mrs Cradell, the widow of a barrister, who had also succeeded in getting her son into the Income-tax Office, had placed him in charge of Mrs Roper; and she, with many injunctions to that motherly woman, submitted her own boy to the same custody.
“And about going to church?” Mrs Eames had said to Mrs Roper.
“I don’t suppose I can look after that, ma’am,” Mrs Roper had answered, conscientiously. “Young gentlemen choose mostly their own churches.”
“But they do go?” asked the mother, very anxious in her heart as to this new life in which her boy was to be left to follow in so many things the guidance of his own lights.
“They who have been brought up steady do so, mostly.”
“He has been brought up steady, Mrs Roper. He has, indeed. And you won’t give him a latchkey?”
“Well, they always do ask for it.”
“But he won’t insist, if you tell him that I had rather that he shouldn’t have one.”
Mrs Roper promised accordingly, and Johnny Eames was left under her charge. He did ask for the latchkey, and Mrs Roper answered as she was bidden. But he asked again, having been sophisticated by the philosophy of Cradell, and then Mrs Roper handed him the key. She was a woman who plumed herself on being as good as her word, not understanding that any one could justly demand from her more than that. She gave Johnny Eames the key, as doubtless she had intended to do; for Mrs Roper knew the world, and understood that young men without latchkeys would not remain with her.
“I thought you didn’t seem to find it so dull since Amelia came home,” said Cradell.
“Amelia! What’s Amelia to me? I have told you everything, Cradell, and yet you can talk to me about Amelia Roper!”
“Come now, Johnny—.” He had always been called Johnny, and the name had gone with him to his office. Even Amelia Roper had called him Johnny on more than one occasion before this. “You were as sweet to her the other night as though there were no such person as L. D. in existence.” John Eames turned away and shook his head. Nevertheless, the words of his friend were grateful to him. The character of a Don Juan was not unpleasant to his imagination, and he liked to think that he might amuse Amelia Roper with a passing word, though his heart was true to Lilian Dale. In truth, however, many more of the passing words had been spoken by the fair Amelia than by him.
Mrs Roper had been quite as good as her word when she told Mrs Eames that her household was composed of herself, of a son who was in an attorney’s office, of an ancient maiden cousin, named Miss Spruce, who lodged with her, and of Mr Cradell. The divine Amelia had not then been living with her, and the nature of the statement which she was making by no means compelled her to inform Mrs Eames that the young lady would probably return home in the following winter. A Mr and Mrs Lupex had also joined the family lately, and Mrs Roper’s house was now supposed to be full.
And it must be acknowledged that Johnny Eames had, in certain unguarded moments, confided to Cradell the secret of a second weaker passion for Amelia. “She is a fine girl,—a deuced fine girl!” Johnny Eames had said, using a style of language which he had learned since he left Guestwick and Allington. Mr Cradell, also, was an admirer of the fair sex; and, alas! that I should say so, Mrs Lupex, at the present moment, was the object of his admiration. Not that he entertained the slightest idea of wronging Mr Lupex,—a man who was a scene-painter, and knew the world. Mr Cradell admired Mrs Lupex as a connoisseur, not simply as a man. “By heavens! Johnny, what a figure that woman has!” he said, one morning, as they were walking to their office.
“Yes; she stands well on her pins.”
“I should think she did. If I understand anything of form,” said Cradell, “that woman is nearly perfect. What a torso she has!”
From which expression, and from the fact that Mrs Lupex depended greatly upon her stays and crinoline for such figure as she succeeded in displaying, it may, perhaps, be understood that Mr Cradell did not understand much about form.
“It seems to me that her nose isn’t quite straight,” said Johnny Eames. Now, it undoubtedly was the fact that the nose on Mrs Lupex’s face was a little awry. It was a long, thin nose, which, as it progressed forward into the air, certainly had a preponderating bias towards the left side.
“I care more for figure than face,” said Cradell. “But Mrs Lupex has fine eyes—very fine eyes.”
“And knows how to use them, too,” said Johnny.
“Why shouldn’t she? And then she has lovely hair.”
“Only she never brushes it in the morning.”
“Do you know, I like that kind of deshabille,” said Cradell. “Too much care always betrays itself.”
“But a woman should be tidy.”
“What a word to apply to such a creature as Mrs Lupex! I call her a splendid woman. And how well she was got up last night. Do you know, I’ve an idea that Lupex treats her very badly. She said a word or two to me yesterday that—,” and then he paused. There are some confidences which a man does not share even with his dearest friend.
“I rather fancy it’s quite the other way,” said Eames.
“How the other way?”
“That Lupex has quite as much as he likes of Mrs L. The sound of her voice sometimes makes me shake in my shoes, I know.”
“I like a woman with spirit,” said Cradell.
“Oh, so do I. But one may have too much of a good thing. Amelia did tell me;—only you won’t mention it.”
“Of course, I won’t.”
“She told me that Lupex sometimes was obliged to run away from her. He goes down to the theatre, and remains there two or three days at a time. Then she goes to fetch him, and there is no end of a row in the house.”
“The fact is, he drinks,” said Cradell. “By George, I pity a woman whose husband drinks—and such a woman as that, too!”
“Take care, old fellow, or you’ll find yourself in a scrape.”
“I know what I’m at. Lord bless you, I’m not going to lose my head because I see a fine woman.”
“Or your heart either?”
“Oh, heart! There’s nothing of that kind of thing about me. I regard a woman as a picture or a statue. I dare say I shall marry some day, because men do; but I’ve no idea of losing myself about a woman.”
“I’d lose myself ten times over for—”
“L. D.,” said Cradell.
“That I would. And yet I know I shall never have her. I’m a jolly, laughing sort of fellow; and yet, do you know, Caudle, when that girl marries, it will be all up with me. It will, indeed.”
“Do you mean that you’ll cut your throat?”
“No; I shan’t do that. I shan’t do anything of that sort; and yet it will be all up with me.”
“You are going down there in October;—why don’t you ask her to have you?”
“With ninety pounds a year!” His grateful country had twice increased his salary at the rate of five pounds each year. “With ninety pounds a year, and twenty allowed me by my mother!”
“She could wait, I suppose. I should ask her, and no mistake. If one is to love a girl, it’s no good one going on in that way!”
“It isn’t much good, certainly,” said Johnny Eames. And then they reached the door of the Income-tax Office, and each went away to his own desk.
From this little dialogue, it may be imagined that though Mrs Roper was as good as her word, she was not exactly the woman whom Mrs Eames would have wished to select as a protecting angel for her son. But the truth I take to be this, that protecting angels for widows’ sons, at forty-eight pounds a year, paid quarterly, are not to be found very readily in London. Mrs Roper was not worse than others of her class. She would much have preferred lodgers who were respectable to those who were not so,—if she could only have found respectable lodgers as she wanted them. Mr and Mrs Lupex hardly came under that denomination; and when she gave them up her big front bedroom at a hundred a year, she knew she was doing wrong. And she was troubled, too, about her own daughter Amelia, who was already over thirty years of age. Amelia was a very clever young woman, who had been, if the truth must be told, first young lady at a millinery establishment in Manchester. Mrs Roper knew that Mrs Eames and Mrs Cradell would not wish their sons to associate with her daughter. But what could she do? She could not refuse the shelter of her own house to her own child, and yet her heart misgave her when she saw Amelia flirting with young Eames.
“I wish, Amelia, you wouldn’t have so much to say to that young man.”
“Laws, mother.”
“So I do. If you go on like that, you’ll put me out of both my lodgers.”
“Go on like what, mother? If a gentleman speaks to me, I suppose I’m to answer him? I know how to behave myself, I believe.” And then she gave her head a toss. Whereupon her mother was silent; for her mother was afraid of her.
Apollo Crosbie left London for Allington on the 31st of August, intending to stay there four weeks, with the declared intention of recruiting his strength by an absence of two months from official cares, and with no fixed purpose as to his destiny for the last of those two months. Offers of hospitality had been made to him by the dozen. Lady Hartletop’s doors, in Shropshire, were open to him, if he chose to enter them. He had been invited by the Countess de Courcy to join her suite at Courcy Castle. His special friend, Montgomerie Dobbs, had a place in Scotland, and then there was a yachting party by which he was much wanted. But Mr Crosbie had as yet knocked himself down to none of these biddings, having before him when he left London no other fixed engagement than that which took him to Allington. On the first of October we shall also find ourselves at Allington in company with Johnny Eames; and Apollo Crosbie will still be there,—by no means to the comfort of our friend from the Income-tax Office.
Johnny Eames cannot be called unlucky in that matter of his annual holiday, seeing that he was allowed to leave London in October, a month during which few chose to own that they remain in town. For myself, I always regard May as the best month for holiday-making; but then no Londoner cares to be absent in May. Young Eames, though he lived in Burton Crescent and had as yet no connection with the West End, had already learned his lesson in this respect. “Those fellows in the big room want me to take May,” he had said to his friend Cradell. “They must think I’m uncommon green.”
“It’s too bad,” said Cradell. “A man shouldn’t be asked to take his leave in May. I never did, and what’s more, I never will. I’d go to the Board first.”
Eames had escaped this evil without going to the Board, and had succeeded in obtaining for himself for his own holiday that month of October, which, of all months, is perhaps the most highly esteemed for holiday purposes. “I shall go down by the mail-train tomorrow night,” he said to Amelia Roper, on the evening before his departure. At that moment he was sitting alone with Amelia in Mrs Roper’s back drawing-room. In the front room Cradell was talking to Mrs Lupex; but as Miss Spruce was with them, it may be presumed that Mr Lupex need have had no cause for jealousy.
“Yes,” said Amelia, “I know how great is your haste to get down to that fascinating spot. I could not expect that you would lose one single hour in hurrying away from Burton Crescent.”
Amelia Roper was a tall, well-grown young woman, with dark hair and dark eyes;—not handsome, for her nose was thick, and the lower part of her face was heavy, but yet not without some feminine attractions. Her eyes were bright; but then, also, they were mischievous. She could talk fluently enough; but then, also, she could scold. She could assume sometimes the plumage of a dove; but then again she could occasionally ruffle her feathers like an angry kite. I am quite prepared to acknowledge that John Eames should have kept himself clear of Amelia Roper; but then young men so frequently do those things which they should not do!
