THE DINERS.
Mrs. Ramshorn, Helen's aunt, was past the middle age of woman; had
been handsome and pleasing, had long ceased to be either; had but
sparingly recognised the fact, yet had recognised it, and felt
aggrieved. Hence in part it was that her mouth had gathered that
peevish and wronged expression which tends to produce a moral nausea
in the beholder. If she had but known how much uglier in the eyes of
her fellow-mortals her own discontent made her, than the severest
operation of the laws of mortal decay could have done, she might
have tried to think less of her wrongs and more of her privileges.
As it was, her own face wronged her own heart, which was still
womanly, and capable of much pity--seldom exercised. Her husband
had been dean of Halystone, a man of insufficient weight of
character to have the right influence in the formation of his
wife's. He had left her tolerably comfortable as to circumstances,
but childless. She loved Helen, whose even imperturbability had by
mere weight, as it might seem, gained such a power over her that she
was really mistress in the house without either of them knowing it.
Naturally desirous of keeping Helen's fortune in the family, and
having, as I say, no son of her own, she had yet not far to look to
find a cousin capable, as she might well imagine, of rendering
himself acceptable to the heiress. He was the son of her younger
sister, married, like herself, to a dignitary of the Church, a canon
of a northern cathedral. This youth, therefore, Greorge Bascombe by
name, whose visible calling at present was to eat his way to the
bar, she often invited to Glaston; and on this Friday afternoon he
was on his way from London to spend the Saturday and Sunday with the
two ladies. The cousins liked each other, had not had more of each
other's society than was favourable to their aunt's designs, who was
far too prudent to have made as yet any reference to them, and stood
altogether in as suitable a relative position for falling in love
with each other as Mrs. Ramshorn could well have desired. Her chief,
almost her only uneasiness, arose from the important and but too
evident fact, that Helen Lingard was not a girl of the sort to fall
readily in love. That, however, was of no consequence, provided it
did not come in the way of marrying her cousin, who, her aunt felt
confident, was better fitted to rouse her dormant affections than
any other youth she had ever seen, or was ever likely to see. Upon
this occasion she had asked Thomas Wingfold to meet him, partly with
the design that he should act as a foil to her nephew, partly in
order to do her duty by the church, to which she felt herself belong
not as a lay member, but in some undefined professional capacity, in
virtue of her departed dean. Wingfold had but lately come to the
parish, and, as he was merely curate, she had not been in haste to
invite him. On the other hand, he was the only clergyman officiating
in the abbey church, which was grand and old, with a miserable
living and a non-resident rector. He, to do him justice, paid nearly
the amount of the tithes in salary to his curate, and spent the rest
on the church material, of which, for certain reasons, he retained
the incumbency, the presentation to which belonged to his own
family.
The curate presented himself at the dinner-hour in Mrs. Ramshorn's
drawing-room, looking like any other gentleman, satisfied with his
share in the administration of things, and affecting nothing of the
professional either in dress, manner, or tone. Helen saw him for the
first time in private life, and, as she had expected, saw nothing
remarkable--a man who looked about thirty, was a little over the
middle height, and well enough constructed as men go, had a good
forehead, a questionable nose, clear grey eyes, long, mobile,
sensitive mouth, large chin, pale complexion, and straight black
hair, and might have been a lawyer just as well as a clergyman. A
keener, that is, a more interested eye than hers, might have
discovered traces of suffering in the forms of the wrinkles which,
as he talked, would now and then flit like ripples over his
forehead; but Helen's eyes seldom did more than slip over the faces
presented to her; and had it been otherwise, who could be expected
to pay much regard to Thomas Wingfold when George Bascombe was
present? There, indeed, stood a man by the corner of the
mantelpiece!--tall and handsome as an Apollo, and strong as the
young Hercules, dressed in the top of the plainest fashion,
self-satisfied, but not offensively so, good-natured, ready to
smile, as clean in conscience, apparently, and as large in sympathy,
as his shirt-front. Everybody who knew him, counted George Bascombe
a genuine good fellow, and George himself knew little to the
contrary, while Helen knew nothing.
One who had only chanced to get a glimpse of her in her own room, as
in imagination my reader has done, would hardly have recognised her
again in the drawing-room. For in her own room she was but as she
appeared to herself in her mirror--dull, inanimate; but in the
drawing-room her reflection from living eyes and presences served to
stir up what waking life was in her. When she spoke, her face dawned
with a clear, although not warm light; and although it must be owned
that when it was at rest, the same over-stillness, amounting almost
to dulness, the same seeming immobility, ruled as before, yet, even
when she was not speaking, the rest was often broken by a smile--a
genuine one, for although there was much that was stiff, there was
nothing artificial about Helen. Neither was there much of the
artificial about her cousin; for his good-nature, and his smile, and
whatever else appeared upon him, were all genuine enough--the only
thing in this respect not quite satisfactory to the morally
fastidious man being his tone in speaking. Whether he had caught it
at the university, or amongst his father's clerical friends, or in
the professional society he now frequented, I cannot tell, but it
had been manufactured somewhere--after a large, scrolly kind of
pattern, sounding well-bred and dignified. I wonder how many speak
with the voices that really belong to them.
Plainly, to judge from the one Bascombe used, he was accustomed to
lay down the law, but in gentlemanly fashion, and not as if he cared
a bit about the thing in question himself. By the side of his easy
carriage, his broad chest, and towering Greek-shaped head, Thomas
Wingfold dwindled almost to vanishing--in a word, looked nobody. And
besides his inferiority in size and self-presentment, he had a
slight hesitation of manner, which seemed to anticipate, if not to
court, the subordinate position which most men, and most women too,
were ready to assign him. He said, "Don't you think?" far oftener
than "I think" and was always more ready to fix his attention upon
the strong points of an opponent's argument than to re-assert his
own in slightly altered phrase like most men, or even in fresh forms
like a few; hence--self-assertion, either modestly worn like a shirt
of fine chain-armour, or gaunt and obtrusive like plates of steel,
being the strength of the ordinary man--what could the curate appear
but defenceless, therefore weak, and therefore contemptible? The
truth is, he had less self-conceit than a mortal's usual share, and
was not yet possessed of any opinions interesting enough to himself
to seem worth defending with any approach to vivacity.
Bascombe and he bowed in response to their introduction with proper
indifference, after a moment's solemn pause exchanged a sentence or
two which resembled an exercise in the proper use of a foreign
language, and then gave what attention Englishmen are capable of
before dinner to the two ladies--the elder of whom, I may just
mention, was dressed in black velvet with heavy Venetian lace, and
the younger in black silk, with old Honiton. Neither of them did
much towards enlivening the conversation. Mrs. Ramshorn, whose
dinner had as yet gained in interest with her years, sat peevishly
longing for its arrival, but cast every now and then a look of mild
satisfaction upon her nephew, which, however, while it made her eyes
sweeter, did not much alter the expression of her mouth. Helen
improved, as she fancied, the arrangement of a few green-house
flowers in an ugly vase on the table.
At length the butler appeared, the curate took Mrs. Ramshorn, and
the cousins followed--making, in the judgment of the butler as he
stood in the hall, and the housekeeper as she peeped from the
baise-covered door that led to the still-room, as handsome a couple
as mortal eyes need wish to see. They looked nearly of an age, the
lady the more stately, the gentleman the more graceful, or, perhaps
rather, ELEGANT, of the two.