THE EARL’S PROMISE.
A Novel.
BY
MRS. RIDDELL,
AUTHOR OF
“GEORGE GEITH,” “TOO MUCH ALONE,” “HOME, SWEET HOME,” ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 8, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1873.
[_All rights of Translation and Reproduction are Reserved._]
PRINTED BY TAYLOR AND CO.,
LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.
CHAP. PAGE.
I. MRS. BRADY UNDERSTANDS HER POSITION 1
II. COMING EVENTS 25
III. SEVEN YEARS AFTER 47
IV. THE LAST JOURNEY 77
V. THE PEOPLE’S FRIEND 114
VI. THE MUTTERING OF THE STORM 150
VII. FEET OF CLAY 178
VIII. BY THE SAD SEA WAVES 214
IX. WHAT THE WAVES WHISPERED 248
X. WHEN DOCTORS DIFFER 270
XI. NO CHANGE 294
THE EARL’S PROMISE.
CHAPTER I.
MRS. BRADY UNDERSTANDS HER POSITION.
Tacitly Kingslough had decided that Mrs. Brady was not to be visited.
Just as by one consent the public sometimes agrees to condemn an untried
man, so gentle and simple made up their minds not to enter the gates of
Maryville.
Those of Nettie’s own class, having regard to that which they considered
a _mésalliance_, quietly tabooed the fact of her marriage and her
existence; those of a lower grade, remembering what Miss O’Hara’s father
had been, and what the Rileys were, feeling if they called upon the
young wife she might not feel grateful for their attentions, agreed it
might be prudent for them to abstain from showing any.
Wherein they were wise. Scant civility would any one have met from
Nettie, who, presuming upon an altered position, had tried to force
unwelcome acquaintanceship on her. Mrs. Brady was not one to be
satisfied with dry bread when she had expected to feast on cake.
She could do without either. That was what the uplifting of her little
head and the defiant flash of her blue eyes silently informed society.
“She could live alone, she would live alone,” this the burden of her
talk to Mrs. Hartley, who, being above or below the considerations that
usually influenced the going and coming of Kingslough’s upper ten, could
afford to set precedence and public opinion at defiance, hired the best
covered car Kingslough boasted, and drove solemnly out to Maryville to
see the bride, and give her some old-fashioned advice as to the way in
which she was to order her future conduct, and make a good thing of the
years that had still to come, still to be lived somehow, happily or
miserably, creditably or the reverse.
“One day,” Mrs. Brady proceeded, “perhaps they” (they stood for the
retired officers of the army and navy, the clergy, the attorneys and
agents, the widows, old maids, poodles, and others who constituted the
aristocracy of Kingslough) “may wish to know me again, and then I will
have nothing to do with them.”
“When that day comes,” said Mrs. Hartley, with the coolness which
exasperated so many of her acquaintances, “you will of course have as
perfect a right to select the houses at which you choose to visit as the
Kingslough people have now.”
“Or as I have now,” amended Nettie.
“Pardon me, I think your selection is at present confined to those at
which you will not visit,” answered Mrs. Hartley. “It is of no use,
Nettie,” she went on, stroking the bright, fair hair kindly and
sorrowfully, “it is of no use trying to fight the world single-handed.
You are very young and you are very pretty, and you have a will of your
own and a temper of your own that few gave you credit for possessing;
but neither youth nor beauty, nor obstinacy, nor being at bottom a
little atom of a vixen will win this battle for you. If you take an old
woman’s advice, you will lay down your arms, and let people imagine you
are still the gentle, quiet Nettie they used to see going to school. You
cannot eat your cake and have it. You knew perfectly what Kingslough
thought, whether rightly or wrongly, of Mr. Brady, and still you chose
to marry Mr. Brady. Now you want Mr. Brady and Kingslough as well; at
least, you are bitter because Kingslough has not welcomed your return
with open arms. What you ought to say to yourself now is, ‘Never mind, I
have got my husband to care for and to love me, and so long as we are
happy together, no slights the world chooses to put upon us can affect
us much;’” and as Mrs. Hartley ended this very proper sentence, she
looked closely and curiously at Nettie, who, muttering something about
the heat of the room, rose and opened one of the windows.
