Notwithstanding the dissatisfaction of his family, John Parke began his
married life very comfortably, and it is doubtful whether he had ever
been so happy in his life before. Lord Frogmore had let the newly
married pair have a house of his in Berkshire, in a good hunting
neighborhood, and not very far from town. John was by no means a great
hunting man, but it is a respectable occupation to fall back upon when
one has nothing else to do, and he was able to keep up his character and
take a moderate interest in all that was going on without very much hard
riding or sacrifice of comfort. His wife rode with him to the admiration
of all the hunting field. But it was not in that way that Letitia meant
to gain distinction. She had known too much about horses in her earlier
days. She did not intend to be a hunting lady. Still it is always
something to be known for one of the best horsewomen in your county. If
you do not hunt after that it shows that you have higher aspirations.
And it was very good for John to know that there was one thing at least
which would have made any man proud of his wife. What Letitia was much
more anxious about was that everybody should call. She procured a list
of all the county families within reach, and carefully compared their
names with those on the visiting cards that were left at Greenpark. And
gradually her high aspirations were carried out. Gradually, not all at
once, but under the weighty influence of the peerage and the hunting,
most people came. Letitia found herself at the apex of the happiness she
most desired, when she ascertained finally that she knew
everybody--scarcely one was left out, and those who were left out were
the insignificant people for whose opinion nobody cared.
She made a capital wife. She knew a great deal about housekeeping and
how to make a little go a long way, and as she was very quick and kept
her eyes wide open wherever she went, she very soon picked up those
minutiæ of comfort and domestic luxury which were not understood at
Grocombe. Grocombe, in fact, passed away altogether like a dissolving
view. Sometimes when she sat in the boudoir which everybody said she had
made so delightful, with its soft chairs and mossy carpets, and
bewildering drapery, there would come before Letitia’s eyes a vision of
the shabby parlor at home with its horsehair sofa and thin
Kidderminster. The curtains were maroon rep in that family abode. The
cover on the table was red and blue worsted: there was not a cosy chair
in the place. It is true that there was a drawing-room in Grocombe, but
everything in it was falling to pieces and it was never used. What a
house to have been brought up in! And what a difference between Tisch
Ravelstone, the hard-riding squire’s neglected daughter, who had never
been educated, or dressed, or looked after by any one, whom the parson’s
wife had been sorry for, who had been invited to the vicarage out of
kindness, who had once thought the vicar’s son when he returned from
Oxford the most splendid of young persons, and the Honorable Mrs. John
Parke in her own beautiful boudoir, with her fine dresses and respectful
servants and luxurious prosperity! What a difference! Letitia never
permitted it to be seen or even divined that such luxury was new to her.
But sometimes there would gleam before her a fading dissolving vision of
that other life, and she would ask herself was it possible? Could it
ever have been? To go back to such a state of affairs now would be the
most horrible misfortune. She said to herself that she would rather die.
It is true that the moors were glorious round about that Yorkshire
house, but Letitia had seen too much of them to care for the moors: and
the stables were admirably arranged, the pride of the district, but
Letitia had seen a great deal too much of them and hated stables. And
when she thought of the miry ways through which she used to tramp in her
Wellington boots and short skirts, and the wintry blighted fir wood, all
blown one way as if the trees were shabby pilgrims going to the west,
which surrounded the house and the garden in which a few straggling rose
bushes and old-fashioned flowers formed a respectful border to the
cabbages, Letitia drew a long breath. Oh-h! she said to herself. What a
difference! what a difference! But this breath of wondering transport
was only breathed when she sat alone in her boudoir and John was well
out of the way, and could not look up with an “Eh? did you speak?”
There were some things, however, not so easily dropped as Grocombe--and
these were its inhabitants. Letitia had five brothers, such a number for
a young woman on her promotion, whose aspirations were so far removed
from anything they could understand. They could all ride like centaurs,
they could doctor horses as well as any vet., harness them as well as
any groom, and were as conversant with the pedigrees of their quadruped
nobility as the Garter-King-at-Arms is with the precedence and
qualifications of dukes and earls. Letitia was not unaware that
knowledge of this kind is sometimes very valuable, and that in the
society of a hunting country it is much esteemed. She knew there were
distinguished houses in the neighborhood in which the stud-groom was a
person highly prized for his conversation and social qualities; and on
such a dreadful emergency as the appearance of Will, or Jack, or Ted, or
Harry at Greenpark, she had already settled in her own mind how to make
the best of their qualities: but it was a thought which made her shiver.
