SUMMER DAYS.
Pedigree is one of those intangible and incontrovertible commodities
which never commands a premium in the busy, bustling, practical city of
London.
A long course of successful trade, big warehouses, troops of clerks,
fleets of vessels,--by these things and such as these shall a man work
out his temporal salvation; and, therefore, to those persons who, in the
ordinary course of business, had come in contact with Mortomley, it did
not signify in the slightest degree whether he had raised himself from
the gutter, or was the last male of a family which had been of some
reputation in days when England and Englishmen cared for something
beyond sale and barter; when they laid down their lives for the sake of
King, Country, Religion; and entertained grand ideas on the subject of
Loyalty, Patriotism, and Courage, which pounds shillings and pence, the
yard measure, and the modern god Commerce have long since elbowed out of
court.
And yet the fact remained that the Mortomleys had once been country
squires of some reputation, and that, notwithstanding their long
connection with trade, and their inter-marriages with the daughters of
a lower social scale, some gentle blood flowed in the veins of Archibald
Mortomley, who was about to be delivered bound hand and foot to the
tormentors.
There is an inevitable decay in some great business houses as there is
in some great families.
Properties change hands, titles become extinct; the trade made so
hardly, the money garnered so carefully, pass into other hands. It has
always been thus; it will be thus till the end, and the reasons are not
perhaps far to seek.
If time brings with it ripeness, it brings with it rottenness also; it
brings the mature fruit, but it brings likewise the dead leaf and the
bare brown branches. If it brings the strength of manhood, it brings
sooner or later the weakness of age.
That weakness had fallen on Archibald Mortomley, not because he was old
or because he was by constitution delicate, but merely because he had
carried the traditions of a bygone and romantic age down into one
eminently utilitarian,--because with every condition of existence
changed, he had tried to do as his fathers had done before him,--because
with rogues multiplying on every side as, like caterpillars, they are
certain to do where the land is well planted and fertile, he refused to
believe in the possibility of being brought personally into contact with
them.
Like his progenitors, without a doubt of failure, he, full of generous
impulses and philanthropic feeling, started on his business journey, and
behold, he fell among thieves.
The stage at which he had therefore arrived when we make his
acquaintance was something a hundred times worse than bankruptcy--a
thousand times worse than friendly liquidation by arrangement. Coolly
those about him, with his most innocent concurrence, handed the cards
which dropped from his feeble fingers to his worst enemies, who, under
the guise of friendship, undertook to play out the game for him, and
played it as we shall see.
About a century ago there came up to London the younger son of a
Leicestershire squire, who, having quarrelled with his father, thought
he would see whether the great metropolis might not prove a more genial
parent.
He came up with some money, good looks, the manners of a gentleman, and
that certain quantity of brains which Heaven, since the time of Jacob,
usually inclines, no doubt for good and equitable reasons, to bestow on
the junior members of a family.
In London he was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a certain
Philip Gyson, whose ancestors had long and honourably been connected
with the city, and who was about to start a colour works in the then
rural village of Hackney.
Into this works Hildebrand Mortomley--his family had not then lost
either the names or the traditions of those who, having fought on the
losing side for King and Crown, were loyal spite of royal ingratitude,
when the King came to his own again--threw himself, his money, his
energy, and his genius.
For he had genius. First of all he set himself to master his trade. When
he had mastered it, he at once began to reject its crude old-fashioned
formulæ, and invent, and simplify, and improve for himself.
A story of a successful man's life might have been written about this
first Mortomley, who, forsaking the paths hitherto trodden by his
progenitors, struck out one for himself which led to fortune and
domestic happiness.
He married a daughter of Philip Gyson, a maiden fair, discreet, young
and well-dowered. When evil days came to the old man, his father, he
succoured him as Joseph succoured Jacob. When famine, sore and sudden,
fell upon the Mortomleys, in Leicestershire, he bade his brothers and
his sisters welcome to sit at his board, and share of the plenty which
had fallen to his lot in the strange land of Cockaigne. He helped the
males of his family to wend their way to foreign lands as the humour
seized them; the females married or died. He buried his father in a
vault he built for the purpose in Hackney old church-yard,--and when his
own time came, he was laid beside him, and his son succeeded him.
