AT HOME IN BLOOMSBURY.
The slow days, the long weeks, the interminable months dragged
themselves out, and Cecil lived alone with her husband in the stately
solitude of the northern side of Brunswick Square.
The celebrated pea-green Hayne was wont to declare that his horses
grew restive when he attempted to take them eastward of Temple Bar;
and there are many people nowadays inferior in status to the elegant
West-Indian millionaire, who shudder at the mention of Bloomsbury, and
affect a serio-comic horror of the unknown latitudes on the northern
side of Holborn.
Mr. O'Boyneville had no fashionable aversion to an unfashionable
locality. He liked his house in Brunswick Square, because it was big
and stoutly built, like himself; and, as the belief that any thing
appertaining to himself must necessarily be the very best thing of its
kind in existence was deeply implanted in his tranquil breast, he was
serenely unconscious of any brighter region than the comfortable square
in which he had taken up his abode when he first found himself able to
support a household of his own.
If he had known that there were fairer places than Bloomsbury within
reach of the courts of law; if he had fancied that there was any spot
in or near London which would have been more pleasant for Cecil, he
would have been quick to move his goods and chattels. He loved his wife
honestly and truly, and would have made a heavier sacrifice to give her
pleasure; but he knew about as much of a woman's tastes and prejudices
as he knew of the habitudes and requirements of a white elephant;
and he took Lady Cecil calmly home to the dreary, scantily-furnished
Bloomsbury mansion, and left her to be happy after her own fashion in
the spacious empty rooms while he went back to his work.
While he went back to his work! In those few words might have been told
the dismal history of two lives. The husband went to his work, and gave
his heart and soul to breaches of contract and actions for damages,
to libel and divorce cases, to actions in debt, trespass, assumpsit,
trover, and ejectment; and the wife saw him go out and come in, heard
his tired sigh, as he sank half-exhausted into his easy chair, but
remained utterly ignorant and unsympathising.
She had just at first tried to understand her husband's career, and
had questioned him upon the subject of his laborious days and studious
nights; but when he tried to explain some interesting case--a great
will case--in which the issue of a tedious suit depended on the
signification of the words "then" and "forthwith,"--whether the former
was meant to specify a particular time, or had reference to some other
antecedent time; and whether the latter meant "immediately" or within a
convenient time after a certain event,--her mind lost itself among the
complications of the law, and she was fain to confess herself mystified
rather than enlightened by her husband's explanation.
He kissed her, and told her he would never plague her again with such
dry details; and from that hour he very rarely talked of business in
his wife's presence.
But he thought of it, and that, for Cecil, was a great deal worse.
At breakfast, at dinner, when his young wife was talking to him in
her brightest and most animated manner, she would stop suddenly,
chilled and discouraged by the discovery that the great barrister
had not heard a word of her discourse. After telling him about a new
book--a fresh view of Mary Queen of Scots, by a French historian; an
anti-Carlyleian essay on Frederick of Prussia; a passionate, classic
tragedy, by a new poet--Cecil would look hopefully for some answering
ray of interest in her husband's face, and would behold his eyes fixed
and staring, and hear his lips murmuring faintly to himself, "The
defendant seems to me to have no case, and the plaintiffs will be
entitled to recover if Giddles and Giddles can show that the letter
was posted on the twenty-first; the defendant must be held in law to
be the purchaser, and therefore responsible for every bale of the
cotton. The cases Slattery _v._ Spindleshanks, 30th Law Digest, Q.B.,
page 102, and Capers _v._ Pepper, in the Weekly Reports, are almost
in point--humph!--yes, yes; but old Giddles must be kept out of the
witness-box, and Giddles junior pinned to the date and postmark of that
letter; and--yes, yes----"
After breakfast Mr. O'Boyneville kissed his wife, and hurried out of
the house. At half-past six he came home, washed his hands in a little
dressing-room at the back of his study, and sat down to dinner in the
dress he had worn all day, with the dust of the law-courts in his hair,
and all the dreariness of the law in his brain. Sometimes he talked a
little to his wife during dinner, telling her some scrap of public news
in which she did not feel the faintest interest, or reciting some legal
witticism, which to her uninitiated mind appeared unspeakably stupid.