“After twelve months up here in London one is glad to get away to one’s own friends,” said Johnny.
“Your own friends, Mr Eames! What sort of friends? Do you suppose I don’t know?”
“Well, no. I don’t think you do know.”
“L. D.!” said Amelia, showing that Lily had been spoken of among people who should never have been allowed to hear her name. But perhaps, after all, no more than those two initials were known in Burton Crescent. From the tone which was now used in naming them, it was sufficiently manifest that Amelia considered herself to be wronged by their very existence.
“L. S. D.,” said Johnny, attempting the line of a witty, gay young spendthrift. “That’s my love—pounds, shillings, and pence; and a very coy mistress she is.”
“Nonsense, sir. Don’t talk to me in that way. As if I didn’t know where your heart was. What right had you to speak to me if you had an L. D. down in the country?”
It should be here declared on behalf of poor John Eames that he had not ever spoken to Amelia—he had not spoken to her in any such phrase as her words seemed to imply. But then he had written to her a fatal note of which we will speak further before long, and that perhaps was quite as bad,—or worse.
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Johnny. But the laugh was assumed, and not assumed with ease.
“Yes, sir; it’s a laughing matter to you, I dare say. It is very easy for a man to laugh under such circumstances;—that is to say, if he is perfectly heartless,—if he’s got a stone inside his bosom instead of flesh and blood. Some men are made of stone, I know, and are troubled with no feelings.”
“What is it you want me to say? You pretend to know all about it, and it wouldn’t be civil in me to contradict you.”
“What is it I want? You know very well what I want; or rather, I don’t want anything. What is it to me? It is nothing to me about L. D. You can go down to Allington and do what you like for me. Only I hate such ways.”
“What ways, Amelia?”
“What ways! Now, look here, Johnny: I’m not going to make a fool of myself for any man. When I came home here three months ago—and I wish I never had;”—she paused here a moment, waiting for a word of tenderness; but as the word of tenderness did not come, she went on—”but when I did come home, I didn’t think there was a man in all London could make me care for him,—that I didn’t. And now you’re going away, without so much as hardly saying a word to me.” And then she brought out her handkerchief.
“What am I to say, when you keep on scolding me all the time?”
“Scolding you!—And me too! No, Johnny, I ain’t scolding you, and don’t mean to. If it’s to be all over between us, say the word, and I’ll take myself away out of the house before you come back again. I’ve had no secrets from you. I can go back to my business in Manchester, though it is beneath my birth, and not what I’ve been used to. If L. D. is more to you than I am, I won’t stand in your way. Only say the word.”
L. D. was more to him than Amelia Roper,—ten times more to him. L. D. would have been everything to him, and Amelia Roper was worse than nothing. He felt all this at the moment, and struggled hard to collect an amount of courage that would make him free.
“Say the word,” said she, rising on her feet before him, “and all between you and me shall be over. I have got your promise, but I’d scorn to take advantage. If Amelia hasn’t got your heart, she’d despise to take your hand. Only I must have an answer.”
It would seem that an easy way of escape was offered to him; but the lady probably knew that the way as offered by her was not easy to such an one as John Eames.
“Amelia,” he said, still keeping his seat.
“Well, sir?”
“You know I love you.”
“And about L. D.?”
“If you choose to believe all the nonsense that Cradell puts into your head, I can’t help it. If you like to make yourself jealous about two letters, it isn’t my fault.”
“And you love me?” said she.
“Of course I love you.” And then, upon hearing these words, Amelia threw herself into his arms.
As the folding doors between the two rooms were not closed, and as Miss Spruce was sitting in her easy chair immediately opposite to them, it was probable that she saw what passed. But Miss Spruce was a taciturn old lady, not easily excited to any show of surprise or admiration; and as she had lived with Mrs Roper for the last twelve years, she was probably well acquainted with her daughter’s ways.
“You’ll be true to me?” said Amelia, during the moment of that embrace—”true to me for ever?”
“Oh, yes; that’s a matter of course,” said Johnny Eames. And then she liberated him; and the two strolled into the front sitting-room.
“I declare, Mr Eames,” said Mrs Lupex, “I’m glad you’ve come. Here’s Mr Cradell does say such queer things.”
“Queer things!” said Cradell. “Now, Miss Spruce, I appeal to you—Have I said any queer things?”
“If you did, sir, I didn’t notice them,” said Miss Spruce.
“I noticed them, then,” said Mrs Lupex. “An unmarried man like Mr Cradell has no business to know whether a married lady wears a cap or her own hair—has he, Mr Eames?”
“I don’t think I ever know,” said Johnny, not intending any sarcasm on Mrs Lupex.
“I dare say not, sir,” said the lady. “We all know where your attention is riveted. If you were to wear a cap, my dear, somebody would see the difference very soon—wouldn’t they, Miss Spruce?”
“I dare say they would,” said Miss Spruce.
“If I could look as nice in a cap as you do, Mrs Lupex, I’d wear one tomorrow,” said Amelia, who did not wish to quarrel with the married lady at the present moment. There were occasions, however, on which Mrs Lupex and Miss Roper were by no means so gracious to each other.
“Does Lupex like caps?” asked Cradell.
“If I wore a plumed helmet on my head, it’s my belief he wouldn’t know the difference; nor yet if I had got no head at all. That’s what comes of getting married. If you’ll take my advice, Miss Roper, you’ll stay as you are; even though somebody should break his heart about it. Wouldn’t you, Miss Spruce?”
“Oh, as for me, I’m an old woman, you know,” said Miss Spruce, which was certainly true.
“I don’t see what any woman gets by marrying,” continued Mrs Lupex. “But a man gains everything. He don’t know how to live, unless he’s got a woman to help him.”
“But is love to go for nothing?” said Cradell.
“Oh, love! I don’t believe in love. I suppose I thought I loved once, but what did it come to after all? Now, there’s Mr Eames—we all know he’s in love.”
“It comes natural to me, Mrs Lupex. I was born so,” said Johnny.
“And there’s Miss Roper—one never ought to speak free about a lady, but perhaps she’s in love too.”
“Speak for yourself, Mrs Lupex,” said Amelia.
“There’s no harm in saying that, is there? I’m sure, if you ain’t, you’re very hardhearted; for, if ever there was a true lover, I believe you’ve got one of your own. My!—if there’s not Lupex’s step on the stair! What can bring him home at this hour? If he’s been drinking, he’ll come home as cross as anything.” Then Mr Lupex entered the room, and the pleasantness of the party was destroyed.
It may be said that neither Mrs Cradell nor Mrs Eames would have placed their sons in Burton Crescent if they had known the dangers into which the young men would fall. Each, it must be acknowledged, was imprudent; but each clearly saw the imprudence of the other. Not a week before this, Cradell had seriously warned his friend against the arts of Miss Roper. “By George, Johnny, you’ll get yourself entangled with that girl.”
“One always has to go through that sort of thing,” said Johnny.
“Yes; but those who go through too much of it never get out again. Where would you be if she got a written promise of marriage from you?” Poor Johnny did not answer this immediately, for in very truth Amelia Roper had such a document in her possession.
“Where should I be?” said he. “Among the breaches of promise, I suppose.”
“Either that, or else among the victims of matrimony. My belief of you is, that if you gave such a promise, you’d carry it out.”
“Perhaps I should,” said Johnny; “but I don’t know. It’s a matter of doubt what a man ought to do in such a case.”
“But there’s been nothing of that kind yet?”
“Oh dear, no!”
“If I was you, Johnny, I’d keep away from her. It’s very good fun, of course, that sort of thing; but it is so uncommon dangerous! Where would you be now with such a girl as that for your wife?”
Such had been the caution given by Cradell to his friend. And now, just as he was starting for Allington, Eames returned the compliment. They had gone together to the Great Western station at Paddington, and Johnny tendered his advice as they were walking together up and down the platform.
“I say, Caudle, old boy, you’ll find yourself in trouble with that Mrs Lupex, if you don’t take care of yourself.”
“But I shall take care of myself. There’s nothing so safe as a little nonsense with a married woman. Of course, it means nothing, you know, between her and me.”
“I don’t suppose it does mean anything. But she’s always talking about Lupex being jealous; and if he was to cut up rough, you wouldn’t find it pleasant.”
Cradell, however, seemed to think that there was no danger. His little affair with Mrs Lupex was quite platonic and safe. As for doing any real harm, his principles, as he assured his friend, were too high. Mrs Lupex was a woman of talent, whom no one seemed to understand, and, therefore, he had taken some pleasure in studying her character. It was merely a study of character, and nothing more. Then the friends parted, and Eames was carried away by the night mail-train down to Guestwick.
How his mother was up to receive him at four o’clock in the morning, how her maternal heart was rejoicing at seeing the improvement in his gait, and the manliness of appearance imparted to him by his whiskers, I need not describe at length. Many of the attributes of a hobbledehoy had fallen from him, and even Lily Dale might now probably acknowledge that he was no longer a boy. All which might be regarded as good, if only in putting off childish things he had taken up things which were better than childish.
On the very first day of his arrival he made his way over to Allington. He did not walk on this occasion as he had used to do in the old happy days. He had an idea that it might not be well for him to go into Mrs Dale’s drawing-room with the dust of the road on his boots, and the heat of the day on his brow. So he borrowed a horse and rode over, taking some pride in a pair of spurs which he had bought in Piccadilly, and in his kid gloves, which were brought out new for the occasion. Alas, alas! I fear that those two years in London have not improved John Eames; and yet I have to acknowledge that John Eames is one of the heroes of my story.
On entering Mrs Dale’s drawing-room he found Mrs Dale and her eldest daughter. Lily at the moment was not there, and as he shook hands with the other two, of course, he asked for her.
“She is only in the garden,” said Bell. “She will be here directly.”