This son was not the Archibald mentioned in the preceding chapter as
connected with an unpleasant occurrence in Mr. Asherill's experience,
but a Mortomley christened Hill--the name to which his father's somewhat
lengthy cognomen had been judiciously abbreviated--who worked even
harder at the colour trade than his father had done, and who, when he
died, left behind him not merely the original little factory enlarged,
but a new and extensive works, situate on the north bank of the Thames,
between what is now called the Regent's Canal and the then unbuilt West
India Docks. Further, during his reign the old city warehouse in Thames
Street,--where Philip Gyson carried on his business and lived when in
town, and not at his country seat in the delightful village of Hackney,
famous in his day for the salubrity of its air, and a favourite resort
of city merchants and their families,--was enlarged and altered so as to
suit the requirements of his extending business. Much more he might have
done, but that in his prime he caught a cold which turned to a fever
that ended in his being carried likewise to the family vault at Hackney.
Out of many children only one son remained, Archibald, and with him
began, not the downfall of the business edifice, but the commencement of
that dead level of successful trading which indicates surely that the
table land is reached, and the next incline will have to be trodden
down, not up.
A man who found and maintained a most lucrative business, who was
content to leave things as he found them, to do all the good he could in
life, whose delight it was to make other people happy, who, excepting
theoretically, had no faith whatever in original sin, and who, thanks to
those who had gone before, never found himself in a serious
embarrassment or difficulty from the time he entered man's estate till
his turn came to take possession of that other property which Adam with
strict impartiality left a share of to all his descendants for ever.
Before Archibald Mortomley's death he had, however, lived a sufficient
number of years to leave some difficult problems for the solution of his
next heir, if that next heir had, in addition to being a clever, chanced
likewise to be a wise man. The two phrases are not inter-changeable.
Archibald the second was not a wise man, and therefore he did not try to
solve the problems; he accepted them.
What his father had done seemed right in his eyes; and as his father had
permitted himself to be governed by his wife, so he allowed himself to
be ruled by his mother.
Early in life the first Archibald Mortomley had a disappointment in love
sufficient to wean his thoughts from matrimony till he was surely old
enough never to have thought of it at all.
Perhaps he did not think of it till the idea was suggested by a widow
lady already the happy mother of one son.
For this son and herself she was anxious to find a suitable home, and as
no more eligible victim offered, she secured that home by marrying
Mortomley.
From the hour she did so she devoted herself to sounding his praises;
and poor Mr. Mortomley, who in his modesty really believed she had
thrown herself away upon him, would cheerfully have laid down his life
to please her.
Unhappily for him and those who were to come after she did not want him
to do anything of the kind. She wanted him to live, she wanted him to
push on her first-born; she wished him to see Archibald their son grow
to manhood; she nursed, coddled, petted, flattered him to such good
purpose that, although his will did not prove to have been made exactly
in accordance with her secret desires, still he had lived long enough to
indoctrinate his son with his own opinions, so that in effect the
document which left the business and properties to Archibald junior and
to herself only a life annuity proved a mere form.
To all intents and purposes she and Richard, her eldest son, long
married to a most disagreeable woman, had the ball at their feet.
Archibald worshipped his mother with a worship worthy of a better
object, and in his eldest brother he believed with that touching faith
which would be pathetic were it not irritating, which single-minded,
honest men will persist occasionally on lavishing on rogues and
vagabonds.
Not that Richard Halling came precisely under either category. He was a
man who, while he wilfully deceived himself, was too selfish to
understand his deceit might chance to prove the ruin of other people.
He ran into debt meaning to repay; he borrowed money intending to
return; he took the roads which pleased him best, and let others settle
for the cost of conveyance and maintenance, with the full determination
of making all their fortunes when he reached his goal. But, like other
men of his temperament, he never reached that goal; he lay down by the
way weary, and died, confessing himself a "gigantic failure," which,
indeed, he was not, since he had never even striven to rise to any
height; blessing his brother for his generous kindness; and lest that
kindness should be in danger of rusting for want of exercise, leaving
him in trust a son and daughter,--that son and daughter, in fact, of
which Mr. Kleinwort had spoken in anything rather than flattering terms
to Mr. Asherill.
