IN HAMPSHIRE AGAIN.
'I wish Jerry were here to help me,' sighed Lady Julia, as she
lounged in a luxurious fauteuil in the beautiful drawing-room of
Wilmothurst, with 'Cousin' Emily, on a dull afternoon of February,
when the trees in the stately chase were dripping with moisture, and
the reedy fens and lonesome marshes, where the bittern boomed and the
heron waded, looked dreary, and the edges of the water-flags were
stiff and white with frost. 'I would Jerry were here to help me with
his advice. Not that his advice would help us much perhaps, Emily,'
she added, querulously.
'Advice, Aunt Julia? When poor dear Jerry was here, he did nothing,'
replied that young lady.
'And that was all he ever cared to do, Emily; but I have seen so
little of Jerry since he joined the Rifles that I seem to be quite
alone in the world.'
And she sighed a little conventional sigh, while spreading her
feather fan, though a large crystal screen was placed between her and
the brilliant fire that burned in a grate of steel polished like
silver.
'But matters have come to a crisis with us; through me, I fear,' she
added.
'Through you, aunt?'
'Yes, unfortunately.'
'How--in what way?'
'Did you not see how I turned my back upon that minx, Miss Chevenix,
at the Charity Bazaar last week; cut her dead indeed, and this is the
result!' exclaimed Lady Julia, tossing from her contemptuously a
letter she had recently received.
'What result?' asked Emily Wilmot, too languid to open the missive in
question.
'Her father will wait for the interest on the mortgages no longer,
and we are ruined! Even this house of Wilmothurst may have to pass
to him, and we shall have to go--to go--'
'Where, aunt?' asked Emily, becoming roused now, her light blue eyes
dilated with wonder, and her nose seeming more _retroussé_ than ever.
'God alone knows where; to some obscure watering-place probably. If
this insolent fellow, who certainly has not been paid for some years,
would only wait till Jerry returns from the Gold Coast, and some
arrangements could be made,' continued Lady Julia, in her plaintive
and bleating kind of voice. 'House, lands, and all will go to
Chevenix, and only a few acres will be left us. We are beggars,' she
continued, with angry querulousness, but without altering a line of
her smooth, handsome, and passionless face. 'We have nothing of our
own--all will become his.'
'But surely, aunt, you have friends. There is Lord Twiseldown--there
is Sir Jasper Dehorsey.'
'I cannot stoop to ask, and who would lend me thousands--not even
money-lenders now, for there is nothing left in the shape of land to
borrow on. Wilmothurst will become the property of this upstart
farmer's son out and out. Jerry will have to give up everything but
his commission, and go to India no doubt. Fortunately he has that
resource left him; but I--I shall no longer be able to maintain even
you, Emily.'
Lady Wilmot's emotions of annoyance and anger at Mr. Chevenix and the
whole situation took the form of making her niece smart, while in
reality she had no very genuine fear of such an awful crisis coming
about, thinking that heaven or fate, or something or other, would
never permit a person of her position to be so heavily visited.
'And _what_ shall I do, auntie?' asked the young lady, plaintively,
but with surprise.
'You may have to go out into the world as a governess or companion.'
'Governess or companion! while Bella Chevenix----'
'Will reign here as heiress of Wilmothurst,' said Lady Julia, with
the first approach to expression on her lineless face--a bitter and
scornful smile.
'Oh, it is hard--very hard!'
'Very hard for _me_,' added Lady Julia, who like most of her class
thought chiefly of 'number one.'
'She will make some good marriage,' said Emily, after a pause.
'She is decidedly very handsome, and has, my maid Florine tells me,
magnificent hair.'
'Handsome,' queried the fair Emily; 'yes, but aunt, this is an age of
belladonna, pearl powder, rouge, and heaven knows what more.'
'I hope the Gold Coast will have cured Jerry of his foolish fancy for
that artful girl.'
'Her tastes are decidedly rural. I have been told that she often
assists the vicar in visiting the poor, and actually teaches in his
school at times.'
'Well, she is more in her place there, and acting the village
Samaritan, than riding with the buckhounds, dancing at county and
garrison balls, and giving herself the airs of the _habituée du
monde_.'
Lady Julia had in her arms a Maltese spaniel, a wheezy, fat, and
petted cur that often reposed in a mother-of-pearl basket lined with
blue satin, and she was fondling it as she had never fondled Jerry
when an infant--a cur that snapped viciously at every one who
approached within ten yards of it or her, but which she always
apostrophised and talked to as if it had been a human being; and,
sooth to say, it was about as human in feeling as this earl's
daughter, so far as tenderness and a capacity for loving went--loving
any one at least but herself.
