No Name
by Wilkie Collins · English · Gutenberg #1438 · 1,508,026 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: No Name
Author: Wilkie Collins
Release date: March 18, 2006 [eBook #1438]
Most recently updated: October 29, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1438
Credits: Produced by James Rusk and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NO NAME ***
cover
No Name
by Wilkie Collins
Contents
PREFACE.
THE FIRST SCENE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
BETWEEN THE SCENES.
THE SECOND SCENE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
BETWEEN THE SCENES.
THE THIRD SCENE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
BETWEEN THE SCENES.
THE FOURTH SCENE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
BETWEEN THE SCENES.
THE FIFTH SCENE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
BETWEEN THE SCENES.
THE SIXTH SCENE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
BETWEEN THE SCENES.
THE SEVENTH SCENE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
BETWEEN THE SCENES.
THE LAST SCENE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
TO
FRANCIS CARR BEARD;
(FELLOW OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS OF ENGLAND)
IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE TIME
WHEN THE CLOSING SCENES OF THIS STORY WERE WRITTEN.
PREFACE.
The main purpose of this story is to appeal to the reader’s interest in
a subject which has been the theme of some of the greatest writers,
living and dead—but which has never been, and can never be, exhausted,
because it is a subject eternally interesting to all mankind. Here is
one more book that depicts the struggle of a human creature, under
those opposing influences of Good and Evil, which we have all felt,
which we have all known. It has been my aim to make the character of
“Magdalen,” which personifies this struggle, a pathetic character even
in its perversity and its error; and I have tried hard to attain this
result by the least obtrusive and the least artificial of all means—by
a resolute adherence throughout to the truth as it is in Nature. This
design was no easy one to accomplish; and it has been a great
encouragement to me (during the publication of my story in its
periodical form) to know, on the authority of many readers, that the
object which I had proposed to myself, I might, in some degree,
consider as an object achieved.
Round the central figure in the narrative other characters will be
found grouped, in sharp contrast—contrast, for the most part, in which
I have endeavored to make the element of humor mainly predominant. I
have sought to impart this relief to the more serious passages in the
book, not only because I believe myself to be justified in doing so by
the laws of Art—but because experience has taught me (what the
experience of my readers will doubtless confirm) that there is no such
moral phenomenon as unmixed tragedy to be found in the world around us.
Look where we may, the dark threads and the light cross each other
perpetually in the texture of human life.
To pass from the Characters to the Story, it will be seen that the
narrative related in these pages has been constructed on a plan which
differs from the plan followed in my last novel, and in some other of
my works published at an earlier date. The only Secret contained in
this book is revealed midway in the first volume. From that point, all
the main events of the story are purposely foreshadowed before they
take place—my present design being to rouse the reader’s interest in
following the train of circumstances by which these foreseen events are
brought about. In trying this new ground, I am not turning my back in
doubt on the ground which I have passed over already. My one object in
following a new course is to enlarge the range of my studies in the art
of writing fiction, and to vary the form in which I make my appeal to
the reader, as attractively as I can.
There is no need for me to add more to these few prefatory words than
is here written. What I might otherwise have wished to say in this
place, I have endeavored to make the book itself say for me.
_Harley Street,
November_, 1862
NO NAME.
THE FIRST SCENE.
COMBE-RAVEN, SOMERSETSHIRE.
CHAPTER I.
The hands on the hall-clock pointed to half-past six in the morning.
The house was a country residence in West Somersetshire, called
Combe-Raven. The day was the fourth of March, and the year was eighteen
hundred and forty-six.
No sounds but the steady ticking of the clock, and the lumpish snoring
of a large dog stretched on a mat outside the dining-room door,
disturbed the mysterious morning stillness of hall and staircase. Who
were the sleepers hidden in the upper regions? Let the house reveal its
own secrets; and, one by one, as they descend the stairs from their
beds, let the sleepers disclose themselves.
As the clock pointed to a quarter to seven, the dog woke and shook
himself. After waiting in vain for the footman, who was accustomed to
let him out, the animal wandered restlessly from one closed door to
another on the ground-floor; and, returning to his mat in great
perplexity, appealed to the sleeping family with a long and melancholy
howl.
Before the last notes of the dog’s remonstrance had died away, the
oaken stairs in the higher regions of the house creaked under
slowly-descending footsteps. In a minute more the first of the female
servants made her appearance, with a dingy woolen shawl over her
shoulders—for the March morning was bleak; and rheumatism and the cook
were old acquaintances.
Receiving the dog’s first cordial advances with the worst possible
grace, the cook slowly opened the hall door and let the animal out. It
was a wild morning. Over a spacious lawn, and behind a black plantation
of firs, the rising sun rent its way upward through piles of ragged
gray cloud; heavy drops of rain fell few and far between; the March
wind shuddered round the corners of the house, and the wet trees swayed
wearily.
Seven o’clock struck; and the signs of domestic life began to show
themselves in more rapid succession.
The housemaid came down—tall and slim, with the state of the spring
temperature written redly on her nose. The lady’s-maid followed—young,
smart, plump, and sleepy. The kitchen-maid came next—afflicted with the
face-ache, and making no secret of her sufferings. Last of all, the
footman appeared, yawning disconsolately; the living picture of a man
who felt that he had been defrauded of his fair night’s rest.
The conversation of the servants, when they assembled before the slowly
lighting kitchen fire, referred to a recent family event, and turned at
starting on this question: Had Thomas, the footman, seen anything of
the concert at Clifton, at which his master and the two young ladies
had been present on the previous night? Yes; Thomas had heard the
concert; he had been paid for to go in at the back; it was a loud
concert; it was a hot concert; it was described at the top of the bills
as Grand; whether it was worth traveling sixteen miles to hear by
railway, with the additional hardship of going back nineteen miles by
road, at half-past one in the morning—was a question which he would
leave his master and the young ladies to decide; his own opinion, in
the meantime, being unhesitatingly, No. Further inquiries, on the part
of all the female servants in succession, elicited no additional
information of any sort. Thomas could hum none of the songs, and could
describe none of the ladies’ dresses. His audience, accordingly, gave
him up in despair; and the kitchen small-talk flowed back into its
ordinary channels, until the clock struck eight and startled the
assembled servants into separating for their morning’s work.
A quarter past eight, and nothing happened. Half-past—and more signs of
life appeared from the bedroom regions. The next member of the family
who came downstairs was Mr. Andrew Vanstone, the master of the house.
Tall, stout, and upright—with bright blue eyes, and healthy, florid
complexion—his brown plush shooting-jacket carelessly buttoned awry;
his vixenish little Scotch terrier barking unrebuked at his heels; one
hand thrust into his waistcoat pocket, and the other smacking the
banisters cheerfully as he came downstairs humming a tune—Mr. Vanstone
showed his character on the surface of him freely to all men. An easy,
hearty, handsome, good-humored gentleman, who walked on the sunny side
of the way of life, and who asked nothing better than to meet all his
fellow-passengers in this world on the sunny side, too. Estimating him
by years, he had turned fifty. Judging him by lightness of heart,
strength of constitution, and capacity for enjoyment, he was no older
than most men who have only turned thirty.
“Thomas!” cried Mr. Vanstone, taking up his old felt hat and his thick
walking stick from the hall table. “Breakfast, this morning, at ten.
The young ladies are not likely to be down earlier after the concert
last night.—By-the-by, how did you like the concert yourself, eh? You
thought it was grand? Quite right; so it was. Nothing but crash-bang,
varied now and then by bang-crash; all the women dressed within an inch
of their lives; smothering heat, blazing gas, and no room for
anybody—yes, yes, Thomas; grand’s the word for it, and comfortable
isn’t.” With that expression of opinion, Mr. Vanstone whistled to his
vixenish terrier; flourished his stick at the hall door in cheerful
defiance of the rain; and set off through wind and weather for his
morning walk.
The hands, stealing their steady way round the dial of the clock,
pointed to ten minutes to nine. Another member of the family appeared
on the stairs—Miss Garth, the governess.
No observant eyes could have surveyed Miss Garth without seeing at once
that she was a north-countrywoman. Her hard featured face; her
masculine readiness and decision of movement; her obstinate honesty of
look and manner, all proclaimed her border birth and border training.
Though little more than forty years of age, her hair was quite gray;
and she wore over it the plain cap of an old woman. Neither hair nor
head-dress was out of harmony with her face—it looked older than her
years: the hard handwriting of trouble had scored it heavily at some
past time. The self-possession of her progress downstairs, and the air
of habitual authority with which she looked about her, spoke well for
her position in Mr. Vanstone’s family. This was evidently not one of
the forlorn, persecuted, pitiably dependent order of governesses. Here
was a woman who lived on ascertained and honorable terms with her
employers—a woman who looked capable of sending any parents in England
to the right-about, if they failed to rate her at her proper value.
“Breakfast at ten?” repeated Miss Garth, when the footman had answered
the bell, and had mentioned his master’s orders. “Ha! I thought what
would come of that concert last night. When people who live in the
country patronize public amusements, public amusements return the
compliment by upsetting the family afterward for days together.
_You’re_ upset, Thomas, I can see your eyes are as red as a ferret’s,
and your cravat looks as if you had slept in it. Bring the kettle at a
quarter to ten—and if you don’t get better in the course of the day,
come to me, and I’ll give you a dose of physic. That’s a well-meaning
lad, if you only let him alone,” continued Miss Garth, in soliloquy,
when Thomas had retired; “but he’s not strong enough for concerts
twenty miles off. They wanted _me_ to go with them last night. Yes:
catch me!”
Nine o’clock struck; and the minute-hand stole on to twenty minutes
past the hour, before any more footsteps were heard on the stairs. At
the end of that time, two ladies appeared, descending to the
breakfast-room together—Mrs. Vanstone and her eldest daughter.
If the personal attractions of Mrs. Vanstone, at an earlier period of
life, had depended solely on her native English charms of complexion
and freshness, she must have long since lost the last relics of her
fairer self. But her beauty as a young woman had passed beyond the
average national limits; and she still preserved the advantage of her
more exceptional personal gifts. Although she was now in her
forty-fourth year; although she had been tried, in bygone times, by the
premature loss of more than one of her children, and by long attacks of
illness which had followed those bereavements of former years—she still
preserved the fair proportion and subtle delicacy of feature, once
associated with the all-adorning brightness and freshness of beauty,
which had left her never to return. Her eldest child, now descending
the stairs by her side, was the mirror in which she could look back and
see again the reflection of her own youth. There, folded thick on the
daughter’s head, lay the massive dark hair, which, on the mother’s, was
fast turning gray. There, in the daughter’s cheek, glowed the lovely
dusky red which had faded from the mother’s to bloom again no more.
Miss Vanstone had already reached the first maturity of womanhood; she
had completed her six-and-twentieth year. Inheriting the dark majestic
character of her mother’s beauty, she had yet hardly inherited all its
charms. Though the shape of her face was the same, the features were
scarcely so delicate, their proportion was scarcely so true. She was
not so tall. She had the dark-brown eyes of her mother—full and soft,
with the steady luster in them which Mrs. Vanstone’s eyes had lost—and
yet there was less interest, less refinement and depth of feeling in
her expression: it was gentle and feminine, but clouded by a certain
quiet reserve, from which her mother’s face was free. If we dare to
look closely enough, may we not observe that the moral force of
character and the higher intellectual capacities in parents seem often
to wear out mysteriously in the course of transmission to children? In
these days of insidious nervous exhaustion and subtly-spreading nervous
malady, is it not possible that the same rule may apply, less rarely
than we are willing to admit, to the bodily gifts as well?
The mother and daughter slowly descended the stairs together—the first
dressed in dark brown, with an Indian shawl thrown over her shoulders;
the second more simply attired in black, with a plain collar and cuffs,
and a dark orange-colored ribbon over the bosom of her dress. As they
crossed the hall and entered the breakfast-room, Miss Vanstone was full
of the all-absorbing subject of the last night’s concert.
“I am so sorry, mamma, you were not with us,” she said. “You have been
so strong and so well ever since last summer—you have felt so many
years younger, as you said yourself—that I am sure the exertion would
not have been too much for you.”
“Perhaps not, my love—but it was as well to keep on the safe side.”
“Quite as well,” remarked Miss Garth, appearing at the breakfast-room
door. “Look at Norah (good-morning, my dear)—look, I say, at Norah. A
perfect wreck; a living proof of your wisdom and mine in staying at
home. The vile gas, the foul air, the late hours—what can you expect?
She’s not made of iron, and she suffers accordingly. No, my dear, you
needn’t deny it. I see you’ve got a headache.”
Norah’s dark, handsome face brightened into a smile—then lightly
clouded again with its accustomed quiet reserve.
“A very little headache; not half enough to make me regret the
concert,” she said, and walked away by herself to the window.
On the far side of a garden and paddock the view overlooked a stream,
some farm buildings which lay beyond, and the opening of a wooded,
rocky pass (called, in Somersetshire, a Combe), which here cleft its
way through the hills that closed the prospect. A winding strip of road
was visible, at no great distance, amid the undulations of the open
ground; and along this strip the stalwart figure of Mr. Vanstone was
now easily recognizable, returning to the house from his morning walk.
He flourished his stick gayly, as he observed his eldest daughter at
the window. She nodded and waved her hand in return, very gracefully
and prettily—but with something of old-fashioned formality in her
manner, which looked strangely in so young a woman, and which seemed
out of harmony with a salutation addressed to her father.
The hall-clock struck the adjourned breakfast-hour. When the minute
hand had recorded the lapse of five minutes more a door banged in the
bedroom regions—a clear young voice was heard singing blithely—light,
rapid footsteps pattered on the upper stairs, descended with a jump to
the landing, and pattered again, faster than ever, down the lower
flight. In another moment the youngest of Mr. Vanstone’s two daughters
(and two only surviving children) dashed into view on the dingy old
oaken stairs, with the suddenness of a flash of light; and clearing the
last three steps into the hall at a jump, presented herself breathless
in the breakfast-room to make the family circle complete.
By one of those strange caprices of Nature, which science leaves still
unexplained, the youngest of Mr. Vanstone’s children presented no
recognizable resemblance to either of her parents. How had she come by
her hair? how had she come by her eyes? Even her father and mother had
asked themselves those questions, as she grew up to girlhood, and had
been sorely perplexed to answer them. Her hair was of that purely
light-brown hue, unmixed with flaxen, or yellow, or red—which is
oftener seen on the plumage of a bird than on the head of a human
being. It was soft and plentiful, and waved downward from her low
forehead in regular folds—but, to some tastes, it was dull and dead, in
its absolute want of glossiness, in its monotonous purity of plain
light color. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were just a shade darker than
her hair, and seemed made expressly for those violet-blue eyes, which
assert their most irresistible charm when associated with a fair
complexion. But it was here exactly that the promise of her face failed
of performance in the most startling manner. The eyes, which should
have been dark, were incomprehensibly and discordantly light; they were
of that nearly colorless gray which, though little attractive in
itself, possesses the rare compensating merit of interpreting the
finest gradations of thought, the gentlest changes of feeling, the
deepest trouble of passion, with a subtle transparency of expression
which no darker eyes can rival. Thus quaintly self-contradictory in the
upper part of her face, she was hardly less at variance with
established ideas of harmony in the lower. Her lips had the true
feminine delicacy of form, her cheeks the lovely roundness and
smoothness of youth—but the mouth was too large and firm, the chin too
square and massive for her sex and age. Her complexion partook of the
pure monotony of tint which characterized her hair—it was of the same
soft, warm, creamy fairness all over, without a tinge of color in the
cheeks, except on occasions of unusual bodily exertion or sudden mental
disturbance. The whole countenance—so remarkable in its strongly
opposed characteristics—was rendered additionally striking by its
extraordinary mobility. The large, electric, light-gray eyes were
hardly ever in repose; all varieties of expression followed each other
over the plastic, ever-changing face, with a giddy rapidity which left
sober analysis far behind in the race. The girl’s exuberant vitality
asserted itself all over her, from head to foot. Her figure—taller than
her sister’s, taller than the average of woman’s height; instinct with
such a seductive, serpentine suppleness, so lightly and playfully
graceful, that its movements suggested, not unnaturally, the movements
of a young cat—her figure was so perfectly developed already that no
one who saw her could have supposed that she was only eighteen. She
bloomed in the full physical maturity of twenty years or more—bloomed
naturally and irresistibly, in right of her matchless health and
strength. Here, in truth, lay the mainspring of this
strangely-constituted organization. Her headlong course down the house
stairs; the brisk activity of all her movements; the incessant sparkle
of expression in her face; the enticing gayety which took the hearts of
the quietest people by storm—even the reckless delight in bright colors
which showed itself in her brilliantly-striped morning dress, in her
fluttering ribbons, in the large scarlet rosettes on her smart little
shoes—all sprang alike from the same source; from the overflowing
physical health which strengthened every muscle, braced every nerve,
and set the warm young blood tingling through her veins, like the blood
of a growing child.
On her entry into the breakfast-room, she was saluted with the
customary remonstrance which her flighty disregard of all punctuality
habitually provoked from the long-suffering household authorities. In
Miss Garth’s favorite phrase, “Magdalen was born with all the
senses—except a sense of order.”
Magdalen! It was a strange name to have given her? Strange, indeed; and
yet, chosen under no extraordinary circumstances. The name had been
borne by one of Mr. Vanstone’s sisters, who had died in early youth;
and, in affectionate remembrance of her, he had called his second
daughter by it—just as he had called his eldest daughter Norah, for his
wife’s sake. Magdalen! Surely, the grand old Bible name—suggestive of a
sad and somber dignity; recalling, in its first association, mournful
ideas of penitence and seclusion—had been here, as events had turned
out, inappropriately bestowed? Surely, this self-contradictory girl had
perversely accomplished one contradiction more, by developing into a
character which was out of all harmony with her own Christian name!
“Late again!” said Mrs. Vanstone, as Magdalen breathlessly kissed her.
“Late again!” chimed in Miss Garth, when Magdalen came her way next.
“Well?” she went on, taking the girl’s chin familiarly in her hand,
with a half-satirical, half-fond attention which betrayed that the
youngest daughter, with all her faults, was the governess’s
favorite—“Well? and what has the concert done for _you?_ What form of
suffering has dissipation inflicted on _your_ system this morning?”
“Suffering!” repeated Magdalen, recovering her breath, and the use of
her tongue with it. “I don’t know the meaning of the word: if there’s
anything the matter with me, I’m too well. Suffering! I’m ready for
another concert to-night, and a ball to-morrow, and a play the day
after. Oh,” cried Magdalen, dropping into a chair and crossing her
hands rapturously on the table, “how I do like pleasure!”
“Come! that’s explicit at any rate,” said Miss Garth. “I think Pope
must have had you in his mind when he wrote his famous lines:
“Men some to business, some to pleasure take,
But every woman is at heart a rake.”
“The deuce she is!” cried Mr. Vanstone, entering the room while Miss
Garth was making her quotation, with the dogs at his heels. “Well; live
and learn. If you’re all rakes, Miss Garth, the sexes are turned
topsy-turvy with a vengeance; and the men will have nothing left for it
but to stop at home and darn the stockings.—Let’s have some breakfast.”
“How-d’ye-do, papa?” said Magdalen, taking Mr. Vanstone as boisterously
round the neck as if he belonged to some larger order of Newfoundland
dog, and was made to be romped with at his daughter’s convenience. “I’m
the rake Miss Garth means; and I want to go to another concert—or a
play, if you like—or a ball, if you prefer it—or anything else in the
way of amusement that puts me into a new dress, and plunges me into a
crowd of people, and illuminates me with plenty of light, and sets me
in a tingle of excitement all over, from head to foot. Anything will
do, as long as it doesn’t send us to bed at eleven o’clock.”
Mr. Vanstone sat down composedly under his daughter’s flow of language,
like a man who was well used to verbal inundation from that quarter.
“If I am to be allowed my choice of amusements next time,” said the
worthy gentleman, “I think a play will suit me better than a concert.
The girls enjoyed themselves amazingly, my dear,” he continued,
addressing his wife. “More than I did, I must say. It was altogether
above my mark. They played one piece of music which lasted forty
minutes. It stopped three times, by-the-way; and we all thought it was
done each time, and clapped our hands, rejoiced to be rid of it. But on
it went again, to our great surprise and mortification, till we gave it
up in despair, and all wished ourselves at Jericho. Norah, my dear!
when we had crash-bang for forty minutes, with three stoppages
by-the-way, what did they call it?”
“A symphony, papa,” replied Norah.
“Yes, you darling old Goth, a symphony by the great Beethoven!” added
Magdalen. “How can you say you were not amused? Have you forgotten the
yellow-looking foreign woman, with the unpronounceable name? Don’t you
remember the faces she made when she sang? and the way she courtesied
and courtesied, till she cheated the foolish people into crying encore?
Look here, mamma—look here, Miss Garth!”