Some time, however, before Mr. Halling--long a widower--went to rejoin
his wife, Mortomley, motherless too late, had met the one woman of his
life.
She would not have been every one's fancy, but she was his, and the way
in which he chanced to meet with her was in this wise.
He had been working hard and fretting, in his own silent fashion,
concerning the death of his mother, and these two causes combined found
him, towards the beginning of a summer which was ever after stamped on
his memory,--ill, languid, in poor health, and worse spirits.
Hitherto he had been wont to take his holidays at the sea-side, in
Scotland, Ireland, or on the Continent; but on this occasion, when the
doctors told him he required change and must have it, he elected to seek
that change in Leicestershire, and look at the old acres and trees and
houses which had formerly made the name of Mortomley a household one in
the county.
The Mortomleys who had preceded this man, being nearer to the root of
the family tree, felt only a vague gratification in being the son,
grandson, and great-grandson of the last squire, but to the Archibald
Mortomley of whom I am writing, the glories of his race, fast merging in
the mists of distance, had been his thought and pride since earliest
boyhood. If they were vanishing it was the more reason he should try to
grasp them; if they were in danger of becoming mere memories of the
past, there was all the more reason why he should strive to make them
once again realities of the present.
From his mother he had inherited a pride of family which would have been
at once ludicrous and intolerable, but that such pride, unlike that of
wealth, rarely finds voice sufficient to proclaim itself. Herself, the
daughter of one parvenu, and the widow of another, it was perhaps
natural that after Mrs. Halling married Mortomley the elder, she should,
when reckoning up his claims to social and personal consideration, have
placed rather an undue value on the monuments, tablets, brasses, lists
of doles, and other such like matters, which were still to be seen in
Great Dassell Church, where the Mortomleys had once their great family
pew, that now, with the lands and woods and manors, was merged in larger
properties owned by mightier men than they had ever been.
And the reader may be quite sure that she instructed her son in all
these matters. Not merely had he grown up to think his father the
cleverest man in the world, his mother the wisest woman, his
step-brother a model of what a brother and a son should be, but the
Mortomley family as one of the first consideration; and, therefore, it
is not, perhaps, a matter for astonishment, that when ill and out of
spirits, he should try to recruit his health and improve his mental tone
by visiting a place where those of his ancestors, who would have turned
up their patrician noses at colour works and colour-makers, had, from
cradle to grave, travelled that pleasant road which leads to ruin.
To Great Dassell he accordingly made his way, companionless; for one of
the many evils of a youth having been brought up under the eye of a
woman is, that when manhood surprises him with its presence, he finds
the capacity for making male friends has somehow been lost in the
process of his one-sided education.
He rented farmhouse apartments, from the windows of which he could see
the turrets and chimneys of the old mansion, now owned by Lord Darsham,
and called Dassell Court, that had been formerly known as Mortomley
Place, or most commonly, "The Place;" and before a week was over, it was
rumoured through all the country round and about Great Dassell, that a
great-great-grandson of the last Mortomley, of The Place, was lodging at
Braffin's Farm, and hand-and-glove with the vicar, a nephew of the late
Lord Darsham.
More than that, Sir Thomas Laman left his card at Braffin's, and
supplemented that delicate attention by asking Mr. Mortomley to dinner;
and it was well known Sir Thomas was twice as rich as Lord Darsham, for
he could afford to reside on his property, whilst his lordship was
obliged to shut up the Court and live upon as little as might be in
"foreign parts."
In one wing of Dassell Court Miss Trebasson resided with her mother, the
Honourable Mrs. Trebasson, sister-in-law to his lordship; and in that
part of the shire mother and daughter made genteel poverty not merely
respectable, but almost fashionable. They dressed like nuns and lived
like anchorites; but being ladies born, of a stately carriage and wont
to dispense alms out of a most insufficient income, people of all
classes bowed down before and did them homage.