She had made up her mind that intercourse with her old home was a thing
to be gradually dropped altogether. Heaven be praised there were no
sisters. Had there been sisters they would not have been so easily
shaken off, they would probably have insisted upon sharing Tisch’s good
luck, and getting “their chance” also through her means. “Tisch!” think
only of hearing that name again ringing through the house in the
stentorian voice of one of the boys! If there were no more than this to
be avoided it would be enough. Letitia put her hands up to her ears as
if to shut out the horrible sound. No, fortunately, nobody here, nobody
in her new world had ever heard that dreadful name: the Sillingers,
indeed--but they were people who knew better than to perpetuate such an
injury. And on the whole Letitia thought it advisable to drop them also.
They were so far off. The north of Yorkshire is a long way from Berks.
It is much further off than either place is, for instance, from London.
Mrs. John Parke lamented in her new neighborhood that she was so far off
from the old; but on the whole it was a dispensation of Providence with
which she was well pleased.
In the meantime Letitia began without delay to do her duty in the
station to which she had been so fortunately called. She produced with
much fortitude and pride a son and heir at the end of the first year,
and after that judiciously, and not with too much haste, other little
Parkes, one after the other, two boys and two girls, thus establishing
the family upon a broad and sturdy basis, which precluded all fear of
extinction to the family honors. Three sons--such a thing had not been
known in the Frogmore family since the creation of the title, which was
not, however, a very old one. There could be no doubt that Lord Frogmore
was pleased. He sent Mrs. John some of the family diamonds, those jewels
which she had so coveted, but which were by no means as splendid as she
had hoped, after the first of these events--and he made a great many
jokes with his brother as the family increased. But, in fact, he was
very considerate indeed, making more than jokes, a considerable addition
to John’s income, and also giving up to his brother the house in Mount
Street, which Mrs. John had so long coveted. It is very evident,
therefore, that Letitia’s course of prosperity for the first eight years
of her married life was as nearly perfect as falls to the lot of woman.
Her new family had forgotten that she was plain--they all had a respect
for her as a very clever woman, who had done her duty by the race. She
was not, perhaps, all that they could have desired; “not what I should
have chosen for my dear boy,” said Lady Frogmore. “A little sharp for my
taste--but then my taste had nothing to do with it,” said the old lord.
But a woman against whom nothing was to be said. Her first season in
London--the first season in which she had actually a house of her own,
and could be said to take the place which the future Lady Frogmore had a
right to aspire to, was not, indeed, triumphant--Letitia did not aspire
to triumphs--but it was, as all her progress had been, a gradual and
steady advance. She did not wish to take an insecure place among the
fast duchesses and the wild millionaires. She disapproved of all the
votaries of dissipation. “We come to town to meet our friends, and pay
our duty to our Sovereign, and see what is going on,” she said, “but our
delight is in our country home.” She had said ’ome at first, as, indeed,
many very well-bred persons do; but Letitia had outgrown any weakness of
that kind. And she was making her way. When she met the Sillingers now
she was in a position to patronize them. The girls had not made very
good marriages; and what was Lady Sillinger, after all, but the wife of
a country baronet, well off, but not very rich, with a nice house and
very hospitable in their way, but not a great country place. The Honble.
Mrs. John Parke, the future Lady Frogmore, was very good-natured, and
glad to be of use to her old friends.
