----Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
SHAKSPEARE.
At one kind word their arms extending
To clasp the neck of him who blest
His child, caressing and carest.
BYRON.
In the romantic charm with which the fancy of the enthusiastic,
though casual admirer of Morden Bay, had invested all it contained,
he had considered the retired residence of the Darnell family as the
chosen abode of content. He judged hastily; and yet he might have
inquired farther, and reasoned more deeply without being undeceived.
His opinion was founded on the tranquil beauty of the scene; and
here he ran into the common error of attributing the same effect from
surrounding objects on those to “the manner born,” as had just been
awakened in himself, by recent comparison and contrast. It operated
as a tonic on his feelings, just then palled with dissipation. ’Twas
“medicine to a mind diseased;” but only daily food to those who
had never known any other: innocent and salubrious no doubt, but
producing no excitement, and having no other effect on the moral
system than regularly excluding many temptations to vice. He would
have thought, however, his hypothesis farther confirmed, if he had
learned that those who dwelt there were in most comfortable worldly
circumstances, removed alike from the fears of want and the desire of
ostentation; that they had not even a neighbour to envy; that, human
cares and ailings excepted, they were healthy alike in mind and
body. And yet was it not the abode of content.
That it was not so, arose entirely from one circumstance, which
would have been supposed incapable of having so much effect upon the
happiness of those around, by persons unaccustomed to observe by
what trivial causes the peace of families is sometimes disturbed.
Mrs. Darnell was a most worthy woman, correct in all her intentions,
exemplary in the discharge of all her duties, from the religious down
to the domestic; but she was a person of an unfortunately minute
mind, with a sort of clock-work regularity of sensations: with her,
each duty, of every degree, was, in its allotted succession, of
equal importance; and, undisturbed by any deviation into feeling,
she not only observed them herself, but, like the dial, pointed them
out to all about her. Any omission of the due decorum of any rule,
she treasured up, not till it had been obliterated by subsequent
punctuality, but till it was succeeded by some fresh deficiency;
by which means she contrived that she should never be without a
grievance: not that she was ever in consequence loud or angry;
this she would have thought wrong; but she put on a most provoking
appearance of patient endurance, which was exactly the sort of look
her husband could least bear, and which inducing, in consequence,
occasional violent ebullitions on his part, gave her the reputation
amongst those who knew little of both, of suffering meekly under his
violence, whilst the many more frequent occasions in which he had
yielded at length, for the sake of repurchasing a smiling face at his
domestic hearth, were unnoticed, because unknown.
Dick Darnell, as he was familiarly called by those who had known
him in his younger days, though now turned forty, had in character
much of the simplicity of a child, with warm affections, a cheerful
temper, and a disposition all whose natural bias was good, though
never much disciplined in the school of self-denial. It was lucky,
perhaps, that he was born in a situation where temptations did not
too much abound; for there were moments in which he was supposed not
to have been particularly successful in resisting those that had
occasionally crossed his path. Now that he was no longer very young,
his appearance would be best described by the epithet hearty. His
person had been handsome, and if its bulk had now increased beyond
the proper proportion, it had rather become portly than unwieldy; and
the good-humoured and cheerful expression of his laughing eye, seemed
to inspire sympathy at first sight.
He had become acquainted with his present wife at the county town,
during assize time. She was the daughter of a respectable tradesman,
who was known as one of that peculiarly strict class, who put forth
exclusive pretensions to monopolise righteousness; she had therefore
received a very serious and unexceptionable education. Richard
Darnell had done his best for many years to try to love her, and
would at that very hour have been very much surprised if anybody
had told him that he had not succeeded, for he always assured his
acquaintance at the market-town, to which he went once a week, “that
for sixteen years he had been married to his _Missus_, and he never
had had so much as one occasion to find fault with her.” He dropped
at these times all mention of those many occasions on which she had
found fault with him, which had led to those altercations mentioned
above. But there were few of his friends who had not remarked, that
of late years he never found the weather so bad as it used to be
when it frequently prevented his coming at all to market; but that,
on the contrary, he often found the distance in returning so much
longer than formerly, that when dark and wet, he could not possibly
reach home over night, but stayed till the next morning. His daughter
he loved better than all the rest of the world put together; and
when he returned from these excursions, and had not seen her for
four-and-twenty hours, he would like to sit in the chimney-corner,
with her slight form resting on his capacious knee, and picking out
those of his adventures by the way best suited to meet her ear, would
chat on for ever and ever, and ask no other reply than to see the
expression of his own laughing eye reflected in the softened likeness
of his daughter’s delicate features.
But these were, in Mrs. Darnell’s idea, moments of time most
completely wasted, and she would generally interrupt them by
demanding,--“why Richard would not stir himself, and look after
his men, whom he had left a whole day without a master’s eye,” and
by informing Lucy, she thought “her hands might be more profitably
employed at her needle, than in hanging idly about her father’s neck.”