Even Sir Thomas and his wife and daughters they received with a distant
courtesy, which taught the worthy baronet and his family they were too
rich and too new to be received quite on an exact equality by their
poorer neighbours.
To Miss Trebasson, whom he chanced to meet at the Vicarage, Mr.
Mortomley was indebted for that private view of Dassell Court, which
showed him at once how little and how much the Mortomleys had formerly
been; how little, that is, without the glamour and how much with it.
Mrs. Trebasson, who was slightly paralysed, received him with great
kindness, and, so far as her infirmity would permit, waxed eloquent on
the subject of family histories in general, and the history of the
Mortomley family in particular.
Drinking tea out of very fine china in company with these ladies,
listening to Mrs. Trebasson's slow talk and old-world ideas, his eyes
wandering over woods and park, and the great silence which necessarily
surrounds a secluded country mansion, causing a tension on his nerves of
hearing which the rattle of East-cheap had never done,--Mortomley felt
for the time a convert to the doctrine that, as compared with birth,
riches were but dross; that the lives of these two must be happy and
peaceful beyond that of dwellers in towns; that it would be delightful
to dream existence away in just such an old mansion as this, which had
once belonged to his ancestors, reading, thinking, experimenting,
without a thought of profit or dread of failure to break in even for a
moment upon the illusions of his life.
Mortomley was an experimenter. When ruin has marked a family for her
own, she usually endows the last of the race with some such form of
genius, which clings about and lends a certain picturesque grace to his
decay, as ivy climbing around an almost lifeless tree clothes it with a
freshness and a beauty it lacked in the days of its strength.
And the form of genius of the first Mortomley who engaged in trade had,
with every condition of existence altered, reappeared in this later,
weaker, and more sensitive descendant.
Even in his father's time he had introduced processes and combinations
into their laboratory hitherto unthought of; and since he had been sole
master of the business, strange and unwonted colours had appeared in the
market which caused astonishment, not unmixed with dread, to fill the
hearts of those who had hitherto been content to travel in the footsteps
of their predecessors, but who now confessed they must move quicker or
they would be left far in the rear.
Of all these things Mrs. Trebasson encouraged Mr. Mortomley to speak as
she would have encouraged any former Mortomley to talk of his hunters,
his hounds, his library, or anything else in which he took delight; and
Mortomley, flattered and pleased, talked of his plans and hopes with the
simplicity of a boy, and further, as the intimacy grew closer, told the
old lady about his lonely home, his lack of all near relatives, the love
he had borne for his mother, and the tender respect, the unquestioning
admiration, the devoted affection he had felt for his father--a
Mortomley every inch--though a Mortomley of The Place no more.
And Miss Trebasson, in her plain nun-like dress, her beauty unheightened
by decking or jewel, sat by and listened; and Mortomley never knew he
had spoken to such purpose of himself and his surroundings, that the
daughter had given him her heart and the mother was willing to give him
her daughter before his holiday came to an end. But it was not to be.
Had that ever been, this story must have remained unwritten. With
Leonora Trebasson for his wife, it is quite certain Mortomley never
would, whether ill or well, successful or defeated, have been permitted
to make the awful _fiasco_ of delivering himself, hair-shorn, strength
gone, into the hands of the Philistines. There are wives and wives; and
Mortomley, people said, was not fortunate in the choice of his. Spite of
her almost judicial wisdom, other people thought Miss Trebasson had not
been fortunate in the choice of her dearest friend. Perhaps for a time
she thought so herself, when she found that friend had bound Mortomley
to her chariot wheels. Perhaps for one night her heart did feel very
bitter towards her inseparable companion; but if this were so, she was
too essentially just to allow her disappointment to overpower her
reason. If her eyes had been unclouded by prejudice, she would have
understood long before, that although Dolly Gerace was not apparently
possessed of a single quality likely to win a man like Mortomley, yet in
reality she was precisely the sort of girl a keen observer would have
prophesied certain to attract him.
And yet so little observant had she been that the truth came upon her
like the stab of a sharp knife, and so little observant had Mrs.