It proved rather a long operation, but when she returned to her seat the
flush Mrs. Hartley had noticed rising even to her temples had not faded
quite away.
“Next time you come to see me,” Nettie began, ignoring the previous
subject of conversation, “I hope you will find the house looking more
comfortable. We have furniture coming from Kilcurragh, but it cannot be
here for a few days.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Hartley, “furniture does not necessarily mean
happiness, any more than—”
“Oh, I know that, of course!” Nettie interrupted, a little peevishly;
“still one would wish to have a few chairs, and perhaps a couple of
tables in a sitting-room, for all that.”
It was characteristic of Mrs. Brady that she elected to receive her
visitor in the drawing-room, which looked like a barren wilderness, and
contained very few more articles of furniture than when she first beheld
its gaunt and pretentious nakedness, rather than in the smaller
apartment where John Riley and his father had held their interview with
her husband.
Mrs. Hartley sat on the dilapidated sofa while Nettie tried to look
comfortable on a very hard and very high, straight-backed chair. Three
windows, reaching from the floor almost to the ceiling, looked out on
the weed-grown garden and the tangled wilderness beyond, so that the
visitor had plenty of light to view the old-fashioned chimney-piece, on
the white marble of which cupids disported themselves, holding wreaths
that seemed almost black with dirt—black and grimy as the wings of the
cupids.
Nevertheless a handsome chimney-piece—handsome and fantastic, like the
great chandelier that hung in the centre of the room, and seemed to Mrs.
Hartley’s critical eye to stand in as much need of a scrubbing as the
floor itself, from contact with which she had carefully preserved her
own dress, and would fain have advised Nettie to guard her muslin, had
that young lady seemed more amenable to common sense, and less sensitive
concerning the loss of social position induced by her marriage.
To Mrs. Hartley it did not signify in what rank Mrs. Brady was now
supposed to be, and she felt sorry to notice how much it appeared to
signify to Nettie. She had known girls make foolish matches before, and
she had seen them put up with the consequences, but never before had she
beheld a young wife battling like Nettie against the results entailed by
her own act.
Dimly she began to fancy that the girl had married less for love of Mr.
Brady than for weariness of her monotonous life, and that now, when the
new life promised to be as monotonous as the old, and there was, besides
no hope of escape from it, the hitherto unsuspected side of Nettie’s
character was beginning to crop up. But Mrs. Hartley, though partly
right, was yet greatly wrong, both in her premises and the results she
deduced from them.
Nettie had staked everything she owned—everything that seemed of value
to her—in order to gain her husband, and now she knew he was not worth
the price at which she purchased him. She had made a mistake which she
would never be able to remedy. No; not if she lived for a hundred years,
and it was not in her nature to forgive society for deserting and
leaving her to bear the consequences of her error as best she might, all
alone.
She had taken her own course, and that course had made her bankrupt. The
world might have helped to render the lot she had chosen happier, but
virtually the world had turned its back upon her and said, “You may
carry your burden as best you can. You may bear your trouble as well as
you are able.”
That was the secret of Nettie’s anger and Nettie’s petulance. Her heart
was bleeding, and not a hand was stretched forth to stanch it. Such
fearful isolation, such utter desertion were almost maddening to Nettie,
who had always thought a good deal of herself, and to whom it never
occurred for one moment that when she went off with Mr. Brady, she took
leave of her relatives and society at the same time.
She could have quarrelled with her own shadow. She would have liked to
strike some one, to scold as a very virago, and so get rid of even a
part of the anger and sorrow, and disappointment and humiliation that
were raging within her. She had gone as far as she dared with Mrs.
Hartley, but to no purpose. She had tried to exhibit her grievances, and
her sensible visitor plainly said she had none; implying rather, indeed,
that society and her relatives were aggrieved instead. It was all very
hard upon Nettie, and had Mrs. Hartley only suspected how thoroughly the
girl already realized the completeness of her mistake, she might have
dealt more gently with the blue-eyed beauty, whose pretty face had
brought such ruin on her life.
As it was, Mrs. Hartley felt a little provoked with her former
favourite.
Elderly people are apt to be a little severe upon young ones when the
ways and thoughts of the latter are beyond their comprehension; and Mrs.
Hartley was severe in her judgment of Nettie, more especially when their
conversation turned, as it soon did, upon Miss Moffat.
