A LOVER FOUND AND LOST.
“I really am at a loss to make up my mind which is the most
extraordinary--the man behaving in this way without encouragement, or
your being so lost to everything that is--ahem!--due to your position in
life as to allow him to think, to hope, that his proposals--_most_
impertinent ones, I must say--_could_ meet with anything but anger and
contempt.”
Lady Millicent was seated on her presidential sofa, in the room
appropriated in Bolton-square to her especial use. It was a dull, dark,
business-looking apartment. The “third drawing-room” it was called, and
in it milady was wont to receive such visitors as clearly were not there
for purposes of mere pleasure, or with the intention of ephemerally
enjoying themselves--men of law, serious men, with faces fraught with
the care that the craving after six-and-eightpences is wont to impress
on the human countenance divine, were seen entering, clearly with a
purpose, the heavy door (white-painted and gilt, but shabby and
tarnished now) that led to milady’s sanctum. It was a room into which
her young daughters rarely intruded; and when, on the morning in
question (it was that of the very day which Honor passed so feverishly
with Arthur Vavasour by her side), Rhoda, poor, timid, nervous Rhoda,
was summoned to an audience with her awe-inspiring mamma, she made her
_entrée_ with a beating heart, and, though she knew not wherefore, with
a strong presentment of evil. The open letter in Lady Millicent’s hand
was scarcely evidence enough to awaken in her mind anything at all
approaching to the truth. Rhoda was as far as the poles from imagining
that the sedate rector of Switcham, the quiet, unpretending young man,
whose “duties” ever seemed so much above his pleasures, could have so
far allowed his mundane feelings, his passions, that were of the “earth,
earthy,” to overpower his well-regulated mind, as to induce him to offer
to the great lady of Gillingham--the patroness of his living, and one
with whom he knew himself to be _not_ a favourite--his humble proposals
for her daughter’s hand.
Standing droopingly in the august presence, and without a word to say
either in her own behalf or that of her co-delinquent, the poor girl
listened in silence to the stern and very bitter words of reprobation
which fell from her mother’s lips. Perhaps until she so listened--until
she contrasted the hard unsympathising nature of the woman to whom she
owed her birth with that of the good, thoroughly-to-be-relied-on
character of the man whose letter, with dimmed eyes and a very pitying
heart, she had just contrived to read and comprehend--she had never
rightly known how necessary the love of him, who for so many months had
been her only object and point of interest at uncongenial Gillingham,
had become to her.
“I am well aware--no justly-reproachful words of yours can make me more
so” (thus one sentence of poor George’s letter ran)--“that I have no
right, in a worldly point of view, to hope that you would look otherwise
than contemptuously on my humble offer. I have little besides my deep
affection, and my prayers that God would enable me to contribute to your
beloved daughter’s happiness, to lay before one who deserves every good
gift that could be bestowed upon her. A small, _very_ small private
fortune--a few hundreds a year only--in addition to the income derived
from my living, is all that I possess. But, if I mistake not, Miss
Vavasour’s tastes are simple ones, and she _might_, God aiding, be
happier in the quiet home which she would deign to share with me than
in the turmoil of the great world, and amongst the gay and rich, of whom
it is said that it is hard for them to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“Methodistical stuff!” murmured Lady Millicent, turning over the leaves
of a law-book, and delivering herself of the severe comment on her
would-be son-in-law’s epistle at the moment when she rightly guessed
that poor Rhoda had arrived at its conclusion. “Very bad taste, I think,
my dear, of your admirer, condemning us _en masse_ in this summary way.