Trebasson been that she actually encouraged Dolly to visit the Court
more frequently than ever during Mr. Mortomley's stay in the
neighbourhood to act as a foil--so the would-be worldly old lady
thought--to her own stately and beautiful daughter.
From which remarks it will readily be concluded that Dolly Gerace was no
beauty; further, that she was not merely destitute of good looks, but
that she had several undesirable points about her.
These things were the case. Dolly had not a good feature in her face. In
person she was small, slight, insignificant; mentally, she was an utter
anomaly to those who came in contact with her; while in more serious
matters, though born in a Christian land of Christian parents--having
been duly baptized and confirmed--being the daughter of a clergyman, and
the only living child of a most truly good woman, Dolly was as thorough
a little heathen as if she had called a squaw mother--and a brave
father.
More so indeed, for then she would have had some settled idea of a
certain code of morals and religion.
As matters stood, Dolly, for all she seemed to reverence or respect
anything, might have been her own Creator--her own all in all.
Not that any one could accuse her of flippancy, irreverence, undue
selfishness, or habitual ill-humour.
She had a want of something, rather than an excess of any evil quality;
indeed she had no evil quality, unless an occasional tendency to flame
up could be so considered. But then she never flamed up except when her
equanimity had been long and sorely tried, and the usual happy
brightness of her temper was pleasant as sunshine--as music--as the
songs of birds--as the perfume of flowers.
Long before Mortomley came upon the scene, Miss Trebasson had exercised
her mind upon the subject of Dolly Gerace.
After much consideration, which ended in leaving her as wise as she was
before, it suddenly dawned upon Miss Trebasson that her friend either
had been born without a soul or that it had never developed.
From that hour Miss Trebasson treated Dolly with the same sort of
tenderness as she might an eminently interesting and attractive infant;
and when it was proved to demonstration that Mortomley had fallen in
love with the girl, Miss Trebasson, after the first bitterness was over,
felt no surprise at his choice.
Beside Dolly, spite of her beauty, her intellect, her ancestors, her
titled relations, Leonora Trebasson knew she must look but as a bird of
very dull plumage.
Weather, means, the state of the domestic atmosphere, the depression of
the home funds, never made any difference to Dolly. Given that you
expected her, and she was quite certain to appear crisp, smiling, happy,
bright, with nothing to say perhaps particularly worth recording, and
yet able to say that nothing in a way which made the time speed by
quickly and pleasantly.
Miss Trebasson had no more thought of Dolly as a rival than she might
have taken of a kitten or a puppy; and yet when Mortomley lost his
heart, being a woman rarely wise and with somewhat of a man's instincts,
she understood he had done so for the same reason in great measure as
she loved Dolly herself, because the creature was gay, sun-shiny,
brimful of life and spirits,--because, in a word, she was Dolly Gerace.
Miss Trebasson had seen Dolly in the dumps,--she had seen Dolly
rueful--Dolly in sorrow--Dolly crying fit to break her heart--Dolly
living with a father who, though loving, never interfered with
her--Dolly living with an aunt who never ceased to interfere; and yet,
through all these changes, Dolly left the impression that in the country
where she lived a fine climate was the rule, not the exception.
When Mortomley fell in love with Dolly, Miss Trebasson waited curiously,
and--she was only human and a woman--anxiously, to see if her friend
would at length develope any of those qualities which are supposed, more
or less erroneously, to attach to a person destined to exist throughout
eternity as well as time, but she watched in vain.
Dolly went through her engagement and her marriage with her customary
sun-shiny cheerfulness.
"She _has_ no soul," decided Miss Trebasson, "she does not care for him
one bit;" and the tears Miss Trebasson shed that night were very bitter,
for she herself had cared for Archibald Mortomley very much, and she
doubted greatly whether Dolly Gerace was the wife he ought to have
chosen. However, he had chosen her, and there was an end of the matter.
Mr. Trebasson gave her away; Miss Trebasson, Miss Halling, and a couple
more young ladies were bridesmaids. Mortomley had been sorely exercised
to find a best man, but at length he hit on Henry Werner.
The wedding breakfast was by desire of Lord Darsham held at the Court.
