ABOUT MRS. MORTOMLEY AND OTHERS.
As has been already stated, Mr. Henry Werner assisted at the wedding in
the character of best man, and it was to this circumstance that he owed
the good fortune of subsequently marrying Miss Trebasson himself.
Had he met that young lady--as he did afterwards meet her, as a mere
guest at Homewood--in the unexalted position of Mrs. Mortomley's
friend, he would never have thought of asking her to be his wife; but
seeing her for the first time with the glamour of Dassell Court upon
her, and the glory of her relatives surrounding her, he thought it would
be a fine thing for him to win and wed such a woman even if she had not,
as he soon found out was the case, a penny of fortune.
More of these matches are made than people generally imagine. It is
astonishing to look around and behold the number of well-born women who
have married men, that at first sight one might imagine to have been as
far distant from the upper ten thousand as earth is from heaven; and it
is more astonishing still to find that these women have, one and
all--despite their prejudices, their pedigree, their pride, and their
delicate sensitiveness--married for money.
It would be useless to deny that Leonora Trebasson did this. She was not
a girl of whom such a step could have been predicated, and yet, looking
at the affair from a common-sense point of view, it was quite
certain--after the event--that if no one for whom she could feel
affection possessed of money came to woo, she would marry some person
for whom she did not care in the least.
It was necessary for her to marry; she knew it, she had always known it.
Her mother's small jointure died with her. Whenever her cousin, the heir
of Dassell Court, took a wife--and there was just as great a necessity
for him to find an heiress as for her to meet a man possessed of a
competence, at all events--she understood she and her mother would have
to leave the Court, and settle down in perhaps such another cottage as
that tenanted by Miss Gerace.
There had been a tenderness once between herself and Charley--the
Honourable Charles Trebasson--but the elders on both sides comprehending
how disastrous such a pauper union must prove, speedily nipped that
attachment in the bud, and the future Lord went out into the world to
look for his heiress, whilst Miss Trebasson stayed at Dassell to await
the husband fate might send her.
Of these and such like matters the mother and daughter never spoke
openly; but it was clearly understood between them, that curates without
private fortune, officers with no income beyond their pay, the younger
sons of neighbouring squires, were to be considered as utterly
ineligible for husbands.
Mrs. Trebasson herself having made a love-match and suffered for the
imprudence every day of her married life, she had educated Leonora to
keep her feelings well in hand and on no account to let affection run
away with her judgment.
When Archibald Mortomley went down that summer to fish, and recruit his
health, Mrs. Trebasson's hopes grew high that love and prudence might,
for once, be able to walk hand in hand together.
She liked Mortomley--he was the kind of man to whom women, especially
elderly women, take naturally with as true and keen an instinct as
children--and the thought passed through her mind that here, at last,
was a possible son-in-law, who would not merely make a good husband to
her daughter, but prove a friend to herself.
She pictured Homewood, and fancied she could end her days there happily.
In those days of uncertainty the future wore a fairer face for mother
and child than had ever been the case previously.
And then the vision departed--Dolly, whom Mrs. Trebasson had always
regarded as less than nobody, was preferred to Leonora. Without lifting
a finger to secure the prize--without the slightest effort or trouble on
her part--the stranger yielded himself captive. It was not Dolly's
fault, nevertheless Mrs. Trebasson regarded her with unchristian
feelings for the remainder of her life.
When, after a time, Henry Werner preferred his suit and was accepted,
Mrs. Trebasson never spoke of ending her days in his house; rather she
trusted she "should not have to leave Dassell Court until she was laid
in the family vault."
She had no fault to find with Mr. Werner. He was a much richer man than
Mortomley; he was possessed of more worldly sense than any Mortomley
ever boasted; he was ambitious and might rise to be a man of mark as
well as one of wealth; he spent money lavishly; he evidently intended to
maintain a handsome establishment; he was proud of the beauty and
stately grace of his _fiancée_; he bowed down before the Darshams and
worshipped them; he was of a suitable age and sufficiently
presentable--and yet--and yet--Mrs. Trebasson felt her daughter ought to
have married Archibald Mortomley, and then Dolly Gerace might have been
chosen by Henry Werner or some one like him.
