JOHN MELLISH.
The house which the banker hired at Brighton for the month of October
was perched high up on the East Cliff, towering loftily above the
wind-driven waves; the purple coast of Shoreham was dimly visible from
the upper windows in the clear autumn mornings, and the Chain Pier
looked like a strip of ribbon below the cliff. A pleasanter situation
to my mind than those level terraces towards the west, from the windows
of which the sea appears of small extent, and the horizon within half a
mile or so of the Parade.
Before Mr. Floyd took his daughter and her cousin to Brighton, he
entered into an arrangement which he thought, no doubt, a very great
evidence of his wisdom; this was the engagement of a lady, who was
to be a compound governess, companion, and chaperon to Aurora, who,
as Mrs. Alexander said, was sadly in need of some accomplished and
watchful person, whose care it would be to train and prune those
exuberant branches of her nature which had been suffered to grow as
they would from her infancy. The beautiful shrub was no longer to trail
its wild stems along the ground, or shoot upward to the blue skies
at its own sweet will; it was to be trimmed and clipped and fastened
primly to the stony wall of society with cruel nails and galling strips
of cloth. In other words, an advertisement was inserted in the 'Times'
newspaper, setting forth that a lady, by birth and education, was
required as finishing governess and companion in the household of a
gentleman, to whom salary was no object, provided the aforesaid lady
was perfect mistress of all the accomplishments under the sun, and was
altogether such an exceptional and extraordinary being as could only
exist in the advertising columns of a popular journal.
But if the world had been filled with exceptional beings, Mr. Floyd
could scarcely have received more answers to his advertisement than
came pelting in upon the unhappy little postmaster at Beckenham.
The man had serious thoughts of hiring a cart, in which to convey
the letters to Felden. If the banker had advertised for a wife,
and had stated the amount of his income, he could scarcely have had
more answers. It seemed as if the female population of London, with
one accord, was seized with the desire to improve the mind and form
the manners of the daughter of the gentleman to whom terms were no
object. Officers' widows, clergymen's widows, lawyers' and merchants'
widows, daughters of gentlemen of high family but reduced means, orphan
daughters of all sorts of noble and distinguished people,--declared
themselves each and every one to be the person who, out of all
living creatures upon this earth, was best adapted for the post.
Mrs. Alexander Floyd selected six letters, threw the rest into the
waste-paper basket, ordered the banker's carriage, and drove into town
to see the six writers thereof. She was a practical and energetic
woman, and she put the six applicants through their facings so
severely, that when she returned to Mr. Floyd it was to announce that
only one of them was good for anything, and that she was coming down to
Felden Woods the next day.
The chosen lady was the widow of an ensign who had died within six
months of his marriage, and about an hour and a half before he would
have succeeded to some enormous property, the particulars of which
were never rightly understood by the friends of his unfortunate
relict. But vague as the story might be, it was quite clear enough to
establish Mrs. Walter Powell in life as a disappointed woman. She was
a woman with straight light hair, and a lady-like droop of the head.
A woman who had left school to marry, and after six months' wedded
life had gone back to the same school as instructress of the junior
pupils. A woman whose whole existence had been spent in teaching and
being taught; who had exercised in her earlier years a species of
hand-to-mouth tuition, teaching in the morning that which she learnt
over-night; who had never lost an opportunity of improving herself;
who had grown mechanically proficient as a musician and an artist,
who had a certain parrot-like skill in foreign languages, who had
read all the books incumbent upon her to read, and who knew all the
things imperative for her to know, and who, beyond all this, and
outside the boundary of the schoolroom wall, was ignorant and soulless
and low-minded and vulgar. Aurora swallowed the bitter pill as best
she might, and accepted Mrs. Powell as the person chartered for her
improvement:--a kind of ballast to be flung into the wandering bark, to
steady its erratic course and keep it off rocks and quicksands.
"I must put up with her, Lucy, I suppose," she said; "and I must
consent to be improved and formed by the poor faded creature. I wonder
whether she will be like Miss Drummond, who used to let me off from my
lessons, and read novels while I ran wild in the gardens and stables. I
can put up with her, Lucy, as long as I have you with me; but I think
I should go mad, if I were to be chained up alone with that grim,
pale-faced watch-dog."