“She has walked across to the Great House with Mr Crosbie,” said Mrs Dale; “but she is not going to remain. She will be so glad to see you, John! We all expected you to-day.”
“Did you?” said Johnny, whose heart had been plunged into cold water at the mention of Mr Crosbie’s name. He had been thinking of Lilian Dale ever since his friend had left him on the railway platform; and, as I beg to assure all ladies who may read my tale, the truth of his love for Lily had moulted no feather through that unholy liaison between him and Miss Roper. I fear that I shall be disbelieved in this; but it was so. His heart was and ever had been true to Lilian, although he had allowed himself to be talked into declarations of affection by such a creature as Amelia Roper. He had been thinking of his meeting with Lily all the night and throughout the morning, and now he heard that she was walking alone about the gardens with a strange gentleman. That Mr Crosbie was very grand and very fashionable he had heard, but he knew no more of him. Why should Mr Crosbie be allowed to walk with Lily Dale? And why should Mrs Dale mention the circumstance as though it were quite a thing of course? Such mystery as there was in this was solved very quickly.
“I’m sure Lily won’t object to my telling such a dear friend as you what has happened,” said Mrs Dale. “She is engaged to be married to Mr Crosbie.”
The water into which Johnny’s heart had been plunged now closed over his head and left him speechless. Lily Dale was engaged to be married to Mr Crosbie! He knew that he should have spoken when he heard the tidings. He knew that the moments of silence as they passed by told his secret to the two women before him,—that secret which it would now behove him to conceal from all the world. But yet he could not speak.
“We are all very well pleased at the match,” said Mrs Dale, wishing to spare him.
“Nothing can be nicer than Mr Crosbie,” said Bell. “We have often talked about you, and he will be so happy to know you.”
“He won’t know much about me,” said Johnny; and even in speaking these few senseless words—words which he uttered because it was necessary that he should say something—the tone of his voice was altered. He would have given the world to have been master of himself at this moment, but he felt that he was utterly vanquished.
“There is Lily coming across the lawn,” said Mrs Dale.
“Then I’d better go,” said Eames. “Don’t say anything about it; pray don’t.” And then, without waiting for another word, he escaped out of the drawing-room.
I am well aware that I have not as yet given any description of Bell and Lilian Dale, and equally well aware that the longer the doing so is postponed the greater the difficulty becomes. I wish it could be understood without any description that they were two pretty, fair-haired girls, of whom Bell was the tallest and the prettiest, whereas Lily was almost as pretty as her sister, and perhaps was more attractive.
They were fair-haired girls, very like each other, of whom I have before my mind’s eye a distinct portrait, which I fear I shall not be able to draw in any such manner as will make it distinct to others. They were something below the usual height, being slight and slender in all their proportions. Lily was the shorter of the two, but the difference was so trifling that it was hardly remembered unless the two were together. And when I said that Bell was the prettier, I should, perhaps, have spoken more justly had I simply declared that her features were more regular than her sister’s. The two girls were very fair, so that the soft tint of colour which relieved the whiteness of their complexion was rather acknowledged than distinctly seen. It was there, telling its own tale of health, as its absence would have told a tale of present or coming sickness; and yet nobody could ever talk about the colour in their cheeks. The hair of the two girls was so alike in hue and texture, that no one, not even their mother, could say that there was a difference. It was not flaxen hair, and yet it was very light. Nor did it approach to auburn; and yet there ran through it a golden tint that gave it a distinct brightness of its own. But with Bell it was more plentiful than with Lily, and therefore Lily would always talk of her own scanty locks, and tell how beautiful were those belonging to her sister. Nevertheless Lily’s head was quite as lovely as her sister’s; for its form was perfect, and the simple braids in which they both wore their hair did not require any great exuberance in quantity. Their eyes were brightly blue; but Bell’s were long, and soft, and tender, often hardly daring to raise themselves to your face; while those of Lily were rounder, but brighter, and seldom kept by any want of courage from fixing themselves where they pleased. And Lily’s face was perhaps less oval in its form,—less perfectly oval,—than her sister’s. The shape of the forehead was, I think, the same, but with Bell the chin was something more slender and delicate. But Bell’s chin was unmarked, whereas on her sister’s there was a dimple which amply compensated for any other deficiency in its beauty. Bell’s teeth were more even than her sister’s; but then she showed her teeth more frequently. Her lips were thinner, and, as I cannot but think, less expressive. Her nose was decidedly more regular in its beauty, for Lily’s nose was somewhat broader than it should have been. It may, therefore, be understood that Bell would be considered the beauty by the family.
But there was, perhaps, more in the general impression made by these girls, and in the whole tone of their appearance, than in the absolute loveliness of their features or the grace of their figures. There was about them a dignity of demeanour devoid of all stiffness or pride, and a maidenly modesty which gave itself no airs. In them was always apparent that sense of security which women should receive from an unconscious dependence on their own mingled purity and weakness. These two girls were never afraid of men,—never looked as though they were so afraid. And I may say that they had little cause for that kind of fear to which I allude. It might be the lot of either of them to be illused by a man, but it was hardly possible that either of them should ever be insulted by one. Lily, as may, perhaps, have been already seen, could be full of play, but in her play she never so carried herself that any one could forget what was due to her.
And now Lily Dale was engaged to be married, and the days of her playfulness were over. It sounds sad, this sentence against her, but I fear that it must be regarded as true. And when I think that it is true,—when I see that the sportiveness and kitten-like gambols of girlhood should be over, and generally are over, when a girl has given her troth, it becomes a matter of regret to me that the feminine world should be in such a hurry after matrimony. I have, however, no remedy to offer for the evil; and, indeed, am aware that the evil, if there be an evil, is not well expressed in the words I have used. The hurry is not for matrimony, but for love. Then, the love once attained, matrimony seizes it for its own, and the evil is accomplished.
And Lily Dale was engaged to be married to Adolphus Crosbie,—to Apollo Crosbie, as she still called him, confiding her little joke to his own ears. And to her he was an Apollo, as a man who is loved should be to the girl who loves him. He was handsome, graceful, clever, self-confident, and always cheerful when she asked him to be cheerful. But he had also his more serious moments, and could talk to her of serious matters. He would read to her, and explain to her things which had hitherto been too hard for her young intelligence. His voice, too, was pleasant, and well under command. It could be pathetic if pathos were required, or ring with laughter as merry as her own. Was not such a man fit to be an Apollo to such a girl, when once the girl had acknowledged to herself that she loved him?
She had acknowledged it to herself, and had acknowledged it to him,—as the reader will perhaps say without much delay. But the courtship had so been carried on that no delay had been needed. All the world had smiled upon it. When Mr Crosbie had first come among them at Allington, as Bernard’s guest, during those few days of his early visit, it had seemed as though Bell had been chiefly noticed by him. And Bell in her own quiet way had accepted his admiration, saying nothing of it and thinking but very little. Lily was heart-free at the time, and had ever been so. No first shadow from Love’s wing had as yet been thrown across the pure tablets of her bosom. With Bell it was not so,—not so in absolute strictness. Bell’s story, too, must be told, but not on this page. But before Crosbie had come among them, it was a thing fixed in her mind that such love as she had felt must be overcome and annihilated. We may say that it had been overcome and annihilated, and that she would have sinned in no way had she listened to vows from this new Apollo. It is almost sad to think that such a man might have had the love of either of such girls, but I fear that I must acknowledge that it was so. Apollo, in the plenitude of his power, soon changed his mind; and before the end of his first visit, had transferred the distant homage which he was then paying from the elder to the younger sister. He afterwards returned, as the squire’s guest, for a longer sojourn among them, and at the end of the first month had already been accepted as Lily’s future husband.
It was beautiful to see how Bell changed in her mood towards Crosbie and towards her sister as soon as she perceived how the affair was going. She was not long in perceiving it, having caught the first glimpses of the idea on that evening when they both dined at the Great House, leaving their mother alone to eat or to neglect the peas. For some six or seven weeks Crosbie had been gone, and during that time Bell had been much more open in speaking of him than her sister. She had been present when Crosbie had bid them goodbye, and had listened to his eagerness as he declared to Lily that he should soon be back again at Allington. Lily had taken this very quietly, as though it had not belonged at all to herself; but Bell had seen something of the truth, and, believing in Crosbie as an earnest, honest man, had spoken kind words of him, fostering any little aptitude for love which might already have formed itself in Lily’s bosom.
“But he is such an Apollo, you know,” Lily had said.
“He is a gentleman; I can see that.”
“Oh, yes; a man can’t be an Apollo unless he’s a gentleman.”
“And he’s very clever.”
“I suppose he is clever.” There was nothing more said about his being a mere clerk. Indeed, Lily had changed her mind on that subject. Johnny Eames was a mere clerk; whereas Crosbie, if he was to be called a clerk at all, was a clerk of some very special denomination. There may be a great difference between one clerk and another! A Clerk of the Council and a parish clerk are very different persons. Lily had got some such idea as this into her head as she attempted in her own mind to rescue Mr Crosbie from the lower orders of the Government service.
“I wish he were not coming,” Mrs Dale had said to her eldest daughter.
“I think you are wrong, mamma.”
“But if she should become fond of him, and then—”
“Lily will never become really fond of any man till he shall have given her proper reason. And if he admires her, why should they not come together?”
“But she is so young, Bell.”
“She is nineteen; and if they were engaged, perhaps, they might wait for a year or so. But it’s no good talking in that way, mamma. If you were to tell Lily not to give him encouragement, she would not speak to him.”
“I should not think of interfering.”
“No, mamma; and therefore it must take its course. For myself, I like Mr Crosbie very much.”
“So do I, my dear.”
“And so does my uncle. I wouldn’t have Lily take a lover of my uncle’s choosing.”
“I should hope not.”
“But it must be considered a good thing if she happens to choose one of his liking.”
In this way the matter had been talked over between the mother and her elder daughter. Then Mr Crosbie had come; and before the end of the first month his declared admiration for Lily had proved the correctness of her sister’s foresight. And during that short courtship all had gone well with the lovers. The squire from the first had declared himself satisfied with the match, informing Mrs Dale, in his cold manner, that Mr Crosbie was a gentleman with an income sufficient for matrimony.