'Come, my sweet one, Floss,' she now exclaimed, oblivious suddenly of
her approaching woes, and while it was leaping and yapping on her
knee she kissed it repeatedly, and said, in a cooing voice, 'Did it
want to go for a drive on this cold cold February afternoon? Then
its mamma will order the carriage and take it for one.'
If Jerry had never in his tender boyhood been fondled in this manner,
how often had he felt in after-life that much of the attention his
mother _did_ at any time bestow upon him was due less to any maternal
instinct or love than to his position and means as Squire of
Wilmothurst and to family pride and vanity.
'A letter, my lady,' said a tall footman, presenting one on a salver,
and withdrawing noiselessly.
'Another from this man Chevenix already. Again! really, really, what
can this person want now!'
She tore it impatiently open, the diamonds on her white fingers
sparkling as she did so, and her delicately pencilled eyebrows were
elevated as she read with aristocratic surprise and impatience:--
'"With reference to my letter of this morning about the mortgages,
dear Lady Julia, take all the delay you may wish. They shall not be
foreclosed till time has soothed the awful blow that has fallen upon
you."'
'Blow!' exclaimed Lady Julia. 'What blow?--what can the man mean?'
'Read on, auntie--there is something more.'
'"The fall of your son so gallantly in Western Africa is a
circumstance to be deplored indeed by all--but more than all by those
who knew him."
'Good heavens--good heavens--good heavens!' said Lady Julia thrice,
in a low yet fretful voice, as if she scarcely understood the
situation; 'it is all some dreadful mistake; Jerry--Jerry--a mistake,
Emily. I saw nothing of it in the _Post_ or _Times_ this morning.
She was trembling excessively now, and Emily's eyes were full of hot
welling tears. Neither of the ladies had seen the fatal intelligence
from the seat of war, for, as they all read only the fashionable
intelligence, they had heeded transactions on the Gold Coast as much
they did those that may be occurring in the mountains of the moon.
However, to do them justice, both were thunderstruck--impressed as
much as it was in their frozen nature to be--when Emily, after
rushing for the morning paper, found the brief telegram or paragraph
to which, no doubt, Mr. Chevenix referred:
'_Coomassie in flames. Army falling back on the Gold Coast; but the
rivers rising fast. Chief casualties--Captain Dalton, Rifles,
severely wounded; Captain J. Wilmot, do., killed and carried off by
the enemy._'
The fashionable aunt and niece, at whose pleasant doors grief and
sorrow seldom or never came, sat for a time as if stunned. Chevenix
and his mortgages were alike forgotten; they could but think of Jerry
and strive to realize the--to them--almost impossible situation,
while the dull and depressing afternoon stole on.
How could it be, or why was it, that Jerry, so jolly and manly--the
son of such a cold and feeble-minded woman of rank and fashion, who
had done her best, but failed, to spoil or pamper him--was reserved
for such a fate as this!
He had escaped the battle of Amoaful, the passage of the Prah, the
fighting prior to the capture of Coomassie, and all the perils of
death by fever and toil to perish thus, when the wretched end had
been achieved and the troops must have been on their homeward way.
Poor Jerry! The life of the mess and the life of Wilmothurst when at
home, where, in consideration of his five feet ten inches and
irreproachable moustache, he had been latterly permitted to be termed
a 'son,' and not, as his mother would have wished, a 'boy.'
Lady Julia Wilmot had never posed in society save as a beauty, and
the great consideration that was ever shown her was due to that
beauty and her birth and position as an earl's daughter; but not to
any brilliant qualities of head--still less of amiability of heart.
Thus in many ways she was a fair average example of 'the upper ten.'
So now it may be said of her and Cousin Emily on this disastrous
occasion,
'Some natural tears they shed, but wip'd them soon.'
And their first thoughts were of a suitable and handsome tablet to
Jerry's memory in the Vicarage Church, and of fashionable mourning
for themselves and the household. It would all cast a gloom over
their return to town after Easter in March, when a 'brief season'
would commence--if they went to town at all, for 'thank Heaven,'
added Lady Julia, 'no one shall accuse me of not doing my duty to my
son. I shall order my mourning at Jay's, and certainly will not wear
one of those frightful bonnets with long--what is it now, John?'
A tall footman, with a face of woe made up for the occasion, and a
manner adapted to it--for the news had spread like wildfire over all
the house and vicinity, and when many genuine tears were shed in the
servants' hall, where Jerry was a prime favourite with the women
folks--brought in a card, announcing
'Miss Chevenix.'
'Chevenix again--this is intolerable! Did you say not at home?'
'I said you were engaged--severially indispoged, my lady,' he
replied, shaking his cauliflower-looking head solemnly.
'Yet--she would come in.'
'Yes, my lady.'
'And at a time like this--when we are plunged in unutterable woe!
Such confident assurance!'
The door was thrown open, and Bella Chevenix came swiftly forward as
the servant withdrew.
But in this we are anticipating a little.