Mr. Floyd and his family drove from Felden to Brighton in the banker's
roomy travelling-carriage, with Aurora's maid in the rumble, a pile of
imperials upon the roof, and Mrs. Powell, with her young charges, in
the interior of the vehicle. Mrs. Alexander had gone back to Fulham,
having done her duty, as she considered, in securing a protectress for
Aurora; but Lucy was to stay with her cousin at Brighton, and to ride
with her on the downs. The saddle-horses had gone down the day before
with Aurora's groom, a gray-haired and rather surly old fellow who had
served Archibald Floyd for thirty years; and the mastiff called Bow-wow
travelled in the carriage with his mistress.
About a week after the arrival at Brighton, Aurora and her cousin were
walking together on the West Cliff, when a gentleman with a stiff leg
rose from a bench upon which he had been seated listening to the band,
and slowly advanced to them. Lucy dropped her eyelids with a faint
blush; but Aurora held out her hand in answer to Captain Bulstrode's
salute.
"I thought I should be sure to meet you down here, Miss Floyd," he
said. "I only came this morning, and I was going to call at Folthorpe's
for your papa's address. Is he quite well?"
"Quite--yes, that is--pretty well." A shadow stole over her face as she
spoke. It was a wonderful face for fitful lights and shades. "But we
did not expect to see you at Brighton, Captain Bulstrode; we thought
your regiment was still quartered at Windsor."
"Yes, my regiment--that is, the Eleventh is still at Windsor; but I
have sold out."
"Sold out!" Both Aurora and her cousin opened their eyes at this
intelligence.
"Yes; I was tired of the army. It's dull work now the fighting is
all over. I might have exchanged and gone to India, certainly," he
added, as if in answer to some argument of his own; "but I'm getting
middle-aged, and I am tired of roaming about the world."
"I should like to go to India," said Aurora, looking seaward as she
spoke.
"You, Aurora! but why?" exclaimed Lucy.
"Because I hate England."
"I thought it was France you disliked."
"I hate them both. What is the use of this big world, if we are to stop
for ever in one place, chained to one set of ideas, fettered to one
narrow circle of people, seeing and hearing of the persons we hate for
ever and ever, and unable to get away from the odious sound of their
names? I should like to turn female missionary, and go to the centre of
Africa with Dr. Livingstone and his family; and I would go if it wasn't
for papa."
Poor Lucy stared at her cousin in helpless amazement. Talbot Bulstrode
found himself falling back into that state of bewilderment in which
this girl always threw him. What did she mean, this heiress of nineteen
years of age, by her fits of despondency and outbursts of bitterness?
Was it not perhaps, after all, only an affectation of singularity?
Aurora looked at him with her brightest smile while he was asking
himself this question. "You will come and see papa?" she said.
Captain Bulstrode declared that he desired no greater happiness than
to pay his respects to Mr. Floyd, in token whereof he walked with the
young ladies towards the East Cliff.
From that morning, the officer became a constant visitor at the
banker's. He played chess with Lucy, accompanied her on the piano
when she sang, assisted her with valuable hints when she painted
in water-colours, put in lights here and glimpses of sky there,
deepened autumnal browns, and intensified horizon purples, and made
himself altogether useful to the young lady, who was, as we know,
accomplished in all lady-like arts. Mrs. Powell, seated in one of the
windows of the pleasant drawing-room, shed the benignant light of
her faded countenance and pale-blue eyes upon the two young people,
and represented all the proprieties in her own person; Aurora, when
the weather prevented her riding, occupied herself more restlessly
than profitably by taking up books and tossing them down, pulling
Bow-wow's ears, staring out of the windows, drawing caricatures of the
promenaders on the cliff, and dragging out a wonderful little watch,
with a bunch of dangling inexplicable golden absurdities, to see what
o'clock it was.
Talbot Bulstrode, while leaning over Lucy's piano or drawing-board,
or pondering about the next move of his queen, had ample leisure to
watch the movements of Miss Floyd, and to be shocked at the purposeless
manner in which that young lady spent the rainy mornings. Sometimes he
saw her poring over 'Bell's Life,' much to the horror of Mrs. Walter
Powell, who had a vague idea of the iniquitous proceedings recited in
that terrible journal, but who was afraid to stretch her authority so
far as to forbid its perusal.
Mrs. Powell looked with silent approbation upon the growing familiarity
between gentle Lucy Floyd and the captain. She had feared at first that
Talbot was an admirer of Aurora's; but the manner of the two soon
dispelled her alarm. Nothing could be more cordial than Miss Floyd's
treatment of the officer; but she displayed the same indifference to
him that she did to everything else, except her dog and her father. Was
it possible that well-nigh perfect face and those haughty graces had no
charm for the banker's daughter? Could it be that she could spend hour
after hour in the society of the handsomest and most aristocratic man
she had ever met, and yet be as heart-whole as when the acquaintance
began? There was one person in the little party who was for ever asking
that question, and never able to answer it to her own satisfaction, and
that person was Lucy Floyd. Poor Lucy Floyd, who was engaged, night and
day, in mentally playing that old German game which Faust and Margaret
played together with the full-blown rose in the garden,--"He loves
me--loves me not!"
