EDGAR HARROWBY.
Thirty-two years of age; tall, handsome, well set-up, and every inch
a soldier; manly in bearing, but also with that grace of gesture and
softness of speech which goes by the name of polished manner; a
bold sportsman, ignorant of physical fear, to whom England was the
culmination of the universe, and such men as he--gentlemen, officers,
squires--the culmination of humanity; a man who loved women as
creatures, but despised them as intelligences; who respected socially
the ladies of his own class, and demanded that they should be without
stain, as befits the wives and mothers and sisters of gentlemen, but
who thought women of a meaner grade fair game for the roving fowler; a
conservative, holding to elemental differences whence arise the value
of races, the dignity of family and the righteousness of caste; an
hereditary landowner, regarding landed property as a sacred possession
meant only for the few and not to be suffered to lapse into low-born
hands; a gentleman, incapable of falsehood, treachery, meanness,
social dishonor, but not incapable of injustice, tyranny, selfishness,
even cruelty, if such came in his way as the privilege of his
rank,--this was Edgar Harrowby as the world saw and his friends knew
him, and as North Aston had henceforth to know him.
His return caused immense local excitement and great rejoicing. It
seemed to set the social barometer at "fair," and to promise a spell
of animation such as North Aston had been long wanting. And indeed
personally for himself it was time that Major Harrowby was at home and
at the head of his own affairs. Matters had been going rather badly on
the estate without him, and the need of a strong hand to keep agents
straight and tenants up to the mark had been making itself somewhat
disastrously felt during the last three or four years. Wherefore
he had sold out, broken all his ties in India handsomely, as he had
broken them in London handsomely once before, when, mad with jealousy,
he had fled like a thief in the night, burned his boats behind him,
and, as he thought, obliterated every trace by which that loved and
graceless woman could discover his real name or family holding; and
now had come home prepared to do his duty to society and himself. That
is, prepared to marry a nice girl of his own kind, keep the estate
well in hand, and set an example of respectability and orthodoxy,
family prayers and bold riding, according to the ideal of the English
country gentleman.
But, above all, he must marry. And the wife provided for him by the
eternal fitness of things was Adelaide Birkett. Who else could be
found to suit the part so perfectly? She was well-born, well-mannered;
though not coarsely robust, yet healthy in the sense of purity
of blood; and she was decidedly pretty. So far to the good of the
Harrowby stock in the future. Neither was she too young, though by
reason of her quiet country life her twenty-four years did not count
more to her in wear and tear of feeling and the doubtful moulding of
experience than if she had lived through one London season. She was a
girl of acknowledged good sense, calm, equable, holding herself in the
strictest leash of ladylike reserve, and governing all her emotions
without trouble, patent or unconfessed. Hers was a character which
would never floreate into irregular beauties to give her friends
anxiety and crowd her life with embarrassing consequences. She
despised sentiment and ridiculed enthusiasm, thought skepticism both
wicked and disreputable, but at the same time fanaticism was silly,
and not nearly so respectable as that quiet, easy-going religion which
does nothing of which society would disapprove, but does not break its
heart in trying to found the kingdom of God on earth.
All her relations with life and society would be blameless, orthodox,
ladylike and thoroughly English. As a wife she would preach submission
in public and practice domination and the moral repression belonging
to the superior being in private. As a mother she would take care
to have experienced nurses and well-bred governesses, who would look
after the children properly, when she would wash her hands of further
trouble and responsibility, save to teach them good manners at
luncheon and self-control in their evening visit to the drawing-room
for the "children's half hour" before dinner. As the mistress of an
establishment she would be strict, demanding perfect purity in the
morals of her servants, not suffering waste, nor followers, nor
kitchen amusements that she knew of, nor kitchen individuality anyhow.