After dinner he read his papers for a quarter of an hour, and then laid
himself down upon a gigantic crimson-morocco-covered sofa, which looked
like the relic of a departed era, a fossilised mammoth in the way of
upholsterer's work, and slept peacefully until nine, when a modest and
almost furtive double knock announced the advent of his clerk, who
brought the evening's batch of letters and papers.
Then the popular barrister arose like a giant refreshed, took a cup of
tea from Cecil's attentive hands, and sipped the revivifying beverage
in a dreamy manner, staring thoughtfully at his wife without seeing
her, and still revolving the case of Giddles and Giddles, Liverpool
brokers, and the three thousand bales of cotton. After tea he went to
his study, which darksome sanctorum he rarely left until the smallest
of the small hours had sounded from the clocks of St. Pancras and the
Foundling.
Laurence O'Boyneville had won his position by honest hard work, and by
divine right of an intellect not easily matched amongst the ranks of
hard-working man. But such a man is apt to make a terrible mistake when
he brings a fair young wife to his joyless home. Incessant work had
become the normal state of the barrister. He did not know that his home
was dreary. His life seemed pleasant enough to him; and he did not know
that to a woman such a mode of existence must be simply intolerable. He
gave his wife a comfortable house, and the unlimited command of money;
and he fancied he had done all that was necessary. He had no time for
any thing more. When his day's work was finished he was too tired to
change his dress, too tired to talk without effort, too tired to go
from one room to another after his dinner; and when he had recovered
from the fatigue of his day's work his night's work began.
And such a life as this was the realisation of his brightest dream.
For these days of unrest and excitement, for these studious nights had
the young man from Shannonville toiled and struggled. He had attained
a high position in his profession, and he loved his profession. What
more could the heart of man desire? Venus Anadyomene divinely smiling
amidst a cloud of silvery spray, radiant with vermilion and carmine,
ultramarine and Naples yellow, could be no more delightful to the mind
of William Crawford, the painter, than were the cases of Giddles and
Giddles _v._ Clithery, Shavington _v._ The Estremadura Soap-boiling
Company (limited), and many others, to Laurence O'Boyneville, Q.C.
What reason have the painter and the poet, the sculptor and the
musician, to be thankful that the arts for which they slave, the
labours to which they devote their lives, are beautiful for all the
world as well as for the labourers! If Cecil's husband had been a
painter she would have been content to stand beside his easel while
his bright fancies grew into life upon the canvas. Every new picture
would have been an era in her existence as well as in his. No curve of
an arm or wrist, no pose of a head, no undulation of a drapery that
would not have made subject for pleasant talk and spirited discussion.
The painter and his wife may go lovingly hand-in-hand upon the great
highway to Fame's starry temple; and if she has been his model now and
then, and if she has suggested the subject of a picture, or devised
some happy alteration of an attitude, she seems to have had a part in
her husband's work. To all time the wives of Rubens will be associated
with his genius; so long as the work of Raffaelle endures, the world
will remember the woman he loved and painted.
But what part can the barrister's wife have in his triumphs? Except
amongst certain sets the world does not talk much of popular
barristers; and the wife of a legal luminary hears little praise of
her husband from the lips of strangers. A woman must be strong-minded
indeed who can interest herself in the technicalities of a dispute
arising out of the purchase of sundry bales of cotton, or the
winding-up of the affairs of a bubble company. There is something in
the very paraphernalia of the legal profession which, on the threshold,
repels all feminine sympathy. The crimson bag, the red tape, the green
ferret; the slippery blue paper, which to the unprofessional pen is
utterly impracticable for all literary use,--every thing seems alike
symbolical of a hopeless dryness and arid barrenness, amidst which no
solitary blossoms, no lonely, accidental prison-flower can put forth
its tender shoots.
As the dull days crept on, so miserably alike one another, Cecil felt
it was her duty to be interested in her husband's career. She read the
law-reports in the _Times_, the pale shadows of bad puns, whereat there
had been laughter, but which could bring no smile to her pensive face.
She could not be interested in those dreary lawsuits, those endless
disputations about sordid things. So at last she abandoned the effort,
and fell back upon her own thoughts, which were sad enough sometimes.