“You have heard from Grace, I suppose?” said Mrs. Hartley.
“I have. She told you she had written to me, of course?”
Mrs. Hartley wondered at the “of course,” but contented herself, with
answering “Yes.”
“Did she tell you also what she had sent me?”
“No; I do not think, whatever her faults may be, Grace is a girl to talk
to one friend about any gift she might intend to make to another.”
“She sent me this!” Nettie exclaimed, pulling out of her belt an
extremely beautiful and expensive watch, which. Mrs. Hartley recognized
as one formerly belonging to Miss Moffat. “She said in her letter she
would have bought me a new one—” for a moment the speaker’s voice
trembled, and she hesitated before finishing her sentence, “but in that
case she must wait until her father went to Dublin, and she did not want
to wait, and, besides that, she had worn this so constantly, it was like
sending me a piece of herself, as she could not come to see me. And
there was something besides the watch and chain.” Here Nettie,
apparently on the brink of a confidence, broke off abruptly.
“_I_ wanted to return her presents,” she went on, after a pause, and
Mrs. Hartley noticed how nervously and passionately the fingers of her
clasped hands laced and twisted round and about, in and out of one
another. “I would have sent them back, but Mr. Brady would not let me. I
would not have kept anything in the house sent by a person who thought
herself too good to come and see me; but I could not help myself. It is
not with any goodwill I wear this thing. I would rather Gracie had come
to see me than that anybody had given me ten thousand pounds; and if she
did not like to do that, she ought not to have made me presents, and I
told her so; Mr. Brady could not prevent my doing that, and I did it.”
“Then you ought to be ashamed of your ungrateful childishness!”
exclaimed Mrs. Hartley; “and I only wish Mr. Brady could have prevented
such an exhibition of temper. It is nothing but temper which is the
matter with you, Nettie; and if you do not take care, you will lose the
few friends who have remained true to you, and who will remain true to
you if you choose to let them, foolish and inconsiderate though your
conduct may have been.”
“Friends!” repeated Nettie scornfully, but tears filled her eyes as she
spoke, and Mrs. Hartley, seeing them, relented.
“You have friends, dear,” she said. “John Riley is your friend, so am I,
so is Grace. I am an old woman, and free to go where and to whom I
choose; but Grace is not free, she cannot come to see you, she cannot
set up her own opinion against that of all her advisers. She has no
mother; you know yourself how little of a protector Mr. Moffat is
capable of being, and till she marries it behoves her to be careful and
prudent. I think I may safely say, had Grace been Mrs. Riley, you would
have seen her here the day she heard of your arrival: as it is—”
“She ought to have taken no notice of me, I should have felt it less,”
finished Nettie. “Tell her though, Mrs. Hartley,” she went on, kneeling
before that lady, and resting her arms across her lap, while she turned
up her face, which looked at the moment pathetically beautiful, towards
her mentor, “tell her I am sorry for writing that nasty letter; tell her
I did not mean half nor a quarter what I said in it; but I was angry, I
was hurt; she ought not to have sent me money, it was like buying me
off. It was treating me like a beggar.”
“It is difficult to please every one,” remarked Mrs. Hartley; “I am
treated frequently like a thief, because I do not send money to those
who have no right to it. But proceed. How did Grace happen so far to
forget what was due to your feelings as to make this present?”
“Do not laugh at me—oh! don’t,” entreated Nettie; “I thought Grace was
fond of me, and it seemed so hard, so cold!”
“Grace is fond of you, and she is neither hard nor cold. What did she
say?”
“You can see her letter, if you care to read it,” Nettie answered; and
she went into the next room and fetched Miss Moffat’s epistle.
It was a simple, loving scrawl—Grace wrote an abominable hand—and told
how earnestly the writer hoped Nettie would be happy, and how she wished
she could go and see her, and how she sent a little token by which
Nettie would know she was not forgotten; and how, thinking there must be
many things Nettie might want to buy in the way of dress, she enclosed
her some money, which she hoped Nettie would take from her as if she was
her sister.
Nothing could have been more tenderly or delicately worded—there was not
a sentence, not a syllable in the letter which could have given offence
to any one who happened to be in a better frame of mind than was Mrs.
Brady’s case when she received it.
