LADY BELL TREVOR.
According to the fashion of the time, though it was only two or three
days’ journey to Trevor Court, Squire Trevor and his young wife made it
a progress from one friend’s house to another, where the Squire in
person announced his marriage, presented his bride, was roasted and
toasted, and regaled with the first instalment of his wedding rejoicings
by the good-will of his neighbours.
The practice was so far lucky in Lady Bell’s case, it gave her no time
to reflect on what had happened in all its importance, so that the
reaction which had already set in after the overstrained resignation and
meekness of her last moments at St. Bevis’s, was only a silent
rebellion.
Lady Bell, even at fifteen, had too much spirit and sense to feel
inclined to exhibit to strangers her wrongs and misery, and the extent
of the sacrifice which she had just celebrated. She did not dissolve in
floods of tears—she controlled herself, and was only thought very pale
(but she was a pale, dark-eyed beauty at any time), proud, and shy,—a
grand, but not very attractive, young madam for old Squire Trevor.
Nevertheless, it was in a state of chronic rebellion that Lady Bell
reached Trevor Court. What good was the rebellion to do then? She never
asked herself. Fifteen does not often ask such questions when it but
writhes under a sense of betrayal and wretchedness.
Trevor Court was not like St. Bevis’s. It was a fine, well-preserved old
place, with noble stacks of warm red-brick chimneys, seen first from
amidst coeval dark green yews on a broad green terrace.
It had a stone-seated porch and an oaklined chimney corner, with great
delf platters hanging by strings on each side of the richly-carved wood
chimney-piece.
It had a best parlour answering to a drawing-room, where the
spindle-legged chairs were made of cane, the hangings and chair-covers
were lemon colour, and there were Indian ornaments and egg-shell
china—altogether so cold, fantastic, and fragile in its details, that
nobody would have dreamt of occupying it, except for the reception of
company.
There were blue, red, and green bedrooms, each with its enormous bed
like a coloured hearse, its square of Persian carpet in the middle of
the floor, and its ebony escritoire. Everything was in keeping and in
order, and was, next to his sovereign self, the pride of Squire Trevor’s
heart and the delight of his eyes.
“Look up, and look out, here is my place, my lady;” so Squire Trevor
introduced Trevor Court, its venerable beauties fresh with the perennial
freshness of early summer, to Lady Bell.
“Is this Trevor Court?” sighed Lady Bell, scarcely stirring herself in
her corner of the chariot.
It was with intense mortification, almost exceeding that with which he
had heard her first address him as a man who might be her father, and
afterwards repel with disgust his clumsy blandishments, that Mr. Trevor
discovered Trevor Court was lost on Lady Bell.
She saw in it only a better sort of prisonhouse. She was not grateful
for the change from the wreck at St. Bevis’s. At St. Bevis’s there had
still been something like freedom and hope. Trevor Court signified
slavery and despair.
Lady Bell was not nearly old enough, or mercenary enough, to weigh with
appreciation the substantial evidences of respectability and comfort.
Her burdened heart and soul were not free to admit a sense of beauty.
Lady Bell looked round her with lacklustre eyes. No comment of
satisfaction or word of praise dropped from her tightly-locked lips.
“Welcome, your honour! Welcome, madam, and long life and prosperity!
Many happy returns of the day! Hoorah! hoorah!” broke the stiff,
oppressive silence. The greeting burst in set form, and simultaneously,
from the pliant dependants and consequential old servants in quilted
gowns like Mrs. Kitty’s, in worsted stockings, and worsted lace setting
off their livery, in gardeners’ green aprons and countrymen’s round
hats, which were at that moment waved lustily in the air.
The worst was to come; for resentment and anguish at fifteen are very
liable to merge into petulance, alternating with heaviness. Lady Bell
received the demonstration haughtily and cavalierly. She was the
mistress of these folks, in spite of herself, and against her will.
Their making merry provoked her when she did not desire their service.
It had been right that she should put the best face upon matters while
she was in other people’s houses; but since she had come home, if home
meant anything, and as Squire Trevor’s marriage had been too
unpremeditated to admit of the assistance of strangers in the
“home-coming,” she need make no farther pretence.
She declined to drink her own health, not to say Squire Trevor’s, in the
ale which had been broached, and the claret which had been drawn. She
was forced to pledge her household in return; but she only touched the
flagon with her lips. She was compelled, too, to take the Squire’s arm,
and walk, accommodating her steps to his pursy gait; but she walked like
a naughty child, with as few smiles and curtseys as she could bestow
between the rows of retainers. She clutched her skirt and riding-gloves,
to prevent any willing hand freeing her from the encumbrances.
There was something pathetic as well as ludicrous in the forlornness of
the unmagnanimous behaviour that showed both singleness of heart and
extreme youthful folly in the friendless girl; but it incensed Squire
Trevor beyond measure.