As Lord Aspendell's daughter and as Laurence O'Boyneville's wife, Lady
Cecil might have had enough of dinner-parties and evening-parties,
kettledrums and _déjeûners_; but she had grown weary of all parties
long before her marriage, and was glad to escape from the set in
which she had lived, and to hide herself in the remote fastnesses of
Bloomsbury.
"My husband has no time for going out," she said, when her old friends
asked her to their houses.
"But you can come, Cecil, and Mr. O'Boyneville can look in during the
evening."
Cecil shook her head.
"He is so tired after his day's work that it would be a cruelty to ask
him to go out," she said.
"And you are going to lead this dull life always, Cecil?"
"I don't care for society. I was accustomed to a solitary life with
poor papa, and it suits me better than any thing else."
But Cecil, looking back upon that old life, remembered with a sigh
how dear a companion her father had been. There was nothing in
heaven and earth that they had not talked of; no book read by one,
and not by the other; no subject so barren that it had not served
for pleasant discourse, when the shabby old curtains were drawn, and
the lamp lighted in the drawing-room of that dear old tumble-down
cottage on the Dyke Road. Cecil did not consider what it was that
constituted the grand difference between her father and her husband.
She had lived amongst poor people before her marriage, but she had
never lived amongst hard-working people. It was very strange to her
to have to do with a person who had no leisure for the refinements
and amenities of life; who gave short answers, for lack of time to be
deliberate and polite; who told her "not to bother," when she asked
some womanly question about his health, or his fatigues, in the midst
of professional meditations. A woman has acquired sublime patience when
she can meekly endure to be bidden not to "bother" her husband, and
still love on.
Never until her marriage had Cecil been familiar with the people who
do the work of this world; and it was scarcely strange if her husband,
in workday clothes and with his workday manners, seemed to her a being
of a different race from that to which belonged the high-bred idlers
she had been accustomed to encounter. She knew that he loved her; she
knew that he was generous, and good, and true: but this knowledge was
not enough. She knew that he was clever; but her lonely days were never
brightened by any ray of his intellect, her desolate evenings were
never enlivened by his wit. Was he _her_ husband? Was he not rather
wedded to that inexorable tyrant which he called his profession? He
loved his wife, and was anxious to please her, but not if her pleasure
involved the neglect of his professional duties. If Cecil knew that
she was beloved, she knew also that Giddles and Giddles and the
subtle niceties of the law were nearer and dearer to her husband than
she could ever be. It was the name of Giddles, mingled with scraps
of an address to the court and jury, that he muttered in his fitful
sleep,--it was how to avail himself of the weak points in Clithery's
defence, or Shavington's, or Jones and Smith's cases, that he pondered
as he brooded by the domestic hearth.
"Why did he marry me?" she thought sometimes sadly; "I am of no use
to him. I am no companion for him. A home for him is only a place in
which he can eat and drink and sleep, and keep some of his law-books.
If I speak to him at breakfast or dinner-time, I may disturb a train
of thought by some idle word; and when he is asleep on the sofa, how
is he the better off for my sitting on the opposite side of the fire
yawning behind my book? The man who comes to him every evening with the
red bag is more to him than I am, for the man and the bag belong to his
profession."
It is not to be supposed that even so busy a man as Mr. O'Boyneville
lived in entire exclusion from all social intercourse with his
fellow-men. There were stately dinner-parties to which he conducted his
elegant young wife, and on rare occasions he gave a stately dinner at
home. And then, once more, Lady Cecil was called upon to give her mind
to the _menu_ of the feast; only in these latter days there were no
harassing calculations of ways and means, no balancing of _fricandeau_
against calves' head _en tortue_, no weighing of lobster-cutlets
against eels _à la tartare_. All Mr. O'Boyneville's ideas were large
and liberal. His household was well organised, his servants few
and efficient, his cellar richly furnished; and if the comfortable
kitchen-wenches of Bloomsbury are behind the _chefs_ and _cordons
bleus_ of Belgravia, the Bloomsbury confectioner is like "Todgers's,"
and can do the thing handsomely when he pleases.
But when all was done those rare and solemn entertainments were very
dreary to Cecil. She tried to be interested in her husband's friends;
but the legal magnates with whom the great O'Boyneville chiefly
associated were not interesting to his young wife; and the wives of the
legal magnates seemed to have lost all the freshness and brightness
of their youth under the all-pervading influence of such cases as
Giddles and Giddles _v._ Clithery, and Shavington _v._ The Estremadura
Soap-boiling Company (limited).