She snatched up an empty plate from the table, to represent a sheet of
music, held it before her in the established concert-room position, and
produced an imitation of the unfortunate singer’s grimaces and
courtesyings, so accurately and quaintly true to the original, that her
father roared with laughter; and even the footman (who came in at that
moment with the post-bag) rushed out of the room again, and committed
the indecorum of echoing his master audibly on the other side of the
door.
“Letters, papa. I want the key,” said Magdalen, passing from the
imitation at the breakfast-table to the post-bag on the sideboard with
the easy abruptness which characterized all her actions.
Mr. Vanstone searched his pockets and shook his head. Though his
youngest daughter might resemble him in nothing else, it was easy to
see where Magdalen’s unmethodical habits came from.
“I dare say I have left it in the library, along with my other keys,”
said Mr. Vanstone. “Go and look for it, my dear.”
“You really should check Magdalen,” pleaded Mrs. Vanstone, addressing
her husband when her daughter had left the room. “Those habits of
mimicry are growing on her; and she speaks to you with a levity which
it is positively shocking to hear.”
“Exactly what I have said myself, till I am tired of repeating it,”
remarked Miss Garth. “She treats Mr. Vanstone as if he was a kind of
younger brother of hers.”
“You are kind to us in everything else, papa; and you make kind
allowances for Magdalen’s high spirits—don’t you?” said the quiet
Norah, taking her father’s part and her sister’s with so little show of
resolution on the surface that few observers would have been sharp
enough to detect the genuine substance beneath it.
“Thank you, my dear,” said good-natured Mr. Vanstone. “Thank you for a
very pretty speech. As for Magdalen,” he continued, addressing his wife
and Miss Garth, “she’s an unbroken filly. Let her caper and kick in the
paddock to her heart’s content. Time enough to break her to harness
when she gets a little older.”
The door opened, and Magdalen returned with the key. She unlocked the
post-bag at the sideboard and poured out the letters in a heap. Sorting
them gayly in less than a minute, she approached the breakfast-table
with both hands full, and delivered the letters all round with the
business-like rapidity of a London postman.
“Two for Norah,” she announced, beginning with her sister. “Three for
Miss Garth. None for mamma. One for me. And the other six all for papa.
You lazy old darling, you hate answering letters, don’t you?” pursued
Magdalen, dropping the postman’s character and assuming the daughter’s.
“How you will grumble and fidget in the study! and how you will wish
there were no such things as letters in the world! and how red your
nice old bald head will get at the top with the worry of writing the
answers; and how many of the answers you will leave until tomorrow
after all! _The Bristol Theater’s open, papa,_” she whispered, slyly
and suddenly, in her father’s ear; “I saw it in the newspaper when I
went to the library to get the key. Let’s go to-morrow night!”
While his daughter was chattering, Mr. Vanstone was mechanically
sorting his letters. He turned over the first four in succession and
looked carelessly at the addresses. When he came to the fifth his
attention, which had hitherto wandered toward Magdalen, suddenly became
fixed on the post-mark of the letter.
Stooping over him, with her head on his shoulder, Magdalen could see
the post-mark as plainly as her father saw it—NEW ORLEANS.
“An American letter, papa!” she said. “Who do you know at New Orleans?”
Mrs. Vanstone started, and looked eagerly at her husband the moment
Magdalen spoke those words.
Mr. Vanstone said nothing. He quietly removed his daughter’s arm from
his neck, as if he wished to be free from all interruption. She
returned, accordingly, to her place at the breakfast-table. Her father,
with the letter in his hand, waited a little before he opened it; her
mother looking at him, the while, with an eager, expectant attention
which attracted Miss Garth’s notice, and Norah’s, as well as
Magdalen’s.
After a minute or more of hesitation Mr. Vanstone opened the letter.
His face changed color the instant he read the first lines; his cheeks
fading to a dull, yellow-brown hue, which would have been ashy paleness
in a less florid man; and his expression becoming saddened and
overclouded in a moment. Norah and Magdalen, watching anxiously, saw
nothing but the change that passed over their father. Miss Garth alone
observed the effect which that change produced on the attentive
mistress of the house.
It was not the effect which she, or any one, could have anticipated.
Mrs. Vanstone looked excited rather than alarmed. A faint flush rose on
her cheeks—her eyes brightened—she stirred the tea round and round in
her cup in a restless, impatient manner which was not natural to her.
Magdalen, in her capacity of spoiled child, was, as usual, the first to
break the silence.
“What _is_ the matter, papa?” she asked.
“Nothing,” said Mr. Vanstone, sharply, without looking up at her.
“I’m sure there must be something,” persisted Magdalen. “I’m sure there
is bad news, papa, in that American letter.”
“There is nothing in the letter that concerns _you_,” said Mr.
Vanstone.
It was the first direct rebuff that Magdalen had ever received from her
father. She looked at him with an incredulous surprise, which would
have been irresistibly absurd under less serious circumstances.
Nothing more was said. For the first time, perhaps, in their lives, the
family sat round the breakfast-table in painful silence. Mr. Vanstone’s
hearty morning appetite, like his hearty morning spirits, was gone. He
absently broke off some morsels of dry toast from the rack near him,
absently finished his first cup of tea—then asked for a second, which
he left before him untouched.
“Norah,” he said, after an interval, “you needn’t wait for me.
Magdalen, my dear, you can go when you like.”
His daughters rose immediately; and Miss Garth considerately followed
their example. When an easy-tempered man does assert himself in his
family, the rarity of the demonstration invariably has its effect; and
the will of that easy-tempered man is Law.
“What can have happened?” whispered Norah, as they closed the
breakfast-room door and crossed the hall.
“What does papa mean by being cross with Me?” exclaimed Magdalen,
chafing under a sense of her own injuries.
“May I ask—what right you had to pry into your father’s private
affairs?” retorted Miss Garth.
“Right?” repeated Magdalen. “I have no secrets from papa—what business
has papa to have secrets from me! I consider myself insulted.”
“If you considered yourself properly reproved for not minding your own
business,” said the plain-spoken Miss Garth, “you would be a trifle
nearer the truth. Ah! you are like all the rest of the girls in the
present day. Not one in a hundred of you knows which end of her’s
uppermost.”
The three ladies entered the morning-room; and Magdalen acknowledged
Miss Garth’s reproof by banging the door.
Half an hour passed, and neither Mr. Vanstone nor his wife left the
breakfast-room. The servant, ignorant of what had happened, went in to
clear the table—found his master and mistress seated close together in
deep consultation—and immediately went out again. Another quarter of an
hour elapsed before the breakfast-room door was opened, and the private
conference of the husband and wife came to an end.
“I hear mamma in the hall,” said Norah. “Perhaps she is coming to tell
us something.”
Mrs. Vanstone entered the morning-room as her daughter spoke. The color
was deeper on her cheeks, and the brightness of half-dried tears
glistened in her eyes; her step was more hasty, all her movements were
quicker than usual.
“I bring news, my dears, which will surprise you,” she said, addressing
her daughters. “Your father and I are going to London to-morrow.”
Magdalen caught her mother by the arm in speechless astonishment. Miss
Garth dropped her work on her lap; even the sedate Norah started to her
feet, and amazedly repeated the words, “Going to London!”
“Without us?” added Magdalen.
“Your father and I are going alone,” said Mrs. Vanstone. “Perhaps, for
as long as three weeks—but not longer. We are going”—she hesitated—“we
are going on important family business. Don’t hold me, Magdalen. This
is a sudden necessity—I have a great deal to do to-day—many things to
set in order before tomorrow. There, there, my love, let me go.”
She drew her arm away; hastily kissed her youngest daughter on the
forehead; and at once left the room again. Even Magdalen saw that her
mother was not to be coaxed into hearing or answering any more
questions.
The morning wore on, and nothing was seen of Mr. Vanstone. With the
reckless curiosity of her age and character, Magdalen, in defiance of
Miss Garth’s prohibition and her sister’s remonstrances, determined to
go to the study and look for her father there. When she tried the door,
it was locked on the inside. She said, “It’s only me, papa;” and waited
for the answer. “I’m busy now, my dear,” was the answer. “Don’t disturb
me.”
Mrs. Vanstone was, in another way, equally inaccessible. She remained
in her own room, with the female servants about her, immersed in
endless preparations for the approaching departure. The servants,
little used in that family to sudden resolutions and unexpected orders,
were awkward and confused in obeying directions. They ran from room to
room unnecessarily, and lost time and patience in jostling each other
on the stairs. If a stranger had entered the house that day, he might
have imagined that an unexpected disaster had happened in it, instead
of an unexpected necessity for a journey to London. Nothing proceeded
in its ordinary routine. Magdalen, who was accustomed to pass the
morning at the piano, wandered restlessly about the staircases and
passages, and in and out of doors when there were glimpses of fine
weather. Norah, whose fondness for reading had passed into a family
proverb, took up book after book from table and shelf, and laid them
down again, in despair of fixing her attention. Even Miss Garth felt
the all-pervading influence of the household disorganization, and sat
alone by the morning-room fire, with her head shaking ominously, and
her work laid aside.
“Family affairs?” thought Miss Garth, pondering over Mrs. Vanstone’s
vague explanatory words. “I have lived twelve years at Combe-Raven; and
these are the first family affairs which have got between the parents
and the children, in all my experience. What does it mean? Change? I
suppose I’m getting old. I don’t like change.”
CHAPTER II.
At ten o’clock the next morning Norah and Magdalen stood alone in the
hall at Combe-Raven watching the departure of the carriage which took
their father and mother to the London train.
Up to the last moment, both the sisters had hoped for some explanation
of that mysterious “family business” to which Mrs. Vanstone had so
briefly alluded on the previous day. No such explanation had been
offered. Even the agitation of the leave-taking, under circumstances
entirely new in the home experience of the parents and children, had
not shaken the resolute discretion of Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone. They had
gone—with the warmest testimonies of affection, with farewell embraces
fervently reiterated again and again—but without dropping one word,
from first to last, of the nature of their errand.
As the grating sound of the carriage-wheels ceased suddenly at a turn
in the road, the sisters looked one another in the face; each feeling,
and each betraying in her own way, the dreary sense that she was openly
excluded, for the first time, from the confidence of her parents.
Norah’s customary reserve strengthened into sullen silence—she sat down
in one of the hall chairs and looked out frowningly through the open
house door. Magdalen, as usual when her temper was ruffled, expressed
her dissatisfaction in the plainest terms. “I don’t care who knows it—I
think we are both of us shamefully ill-used!” With those words, the
young lady followed her sister’s example by seating herself on a hall
chair and looking aimlessly out through the open house door.
Almost at the same moment Miss Garth entered the hall from the
morning-room. Her quick observation showed her the necessity for
interfering to some practical purpose; and her ready good sense at once
pointed the way.
“Look up, both of you, if you please, and listen to me,” said Miss
Garth. “If we are all three to be comfortable and happy together, now
we are alone, we must stick to our usual habits and go on in our
regular way. There is the state of things in plain words. Accept the
situation—as the French say. Here am I to set you the example. I have
just ordered an excellent dinner at the customary hour. I am going to
the medicine-chest next, to physic the kitchen-maid—an unwholesome
girl, whose face-ache is all stomach. In the meantime, Norah, my dear,
you will find your work and your books, as usual, in the library.
Magdalen, suppose you leave off tying your handkerchief into knots and
use your fingers on the keys of the piano instead? We’ll lunch at one,
and take the dogs out afterward. Be as brisk and cheerful both of you
as I am. Come, rouse up directly. If I see those gloomy faces any
longer, as sure as my name’s Garth, I’ll give your mother written
warning and go back to my friends by the mixed train at twelve forty.”
Concluding her address of expostulation in those terms, Miss Garth led
Norah to the library door, pushed Magdalen into the morning-room, and
went on her own way sternly to the regions of the medicine-chest.
In this half-jesting, half-earnest manner she was accustomed to
maintain a sort of friendly authority over Mr. Vanstone’s daughters,
after her proper functions as governess had necessarily come to an end.
Norah, it is needless to say, had long since ceased to be her pupil;
and Magdalen had, by this time, completed her education. But Miss Garth
had lived too long and too intimately under Mr. Vanstone’s roof to be
parted with for any purely formal considerations; and the first hint at
going away which she had thought it her duty to drop was dismissed with
such affectionate warmth of protest that she never repeated it again,
except in jest. The entire management of the household was, from that
time forth, left in her hands; and to those duties she was free to add
what companionable assistance she could render to Norah’s reading, and
what friendly superintendence she could still exercise over Magdalen’s
music. Such were the terms on which Miss Garth was now a resident in
Mr. Vanstone’s family.
Toward the afternoon the weather improved. At half-past one the sun was
shining brightly; and the ladies left the house, accompanied by the
dogs, to set forth on their walk.
They crossed the stream, and ascended by the little rocky pass to the
hills beyond; then diverged to the left, and returned by a cross-road
which led through the village of Combe-Raven.
As they came in sight of the first cottages, they passed a man, hanging
about the road, who looked attentively, first at Magdalen, then at
Norah. They merely observed that he was short, that he was dressed in
black, and that he was a total stranger to them—and continued their
homeward walk, without thinking more about the loitering foot-passenger
whom they had met on their way back.
After they had left the village, and had entered the road which led
straight to the house, Magdalen surprised Miss Garth by announcing that
the stranger in black had turned, after they had passed him, and was
now following them. “He keeps on Norah’s side of the road,” she said,
mischievously. “I’m not the attraction—don’t blame _me_.”
Whether the man was really following them, or not, made little
difference, for they were now close to the house. As they passed
through the lodge-gates, Miss Garth looked round, and saw that the
stranger was quickening his pace, apparently with the purpose of
entering into conversation. Seeing this, she at once directed the young
ladies to go on to the house with the dogs, while she herself waited
for events at the gate.
There was just time to complete this discreet arrangement, before the
stranger reached the lodge. He took off his hat to Miss Garth politely,
as she turned round. What did he look like, on the face of him? He
looked like a clergyman in difficulties.
Taking his portrait, from top to toe, the picture of him began with a
tall hat, broadly encircled by a mourning band of crumpled crape. Below
the hat was a lean, long, sallow face, deeply pitted with the smallpox,
and characterized, very remarkably, by eyes of two different colors—one
bilious green, one bilious brown, both sharply intelligent. His hair
was iron-gray, carefully brushed round at the temples. His cheeks and
chin were in the bluest bloom of smooth shaving; his nose was short
Roman; his lips long, thin, and supple, curled up at the corners with a
mildly-humorous smile. His white cravat was high, stiff, and dingy; the
collar, higher, stiffer, and dingier, projected its rigid points on
either side beyond his chin. Lower down, the lithe little figure of the
man was arrayed throughout in sober-shabby black. His frock-coat was
buttoned tight round the waist, and left to bulge open majestically at
the chest. His hands were covered with black cotton gloves neatly
darned at the fingers; his umbrella, worn down at the ferule to the
last quarter of an inch, was carefully preserved, nevertheless, in an
oilskin case. The front view of him was the view in which he looked
oldest; meeting him face to face, he might have been estimated at fifty
or more. Walking behind him, his back and shoulders were almost young
enough to have passed for five-and-thirty. His manners were
distinguished by a grave serenity. When he opened his lips, he spoke in
a rich bass voice, with an easy flow of language, and a strict
attention to the elocutionary claims of words in more than one
syllable. Persuasion distilled from his mildly-curling lips; and,
shabby as he was, perennial flowers of courtesy bloomed all over him
from head to foot.
“This is the residence of Mr. Vanstone, I believe?” he began, with a
circular wave of his hand in the direction of the house. “Have I the
honor of addressing a member of Mr. Vanstone’s family?”
“Yes,” said the plain-spoken Miss Garth. “You are addressing Mr.
Vanstone’s governess.”
The persuasive man fell back a step—admired Mr. Vanstone’s
governess—advanced a step again—and continued the conversation.
“And the two young ladies,” he went on, “the two young ladies who were
walking with you are doubtless Mr. Vanstone’s daughters? I recognized
the darker of the two, and the elder as I apprehend, by her likeness to
her handsome mother. The younger lady—”
“You are acquainted with Mrs. Vanstone, I suppose?” said Miss Garth,
interrupting the stranger’s flow of language, which, all things
considered, was beginning, in her opinion, to flow rather freely. The
stranger acknowledged the interruption by one of his polite bows, and
submerged Miss Garth in his next sentence as if nothing had happened.
“The younger lady,” he proceeded, “takes after her father, I presume? I
assure you, her face struck me. Looking at it with my friendly interest
in the family, I thought it very remarkable. I said to myself—Charming,
Characteristic, Memorable. Not like her sister, not like her mother. No
doubt, the image of her father?”
Once more Miss Garth attempted to stem the man’s flow of words. It was
plain that he did not know Mr. Vanstone, even by sight—otherwise he
would never have committed the error of supposing that Magdalen took
after her father. Did he know Mrs. Vanstone any better? He had left
Miss Garth’s question on that point unanswered. In the name of wonder,
who was he? Powers of impudence! what did he want?
“You may be a friend of the family, though I don’t remember your face,”
said Miss Garth. “What may your commands be, if you please? Did you
come here to pay Mrs. Vanstone a visit?”
“I had anticipated the pleasure of communicating with Mrs. Vanstone,”
answered this inveterately evasive and inveterately civil man. “How is
she?”
“Much as usual,” said Miss Garth, feeling her resources of politeness
fast failing her.
“Is she at home?”
“No.”
“Out for long?”
“Gone to London with Mr. Vanstone.”
The man’s long face suddenly grew longer. His bilious brown eye looked
disconcerted, and his bilious green eye followed its example. His
manner became palpably anxious; and his choice of words was more
carefully selected than ever.
“Is Mrs. Vanstone’s absence likely to extend over any very lengthened
period?” he inquired.
“It will extend over three weeks,” replied Miss Garth. “I think you
have now asked me questions enough,” she went on, beginning to let her
temper get the better of her at last. “Be so good, if you please, as to
mention your business and your name. If you have any message to leave
for Mrs. Vanstone, I shall be writing to her by to-night’s post, and I
can take charge of it.”
“A thousand thanks! A most valuable suggestion. Permit me to take
advantage of it immediately.”
He was not in the least affected by the severity of Miss Garth’s looks
and language—he was simply relieved by her proposal, and he showed it
with the most engaging sincerity. This time his bilious green eye took
the initiative, and set his bilious brown eye the example of recovered
serenity. His curling lips took a new twist upward; he tucked his
umbrella briskly under his arm; and produced from the breast of his
coat a large old-fashioned black pocketbook. From this he took a pencil
and a card—hesitated and considered for a moment—wrote rapidly on the
card—and placed it, with the politest alacrity, in Miss Garth’s hand.
“I shall feel personally obliged if you will honor me by inclosing that
card in your letter,” he said. “There is no necessity for my troubling
you additionally with a message. My name will be quite sufficient to
recall a little family matter to Mrs. Vanstone, which has no doubt
escaped her memory. Accept my best thanks. This has been a day of
agreeable surprises to me. I have found the country hereabouts
remarkably pretty; I have seen Mrs. Vanstone’s two charming daughters;
I have become acquainted with an honored preceptress in Mr. Vanstone’s
family. I congratulate myself—I apologize for occupying your valuable
time—I beg my renewed acknowledgments—I wish you good-morning.”
He raised his tall hat. His brown eye twinkled, his green eye twinkled,
his curly lips smiled sweetly. In a moment he turned on his heel. His
youthful back appeared to the best advantage; his active little legs
took him away trippingly in the direction of the village. One, two,
three—and he reached the turn in the road. Four, five, six—and he was
gone.
Miss Garth looked down at the card in her hand, and looked up again in
blank astonishment. The name and address of the clerical-looking
stranger (both written in pencil) ran as follows:
_Captain Wragge. Post-office, Bristol._
CHAPTER III.
When she returned to the house, Miss Garth made no attempt to conceal
her unfavorable opinion of the stranger in black. His object was, no
doubt, to obtain pecuniary assistance from Mrs. Vanstone. What the
nature of his claim on her might be seemed less intelligible—unless it
was the claim of a poor relation. Had Mrs. Vanstone ever mentioned, in
the presence of her daughters, the name of Captain Wragge? Neither of
them recollected to have heard it before. Had Mrs. Vanstone ever
referred to any poor relations who were dependent on her? On the
contrary she had mentioned of late years that she doubted having any
relations at all who were still living. And yet Captain Wragge had
plainly declared that the name on his card would recall “a family
matter” to Mrs. Vanstone’s memory. What did it mean? A false statement,
on the stranger’s part, without any intelligible reason for making it?
Or a second mystery, following close on the heels of the mysterious
journey to London?
All the probabilities seemed to point to some hidden connection between
the “family affairs” which had taken Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone so suddenly
from home and the “family matter” associated with the name of Captain
Wragge. Miss Garth’s doubts thronged back irresistibly on her mind as
she sealed her letter to Mrs. Vanstone, with the captain’s card added
by way of inclosure.
By return of post the answer arrived.