There was another old friend who at this period was brought to her mind
by an unexpected encounter at one of the exhibitions, which is a place
where the poor may meet the rich without anything surprising being in
it. Letitia, in the course of her cursory survey of the pictures, found
before her a group which she recognized--or rather it would be more just
to say she recognized one of the members of it. She looked, she turned
away her head, she looked again. Yes, certainly, it was! it was! the
very vicar’s daughter who had always been kind to Letitia Ravelstone,
who had been held up to her as a model, whose neat frocks and pinafores
it had been a vain effort to emulate. The name of the vicar’s daughter
was Mary Hill, one of the most commonplace of names, yet capable of no
such horrible travesty as that nickname of Tisch, which had been the
burden of Letitia’s youth--yet she had always been prettier than
Letitia, as well as more neat and carefully dressed. Mrs. John Parke
stood in her fashionable London garments, in what might be called the
height of her dignified maternal--but not too maternal--position (for
Letitia had preserved her figure and was still slim) and gazed upon the
companion of her youth. Miss Hill looked forty, though she was not quite
so much as that. She was dressed in a grey alpaca, very simply made. She
had a close little bonnet of the same color, tied with pink ribbons
under her chin. She was as neat as she used to be in the old days when
she was held up as an example to Tisch Ravelstone. She was accompanied
by two elderly ladies of homely respectability, one of whom called to
her continually, “Mary, Mary, you have not looked at this.” They were
doing the honors of the pictures to her, not sparing her one. She had a
catalogue in her hand, but between that and the lady who called Mary,
Mary, and the other who stopped before all the worst pictures and said,
with a wave of her hand, “This is one that has been a great deal talked
about,” their gentle country cousin was evidently a little confused.
She smiled, and allowed herself to be dragged in two directions at once.
Letitia stood and watched with a sensation which was very mingled. There
was good in it and there was evil, a sense of triumph which so swelled
her bosom that had her dress not been so perfectly fitted some of the
buttons must certainly have burst, but along with this a certain sense
of kindness, of pleasure in such a kind face. If it had been anybody but
Mary Hill not even the delight of showing how different she herself was
from Tisch Ravelstone would have made Mrs. Parke pause. But a softer
impulse touched her breast. She stood still where she was until Mary, in
one of the many gyrations she had to make to please her companions,
turned round full upon her and recognized her with a start and a cry.
Letitia, in the excitement of the moment, actually forgave her old
friend, whose cry was “Tisch!”
“It is surely Mary Hill,” she said, advancing in her turn, with all the
magnificence of which she was capable, and that was no small matter. “I
have been looking at you for five minutes wondering; but it is you. And
you have not changed a bit.”
“Oh, no; how should I change? But you; now I look at you again I wonder
that I recognized you at all. It was the first glance. I felt it could
be no one else.”
“It makes a great difference to be married and have a number of
children,” said Letitia with genial dignity. “You have never married,
Mary.”
“Oh, no,” said Mary, with a faint laugh.
“And are you just at home--as you used to be?”
“Just at home--as I used to be. We are all older, the boys are out in
the world, and little Fanny too, as a governess; but Annie and I are
just the same, taking care of father and mother.”
“They can’t want two of you to take care of them.”
“That is true,” said Mary, with a faint change of color, “but we had no
education--we elder ones--and we can’t teach, and there’s nothing else
for a girl to do.”
“A girl!” said Letitia under her breath, looking at Mary in her gentle
middle-agedness from top to toe. But she perceived that the two elderly
ladies, who had hitherto kept at a distance overawed by her fashionable
appearance, were now consulting together with evident intention of
advancing, so she added quickly, “I am so glad to have seen you. Come
and see me, please, in the morning before one, at 300, Mount street,
Berkeley Square--the park end--will you? Come to-morrow, Mary, please.”
“I will indeed,” said Mary, with fervor. “It is the finest thing I have
seen in London, dear Tishy, the face of an old friend: and as kind as
ever,” she said with a glance of tender gratitude. She had not perhaps
quite expected, nor had Letitia expected, that any such soft sentiment
should have arisen in her bosom, if truth be told.
“Don’t call me that, for heaven’s sake,” cried Letitia, waving her hand
as she hurried away. And so the two elderly ladies were balked, and Mrs.
Parke left the exhibition with a new plan taking form in her mind--a
plan which would be a great kindness, yet very useful to herself--a plan
which was to produce fruits of an importance almost awful to Letitia,
yet at this moment altogether hidden, and the very possibility of them,
from her eyes.