If Mr. O'Boyneville could have purchased his wife pleasure at any cost
save that of his legal position, he would gladly have done so. He saw
a pile of Cecil's music-books, heaped on a side-table in the bare,
bleak drawing-rooms, and half an hour afterwards bade his clerk convey
to Messrs. Broadwood his desire that one of the finest grand pianos
that firm could supply, should be delivered without delay in Brunswick
Square. Cecil felt a kind of rapture as she ran her fingers over the
new keys, and heard the silvery tones of that perfect instrument; for
the dowager's cottage, on which she had been wont to perform in Dorset
Square, gave forth only feeble tinklings for its treble, and woolly
confusion for its bass. After the pleasant surprise occasioned by the
arrival of the splendid grand, after a happy day spent in desultory
ramblings amongst old music-books, Cecil tripped lightly down to the
hall when the banging of doors announced the arrival of her husband's
hansom-cab, eager to bid him welcome.
She met him, and went with him into the dressing-room, where he was
wont to make his brief toilet.
"I want to thank you a thousand, thousand times!" she said.
"Thank me, my dear! What for?" asked the barrister, washing his hands.
"The piano--the beautiful Broadwood!"
"What piano?"
The great O'Boyneville's mind was either with Giddles _v._ Clithery or
the Spanish Soap-boiling Company. Cecil sighed. It seemed as if half
the value of the gift was taken away by the indifference of the giver.
"I thank you very, very much," she said presently, but all the girlish
animation had gone from her manner. "There is nothing in the world you
could have given me so welcome as that delightful piano."
"I'm very glad you like it, dear; I told them to send you a good one.
I caught sight of your music-books on the table in the drawing-room
through the open door as I came down to breakfast yesterday morning,
and I remembered that music-books couldn't be of any use to you without
a piano."
After this Cecil tried to make herself happy in her husband's house.
She tried to reconcile herself to his long absences, his gloomy
preoccupation, his profound slumbers on the mammoth sofa. She tried
to be in all things a good and dutiful wife, and to lead her own life
peacefully and happily, thanking Providence for having given her so
kind a protector, so honest a friend, in the person of the husband who
could never be her companion. She arranged her favourite books in a
little old-fashioned bookcase in the back drawing-room; she decorated
the two gaunt rooms with birds and flowers, and scattered pretty
inexpensive nicknacks on the ponderous rosewood tables. Whatever
elegance can be imparted to two great dreary apartments, furnished by
general order on an upholsterer with all that is most solid in carved
rosewood, and all that is most darksome in green damask, Lady Cecil
imparted to the Bloomsbury drawing-rooms. But when all was done they
were too large for her loneliness, and the days and nights seemed
very long in them. She had piles of new books from a mighty emporium
in the neighbourhood, and she read herself almost blind sometimes
before the day was done. She had a neat little brougham in which
to pay visits or drive in the park, but she did not care to retain
fashionable acquaintances whose ways were no longer her ways. The
delights for which she pined were not the frivolous joys of Belgravian
drawing-rooms, nor the glare and glitter of Tyburnian festivals. When
her fancies wandered away from the Bloomsbury realities into the world
of visions, they carried her to fair cities in distant lands, to sombre
German forests and snow-clad Swiss mountains, towering upward in an
atmosphere whose breath is like the breath of a new life revivifying
a worn-out body. She thought how peaceful, how very nearly happy, the
quiet autumn days spent in Devonshire with her husband had seemed to
her.
Mr. O'Boyneville was not a man to do things by halves, and when he
divorced himself from business the separation was always a complete
one. During the brief honeymoon he had been the most devoted and
submissive of husbands, the tenderest of friends, the most sympathetic
of companions; but once within a shilling cab-fare of the law-courts,
the husband and the lover froze into the man of business, and Giddles
_v._ Clithery, or Jones _v._ Robinson, or Smith against Brown and
others, reigned paramount.