“It would be close enough in London,” Mrs Dale had said.
“He has more than my brother had when he married,” said the squire.
“If he will only make her as happy as your brother made me,—while it lasted!” said Mrs Dale, as she turned away her face to conceal a tear that was coming. And then there was nothing more said about it between the squire and his sister-in-law. The squire spoke no word as to assistance in money matters,—did not even suggest that he would lend a hand to the young people at starting, as an uncle in such a position might surely have done. It may well be conceived that Mrs Dale herself said nothing on the subject. And, indeed, it may be conceived, also, that the squire, let his intentions be what they might, would not divulge them to Mrs Dale. This was uncomfortable, but the position was one that was well understood between them.
Bernard Dale was still at Allington, and had remained there through the period of Crosbie’s absence. Whatever words Mrs Dale might choose to speak on the matter would probably be spoken to him; but, then, Bernard could be quite as close as his uncle. When Crosbie returned, he and Bernard had, of course, lived much together; and, as was natural, there came to be close discussion between them as to the two girls, when Crosbie allowed it to be understood that his liking for Lily was becoming strong.
“You know, I suppose, that my uncle wishes me to marry the elder one,” Bernard had said.
“I have guessed as much.”
“And I suppose the match will come off. She’s a pretty girl, and as good as gold.”
“Yes, she is.”
“I don’t pretend to be very much in love with her. It’s not my way, you know. But, some of these days, I shall ask her to have me, and I suppose it’ll all go right. The governor has distinctly promised to allow me eight hundred a year off the estate, and to take us in for three months every year if we wish it. I told him simply that I couldn’t do it for less, and he agreed with me.”
“You and he get on very well together.”
“Oh, yes! There’s never been any fal-lal between us about love, and duty, and all that. I think we understand each other, and that’s everything. He knows the comfort of standing well with the heir, and I know the comfort of standing well with the owner.” It must be admitted, I think, that there was a great deal of sound, common sense about Bernard Dale.
“What will he do for the younger sister?” asked Crosbie; and, as he asked the important question, a close observer might have perceived that there was some slight tremor in his voice.
“Ah! that’s more than I can tell you. If I were you, I should ask him. The governor is a plain man, and likes plain business.”
“I suppose you couldn’t ask him?”
“No; I don’t think I could. It is my belief that he will not let her go by any means empty-handed.”
“Well, I should suppose not.”
“But remember this, Crosbie,—I can say nothing to you on which you are to depend. Lily, also, is as good as gold; and, as you seem to be fond of her, I should ask the governor, if I were you, in so many words, what he intends to do. Of course, it’s against my interest, for every shilling he gives Lily will ultimately come out of my pocket. But I’m not the man to care about that, as you know.”
What might be Crosbie’s knowledge on this subject we will not here inquire; but we may say that it would have mattered very little to him out of whose pocket the money came, so long as it went into his own. When he felt quite sure of Lily,—having, in fact, received Lily’s permission to speak to her uncle, and Lily’s promise that she would herself speak to her mother,—he did tell the squire what was his intention. This he did in an open, manly way, as though he felt that in asking for much he also offered to give much.
“I have nothing to say against it,” said the squire.
“And I have your permission to consider myself as engaged to her?”
“If you have hers and her mother’s. Of course you are aware that I have no authority over her.”
“She would not marry without your sanction.”
“She is very good to think so much of her uncle,” said the squire; and his words as he spoke them sounded very cold in Crosbie’s ears. After that Crosbie said nothing about money, having to confess to himself that he was afraid to do so. “And what would be the use?” said he to himself, wishing to make excuses for what he felt to be weak in his own conduct. “If he should refuse to give her a shilling I could not go back from it now.” And then some ideas ran across his mind as to the injustice to which men are subjected in this matter of matrimony. A man has to declare himself before it is fitting that he should make any inquiry about a lady’s money; and then, when he has declared himself, any such inquiry is unavailing. Which consideration somewhat cooled the ardour of his happiness. Lily Dale was very pretty, very nice, very refreshing in her innocence, her purity, and her quick intelligence. No amusement could be more deliciously amusing than that of making love to Lily Dale. Her way of flattering her lover without any intention of flattery on her part, had put Crosbie into a seventh heaven. In all his experience he had known nothing like it. “You may be sure of this,” she had said,—”I shall love you with all my heart and all my strength.” It was very nice;—but then what were they to live upon? Could it be that he, Adolphus Crosbie, should settle down on the north side of the New Road, as a married, man, with eight hundred a year? If indeed the squire would be as good to Lily as he had promised to be to Bell, then indeed things might be made to arrange themselves.
But there was no such drawback on Lily’s happiness. Her ideas about money were rather vague, but they were very honest. She knew she had none of her own, but supposed it was a husband’s duty to find what would be needful. She knew she had none of her own, and was therefore aware that she ought not to expect luxuries in the little household that was to be prepared for her. She hoped, for his sake, that her uncle might give some assistance, but was quite prepared to prove that she could be a good poor man’s wife. In the old colloquies on such matters between her and her sister, she had always declared that some decent income should be considered as indispensable before love could be entertained. But eight hundred a year had been considered as doing much more than fulfilling this stipulation. Bell had high-flown notions as to the absolute glory of poverty. She had declared that income should not be considered at all. If she had loved a man, she could allow herself to be engaged to him, even though he had no income. Such had been their theories; and as regarded money, Lily was quite contented with the way in which she had carried out her own.
In these beautiful days there was nothing to check her happiness. Her mother and sister united in telling her that she had done well,—that she was happy in her choice, and justified in her love. On that first day, when she told her mother all, she had been made exquisitely blissful by the way in which her tidings had been received.
“Oh! mamma, I must tell you something,” she said, coming up to her mother’s bedroom, after a long ramble with Mr Crosbie through those Allington fields.
“Is it about Mr Crosbie?”
“Yes, mamma.” And then the rest had been said through the medium of warm embraces and happy tears rather than by words.
As she sat in her mother’s room, hiding her face on her mother’s shoulders, Bell had come, and had knelt at her feet.
“Dear Lily,” she had said, “I am so glad.” And then Lily remembered how she had, as it were, stolen her lover from her sister, and she put her arms round Bell’s neck and kissed her.
“I knew how it was going to be from the very first,” said Bell. “Did I not, mamma?”
“I’m sure I didn’t,” said Lily. “I never thought such a thing was possible.”
“But we did,—mamma and I.”
“Did you?” said Lily.
“Bell told me that it was to be so,” said Mrs Dale. “But I could hardly bring myself at first to think that he was good enough for my darling.”
“Oh, mamma! you must not say that. You must think that he is good enough for anything.”
“I will think that he is very good.”
“Who could be better? And then, when you remember all that he is to give up for my sake!— And what can I do for him in return? What have I got to give him?”
Neither Mrs Dale nor Bell could look at the matter in this light, thinking that Lily gave quite as much as she received. But they both declared that Crosbie was perfect, knowing that by such assurances only could they now administer to Lily’s happiness; and Lily, between them, was made perfect in her happiness, receiving all manner of encouragement in her love, and being nourished in her passion by the sympathy and approval of her mother and sister.
And then had come that visit from Johnny Eames. As the poor fellow marched out of the room, giving them no time to say farewell, Mrs Dale and Bell looked at each other sadly; but they were unable to concoct any arrangement, for Lily had run across the lawn and was already on the ground before the window.
“As soon as we got to the end of the shrubbery there were Uncle Christopher and Bernard close to us; so I told Adolphus he might go on by himself.”
“And who do you think has been here?” said Bell. But Mrs Dale said nothing. Had time been given to her to use her own judgment, nothing should have been said at that moment as to Johnny’s visit.
“Has anybody been here since I went? Whoever it was didn’t stay very long.”
“Poor Johnny Eames,” said Bell. Then the colour came up into Lily’s face, and she bethought herself in a moment that the old friend of her young days had loved her, that he, too, had had hopes as to his love, and that now he had heard tidings which would put an end to such hopes. She understood it all in a moment, but understood also that it was necessary that she should conceal such understanding.
“Dear Johnny!” she said. “Why did he not wait for me?”
“We told him you were out,” said Mrs Dale. “He will be here again before long, no doubt.”
“And he knows—?”
“Yes; I thought you would not object to my telling him.”
“No, mamma; of course not. And he has gone back to Guestwick?”
There was no answer given to this question, nor were there any further words then spoken about Johnny Eames. Each of these women understood exactly how the matter stood, and each knew that the others understood it. The young man was loved by them all, but not loved with that sort of admiring affection which had been accorded to Mr Crosbie. Johnny Eames could not have been accepted as a suitor by their pet. Mrs Dale and Bell both felt that. And yet they loved him for his love, and for that distant, modest respect which had restrained him from any speech regarding it. Poor Johnny! But he was young,—hardly as yet out of his hobbledehoyhood,—and he would easily recover this blow, remembering, and perhaps feeling to his advantage, some slight touch of its passing romance. It is thus women think of men who love young and love in vain.