But now, _do_ tell me,” laying down the pen with which she had been
making notes, “what _did_ you do at Gillingham to bring upon me such a
letter as that? I should have thought--but one lives and learns--that if
there existed a girl in the world who would have abstained from this
kind of thing, it was you; and now I find that--”
“O, mamma!” began poor Rhoda, whose delicacy (and she was sensitively
delicate) was severely wounded by this exordium,--“O, mamma, I did
nothing! Indeed, indeed, I gave no--I mean--I did not lead--”
And then she stopped, poor girl, from utter inability to make herself
understood by the parent whose cold unwomanly eyes were fixed with such
unassisting scrutiny on her blushing face. There are mothers and
mothers, even as (I was about to say) there are friends and friends: but
in using such a conjunction I was wrong, for of that rare hypostasis
there can be but one variety; degrees of comparison exist not in that
particular noun substantive of the many which signify “to be, to do, and
to suffer.” Either a friend’s love passeth the love of woman, and he
sticketh closer than a brother, or he is that daily-met-with and more
generally-useful thing, _id est_, a good-natured acquaintance, whose
services, should they not chance to interfere with his own requirements,
may possibly be at our disposal. But to return to Rhoda Vavasour’s
natural friend--to the one being who had it in her power, and whose
sacred duty it was, as far as mortal skill can do the heavenly work, to
make the crooked straight and the rough places plain to the weaker and
the tottering vessel, who was less able than herself to bear the burden
and the heat of the day. A few words softly, wisely spoken, a kind
caress, the sweet conviction, in some unknown mysterious way conveyed,
that she, the mother, was the best, the most heaven-deputed guardian for
her child, would have convinced that child, whose experience of life was
_nil_, and who had seen no man save her brothers whom she could compare
with the right-minded young rector of Switcham, that an engagement with
that reverend gentleman might not be exactly a desirable consummation,
or one, save by the good man himself, prudently as well as _devoutly_ to
be wished. Rhoda was a girl thoroughly amenable to reason, as well as
one whom the silken cords of affection could have led with the lightest,
tenderest touch. Delicate of frame, physically as well as mentally, she
could ill bear the wear and tear of either excitement or worry; and
perhaps George Wallingford had said no more than the truth when he
suggested that her life, in the seclusion of a country parsonage, would
probably pass more happily away than were the nervous girl to be thrown
into the whirlpool of stir and fashion, there to be tossed to and fro
amongst the vessels of iron, against which her frailer, humbler self
would be hopelessly, maybe, bruised and broken.
To convince Lady Millicent of this truth would, however, have required
eloquence far greater than that possessed by the lowly-born clergyman,
who certainly had not chosen the very likeliest way in the world to gain
his ends. As milady had truly said, there were but two ways of
accounting for the reverend gentleman’s preposterous conduct, and
neither of those two ways was calculated to throw a roseate hue over the
matter. That Rhoda--her favourite, because her most submissive,
daughter--had degraded herself to the degree of giving encouragement to
“the man” for whose audacity no words were sufficiently severe, caused
as much surprise and indignation to the magnificent widow as if she had
systematically and kindly encouraged her child to pour out into the
maternal breast her cares, her sorrows, and her joys. That a heart,
young and love-requiring, will, in default of home aliment, seek
elsewhere for its natural, and in some cases even necessary, food, this
mother, engrossed by her own plans and projects for personal
aggrandisement and power, had never yet suspected. Lady Millicent--a
stay-at-home, “domestic” woman, a “widow indeed,” and one of those
constitutionally prudent matrons against whom the tongue of scandal
never had for a single instant wagged--was precisely one of those
individuals with whom self-deception is the very easiest thing in life.
Her hopes and wishes, her thoughts and fancies, never--that she could
truly have said--soared above or beyond the boundaries of her own
property; and the interests of her children, she had taught herself to
believe, were the groundwork and the motive power of all the hard,
unwomanly business that she had set herself to do.