Thus Mortomley came by his wife. A few sentences will explain how she
came by her being:--
A certain Mr. Gerace having been presented by his pupil, Lord Darsham,
with the family living of Great Dassell, which was not a very great
thing after all, being only about three hundred and fifty pounds a year,
beside the Vicarage-house and glebe lands, the Reverend Mr. Gerace
immediately married an eminently discreet, Christian-minded, and
unendowed young governess, for which act he had no excuse to offer
except that he loved her.
This justification might have been all very well if, in addition to a
tender heart, the clergyman had not possessed a weary list of college
debts.
He had been foolish once,--he had to pay for that folly to the last day
of his life.
He thought he could do much with his income as vicar of Great Dassell,
and yet he was only able to live and go on paying those weary, weary
bills till it was impossible for him to do anything more on earth.
Before hope had died out in him a female child was born, and after a
serious consultation he and his wife decided to name her Dollabella
after a distant relative who had no sons or daughters, but, better than
either, a considerable amount of money.
She stood for one of the godmothers, together with Miss Celia Gerace, an
aunt of the vicar's, Lord Darsham volunteering the part of godfather.
Dolly had not so much as a spoon from the whole of the trio,--she was
wont to state this fact with a certain malicious point in her sentence;
but they had all, with the exception of Miss Dollabella, been kind to
her,--so kind--better than any number of services of plate, Dolly added
with her wonderful rippling laugh.
And she meant it. They had been kind,--every one was kind sooner or
later to Dolly.
This was another peculiarity about her friend which puzzled Miss
Trebasson; other people professed much gratitude for favours received,
even though they spoke with occasional bitterness of those who conferred
them; but that was not Dolly's way, she accepted kindness as she
accepted unkindness, with an equanimity of feeling which seemed simply
incomprehensible.
As she grew older this equanimity increased. She laughed and jested with
those about her when they were in pleasant moods; when the reverse was
the case, when her aunt Celia took her grand-niece to task for the
general sins of the human race, Dolly either left the house as soon as
she decently could, or if that were impossible, busied herself about
domestic matters or worked with rare industry at whatever article of
apparel she was making, till the storm blew over, and the domestic
atmosphere was clear once more.
There were those who, knowing Miss Celia's temper, wondered Dolly could
live with it and its owner; but if people do not object to rain, bad
weather cannot seriously affect their spirits, and accordingly, in spite
of the usual inclemency of the climate at Eglantine Cottage, Dolly spent
some not unhappy years under its roof.
All the great, passionate, unruly love her untrained nature had yet
given to any one, she had laid, the first year she was in her teens, in
her father's grave.
The world,--her poor little narrow world, did what it could for the
orphan, but, as was natural, failed to sympathize fully in her grief.
That was enough for Dolly. She did not trouble the world with much
outward evidence of sorrow after that. The wound closed externally, bled
internally. Her bed-room in the roof of Eglantine Cottage, selected by
herself because there she was out of the way, the lonely woods around
Dassell Court, the alder-trees growing by the trout streams, quiet
lanes bordered by wild roses, holly and blackberries, and even quieter
fields where the half-horned cattle browsed peacefully,--could have told
tales of long weary fits of crying, of broken-hearted inquiries as to
why such things should be, of an insensate struggle against the
inevitable,--of very, very bad half-hours indeed when Dolly wished she
was lying beside her father in Dassell's quiet church-yard.
Time went by; and if the wound was not healed it ceased to bleed at any
rate. Life had to be gone through, and Dolly was not one to lengthen the
distance between the miles with useless repinings. Though she probably
had never read "A Winter's Tale" with sufficient attention to know that
"A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a!"
she seemed to have adopted that couplet for her ensampler.
She might, as Miss Trebasson suspected, have no soul, but she was
possessed of a wonderful temper--of a marvellous elasticity.
She took life after the fashion of an amiable cat or dog. If people
stroked and patted her, she purred and gambolled for joy; if they were
out of sorts she crept away from sight till that mood was past.
She was a lazy little sinner--lazy, that is, in points where other young
ladies of her acquaintance were most industrious. She would not
practice, she would not sketch, she resolutely refused to read German
with any one, and she openly scoffed at two London misses who visiting
at the Rectory talked French to each other on the strength of having
spent a winter at Paris, imagining the Dassell natives could not
understand their satirical sentences.