Always the earliest riser among the ladies of the house, Miss Garth was
alone in the breakfast-room when the letter was brought in. Her first
glance at its contents convinced her of the necessity of reading it
carefully through in retirement, before any embarrassing questions
could be put to her. Leaving a message with the servant requesting
Norah to make the tea that morning, she went upstairs at once to the
solitude and security of her own room.
Mrs. Vanstone’s letter extended to some length. The first part of it
referred to Captain Wragge, and entered unreservedly into all necessary
explanations relating to the man himself and to the motive which had
brought him to Combe-Raven.
It appeared from Mrs. Vanstone’s statement that her mother had been
twice married. Her mother’s first husband had been a certain Doctor
Wragge—a widower with young children; and one of those children was now
the unmilitary-looking captain, whose address was “Post-office,
Bristol.” Mrs. Wragge had left no family by her first husband; and had
afterward married Mrs. Vanstone’s father. Of that second marriage Mrs.
Vanstone herself was the only issue. She had lost both her parents
while she was still a young woman; and, in course of years, her
mother’s family connections (who were then her nearest surviving
relatives) had been one after another removed by death. She was left,
at the present writing, without a relation in the world—excepting,
perhaps, certain cousins whom she had never seen, and of whose
existence even, at the present moment, she possessed no positive
knowledge.
Under these circumstances, what family claim had Captain Wragge on Mrs.
Vanstone?
None whatever. As the son of her mother’s first husband, by that
husband’s first wife, not even the widest stretch of courtesy could
have included him at any time in the list of Mrs. Vanstone’s most
distant relations. Well knowing this (the letter proceeded to say), he
had nevertheless persisted in forcing himself upon her as a species of
family connection: and she had weakly sanctioned the intrusion, solely
from the dread that he would otherwise introduce himself to Mr.
Vanstone’s notice, and take unblushing advantage of Mr. Vanstone’s
generosity. Shrinking, naturally, from allowing her husband to be
annoyed, and probably cheated as well, by any person who claimed,
however preposterously, a family connection with herself, it had been
her practice, for many years past, to assist the captain from her own
purse, on the condition that he should never come near the house, and
that he should not presume to make any application whatever to Mr.
Vanstone.
Readily admitting the imprudence of this course, Mrs. Vanstone further
explained that she had perhaps been the more inclined to adopt it
through having been always accustomed, in her early days, to see the
captain living now upon one member, and now upon another, of her
mother’s family. Possessed of abilities which might have raised him to
distinction in almost any career that he could have chosen, he had
nevertheless, from his youth upward, been a disgrace to all his
relatives. He had been expelled the militia regiment in which he once
held a commission. He had tried one employment after another, and had
discreditably failed in all. He had lived on his wits, in the lowest
and basest meaning of the phrase. He had married a poor ignorant woman,
who had served as a waitress at some low eating-house, who had
unexpectedly come into a little money, and whose small inheritance he
had mercilessly squandered to the last farthing. In plain terms, he was
an incorrigible scoundrel; and he had now added one more to the list of
his many misdemeanors by impudently breaking the conditions on which
Mrs. Vanstone had hitherto assisted him. She had written at once to the
address indicated on his card, in such terms and to such purpose as
would prevent him, she hoped and believed, from ever venturing near the
house again. Such were the terms in which Mrs. Vanstone concluded that
first part of her letter which referred exclusively to Captain Wragge.
Although the statement thus presented implied a weakness in Mrs.
Vanstone’s character which Miss Garth, after many years of intimate
experience, had never detected, she accepted the explanation as a
matter of course; receiving it all the more readily inasmuch as it
might, without impropriety, be communicated in substance to appease the
irritated curiosity of the two young ladies. For this reason especially
she perused the first half of the letter with an agreeable sense of
relief. Far different was the impression produced on her when she
advanced to the second half, and when she had read it to the end.
The second part of the letter was devoted to the subject of the journey
to London.
Mrs. Vanstone began by referring to the long and intimate friendship
which had existed between Miss Garth and herself. She now felt it due
to that friendship to explain confidentially the motive which had
induced her to leave home with her husband. Miss Garth had delicately
refrained from showing it, but she must naturally have felt, and must
still be feeling, great surprise at the mystery in which their
departure had been involved; and she must doubtless have asked herself
why Mrs. Vanstone should have been associated with family affairs which
(in her independent position as to relatives) must necessarily concern
Mr. Vanstone alone.
Without touching on those affairs, which it was neither desirable nor
necessary to do, Mrs. Vanstone then proceeded to say that she would at
once set all Miss Garth’s doubts at rest, so far as they related to
herself, by one plain acknowledgment. Her object in accompanying her
husband to London was to see a certain celebrated physician, and to
consult him privately on a very delicate and anxious matter connected
with the state of her health. In plainer terms still, this anxious
matter meant nothing less than the possibility that she might again
become a mother.
When the doubt had first suggested itself she had treated it as a mere
delusion. The long interval that had elapsed since the birth of her
last child; the serious illness which had afflicted her after the death
of that child in infancy; the time of life at which she had now
arrived—all inclined her to dismiss the idea as soon as it arose in her
mind. It had returned again and again in spite of her. She had felt the
necessity of consulting the highest medical authority; and had shrunk,
at the same time, from alarming her daughters by summoning a London
physician to the house. The medical opinion, sought under the
circumstances already mentioned, had now been obtained. Her doubt was
confirmed as a certainty; and the result, which might be expected to
take place toward the end of the summer, was, at her age and with her
constitutional peculiarities, a subject for serious future anxiety, to
say the least of it. The physician had done his best to encourage her;
but she had understood the drift of his questions more clearly than he
supposed, and she knew that he looked to the future with more than
ordinary doubt.
Having disclosed these particulars, Mrs. Vanstone requested that they
might be kept a secret between her correspondent and herself. She had
felt unwilling to mention her suspicions to Miss Garth, until those
suspicions had been confirmed—and she now recoiled, with even greater
reluctance, from allowing her daughters to be in any way alarmed about
her. It would be best to dismiss the subject for the present, and to
wait hopefully till the summer came. In the meantime they would all,
she trusted, be happily reunited on the twenty-third of the month,
which Mr. Vanstone had fixed on as the day for their return. With this
intimation, and with the customary messages, the letter, abruptly and
confusedly, came to an end.
For the first few minutes, a natural sympathy for Mrs. Vanstone was the
only feeling of which Miss Garth was conscious after she had laid the
letter down. Ere long, however, there rose obscurely on her mind a
doubt which perplexed and distressed her. Was the explanation which she
had just read really as satisfactory and as complete as it professed to
be? Testing it plainly by facts, surely not.
On the morning of her departure, Mrs. Vanstone had unquestionably left
the house in good spirits. At her age, and in her state of health, were
good spirits compatible with such an errand to a physician as the
errand on which she was bent? Then, again, had that letter from New
Orleans, which had necessitated Mr. Vanstone’s departure, no share in
occasioning his wife’s departure as well? Why, otherwise, had she
looked up so eagerly the moment her daughter mentioned the postmark.
Granting the avowed motive for her journey—did not her manner, on the
morning when the letter was opened, and again on the morning of
departure, suggest the existence of some other motive which her letter
kept concealed?
If it was so, the conclusion that followed was a very distressing one.
Mrs. Vanstone, feeling what was due to her long friendship with Miss
Garth, had apparently placed the fullest confidence in her, on one
subject, by way of unsuspiciously maintaining the strictest reserve
toward her on another. Naturally frank and straightforward in all her
own dealings, Miss Garth shrank from plainly pursuing her doubts to
this result: a want of loyalty toward her tried and valued friend
seemed implied in the mere dawning of it on her mind.
She locked up the letter in her desk; roused herself resolutely to
attend to the passing interests of the day; and went downstairs again
to the breakfast-room. Amid many uncertainties, this at least was
clear, Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone were coming back on the twenty-third of
the month. Who could say what new revelations might not come back with
them?
CHAPTER IV.
No new revelations came back with them: no anticipations associated
with their return were realized. On the one forbidden subject of their
errand in London, there was no moving either the master or the mistress
of the house. Whatever their object might have been, they had to all
appearance successfully accomplished it—for they both returned in
perfect possession of their every-day looks and manners. Mrs.
Vanstone’s spirits had subsided to their natural quiet level; Mr.
Vanstone’s imperturbable cheerfulness sat as easily and indolently on
him as usual. This was the one noticeable result of their journey—this,
and no more. Had the household revolution run its course already? Was
the secret thus far hidden impenetrably, hidden forever?
Nothing in this world is hidden forever. The gold which has lain for
centuries unsuspected in the ground, reveals itself one day on the
surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed
over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has
been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the
substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the
thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who
betrays it by a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of
revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a
secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.
How was the secret now hidden in the household at Combe-Raven doomed to
disclose itself? Through what coming event in the daily lives of the
father, the mother, and the daughters, was the law of revelation
destined to break the fatal way to discovery? The way opened (unseen by
the parents, and unsuspected by the children) through the first event
that happened after Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone’s return—an event which
presented, on the surface of it, no interest of greater importance than
the trivial social ceremony of a morning call.
Three days after the master and mistress of Combe-Raven had come back,
the female members of the family happened to be assembled together in
the morning-room. The view from the windows looked over the
flower-garden and shrubbery; this last being protected at its outward
extremity by a fence, and approached from the lane beyond by a
wicket-gate. During an interval in the conversation, the attention of
the ladies was suddenly attracted to this gate, by the sharp sound of
the iron latch falling in its socket. Some one had entered the
shrubbery from the lane; and Magdalen at once placed herself at the
window to catch the first sight of the visitor through the trees.
After a few minutes, the figure of a gentleman became visible, at the
point where the shrubbery path joined the winding garden-walk which led
to the house. Magdalen looked at him attentively, without appearing, at
first, to know who he was. As he came nearer, however, she started in
astonishment; and, turning quickly to her mother and sister, proclaimed
the gentleman in the garden to be no other than “Mr. Francis Clare.”
The visitor thus announced was the son of Mr. Vanstone’s oldest
associate and nearest neighbor.
Mr. Clare the elder inhabited an unpretending little cottage, situated
just outside the shrubbery fence which marked the limit of the
Combe-Raven grounds. Belonging to the younger branch of a family of
great antiquity, the one inheritance of importance that he had derived
from his ancestors was the possession of a magnificent library, which
not only filled all the rooms in his modest little dwelling, but lined
the staircases and passages as well. Mr. Clare’s books represented the
one important interest of Mr. Clare’s life. He had been a widower for
many years past, and made no secret of his philosophical resignation to
the loss of his wife. As a father, he regarded his family of three sons
in the light of a necessary domestic evil, which perpetually threatened
the sanctity of his study and the safety of his books. When the boys
went to school, Mr. Clare said “good-by” to them—and “thank God” to
himself. As for his small income, and his still smaller domestic
establishment, he looked at them both from the same satirically
indifferent point of view. He called himself a pauper with a pedigree.
He abandoned the entire direction of his household to the slatternly
old woman who was his only servant, on the condition that she was never
to venture near his books, with a duster in her hand, from one year’s
end to the other. His favorite poets were Horace and Pope; his chosen
philosophers, Hobbes and Voltaire. He took his exercise and his fresh
air under protest; and always walked the same distance to a yard, on
the ugliest high-road in the neighborhood. He was crooked of back, and
quick of temper. He could digest radishes, and sleep after green tea.
His views of human nature were the views of Diogenes, tempered by
Rochefoucauld; his personal habits were slovenly in the last degree;
and his favorite boast was that he had outlived all human prejudices.
Such was this singular man, in his more superficial aspects. What
nobler qualities he might possess below the surface, no one had ever
discovered. Mr. Vanstone, it is true, stoutly asserted that “Mr.
Clare’s worst side was his outside”—but in this expression of opinion
he stood alone among his neighbors. The association between these two
widely-dissimilar men had lasted for many years, and was almost close
enough to be called a friendship. They had acquired a habit of meeting
to smoke together on certain evenings in the week, in the
cynic-philosopher’s study, and of there disputing on every imaginable
subject—Mr. Vanstone flourishing the stout cudgels of assertion, and
Mr. Clare meeting him with the keen edged-tools of sophistry. They
generally quarreled at night, and met on the neutral ground of the
shrubbery to be reconciled together the next morning. The bond of
intercourse thus curiously established between them was strengthened on
Mr. Vanstone’s side by a hearty interest in his neighbor’s three
sons—an interest by which those sons benefited all the more
importantly, seeing that one of the prejudices which their father had
outlived was a prejudice in favor of his own children.
“I look at those boys,” the philosopher was accustomed to say, “with a
perfectly impartial eye; I dismiss the unimportant accident of their
birth from all consideration; and I find them below the average in
every respect. The only excuse which a poor gentleman has for presuming
to exist in the nineteenth century, is the excuse of extraordinary
ability. My boys have been addle-headed from infancy. If I had any
capital to give them, I should make Frank a butcher, Cecil a baker, and
Arthur a grocer—those being the only human vocations I know of which
are certain to be always in request. As it is, I have no money to help
them with; and they have no brains to help themselves. They appear to
me to be three human superfluities in dirty jackets and noisy boots;
and, unless they clear themselves off the community by running away, I
don’t myself profess to see what is to be done with them.”
Fortunately for the boys, Mr. Vanstone’s views were still fast
imprisoned in the ordinary prejudices. At his intercession, and through
his influence, Frank, Cecil, and Arthur were received on the foundation
of a well-reputed grammar-school. In holiday-time they were mercifully
allowed the run of Mr. Vanstone’s paddock; and were humanized and
refined by association, indoors, with Mrs. Vanstone and her daughters.
On these occasions, Mr. Clare used sometimes to walk across from his
cottage (in his dressing-gown and slippers), and look at the boys
disparagingly, through the window or over the fence, as if they were
three wild animals whom his neighbor was attempting to tame. “You and
your wife are excellent people,” he used to say to Mr. Vanstone. “I
respect your honest prejudices in favor of those boys of mine with all
my heart. But you are _so_ wrong about them—you are indeed! I wish to
give no offense; I speak quite impartially—but mark my words, Vanstone:
they’ll all three turn out ill, in spite of everything you can do to
prevent it.”
In later years, when Frank had reached the age of seventeen, the same
curious shifting of the relative positions of parent and friend between
the two neighbors was exemplified more absurdly than ever. A civil
engineer in the north of England, who owed certain obligations to Mr.
Vanstone, expressed his willingness to take Frank under
superintendence, on terms of the most favorable kind. When this
proposal was received, Mr. Clare, as usual, first shifted his own
character as Frank’s father on Mr. Vanstone’s shoulders—and then
moderated his neighbor’s parental enthusiasm from the point of view of
an impartial spectator.
“It’s the finest chance for Frank that could possibly have happened,”
cried Mr. Vanstone, in a glow of fatherly enthusiasm.
“My good fellow, he won’t take it,” retorted Mr. Clare, with the icy
composure of a disinterested friend.
“But he _shall_ take it,” persisted Mr. Vanstone.
“Say he shall have a mathematical head,” rejoined Mr. Clare; “say he
shall possess industry, ambition, and firmness of purpose. Pooh! pooh!
you don’t look at him with my impartial eyes. I say, No mathematics, no
industry, no ambition, no firmness of purpose. Frank is a compound of
negatives—and there they are.”
“Hang your negatives!” shouted Mr. Vanstone. “I don’t care a rush for
negatives, or affirmatives either. Frank shall have this splendid
chance; and I’ll lay you any wager you like he makes the best of it.”
“I am not rich enough to lay wagers, usually,” replied Mr. Clare; “but
I think I have got a guinea about the house somewhere; and I’ll lay you
that guinea Frank comes back on our hands like a bad shilling.”
“Done!” said Mr. Vanstone. “No: stop a minute! I won’t do the lad’s
character the injustice of backing it at even money. I’ll lay you five
to one Frank turns up trumps in this business! You ought to be ashamed
of yourself for talking of him as you do. What sort of hocus-pocus you
bring it about by, I don’t pretend to know; but you always end in
making me take his part, as if I was his father instead of you. Ah yes!
give you time, and you’ll defend yourself. I won’t give you time; I
won’t have any of your special pleading. Black’s white according to
you. I don’t care: it’s black for all that. You may talk nineteen to
the dozen—I shall write to my friend and say Yes, in Frank’s interests,
by to-day’s post.”
Such were the circumstances under which Mr. Francis Clare departed for
the north of England, at the age of seventeen, to start in life as a
civil engineer.
From time to time, Mr. Vanstone’s friend communicated with him on the
subject of the new pupil. Frank was praised, as a quiet,
gentleman-like, interesting lad—but he was also reported to be rather
slow at acquiring the rudiments of engineering science. Other letters,
later in date, described him as a little too ready to despond about
himself; as having been sent away, on that account, to some new railway
works, to see if change of scene would rouse him; and as having
benefited in every respect by the experiment—except perhaps in regard
to his professional studies, which still advanced but slowly.
Subsequent communications announced his departure, under care of a
trustworthy foreman, for some public works in Belgium; touched on the
general benefit he appeared to derive from this new change; praised his
excellent manners and address, which were of great assistance in
facilitating business communications with the foreigners—and passed
over in ominous silence the main question of his actual progress in the
acquirement of knowledge. These reports, and many others which
resembled them, were all conscientiously presented by Frank’s friend to
the attention of Frank’s father. On each occasion, Mr. Clare exulted
over Mr. Vanstone, and Mr. Vanstone quarreled with Mr. Clare. “One of
these days you’ll wish you hadn’t laid that wager,” said the cynic
philosopher. “One of these days I shall have the blessed satisfaction
of pocketing your guinea,” cried the sanguine friend. Two years had
then passed since Frank’s departure. In one year more results asserted
themselves, and settled the question.
Two days after Mr. Vanstone’s return from London, he was called away
from the breakfast-table before he had found time enough to look over
his letters, delivered by the morning’s post. Thrusting them into one
of the pockets of his shooting-jacket, he took the letters out again,
at one grasp, to read them when occasion served, later in the day. The
grasp included the whole correspondence, with one exception—that
exception being a final report from the civil engineer, which notified
the termination of the connection between his pupil and himself, and
the immediate return of Frank to his father’s house.
While this important announcement lay unsuspected in Mr. Vanstone’s
pocket, the object of it was traveling home, as fast as railways could
take him. At half-past ten at night, while Mr. Clare was sitting in
studious solitude over his books and his green tea, with his favorite
black cat to keep him company, he heard footsteps in the passage—the
door opened—and Frank stood before him.
Ordinary men would have been astonished. But the philosopher’s
composure was not to be shaken by any such trifle as the unexpected
return of his eldest son. He could not have looked up more calmly from
his learned volume if Frank had been absent for three minutes instead
of three years.
“Exactly what I predicted,” said Mr. Clare. “Don’t interrupt me by
making explanations; and don’t frighten the cat. If there is anything
to eat in the kitchen, get it and go to bed. You can walk over to
Combe-Raven tomorrow and give this message from me to Mr. Vanstone:
‘Father’s compliments, sir, and I have come back upon your hands like a
bad shilling, as he always said I should. He keeps his own guinea, and
takes your five; and he hopes you’ll mind what he says to you another
time.’ That is the message. Shut the door after you. Good-night.”
Under these unfavorable auspices, Mr. Francis Clare made his appearance
the next morning in the grounds at Combe-Raven; and, something doubtful
of the reception that might await him, slowly approached the precincts
of the house.
It was not wonderful that Magdalen should have failed to recognize him
when he first appeared in view. He had gone away a backward lad of
seventeen; he returned a young man of twenty. His slim figure had now
acquired strength and grace, and had increased in stature to the medium
height. The small regular features, which he was supposed to have
inherited from his mother, were rounded and filled out, without having
lost their remarkable delicacy of form. His beard was still in its
infancy; and nascent lines of whisker traced their modest way sparely
down his cheeks. His gentle, wandering brown eyes would have looked to
better advantage in a woman’s face—they wanted spirit and firmness to
fit them for the face of a man. His hands had the same wandering habit
as his eyes; they were constantly changing from one position to
another, constantly twisting and turning any little stray thing they
could pick up. He was undeniably handsome, graceful, well-bred—but no
close observer could look at him without suspecting that the stout old
family stock had begun to wear out in the later generations, and that
Mr. Francis Clare had more in him of the shadow of his ancestors than
of the substance.
When the astonishment caused by his appearance had partially subsided,
a search was instituted for the missing report. It was found in the
remotest recesses of Mr. Vanstone’s capacious pocket, and was read by
that gentleman on the spot.
The plain facts, as stated by the engineer, were briefly these: Frank
was not possessed of the necessary abilities to fit him for his new
calling; and it was useless to waste time by keeping him any longer in
an employment for which he had no vocation. This, after three years’
trial, being the conviction on both sides, the master had thought it
the most straightforward course for the pupil to go home and candidly
place results before his father and his friends. In some other pursuit,
for which he was more fit, and in which he could feel an interest, he
would no doubt display the industry and perseverance which he had been
too much discouraged to practice in the profession that he had now
abandoned. Personally, he was liked by all who knew him; and his future
prosperity was heartily desired by the many friends whom he had made in
the North. Such was the substance of the report, and so it came to an
end.