Never before, Mrs. Hartley felt, had she quite appreciated Grace Moffat.
Certainly there was a sweetness and softness about her mentally which
Nettie lacked.
“You did not stand in need of this money,” she said, folding up the
letter and returning it, “or else you never could have resented a
kindness so gracefully offered, or the feeling which prompted that
kindness. What was the amount of her enclosure?”
“Fifty pounds,” answered Nettie, slowly and reluctantly.
“Upon my word, Miss Grace, when you come into your own, you will do
things right royally!” remarked Mrs. Hartley. She was astonished at the
idea of Miss Moffat proffering such a sum, and yet while blaming the
girl’s reckless generosity, as she privately styled it, she was touched
by it sensibly. Middle-aged people, who, having learned the value of
money, look at a shilling twice before they spend sixpence, are not
always displeased at the spectacle of a lavish liberality on the part of
young folks. Nevertheless, she intended to remonstrate with Miss Moffat,
to point out the evil and folly of her pecuniary ways, and read her a
lecture, which she well knew beforehand would be answered with many an
“Ah, no!” and “Dear Mrs. Hartley,” and “Well, but,” and earnest excuse
and playful protest, uttered by that soft, sweet, stealing voice which
was—the Englishwoman confessed it with shame—almost reconciling her to
the Irish accent.
“If you really do not require the money, Nettie, I should return the
whole or part of it,” said Mrs. Hartley, forgetful apparently of the
statement Mrs. Brady had made when the subject of Grace was first
broached.
“I cannot,” Nettie answered.
“What, spent it all already!”
“No,” she replied; “I have given it away,” and once again the tell-tale
colour flamed in Nettie’s cheeks.
No good purpose was to be served in continuing that conversation, so
Mrs. Hartley immediately guessed, and changed it.
“Grace has refused John Riley,” she began.
“So I hear.”
“How did you hear it?”
“John told me, and I am very sorry. I did not say I was sorry to Grace
because she might not believe me, but I am. She will never meet with any
person one half so fond of her for herself as John.”
“I agree with you there,” said Mrs. Hartley briskly; “but why do you
imagine Grace would not have believed you felt sorry, if you told her
you did?”
“Oh! because I used to be foolish about things,” answered Nettie,
looking straight down the dreary expanse of uncarpeted floor that
stretched between her and the other end of the room.
“About what things?” asked Mrs. Hartley.
“About lovers and husbands, and other nonsense of that sort,” Nettie
replied, as if she were five hundred years old. “I thought no girl
_could_ care for a man unless he was handsome; and John is not handsome,
you know. You remember the saying, Mrs. Hartley, that it is better to be
‘good than bonny.’ I did not believe anybody could be good who was not
bonny. I have learned better since then.”
Mrs. Hartley did not care to inquire “since when?” so she merely
remarked,—
“You were therefore, I suppose, always influencing Grace against him?”
“She did not need any influencing,” was the calm reply. “She did not
care for him—not—not in that way, and she did think he wanted her money
as much as herself; perhaps he did, he has not much of his own to spare;
and then she met Mr. Somerford, and he took her fancy with his playing
and singing, and talk about painting, and rubbish of that sort. No,”
added Nettie abruptly, reverting to the question of Miss Moffat’s
rejected lover, “we did not often speak about John. She always said she
never intended to marry any one; and of course I had to listen, and seem
to believe her.”
“You did not think she expressed her real intention, then?” suggested
Mrs. Hartley.
“I am not sure. I think Grace is likely enough to stay single all her
days; unless she marries Mr. Somerford, or some person like him; and I
hope she will not marry Mr. Somerford, I do, from my heart.”
“Why, Nettie?”
“Because I do not think he is good enough for her. He has nothing inside
his head excepting selfishness and the roots of his curly-black hair,”
criticized Mrs. Brady, whose ideas on the subject of physiology were
vague in the extreme.
Mrs. Hartley laughed. Disparagement of that handsome scion of a
worthless stock was very music to her ears.
“And besides,” proceeded Nettie, “I am certain Grace would never be
happy, stuck up amongst the peerage. I know she and the countess are now
never separate; but she must be a greatly altered girl if she cares very
much for being intimate with the nobility. However, there is no
knowing,” finished the speaker sententiously. “I suppose we are none of
us exactly what we seem,” and blue eyes and golden curls relapsed into
reverie.
