IN TRUST
Ballantyne-Press
BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
IN TRUST
_THE STORY OF A LADY AND HER LOVER_
BY
M. O. W. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF ‘THE CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD’ ETC.
_NEW EDITION_
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1883
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FATHER AND DAUGHTER 1
II. THE REST OF THE FAMILY 11
III. THE ‘GAME’ 22
IV. UNDER THE BEECHES 34
V. EXPLANATIONS 47
VI. GOOD-BYE 59
VII. CROSS-EXAMINATION 70
VIII. THE MEADOWLANDS’ PARTY 83
IX. COSMO 94
X. FAMILY COUNSELS 108
XI. PROJECTS OF MARRIAGE 121
XII. MISTRESS AND MAID 134
XIII. HEATHCOTE MOUNTFORD 146
XIV. THE SPECTATOR’S VIEW 160
XV. TAMPERING WITH A LAWYER 171
XVI. GOOD ADVICE 184
XVII. THE ABSOLUTE AND THE COMPARATIVE 198
XVIII. AFTERTHOUGHTS 211
XIX. THE CATASTROPHE 228
XX. THE WILL 239
XXI. WHEN ALL WAS OVER 252
XXII. SOPHISTRY 268
XXIII. HEATHCOTE’S PROPOSAL 279
XXIV. A VISITOR 292
XXV. PACKING UP 307
XXVI. GOING AWAY 318
XXVII. A NEW BEGINNING 331
XXVIII. HEATHCOTE’S CAREER 342
XXIX. CHARLEY INTERFERES 356
XXX. THE RECTOR SATISFIED 370
XXXI. FALLEN FROM HER HIGH ESTATE 383
XXXII. ROSE ON HER DEFENCE 397
XXXIII. THE MAN OF THE PERIOD 414
XXXIV. THE HEIRESS’S TRIAL 422
XXXV. A SIMPLE WOMAN 442
XXXVI. THE LAST 456
IN TRUST.
CHAPTER I.
FATHER AND DAUGHTER.
‘My dear, the case is as plain as noonday; you must give this man up.’
‘The case is not plain to me, father--at least, not in your sense.’
‘Anne, you are very positive and self-opinionated, but you cannot--it is
not possible--set up your judgment against mine on such a point. You, an
inexperienced, prejudiced girl, a rustic with no knowledge of the world!
What do you know about the man? Oh, I allow he is well enough to look
at; he has had the usual amount of education, and so forth; but what do
you _know_ about him? that is what I ask.’
‘Not much, father,’ said Anne, steadily; ‘but I know _him_.’
‘Stuff! you, a girl not much over twenty, know a _man_! Does he tell
you, do you suppose, all the adventures of his life? Does he confess his
sins to you? A young fellow that has been trained at a public school,
that has been at the university, that has knocked about the world--is he
going to confide all that to _you_? He would be unworthy the name of
gentleman if he did.’
‘Would he not be more unworthy the name of gentleman if he had done
things which he could not confide to me?’ said Anne; then reddening
suddenly, she added, ‘And even if it were so, father, if in those days
he had done things unfit for my ears, let him be silent; I will not ask
any questions: I know what he is now.’
‘Oh, stuff, I tell you! stuff and nonsense, child! You know what he is
_now_! Yes, what he is when his best coat is on, when he is going to
church with his hymn-book in his pocket and you on his arm; that is a
very edifying aspect of him; but if you think that is all, or nearly
all----’
Anne was silent. It was not that she was convinced, but that her
indignation took words from her. She could not make any reply to such
calumnies; and this was troublesome to her father, who preferred an
argument to a distinct and unsupported statement. He looked at her for a
moment, baffled, feeling himself cut short in the full flow of
utterance--then picked up the thread again, and resumed:
‘You would be a fool to trust in any man in that unguarded way: and
above all in a lawyer. They are all rogues; it is in them. When did you
ever hear a good word spoken for that class of men? I will not consent
to any such nonsense: and if you act without my consent, you know the
consequence. I will not give your mother’s money to maintain in luxury a
man who is--who will be--never mind! You shall not have it. I will give
it to Rose, as I have the power.’
‘You would not be so unjust,’ said Anne.
‘Unjust! I will do it if you defy me in this way. Rose has always been a
better child to me than you have been; and she shall have the money if
you don’t mind.’