Her servants would be her serfs, and she would assume to have bought
them by food and wages in soul as well as body, in mind as well as
muscle. She would give broken meat in moderation to the deserving
poor, but she would let those who are not deserving do the best they
could with want at home and inclemency abroad; and she would have
called it fostering vice had she fed the husbandless mother when
hungry or clothed the drunkard's children when naked. She would never
be talked about for extremes or eccentricities of any kind; and the
world would be forced to mention her with respect when it mentioned
her at all, having indeed no desire to do otherwise. For she was of
the kind dear to the heart of England--one of those who are called the
salt of the earth, and who are assumed to keep society safe and
pure. She was incredulous of science, contemptuous of superstition,
impatient of new ideas--appreciating art, but holding artists as
inferior creatures, like actors, acrobats and newspaper writers. She
was loyal to the queen and royal family, the nobility and Established
Church, bracketing republicans with atheists, and both with unpunished
felons; as also classing immorality, the facts of physiology and the
details of disease in a group together, as things horrible and not to
be spoken of before ladies. She was not slow to believe evil of her
neighbors, maintaining, indeed, that to be spoken of at all was proof
sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never investigate a
charge, preferring rather to accept it in its vile integrity than to
soil her hands by attempting to unweave its dirty threads; hence she
would be pitiless, repellent, but she would never make herself the
focus of gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in
creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things she was
a well-mannered, well-conducted English lady, a person of spotless
morals and exquisite propriety, in the presence of whom humanity must
not be human, truth truthful, nor Nature natural.
This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country gentleman--the
woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen out of thousands to be her
daughter-in-law, whom his sisters would like, who would do credit to
his name and position; and whom he himself would find as good for his
purpose as any within the four seas.
For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational grounds:
he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he need love the
woman as he had loved some others. He would marry her, whoever
she might be, because she would be of a good family and reasonable
character, fairly handsome, unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted
with hereditary disease nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having
nothing to do with vice or poverty in the remotest link of her
connections--a woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer
of his name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion,
enthusiasm, sentiment--Edgar thought all such emotional impedimenta
as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes disastrous in the grave
campaign of matrimony.
It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself. She believed
that any woman can marry any man if she only wills to do so; and from
the day when she was seventeen, and they had had a picnic at Dunaston,
she had made up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby. When he came home
for good, unmarried and unengaged, she knew that she should succeed;
and Edgar knew it too. He knew it so well after he had been at home
about a week that if anything could have turned him against the wife
carved out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the
almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not left him
a choice in the matter.
"And what do you think of Adelaide?" asked Mrs. Harrowby one day when
her son said that he had been to the rectory. "You have seen her twice
now: what is your impression of her?'"
"She is prettier than ever--improved, I should say, all through," was
his answer.
Mrs. Harrowby smiled. "She is a girl I like," she said. "She is so
sensible and has such nice feeling about things."
"Yes," answered Edgar, "she is thoroughly well-bred."
"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs. Harrowby
continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are fast friends,
especially she and Josephine, though there is certainly some slight
difference of age between them. But Adelaide prefers their society
to that of any one about the neighborhood. And I think that of itself
shows such good taste and nice feeling."
"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for
himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and nice feeling in
this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter
companionship of the Fairbairns, say, or any other of the local
nymphs. To him those elderly maiden sisters of his were rather bores
than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett
thought differently. If it "ever came to anything," it would be better
that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.
"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby went on to
say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and looked half puzzled
if wholly pleased.
"She is a pretty girl," he said with the imbecility of a man who ought
to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has something that he
does not wish to say.
"She is better than pretty--she is good," returned Mrs. Harrowby;
and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his
mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the
fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects
in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally
abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony
and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.
Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too, was one
of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person, habits, all were
regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as
of delay, and as little of both as of passion.
"You are such a dear, good punctual girl!" said Josephine
affectionately--Josephine, whose virtues had a few more, loose ends
and knots untied than had her friend's.
"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her calm
good-breeding. "It seems to me only another form of uncleanliness and
disorder."