But Johnny Eames himself, as he rode back to Guestwick, forgetful of his spurs, and with his gloves stuffed into his pocket, thought of the matter very differently. He had never promised to himself any success as to his passion for Lily, and had, indeed, always acknowledged that he could have no hope; but now, that she was actually promised to another man, and as good as married, he was not the less brokenhearted because his former hopes had not been high. He had never dared to speak to Lily of his love, but he was conscious that she knew it, and he did not now dare to stand before her as one convicted of having loved in vain. And then, as he rode back, he thought also of his other love, not with many of those pleasant thoughts which Lotharios and Don Juans may be presumed to enjoy when they contemplate their successes. “I suppose I shall marry her, and there’ll be an end of me,” he said to himself, as he remembered a short note which he had once written to her in his madness. There had been a little supper at Mrs Roper’s, and Mrs Lupex and Amelia had made the punch. After supper, he had been by some accident alone with Amelia in the dining-parlour; and when, warmed by the generous god, he had declared his passion, she had shaken her head mournfully, and had fled from him to some upper region, absolutely refusing his proffered embrace. But on the same night, before his head had found its pillow, a note had come to him, half repentant, half affectionate, half repellent,—”If, indeed, he would swear to her that his love was honest and manly, then, indeed, she might even yet,—see him through the chink of the doorway with the purport of telling him that he was forgiven.” Whereupon, a perfidious pencil being near to his hand, he had written the requisite words. “My only object in life is to call you my own for ever.” Amelia had her misgivings whether such a promise, in order that it might be used as legal evidence, should not have been written in ink. It was a painful doubt; but nevertheless she was as good as her word, and saw him through the chink, forgiving him for his impetuosity in the parlour with, perhaps, more clemency than a mere pardon required. “By George! how well she looked with her hair all loose,” he said to himself, as he at last regained his pillow, still warm with the generous god. But now, as he thought of that night, returning on his road from Allington to Guestwick, those loose, floating locks were remembered by him with no strong feeling as to their charms. And he thought also of Lily Dale, as she was when he had said farewell to her on that day before he first went up to London. “I shall care more about seeing you than anybody,” he had said; and he had often thought of the words since, wondering whether she had understood them as meaning more than an assurance of ordinary friendship. And he remembered well the dress she had then worn. It was an old brown merino, which he had known before, and which, in truth, had nothing in it to recommend it specially to a lover’s notice. “Horrid old thing!” had been Lily’s own verdict respecting the frock, even before that day. But she had hallowed it in his eyes, and he would have been only too happy to have worn a shred of it near his heart, as a talisman. How wonderful in its nature is that passion of which men speak when they acknowledge to themselves that they are in love. Of all things, it is, under one condition, the most foul, and under another, the most fair. As that condition is, a man shows himself either as a beast or as a god! And so we will let poor Johnny Eames ride back to Guestwick, suffering much in that he had loved basely—and suffering much, also, in that he had loved nobly.
Lily, as she had tripped along through the shrubbery, under her lover’s arm, looking up, every other moment, into his face, had espied her uncle and Bernard. “Stop,” she had said, giving him a little pull at the arm; “I won’t go on. Uncle is always teasing me with some old-fashioned wit. And I’ve had quite enough of you to-day, sir. Mind you come over tomorrow before you go to your shooting.” And so she had left him.
We may as well learn here what was the question in dispute between the uncle and cousin, as they were walking there on the broad gravel path behind the Great House. “Bernard,” the old man had said, “I wish this matter could be settled between you and Bell.”
“Is there any hurry about it, sir?”
“Yes, there is hurry; or, rather, as I hate hurry in all things, I would say that there is ground for despatch. Mind, I do not wish to drive you. If you do not like your cousin, say so.”
“But I do like her; only I have a sort of feeling that these things grow best by degrees. I quite share your dislike to being in a hurry.”
“But time enough has been taken now. You see, Bernard, I am going to make a great sacrifice of income on your behalf.”
“I am sure I am very grateful.”
“I have no children, and have therefore always regarded you as my own. But there is no reason why my brother Philip’s daughter should not be as dear to me as my brother Orlando’s son.”
“Of course not, sir; or, rather, his two daughters.”
“You may leave that matter to me, Bernard. The younger girl is going to marry this friend of yours, and as he has a sufficient income to support a wife, I think that my sister-in-law has good reason to be satisfied by the match. She will not be expected to give up any part of her small income, as she must have done had Lily married a poor man.”
“I suppose she could hardly give up much.”
“People must be guided by circumstances. I am not disposed to put myself in the place of a parent to them both. There is no reason why I should, and I will not encourage false hopes. If I knew that this matter between you and Bell was arranged, I should have reason to feel satisfied with what I was doing.” From all which Bernard began to perceive that poor Crosbie’s expectations in the matter of money would not probably receive much gratification. But he also perceived—or thought that he perceived—a kind of threat in this warning from his uncle. “I have promised you eight hundred a year with your wife,” the warning seemed to say. “But if you do not at once accept it, or let me feel that it will be accepted, it may be well for me to change my mind—especially as this other niece is about to be married. If I am to give you so large a fortune with Bell, I need do nothing for Lily. But if you do not choose to take Bell and the fortune, why then—” And so on. It was thus that Bernard read his uncle’s caution, as they walked together on the broad gravel path.
“I have no desire to postpone the matter any longer,” said Bernard. “I will propose to Bell at once, if you wish it.”
“If your mind be quite made up, I cannot see why you should delay it.”
And then, having thus arranged that matter, they received their future relative with kind smiles and soft words.
Lily, as she parted with her lover in the garden, had required of him to attend upon her the next morning as he went to his shooting, and in obedience to this command he appeared on Mrs Dale’s lawn after breakfast, accompanied by Bernard and two dogs. The men had guns in their hands, and were got up with all proper sporting appurtenances, but it so turned out that they did not reach the stubble-fields on the farther side of the road until after luncheon. And may it not be fairly doubted whether croquet is not as good as shooting when a man is in love?
It will be said that Bernard Dale was not in love; but they who bring such accusation against him, will bring it falsely. He was in love with his cousin Bell according to his manner and fashion. It was not his nature to love Bell as John Eames loved Lily; but then neither would his nature bring him into such a trouble as that which the charms of Amelia Roper had brought upon the poor clerk from the Income-tax Office. Johnny was susceptible, as the word goes; whereas Captain Dale was a man who had his feelings well under control. He was not one to make a fool of himself about a girl, or to die of a broken heart; but, nevertheless, he would probably love his wife when he got a wife, and would be a careful father to his children.
They were very intimate with each other now,—these four. It was Bernard and Adolphus, or sometimes Apollo, and Bell and Lily among them; and Crosbie found it to be pleasant enough. A new position of life had come upon him, and one exceeding pleasant; but, nevertheless, there were moments in which cold fits of a melancholy nature came upon him. He was doing the very thing which throughout all the years of his manhood he had declared to himself that he would not do. According to his plan of life he was to have eschewed marriage, and to have allowed himself to regard it as a possible event only under the circumstances of wealth, rank, and beauty all coming in his way together. As he had expected no such glorious prize, he had regarded himself as a man who would reign at the Beaufort and be potent at Sebright’s to the end of his chapter. But now—
It was the fact that he had fallen from his settled position, vanquished by a silver voice, a pretty wit, and a pair of moderately bright eyes. He was very fond of Lily, having in truth a stronger capability for falling in love than his friend Captain Dale; but was the sacrifice worth his while? This was the question which he asked himself in those melancholy moments; while he was lying in bed, for instance, awake in the morning, when he was shaving himself, and sometimes also when the squire was prosy after dinner. At such times as these, while he would be listening to Mr Dale, his self-reproaches would sometimes be very bitter. Why should he undergo this, he, Crosbie of Sebright’s, Crosbie of the General Committee Office, Crosbie who would allow no one to bore him between Charing Cross and the far end of Bayswater,—why should he listen to the longwinded stories of such a one as Squire Dale? If, indeed, the squire intended to be liberal to his niece, then it might be very well. But as yet the squire had given no sign of such intention, and Crosbie was angry with himself in that he had not had the courage to ask a question on that subject.
And thus the course of love was not all smooth to our Apollo. It was still pleasant for him when he was there on the croquet ground, or sitting in Mrs Dale’s drawing-room with all the privileges of an accepted lover. It was pleasant to him also as he sipped the squire’s claret, knowing that his coffee would soon be handed to him by a sweet girl who would have tripped across the two gardens on purpose to perform for him this service. There is nothing pleasanter than all this, although a man when so treated does feel himself to look like a calf at the altar, ready for the knife, with blue ribbons round his horns and neck. Crosbie felt that he was such a calf,—and the more calf-like, in that he had not as yet dared to ask a question about his wife’s fortune. “I will have it out of the old fellow this evening,” he said to himself, as he buttoned on his dandy shooting gaiters that morning.
“How nice he looks in them,” Lily said to her sister afterwards, knowing nothing of the thoughts which had troubled her lover’s mind while he was adorning his legs.
“I suppose we shall come back this way,” Crosbie said, as they prepared to move away on their proper business when lunch was over.
“Well, not exactly!” said Bernard. “We shall make our way round by Darvell’s farm, and so back by Gruddock’s. Are the girls going to dine up at the Great House to-day?”
The girls declared that they were not going to dine up at the Great House,—that they did not intend going to the Great House at all that evening.
“Then, as you won’t have to dress, you might as well meet us at Gruddock’s gate, at the back of the farmyard. We’ll be there exactly at half-past five.”
“That is to say, we’re to be there at half-past five, and you’ll keep us waiting for three-quarters of an hour,” said Lily. Nevertheless the arrangement as proposed was made, and the two ladies were not at all unwilling to make it. It is thus that the game is carried on among unsophisticated people who really live in the country. The farmyard gate at Farmer Gruddock’s has not a fitting sound as a trysting-place in romance, but for people who are in earnest it does as well as any oak in the middle glade of a forest. Lily Dale was quite in earnest—and so indeed was Adolphus Crosbie,—only with him the earnest was beginning to take that shade of brown which most earnest things have to wear in this vale of tears. With Lily it was as yet all rose-coloured. And Bernard Dale was also in earnest. Throughout this morning he had stood very near to Bell on the lawn, and had thought that his cousin did not receive his little whisperings with any aversion. Why should she? Lucky girl that she was, thus to have eight hundred a year pinned to her skirt!
“I say, Dale,” Crosbie said, as in the course of their day’s work they had come round upon Gruddock’s ground, and were preparing to finish off his turnips before they reached the farmyard gate. And now, as Crosbie spoke, they stood leaning on the gate, looking at the turnips while the two dogs squatted on their haunches. Crosbie had been very silent for the last mile or two, and had been making up his mind for this conversation. “I say, Dale,—your uncle has never said a word to me yet as to Lily’s fortune.”
“As to Lily’s fortune! The question is whether Lily has got a fortune.”