Many men would have thought the engineer’s statement rather too
carefully worded; and, suspecting him of trying to make the best of a
bad case, would have entertained serious doubts on the subject of
Frank’s future. Mr. Vanstone was too easy-tempered and sanguine—and too
anxious, as well, not to yield his old antagonist an inch more ground
than he could help—to look at the letter from any such unfavorable
point of view. Was it Frank’s fault if he had not got the stuff in him
that engineers were made of? Did no other young men ever begin life
with a false start? Plenty began in that way, and got over it, and did
wonders afterward. With these commentaries on the letter, the
kind-hearted gentleman patted Frank on the shoulder. “Cheer up, my
lad!” said Mr. Vanstone. “We will be even with your father one of these
days, though he _has_ won the wager this time!”
The example thus set by the master of the house was followed at once by
the family—with the solitary exception of Norah, whose incurable
formality and reserve expressed themselves, not too graciously, in her
distant manner toward the visitor. The rest, led by Magdalen (who had
been Frank’s favorite playfellow in past times) glided back into their
old easy habits with him without an effort. He was “Frank” with all of
them but Norah, who persisted in addressing him as “Mr. Clare.” Even
the account he was now encouraged to give of the reception accorded to
him by his father, on the previous night, failed to disturb Norah’s
gravity. She sat with her dark, handsome face steadily averted, her
eyes cast down, and the rich color in her cheeks warmer and deeper than
usual. All the rest, Miss Garth included, found old Mr. Clare’s speech
of welcome to his son quite irresistible. The noise and merriment were
at their height when the servant came in, and struck the whole party
dumb by the announcement of visitors in the drawing-room. “Mr.
Marrable, Mrs. Marrable, and Miss Marrable; Evergreen Lodge, Clifton.”
Norah rose as readily as if the new arrivals had been a relief to her
mind. Mrs. Vanstone was the next to leave her chair. These two went
away first, to receive the visitors. Magdalen, who preferred the
society of her father and Frank, pleaded hard to be left behind; but
Miss Garth, after granting five minutes’ grace, took her into custody
and marched her out of the room. Frank rose to take his leave.
“No, no,” said Mr. Vanstone, detaining him. “Don’t go. These people
won’t stop long. Mr. Marrable’s a merchant at Bristol. I’ve met him
once or twice, when the girls forced me to take them to parties at
Clifton. Mere acquaintances, nothing more. Come and smoke a cigar in
the greenhouse. Hang all visitors—they worry one’s life out. I’ll
appear at the last moment with an apology; and you shall follow me at a
safe distance, and be a proof that I was really engaged.”
Proposing this ingenious stratagem in a confidential whisper, Mr.
Vanstone took Frank’s arm and led him round the house by the back way.
The first ten minutes of seclusion in the conservatory passed without
events of any kind. At the end of that time, a flying figure in bright
garments flashed upon the two gentlemen through the glass—the door was
flung open—flower-pots fell in homage to passing petticoats—and Mr.
Vanstone’s youngest daughter ran up to him at headlong speed, with
every external appearance of having suddenly taken leave of her senses.
“Papa! the dream of my whole life is realized,” she said, as soon as
she could speak. “I shall fly through the roof of the greenhouse if
somebody doesn’t hold me down. The Marrables have come here with an
invitation. Guess, you darling—guess what they’re going to give at
Evergreen Lodge!”
“A ball!” said Mr. Vanstone, without a moment’s hesitation.
“Private Theatricals!!!” cried Magdalen, her clear young voice ringing
through the conservatory like a bell; her loose sleeves falling back
and showing her round white arms to the dimpled elbows, as she clapped
her hands ecstatically in the air. “‘The Rivals’ is the play, papa—‘The
Rivals,’ by the famous what’s-his-name—and they want ME to act! The one
thing in the whole universe that I long to do most. It all depends on
you. Mamma shakes her head; and Miss Garth looks daggers; and Norah’s
as sulky as usual—but if you say Yes, they must all three give way and
let me do as I like. Say Yes,” she pleaded, nestling softly up to her
father, and pressing her lips with a fond gentleness to his ear, as she
whispered the next words. “Say Yes, and I’ll be a good girl for the
rest of my life.”
“A good girl?” repeated Mr. Vanstone—“a mad girl, I think you must
mean. Hang these people and their theatricals! I shall have to go
indoors and see about this matter. You needn’t throw away your cigar,
Frank. You’re well out of the business, and you can stop here.”
“No, he can’t,” said Magdalen. “He’s in the business, too.”
Mr. Francis Clare had hitherto remained modestly in the background. He
now came forward with a face expressive of speechless amazement.
“Yes,” continued Magdalen, answering his blank look of inquiry with
perfect composure. “You are to act. Miss Marrable and I have a turn for
business, and we settled it all in five minutes. There are two parts in
the play left to be filled. One is Lucy, the waiting-maid; which is the
character I have undertaken—with papa’s permission,” she added, slyly
pinching her father’s arm; “and he won’t say No, will he? First,
because he’s a darling; secondly, because I love him, and he loves me;
thirdly, because there is never any difference of opinion between us
(is there?); fourthly, because I give him a kiss, which naturally stops
his mouth and settles the whole question. Dear me, I’m wandering. Where
was I just now? Oh yes! explaining myself to Frank—”
“I beg your pardon,” began Frank, attempting, at this point, to enter
his protest.
“The second character in the play,” pursued Magdalen, without taking
the smallest notice of the protest, “is Falkland—a jealous lover, with
a fine flow of language. Miss Marrable and I discussed Falkland
privately on the window-seat while the rest were talking. She is a
delightful girl—so impulsive, so sensible, so entirely unaffected. She
confided in me. She said: ‘One of our miseries is that we can’t find a
gentleman who will grapple with the hideous difficulties of Falkland.’
Of course I soothed her. Of course I said: ‘I’ve got the gentleman, and
he shall grapple immediately.’—‘Oh heavens! who is he?’—‘Mr. Francis
Clare.’—‘And where is he?’—‘In the house at this moment.’—‘Will you be
so very charming, Miss Vanstone, as to fetch him?’—‘I’ll fetch him,
Miss Marrable, with the greatest pleasure.’ I left the window-seat—I
rushed into the morning-room—I smelled cigars—I followed the smell—and
here I am.”
“It’s a compliment, I know, to be asked to act,” said Frank, in great
embarrassment. “But I hope you and Miss Marrable will excuse me—”
“Certainly not. Miss Marrable and I are both remarkable for the
firmness of our characters. When we say Mr. So-and-So is positively to
act the part of Falkland, we positively mean it. Come in and be
introduced.”
“But I never tried to act. I don’t know how.”
“Not of the slightest consequence. If you don’t know how, come to me
and I’ll teach you.”
“You!” exclaimed Mr. Vanstone. “What do you know about it?”
“Pray, papa, be serious! I have the strongest internal conviction that
I could act every character in the play—Falkland included. Don’t let me
have to speak a second time, Frank. Come and be introduced.”
She took her father’s arm, and moved on with him to the door of the
greenhouse. At the steps, she turned and looked round to see if Frank
was following her. It was only the action of a moment; but in that
moment her natural firmness of will rallied all its
resources—strengthened itself with the influence of her beauty
—commanded—and conquered. She looked lovely: the flush was tenderly
bright in her cheeks; the radiant pleasure shone and sparkled in her
eyes; the position of her figure, turned suddenly from the waist
upward, disclosed its delicate strength, its supple firmness, its
seductive, serpentine grace. “Come!” she said, with a coquettish
beckoning action of her head. “Come, Frank!”
Few men of forty would have resisted her at that moment. Frank was
twenty last birthday. In other words, he threw aside his cigar, and
followed her out of the greenhouse.
As he turned and closed the door—in the instant when he lost sight of
her—his disinclination to be associated with the private theatricals
revived. At the foot of the house-steps he stopped again; plucked a
twig from a plant near him; broke it in his hand; and looked about him
uneasily, on this side and on that. The path to the left led back to
his father’s cottage—the way of escape lay open. Why not take it?
While he still hesitated, Mr. Vanstone and his daughter reached the top
of the steps. Once more, Magdalen looked round—looked with her
resistless beauty, with her all-conquering smile. She beckoned again;
and again he followed her—up the steps, and over the threshold. The
door closed on them.
So, with a trifling gesture of invitation on one side, with a trifling
act of compliance on the other: so—with no knowledge in his mind, with
no thought in hers, of the secret still hidden under the journey to
London—they took the way which led to that secret’s discovery, through
many a darker winding that was yet to come.
CHAPTER V.
Mr. Vanstone’s inquiries into the proposed theatrical entertainment at
Evergreen Lodge were answered by a narrative of dramatic disasters; of
which Miss Marrable impersonated the innocent cause, and in which her
father and mother played the parts of chief victims.
Miss Marrable was that hardest of all born tyrants—an only child. She
had never granted a constitutional privilege to her oppressed father
and mother since the time when she cut her first tooth. Her seventeenth
birthday was now near at hand; she had decided on celebrating it by
acting a play; had issued her orders accordingly; and had been obeyed
by her docile parents as implicitly as usual. Mrs. Marrable gave up the
drawing-room to be laid waste for a stage and a theater. Mr. Marrable
secured the services of a respectable professional person to drill the
young ladies and gentlemen, and to accept all the other
responsibilities incidental to creating a dramatic world out of a
domestic chaos. Having further accustomed themselves to the breaking of
furniture and the staining of walls—to thumping, tumbling, hammering,
and screaming; to doors always banging, and to footsteps perpetually
running up and down stairs—the nominal master and mistress of the house
fondly believed that their chief troubles were over. Innocent and fatal
delusion! It is one thing in private society to set up the stage and
choose the play—it is another thing altogether to find the actors.
Hitherto, only the small preliminary annoyances proper to the occasion
had shown themselves at Evergreen Lodge. The sound and serious troubles
were all to come.
“The Rivals” having been chosen as the play, Miss Marrable, as a matter
of course, appropriated to herself the part of “Lydia Languish.” One of
her favored swains next secured “Captain Absolute,” and another laid
violent hands on “Sir Lucius O’Trigger.” These two were followed by an
accommodating spinster relative, who accepted the heavy dramatic
responsibility of “Mrs. Malaprop”—and there the theatrical proceedings
came to a pause. Nine more speaking characters were left to be fitted
with representatives; and with that unavoidable necessity the serious
troubles began.
All the friends of the family suddenly became unreliable people, for
the first time in their lives. After encouraging the idea of the play,
they declined the personal sacrifice of acting in it—or, they accepted
characters, and then broke down in the effort to study them—or they
volunteered to take the parts which they knew were already engaged, and
declined the parts which were waiting to be acted—or they were
afflicted with weak constitutions, and mischievously fell ill when they
were wanted at rehearsal—or they had Puritan relatives in the
background, and, after slipping into their parts cheerfully at the
week’s beginning, oozed out of them penitently, under serious family
pressure, at the week’s end. Meanwhile, the carpenters hammered and the
scenes rose. Miss Marrable, whose temperament was sensitive, became
hysterical under the strain of perpetual anxiety; the family doctor
declined to answer for the nervous consequences if something was not
done. Renewed efforts were made in every direction. Actors and
actresses were sought with a desperate disregard of all considerations
of personal fitness. Necessity, which knows no law, either in the drama
or out of it, accepted a lad of eighteen as the representative of “Sir
Anthony Absolute”; the stage-manager undertaking to supply the
necessary wrinkles from the illimitable resources of theatrical art. A
lady whose age was unknown, and whose personal appearance was stout—but
whose heart was in the right place—volunteered to act the part of the
sentimental “Julia,” and brought with her the dramatic qualification of
habitually wearing a wig in private life. Thanks to these vigorous
measures, the play was at last supplied with representatives—always
excepting the two unmanageable characters of “Lucy” the waiting-maid,
and “Falkland,” Julia’s jealous lover. Gentlemen came; saw Julia at
rehearsal; observed her stoutness and her wig; omitted to notice that
her heart was in the right place; quailed at the prospect, apologized,
and retired. Ladies read the part of “Lucy”; remarked that she appeared
to great advantage in the first half of the play, and faded out of it
altogether in the latter half; objected to pass from the notice of the
audience in that manner, when all the rest had a chance of
distinguishing themselves to the end; shut up the book, apologized, and
retired. In eight days more the night of performance would arrive; a
phalanx of social martyrs two hundred strong had been convened to
witness it; three full rehearsals were absolutely necessary; and two
characters in the play were not filled yet. With this lamentable story,
and with the humblest apologies for presuming on a slight acquaintance,
the Marrables appeared at Combe-Raven, to appeal to the young ladies
for a “Lucy,” and to the universe for a “Falkland,” with the mendicant
pertinacity of a family in despair.
This statement of circumstances—addressed to an audience which included
a father of Mr. Vanstone’s disposition, and a daughter of Magdalen’s
temperament—produced the result which might have been anticipated from
the first.
Either misinterpreting, or disregarding, the ominous silence preserved
by his wife and Miss Garth, Mr. Vanstone not only gave Magdalen
permission to assist the forlorn dramatic company, but accepted an
invitation to witness the performance for Norah and himself. Mrs.
Vanstone declined accompanying them on account of her health; and Miss
Garth only engaged to make one among the audience conditionally on not
being wanted at home. The “parts” of “Lucy” and “Falkland” (which the
distressed family carried about with them everywhere, like incidental
maladies) were handed to their representatives on the spot. Frank’s
faint remonstrances were rejected without a hearing; the days and hours
of rehearsal were carefully noted down on the covers of the parts; and
the Marrables took their leave, with a perfect explosion of
thanks—father, mother, and daughter sowing their expressions of
gratitude broadcast, from the drawing-room door to the garden-gates.
As soon as the carriage had driven away, Magdalen presented herself to
the general observation under an entirely new aspect.
“If any more visitors call to-day,” she said, with the profoundest
gravity of look and manner, “I am not at home. This is a far more
serious matter than any of you suppose. Go somewhere by yourself,
Frank, and read over your part, and don’t let your attention wander if
you can possibly help it. I shall not be accessible before the evening.
If you will come here—with papa’s permission—after tea, my views on the
subject of Falkland will be at your disposal. Thomas! whatever else the
gardener does, he is not to make any floricultural noises under my
window. For the rest of the afternoon I shall be immersed in study—and
the quieter the house is, the more obliged I shall feel to everybody.”
Before Miss Garth’s battery of reproof could open fire, before the
first outburst of Mr. Vanstone’s hearty laughter could escape his lips,
she bowed to them with imperturbable gravity; ascended the house-steps,
for the first time in her life, at a walk instead of a run, and retired
then and there to the bedroom regions. Frank’s helpless astonishment at
her disappearance added a new element of absurdity to the scene. He
stood first on one leg and then on the other; rolling and unrolling his
part, and looking piteously in the faces of the friends about him. “I
know I can’t do it,” he said. “May I come in after tea, and hear
Magdalen’s views? Thank you—I’ll look in about eight. Don’t tell my
father about this acting, please; I should never hear the last of it.”
Those were the only words he had spirit enough to utter. He drifted
away aimlessly in the direction of the shrubbery, with the part hanging
open in his hand—the most incapable of Falklands, and the most helpless
of mankind.
Frank’s departure left the family by themselves, and was the signal
accordingly for an attack on Mr. Vanstone’s inveterate carelessness in
the exercise of his paternal authority.
“What could you possibly be thinking of, Andrew, when you gave your
consent?” said Mrs. Vanstone. “Surely my silence was a sufficient
warning to you to say No?”
“A mistake, Mr. Vanstone,” chimed in Miss Garth. “Made with the best
intentions—but a mistake for all that.”
“It may be a mistake,” said Norah, taking her father’s part, as usual.
“But I really don’t see how papa, or any one else, could have declined,
under the circumstances.”
“Quite right, my dear,” observed Mr. Vanstone. “The circumstances, as
you say, were dead against me. Here were these unfortunate people in a
scrape on one side; and Magdalen, on the other, mad to act. I couldn’t
say I had methodistical objections—I’ve nothing methodistical about me.
What other excuse could I make? The Marrables are respectable people,
and keep the best company in Clifton. What harm can she get in their
house? If you come to prudence and that sort of thing—why shouldn’t
Magdalen do what Miss Marrable does? There! there! let the poor things
act, and amuse themselves. We were their age once—and it’s no use
making a fuss—and that’s all I’ve got to say about it.”
With that characteristic defense of his own conduct, Mr. Vanstone
sauntered back to the greenhouse to smoke another cigar.
“I didn’t say so to papa,” said Norah, taking her mother’s arm on the
way back to the house, “but the bad result of the acting, in my
opinion, will be the familiarity it is sure to encourage between
Magdalen and Francis Clare.”
“You are prejudiced against Frank, my love,” said Mrs. Vanstone.
Norah’s soft, secret, hazel eyes sank to the ground; she said no more.
Her opinions were unchangeable—but she never disputed with anybody. She
had the great failing of a reserved nature—the failing of obstinacy;
and the great merit—the merit of silence. “What is your head running on
now?” thought Miss Garth, casting a sharp look at Norah’s dark,
downcast face. “You’re one of the impenetrable sort. Give me Magdalen,
with all her perversities; I can see daylight through her. You’re as
dark as night.”
The hours of the afternoon passed away, and still Magdalen remained
shut up in her own room. No restless footsteps pattered on the stairs;
no nimble tongue was heard chattering here, there, and everywhere, from
the garret to the kitchen—the house seemed hardly like itself, with the
one ever-disturbing element in the family serenity suddenly withdrawn
from it. Anxious to witness with her own eyes the reality of a
transformation in which past experience still inclined her to
disbelieve, Miss Garth ascended to Magdalen’s room, knocked twice at
the door, received no answer, opened it and looked in.
There sat Magdalen, in an arm-chair before the long looking-glass, with
all her hair let down over her shoulders; absorbed in the study of her
part and comfortably arrayed in her morning wrapper, until it was time
to dress for dinner. And there behind her sat the lady’s-maid, slowly
combing out the long heavy locks of her young mistress’s hair, with the
sleepy resignation of a woman who had been engaged in that employment
for some hours past. The sun was shining; and the green shutters
outside the window were closed. The dim light fell tenderly on the two
quiet seated figures; on the little white bed, with the knots of
rose-colored ribbon which looped up its curtains, and the bright dress
for dinner laid ready across it; on the gayly painted bath, with its
pure lining of white enamel; on the toilet-table with its sparkling
trinkets, its crystal bottles, its silver bell with Cupid for a handle,
its litter of little luxuries that adorn the shrine of a woman’s
bed-chamber. The luxurious tranquillity of the scene; the cool
fragrance of flowers and perfumes in the atmosphere; the rapt attitude
of Magdalen, absorbed over her reading; the monotonous regularity of
movement in the maid’s hand and arm, as she drew the comb smoothly
through and through her mistress’s hair—all conveyed the same soothing
impression of drowsy, delicious quiet. On one side of the door were the
broad daylight and the familiar realities of life. On the other was the
dream-land of Elysian serenity—the sanctuary of unruffled repose.
Miss Garth paused on the threshold, and looked into the room in
silence.
Magdalen’s curious fancy for having her hair combed at all times and
seasons was among the peculiarities of her character which were
notorious to everybody in the house. It was one of her father’s
favorite jokes that she reminded him, on such occasions, of a cat
having her back stroked, and that he always expected, if the combing
were only continued long enough, to hear her _purr_. Extravagant as it
may seem, the comparison was not altogether inappropriate. The girl’s
fervid temperament intensified the essentially feminine pleasure that
most women feel in the passage of the comb through their hair, to a
luxury of sensation which absorbed her in enjoyment, so serenely
self-demonstrative, so drowsily deep that it did irresistibly suggest a
pet cat’s enjoyment under a caressing hand. Intimately as Miss Garth
was acquainted with this peculiarity in her pupil, she now saw it
asserting itself for the first time, in association with mental
exertion of any kind on Magdalen’s part. Feeling, therefore, some
curiosity to know how long the combing and the studying had gone on
together, she ventured on putting the question, first to the mistress;
and (receiving no answer in that quarter) secondly to the maid.
“All the afternoon, miss, off and on,” was the weary answer. “Miss
Magdalen says it soothes her feelings and clears her mind.”
Knowing by experience that interference would be hopeless, under these
circumstances, Miss Garth turned sharply and left the room. She smiled
when she was outside on the landing. The female mind does
occasionally—though not often—project itself into the future. Miss
Garth was prophetically pitying Magdalen’s unfortunate husband.
Dinner-time presented the fair student to the family eye in the same
mentally absorbed aspect. On all ordinary occasions Magdalen’s appetite
would have terrified those feeble sentimentalists who affect to ignore
the all-important influence which female feeding exerts in the
production of female beauty. On this occasion she refused one dish
after another with a resolution which implied the rarest of all modern
martyrdoms—gastric martyrdom. “I have conceived the part of Lucy,” she
observed, with the demurest gravity. “The next difficulty is to make
Frank conceive the part of Falkland. I see nothing to laugh at—you
would all be serious enough if you had my responsibilities. No, papa—no
wine to-day, thank you. I must keep my intelligence clear. Water,
Thomas—and a little more jelly, I think, before you take it away.”