Dolly had no love, however, for Henry Werner. So far as she was in the
habit of developing antipathies she felt one for him, and when she
learned he had proposed for Leonora and been accepted, she expressed her
opinions on the subject with a freedom which Mrs. Trebasson, at all
events, keenly resented.
"You must not be angry with poor Dolly, mamma," said her friend, tearing
Mrs. Mortomley's letter into very small fragments and then strewing them
on the fire. Mrs. Trebasson had desired the letter should be preserved
and deposited with other family treasures, to the end that Dolly might,
at some future day, be confronted with it and covered with confusion;
but her daughter would permit nothing of the kind.
"I do not know why you call her 'poor' Dolly," retorted Mrs. Trebasson,
"she has an excellent husband who gives her everything she wants and
never crosses her whims. She has plenty of money and a pretty house--she
who never had a sovereign in her pocket she could call her own; and now,
forsooth, she must give herself airs and presume to dictate to you."
"She does not dictate, mamma, she only expresses her opinions--she means
no harm."
"It would be harm in any one else. Why should you defend her when she is
so grossly impertinent?"
"I love Dolly," was the quiet answer. "She is often very foolish,
sometimes very trying, always disappointing and unsatisfying; but I
shall love her to the end."
When Miss Trebasson set her foot down upon such a sentence as the
foregoing, Mrs. Trebasson understood further expostulation was useless,
and so the offensive letter smouldered into ashes, and the bride elect
tried to forget its contents as she had too readily, perhaps, forgiven
them.
Fortunately for all concerned Dolly was unable to be present at her
friend's wedding, and Mortomley gladly enough made the state of his
wife's health a plea for excusing his own attendance.
Owing either to her own folly, or to some remoter cause with which this
story has no concern, Mrs. Mortomley was, at that period, having an
extremely hard fight for life. She had been happy with her child--that
Lenore of whom Mr. Kleinwort made mention--for a couple of days. Every
one was satisfied, husband, doctor, nurse; and then suddenly there came
a reaction, and Dolly hung between life and death, insensible to the
reality of either.
When Mrs. Werner, after her wedding tour, drove over and visited her
friend, she found outwardly a very different Dolly to that photographed
in her memory.
A pale weak woman, with hair cut short and softly curling round her
temples; a creature with transparent hands; dark eyes looking eagerly
and anxiously out of a white sunken face; the Dolly of old; but Dolly as
she might have looked had she gone to heaven and come back again to
earth; Dolly etherealised, and with a beauty of delicacy strange as it
was new--but Dolly unchanged mentally.
With a feeling of surprise and regret Mrs. Werner confessed to herself
that not even the fact of having set her feet in the valley of the
shadow, and being brought back into the sunshine, almost by a miracle,
had altered her friend.
The want there had been in Dolly before her marriage still remained
unsupplied.
"I wonder what would really change her," thought Mrs. Werner looking at
the poor wan cheeks, at the wasted figure, at the feeble woman too weak
to hold her child in her arms and coo soft tender nothings in its ear.
One day Mrs. Werner was to understand; but before that day arrived she
was destined to see many changes in Dolly.
When Mrs. Mortomley was sufficiently recovered to endure the fatigue of
travelling, the doctors recommended her to leave London and remain for
some time at a quiet watering-place on the East coast. Near that
particular town resided some relatives of the Trebassons, and to them
Mrs. Werner wrote, asking them to call on her friend.
That proved the turning point in Dolly's life, and she took, as
generally proves the case, the wrong road. With what anguish of spirit,
over what weary and stony paths, through what hedges set thick with
thorns, she retraced her steps, it is part of the purpose of this story
to show. As matters then stood, she simply went along winding lanes
bordered with flowers, festooned by roses, the sun shining over-head,
the birds singing all around; went on, unthinking of evil, happier than
she had ever been before; satisfied, because at last she had found her
vocation.
To enjoy herself--that was the object for which she was created. If she
did not say this in so many words, she felt it, felt it like a blessing
each night as she laid her head on her pillow--her poor foolish little
head which was not strong enough to bear the excitement of the new and
strange life suddenly opened before her.