Mrs. MacClaverhouse honoured her niece by dining with her now and then,
and was received with stately ceremony, and treated with all courteous
attention by her nephew-in-law, for whom she seemed to entertain a
profound esteem. The dowager was pleased to express her approval of
Mr. O'Boyneville's wines, and her commendation of her niece's cook,
"though she robs you, my dear, I have no doubt, up hill and down dale,"
said the experienced housekeeper; "those good cooks always do. And that
husband of yours is such a generous creature, that I think he must
have been created to be robbed. I do hope you keep some check upon
the housekeeping, and go down to the kitchen at least _once_ a-day. I
know it requires moral courage to do it, just at first; but a woman
who has no moral courage is not fit to have a house of her own, or to
live in lodgings either; for, long as my experience has been, I'm not
able to say whether a cook's or a landlady's audacity goes furthest
in such matters as lard and gravy-beef, while the amount of port and
sherry such women will make away with, under pretence of hare-soup and
cabinet-puddings, is something awful."
But though the dowager had every reason to be satisfied with her
reception whenever she visited Brunswick Square, she did not care to go
there often, for her lively spirit revolted against the dulness of Mr.
O'Boyneville's mansion.
"I don't know how it is, Cecil," she exclaimed one day, "but from the
first moment I entered your dining-room its effect upon me has been
equally depressing. There's a something. I don't know whether it's
the dark-brown curtains or that dreadful mahogany cellaret--and, oh,
why do they make cellarets like sarcophaguses?--under that gigantic
sideboard; but there is a something in your house that preys upon my
spirits. Of course it needn't have that effect upon you, my dear, for
you're accustomed to it, and habit always attaches one to things; but
I'm a whimsical old woman, and this end of the town always did depress
me; while if you take me up towards Islington, past all those cheap
photographers and dusty little gardens, you take me to despair."
Miss Crawford was a frequent visitor at her old friend's house, though
Cecil did not encourage her visits, as her coming very often involved
the escort of Mr. Lobyer, who worried the birds stealthily while
the two ladies were engaged in conversation, and who was generally
accompanied by a diminutive terrier, or a fawn-coloured pug of
unamiable disposition. Even when Florence Crawford came alone, her
presence was not altogether welcome to Cecil. She was oppressively
lively, and seemed to grow more and more volatile as the time appointed
for her marriage with the young millionaire grew nearer. She talked
of nothing but carriages and horses, Tyburnian mansions, and county
splendours; and she was never weary of upbraiding Cecil upon the folly
of her residence in Brunswick Square.
"If I were you I wouldn't allow my husband an hour's peace till he
removed to the West-end," she said; "I hear he earns heaps of money,
and it's really shameful of him to keep you here."
"My dear Florence, if I were to ask Mr. O'Boyneville to take a house at
the West-end, I'm sure he would do so immediately."
"Then why in goodness' name don't you ask him?"
"Because he would be so ready to grant my request, and I don't wish to
impose upon his kindness."
"Impose upon his fiddlesticks! Really, Cecil, you provoke me into being
vulgar: and I wonder how it is, by-the-bye, that all great emotions
have a tendency to make one vulgar. I shall lose all common patience if
you insist upon talking like the good young woman in a novel. What did
you marry Mr. O'Boyneville for unless it was for a handsome house and a
fashionable carriage?"
"I married him because I loved him," Cecil answered gravely, "and
because I hoped to make him a good wife."
Flo's piquant eyebrows elevated themselves to their utmost extent as
her friend said this.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, "of course that alters the case: but you really
_are_ like the young woman in a novel, Cecil; and I could never quite
bring myself to believe in that young woman."
And then the impulsive Florence pounced upon her friend, and embraced
her with effusion, declaring that she loved her dearest Cecil to
distraction, and that she would not for worlds say any thing to wound
or distress her. "I'm such a mercenary wretch myself, dear," she
said, "that I fancy every body must be made of the same contemptible
stuff. The girls I meet are so like me, and all our ideas seem to run
in the same groove. Do you know, Cecil, I sometimes think that if we
are unbelieving and mercenary--if we worship nothing but the pomps
and vanities of society--our wickedness is only the natural effect
of the precepts instilled into the youthful mind by those dreadful
grandmothers and maiden aunts of the old school, who were always
preaching against all that is romantic and poetical, and whose dearest
delight was to bray their children's brains in the stony mortar of
common-sense."