“Where is your husband?” inquired Mrs. Hartley, after a moment’s pause.
She had hoped to see him, and she did not wish to end her visit without
doing so.
“Mr. Brady,” said Nettie (it was a noticeable feature in the young
wife’s conversation that since the day when General Riley and his son
came upon her, standing by the broken sun-dial, she had never spoken of
her husband as such, or addressed or referred to him by his Christian
name); “Oh! he has gone down the Lough as far as Port Clune, to look at
some cattle he is thinking of buying. It saves ten or twelve miles going
by water instead of round the headlands; but he cannot be back before
the evening. I am sorry it has so happened; he will be grieved to have
missed you.”
It struck Mrs. Hartley that although Mr. Brady might possibly be
grieved, Mrs. Brady was certainly not sorry; but she was rising to take
her leave, taking Nettie’s statement apparently for granted, when the
door opened, and the person of whom they had been speaking walked in.
At sight of a visitor he hesitated for a moment, then came across the
room and said how glad he was to see Mrs. Hartley, how proud to make her
acquaintance.
“I did not know any one was here,” he added (which must have been a mere
figure of speech, since he had seen Mrs. Hartley’s car, and learned from
the servant to whom it belonged), “or I should not have appeared before
you in such a plight.”
“Where have you been? what have you been doing?” inquired his wife.
“I have been in the water,” he replied, “bringing Lady Glendare back to
land. She got out of her depth, or caught by a current, or something of
that sort, and would most likely have been part of her way back to
England by this time, had we not happened to be passing.”
“You ought to change your clothes at once,” remarked Mrs. Hartley,
practical and unemotional as ever.
“There is no hurry,” answered Mr. Brady, laughing. “Mr. Moffat insisted
on my taking an internal antidote against cold; and, besides, salt water
never hurts anybody.”
“And the countess?” inquired Nettie.
“Oh! there is not much the matter with her beyond fright. She was
terrified. Miss Moffat, I suspect, has not come off so well. She was
sitting at the door of the bathing-box when Lady Glendare’s maid
screamed, and in one moment (by George, I never saw anything so quick or
so well done in my life) she was out along the rocks (how she kept her
footing I cannot imagine), and made one leap after her ladyship. I was
near the countess by that time, and Calpin had rowed in shore, so we
saved them both; but Miss Moffat is hurt, I know, though she will not
confess it. What a girl that is!” finished Mr. Brady reflectively; “what
a spirit she has! The first words she said to the countess, as Calpin
and I were carrying her ladyship up to Bayview, were, ‘Of course there
is no fear of the election now?’ I rather fancy the election was a
matter of secondary importance to Lady Glendare at that moment; but Miss
Moffat was right, nevertheless.”
Mrs. Hartley looked straight at Mr. Brady while he uttered the foregoing
sentence. He was a handsome man, no one could deny that; handsome after
his kind; and there was really nothing in the words he spoke calculated
to annoy any one. But there was a manner about him that offended the
lady’s taste. More especially she hated the tone in which he alluded to
Grace; and she felt angry with Grace for having made any remark capable
of repetition in the presence of such a person.
“I am certain that your husband ought not to be standing here in his wet
clothes,” she said, turning to Nettie. “If you name an evening when you
and Mr. Brady can come and take a cup of tea with me, I will not intrude
any longer upon you to-day.”
“I do not think,” Nettie was beginning, when Mr. Brady interrupted her,—
“Annette and I have not so many engagements, Mrs. Hartley, that we need
hesitate about accepting yours,” he said. “Any evening which suits you
will be agreeable to us.”
“Thursday, then?” suggested the lady.
“Thursday, with many thanks,” he replied.
“You know what that means, I suppose?” remarked Nettie, when he
returned, after helping Mrs. Hartley into her car. “She does not want us
to call when we might meet other visitors, but asks us to tea when she
will take good care to have nobody there.”
Nettie had not lived behind the scenes of high life in Kingslough for
nothing.
“Never mind,” returned her husband, “it is the thin edge of the wedge;”
and he went out to state to some of his astonished labourers that he
wanted the drive weeded, gravelled, and rolled, and that they were to
set about putting it in order immediately.