When Frank presented himself in the evening, ignorant of the first
elements of his part, she took him in hand, as a middle-aged
schoolmistress might have taken in hand a backward little boy. The few
attempts he made to vary the sternly practical nature of the evening’s
occupation by slipping in compliments sidelong she put away from her
with the contemptuous self-possession of a woman of twice her age. She
literally forced him into his part. Her father fell asleep in his
chair. Mrs. Vanstone and Miss Garth lost their interest in the
proceedings, retired to the further end of the room, and spoke together
in whispers. It grew later and later; and still Magdalen never flinched
from her task—still, with equal perseverance, Norah, who had been on
the watch all through the evening, kept on the watch to the end. The
distrust darkened and darkened on her face as she looked at her sister
and Frank; as she saw how close they sat together, devoted to the same
interest and working to the same end. The clock on the mantel-piece
pointed to half-past eleven before Lucy the resolute permitted Falkland
the helpless to shut up his task-book for the night. “She’s wonderfully
clever, isn’t she?” said Frank, taking leave of Mr. Vanstone at the
hall door. “I’m to come to-morrow, and hear more of her views—if you
have no objection. I shall never do it; don’t tell her I said so. As
fast as she teaches me one speech, the other goes out of my head.
Discouraging, isn’t it? Goodnight.”
The next day but one was the day of the first full rehearsal. On the
previous evening Mrs. Vanstone’s spirits had been sadly depressed. At a
private interview with Miss Garth she had referred again, of her own
accord, to the subject of her letter from London—had spoken
self-reproachfully of her weakness in admitting Captain Wragge’s
impudent claim to a family connection with her—and had then reverted to
the state of her health and to the doubtful prospect that awaited her
in the coming summer in a tone of despondency which it was very
distressing to hear. Anxious to cheer her spirits, Miss Garth had
changed the conversation as soon as possible—had referred to the
approaching theatrical performance—and had relieved Mrs. Vanstone’s
mind of all anxiety in that direction, by announcing her intention of
accompanying Magdalen to each rehearsal, and of not losing sight of her
until she was safely back again in her father’s house. Accordingly,
when Frank presented himself at Combe-Raven on the eventful morning,
there stood Miss Garth, prepared—in the interpolated character of
Argus—to accompany Lucy and Falkland to the scene of trial. The railway
conveyed the three, in excellent time, to Evergreen Lodge; and at one
o’clock the rehearsal began.
CHAPTER VI.
“I hope Miss Vanstone knows her part?” whispered Mrs. Marrable,
anxiously addressing herself to Miss Garth, in a corner of the theater.
“If airs and graces make an actress, ma’am, Magdalen’s performance will
astonish us all.” With that reply, Miss Garth took out her work, and
seated herself, on guard, in the center of the pit.
The manager perched himself, book in hand, on a stool close in front of
the stage. He was an active little man, of a sweet and cheerful temper;
and he gave the signal to begin with as patient an interest in the
proceedings as if they had caused him no trouble in the past and
promised him no difficulty in the future. The two characters which
opened the comedy of The Rivals, “Fag” and “The Coachman,” appeared on
the scene—looked many sizes too tall for their canvas background, which
represented a “Street in Bath”—exhibited the customary inability to
manage their own arms, legs, and voices—went out severally at the wrong
exits—and expressed their perfect approval of results, so far, by
laughing heartily behind the scenes. “Silence, gentlemen, if you
please,” remonstrated the cheerful manager. “As loud as you like _on_
the stage, but the audience mustn’t hear you _off_ it. Miss Marrable
ready? Miss Vanstone ready? Easy there with the ‘Street in Bath’; it’s
going up crooked! Face this way, Miss Marrable; full face, if you
please. Miss Vanstone—” he checked himself suddenly. “Curious,” he
said, under his breath—“she fronts the audience of her own accord!”
Lucy opened the scene in these words: “Indeed, ma’am, I traversed half
the town in search of it: I don’t believe there’s a circulating library
in Bath I haven’t been at.” The manager started in his chair. “My heart
alive! she speaks out without telling!” The dialogue went on. Lucy
produced the novels for Miss Lydia Languish’s private reading from
under her cloak. The manager rose excitably to his feet. Marvelous! No
hurry with the books; no dropping them. She looked at the titles before
she announced them to her mistress; she set down “Humphrey Clinker” on
“The Tears of Sensibility” with a smart little smack which pointed the
antithesis. One moment—and she announced Julia’s visit; another—and she
dropped the brisk waiting-maid’s courtesy; a third—and she was off the
stage on the side set down for her in the book. The manager wheeled
round on his stool, and looked hard at Miss Garth. “I beg your pardon,
ma’am,” he said. “Miss Marrable told me, before we began, that this was
the young lady’s first attempt. It can’t be, surely!”
“It is,” replied Miss Garth, reflecting the manager’s look of amazement
on her own face. Was it possible that Magdalen’s unintelligible
industry in the study of her part really sprang from a serious interest
in her occupation—an interest which implied a natural fitness for it?
The rehearsal went on. The stout lady with the wig (and the excellent
heart) personated the sentimental Julia from an inveterately tragic
point of view, and used her handkerchief distractedly in the first
scene. The spinster relative felt Mrs. Malaprop’s mistakes in language
so seriously, and took such extraordinary pains with her blunders, that
they sounded more like exercises in elocution than anything else. The
unhappy lad who led the forlorn hope of the company, in the person of
“Sir Anthony Absolute,” expressed the age and irascibility of his
character by tottering incessantly at the knees, and thumping the stage
perpetually with his stick. Slowly and clumsily, with constant
interruptions and interminable mistakes, the first act dragged on,
until Lucy appeared again to end it in soliloquy, with the confession
of her assumed simplicity and the praise of her own cunning.
Here the stage artifice of the situation presented difficulties which
Magdalen had not encountered in the first scene—and here, her total
want of experience led her into more than one palpable mistake. The
stage-manager, with an eagerness which he had not shown in the case of
any other member of the company, interfered immediately, and set her
right. At one point she was to pause, and take a turn on the stage—she
did it. At another, she was to stop, toss her head, and look pertly at
the audience—she did it. When she took out the paper to read the list
of the presents she had received, could she give it a tap with her
finger (Yes)? And lead off with a little laugh (Yes—after twice
trying)? Could she read the different items with a sly look at the end
of each sentence, straight at the pit (Yes, straight at the pit, and as
sly as you please)? The manager’s cheerful face beamed with approval.
He tucked the play under his arm, and clapped his hands gayly; the
gentlemen, clustered together behind the scenes, followed his example;
the ladies looked at each other with dawning doubts whether they had
not better have left the new recruit in the retirement of private life.
Too deeply absorbed in the business of the stage to heed any of them,
Magdalen asked leave to repeat the soliloquy, and make quite sure of
her own improvement. She went all through it again without a mistake,
this time, from beginning to end; the manager celebrating her attention
to his directions by an outburst of professional approbation, which
escaped him in spite of himself. “She can take a hint!” cried the
little man, with a hearty smack of his hand on the prompt-book. “She’s
a born actress, if ever there was one yet!”
“I hope not,” said Miss Garth to herself, taking up the work which had
dropped into her lap, and looking down at it in some perplexity. Her
worst apprehension of results in connection with the theatrical
enterprise had foreboded levity of conduct with some of the
gentlemen—she had not bargained for this. Magdalen, in the capacity of
a thoughtless girl, was comparatively easy to deal with. Magdalen, in
the character of a born actress, threatened serious future
difficulties.
The rehearsal proceeded. Lucy returned to the stage for her scenes in
the second act (the last in which she appears) with Sir Lucius and Fag.
Here, again, Magdalen’s inexperience betrayed itself—and here once more
her resolution in attacking and conquering her own mistakes astonished
everybody. “Bravo!” cried the gentlemen behind the scenes, as she
steadily trampled down one blunder after another. “Ridiculous!” said
the ladies, “with such a small part as hers.” “Heaven forgive me!”
thought Miss. Garth, coming round unwillingly to the general opinion.
“I almost wish we were Papists, and I had a convent to put her in
to-morrow.” One of Mr. Marrable’s servants entered the theater as that
desperate aspiration escaped the governess. She instantly sent the man
behind the scene with a message: “Miss Vanstone has done her part in
the rehearsal; request her to come here and sit by me.” The servant
returned with a polite apology: “Miss Vanstone’s kind love, and she
begs to be excused—she’s prompting Mr. Clare.” She prompted him to such
purpose that he actually got through his part. The performances of the
other gentlemen were obtrusively imbecile. Frank was just one degree
better—he was modestly incapable; and he gained by comparison. “Thanks
to Miss Vanstone,” observed the manager, who had heard the prompting.
“She pulled him through. We shall be flat enough at night, when the
drop falls on the second act, and the audience have seen the last of
her. It’s a thousand pities she hasn’t got a better part!”
“It’s a thousand mercies she’s no more to do than she has,” muttered
Miss Garth, overhearing him. “As things are, the people can’t well turn
her head with applause. She’s out of the play in the second act—that’s
one comfort!”
No well-regulated mind ever draws its inferences in a hurry; Miss
Garth’s mind was well regulated; therefore, logically speaking, Miss
Garth ought to have been superior to the weakness of rushing at
conclusions. She had committed that error, nevertheless, under present
circumstances. In plainer terms, the consoling reflection which had
just occurred to her assumed that the play had by this time survived
all its disasters, and entered on its long-deferred career of success.
The play had done nothing of the sort. Misfortune and the Marrable
family had not parted company yet.
When the rehearsal was over, nobody observed that the stout lady with
the wig privately withdrew herself from the company; and when she was
afterward missed from the table of refreshments, which Mr. Marrable’s
hospitality kept ready spread in a room near the theater, nobody
imagined that there was any serious reason for her absence. It was not
till the ladies and gentlemen assembled for the next rehearsal that the
true state of the case was impressed on the minds of the company. At
the appointed hour no Julia appeared. In her stead, Mrs. Marrable
portentously approached the stage, with an open letter in her hand. She
was naturally a lady of the mildest good breeding: she was mistress of
every bland conventionality in the English language—but disasters and
dramatic influences combined, threw even this harmless matron off her
balance at last. For the first time in her life Mrs. Marrable indulged
in vehement gesture, and used strong language. She handed the letter
sternly, at arms-length, to her daughter. “My dear,” she said, with an
aspect of awful composure, “we are under a Curse.” Before the amazed
dramatic company could petition for an explanation, she turned and left
the room. The manager’s professional eye followed her out
respectfully—he looked as if he approved of the exit, from a theatrical
point of view.
What new misfortune had befallen the play? The last and worst of all
misfortunes had assailed it. The stout lady had resigned her part.
Not maliciously. Her heart, which had been in the right place
throughout, remained inflexibly in the right place still. Her
explanation of the circumstances proved this, if nothing else did. The
letter began with a statement: She had overheard, at the last rehearsal
(quite unintentionally), personal remarks of which she was the subject.
They might, or might not, have had reference to her—Hair; and
her—Figure. She would not distress Mrs. Marrable by repeating them.
Neither would she mention names, because it was foreign to her nature
to make bad worse. The only course at all consistent with her own
self-respect was to resign her part. She inclosed it, accordingly, to
Mrs. Marrable, with many apologies for her presumption in undertaking a
youthful character, at—what a gentleman was pleased to term—her Age;
and with what two ladies were rude enough to characterize as her
disadvantages of—Hair, and—Figure. A younger and more attractive
representative of Julia would no doubt be easily found. In the
meantime, all persons concerned had her full forgiveness, to which she
would only beg leave to add her best and kindest wishes for the success
of the play.
In four nights more the play was to be performed. If ever any human
enterprise stood in need of good wishes to help it, that enterprise was
unquestionably the theatrical entertainment at Evergreen Lodge!
One arm-chair was allowed on the stage; and into that arm-chair Miss
Marrable sank, preparatory to a fit of hysterics. Magdalen stepped
forward at the first convulsion; snatched the letter from Miss
Marrable’s hand; and stopped the threatened catastrophe.
“She’s an ugly, bald-headed, malicious, middle-aged wretch!” said
Magdalen, tearing the letter into fragments, and tossing them over the
heads of the company. “But I can tell her one thing—she shan’t spoil
the play. I’ll act Julia.”
“Bravo!” cried the chorus of gentlemen—the anonymous gentleman who had
helped to do the mischief (otherwise Mr. Francis Clare) loudest of all.
“If you want the truth, I don’t shrink from owning it,” continued
Magdalen. “I’m one of the ladies she means. I said she had a head like
a mop, and a waist like a bolster. So she has.”
“I am the other lady,” added the spinster relative. “But I only said
she was too stout for the part.”
“I am the gentleman,” chimed in Frank, stimulated by the force of
example. “I said nothing—I only agreed with the ladies.”
Here Miss Garth seized her opportunity, and addressed the stage loudly
from the pit.
“Stop! Stop!” she said. “You can’t settle the difficulty that way. If
Magdalen plays Julia, who is to play Lucy?”
Miss Marrable sank back in the arm-chair, and gave way to the second
convulsion.
“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Magdalen, “the thing’s simple enough, I’ll
act Julia and Lucy both together.”
The manager was consulted on the spot. Suppressing Lucy’s first
entrance, and turning the short dialogue about the novels into a
soliloquy for Lydia Languish, appeared to be the only changes of
importance necessary to the accomplishment of Magdalen’s project.
Lucy’s two telling scenes, at the end of the first and second acts,
were sufficiently removed from the scenes in which Julia appeared to
give time for the necessary transformations in dress. Even Miss Garth,
though she tried hard to find them, could put no fresh obstacles in the
way. The question was settled in five minutes, and the rehearsal went
on; Magdalen learning Julia’s stage situations with the book in her
hand, and announcing afterward, on the journey home, that she proposed
sitting up all night to study the new part. Frank thereupon expressed
his fears that she would have no time left to help him through his
theatrical difficulties. She tapped him on the shoulder coquettishly
with her part. “You foolish fellow, how am I to do without you? You’re
Julia’s jealous lover; you’re always making Julia cry. Come to-night,
and make me cry at tea-time. You haven’t got a venomous old woman in a
wig to act with now. It’s _my_ heart you’re to break—and of course I
shall teach you how to do it.”
The four days’ interval passed busily in perpetual rehearsals, public
and private. The night of performance arrived; the guests assembled;
the great dramatic experiment stood on its trial. Magdalen had made the
most of her opportunities; she had learned all that the manager could
teach her in the time. Miss Garth left her when the overture began,
sitting apart in a corner behind the scenes, serious and silent, with
her smelling-bottle in one hand, and her book in the other, resolutely
training herself for the coming ordeal, to the very last.
The play began, with all the proper accompaniments of a theatrical
performance in private life; with a crowded audience, an African
temperature, a bursting of heated lamp-glasses, and a difficulty in
drawing up the curtain. “Fag” and “the Coachman,” who opened the scene,
took leave of their memories as soon as they stepped on the stage; left
half their dialogue unspoken; came to a dead pause; were audibly
entreated by the invisible manager to “come off”; and went off
accordingly, in every respect sadder and wiser men than when they went
on. The next scene disclosed Miss Marrable as “Lydia Languish,”
gracefully seated, very pretty, beautifully dressed, accurately
mistress of the smallest words in her part; possessed, in short, of
every personal resource—except her voice. The ladies admired, the
gentlemen applauded. Nobody heard anything but the words “Speak up,
miss,” whispered by the same voice which had already entreated “Fag”
and “the Coachman” to “come off.” A responsive titter rose among the
younger spectators; checked immediately by magnanimous applause. The
temperature of the audience was rising to Blood Heat—but the national
sense of fair play was not boiled out of them yet.
In the midst of the demonstration, Magdalen quietly made her first
entrance, as “Julia.” She was dressed very plainly in dark colors, and
wore her own hair; all stage adjuncts and alterations (excepting the
slightest possible touch of rouge on her cheeks) having been kept in
reserve to disguise her the more effectually in her second part. The
grace and simplicity of her costume, the steady self-possession with
which she looked out over the eager rows of faces before her, raised a
low hum of approval and expectation. She spoke—after suppressing a
momentary tremor—with a quiet distinctness of utterance which reached
all ears, and which at once confirmed the favorable impression that her
appearance had produced. The one member of the audience who looked at
her and listened to her coldly, was her elder sister. Before the
actress of the evening had been five minutes on the stage, Norah
detected, to her own indescribable astonishment, that Magdalen had
audaciously individualized the feeble amiability of “Julia’s”
character, by seizing no less a person than herself as the model to act
it by. She saw all her own little formal peculiarities of manner and
movement unblushingly reproduced—and even the very tone of her voice so
accurately mimicked from time to time, that the accents startled her as
if she was speaking herself, with an echo on the stage. The effect of
this cool appropriation of Norah’s identity to theatrical purposes on
the audience—who only saw results—asserted itself in a storm of
applause on Magdalen’s exit. She had won two incontestable triumphs in
her first scene. By a dexterous piece of mimicry, she had made a living
reality of one of the most insipid characters in the English drama; and
she had roused to enthusiasm an audience of two hundred exiles from the
blessings of ventilation, all simmering together in their own animal
heat. Under the circumstances, where is the actress by profession who
could have done much more?
But the event of the evening was still to come. Magdalen’s disguised
re-appearance at the end of the act, in the character of “Lucy”—with
false hair and false eyebrows, with a bright-red complexion and patches
on her cheeks, with the gayest colors flaunting in her dress, and the
shrillest vivacity of voice and manner—fairly staggered the audience.
They looked down at their programmes, in which the representative of
Lucy figured under an assumed name; looked up again at the stage;
penetrated the disguise; and vented their astonishment in another round
of applause, louder and heartier even than the last. Norah herself
could not deny this time that the tribute of approbation had been well
deserved. There, forcing its way steadily through all the faults of
inexperience—there, plainly visible to the dullest of the spectators,
was the rare faculty of dramatic impersonation, expressing itself in
every look and action of this girl of eighteen, who now stood on a
stage for the first time in her life. Failing in many minor requisites
of the double task which she had undertaken, she succeeded in the one
important necessity of keeping the main distinctions of the two
characters thoroughly apart. Everybody felt that the difficulty lay
here—everybody saw the difficulty conquered—everybody echoed the
manager’s enthusiasm at rehearsal, which had hailed her as a born
actress.
When the drop-scene descended for the first time, Magdalen had
concentrated in herself the whole interest and attraction of the play.
The audience politely applauded Miss Marrable, as became the guests
assembled in her father’s house: and good-humoredly encouraged the
remainder of the company, to help them through a task for which they
were all, more or less, palpably unfit. But, as the play proceeded,
nothing roused them to any genuine expression of interest when Magdalen
was absent from the scene. There was no disguising it: Miss Marrable
and her bosom friends had been all hopelessly cast in the shade by the
new recruit whom they had summoned to assist them, in the capacity of
forlorn hope. And this on Miss Marrable’s own birthday! and this in her
father’s house! and this after the unutterable sacrifices of six weeks
past! Of all the domestic disasters which the thankless theatrical
enterprise had inflicted on the Marrable family, the crowning
misfortune was now consummated by Magdalen’s success.
Leaving Mr. Vanstone and Norah, on the conclusion of the play, among
the guests in the supper-room, Miss Garth went behind the scenes;
ostensibly anxious to see if she could be of any use; really bent on
ascertaining whether Magdalen’s head had been turned by the triumphs of
the evening. It would not have surprised Miss Garth if she had
discovered her pupil in the act of making terms with the manager for
her forthcoming appearance in a public theater. As events really turned
out, she found Magdalen on the stage, receiving, with gracious smiles,
a card which the manager presented to her with a professional bow.
Noticing Miss Garth’s mute look of inquiry, the civil little man
hastened to explain that the card was his own, and that he was merely
asking the favor of Miss Vanstone’s recommendation at any future
opportunity.
“This is not the last time the young lady will be concerned in private
theatricals, I’ll answer for it,” said the manager. “And if a
superintendent is wanted on the next occasion, she has kindly promised
to say a good word for me. I am always to be heard of, miss, at that
address.” Saying those words, he bowed again, and discreetly
disappeared.
Vague suspicions beset the mind of Miss Garth, and urged her to insist
on looking at the card. No more harmless morsel of pasteboard was ever
passed from one hand to another. The card contained nothing but the
manager’s name, and, under it, the name and address of a theatrical
agent in London.
“It is not worth the trouble of keeping,” said Miss Garth.
Magdalen caught her hand before she could throw the card away—possessed
herself of it the next instant—and put it in her pocket.
“I promised to recommend him,” she said—“and that’s one reason for
keeping his card. If it does nothing else, it will remind me of the
happiest evening of my life—and that’s another. Come!” she cried,
throwing her arms round Miss Garth with a feverish gayety—“congratulate
me on my success!”
“I will congratulate you when you have got over it,” said Miss Garth.