Once, and once only, did Cecil venture to speak earnestly to Florence
Crawford on the subject of her approaching marriage. All those vague
allusions to the mercenary sentiments of modern damsels, which Miss
Crawford was so fond of uttering, seemed to Cecil like so many excuses
for her union with the rich young Manchester man. She had not the heart
to ask direct questions, but she spoke very seriously--as she would
have spoken to a sister.
"Remember the long, long life, dear," she said earnestly,--"the long
years that are to come after the wedding-day. Women never could talk
so lightly of marriage if they had any thought of the future. Think,
Florence dear, it is a union that can only be broken by death--or shame
and misery ten times worse than death. I can only repeat the stalest
truisms; these things have been said a hundred times before to-day far
better than I can say them; and yet day after day, year after year,
there are wedding-favours worn, and wedding-bells rung, in honour of
marriages that are only the beginning of life-long misery."
"Cecil," cried Flo impatiently, "if you talk like that I shall begin to
think you repent having married Mr. O'Boyneville."
"No, no, dear, I don't repent; but I know now that I did not think
seriously enough of the step I was taking."
Miss Crawford had been beating the point of her pretty little boot upon
the floor, and twisting the fringe of her elegant parasol into all
manner of knots and entanglements during Cecil's lecture. The piquant
eyebrows were contracted into a frown, and the pretty grey eyes were
filled with tears, and it was not easy to discover whether anger or
sorrow were the stronger in the breast of Florence Crawford.
"I don't think I should have accepted Thomas," she said presently--and
she had not yet brought herself to pronounce her lover's Christian name
without making a wry face--"in fact, I'm sure I shouldn't have accepted
him if I had known what being engaged would bring upon me. Every
creature upon earth seems to make it his or her business to lecture me.
People talk about hasty marriages and life-long misery just as if they
had some occult power of knowing that Mr. Lobyer was predoomed to half
murder me with a poker, like the men one reads of at the police-courts,
within a week of our marriage. And yet what did I see before I was
engaged? Every girl I knew eager to please the man I am going to marry,
and every mother trying to beguile him into marrying her daughter. But
now every thing is changed. People shake their heads when they talk of
Mr. Lobyer, and my particular friends sigh and groan about my prospects
as dismally as if I had set my heart upon marrying a chimney-sweep.
If I was going to be sacrificed upon an altar to-morrow, like that
young woman in Racine's tragedy, people couldn't go on about me worse
than they do. Of course I don't pretend to say that I am romantically
attached to Mr. Lobyer--first and foremost because I don't believe
there are any romantic attachments in these days; and secondly, because
if there are, I'm not at all the sort of person to be the subject of
one."
And then, after a little pause, Miss Crawford would continue the
discussion.
"I like him very well, I'm sure," she said rather thoughtfully, and
somewhat as if she had not quite decided the question in her own mind,
"and I don't care a straw for any one else; and I dare say I shall
behave pretty well to him, though I fear it's not in my nature to
behave too well to any one. So, on the whole, I really can't see that
people have any right to lecture me about the unfortunate young man I'm
going to marry."
After this tirade the impetuous Florence again embraced her friend, and
declared herself for the twentieth time to be a frivolous mercenary
creature, unworthy alike of love and friendship. But henceforward
Cecil felt that it was useless to interfere with Miss Crawford's
arrangements. If sorrow lay before the painter's daughter on the road
that she was treading, she was too obstinately bent on going her own
way to be drawn back by any friendly hand, let it hold her never so
gently.
Mr. Lobyer dined in Brunswick Square one evening to meet his betrothed;
on which occasion the barrister subjected him to rather a severe
cross-examination. Cecil ventured next morning to ask her husband what
he thought of her friend's suitor.
"It's rather fortunate for your friend and for the gentleman himself
that he was born rich," answered Mr. O'Boyneville; "there are some men
who seem created to distinguish themselves at the Old Bailey, and I'm
afraid Mr. Lobyer is one of them. But as he is the owner of a million
or two, it doesn't much matter. If he had been a poor man, he would
have run through all the crimes in the statute-book; but as he has
unlimited wealth, he can indulge himself by breaking four-fifths of the
ten commandments without putting himself in the power of the law."