“You are not aware, perhaps,” she said coldly to the poor girl who stood
unconsciously doubling down and plaiting with her trembling fingers the
fringe of the table-cover that hung near her,--“you are not aware, I
daresay, that, unless I succeed--for the benefit of my younger
children--in a law-suit which is in progress, your fortune, as well as
Katherine’s, will be very trifling indeed. Had your poor father lived,
there would, of course, have been an opportunity of remedying this evil,
this _injustice_,” she added firmly, and with a stress upon the word
which poor Rhoda was far too much engrossed by her own troubles to
notice. “I tell you this, not that you may suppose that, under _any_
circumstances, you could have been permitted to disgrace your family by
marrying this extraordinarily presumptuous person, but because I wish
you to understand that a _good_ marriage may be positively necessary,
both for you and for Katherine. By the way, now that we are on this
disagreeable subject, will you allow me to ask whether she--whether your
sister, who seems to me to be self-willed and forward enough for
anything--knew of this--this disgraceful entanglement: for entanglement,
Rhoda,” she went on severely, “there must have been. Poor as my opinion
naturally is of the intellect of a person who could write such a letter
as that” (pointing to it contemptuously), “quoting Scripture too in such
a personal and impertinent manner, still I cannot believe that the man
_could_ have been such an egregious fool, could have been so
preposterously silly, as to have written to me, if you--just look at
me, will you, instead of at the carpet--had not said or done something
to authorise his presumption.”
The cold eyes fixed upon the now tearful face before her seemed to
command as well as to expect an answer. None, however, came; so, still
more authoritatively, Lady Millicent--could she find no better way of
improving her talents (_id est_, her children) and of showing her
appreciation of the legacy committed to her charge, than by thus
torturing the feelings of Cecil Vavasour’s young daughter?--Lady
Millicent pressed the question to which she had hitherto received none
but the least comprehensible of replies.
“Answer me. Really I have no more time to waste. Had you any idea that
this Mr. Wallingford intended making the application which strikes me as
so extraordinary?”
With some difficulty, Rhoda managed to stammer forth a negative. “Indeed
no,” she said; “and, mamma, Kate knew no more about it than I did. I
never told her--I mean, I--”
She stopped suddenly, her face the colour of the setting sun when,
“cradled in vermilion,” it throws its red reflection over slope and
mountain, land and river. On her cheek and brow and slender neck the
tell-tale witness rushed; and Lady Millicent--well aware that her
guileless daughter knew and felt that she had committed herself--said,
even more coldly than before:
“You are a poor dissembler, Rhoda. You may go to your room now. Of
course you allowed this man, this hypocritical _good_ clergyman, to lead
you into deception. You let him fancy--for it _is_ only fancy on your
part--that--”
“O mamma,--dear mamma,” the girl cried in an agony of shame and grief,
“if you would only listen to me,--only believe that I never did, never
could have done all you say! I wish I could tell you how it was; and yet
it seems--indeed it does--as if I had nothing--_nothing_ really to tell.
We used to meet--Mr. Wallingford and I--sometimes at the school, and at
the poor people’s cottages. He is so good, mamma,” gaining a little
courage when she found herself listened to without rebuke. “If you could
but know how much the sick and the old think of him, and all he does for
them, you would not wonder at--”
“At his doing one of the most unprincipled acts of which a man can be
capable,” sneered Lady Millicent. “He was perfectly well aware--he says
so in his letter--that I should be intensely angry at his presumption;
and yet--really, Rhoda, I have no patience with your folly and
wrongheadedness--you stand up for this priggish, formal, underhand--”
“But he has not been underhand, mamma. As Mr. Wallingford is not here to
tell you so himself, _I_ must say the truth; and that is, that never
till the day before we left Gillingham did he say one word that you
might not have heard, and then he only”--and the colour deepened on her
cheek--“said that he should miss me--should think of me till I came
back, and that he hoped I would not quite forget Gillingham and--and
‘good things’ while I was away.”
Lady Millicent laughed scornfully.
“For Gillingham read Mr. Wallingford, and for good things the delights,
I suppose, of Switcham Parsonage,--boiled leg of mutton and what is
called, I believe, a parlour-maid to wait upon you. My dear Rhoda, be
thankful that such a fate as becoming the wife of a poor country parson
is not in store for you. And now, my dear, you may go, as I said before,
to your own room. There is no occasion to make this sort of thing
public. _I_ shall of course answer Mr. Wallingford’s letter, and I think
I may venture to say that we are not likely to be troubled further on
the subject. There, there, that will do; I am very much engaged this
morning,”--arresting the words which she could see were hovering on her
daughter’s lips,--“and I can afford to waste no more time on such
nonsense as this.”