In half an hour more Magdalen had changed her dress; had joined the
guests; and had soared into an atmosphere of congratulation high above
the reach of any controlling influence that Miss Garth could exercise.
Frank, dilatory in all his proceedings, was the last of the dramatic
company who left the precincts of the stage. He made no attempt to join
Magdalen in the supper-room—but he was ready in the hall with her cloak
when the carriages were called and the party broke up.
“Oh, Frank!” she said, looking round at him as he put the cloak on her
shoulders, “I am so sorry it’s all over! Come to-morrow morning, and
let’s talk about it by ourselves.”
“In the shrubbery at ten?” asked Frank, in a whisper.
She drew up the hood of her cloak and nodded to him gayly. Miss Garth,
standing near, noticed the looks that passed between them, though the
disturbance made by the parting guests prevented her from hearing the
words. There was a soft, underlying tenderness in Magdalen’s assumed
gayety of manner—there was a sudden thoughtfulness in her face, a
confidential readiness in her hand, as she took Frank’s arm and went
out to the carriage. What did it mean? Had her passing interest in him
as her stage-pupil treacherously sown the seeds of any deeper interest
in him, as a man? Had the idle theatrical scheme, now that it was all
over, graver results to answer for than a mischievous waste of time?
The lines on Miss Garth’s face deepened and hardened: she stood lost
among the fluttering crowd around her. Norah’s warning words, addressed
to Mrs. Vanstone in the garden, recurred to her memory—and now, for the
first time, the idea dawned on her that Norah had seen the consequences
in their true light.
CHAPTER VII.
Early the next morning Miss Garth and Norah met in the garden and spoke
together privately. The only noticeable result of the interview, when
they presented themselves at the breakfast-table, appeared in the
marked silence which they both maintained on the topic of the
theatrical performance. Mrs. Vanstone was entirely indebted to her
husband and to her youngest daughter for all that she heard of the
evening’s entertainment. The governess and the elder daughter had
evidently determined on letting the subject drop.
After breakfast was over Magdalen proved to be missing, when the ladies
assembled as usual in the morning-room. Her habits were so little
regular that Mrs. Vanstone felt neither surprise nor uneasiness at her
absence. Miss Garth and Norah looked at one another significantly, and
waited in silence. Two hours passed—and there were no signs of
Magdalen. Norah rose, as the clock struck twelve, and quietly left the
room to look for her.
She was not upstairs dusting her jewelry and disarranging her dresses.
She was not in the conservatory, not in the flower-garden; not in the
kitchen teasing the cook; not in the yard playing with the dogs. Had
she, by any chance, gone out with her father? Mr. Vanstone had
announced his intention, at the breakfast-table, of paying a morning
visit to his old ally, Mr. Clare, and of rousing the philosopher’s
sarcastic indignation by an account of the dramatic performance. None
of the other ladies at Combe-Raven ever ventured themselves inside the
cottage. But Magdalen was reckless enough for anything—and Magdalen
might have gone there. As the idea occurred to her, Norah entered the
shrubbery.
At the second turning, where the path among the trees wound away out of
sight of the house, she came suddenly face to face with Magdalen and
Frank: they were sauntering toward her, arm in arm, their heads close
together, their conversation apparently proceeding in whispers. They
looked suspiciously handsome and happy. At the sight of Norah both
started, and both stopped. Frank confusedly raised his hat, and turned
back in the direction of his father’s cottage. Magdalen advanced to
meet her sister, carelessly swinging her closed parasol from side to
side, carelessly humming an air from the overture which had preceded
the rising of the curtain on the previous night.
“Luncheon-time already!” she said, looking at her watch. “Surely not?”
“Have you and Mr. Francis Clare been alone in the shrubbery since ten
o’clock?” asked Norah.
“_Mr._ Francis Clare! How ridiculously formal you are. Why don’t you
call him Frank?”
“I asked you a question, Magdalen.”
“Dear me, how black you look this morning! I’m in disgrace, I suppose.
Haven’t you forgiven me yet for my acting last night? I couldn’t help
it, love; I should have made nothing of Julia, if I hadn’t taken you
for my model. It’s quite a question of Art. In your place, I should
have felt flattered by the selection.”
“In _your_ place, Magdalen, I should have thought twice before I
mimicked my sister to an audience of strangers.”
“That’s exactly why I did it—an audience of strangers. How were they to
know? Come! come! don’t be angry. You are eight years older than I
am—you ought to set me an example of good-humor.”
“I will set you an example of plain-speaking. I am more sorry than I
can say, Magdalen, to meet you as I met you here just now!”
“What next, I wonder? You meet me in the shrubbery at home, talking
over the private theatricals with my old playfellow, whom I knew when I
was no taller than this parasol. And that is a glaring impropriety, is
it? ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’ You wanted an answer a minute
ago—there it is for you, my dear, in the choicest Norman-French.”
“I am in earnest about this, Magdalen—”
“Not a doubt of it. Nobody can accuse you of ever making jokes.”
“I am seriously sorry—”
“Oh, dear!”
“It is quite useless to interrupt me. I have it on my conscience to
tell you—and I _will_ tell you—that I am sorry to see how this intimacy
is growing. I am sorry to see a secret understanding established
already between you and Mr. Francis Clare.”
“Poor Frank! How you do hate him, to be sure. What on earth has he done
to offend you?”
Norah’s self-control began to show signs of failing her. Her dark
cheeks glowed, her delicate lips trembled, before she spoke again.
Magdalen paid more attention to her parasol than to her sister. She
tossed it high in the air and caught it. “Once!” she said—and tossed it
up again. “Twice!”—and she tossed it higher. “Thrice—” Before she could
catch it for the third time, Norah seized her passionately by the arm,
and the parasol dropped to the ground between them.
“You are treating me heartlessly,” she said. “For shame, Magdalen—for
shame!”
The irrepressible outburst of a reserved nature, forced into open
self-assertion in its own despite, is of all moral forces the hardest
to resist. Magdalen was startled into silence. For a moment, the two
sisters—so strangely dissimilar in person and character—faced one
another, without a word passing between them. For a moment the deep
brown eyes of the elder and the light gray eyes of the younger looked
into each other with steady, unyielding scrutiny on either side.
Norah’s face was the first to change; Norah’s head was the first to
turn away. She dropped her sister’s arm in silence. Magdalen stooped
and picked up her parasol.
“I try to keep my temper,” she said, “and you call me heartless for
doing it. You always were hard on me, and you always will be.”
Norah clasped her trembling hands fast in each other. “Hard on you!”
she said, in low, mournful tones—and sighed bitterly.
Magdalen drew back a little, and mechanically dusted the parasol with
the end of her garden cloak.
“Yes!” she resumed, doggedly. “Hard on me and hard on Frank.”
“Frank!” repeated Norah, advancing on her sister and turning pale as
suddenly as she had turned red. “Do you talk of yourself and Frank as
if your interests were One already? Magdalen! if I hurt _you_, do I
hurt _him_? Is he so near and so dear to you as that?”
Magdalen drew further and further back. A twig from a tree near caught
her cloak; she turned petulantly, broke it off, and threw it on the
ground. “What right have you to question me?” she broke out on a
sudden. “Whether I like Frank, or whether I don’t, what interest is it
of yours?” As she said the words, she abruptly stepped forward to pass
her sister and return to the house.
Norah, turning paler and paler, barred the way to her. “If I hold you
by main force,” she said, “you shall stop and hear me. I have watched
this Francis Clare; I know him better than you do. He is unworthy of a
moment’s serious feeling on your part; he is unworthy of our dear,
good, kind-hearted father’s interest in him. A man with any principle,
any honor, any gratitude, would not have come back as he has come back,
disgraced—yes! disgraced by his spiritless neglect of his own duty. I
watched his face while the friend who has been better than a father to
him was comforting and forgiving him with a kindness he had not
deserved: I watched his face, and I saw no shame and no distress in
it—I saw nothing but a look of thankless, heartless relief. He is
selfish, he is ungrateful, he is ungenerous—he is only twenty, and he
has the worst failings of a mean old age already. And this is the man I
find you meeting in secret—the man who has taken such a place in your
favor that you are deaf to the truth about him, even from _my_ lips!
Magdalen! this will end ill. For God’s sake, think of what I have said
to you, and control yourself before it is too late!” She stopped,
vehement and breathless, and caught her sister anxiously by the hand.
Magdalen looked at her in unconcealed astonishment.
“You are so violent,” she said, “and so unlike yourself, that I hardly
know you. The more patient I am, the more hard words I get for my
pains. You have taken a perverse hatred to Frank; and you are
unreasonably angry with me because I won’t hate him, too. Don’t, Norah!
you hurt my hand.”
Norah pushed the hand from her contemptuously. “I shall never hurt your
heart,” she said; and suddenly turned her back on Magdalen as she spoke
the words.
There was a momentary pause. Norah kept her position. Magdalen looked
at her perplexedly—hesitated—then walked away by herself toward the
house.
At the turn in the shrubbery path she stopped and looked back uneasily.
“Oh, dear, dear!” she thought to herself, “why didn’t Frank go when I
told him?” She hesitated, and went back a few steps. “There’s Norah
standing on her dignity, as obstinate as ever.” She stopped again.
“What had I better do? I hate quarreling: I think I’ll make up.” She
ventured close to her sister and touched her on the shoulder. Norah
never moved. “It’s not often she flies into a passion,” thought
Magdalen, touching her again; “but when she does, what a time it lasts
her!—Come!” she said, “give me a kiss, Norah, and make it up. Won’t you
let me get at any part of you, my dear, but the back of your neck?
Well, it’s a very nice neck—it’s better worth kissing than mine—and
there the kiss is, in spite of you!”
She caught fast hold of Norah from behind, and suited the action to the
word, with a total disregard of all that had just passed, which her
sister was far from emulating. Hardly a minute since the warm
outpouring of Norah’s heart had burst through all obstacles. Had the
icy reserve frozen her up again already! It was hard to say. She never
spoke; she never changed her position—she only searched hurriedly for
her handkerchief. As she drew it out, there was a sound of approaching
footsteps in the inner recesses of the shrubbery. A Scotch terrier
scampered into view; and a cheerful voice sang the first lines of the
glee in “As You Like It.” “It’s papa!” cried Magdalen. “Come,
Norah—come and meet him.”
Instead of following her sister, Norah pulled down the veil of her
garden hat, turned in the opposite direction, and hurried back to the
house. She ran up to her own room and locked herself in. She was crying
bitterly.
CHAPTER VIII.
When Magdalen and her father met in the shrubbery Mr. Vanstone’s face
showed plainly that something had happened to please him since he had
left home in the morning. He answered the question which his daughter’s
curiosity at once addressed to him by informing her that he had just
come from Mr. Clare’s cottage; and that he had picked up, in that
unpromising locality, a startling piece of news for the family at
Combe-Raven.
On entering the philosopher’s study that morning, Mr. Vanstone had
found him still dawdling over his late breakfast, with an open letter
by his side, in place of the book which, on other occasions, lay ready
to his hand at meal-times. He held up the letter the moment his visitor
came into the room, and abruptly opened the conversation by asking Mr.
Vanstone if his nerves were in good order, and if he felt himself
strong enough for the shock of an overwhelming surprise.
“Nerves!” repeated Mr. Vanstone. “Thank God, I know nothing about my
nerves. If you have got anything to tell me, shock or no shock, out
with it on the spot.”
Mr. Clare held the letter a little higher, and frowned at his visitor
across the breakfast-table. “What have I always told you?” he asked,
with his sourest solemnity of look and manner.
“A great deal more than I could ever keep in my head,” answered Mr.
Vanstone.
“In your presence and out of it,” continued Mr. Clare, “I have always
maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern
society is—the enormous prosperity of Fools. Show me an individual
Fool, and I will show you an aggregate Society which gives that
highly-favored personage nine chances out of ten—and grudges the tenth
to the wisest man in existence. Look where you will, in every high
place there sits an Ass, settled beyond the reach of all the greatest
intellects in this world to pull him down. Over our whole social
system, complacent Imbecility rules supreme—snuffs out the searching
light of Intelligence with total impunity—and hoots, owl-like, in
answer to every form of protest, See how well we all do in the dark!
One of these days that audacious assertion will be practically
contradicted, and the whole rotten system of modern society will come
down with a crash.”
“God forbid!” cried Mr. Vanstone, looking about him as if the crash was
coming already.
“With a crash!” repeated Mr. Clare. “There is my theory, in few words.
Now for the remarkable application of it which this letter suggests.
Here is my lout of a boy—”
“You don’t mean that Frank has got another chance?” exclaimed Mr.
Vanstone.
“Here is this perfectly hopeless booby, Frank,” pursued the
philosopher. “He has never done anything in his life to help himself,
and, as a necessary consequence, Society is in a conspiracy to carry
him to the top of the tree. He has hardly had time to throw away that
chance you gave him before this letter comes, and puts the ball at his
foot for the second time. My rich cousin (who is intellectually fit to
be at the tail of the family, and who is, therefore, as a matter of
course, at the head of it) has been good enough to remember my
existence; and has offered his influence to serve my eldest boy. Read
his letter, and then observe the sequence of events. My rich cousin is
a booby who thrives on landed property; he has done something for
another booby who thrives on Politics, who knows a third booby who
thrives on Commerce, who can do something for a fourth booby, thriving
at present on nothing, whose name is Frank. So the mill goes. So the
cream of all human rewards is sipped in endless succession by the
Fools. I shall pack Frank off to-morrow. In course of time he’ll come
back again on our hands, like a bad shilling; more chances will fall in
his way, as a necessary consequence of his meritorious imbecility.
Years will go on—I may not live to see it, no more may you—it doesn’t
matter; Frank’s future is equally certain either way—put him into the
army, the Church, politics, what you please, and let him drift: he’ll
end in being a general, a bishop, or a minister of State, by dint of
the great modern qualification of doing nothing whatever to deserve his
place.” With this summary of his son’s worldly prospects, Mr. Clare
tossed the letter contemptuously across the table and poured himself
out another cup of tea.
Mr. Vanstone read the letter with eager interest and pleasure. It was
written in a tone of somewhat elaborate cordiality; but the practical
advantages which it placed at Frank’s disposal were beyond all doubt.
The writer had the means of using a friend’s interest—interest of no
ordinary kind—with a great Mercantile Firm in the City; and he had at
once exerted this influence in favor of Mr. Clare’s eldest boy. Frank
would be received in the office on a very different footing from the
footing of an ordinary clerk; he would be “pushed on” at every
available opportunity; and the first “good thing” the House had to
offer, either at home or abroad, would be placed at his disposal. If he
possessed fair abilities and showed common diligence in exercising
them, his fortune was made; and the sooner he was sent to London to
begin the better for his own interests it would be.
“Wonderful news!” cried Mr. Vanstone, returning the letter. “I’m
delighted—I must go back and tell them at home. This is fifty times the
chance that mine was. What the deuce do you mean by abusing Society?
Society has behaved uncommonly well, in my opinion. Where’s Frank?”
“Lurking,” said Mr. Clare. “It is one of the intolerable peculiarities
of louts that they always lurk. I haven’t seen _my_ lout this morning.
It you meet with him anywhere, give him a kick, and say I want him.”
Mr. Clare’s opinion of his son’s habits might have been expressed more
politely as to form; but, as to substance, it happened, on that
particular morning, to be perfectly correct. After leaving Magdalen,
Frank had waited in the shrubbery, at a safe distance, on the chance
that she might detach herself from her sister’s company, and join him
again. Mr. Vanstone’s appearance immediately on Norah’s departure,
instead of encouraging him to show himself, had determined him on
returning to the cottage. He walked back discontentedly; and so fell
into his father’s clutches, totally unprepared for the pending
announcement, in that formidable quarter, of his departure for London.
In the meantime, Mr. Vanstone had communicated his news—in the first
place, to Magdalen, and afterward, on getting back to the house, to his
wife and Miss Garth. He was too unobservant a man to notice that
Magdalen looked unaccountably startled, and Miss Garth unaccountably
relieved, by his announcement of Frank’s good fortune. He talked on
about it, quite unsuspiciously, until the luncheon-bell rang—and then,
for the first time, he noticed Norah’s absence. She sent a message
downstairs, after they had assembled at the table, to say that a
headache was keeping her in her own room. When Miss Garth went up
shortly afterward to communicate the news about Frank, Norah appeared,
strangely enough, to feel very little relieved by hearing it. Mr.
Francis Clare had gone away on a former occasion (she remarked), and
had come back. He might come back again, and sooner than they any of
them thought for. She said no more on the subject than this: she made
no reference to what had taken place in the shrubbery. Her
unconquerable reserve seemed to have strengthened its hold on her since
the outburst of the morning. She met Magdalen, later in the day, as if
nothing had happened: no formal reconciliation took place between them.
It was one of Norah’s peculiarities to shrink from all reconciliations
that were openly ratified, and to take her shy refuge in
reconciliations that were silently implied. Magdalen saw plainly, in
her look and manner, that she had made her first and last protest.
Whether the motive was pride, or sullenness, or distrust of herself, or
despair of doing good, the result was not to be mistaken—Norah had
resolved on remaining passive for the future.
Later in the afternoon, Mr. Vanstone suggested a drive to his eldest
daughter, as the best remedy for her headache. She readily consented to
accompany her father; who thereupon proposed, as usual, that Magdalen
should join them. Magdalen was nowhere to be found. For the second time
that day she had wandered into the grounds by herself. On this
occasion, Miss Garth—who, after adopting Norah’s opinions, had passed
from the one extreme of over-looking Frank altogether, to the other
extreme of believing him capable of planning an elopement at five
minutes’ notice—volunteered to set forth immediately, and do her best
to find the missing young lady. After a prolonged absence, she returned
unsuccessful—with the strongest persuasion in her own mind that
Magdalen and Frank had secretly met one another somewhere, but without
having discovered the smallest fragment of evidence to confirm her
suspicions. By this time the carriage was at the door, and Mr. Vanstone
was unwilling to wait any longer. He and Norah drove away together; and
Mrs. Vanstone and Miss Garth sat at home over their work.
In half an hour more, Magdalen composedly walked into the room. She was
pale and depressed. She received Miss Garth’s remonstrances with a
weary inattention; explained carelessly that she had been wandering in
the wood; took up some books, and put them down again; sighed
impatiently, and went away upstairs to her own room.
“I think Magdalen is feeling the reaction, after yesterday,” said Mrs.
Vanstone, quietly. “It is just as we thought. Now the theatrical
amusements are all over, she is fretting for more.”
Here was an opportunity of letting in the light of truth on Mrs.
Vanstone’s mind, which was too favorable to be missed. Miss Garth
questioned her conscience, saw her chance, and took it on the spot.
“You forget,” she rejoined, “that a certain neighbor of ours is going
away to-morrow. Shall I tell you the truth? Magdalen is fretting over
the departure of Francis Clare.”
Mrs. Vanstone looked up from her work with a gentle, smiling surprise.
“Surely not?” she said. “It is natural enough that Frank should be
attracted by Magdalen; but I can’t think that Magdalen returns the
feeling. Frank is so very unlike her; so quiet and undemonstrative; so
dull and helpless, poor fellow, in some things. He is handsome, I know,
but he is so singularly unlike Magdalen, that I can’t think it
possible—I can’t indeed.”
“My dear good lady!” cried Miss Garth, in great amazement; “do you
really suppose that people fall in love with each other on account of
similarities in their characters? In the vast majority of cases, they
do just the reverse. Men marry the very last women, and women the very
last men, whom their friends would think it possible they could care
about. Is there any phrase that is oftener on all our lips than ‘What
can have made Mr. So-and-So marry that woman?’—or ‘How could Mrs.
So-and-So throw herself away on that man?’ Has all your experience of
the world never yet shown you that girls take perverse fancies for men
who are totally unworthy of them?”
“Very true,” said Mrs. Vanstone, composedly. “I forgot that. Still it
seems unaccountable, doesn’t it?”
“Unaccountable, because it happens every day!” retorted Miss Garth,
good-humoredly. “I know a great many excellent people who reason
against plain experience in the same way—who read the newspapers in the
morning, and deny in the evening that there is any romance for writers
or painters to work upon in modern life. Seriously, Mrs. Vanstone, you
may take my word for it—thanks to those wretched theatricals, Magdalen
is going the way with Frank that a great many young ladies have gone
before her. He is quite unworthy of her; he is, in almost every
respect, her exact opposite—and, without knowing it herself, she has
fallen in love with him on that very account. She is resolute and
impetuous, clever and domineering; she is not one of those model women
who want a man to look up to, and to protect them—her beau-ideal
(though she may not think it herself) is a man she can henpeck. Well!
one comfort is, there are far better men, even of that sort, to be had
than Frank. It’s a mercy he is going away, before we have more trouble
with them, and before any serious mischief is done.”
“Poor Frank!” said Mrs. Vanstone, smiling compassionately. “We have
known him since he was in jackets, and Magdalen in short frocks. Don’t
let us give him up yet. He may do better this second time.”
Miss Garth looked up in astonishment.