“He can hardly expect that I am to take her without something. Your uncle is a man of the world and he knows—”
“Whether or no my uncle is a man of the world, I will not say; but you are, Crosbie, whether he is or not. Lily, as you have always known, has nothing of her own.”
“I am not talking of Lily’s own. I’m speaking of her uncle. I have been straightforward with him; and when I became attached to your cousin I declared what I meant at once.”
“You should have asked him the question, if you thought there was any room for such a question.”
“Thought there was any room! Upon my word, you are a cool fellow.”
“Now look here, Crosbie; you may say what you like about my uncle, but you must not say a word against Lily.”
“Who is going to say a word against her? You can little understand me if you don’t know that the protection of her name against evil words is already more my care than it is yours. I regard Lily as my own.”
“I only meant to say, that any discontent you may feel as to her money, or want of money, you must refer to my uncle, and not to the family at the Small House.”
“I am quite well aware of that.”
“And though you are quite at liberty to say what you like to me about my uncle, I cannot say that I can see that he has been to blame.”
“He should have told me what her prospects are.”
“But if she have got no prospects! It cannot be an uncle’s duty to tell everybody that he does not mean to give his niece a fortune. In point of fact, why should you suppose that he has such an intention?”
“Do you know that he has not? because you once led me to believe that he would give his niece money.”
“Now, Crosbie, it is necessary that you and I should understand each other in this matter—”
“But did you not?”
“Listen to me for a moment. I never said a word to you about my uncle’s intentions in any way, until after you had become fully engaged to Lily with the knowledge of us all. Then, when my belief on the subject could make no possible difference in your conduct, I told you that I thought my uncle would do something for her. I told you so because I did think so,—and as your friend, I should have told you what I thought in any matter that concerned your interest.”
“And now you have changed your opinion?”
“I have changed my opinion; but very probably without sufficient ground.”
“That’s hard upon me.”
“It may be hard to bear disappointment; but you cannot say that anybody has illused you.”
“And you don’t think he will give her anything?”
“Nothing that will be of much moment to you.”
“And I’m not to say that that’s hard? I think it confounded hard. Of course I must put off my marriage.”
“Why do you not speak to my uncle?”
“I shall do so. To tell the truth, I think it would have come better from him; but that is a matter of opinion. I shall tell him very plainly what I think about it; and if he is angry, why, I suppose I must leave his house; that will be all.”
“Look here, Crosbie; do not begin your conversation with the purpose of angering him. He is not a bad-hearted man, but is very obstinate.”
“I can be quite as obstinate as he.” And, then, without further parley, they went in among the turnips, and each swore against his luck as he missed his birds. There are certain phases of mind in which a man can neither ride nor shoot, nor play a stroke at billiards, nor remember a card at whist,—and to such a phase of mind had come both Crosbie and Dale after their conversation over the gate.
They were not above fifteen minutes late at the trysting-place, but nevertheless, punctual though they had been, the girls were there before them. Of course the first inquiries were made about the game, and of course the gentlemen declared that the birds were scarcer than they had ever been before, that the dogs were wilder, and their luck more excruciatingly bad,—to all which apologies very little attention was paid. Lily and Bell had not come there to inquire after partridges, and would have forgiven the sportsmen even though no single bird had been killed. But they could not forgive the want of good spirits which was apparent.
“I declare I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” Lily said to her lover.
“We have been over fifteen miles of ground, and—”
“I never knew anything so lackadaisical as you gentlemen from London. Been over fifteen miles of ground! Why, Uncle Christopher would think nothing of that.”
“Uncle Christopher is made of sterner stuff than we are,” said Crosbie. “They used to be born so sixty or seventy years ago.” And then they walked on through Gruddock’s fields, and the home paddocks, back to the Great House, where they found the squire standing in the front of the porch.
The walk had not been so pleasant as they had all intended that it should be when they made their arrangements for it. Crosbie had endeavoured to recover his happy state of mind, but had been unsuccessful; and Lily, fancying that her lover was not all that he should be, had become reserved and silent. Bernard and Bell had not shared this discomfiture, but then Bernard and Bell were, as a rule, much more given to silence than the other two.
“Uncle,” said Lily, “these men have shot nothing, and you cannot conceive how unhappy they are in consequence. It’s all the fault of the naughty partridges.”
“There are plenty of partridges if they knew how to get them,” said the squire.
“The dogs are uncommonly wild,” said Crosbie.
“They are not wild with me,” said the squire; “nor yet with Dingles.” Dingles was the squire’s gamekeeper. “The fact is, you young men, nowadays, expect to have dogs trained to do all the work for you. It’s too much labour for you to walk up to your game. You’ll be late for dinner, girls, if you don’t look sharp.”
“We’re not coming up this evening, sir,” said Bell.
“And why not?”
“We’re going to stay with mamma.”
“And why will not your mother come with you? I’ll be whipped if I can understand it. One would have thought that under the present circumstances she would have been glad to see you all as much together as possible.”
“We’re together quite enough,” said Lily. “And as for mamma, I suppose she thinks—” And then she stopped herself, catching the glance of Bell’s imploring eye. She was going to make some indignant excuse for her mother, some excuse which would be calculated to make her uncle angry. It was her practice to say such sharp words to him, and consequently he did not regard her as warmly as her more silent and more prudent sister. At the present moment he turned quickly round and went into the house; and then, with a very few words of farewell, the two young men followed him. The girls went back over the little bridge by themselves, feeling that the afternoon had not gone off altogether well.
“You shouldn’t provoke him, Lily,” said Bell.
“And he shouldn’t say those things about mamma. It seems to me that you don’t mind what he says.”
“Oh, Lily.”
“No more you do. He makes me so angry that I cannot hold my tongue. He thinks that because all the place is his, he is to say just what he likes. Why should mamma go up there to please his humours?”
“You may be sure that mamma will do what she thinks best. She is stronger-minded than Uncle Christopher, and does not want any one to help her. But, Lily, you shouldn’t speak as though I were careless about mamma. You didn’t mean that, I know.”
“Of course I didn’t.” Then the two girls joined their mother in their own little domain; but we will return to the men at the Great House.
Crosbie, when he went up to dress for dinner, fell into one of those melancholy fits of which I have spoken. Was he absolutely about to destroy all the good that he had done for himself throughout the past years of his hitherto successful life? or rather, as he at last put the question to himself more strongly,—was it not the case that he had already destroyed all that success? His marriage with Lily, whether it was to be for good or bad, was now a settled thing, and was not regarded as a matter admitting of any doubt. To do the man justice, I must declare that in all these moments of misery he still did the best he could to think of Lily herself as of a great treasure which he had won,—as of a treasure which should, and perhaps would, compensate him for his misery. But there was the misery very plain. He must give up his clubs, and his fashion, and all that he had hitherto gained, and be content to live a plain, humdrum, domestic life, with eight hundred a year, and a small house, full of babies. It was not the kind of Elysium for which he had tutored himself. Lily was very nice, very nice indeed. She was, as he said to himself, “by odds, the nicest girl that he had ever seen.” Whatever might now turn up, her happiness should be his first care. But as for his own,—he began to fear that the compensation would hardly be perfect. “It is my own doing,” he said to himself, intending to be rather noble in the purport of his soliloquy, “I have trained myself for other things,—very foolishly. Of course I must suffer,—suffer damnably. But she shall never know it. Dear, sweet, innocent, pretty little thing!” And then he went on about the squire, as to whom he felt himself entitled to be indignant by his own disinterested and manly line of conduct towards the niece. “But I will let him know what I think about it,” he said. “It’s all very well for Dale to say that I have been treated fairly. It isn’t fair for a man to put forward his niece under false pretences. Of course I thought that he intended to provide for her.” And then, having made up his mind in a very manly way that he would not desert Lily altogether after having promised to marry her, he endeavoured to find consolation in the reflection that he might, at any rate, allow himself two years’ more run as a bachelor in London. Girls who have to get themselves married without fortunes always know that they will have to wait. Indeed, Lily had already told him, that as far as she was concerned, she was in no hurry. He need not, therefore, at once withdraw his name from Sebright’s. Thus he endeavoured to console himself, still, however, resolving that he would have a little serious conversation with the squire that very evening as to Lily’s fortune.
And what was the state of Lily’s mind at the same moment, while she, also, was performing some slight toilet changes preparatory to their simple dinner at the Small House?
“I didn’t behave well to him,” she said to herself; “I never do. I forget how much he is giving up for me; and then, when anything annoys him, I make it worse instead of comforting him.” And upon that she made accusation against herself that she did not love him half enough,—that she did not let him see how thoroughly and perfectly she loved him. She had an idea of her own, that as a girl should never show any preference for a man till circumstances should have fully entitled him to such manifestation, so also should she make no drawback on her love, but pour it forth for his benefit with all her strength, when such circumstances had come to exist. But she was ever feeling that she was not acting up to her theory, now that the time for such practice had come. She would unwittingly assume little reserves, and make small pretences of indifference in spite of her own judgment. She had done so on this afternoon, and had left him without giving him her hand to press, without looking up into his face with an assurance of love, and therefore she was angry with herself. “I know I shall teach him to hate me,” she said out loud to Bell.
“That would be very sad,” said Bell; “but I don’t see it.”
“If you were engaged to a man you would be much better to him. You would not say so much, but what you did say would be all affection. I am always making horrid little speeches, for which I should like to cut out my tongue afterwards.”
“Whatever sort of speeches they are, I think that he likes them.”
“Does he? I’m not all so sure of that, Bell. Of course I don’t expect that he is to scold me,—not yet, that is. But I know by his eye when he is pleased and when he is displeased.”
And then they went down to their dinner.
Up at the Great House the three gentlemen met together in apparent good humour. Bernard Dale was a man of an equal temperament, who rarely allowed any feeling, or even any annoyance, to interfere with his usual manner,—a man who could always come to table with a smile, and meet either his friend or his enemy with a properly civil greeting. Not that he was especially a false man. There was nothing of deceit in his placidity of demeanour. It arose from true equanimity; but it was the equanimity of a cold disposition rather than of one well ordered by discipline. The squire was aware that he had been unreasonably petulant before dinner, and having taken himself to task in his own way, now entered the dining-room with the courteous greeting of a host. “I find that your bag was not so bad after all,” he said, “and I hope that your appetite is at least as good as your bag.”