Mrs. Walter Powell's shallow-sighted blue eyes might behold in Lucy
Captain Bulstrode's attraction to the East Cliff; but Lucy herself knew
better--bitterly, cruelly better.
"Captain Bulstrode's attentions to Miss Lucy Floyd were most evident,"
Mrs. Powell said one day when the captain left, after a long morning's
music and singing and chess. How Lucy hated the prim phrase! None
knew so well as she the value of those "attentions." They had been at
Brighton six weeks, and for the last five the captain had been with
them nearly every morning. He had ridden with them on the downs, and
driven with them to the Dyke, and lounged beside them listening to
the band, and stood behind them in their box at the pretty little
theatre, and crushed with them into the Pavilion to hear Grisi and
Mario, and Alboni and poor Bosio. He had attended them through the
whole round of Brighton amusements, and had never seemed weary of
their companionship. But for all this, Lucy knew what the last leaf
upon the rose would tell her, when the many petals should be plucked
away, and the poor stem be left bare. She knew how often he forgot to
turn over the leaf in the Beethoven sonatas; how often he put streaks
of green into an horizon that should have been purple, and touched
up the trees in her foreground with rose-pink, and suffered himself
to be ignominiously checkmated from sheer inattention, and gave her
wandering, random answers when she spoke to him. She knew how restless
he was when Aurora read 'Bell's Life,' and how the very crackle of the
newspaper made him wince with nervous pain. She knew how tender he was
of the purblind mastiff, how eager to be friends with him, how almost
sycophantic in his attentions to the big stately animal. Lucy knew, in
short, that which Talbot as yet did not know himself: she knew that he
was fast falling over head and ears in love with her cousin, and she
had at the same time a vague idea that he would much rather have fallen
in love with herself, and that he was blindly struggling with the
growing passion.
It was so; he was falling in love with Aurora. The more he protested
against her, the more determinedly he exaggerated her follies, and
argued with himself upon the folly of loving her, so much the more
surely did he love her. The very battle he was fighting kept her for
ever in his mind, until he grew the veriest slave of the lovely vision,
which he only evoked in order to endeavour to exorcise.
"How could he take her down to Bulstrode, and introduce her to his
father and mother?" he thought; and at the thought she appeared to him
illuminating the old Cornish mansion by the radiance of her beauty,
fascinating his father, bewitching his mother, riding across the
moorland on her thorough-bred mare, and driving all the parish mad with
admiration of her.
He felt that his visits to Mr. Floyd's house were fast compromising him
in the eyes of its inmates. Sometimes he felt himself bound in honour
to make Lucy an offer of his hand; sometimes he argued that no one
had any right to consider his attentions more particular to one than
to the other of the young ladies. If he had known of that weary game
which Lucy was for ever mentally playing with the imaginary rose, I
am sure he would not have lost an hour in proposing to her; but Mrs.
Alexander's daughter had been far too well educated to betray one
emotion of her heart, and she bore her girlish agonies, and concealed
her hourly tortures, with the quiet patience common to these simple
womanly martyrs. She knew that the last leaf must soon be plucked, and
the sweet pain of uncertainty be for ever ended.
Heaven knows how long Talbot Bulstrode might have done battle with his
growing passion, had it not been for an event which put an end to his
indecision and made him desperate. This event was the appearance of a
rival.
He was walking with Aurora and Lucy upon the West Cliff one afternoon
in November, when a mail-phaeton and pair suddenly drew up against the
railings that separated them from the road, and a big man, with huge
masses of Scotch plaid twisted about his waist and shoulders, sprang
out of the vehicle, splashing the mud upon his legs, and rushed up to
Talbot, taking off his hat as he approached, and bowing apologetically
to the ladies.
"Why, Bulstrode," he said, "who on earth would have thought of seeing
you here? I heard you were in India, man; but what have you done to
your leg?"
He was so breathless with hurry and excitement, that he was utterly
indifferent to punctuation; and it seemed as much as he could do to
keep silence while Talbot introduced him to the ladies as Mr. Mellish,
an old friend and school-fellow. The stranger stared with such
open-mouthed admiration at Miss Floyd's black eyes, that the captain
turned round upon him almost savagely, as he asked what had brought
_him_ to Brighton.