"And Edgar is so punctual too!" cried Josephine by way of commentary.
Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the exact shade
demanded by conversational sympathy. "Then we shall agree in this,"
she said quietly.
"Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this," Josephine
returned, almost with enthusiasm.
Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the
beginning?--if not the open confidante, yet secretly holding the key
to her younger friend's mind and actions? and was she not, like all
the kindly disappointed, intensely sympathetic with love-matters,
whether wise or foolish, hopeful or hopeless?
"Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide, if any one
indeed could be found to disagree with her?" asked Edgar, standing in
the doorway.
Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman "caught." She
looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her quiet face, unflushed,
unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor looked slyly.
"She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that you were
punctual too," she explained cheerfully.
"We learn that in the army," said Edgar.
"But I have had to learn it without the army," she answered.
"Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I have attained
only by discipline and art," said Edgar gallantly.
Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain the compliment. On the contrary,
she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted his praises
because they were her due. She knew that the world takes us if not
quite at our own valuation, yet as being the character we assume to
be. It all depends on our choice of a mask and to what ideal self we
dress. If we are clever and dress in keeping, without showing chinks
or discrepancies, no one will find out that it is only a mask; and
those of us are most successful in gaining the good-will of our
fellows who understand this principle the most clearly and act on it
the most consistently.
The evening was a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an earnest of the
future for which, if she had not worked hard, she had controlled much.
Edgar sang solos to her accompaniment, and put in his rich baritone to
her pure if feeble soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and
praised her play, as it deserved: naturally, not thinking it necessary
to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost exclusive attention,
and looked the admiration he felt. She really was a very pretty young
woman, and she had unexceptionable manners; and having cut himself
adrift from his ties and handsomely released himself from his
obligations, he was not disposed to take much trouble in looking far
afield for a wife when here was one ready-made to his hand. Still,
he was not so rash as to commit himself too soon. Fine play is never
precipitate; and even the most lordly lover, if an English gentleman,
thinks it seemly to pretend to woo the woman whom he means to take,
and who he knows will yield.
And on her side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part, and too
wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize she had willed
should be hers. Her actions must be like her gestures, graceful,
rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and bearing the stamp of purpose
and deliberation. When Edgar should make his offer, as she knew he
would, she would ask for time to reflect and make up her mind. This
would be doing the thing properly and with due regard to her own
dignity; for no husband of hers should ever have cause to think that
she held her marriage with him as a thing so undeniably advantageous
there was no doubt of her acceptance from the first. Every woman must
make herself difficult, thought Adelaide, if she wishes to be prized,
even the woman who for seven years has fixed her eyes steadily on one
point, and has determined that she will finally capture a certain man
and land him as her lifelong possession.
Thus the evening passed, with a subtle undercurrent of concealed
resolves flowing beneath its surface admiration that gave it a
peculiar charm to the two people principally concerned--the one
feeling that she had advanced her game by an important move; the
other, that the eternal fitness of things 'was making itself more
and-more evident, and that it was manifest to all his senses
whom Providence had destined for his wife, and for what ultimate
matrimonial end he had been shaped and spared.
A book of photographs was on the table.
"Are you here?" asked Edgar, lowering his bright blue eyes on
Adelaide as she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrowby's feet, carrying
daughterly incense to that withered shrine.
"Yes, I think so," she answered.
He turned the pages carefully--passing over his sisters in wide
crinolines and spoon bonnets; his mother, photographed from an old
picture, in a low dress and long dropping bands of hair, like a
mouflon's ears, about her face; Fred and himself, both as boys in
Scotch suits, set stiffly against the table like dolls--with gradual
improvement in art and style, till he came to a page where Adelaide's
fair vignetted head of large size was placed side by side with
another, also vignetted and also large.