“And suppose he does better?” she asked. “What then?”
Mrs. Vanstone cut off a loose thread in her work, and laughed outright.
“My good friend,” she said, “there is an old farmyard proverb which
warns us not to count our chickens before they are hatched. Let us wait
a little before we count ours.”
It was not easy to silence Miss Garth, when she was speaking under the
influence of a strong conviction; but this reply closed her lips. She
resumed her work, and looked, and thought, unutterable things.
Mrs. Vanstone’s behavior was certainly remarkable under the
circumstances. Here, on one side, was a girl—with great personal
attractions, with rare pecuniary prospects, with a social position
which might have justified the best gentleman in the neighborhood in
making her an offer of marriage—perversely casting herself away on a
penniless idle young fellow, who had failed at his first start in life,
and who even if he succeeded in his second attempt, must be for years
to come in no position to marry a young lady of fortune on equal terms.
And there, on the other side, was that girl’s mother, by no means
dismayed at the prospect of a connection which was, to say the least of
it, far from desirable; by no means certain, judging her by her own
words and looks, that a marriage between Mr. Vanstone’s daughter and
Mr. Clare’s son might not prove to be as satisfactory a result of the
intimacy between the two young people as the parents on both sides
could possibly wish for! It was perplexing in the extreme. It was
almost as unintelligible as that past mystery—that forgotten mystery
now—of the journey to London.
In the evening, Frank made his appearance, and announced that his
father had mercilessly sentenced him to leave Combe-Raven by the
parliamentary train the next morning. He mentioned this circumstance
with an air of sentimental resignation; and listened to Mr. Vanstone’s
boisterous rejoicings over his new prospects with a mild and mute
surprise. His gentle melancholy of look and manner greatly assisted his
personal advantages. In his own effeminate way he was more handsome
than ever that evening. His soft brown eyes wandered about the room
with a melting tenderness; his hair was beautifully brushed; his
delicate hands hung over the arms of his chair with a languid grace. He
looked like a convalescent Apollo. Never, on any previous occasion, had
he practiced more successfully the social art which he habitually
cultivated—the art of casting himself on society in the character of a
well-bred Incubus, and conferring an obligation on his fellow-creatures
by allowing them to sit under him. It was undeniably a dull evening.
All the talking fell to the share of Mr. Vanstone and Miss Garth. Mrs.
Vanstone was habitually silent; Norah kept herself obstinately in the
background; Magdalen was quiet and undemonstrative beyond all former
precedent. From first to last, she kept rigidly on her guard. The few
meaning looks that she cast on Frank flashed at him like lightning, and
were gone before any one else could see them. Even when she brought him
his tea; and when, in doing so, her self-control gave way under the
temptation which no woman can resist—the temptation of touching the man
she loves—even then, she held the saucer so dexterously that it
screened her hand. Frank’s self-possession was far less steadily
disciplined: it only lasted as long as he remained passive. When he
rose to go; when he felt the warm, clinging pressure of Magdalen’s
fingers round his hand, and the lock of her hair which she slipped into
it at the same moment, he became awkward and confused. He might have
betrayed Magdalen and betrayed himself, but for Mr. Vanstone, who
innocently covered his retreat by following him out, and patting him on
the shoulder all the way. “God bless you, Frank!” cried the friendly
voice that never had a harsh note in it for anybody. “Your fortune’s
waiting for you. Go in, my boy—go in and win.”
“Yes,” said Frank. “Thank you. It will be rather difficult to go in and
win, at first. Of course, as you have always told me, a man’s business
is to conquer his difficulties, and not to talk about them. At the same
time, I wish I didn’t feel quite so loose as I do in my figures. It’s
discouraging to feel loose in one’s figures.—Oh, yes; I’ll write and
tell you how I get on. I’m very much obliged by your kindness, and very
sorry I couldn’t succeed with the engineering. I think I should have
liked engineering better than trade. It can’t be helped now, can it?
Thank you, again. Good-by.”
So he drifted away into the misty commercial future—as aimless, as
helpless, as gentleman-like as ever.
CHAPTER IX.
Three months passed. During that time Frank remained in London;
pursuing his new duties, and writing occasionally to report himself to
Mr. Vanstone, as he had promised.
His letters were not enthusiastic on the subject of mercantile
occupations. He described himself as being still painfully loose in his
figures. He was also more firmly persuaded than ever—now when it was
unfortunately too late—that he preferred engineering to trade. In spite
of this conviction; in spite of headaches caused by sitting on a high
stool and stooping over ledgers in unwholesome air; in spite of want of
society, and hasty breakfasts, and bad dinners at chop-houses, his
attendance at the office was regular, and his diligence at the desk
unremitting. The head of the department in which he was working might
be referred to if any corroboration of this statement was desired. Such
was the general tenor of the letters; and Frank’s correspondent and
Frank’s father differed over them as widely as usual. Mr. Vanstone
accepted them as proofs of the steady development of industrious
principles in the writer. Mr. Clare took his own characteristically
opposite view. “These London men,” said the philosopher, “are not to be
trifled with by louts. They have got Frank by the scruff of the neck—he
can’t wriggle himself free—and he makes a merit of yielding to sheer
necessity.”
The three months’ interval of Frank’s probation in London passed less
cheerfully than usual in the household at Combe-Raven.
As the summer came nearer and nearer, Mrs. Vanstone’s spirits, in spite
of her resolute efforts to control them, became more and more
depressed.
“I do my best,” she said to Miss Garth; “I set an example of
cheerfulness to my husband and my children—but I dread July.” Norah’s
secret misgivings on her sister’s account rendered her more than
usually serious and uncommunicative, as the year advanced. Even Mr.
Vanstone, when July drew nearer, lost something of his elasticity of
spirit. He kept up appearances in his wife’s presence—but on all other
occasions there was now a perceptible shade of sadness in his look and
manner. Magdalen was so changed since Frank’s departure that she helped
the general depression, instead of relieving it. All her movements had
grown languid; all her usual occupations were pursued with the same
weary indifference; she spent hours alone in her own room; she lost her
interest in being brightly and prettily dressed; her eyes were heavy,
her nerves were irritable, her complexion was altered visibly for the
worse—in one word, she had become an oppression and a weariness to
herself and to all about her. Stoutly as Miss Garth contended with
these growing domestic difficulties, her own spirits suffered in the
effort. Her memory reverted, oftener and oftener, to the March morning
when the master and mistress of the house had departed for London, and
then the first serious change, for many a year past, had stolen over
the family atmosphere. When was that atmosphere to be clear again? When
were the clouds of change to pass off before the returning sunshine of
past and happier times?
The spring and the early summer wore away. The dreaded month of July
came, with its airless nights, its cloudless mornings, and its sultry
days.
On the fifteenth of the month, an event happened which took every one
but Norah by surprise. For the second time, without the slightest
apparent reason—for the second time, without a word of warning
beforehand—Frank suddenly re-appeared at his father’s cottage.
Mr. Clare’s lips opened to hail his son’s return, in the old character
of the “bad shilling”; and closed again without uttering a word. There
was a portentous composure in Frank’s manner which showed that he had
other news to communicate than the news of his dismissal. He answered
his father’s sardonic look of inquiry by at once explaining that a very
important proposal for his future benefit had been made to him, that
morning, at the office. His first idea had been to communicate the
details in writing; but the partners had, on reflection, thought that
the necessary decision might be more readily obtained by a personal
interview with his father and his friends. He had laid aside the pen
accordingly, and had resigned himself to the railway on the spot.
After this preliminary statement, Frank proceeded to describe the
proposal which his employers had addressed to him, with every external
appearance of viewing it in the light of an intolerable hardship.
The great firm in the City had obviously made a discovery in relation
to their clerk, exactly similar to the discovery which had formerly
forced itself on the engineer in relation to his pupil. The young man,
as they politely phrased it, stood in need of some special stimulant to
stir him up. His employers (acting under a sense of their obligation to
the gentleman by whom Frank had been recommended) had considered the
question carefully, and had decided that the one promising use to which
they could put Mr. Francis Clare was to send him forthwith into another
quarter of the globe.
As a consequence of this decision, it was now, therefore, proposed that
he should enter the house of their correspondents in China; that he
should remain there, familiarizing himself thoroughly on the spot with
the tea trade and the silk trade for five years; and that he should
return, at the expiration of this period, to the central establishment
in London. If he made a fair use of his opportunities in China, he
would come back, while still a young man, fit for a position of trust
and emolument, and justified in looking forward, at no distant date, to
a time when the House would assist him to start in business for
himself. Such were the new prospects which—to adopt Mr. Clare’s
theory—now forced themselves on the ever-reluctant, ever-helpless and
ever-ungrateful Frank. There was no time to be lost. The final answer
was to be at the office on “Monday, the twentieth”: the correspondents
in China were to be written to by the mail on that day; and Frank was
to follow the letter by the next opportunity, or to resign his chance
in favor of some more enterprising young man.
Mr. Clare’s reception of this extraordinary news was startling in the
extreme. The glorious prospect of his son’s banishment to China
appeared to turn his brain. The firm pedestal of his philosophy sank
under him; the prejudices of society recovered their hold on his mind.
He seized Frank by the arm, and actually accompanied him to
Combe-Raven, in the amazing character of visitor to the house!
“Here I am with my lout,” said Mr. Clare, before a word could be
uttered by the astonished family. “Hear his story, all of you. It has
reconciled me, for the first time in my life, to the anomaly of his
existence.” Frank ruefully narrated the Chinese proposal for the second
time, and attempted to attach to it his own supplementary statement of
objections and difficulties. His father stopped him at the first word,
pointed peremptorily southeastward (from Somersetshire to China); and
said, without an instant’s hesitation: “Go!” Mr. Vanstone, basking in
golden visions of his young friend’s future, echoed that monosyllabic
decision with all his heart. Mrs. Vanstone, Miss Garth, even Norah
herself, spoke to the same purpose. Frank was petrified by an absolute
unanimity of opinion which he had not anticipated; and Magdalen was
caught, for once in her life, at the end of all her resources.
So far as practical results were concerned, the sitting of the family
council began and ended with the general opinion that Frank must go.
Mr. Vanstone’s faculties were so bewildered by the son’s sudden
arrival, the father’s unexpected visit, and the news they both brought
with them, that he petitioned for an adjournment before the necessary
arrangements connected with his young friend’s departure were
considered in detail. “Suppose we all sleep upon it?” he said.
“Tomorrow our heads will feel a little steadier; and to-morrow will be
time enough to decide all uncertainties.” This suggestion was readily
adopted; and all further proceedings stood adjourned until the next
day.
That next day was destined to decide more uncertainties than Mr.
Vanstone dreamed of.
Early in the morning, after making tea by herself as usual, Miss Garth
took her parasol and strolled into the garden. She had slept ill; and
ten minutes in the open air before the family assembled at breakfast
might help to compensate her, as she thought, for the loss of her
night’s rest.
She wandered to the outermost boundary of the flower-garden, and then
returned by another path, which led back, past the side of an
ornamental summer-house commanding a view over the fields from a corner
of the lawn. A slight noise—like, and yet not like, the chirruping of a
bird—caught her ear as she approached the summer-house. She stepped
round to the entrance; looked in; and discovered Magdalen and Frank
seated close together. To Miss Garth’s horror, Magdalen’s arm was
unmistakably round Frank’s neck; and, worse still, the position of her
face, at the moment of discovery, showed beyond all doubt that she had
just been offering to the victim of Chinese commerce the first and
foremost of all the consolations which a woman can bestow on a man. In
plainer words, she had just given Frank a kiss.
In the presence of such an emergency as now confronted her, Miss Garth
felt instinctively that all ordinary phrases of reproof would be
phrases thrown away.
“I presume,” she remarked, addressing Magdalen with the merciless
self-possession of a middle-aged lady, unprovided for the occasion with
any kissing remembrances of her own—“I presume (whatever excuses your
effrontery may suggest) you will not deny that my duty compels me to
mention what I have just seen to your father?”
“I will save you the trouble,” replied Magdalen, composedly. “I will
mention it to him myself.”
With those words, she looked round at Frank, standing trebly helpless
in a corner of the summer-house. “You shall hear what happens,” she
said, with her bright smile. “And so shall you,” she added for Miss
Garth’s especial benefit, as she sauntered past the governess on her
way back to the breakfast-table. The eyes of Miss Garth followed her
indignantly; and Frank slipped out on his side at that favorable
opportunity.
Under these circumstances, there was but one course that any
respectable woman could take—she could only shudder. Miss Garth
registered her protest in that form, and returned to the house.
When breakfast was over, and when Mr. Vanstone’s hand descended to his
pocket in search of his cigar-case, Magdalen rose; looked significantly
at Miss Garth; and followed her father into the hall.
“Papa,” she said, “I want to speak to you this morning—in private.”
“Ay! ay!” returned Mr. Vanstone. “What about, my dear!”
“About—” Magdalen hesitated, searching for a satisfactory form of
expression, and found it. “About business, papa,” she said.
Mr. Vanstone took his garden hat from the hall table—opened his eyes in
mute perplexity—attempted to associate in his mind the two
extravagantly dissimilar ideas of Magdalen and “business”—failed—and
led the way resignedly into the garden.
His daughter took his arm, and walked with him to a shady seat at a
convenient distance from the house. She dusted the seat with her smart
silk apron before her father occupied it. Mr. Vanstone was not
accustomed to such an extraordinary act of attention as this. He sat
down, looking more puzzled than ever. Magdalen immediately placed
herself on his knee, and rested her head comfortably on his shoulder.
“Am I heavy, papa?” she asked.
“Yes, my dear, you are,” said Mr. Vanstone—“but not too heavy for _me_.
Stop on your perch, if you like it. Well? And what may this business
happen to be?”
“It begins with a question.”
“Ah, indeed? That doesn’t surprise me. Business with your sex, my dear,
always begins with questions. Go on.”
“Papa! do you ever intend allowing me to be married?”
Mr. Vanstone’s eyes opened wider and wider. The question, to use his
own phrase, completely staggered him.
“This is business with a vengeance!” he said. “Why, Magdalen! what have
you got in that harum-scarum head of yours now?”
“I don’t exactly know, papa. Will you answer my question?”
“I will if I can, my dear; you rather stagger me. Well, I don’t know.
Yes; I suppose I must let you be married one of these days—if we can
find a good husband for you. How hot your face is! Lift it up, and let
the air blow over it. You won’t? Well—have your own way. If talking of
business means tickling your cheek against my whisker I’ve nothing to
say against it. Go on, my dear. What’s the next question? Come to the
point.”
She was far too genuine a woman to do anything of the sort. She skirted
round the point and calculated her distance to the nicety of a
hair-breadth.
“We were all very much surprised yesterday—were we not, papa? Frank is
wonderfully lucky, isn’t he?”
“He’s the luckiest dog I ever came across,” said Mr. Vanstone “But what
has that got to do with this business of yours? I dare say you see your
way, Magdalen. Hang me if I can see mine!”
She skirted a little nearer.
“I suppose he will make his fortune in China?” she said. “It’s a long
way off, isn’t it? Did you observe, papa, that Frank looked sadly out
of spirits yesterday?”
“I was so surprised by the news,” said Mr. Vanstone, “and so staggered
by the sight of old Clare’s sharp nose in my house, that I didn’t much
notice. Now you remind me of it—yes. I don’t think Frank took kindly to
his own good luck; not kindly at all.”
“Do you wonder at that, papa?”
“Yes, my dear; I do, rather.”
“Don’t you think it’s hard to be sent away for five years, to make your
fortune among hateful savages, and lose sight of your friends at home
for all that long time? Don’t you think Frank will miss _us_ sadly?
Don’t you, papa?—don’t you?”
“Gently, Magdalen! I’m a little too old for those long arms of yours to
throttle me in fun.—You’re right, my love. Nothing in this world
without a drawback. Frank _will_ miss his friends in England: there’s
no denying that.”
“You always liked Frank. And Frank always liked you.”
“Yes, yes—a good fellow; a quiet, good fellow. Frank and I have always
got on smoothly together.”
“You have got on like father and son, haven’t you?”
“Certainly, my dear.”
“Perhaps you will think it harder on him when he has gone than you
think it now?”
“Likely enough, Magdalen; I don’t say no.”
“Perhaps you will wish he had stopped in England? Why shouldn’t he stop
in England, and do as well as if he went to China?”
“My dear! he has no prospects in England. I wish he had, for his own
sake. I wish the lad well, with all my heart.”
“May I wish him well too, papa—with all _my_ heart?”
“Certainly, my love—your old playfellow—why not? What’s the matter? God
bless my soul, what is the girl crying about? One would think Frank was
transported for life. You goose! You know, as well as I do, he is going
to China to make his fortune.”
“He doesn’t want to make his fortune—he might do much better.”
“The deuce he might! How, I should like to know?”
“I’m afraid to tell you. I’m afraid you’ll laugh at me. Will you
promise not to laugh at me?”
“Anything to please you, my dear. Yes: I promise. Now, then, out with
it! How might Frank do better?”
“He might marry Me.”
If the summer scene which then spread before Mr. Vanstone’s eyes had
suddenly changed to a dreary winter view—if the trees had lost all
their leaves, and the green fields had turned white with snow in an
instant—his face could hardly have expressed greater amazement than it
displayed when his daughter’s faltering voice spoke those four last
words. He tried to look at her—but she steadily refused him the
opportunity: she kept her face hidden over his shoulder. Was she in
earnest? His cheek, still wet with her tears, answered for her. There
was a long pause of silence; she waited—with unaccustomed patience, she
waited for him to speak. He roused himself, and spoke these words only:
“You surprise me, Magdalen; you surprise me more than I can say.”
At the altered tone of his voice—altered to a quiet, fatherly
seriousness—Magdalen’s arms clung round him closer than before.
“Have I disappointed you, papa?” she asked, faintly. “Don’t say I have
disappointed you! Who am I to tell my secret to, if not to you? Don’t
let him go—don’t! don’t! You will break his heart. He is afraid to tell
his father; he is even afraid _you_ might be angry with him. There is
nobody to speak for us, except—except me. Oh, don’t let him go! Don’t
for his sake—” she whispered the next words in a kiss—“Don’t for Mine!”
Her father’s kind face saddened; he sighed, and patted her fair head
tenderly. “Hush, my love,” he said, almost in a whisper; “hush!” She
little knew what a revelation every word, every action that escaped
her, now opened before him. She had made him her grown-up playfellow,
from her childhood to that day. She had romped with him in her frocks,
she had gone on romping with him in her gowns. He had never been long
enough separated from her to have the external changes in his daughter
forced on his attention. His artless, fatherly experience of her had
taught him that she was a taller child in later years—and had taught
him little more. And now, in one breathless instant, the conviction
that she was a woman rushed over his mind. He felt it in the trouble of
her bosom pressed against his; in the nervous thrill of her arms
clasped around his neck. The Magdalen of his innocent experience, a
woman—with the master-passion of her sex in possession of her heart
already!
“Have you thought long of this, my dear?” he asked, as soon as he could
speak composedly. “Are you sure—?”
She answered the question before he could finish it.
“Sure I love him?” she said. “Oh, what words can say Yes for me, as I
want to say it? I love him—!” Her voice faltered softly; and her answer
ended in a sigh.
“You are very young. You and Frank, my love, are both very young.”
She raised her head from his shoulder for the first time. The thought
and its expression flashed from her at the same moment.
“Are we much younger than you and mamma were?” she asked, smiling
through her tears.
She tried to lay her head back in its old position; but as she spoke
those words, her father caught her round the waist, forced her, before
she was aware of it, to look him in the face—and kissed her, with a
sudden outburst of tenderness which brought the tears thronging back
thickly into her eyes. “Not much younger, my child,” he said, in low,
broken tones—“not much younger than your mother and I were.” He put her
away from him, and rose from the seat, and turned his head aside
quickly. “Wait here, and compose yourself; I will go indoors and speak
to your mother.” His voice trembled over those parting words; and he
left her without once looking round again.
She waited—waited a weary time; and he never came back. At last her
growing anxiety urged her to follow him into the house. A new timidity
throbbed in her heart as she doubtingly approached the door. Never had
she seen the depths of her father’s simple nature stirred as they had
been stirred by her confession. She almost dreaded her next meeting
with him. She wandered softly to and fro in the hall, with a shyness
unaccountable to herself; with a terror of being discovered and spoken
to by her sister or Miss Garth, which made her nervously susceptible to
the slightest noises in the house. The door of the morning-room opened
while her back was turned toward it. She started violently, as she
looked round and saw her father in the hall: her heart beat faster and
faster, and she felt herself turning pale. A second look at him, as he
came nearer, re-assured her. He was composed again, though not so
cheerful as usual. She noticed that he advanced and spoke to her with a
forbearing gentleness, which was more like his manner to her mother
than his ordinary manner to herself.
“Go in, my love,” he said, opening the door for her which he had just
closed. “Tell your mother all you have told me—and more, if you have
more to say. She is better prepared for you than I was. We will take
to-day to think of it, Magdalen; and to-morrow you shall know, and
Frank shall know, what we decide.”