The head and eyes resolutely bent upon the folio before her, the decided
tone of a voice whose stern, determined accents Rhoda knew and
understood full well, convinced the timid girl that appeal there was
none, and that nothing remained for her but to obey. With a heavy heart
she ascended the stairs to the chamber that she called her own, and
which, opening into a smaller one appropriated to Kate, enabled that
lighter-spirited young lady to overhear through the keyhole of the door
the hardly suppressed sobs which broke from the breast of the unhappy
Rhoda.
“My darling, what _is_ the matter?” cried the younger girl, rushing in
impetuously,--for Kate’s strong points were certainly neither prudence
nor self-control,--“what is the matter, you poor dear?” And tumbling on
her knees by the side of her weeping sister, Kate began sobbing too by
sheer force of sympathy.
A very few words sufficed to put the latter _au fait_ of the
secret--_secret_, alas, no longer--which Rhoda had so long and so
sedulously kept. Kate listened with eager ears and widely-distended eyes
to the details, stammered forth incoherently, of this first love episode
in the family. _As_ a love affair, it was certainly not without its
interest; but with that interest, and in spite of her sisterly
compassion, Katie certainly did feel a little surprise at the
singularity of Rhoda’s choice. She made no allowance for the utter
absence of competitors for her sister’s favour; all that was patent to
this damsel of fast proclivities--who thought Sunday-schools a bore, and
who hoped some day to be wooed by a lover of a widely different
type--was the fact that Mr. Wallingford had straight hair, was anything
but “jolly,” had the misfortune to possess scanty whiskers, did not
smoke, and, to sum up all his defects in one comprehensive word, was a
“parson.”
“I can’t the least understand how Rhoda can _care_ for him,” she said an
hour afterwards to her eldest brother, to whom she had just narrated the
provoking circumstance that her sister, who was in love with that stupid
Mr. Wallingford, had cried so long and so bitterly that she wasn’t fit
to be seen,--“a man who is always talking ‘good,’ and who, of course,
thinks it’s wicked to be jolly. Can you make it out, Arthur? I suppose
it was all done by staring at each other, for _I_ never saw them
speaking, or seeming as if anything was going on.”
“Of course you didn’t,” her brother said, as he settled his cravat in
the pier-glass over the mantelshelf (he was going to ride--his usual
morning avocation--with Honor Beacham, and naturally wished to look his
best on the occasion),--“of course you didn’t. Girls when they are in
love (and the best girls too) will deceive even other women,--a very
different affair, I can tell you, from taking in a man; and if you
think, my dear Katie--”
“O don’t bother about that now,” Kate said impatiently. “I asked you
whether you _can_ believe that Rhoda really likes Mr. Wallingford. _I_
can’t fancy his being a lover: horrid creature, I call him! Now, Arthur,
do attend one moment. I want to know whether I ought to be glad or sorry
that mamma has put an end to the business, and--”
“Glad, to be sure,” said Arthur, taking up his gloves, and troubling
himself less than was altogether brotherly about poor Rhoda’s first and,
as the preoccupied young man considered, thoroughly uninteresting
love-affair,--“glad! Why it’s the most disgusting piece of folly I ever
heard of. Such bad taste too! But it’s all my mother’s fault. If a
gushing young woman like Rhoda had seen some good-looking young fellows
every now and then, she would never have got spooney on such a slow prig
of a parson as George Wallingford. An excellent young man, I daresay, in
his way; but excellent young men haven’t much of a pull in these days,
except when girls haven’t anyone else to talk to. Trust me, it won’t be
long, if I know anything about such matters, before Miss Rhoda finds
another lover ready to knock this spooney fellow out of her head.” And
Arthur Vavasour, satisfied with this summary settlement of a question
which probably appeared to him in the light of a very commonplace affair
indeed, hurried away to his appointment in Stanwick-street--hurried to
the presence of the still pure-hearted woman, for the love of whose
bright eyes the silly young man was ready to lose his all of peace on
earth, the goodwill of friends and kindred, and that much-prized but
unexplainable thing for which no other nation save our own can boast
even the simple name--the name, that is, of Respectability.