She was young--she was recovering from dangerous illness; she was,
notwithstanding her feeble health, bright and gay and sun-shiny. She had
plenty of money, for her husband grudged her nothing his love could
supply; she was interesting and fresh, and new, and naïve, and she was
the dearest friend Leonora Trebasson ever had; what wonder therefore
that the people amongst whom she was thrown fussed over, and petted and
flattered, and humoured her, till they taught Dolly wherein her power
and her genius lay; so that when Mrs. Mortomley returned home she took
with her graces previously undeveloped, and left behind the virtue of
unconsciousness and the mantle of personal humility which had hitherto
clothed her.
Up to that time Dolly had not thought much of herself. Now she was as
one possessed of a beautiful face, who having seen her own reflection
for the first time can never forget the impression it produced upon her.
In her own country and amongst her own people, Dolly had been no
prophet. Rather she had been regarded as a nonentity, and the little
world of Dassell wondered at Mr. Mortomley's choice. Amongst strangers
Dolly had spread her wings and tried her strength. She felt in the
position of a usually silent man, considered by his friends rather
stupid than otherwise, who in a fresh place and under unwonted
circumstances opens his mouth and gives utterance to words he knew not
previously were his to command.
Yes, Dolly would never be humble again. She had lost that attraction,
and through all the years to follow, the years filled with happiness and
sorrow, exaltation and abasement, she never recovered it.
There are plants of a rare sweetness which die more surely from excess
of sunshine than from the severity of frost; common plants, yet that we
miss from the borders set round and about our homes with a heart-ache we
never feel when a more flaunting flower fails to make its appearance;
and just such a tender blossom, just such a healing herb, died that
summer in the garden of Dolly's nature.
And she only nineteen! Well-a-day, the plant had not perhaps had time to
strike its roots very deep, and the soil was certainly uncongenial. At
all events its place knew it no more, and something of sweetness and
softness departed with it.
But it was only a very keen and close observer who could have detected
all this; for other flowers sprang up and made a great show where that
had been--graces of manner, inflections of voice, thoughtfulness for
others, which if acquired seemed none the less charming on that account,
a desire to please and be pleased, which exercised itself on rich and
poor alike--these things and the sunshine of old which she still carried
with her, made Dolly seem a very exceptional woman in the bright years
which were still to come.
They made her so exceptional in fact, that her god-mother left her eight
thousand pounds. She would not have left her eight pence in the Dassell
days, but after spending a fortnight at Homewood she returned home,
altered her will which had provided for the establishment and
preservation of certain useless charities, and bequeathed eight thousand
pounds, her plate, and her jewellery, and her lace, to her beloved
god-daughter Dollabella, wife of Archibald Mortomley, Esquire, of
Homewood.
If people be travelling downhill the devil is always conveniently at
hand to give the vehicle they occupy a shove. That eight thousand pounds
proved a nice impetus to the Mortomleys, and a further legacy from a
distant relative which dropped in shortly after the previous bequest,
accelerated the descent.
When Dolly was married, no girl could have come to a husband with more
economical ideas than she possessed. Poverty and she had been friends
all her life; she had been accustomed to shortness of money, to frugal
fare, to the closest and strictest expenditure from her childhood
upwards, and had Mortomley been wise as he was amiable, she might have
regarded changing a five-pound note with a certain awe and hesitation to
the end of her days.
In money as in other matters, however, she speedily, in that different
atmosphere, lost her head. There can be no greater mistake than to
suppose, because a person has made both ends meet on, say a hundred and
fifty pounds a year, he will be able to manage comfortably on fifteen
hundred; on the contrary, he is nearly certain either to turn miser or
spendthrift. Dolly had not the faintest idea how to deal with a
comfortable income, and as her husband was as incompetent as herself, he
let her have pretty well her own way, which was a very bad way indeed.
Like his wife, perhaps, he thought those legacies represented a great
deal more money than was the case, since money only represents money
according to the way in which it chances to be expended.