Whoever had looked at Anne Mountford then would not have given much for
the chance of her submission. She said nothing, but her upper lip shut
down upon the lower with an unrelenting, immovable determination. She
would not even add a word to her protest against the possibility of the
injustice with which she had been threatened. She was too proud to
repeat herself; she stood still, unbending, betraying no impatience,
ready to receive with calmness everything that might be said to her, but
firm as the house upon its foundations, or the hills that are called
everlasting. Her father knew something of the character of his eldest
child; he knew very well that no small argument would move her, but
perhaps he was not aware how far beyond his power she was. He looked at
her, however, with a passionate annoyance very different from her calm,
and with something vindictive and almost spiteful in his reddish-grey
eyes. Most likely he had felt himself dashed against the wall of her
strong will before now, and had been exasperated by the calm force of
opposition which he could make no head against.
‘You hear what I say,’ he repeated roughly; ‘if you insist, I shall
exercise the right your mother gave me; I shall alter my will: and the
fortune which is no doubt your chief attraction in this man’s eyes--the
fortune he has been calculating upon--I will give to Rose. You hear what
I say?’
‘Yes,’ said Anne. She bowed her head gravely; no doubt that she
understood him, and equally no doubt that what he said had moved her as
much as a shower of rain might have done, and that she was fully
determined to take her own way.
‘On your own head be it then,’ he cried.
She bowed again, and after waiting for a moment to see if he had
anything further to say to her, went quietly out of the room. It was in
the library of a country house that this interview had taken place--the
commonplace business room of a country gentleman of no very great
pretensions. The walls were lined with bookcases in which there was a
tolerable collection of books, but yet they did not tell for much in the
place. They were furniture like the curtains, which were rather shabby,
and the old Turkey carpet--most respectable furniture, yet a little
neglected, wanting renewal. Mr. Mountford’s writing-table was laden with
papers; he had plenty of business to transact, though not of a strictly
intellectual kind. He was an old man, still handsome in his age, with
picturesque snow-white hair in masses, clearly-cut, fine features, and
keen eyes of that reddish hazel which betokens temper. Those eyes
constantly burned under the somewhat projecting eyebrows. They threw a
sort of angry lurid light on his face. The name of the house was Mount;
it had been in the Mountford family for many generations; but it was not
a beautiful and dignified house any more than he was a fine old English
gentleman. Both the place and the man had traditionary rights to popular
respect, but neither man nor place had enforced this claim by any
individual beauty or excellence. There was no doubt as to the right of
the Mountfords to be ranked among the gentry of the district, as good as
the best, in so far that the family had been settled there for
centuries; but they were of that curiously commonplace strain which is
prevalent enough among the smaller gentry, without any splendour of
wealth to dazzle the beholder, and which rouses in the mind of the
spectator a wonder as to what it is that makes the squire superior to
his neighbours. The Mountfords from father to son had got on through the
world without any particular harm or good, uninteresting, ordinary
people, respectable enough, yet not even very respectable. They were not
rich, they were not able; they had nothing in themselves to distinguish
them from the rest of the world; yet wherever the name of Mountford
appeared, throughout all the southern counties at least, the claims of
its possessor to gentility were founded on his relationship to the
Mountfords of Mount. Most curious of all the triumphs of the
aristocratical principle! Or rather perhaps it is the more human
principle of continuance which is the foundation of this prejudice to
which we are all more or less subject. A family which has lasted, which
has had obstinacy enough to cling to its bit of soil, to its old house,
must have something in it worth respect. This principle, however, tells
in favour of the respectable shopkeeper quite as much as the squire, but
it does not tell in the same way. The Mountfords felt themselves of an
entirely different order from the shopkeeper--why, heaven knows! but
their estimate was accepted by all the world.