She commented on their remarks in English, and so put them to the rout.
"I thought you told me you could not speak French?" said the youngest to
her.
"Neither I can any better than you," retorted Dolly; "and I do not call
_that_ speaking French."
Altogether an unpleasant young person, and yet Miss Trebasson loved her
tenderly, and Mortomley as well as he knew how.
"What is the matter with you to-night, Dolly?" asked Miss Celia one
evening when her niece had sat longer than usual looking out into the
twilight while the spinster indulged in that nap which "saved candles."
"Are not you well? I told you how it would be going out for that long
walk in the heat of the day."
"We walked through the woods, aunt, and it was not too hot,--and I am
quite well," answered Dolly in her concise manner, still looking out
into the gathering night. If she could have seen painted upon that blank
background all that was to come, would she have gone forward?
Yes, I think so; I am sure she would. For although Dolly had not been
born in the purple, there was not a drop of cowardly blood in her veins.
"Then what is the matter with you?" persisted Miss Celia, who always
resented having been permitted to finish her nap in peace.
"I was only thinking, aunt."
"That is a very bad habit, particularly for a young girl like you."
"I do not quite see how young girls can help thinking sometimes any more
than old ones," answered Dolly, but there was no flippancy in her tone,
if there were in her words. "Aunty, Mr. Mortomley--that gentleman I have
told you of, who is so much at the Vicarage and Dassell Court--has asked
me to marry him."
"Asked _you_ to marry him, child?"
"Yes."
"And what did you say?"
"What could I say, aunt? He is coming to see you about it to-morrow."
Miss Celia arose from her easy-chair. Perhaps out of the midst of the
cloud of years that had gathered behind her there arose the ghost of an
old love-dream, never laid--never likely to be laid. At all events her
usually shrill voice was modulated to an almost tender key, as, drawing
Dolly towards her, she asked,
"Do you love him, Dolly?"
"What should I know about love, aunty?" inquired Dolly; and at that
answer the elder woman's embrace relaxed. Here was no sentimental Miss
such as she herself had been in her teens, but a girl lacking something
as every one felt--who in some way or other was not as other human
beings--who even in those remote wilds was able to behold a personable
man and not go crazy about him on the instant.
Clearly there was a want in Dolly. Miss Gerace could not imagine what
that want might be, but that it existed she entertained not the smallest
manner of doubt.
After that answer about love, Dolly slipped out of her aunt's arms, out
of the room, out of the house. It was a quiet country place, and so she
merely wrapped a shawl about her head and shoulders, and walked a few
paces up the road to a field path across which she struck--a field path
leading to the church-yard.
There were no gates and bolts and locks there--cutting off the dead from
the living. Dolly swung back the turnstile gate--it had often yielded to
her touch before--and entered the enclosure.
Leaning over the spot where her father lay, she--this girl who had never
known a mother--whispered her story.
Dolly's best friend was right, I fear, and the girl was a heathen; but
this visit to the dead had been a fancy of hers for years. Whenever she
was troubled, whenever she was glad, whenever she was in perplexity,
whenever a difficult problem had been solved--she carried the trouble,
the gladness, the perplexity, the solution to a mound where the grass
grew, which the daisies covered, and went away relieved.
A strange creature--destitute of beauty, not in the least like other
young ladies, with occasionally a biting tongue--for Mortomley to
choose.
Yet he chose her; that was the last act wanting to complete his ruin.
Had he married Leonora Trebasson, she would have made him successful.
Her grand nature, her imperial beauty, her strength of character, would
have impelled him to deeds of daring; she would have armed him for the
battle and insisted on his coming back victorious.
As matters stood, he wooed and won Dolly; he married her in the spring
succeeding his first visit to Dassell. When the woods were putting on
their earliest robings of delicate green he made her his wife, and Miss
Trebasson was principal bridesmaid, and Mr. Henry Werner best man.
So the play I have to recount commenced; how it ended, if you have
patience, you shall know.