It is not in the unclouded noontide, however, when fortune wears its
brightest smiles, that any one dreams of the wild night--the darkness of
despair to follow. It seems to me that the stories we hear of second
sight, of presentiments, of warnings, had a deeper origin than the usual
superstitious fantasies we associate with them. I think they were
originally intended as parables--as prophecies.
I believe the words of dark import were designed to convey to the
man--prosperous, victorious--safe in the security of his undiscovered
sins, the same lesson that Nathan's final sentence, "Thou art the Man,"
conveyed in _his_ hour of fancied safety to the heart of David. I
believe under the disguise of a thrice-told tale, those inscrutable
warnings of which we hear, arresting a man in the middle of a
questionable story or a peal of drunken laughter, were meant to be as
truly writings on the wall as ever silenced the merriment in
Belshazzar's halls--as certainly prophecies as that dream which
prefigured Nebuchadnezzar's madness.
And there was a time when portents, prophecies, and parables did
influence men for good, did turn them from the evil, did turn their
thoughts from earth to heaven, but that was in the days when people
having time to think--thought; when sometimes alone, separate from their
fellow-creatures, able to forget for a period the world and its
requirements, they were free to think of that which, spite of a learned
divine's dictum, is more wonderful and more bewildering than
eternity--the soul of man--the object of his creation, the use and
reason and purpose of his ever having been made in God's image to walk
erect upon the earth.
There were not wanting, in the very middle of their abundant prosperity,
signs and tokens sufficient to have assured the Mortomleys that to the
life, one at least of them was leading, there must come an end; but
neither husband nor wife had eyes to see presages which were patent to
the very ordinary minds of some of the business men with whom the owner
of Homewood had dealings. Notwithstanding his large connexion, his
monopoly of several lucrative branches of his trade, his own patrimony,
his wife's thousands, Mortomley was always short of money.
When once shortness of money becomes chronic, it is quite certain the
patient is suffering under a mortal disease. People who are clever in
commercial matters understand this fact thoroughly. Chronic shortness of
money has no more to do with unexpected reverses, with solvent poverty,
with any ailment curable by any means short of sharp and agonizing
treatment, than the heart throbs of a man destined some day to fall down
stone dead in the middle of a sentence, has a likeness to the pulsations
of fever, or the languid flow of life which betokens that the body is
temporarily exhausted.
Like all persons, however, who are sickening unto death, Mortomley was
the last to realize the fact.
He knew he was embarrassed, he knew why he was embarrassed, and he
thought he should have no difficulty in clearing himself of those
embarrassments.
And, in truth, had he been a wise man he might have done so. If, after
the death of his brother, which occurred about seven years subsequent to
his own marriage with Dolly, he had faced his position, there would have
been no story to tell about him or his estate either; but instead of
doing that, he drifted--there are hundreds and thousands in business, in
love, on sea or land, who when an emergency comes, always drift--and
always make ship-wreck of their fortunes and their lives in consequence.
For years he had helped his step-brother by going security for him, by
lending his name, by giving him money, by paying his debts. Somehow the
security had never involved pecuniary outlay. The loan of the name had
been renewed, passed into different channels, held over, manipulated in
fact by Mr. Richard Halling, until, in very truth, Mortomley, at best as
wretched a financier as he was an admirable inventor, knew no more than
his own daughter how accounts stood between him and the man who had been
his mother's favourite son.
One day, however, Mr. Richard Halling caught cold--a fortnight after, he
was dead. The debts he left behind him were considerable; his effects
small. To Mortomley he bequeathed the former, together with his son and
daughter. Of his effects the creditors took possession.
The event cut up Mr. Mortomley considerably. He was a man who, making no
fresh friends, felt the loss of relatives morbidly.
He returned from the funeral looking like one broken-hearted, and
brought back with him to Homewood his nephew and niece, who were to
remain there "until something definite could be settled about their
future."
To this arrangement Dolly made no objection. Dolly would not have
objected had her husband suggested inviting the noblemen composing the
House of Lords, or a regiment of soldiers, or a squad of workhouse boys.
People came and people went. It was all the same to Dolly.