Mount had the distinction of being entailed; it was not a large estate
nor a valuable one, and it had been deeply mortgaged when the present
Mr. Mountford, St. John by name, came of age. But he had married an
heiress, who had liberated his acres and added greatly to his social
importance. The first Mrs. Mountford had died early, leaving only one
daughter, and at the same time her entire fortune in the hands of her
husband, to do with it what he pleased. These were the days when public
opinion was very unanimous as to the impropriety and unnecessariness of
female rights of any kind, and everybody applauded Mrs. Mountford for
resisting all conditions, and putting herself and her child unreservedly
in her husband’s hands. He had re-married two years after her death, but
unfortunately had succeeded in obtaining only another girl from
unpropitious fate. His first wife’s daughter was Anne, universally
considered as the natural heiress of the considerable fortune which,
after clearing the estate, had remained of her mother’s money, and which
her father had kept scrupulously ‘in a napkin,’ like the churl in the
parable, neither increasing nor diminishing the store. The other
daughter was Rose. Such was the household at Mount in the days when this
history begins. The reigning Mrs. Mountford was a good sort of easy
woman who did not count for much. She was one of the Codringtons of
Carrisford--a ‘very good family’ of the same class as the Mountfords.
Nothing could be better than the connections on both sides--or duller.
But the girls were different. It is very hard to say why the girls
should have been different--perhaps because the present new wave of life
has distinctly affected the girls more than any other class of society.
At all events, the point was indisputable. Anne perhaps might have taken
after her mother, who was of an entirely new stock, not a kind which had
ever before been ingrafted on the steady-going family tree. She had come
out of a race partly mercantile, partly diplomatic; her grandfather had
been Spanish; it was even suspected that one of her ancestors had been a
Jew. All kinds of out-of-the-way sources had furnished the blood which
had been destined to mix with the slow current in the Mountford veins;
and probably Anne had inherited certain bizarre qualities from this
jumble. But Rose had no such mixed antecedents. There was not a drop of
blood in her veins that did not belong to the county, and it was
difficult to see how she could have ‘taken after’ her sister Anne, as
was sometimes suggested, in respect to peculiarities which had come to
Anne from her mother; but if she did not take after Anne, who _did_ she
take after, as Mrs. Mountford often demanded?
Rose was now eighteen and Anne just over one-and-twenty. They were
considered in the neighbourhood to be attractive girls. A household
possessing two such daughters is naturally supposed to have all the
elements of brightness within it; and perhaps if there had been
brothers the girls would have taken their natural place as harmonisers
and peacemakers. But there were no brothers, and the girls embodied all
the confusing and disturbing influences natural to boys in their own
persons, with certain difficulties appropriate to their natural
character. It is true they did not get into scrapes or into debt; they
were not expelled from school or ‘sent down’ from College. Duns did not
follow them to the paternal door, or roistering companions break the
family peace. But yet Anne and Rose contrived to give as much trouble to
Mr. and Mrs. Mountford as if they had been Jack and Tom. These good
people had lived for about a dozen years in their rural mansion like the
cabbages in the kitchen garden. Nothing had disturbed them. There had
been no call upon their reasoning faculties, no strain upon their
affections: everything had gone on quite tranquilly and comfortably,
with that quiet persistence of well-being which makes trouble seem
impossible. They had even said to themselves with sighs, that to have
only girls was after all good for something. They could not be tormented
as others were, or even as the rector, one of whose boys had gone ‘to
the bad.’ The thing which had been was that which should be. The shocks,
the discoveries, the commotions, which the restless elements involved in
male youth bring with them, could not trouble their quiet existence. So
they consoled themselves, although not without a sigh.