Crosbie smiled, and made himself pleasant, and said a few flattering words. A man who intends to take some very decided step in an hour or two generally contrives to bear himself in the meantime as though the trifles of the world were quite sufficient for him. So he praised the squire’s game; said a goodnatured word as to Dingles, and bantered himself as to his own want of skill. Then all went merry, not quite as a marriage bell; but still merry enough for a party of three gentlemen.
But Crosbie’s resolution was fixed; and as soon, therefore, as the old butler was permanently gone, and the wine steadily in transit upon the table, he began his task, not without some apparent abruptness. Having fully considered the matter, he had determined that he would not wait for Bernard Dale’s absence. He thought it possible that he might be able to fight his battle better in Bernard’s presence than he should do behind his back.
“Squire,” he began. They all called him squire when they were on good terms together, and Crosbie thought it well to begin as though there was nothing amiss between them. “Squire, of course I am thinking a good deal at the present moment as to my intended marriage.”
“That’s natural enough,” said the squire.
“Yes, by George! sir, a man doesn’t make a change like that without finding that he has got something to think of.”
“I suppose not,” said the squire. “I never was in the way of getting married myself, but I can easily understand that.”
“I’ve been the luckiest fellow in the world in finding such a girl as your niece—” Whereupon the squire bowed, intending to make a little courteous declaration that the luck in the matter was on the side of the Dales. “I know that,” continued Crosbie. “She is exactly everything that a girl ought to be.”
“She is a good girl,” said Bernard.
“Yes; I think she is,” said the squire.
“But it seems to me,” said Crosbie, finding that it was necessary to dash at once headlong into the water, “that something ought to be said as to my means of supporting her properly.”
Then he paused for a moment, expecting that the squire would speak. But the squire sat perfectly still, looking intently at the empty fireplace and saying nothing. “Of supporting her,” continued Crosbie, “with all those comforts to which she has been accustomed.”
“She has never been used to expense,” said the squire. “Her mother, as you doubtless know, is not a rich woman.”
“But living here, Lily has had great advantages,—a horse to ride, and all that sort of thing.”
“I don’t suppose she expects a horse in the park,” said the squire, with a very perceptible touch of sarcasm in his voice.
“I hope not,” said Crosbie.
“I believe she has had the use of one of the ponies here sometimes, but I hope that has not made her extravagant in her ideas. I did not think that there was anything of that nonsense about either of them.”
“Nor is there,—as far as I know.”
“Nothing of the sort,” said Bernard.
“But the long and the short of it is this, sir!” and Crosbie, as he spoke, endeavoured to maintain his ordinary voice and usual coolness, but his heightened colour betrayed that he was nervous. “Am I to expect any accession of income with my wife?”
“I have not spoken to my sister-in-law on the subject,” said the squire; “but I should fear that she cannot do much.”
“As a matter of course, I would not take a shilling from her,” said Crosbie.
“Then that settles it,” said the squire.
Crosbie paused a moment, during which his colour became very red. He unconsciously took up an apricot and ate it, and then he spoke out. “Of course I was not alluding to Mrs Dale’s income; I would not, on any account, disturb her arrangements. But I wished to learn, sir, whether you intend to do anything for your niece.”
“In the way of giving her a fortune? Nothing at all. I intend to do nothing at all.”
“Then I suppose we understand each other,—at last,” said Crosbie.
“I should have thought that we might have understood each other at first,” said the squire. “Did I ever make you any promise, or give you any hint that I intended to provide for my niece? Have I ever held out to you any such hope? I don’t know what you mean by that word ‘at last’—unless it be to give offence.”
“I meant the truth, sir;—I meant this—that seeing the manner in which your nieces lived with you, I thought it probable that you would treat them both as though they were your daughters. Now I find out my mistake;—that is all!”
“You have been mistaken,—and without a shadow of excuse for your mistake.”
“Others have been mistaken with me,” said Crosbie, forgetting, on the spur of the moment, that he had no right to drag the opinion of any other person into the question.
“What others?” said the squire, with anger; and his mind immediately betook itself to his sister-in-law.
“I do not want to make any mischief,” said Crosbie.
“If anybody connected with my family has presumed to tell you that I intended to do more for my niece Lilian than I have already done, such person has not only been false, but ungrateful. I have given to no one any authority to make any promise on behalf of my niece.”
“No such promise has been made. It was only a suggestion,” said Crosbie.
He was not in the least aware to whom the squire was alluding in his anger; but he perceived that his host was angry, and having already reflected that he should not have alluded to the words which Bernard Dale had spoken in his friendship, he resolved to name no one. Bernard, as he sat by listening, knew exactly how the matter stood; but, as he thought, there could be no reason why he should subject himself to his uncle’s ill-will, seeing that he had committed no sin.
“No such suggestion should have been made,” said the squire. “No one has had a right to make such a suggestion. No one has been placed by me in a position to make such a suggestion to you without manifest impropriety. I will ask no further questions about it; but it is quite as well that you should understand at once that I do not consider it to be my duty to give my niece Lilian a fortune on her marriage. I trust that your offer to her was not made under any such delusion.”
“No, sir; it was not,” said Crosbie.
“Then I suppose that no great harm has been done. I am sorry if false hopes have been given to you; but I am sure you will acknowledge that they were not given to you by me.”
“I think you have misunderstood me, sir. My hopes were never very high; but I thought it right to ascertain your intentions.”
“Now you know them. I trust, for the girl’s sake, that it will make no difference to her. I can hardly believe that she has been to blame in the matter.”
Crosbie hastened at once to exculpate Lily; and then, with more awkward blunders than a man should have made who was so well acquainted with fashionable life as the Apollo of the Beaufort, he proceeded to explain that, as Lily was to have nothing, his own pecuniary arrangements would necessitate some little delay in their marriage.
“As far as I myself am concerned,” said the squire, “I do not like long engagements. But I am quite aware that in this matter I have no right to interfere, unless, indeed—” and then he stopped himself.
“I suppose it will be well to fix some day; eh, Crosbie?” said Bernard.
“I will discuss that matter with Mrs Dale,” said Crosbie.
“If you and she understand each other,” said the squire, “that will be sufficient. Shall we go into the drawing-room now, or out upon the lawn?”
That evening, as Crosbie went to bed, he felt that he had not gained the victory in his encounter with the squire.
On the following morning at breakfast each of the three gentlemen at the Great House received a little note on pink paper, nominally from Mrs Dale, asking them to drink tea at the Small House on that day week. At the bottom of the note which Lily had written for Mr Crosbie was added: “Dancing on the lawn, if we can get anybody to stand up. Of course you must come, whether you like it or not. And Bernard also. Do your possible to talk my uncle into coming.” And this note did something towards recreating good-humour among them at the breakfast-table. It was shown to the squire, and at last he was brought to say that he would perhaps go to Mrs Dale’s little evening-party.
It may be well to explain that this promised entertainment had been originated with no special view to the pleasure of Mr Crosbie, but altogether on behalf of poor Johnny Eames. What was to be done in that matter? This question had been fully discussed between Mrs Dale and Bell, and they had come to the conclusion that it would best to ask Johnny over to a little friendly gathering, in which he might be able to meet Lily with some strangers around them. In this way his embarrassment might be overcome. It would never do, as Mrs Dale said, that he should be suffered to stay away, unnoticed by them. “When the ice is once broken he won’t mind it,” said Bell. And, therefore, early in the day, a messenger was sent over to Guestwick, who returned with a note from Mrs Eames, saying that she would come on the evening in question, with her son and daughter. They would keep the fly and get back to Guestwick the same evening. This was added, as an offer had been made of beds for Mrs Eames and Mary.
Before the evening of the party another memorable occurrence had taken place at Allington, which must be described, in order that the feelings of the different people on that evening may be understood. The squire had given his nephew to understand that he wished to have that matter settled as to his niece Bell; and as Bernard’s views were altogether in accordance with the squire’s, he resolved to comply with his uncle’s wishes. The project with him was not a new thing. He did love his cousin quite sufficiently for purposes of matrimony, and was minded that it would be a good thing for him to marry. He could not marry without money, but this marriage would give him an income without the trouble of intricate settlements, or the interference of lawyers hostile to his own interests. It was possible that he might do better; but then it was possible also that he might do much worse; and, in addition to this, he was fond of his cousin. He discussed the matter within himself, very calmly; made some excellent resolutions as to the kind of life which it would behove him to live as a married man; settled on the street in London in which he would have his house, and behaved very prettily to Bell for four or five days running. That he did not make love to her, in the ordinary sense of the word, must, I suppose, be taken for granted, seeing that Bell herself did not recognise the fact. She had always liked her cousin, and thought that in these days he was making himself particularly agreeable.
On the evening before the party the girls were at the Great House, having come up nominally with the intention of discussing the expediency of dancing on the lawn. Lily had made up her mind that it was to be so, but Bell had objected that it would be cold and damp, and that the drawing-room would be nicer for dancing.
“You see we’ve only got four young gentlemen and one ungrown,” said Lily; “and they will look so stupid standing up all properly in a room, as though we had a regular party.”
“Thank you for the compliment,” said Crosbie, taking off his straw hat.
“So you will; and we girls will look more stupid still. But out on the lawn it won’t look stupid at all. Two or three might stand up on the lawn, and it would be jolly enough.”
“I don’t quite see it,” said Bernard.
“Yes, I think I see it,” said Crosbie. “The unadaptability of the lawn for the purpose of a ball—”
“Nobody is thinking of a ball,” said Lily, with mock petulance.
“I’m defending you, and yet you won’t let me speak. The unadaptability of the lawn for the purpose of a ball will conceal the insufficiency of four men and a boy as a supply of male dancers. But, Lily, who is the ungrown gentleman? Is it your old friend Johnny Eames?”
Lily’s voice became sobered as she answered him.