"Ah! there you are; and what a capital likeness!" cried Edgar, with
the joyous look and accent of one meeting an old friend, giving that
gauge of interest which we all unconsciously give when we first see
the photograph of a well-known face. He looked at the portrait long
and critically. "Only not so pretty," he added gallantly. "Those
fellows cannot catch the spirit: they give only the outside forms, and
not always these correctly. Here is a striking face," he continued,
pointing to Adelaide's companion-picture--a girl with masses of dark
hair, dark eyes, large, mournful, heavily fringed with long lashes,
and a grave, sad face, that seemed listening rather than looking. "Who
is she? She looks foreign."
Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she did not know it by heart.
"That? Oh! that is only Leam Dundas," she said with the faintest,
finest flavor of scorn in her voice.
"Leam Dundas?" repeated Edgar--"the daughter of that awful woman?"
"Yes, and nearly as odd as the mother," answered Adelaide, still in
the same cold manner and with the same accent of superior scorn.
"At least she used to be, you mean, dear, but she is more like other
people now," said kindly Josephine, more just than politic.
Adelaide looked at her calmly, indifferently. "Yes, I suppose she is
rather less savage than of old," was her reply, "but I do not see much
of her,"
"I do not remember to have ever seen her: she must have been a mere
child when I was here last," said Edgar.
"She is nineteen now, I think," said Mrs. Harrowby.
"Not more?" repeated Adelaide. "I imagined she was one-and-twenty at
the least. She looks so very much older than even this--five or six
and twenty, full; dark people age so quickly."
"She seems to be superbly handsome," Edgar said, still looking at the
portrait.
"For those who like that swarthy kind of beauty. For myself, I do not:
it always reminds me of negroes and Lascars."
Adelaide leaned forward, and made pretence to examine Leam's portrait
with critical independence of judgment. She spoke as if this was the
first time she had seen it, and her words the thought of the moment
resulting.
"There is no negroid taint here," Edgar answered gravely. "It is the
face of a sibyl, of a tragedian."
"Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous
to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is,
there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most
profoundly stupid person you can imagine."
"Not now, Addy: she has wakened up a good deal," again interposed
Josephine with her love of justice and want of tact.
"But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do, painfully; and
the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like her. She will grow her
exact counterpart"
"A bad model enough," said Edgar; "but this face is not bad. It has
more in it than poor old Pepita's. How fat she was!"
"So will Leam be when she is as old," said Adelaide quietly. "And do
you think these dark people ever look clean? I don't,"
"That is a drawback certainly," laughed Edgar, running through the
remainder of the book.
But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and Adelaide side
by side, and he spoke of the latter while he looked at the former. The
face of Leam Dundas, mournful, passionate, concentrated as it was,
had struck his imagination--struck it as none other had done since the
time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering, lost in
a fog, in St. James's Park, and had protected from possible annoyance
till he had landed her in St. John's Wood. He was glad that Leam
Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he should see her without
trouble or overt action; and as he handed Adelaide into her carriage
he noticed for the first time that her blue eyes were not quite even,
that her flaxen hair had not quite enough color, and that her face, if
pure and fair, was slightly insipid.
"Poor, dear Adelaide!" he said when he returned to the drawing-room,
"how nice she is! but how tart she was about this Leam Dundas of
yours! Looks like jealousy; and very likely is. All you women are so
horribly jealous."
"Not all of us," said Maria hastily.
"And I do not think that Adelaide is," said Josephine. "She has no
cause; for though Leam is certainly very lovely, and seems to have
improved immensely for being at school, still she and Addy do not come
into collision any way, and I do not see why she should be jealous."
"Perhaps Edgar admired her photograph too much," said Fanny, who
was the stupid one of the three, but on occasions made the shrewdest
remarks.
Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. "That would be paying me too high a
compliment," he said.
Whereat his three sisters echoed "Compliment!" in various tones of
deprecation, and Josephine added a meaning little laugh for her own
share, for which Edgar gave her a kiss, and said in a bantering kind
of voice, "Now, Joseph! mind what you are about!"