Alas, good people! they had reckoned without their girls. The first
storm that arose in the house was when Anne suddenly discovered that her
governess never detected her false notes when she played, and passed the
mistakes which she made, on purpose to test her, in her grammar. ‘I want
some one who can teach me,’ the girl said. She was only fifteen, but she
had already made a great deal more use of that pernicious faculty of
reading which works so much mischief in the world than Mrs. Mountford
approved. Someone who could teach her! That meant a lady at seventy-five
or a hundred pounds a year, instead of thirty-five, which was what they
had hitherto given. Mrs. Mountford nearly cried over this most
unreasonable demand. Miss Montressor was very nice. She was of a family
which had seen better days, and she was fully conscious of her good
fortune in having gained an entry into a county family. After all, what
did it matter about false notes or mistakes in grammar? It was a
ladylike person that was everything. But when Rose too declared in her
little treble that she wanted somebody who could teach her, Miss
Montressor had to go; and the troubles that followed! To do them
justice, the Squire and his wife did their very best to satisfy these
unreasonable young people. They got a German governess with all kinds of
certificates, who taught Rose to say ‘pon chour;’ they got a French
lady, who commended herself to the best feelings of Mrs. Mountford’s
nature by making her up the sweetest cap, but who taught the girls that
Charles I. was all but rescued from the scaffold by the generous
exertions of a Gascon gentleman of the name of D’Artagnan and three
friends who were devoted to him. Mrs. Mountford herself was much pleased
with this information, but Anne and her father were of a different
opinion. However, it would be too long to follow them minutely through
all these troubles. At seventeen Anne wanted Greek and to ‘go in for’
examinations--which gave a still more complete blow to the prejudices of
the house. ‘The same as a young man!’ It was improper in the highest
degree, almost wicked; Mrs. Mountford did not like to think of it. It
seemed to her, as to some of our ablest critics, that nothing but
illicit longings after evil could make a girl wish to pass examinations
and acquire knowledge. She must want to read the naughty books which are
written in Greek and Latin, and which deprave the minds of young men,
the good woman thought. As for the certificates and honours, they might
be all very well for the governesses of whom Mrs. Mountford had such
melancholy experience; but a young lady of a county family, what did she
want with them? They would be things to be ashamed, not proud of. And on
this point Anne was vanquished. She was allowed to learn Greek with many
forebodings, but not to be examined in her knowledge. However, this
decision was chiefly intended to prevent Rose from following her sister,
as she always did; for to refuse Girton to Rose would have been more
difficult than to neglect Anne’s entreaties. For, though Anne was the
eldest sister, it was Rose who was the princess royal and reigned over
the whole demesne.
This desire of the higher education on the part of Rose, who still said
‘pon chour,’ and was not at all certain that two and two always make
four, would have been enough to keep the house in commotion if there had
not occurred just then one of the family troubles appropriate to girls
after so many that could not be called feminine. It has already been
said that the rector of the parish had a son who had ‘gone to the bad.’
He had two other sons, rocks ahead for the young ladies at Mount. Indeed
these two young men were such obvious dangers that Mrs. Mountford had
taken precautions against them while Rose was still in her cradle. One
was a curate, his father’s probable successor; but as the living was in
Mr. Mountford’s hands, and it was always possible that someone else
might be preferred to Charley, some Mountford connection who had a
nearer claim, that prospect did not count for much. The other was
nothing at all, a young man at Oxford, not yet launched upon life. But
fortunately these young men, though very familiar in the house, were not
handsome nor dangerously attractive, and this peril is one which must
always be encountered in the country, even by people of much higher
pretensions than the Mountfords. The first trouble, however, did not
come from this obvious quarter, though it came through there. It was not
one of the Ashleys; but it was a person still less satisfactory. One of
the curate’s friends arrived suddenly on a visit in the late summer--a
young Mr. Douglas, a barrister, which sounds well enough; but not one of
the Douglasses who have ever been heard of. They did not find this out
for some time, imagining fondly that he belonged, at a distance perhaps,
to the Morton family, or to the house of Queensberry, or at least to
Douglasses in Scotland, of whom it could be said that they were of
Lanarkshire or Selkirkshire or some other county. Indeed, it was not
until the whole household was thrown into commotion by a morning call
from Mr. Douglas, who asked for Mr. Mountford, and boldly demanded from
him the hand of Anne, that it burst upon them that he was a Douglas of
nowhere at all. He had been very well educated, and he was at the bar;
but when he was asked what branch of the Douglasses he belonged to, he
answered ‘None,’ with a smile. ‘I have no relations,’ he said. Relations
can be dispensed with. There is no harm in being without them; but a
family was indispensable, and he belonged to nobody. It was just like
Anne, however, not to care. She did not in the least care, nor did she
see any harm in her lover’s countyless condition. And when Mr. Mountford
politely declined the honour of an alliance with this Mr. Douglas of
nowhere at all, she did not hesitate to say that she entirely disagreed
with her father. This was the state in which things were at the time of
the interview I have recorded. Mr. Mountford was determined, and so was
his daughter. This struggle of wills had taken place before, but never
before had it gone so far. In former cases Anne had given in, or she had
been given in to, the one as much as the other. But now there was no
yielding on one side or the other. The father had declared himself
inexorable; the daughter had said little, but her countenance had said
much. And the threat with which he wound up had introduced an entirely
new element into the discussion. What was to come of it? But that was
what at this moment nobody could venture to say.