Her eyes brightened, as they looked into his face and saw the decision
there already, with the double penetration of her womanhood and her
love. Happy, and beautiful in her happiness, she put his hand to her
lips, and went, without hesitation, into the morning-room. There, her
father’s words had smoothed the way for her; there, the first shock of
the surprise was past and over, and only the pleasure of it remained.
Her mother had been her age once; her mother would know how fond she
was of Frank. So the coming interview was anticipated in her thoughts;
and—except that there was an unaccountable appearance of restraint in
Mrs. Vanstone’s first reception of her—was anticipated aright. After a
little, the mother’s questions came more and more unreservedly from the
sweet, unforgotten experience of the mother’s heart. She lived again
through her own young days of hope and love in Magdalen’s replies.
The next morning the all-important decision was announced in words. Mr.
Vanstone took his daughter upstairs into her mother’s room, and there
placed before her the result of the yesterday’s consultation, and of
the night’s reflection which had followed it. He spoke with perfect
kindness and self-possession of manner—but in fewer and more serious
words than usual; and he held his wife’s hand tenderly in his own all
through the interview.
He informed Magdalen that neither he nor her mother felt themselves
justified in blaming her attachment to Frank. It had been in part,
perhaps, the natural consequence of her childish familiarity with him;
in part, also, the result of the closer intimacy between them which the
theatrical entertainment had necessarily produced. At the same time, it
was now the duty of her parents to put that attachment, on both sides,
to a proper test—for her sake, because her happy future was their
dearest care; for Frank’s sake, because they were bound to give him the
opportunity of showing himself worthy of the trust confided in him.
They were both conscious of being strongly prejudiced in Frank’s favor.
His father’s eccentric conduct had made the lad the object of their
compassion and their care from his earliest years. He (and his younger
brothers) had almost filled the places to them of those other children
of their own whom they had lost. Although they firmly believed their
good opinion of Frank to be well founded—still, in the interest of
their daughter’s happiness, it was necessary to put that opinion firmly
to the proof, by fixing certain conditions, and by interposing a year
of delay between the contemplated marriage and the present time.
During that year, Frank was to remain at the office in London; his
employers being informed beforehand that family circumstances prevented
his accepting their offer of employment in China. He was to consider
this concession as a recognition of the attachment between Magdalen and
himself, on certain terms only. If, during the year of probation, he
failed to justify the confidence placed in him—a confidence which had
led Mr. Vanstone to take unreservedly upon himself the whole
responsibility of Frank’s future prospects—the marriage scheme was to
be considered, from that moment, as at an end. If, on the other hand,
the result to which Mr. Vanstone confidently looked forward really
occurred—if Frank’s probationary year proved his claim to the most
precious trust that could be placed in his hands—then Magdalen herself
should reward him with all that a woman can bestow; and the future,
which his present employers had placed before him as the result of a
five years’ residence in China, should be realized in one year’s time,
by the dowry of his young wife.
As her father drew that picture of the future, the outburst of
Magdalen’s gratitude could no longer be restrained. She was deeply
touched—she spoke from her inmost heart. Mr. Vanstone waited until his
daughter and his wife were composed again; and then added the last
words of explanation which were now left for him to speak.
“You understand, my love,” he said, “that I am not anticipating Frank’s
living in idleness on his wife’s means? My plan for him is that he
should still profit by the interest which his present employers take in
him. Their knowledge of affairs in the City will soon place a good
partnership at his disposal, and you will give him the money to buy it
out of hand. I shall limit the sum, my dear, to half your fortune; and
the other half I shall have settled upon yourself. We shall all be
alive and hearty, I hope”—he looked tenderly at his wife as he said
those words—“all alive and hearty at the year’s end. But if I am gone,
Magdalen, it will make no difference. My will—made long before I ever
thought of having a son-in-law divides my fortune into two equal parts.
One part goes to your mother; and the other part is fairly divided
between my children. You will have your share on your wedding-day (and
Norah will have hers when she marries) from my own hand, if I live; and
under my will if I die. There! there! no gloomy faces,” he said, with a
momentary return of his every-day good spirits. “Your mother and I mean
to live and see Frank a great merchant. I shall leave you, my dear, to
enlighten the son on our new projects, while I walk over to the
cottage—”
He stopped; his eyebrows contracted a little; and he looked aside
hesitatingly at Mrs. Vanstone.
“What must you do at the cottage, papa?” asked Magdalen, after having
vainly waited for him to finish the sentence of his own accord.
“I must consult Frank’s father,” he replied. “We must not forget that
Mr. Clare’s consent is still wanting to settle this matter. And as time
presses, and we don’t know what difficulties he may not raise, the
sooner I see him the better.”
He gave that answer in low, altered tones; and rose from his chair in a
half-reluctant, half-resigned manner, which Magdalen observed with
secret alarm.
She glanced inquiringly at her mother. To all appearance, Mrs. Vanstone
had been alarmed by the change in him also. She looked anxious and
uneasy; she turned her face away on the sofa pillow—turned it suddenly,
as if she was in pain.
“Are you not well, mamma?” asked Magdalen.
“Quite well, my love,” said Mrs. Vanstone, shortly and sharply, without
turning round. “Leave me a little—I only want rest.”
Magdalen went out with her father.
“Papa!” she whispered anxiously, as they descended the stairs; “you
don’t think Mr. Clare will say No?”
“I can’t tell beforehand,” answered Mr. Vanstone. “I hope he will say
Yes.”
“There is no reason why he should say anything else—is there?”
She put the question faintly, while he was getting his hat and stick;
and he did not appear to hear her. Doubting whether she should repeat
it or not, she accompanied him as far as the garden, on his way to Mr.
Clare’s cottage. He stopped her on the lawn, and sent her back to the
house.
“You have nothing on your head, my dear,” he said. “If you want to be
in the garden, don’t forget how hot the sun is—don’t come out without
your hat.”
He walked on toward the cottage.
She waited a moment, and looked after him. She missed the customary
flourish of his stick; she saw his little Scotch terrier, who had run
out at his heels, barking and capering about him unnoticed. He was out
of spirits: he was strangely out of spirits. What did it mean?
CHAPTER X.
On returning to the house, Magdalen felt her shoulder suddenly touched
from behind as she crossed the hall. She turned and confronted her
sister. Before she could ask any questions, Norah confusedly addressed
her, in these words: “I beg your pardon; I beg you to forgive me.”
Magdalen looked at her sister in astonishment. All memory, on her side,
of the sharp words which had passed between them in the shrubbery was
lost in the new interests that now absorbed her; lost as completely as
if the angry interview had never taken place. “Forgive you!” she
repeated, amazedly. “What for?”
“I have heard of your new prospects,” pursued Norah, speaking with a
mechanical submissiveness of manner which seemed almost ungracious; “I
wished to set things right between us; I wished to say I was sorry for
what happened. Will you forget it? Will you forget and forgive what
happened in the shrubbery?” She tried to proceed; but her inveterate
reserve—or, perhaps, her obstinate reliance on her own
opinions—silenced her at those last words. Her face clouded over on a
sudden. Before her sister could answer her, she turned away abruptly
and ran upstairs.
The door of the library opened, before Magdalen could follow her; and
Miss Garth advanced to express the sentiments proper to the occasion.
They were not the mechanically-submissive sentiments which Magdalen had
just heard. Norah had struggled against her rooted distrust of Frank,
in deference to the unanswerable decision of both her parents in his
favor; and had suppressed the open expression of her antipathy, though
the feeling itself remained unconquered. Miss Garth had made no such
concession to the master and mistress of the house. She had hitherto
held the position of a high authority on all domestic questions; and
she flatly declined to get off her pedestal in deference to any change
in the family circumstances, no matter how amazing or how unexpected
that change might be.
“Pray accept my congratulations,” said Miss Garth, bristling all over
with implied objections to Frank—“my congratulations, _and_ my
apologies. When I caught you kissing Mr. Francis Clare in the
summer-house, I had no idea you were engaged in carrying out the
intentions of your parents. I offer no opinion on the subject. I merely
regret my own accidental appearance in the character of an Obstacle to
the course of true-love—which appears to run smooth in summer-houses,
whatever Shakespeare may say to the contrary. Consider me for the
future, if you please, as an Obstacle removed. May you be happy!” Miss
Garth’s lips closed on that last sentence like a trap, and Miss Garth’s
eyes looked ominously prophetic into the matrimonial future.
If Magdalen’s anxieties had not been far too serious to allow her the
customary free use of her tongue, she would have been ready on the
instant with an appropriately satirical answer. As it was, Miss Garth
simply irritated her. “Pooh!” she said—and ran upstairs to her sister’s
room.
She knocked at the door, and there was no answer. She tried the door,
and it resisted her from the inside. The sullen, unmanageable Norah was
locked in.
Under other circumstances, Magdalen would not have been satisfied with
knocking—she would have called through the door loudly and more loudly,
till the house was disturbed and she had carried her point. But the
doubts and fears of the morning had unnerved her already. She went
downstairs again softly, and took her hat from the stand in the hall.
“He told me to put my hat on,” she said to herself, with a meek filial
docility which was totally out of her character.
She went into the garden, on the shrubbery side; and waited there to
catch the first sight of her father on his return. Half an hour passed;
forty minutes passed—and then his voice reached her from among the
distant trees. “Come in to heel!” she heard him call out loudly to the
dog. Her face turned pale. “He’s angry with Snap!” she exclaimed to
herself in a whisper. The next minute he appeared in view; walking
rapidly, with his head down and Snap at his heels in disgrace. The
sudden excess of her alarm as she observed those ominous signs of
something wrong rallied her natural energy, and determined her
desperately on knowing the worst. She walked straight forward to meet
her father.
“Your face tells your news,” she said faintly. “Mr. Clare has been as
heartless as usual—Mr. Clare has said No?”
Her father turned on her with a sudden severity, so entirely
unparalleled in her experience of him that she started back in
downright terror.
“Magdalen!” he said; “whenever you speak of my old friend and neighbor
again, bear this in mind: Mr. Clare has just laid me under an
obligation which I shall remember gratefully to the end of my life.”
He stopped suddenly after saying those remarkable words. Seeing that he
had startled her, his natural kindness prompted him instantly to soften
the reproof, and to end the suspense from which she was plainly
suffering. “Give me a kiss, my love,” he resumed; “and I’ll tell you in
return that Mr. Clare has said—YES.”
She attempted to thank him; but the sudden luxury of relief was too
much for her. She could only cling round his neck in silence. He felt
her trembling from head to foot, and said a few words to calm her. At
the altered tones of his master’s voice, Snap’s meek tail re-appeared
fiercely from between his legs; and Snap’s lungs modestly tested his
position with a brief, experimental bark. The dog’s quaintly
appropriate assertion of himself on his old footing was the
interruption of all others which was best fitted to restore Magdalen to
herself. She caught the shaggy little terrier up in her arms and kissed
_him_ next. “You darling,” she exclaimed, “you’re almost as glad as I
am!” She turned again to her father, with a look of tender reproach.
“You frightened me, papa,” she said. “You were so unlike yourself.”
“I shall be right again to-morrow, my dear. I am a little upset
to-day.”
“Not by me?”
“No, no.”
“By something you have heard at Mr. Clare’s?”
“Yes—nothing you need alarm yourself about; nothing that won’t wear off
by to-morrow. Let me go now, my dear; I have a letter to write; and I
want to speak to your mother.”
He left her and went on to the house. Magdalen lingered a little on the
lawn, to feel all the happiness of her new sensations—then turned away
toward the shrubbery to enjoy the higher luxury of communicating them.
The dog followed her. She whistled, and clapped her hands. “Find him!”
she said, with beaming eyes. “Find Frank!” Snap scampered into the
shrubbery, with a bloodthirsty snarl at starting. Perhaps he had
mistaken his young mistress and considered himself her emissary in
search of a rat?
Meanwhile, Mr. Vanstone entered the house. He met his wife slowly
descending the stairs, and advanced to give her his arm. “How has it
ended?” she asked, anxiously, as he led her to the sofa.
“Happily—as we hoped it would,” answered her husband. “My old friend
has justified my opinion of him.”
“Thank God!” said Mrs. Vanstone, fervently. “Did you feel it, love?”
she asked, as her husband arranged the sofa pillows—“did you feel it as
painfully as I feared you would?”
“I had a duty to do, my dear—and I did it.”
After replying in those terms, he hesitated. Apparently, he had
something more to say—something, perhaps, on the subject of that
passing uneasiness of mind which had been produced by his interview
with Mr. Clare, and which Magdalen’s questions had obliged him to
acknowledge. A look at his wife decided his doubts in the negative. He
only asked if she felt comfortable; and then turned away to leave the
room.
“Must you go?” she asked.
“I have a letter to write, my dear.”
“Anything about Frank?”
“No: to-morrow will do for that. A letter to Mr. Pendril. I want him
here immediately.”
“Business, I suppose?”
“Yes, my dear—business.”
He went out, and shut himself into the little front room, close to the
hall door, which was called his study. By nature and habit the most
procrastinating of letter-writers, he now inconsistently opened his
desk and took up the pen without a moment’s delay. His letter was long
enough to occupy three pages of note-paper; it was written with a
readiness of expression and a rapidity of hand which seldom
characterized his proceedings when engaged over his ordinary
correspondence. He wrote the address as follows: “Immediate—William
Pendril, Esq., Serle Street, Lincoln’s Inn, London”—then pushed the
letter away from him, and sat at the table, drawing lines on the
blotting-paper with his pen, lost in thought. “No,” he said to himself;
“I can do nothing more till Pendril comes.” He rose; his face
brightened as he put the stamp on the envelope. The writing of the
letter had sensibly relieved him, and his whole bearing showed it as he
left the room.
On the doorstep he found Norah and Miss Garth, setting forth together
for a walk.
“Which way are you going?” he asked. “Anywhere near the post-office? I
wish you would post this letter for me, Norah. It is very important—so
important that I hardly like to trust it to Thomas, as usual.”
Norah at once took charge of the letter.
“If you look, my dear,” continued her father, “you will see that I am
writing to Mr. Pendril. I expect him here to-morrow afternoon. Will you
give the necessary directions, Miss Garth? Mr. Pendril will sleep here
to-morrow night, and stay over Sunday.—Wait a minute! Today is Friday.
Surely I had an engagement for Saturday afternoon?” He consulted his
pocketbook and read over one of the entries, with a look of annoyance.
“Grailsea Mill, three o’clock, Saturday. Just the time when Pendril
will be here; and I _must_ be at home to see him. How can I manage it?
Monday will be too late for my business at Grailsea. I’ll go to-day,
instead; and take my chance of catching the miller at his dinner-time.”
He looked at his watch. “No time for driving; I must do it by railway.
If I go at once, I shall catch the down train at our station, and get
on to Grailsea. Take care of the letter, Norah. I won’t keep dinner
waiting; if the return train doesn’t suit, I’ll borrow a gig and get
back in that way.”
As he took up his hat, Magdalen appeared at the door, returning from
her interview with Frank. The hurry of her father’s movements attracted
her attention; and she asked him where he was going.
“To Grailsea,” replied Mr. Vanstone. “Your business, Miss Magdalen, has
got in the way of mine—and mine must give way to it.”
He spoke those parting words in his old hearty manner; and left them,
with the old characteristic flourish of his trusty stick.
“My business!” said Magdalen. “I thought my business was done.”
Miss Garth pointed significantly to the letter in Norah’s hand. “Your
business, beyond all doubt,” she said. “Mr. Pendril is coming tomorrow;
and Mr. Vanstone seems remarkably anxious about it. Law, and its
attendant troubles already! Governesses who look in at summer-house
doors are not the only obstacles to the course of true-love. Parchment
is sometimes an obstacle. I hope you may find Parchment as pliable as I
am—I wish you well through it. Now, Norah!”
Miss Garth’s second shaft struck as harmless as the first. Magdalen had
returned to the house, a little vexed; her interview with Frank having
been interrupted by a messenger from Mr. Clare, sent to summon the son
into the father’s presence. Although it had been agreed at the private
interview between Mr. Vanstone and Mr. Clare that the questions
discussed that morning should not be communicated to the children until
the year of probation was at an end—-and although under these
circumstances Mr. Clare had nothing to tell Frank which Magdalen could
not communicate to him much more agreeably—the philosopher was not the
less resolved on personally informing his son of the parental
concession which rescued him from Chinese exile. The result was a
sudden summons to the cottage, which startled Magdalen, but which did
not appear to take Frank by surprise. His filial experience penetrated
the mystery of Mr. Clare’s motives easily enough. “When my father’s in
spirits,” he said, sulkily, “he likes to bully me about my good luck.
This message means that he’s going to bully me now.”
“Don’t go,” suggested Magdalen.
“I must,” rejoined Frank. “I shall never hear the last of it if I
don’t. He’s primed and loaded, and he means to go off. He went off,
once, when the engineer took me; he went off, twice, when the office in
the City took me; and he’s going off, thrice, now _you’ve_ taken me. If
it wasn’t for you, I should wish I had never been born. Yes; your
father’s been kind to me, I know—and I should have gone to China, if it
hadn’t been for him. I’m sure I’m very much obliged. Of course, we have
no right to expect anything else—still it’s discouraging to keep us
waiting a year, isn’t it?”
Magdalen stopped his mouth by a summary process, to which even Frank
submitted gratefully. At the same time, she did not forget to set down
his discontent to the right side. “How fond he is of me!” she thought.
“A year’s waiting is quite a hardship to him.” She returned to the
house, secretly regretting that she had not heard more of Frank’s
complimentary complaints. Miss Garth’s elaborate satire, addressed to
her while she was in this frame of mind, was a purely gratuitous waste
of Miss Garth’s breath. What did Magdalen care for satire? What do
Youth and Love ever care for except themselves? She never even said as
much as “Pooh!” this time. She laid aside her hat in serene silence,
and sauntered languidly into the morning-room to keep her mother
company. She lunched on dire forebodings of a quarrel between Frank and
his father, with accidental interruptions in the shape of cold chicken
and cheese-cakes. She trifled away half an hour at the piano; and
played, in that time, selections from the Songs of Mendelssohn, the
Mazurkas of Chopin, the Operas of Verdi, and the Sonatas of Mozart—all
of whom had combined together on this occasion and produced one
immortal work, entitled “Frank.” She closed the piano and went up to
her room, to dream away the hours luxuriously in visions of her married
future. The green shutters were closed, the easy-chair was pushed in
front of the glass, the maid was summoned as usual; and the comb
assisted the mistress’s reflections, through the medium of the
mistress’s hair, till heat and idleness asserted their narcotic
influences together, and Magdalen fell asleep.
It was past three o’clock when she woke. On going downstairs again she
found her mother, Norah and Miss Garth all sitting together enjoying
the shade and the coolness under the open portico in front of the
house.
Norah had the railway time-table in her hand. They had been discussing
the chances of Mr. Vanstone’s catching the return train and getting
back in good time. That topic had led them, next, to his business
errand at Grailsea—an errand of kindness, as usual; undertaken for the
benefit of the miller, who had been his old farm-servant, and who was
now hard pressed by serious pecuniary difficulties. From this they had
glided insensibly into a subject often repeated among them, and never
exhausted by repetition—the praise of Mr. Vanstone himself. Each one of
the three had some experience of her own to relate of his simple,
generous nature. The conversation seemed to be almost painfully
interesting to his wife. She was too near the time of her trial now not
to feel nervously sensitive to the one subject which always held the
foremost place in her heart. Her eyes overflowed as Magdalen joined the
little group under the portico; her frail hand trembled as it signed to
her youngest daughter to take the vacant chair by her side. “We were
talking of your father,” she said, softly. “Oh, my love, if your
married life is only as happy—” Her voice failed her; she put her
handkerchief hurriedly over her face and rested her head on Magdalen’s
shoulder. Norah looked appealingly to Miss Garth, who at once led the
conversation back to the more trivial subject of Mr. Vanstone’s return.
“We have all been wondering,” she said, with a significant look at
Magdalen, “whether your father will leave Grailsea in time to catch the
train—or whether he will miss it and be obliged to drive back. What do
you say?”
“I say, papa will miss the train,” replied Magdalen, taking Miss
Garth’s hint with her customary quickness. “The last thing he attends
to at Grailsea will be the business that brings him there. Whenever he
has business to do, he always puts it off to the last moment, doesn’t
he, mamma?”
The question roused her mother exactly as Magdalen had intended it
should. “Not when his errand is an errand of kindness,” said Mrs.
Vanstone. “He has gone to help the miller in a very pressing
difficulty—”
“And don’t you know what he’ll do?” persisted Magdalen. “He’ll romp
with the miller’s children, and gossip with the mother, and hob-and-nob
with the father. At the last moment when he has got five minutes left
to catch the train, he’ll say: ‘Let’s go into the counting-house and
look at the books.’ He’ll find the books dreadfully complicated; he’ll
suggest sending for an accountant; he’ll settle the business off hand,
by lending the money in the meantim
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