"The hunting season, my boy. Tired of Yorkshire; know every field,
ditch, hedge, pond, sunk fence, and scrap of timber in the three
Ridings. I'm staying at the Bedford; I've got my stud with me--give you
a mount to-morrow morning if you like. Harriers meet at eleven--Dyke
Road. I've a gray that'll suit you to a nicety--carry my weight, and as
easy to sit as your arm-chair."
Talbot hated his friend for talking of horses; he felt a jealous
terror of him. This, perhaps, was the sort of man whose society
would be agreeable to Aurora,--this big, empty-headed Yorkshireman,
with his babble about his stud and hunting appointments. But turning
sharply round to scrutinize Miss Floyd, he was gratified to find that
young lady looking vacantly at the gathering mists upon the sea, and
apparently unconscious of the existence of Mr. John Mellish, of Mellish
Park, Yorkshire.
This John Mellish was, I have said, a big man, looking even bigger than
he was by reason of about eight yards' length of thick shepherd's plaid
twisted scientifically about his shoulders. He was a man of thirty
years of age at least, but having withal such a boyish exuberance
in his manner, such a youthful and innocent joyousness in his face,
that he might have been a youngster of eighteen just let loose from
some public academy of the muscular Christianity school. I think
the Rev. Charles Kingsley would have delighted in this big, hearty,
broad-chested young Englishman, with brown hair brushed away from an
open forehead, and a thick auburn moustache bordering a mouth for ever
ready to expand into a laugh. Such a laugh, too! such a hearty and
sonorous peal, that the people on the Parade turned round to look at
the owner of those sturdy lungs, and smiled good-naturedly for very
sympathy with his honest merriment.
Talbot Bulstrode would have given a hundred pounds to get rid of
the noisy Yorkshireman. What business had he at Brighton? Wasn't
the biggest county in England big enough to hold him, that he must
needs bring his north-country bluster to Sussex, for the annoyance of
Talbot's friends?
Captain Bulstrode was not any better pleased when, strolling a little
further on, the party met with Archibald Floyd, who had come out to
look for his daughter. The old man begged to be introduced to Mr.
Mellish, and invited the honest Yorkshireman to dine at the East Cliff
that very evening, much to the aggravation of Talbot, who fell sulkily
back, and allowed John to make the acquaintance of the ladies. The
familiar brute ingratiated himself into their good graces in about ten
minutes; and by the time they reached the banker's house was more at
his ease with Aurora than was the heir of Bulstrode after two months'
acquaintance. He accompanied them to the door-step, shook hands with
the ladies and Mr. Floyd, patted the mastiff Bow-wow, gave Talbot a
playful sledge-hammer-like slap upon the shoulder, and ran back to the
Bedford to dress for dinner. His spirits were so high that he knocked
over little boys and tumbled against fashionable young men, who drew
themselves up in stiff amazement as the big fellow dashed past them.
He sang a scrap of a hunting-song as he ran up the great staircase to
his eyrie at the Bedford, and chattered to his valet as he dressed. He
seemed a creature especially created to be prosperous; to be the owner
and dispenser of wealth, the distributor of good things. People who
were strangers to him ran after and served him on speculation, knowing
instinctively that they would get ample reward for their trouble.
Waiters in a coffee-room deserted other tables to attend upon that at
which he was seated. Box-keepers would leave parties of six shivering
in the dreary corridors while they found a seat for John Mellish.