Next to hanging about her father’s neck, her mother thought that the
most useless way in which Lucy’s hands were sometimes employed, was
holding a book. That is, to do her justice, she drew the distinction
between the use of a book as an amusement, or as a duty; as the
latter she not only very properly enjoined the lecture of the Psalms
and Lessons of the day, but enforced it so regularly, that one of
Lucy’s delinquencies, to which most frequent plaintive allusion
was made, was, that _once_ she had inadvertently read the Evening
Lesson in the morning, a fault which it was impossible to undo, but
by doubling it, and reading the Morning in the Evening. All reading
beyond this, whether history or fiction, she treated alike as vanity.
The duty of letters she did not consider as that of a standing army
to be sent abroad on the sea of knowledge, to extend the empire of
the mind; but merely as a sort of local militia, to be called out at
stated times on this one home service.
Such limitations as in this respect she put upon herself, she would
have exacted from Lucy, had not the latter been taught differently
in the course of the frequent visits she made to the aunt, mentioned
above. This aunt was an unmarried sister of Dick Darnell’s: some
years his junior, she had come to establish herself, within the
memory of Lucy, at a small but neat cottage round the next point,
which had originally been built as a house of occasional call in bad
weather, by a gentleman who had been sailing about in a yacht on that
coast.
She was a lone woman, who had evidently had her sorrows, not yet
forgotten by herself, though never obtruding their chilling contagion
on the spirits of her young visitors, who always found her anxious to
participate in their cheerfulness, though even at their thoughtless
years they sometimes noticed the effort that it required to enable
her to assume an appearance contradicted by the care-worn character
of her beauty, which, striking as that beauty still was, did not give
the idea of a person so much younger than her brother as she really
was.
It was curious to trace what is called a family likeness in two
persons so totally unlike. Her form was altogether of another mould,
and different habits had given the deportment of a different rank
in life. If the resemblance could be traced to any definite feature,
it lurked in the benevolent smile of the mouth, of which her’s was
the miniature copy of his, though that which gave to his its joyous
character, the sparkle of his laughing eye, if it ever had existed in
her’s, was now prematurely obscured. She lived entirely alone, with
the attendance only of one maid servant, and dependant for society,
(if she could be called dependant on that which she did not seem to
require) upon the frequent visits of her niece, the occasional calls
of her brother, or his nephew George, and those, luckily, more rare
occasions on which Mrs. Darnell found her way as far as her cottage,
mildly to murmur over her grievances. Though always cheerfully
receiving these separate visitors, the same disposition which, when
she first came into the neighbourhood, made her decline her brother
Richard’s hospitable offer, to lodge her under his roof, seemed
still to induce her to avoid the full family reunion at their own
house; and the only place where she met them altogether, (and this
she rarely missed,) was weekly in their common pew, at the Parish
Church, three miles off. It is impossible to conceive two persons
more different in the detail of their dispositions, than Mrs. Darnell
and this sister-in-law. The one with every thing to make a home happy
and comfortable, yet (one could almost as little tell how, as why,)
contriving to turn every thing into a grievance: the other, to whom
the world seemed to have done its worst, to have separated as an
isolated being from its interests, yet the chosen confidant even of
the changeful fancies of children, and occasionally sought as the
depositary of the complaints of her whom she so little resembled.
The fact was, that Alice Darnell had unconsciously assumed over her
sister-in-law that influence which a strong mind can hardly fail of
exerting over a weak one. This prevented her mother from objecting,
as she otherwise might have done, to the loss of time occasioned by
the frequent visits of Lucy to her aunt. There might, perhaps, be
another reason for this. Alice Darnell, though still young, was in a
precarious state of health, which had indeed been given by Richard
as the reason for his sister’s wishing to retire there; and, as
curiosity was not one of the flaws of his wife’s character, she had
always believed this to be the only cause of that measure; but Miss
Darnell’s fortune, for her rank in life, seemed considerable, and
whom was she to leave it to? This was a consideration which often
crossed Mrs. Darnell’s mind, as she had been educated in a school
in which, in the midst of pious contempt for the vanities of this
world, a beneficial distinction was always taken between its empty
pleasures and its solid advantages.
Alice Darnell had not what, in the enlarged sense, would have been
called a library, but she had some shelves well-stored with the
common editions of the English classics. Lucy generally found her
aunt occupied among these, but one thick octavo, she remarked, was a
constant favourite. It was a compendious volume, for it contained all
Shakspeare. In answer to her niece’s question, “Why she read it so
often?” she said, “This is the world in which alone I wish to live.
As long as this little book is left me, I am less alone, more in the
midst of human nature, than in the most crowded city.”
For once she spoke more according to her own feelings than to the
capacity of her she was addressing: she perceived her mistake. The
little girl could not understand her, but her curiosity was roused;
she anxiously listened to her aunt, who commenced reading to her
selected passages, in a manner which added all the charm of voice and
delivery to what was in itself so well calculated to interest; and
from that time forward one of the most eagerly anticipated pleasures
of her visits to her aunt was to cry with “Constance,” or to tremble
at “Lady Macbeth;” she never saw a storm without thinking of poor
“King Lear;” cultivated her _red roses_, out of sympathy for the
“House of Lancaster,” and neglected the _white ones_, out of mere
spite to “Richard III.”