“Oh, no; I did not mean Mr Eames. He is coming, but I did not mean him. Dick Boyce, Mr Boyce’s son, is only sixteen. He is the ungrown gentleman.”
“And who is the fourth adult?”
“Dr Crofts, from Guestwick. I do hope you will like him, Adolphus. We think he is the very perfection of a man.”
“Then of course I shall hate him; and be very jealous, too!”
And then that pair went off together, fighting their own little battle on that head, as turtle-doves will sometimes do. They went off, and Bernard was left with Bell standing together over the ha-ha fence which divides the garden at the back of the house from the field.
“Bell,” he said, “they seem very happy, don’t they?”
“And they ought to be happy now, oughtn’t they? Dear Lily! I hope he will be good to her. Do you know, Bernard, though he is your friend, I am very, very anxious about it. It is such a vast trust to put in a man when we do not quite know him.”
“Yes, it is; but they’ll do very well together. Lily will be happy enough.”
“And he?”
“I suppose he’ll be happy, too. He’ll feel himself a little straightened as to income at first, but that will all come round.”
“If he is not, she will be wretched.”
“They will do very well. Lily must be prepared to make the money go as far as she can, that’s all.”
“Lily won’t feel the want of money. It is not that. But if he lets her know that she has made him a poor man, then she will be unhappy. Is he extravagant, Bernard?”
But Bernard was anxious to discuss another subject, and therefore would not speak such words of wisdom as to Lily’s engagement as might have been expected from him had he been in a different frame of mind.
“No, I should say not,” said he. “But, Bell—”
“I do not know that we could have acted otherwise than we have done, and yet I fear that we have been rash. If he makes her unhappy, Bernard, I shall never forgive you.”
But as she said this she put her hand lovingly upon his arm, as a cousin might do, and spoke in a tone which divested her threat of its acerbity.
“You must not quarrel with me, Bell, whatever may happen. I cannot afford to quarrel with you.”
“Of course I was not in earnest as to that.”
“You and I must never quarrel, Bell; at least, I hope not. I could bear to quarrel with any one rather than with you.” And then, as he spoke, there was something in his voice which gave the girl some slight, indistinct warning of what might be his intention. Not that she said to herself at once, that he was going to make her an offer of his hand,—now, on the spot; but she felt that he intended something beyond the tenderness of ordinary cousinly affection.
“I hope we shall never quarrel,” she said. But as she spoke, her mind was settling itself,—forming its resolution, and coming to a conclusion as to the sort of love which Bernard might, perhaps, expect. And it formed another conclusion; as to the sort of love which might be given in return.
“Bell,” he said, “you and I have always been dear friends.”
“Yes; always.”
“Why should we not be something more than friends?”
To give Captain Dale his due I must declare that his voice was perfectly natural as he asked this question, and that he showed no signs of nervousness, either in his face or limbs. He had made up his mind to do it on that occasion, and he did it without any signs of outward disturbance. He asked his question, and then he waited for his answer. In this he was rather hard upon his cousin; for, though the question had certainly been asked in language that could not be mistaken, still the matter had not been put forward with all that fullness which a young lady, under such circumstances, has a right to expect.
They had sat down on the turf close to the ha-ha, and they were so near that Bernard was able to put out his hand with the view of taking that of his cousin within his own. But she contrived to keep her hands locked together, so that he merely held her gently by the wrist.
“I don’t quite understand, Bernard,” she said, after a minute’s pause.
“Shall we be more than cousins? Shall we be man and wife?”
Now, at least, she could not say that she did not understand. If the question was ever asked plainly, Bernard Dale had asked it plainly. Shall we be man and wife? Few men, I fancy, dare to put it all at once in so abrupt a way, and yet I do not know that the English language affords any better terms for the question.
“Oh, Bernard! you have surprised me.”
“I hope I have not pained you, Bell. I have been long thinking of this, but I am well aware that my own manner, even to you, has not been that of a lover. It is not in me to smile and say soft things, as Crosbie can. But I do not love you the less on that account. I have looked about for a wife, and I have thought that if I could gain you I should be very fortunate.”
He did not then say anything about his uncle, and the eight hundred a year; but he fully intended to do so as soon as an opportunity should serve. He was quite of opinion that eight hundred a year and the goodwill of a rich uncle were strong ground for matrimony,—were grounds even for love; and he did not doubt but his cousin would see the matter in the same light.
“You are very good to me—more than good. Of course I know that. But, oh, Bernard I did not expect this a bit.”
“But you will answer me, Bell! Or if you would like time to think, or to speak to my aunt, perhaps you will answer me tomorrow?”
“I think I ought to answer you now.”
“Not if it be a refusal, Bell. Think well of it before you do that. I should have told you that our uncle wishes this match, and that he will remove any difficulty there might be about money.”
“I do not care for money.”
“But, as you were saying about Lily, one has to be prudent. Now, in our marriage, everything of that kind would be well arranged. My uncle has promised me that he would at once allow us—”
“Stop, Bernard. You must not be led to suppose that any offer made by my uncle would help to purchase— Indeed, there can be no need for us to talk about money.”
“I wished to let you know the facts of the case, exactly as they are. And as to our uncle, I cannot but think that you would be glad, in such a matter, to have him on your side.”
“Yes, I should be glad to have him on my side; that is, if I were going— But my uncle’s wishes could not influence my decision. The fact is, Bernard—”
“Well, dearest, what is the fact?”
“I have always regarded you rather as a brother than as anything else.”
“But that regard may be changed.”
“No; I think not. Bernard, I will go further and speak on at once. It cannot be changed. I know myself well enough to say that with certainty. It cannot be changed.”
“You mean that you cannot love me?”
“Not as you would have me do. I do love you very dearly, very dearly, indeed. I would go to you in any trouble, exactly as I would go to a brother.”
“And must that be all, Bell?”
“Is not that all the sweetest love that can be felt? But you must not think me ungrateful, or proud. I know well that you are—are proposing to do for me much more than I deserve. Any girl might be proud of such an offer. But, dear Bernard—”
“Bell, before you give me a final answer, sleep upon this and talk it over with your mother. Of course you were unprepared, and I cannot expect that you should promise me so much without a moment’s consideration.”
“I was unprepared, and therefore I have not answered you as I should have done. But as it has gone so far, I cannot let you leave me in uncertainty. It is not necessary that I should keep you waiting. In this matter I do know my own mind. Dear Bernard, indeed it cannot be as you have proposed.”
She spoke in a low voice, and in a tone that had in it something of almost imploring humility; but, nevertheless, it conveyed to her cousin an assurance that she was in earnest; an assurance also that that earnest would not readily be changed. Was she not a Dale? And when did a Dale change his mind? For a while he sat silent by her; and she too, having declared her intention, refrained from further words. For some minutes they thus remained, looking down into the ha-ha. She still kept her old position, holding her hands clasped together over her knees; but he was now lying on his side, supporting his head upon his arm, with his face indeed turned towards her, but with his eyes fixed upon the grass. During this time, however, he was not idle. His cousin’s answer, though it had grieved him, had not come upon him as a blow stunning him for a moment, and rendering him unfit for instant thought. He was grieved, more grieved than he had thought he would have been. The thing that he had wanted moderately, he now wanted the more in that it was denied to him. But he was able to perceive the exact truth of his position, and to calculate what might be his chances if he went on with his suit, and what his advantage if he at once abandoned it.
“I do not wish to press you unfairly, Bell; but may I ask if any other preference—”
“There is no other preference,” she answered. And then again they were silent for a minute or two.
“My uncle will be much grieved at this,” he said at last.
“If that be all,” said Bell, “I do not think that we need either of us trouble ourselves. He can have no right to dispose of our hearts.”
“I understand the taunt, Bell.”
“Dear Bernard, there was no taunt. I intended none.”
“I need not speak of my own grief. You cannot but know how deep it must be. Why should I have submitted myself to this mortification had not my heart been concerned? But that I will bear, if I must bear it—” And then he paused, looking up at her.
“It will soon pass away,” she said.
“I will accept it at any rate without complaint. But as to my uncle’s feelings, it is open to me to speak, and to you, I should think, to listen without indifference. He has been kind to us both, and loves us two above any other living beings. It’s not surprising that he should wish to see us married, and it will not be surprising if your refusal should be a great blow to him.”
“I shall be sorry—very sorry.”
“I also shall be sorry. I am now speaking of him. He has set his heart upon it; and as he has but few wishes, few desires, so is he the more constant in those which he expresses. When he knows this, I fear that we shall find him very stern.”
“Then he will be unjust.”
“No; he will not be unjust. He is always a just man. But he will be unhappy, and will, I fear, make others unhappy. Dear Bell, may not this thing remain for a while unsettled? You will not find that I take advantage of your goodness. I will not intrude it on you again,—say for a fortnight,—or till Crosbie shall be gone.”
“No, no, no,” said Bell.
“Why are you so eager in your noes? There can be no danger in such delay. I will not press you,—and you can let my uncle think that you have at least taken time for consideration.”
“There are things as to which one is bound to answer at once. If I doubted myself, I would let you persuade me. But I do not doubt myself, and I should be wrong to keep you in suspense. Dear, dearest Bernard, it cannot be; and as it cannot he, you, as my brother, would bid me say so clearly. It cannot be.”
As she made this last assurance, they heard the steps of Lily and her lover close to them, and they both felt that it would be well that their intercourse should thus be brought to a close. Neither had known how to get up and leave the place, and yet each had felt that nothing further could then be said.
“Did you ever see anything so sweet and affectionate and romantic?” said Lily, standing over them and looking at them. “And all the while we have been so practical and worldly. Do you know, Bell, that Adolphus seems to think we can’t very well keep pigs in London. It makes me so unhappy.”
“It does seem a pity,” said Crosbie, “for Lily seems to know all about pigs.”
“Of course I do. I haven’t lived in the country all my life for nothing. Oh, Bernard, I should so like to see you rolled down into the bottom of the ha-ha. Just remain there, and we’ll do it between us.”
Whereupon Bernard got up, as did Bell also, and they all went in to tea.