Mendicants picked him out from the crowd in a busy thoroughfare, and
hung about him, and would not be driven away without a dole from the
pocket of his roomy waistcoat. He was always spending his money for
the convenience of other people. He had an army of old servants at
Mellish Park, who adored him and tyrannized over him after the manner
of their kind. His stables were crowded with horses that were lame,
or wall-eyed, or otherwise disqualified for service, but that lived
on his bounty like a set of jolly equine paupers, and consumed as
much corn as would have supplied a racing stud. He was perpetually
paying for things he neither ordered nor had, and was for ever being
cheated by the dear honest creatures about him, who, for all they did
their best to ruin him, would have gone through typical fire and water
to serve him, and would have clung to him, and worked for him, and
supported him out of those very savings for which they had robbed him,
when the ruin came. If "Muster John" had a headache, every creature in
that disorderly household was unhappy and uneasy till the ailment was
cured; every lad in the stables, every servant-maid in the house, was
eager that his or her remedy should be tried for his restoration. If
you had said at Mellish Park that John's fair face and broad shoulders
were not the highest forms of manly beauty and grace, you would have
been set down as a creature devoid of all taste or judgment. To the
mind of that household, John Mellish in "pink" and pipe-clayed tops
was more beautiful than the Apollo Belvidere, whose bronze image
in little adorned a niche in the hall. If you had told them that
fourteen-stone weight was not indispensable to manly perfection, or
that it was possible there were more lofty accomplishments than driving
unicorn or shooting forty-seven head of game in a morning, or pulling
the bay mare's shoulder into joint that time she got a sprain in the
hunting-field, or vanquishing Joe Millings, the East Riding smasher,
without so much as losing breath,--those simple-hearted Yorkshire
servants would have fairly laughed in your face. Talbot Bulstrode
complained that everybody respected him, and nobody loved him. John
Mellish might have uttered the reverse of this complaint, had he been
so minded. Who could help loving the honest, generous squire, whose
house and purse were open to all the country-side? Who could feel
any chilling amount of respect for the friendly and familiar master
who sat upon the table in the big kitchen at Mellish Park, with his
dogs and servants round him, and gave them the history of the day's
adventures in the hunting-field, till the old blind fox-hound at his
feet lifted his big head and set up a feeble music? No; John Mellish
was well content to be beloved, and never questioned the quality of the
affection bestowed upon him. To him it was all the purest virgin gold;
and you might have talked to him for twelve hours at a sitting without
convincing him that men and women were vile and mercenary creatures,
and that if his servants, and his tenantry, and the poor about his
estate, loved him, it was for the sake of the temporal benefits they
received of him. He was as unsuspicious as a child, who believes
that the fairies in a pantomime are fairies for ever and ever, and
that the harlequin is born in patches and a mask. He was as open to
flattery as a school-girl who distributes the contents of her hamper
among a circle of toadies. When people told him he was a fine fellow,
he believed them, and agreed with them, and thought that the world
was altogether a hearty, honest place, and that everybody was a fine
fellow. Never having an _arrière pensée_ himself, he looked for none in
the words of other people, but thought that every one blurted out their
real opinions, and offended or pleased their fellows, as frankly and
blunderingly as himself. If he had been a vicious young man, he would
no doubt have gone altogether to the bad, and fallen among thieves.
But being blest with a nature that was inherently pure and innocent,
his greatest follies were no worse than those of a big school-boy who
errs from very exuberance of spirit. He had lost his mother in the
first year of his infancy, and his father had died some time before
his majority; so there had been none to restrain his actions, and it
was something at thirty years of age to be able to look back upon a
stainless boyhood and youth, which might have been befouled with the
slime of the gutters, and infected with the odour of villanous haunts.
Had he not reason to be proud of this?
Is there anything, after all, so grand as a pure and unsullied life--a
fair picture, with no ugly shadows lurking in the background--a smooth
poem, with no crooked, halting line to mar the verse--a noble book,
with no unholy page--a simple story, such as our children may read? Can
any greatness be greater? can any nobility be more truly noble? When
a whole nation mourned with one voice but a few months since; when we
drew down our blinds and shut out the dull light of the December day,
and listened sadly to the far booming of the guns; when the poorest
put aside their work-a-day troubles to weep for a widowed Queen and
orphaned children in a desolate palace; when rough omnibus-drivers
forgot to blaspheme at each other, and tied decent scraps of crape upon
their whips, and went sorrowfully about their common business, thinking
of that great sorrow at Windsor,--the words that rose simultaneously to
every lip dwelt most upon the spotless character of him who was lost;
the tender husband, the watchful father, the kindly master, the liberal
patron, the temperate adviser, the stainless gentleman.
It is many years since England mourned for another royal personage who
was called a "gentleman." A gentleman who played practical jokes, and
held infamous orgies, and persecuted a wretched foreign woman, whose
chief sin and misfortune it was to be his wife; a gentleman who cut out
his own nether garments, and left the companion of his gayest revels,
the genius whose brightness had flung a spurious lustre upon the dreary
saturnalia of vice, to die destitute and despairing. Surely there is
some hope that we have changed for the better within the last thirty
years, inasmuch as we attach a new meaning to-day to this simple title
of "gentleman." I take some pride, therefore, in the two young men of
whom I write, for the simple reason that I have no dark patches to
gloss over in the history of either of them. I may fail in making you
like them; but I can promise that you shall have no cause to be ashamed
of them. Talbot Bulstrode may offend you with his sulky pride; John
Mellish may simply impress you as a blundering countrified ignoramus;
but neither of them shall ever shock you by an ugly word or an unholy
thought.