Without the indiscretion, he might have felt inclined, as he had carried
his point and gained his end, to be in good humour with his bride and
the rest of the world.
True, he had married on a mere impulse, and in a spirit of
contradiction. His fancy for Lady Bell, who was showing herself
intractable and exasperating, hardly deserved the name even of passion.
The accidents of her situation, and of the opportune manner in which she
had crossed his path, together with her rank, had as much to do with his
fancy as any gust of passion, though the girl, in her right mind, was
attractive enough. He was but slightly acquainted with her. He had no
familiarity with girls, not much with women of more mature age. He
would, under any circumstances, have been shy and awkward, would not
have known what to do with Lady Bell after he had got her, and would
soon have found her in his way, even if she had conducted herself with
amazing self-restraint and tact.
But he might not have betrayed speedy symptoms of moroseness and
violence had he not felt deeply injured.
As it was, Lady Bell, who had been used, in her experience of mankind as
master, simply to Squire Godwin’s supercilious scorn, had cause within
her very first day at Trevor Court to dread Squire Trevor’s awfully
furious temper. She had married the worst-conditioned John Trot in
Gloucestershire, and she had set his teeth on edge in crossing his
threshold.
She saw him fretting and fidgeting,—
“Lazy tykes, not to have finished with the hay crop. Who set them to
hoist flags and busk arches? I’ll let them know I’ll marry every day in
the year, without freeing them from their tasks. Zounds! one of the
young horses broke her neck in the quarry.—I’ll break more necks before
I’ve done, the fiends take them!”
She witnessed the storm gathering and rising, while he stamped here and
clattered there, till it reached a roar, which, for shame’s sake, was
not directed against her as yet, but which suddenly took her into the
general offence.
The entire household cowered in the middle of their holiday, keeping
before the untimely blast. Lady Bell cowered, too, secretly.
From that moment’s height of startled dismay she was in fear of her life
whenever the Squire rampaged, swore, and (especially after his dinner
and bottle of port) flung about the furniture, dashed down his pipe,
kicked the very live coals from the grate over the room, and drove the
dogs, with their tails between their heels, flying from the house.
But, notwithstanding, the girl was not tamed or cured of her sauciness;
her spirit might be broken in time, but it was not broken at once,
though it had recoiled before Squire Godwin’s irony. There was that in
her which rose naturally against the physical terror of brute force,
though it might overwhelm her ultimately.
Lady Bell kept as far as she could out of sight and sound of the
Squire’s “rages;” but when they were over, leaving him in a condition of
stupid exhaustion and dogged affront, she went her own way again, as if
the rages had never been. Her way was very much the same way that she
had pursued at St. Bevis’s, of carrying on always more listlessly her
slender studies, and of working out idly her manifold minute devices.
“Hadn’t you better take a sensible piece of work into your hands in
place of reading fools’ verses and French books—no good comes from
France—or wasting your time with trumpery drawing and flowering?” Thus
Mr. Trevor had sought to lay the ungentle yoke on her in the first
lustre of the honeymoon. “I thought all proper brought-up young women,
whether they were Lady Bells or not, without a penny to bring to their
husbands”—he illustrated the position candidly—“were taught to keep
accounts, and help to make their own clothes, like my cousin at the
parsonage, even if they could not raise paste and feed poultry.”
“Let me tell you, sir,” retorted Lady Bell with considerable courage,
“that though I am Lady Bell who never pretended to bring a penny to a
husband—as it is not my fault that I have one—I can keep accounts, and
help to make my clothes when it is needful. But I choose to have other
occupations when those that you have been so good as to point out to me,
fail me. I suppose you do not wish me to make accounts, that I may add
them up, or to cut out and stitch together more clothes than I can wear?
As for raising paste, I confess I have seen that left to the cook; and
for poultry—we had only sparrows in town.”
“A fig for town—a sink of corruption,” protested Mr. Trevor, reddening
like a turkey-cock at the insulting idea that town could be held
superior to Trevor Court. “I’m of the mind of Lord Mulcaster, who had it
put into the articles of his marriage contract, that my lady was neither
to go to town, nor to wear diamonds.”
“I did not know that the question was of going to town or wearing
diamonds,” cried Lady Bell with a grimace. “I thought you were speaking
of raising paste and feeding poultry.”
“Can’t you bide in your own house, Bell,” the Squire would bully his
wife another time, because he himself seldom indulged in exercise beyond
stumping to his offices, riding round a field or two on his cob, and
playing a game of bowls or skittles with his servants. He was disturbed
by the young girl’s girlish restlessness. He hated to have her doing
what he did not care to do—without him too.
“No, I can’t, Mr. Trevor. I must have breath and motion, if I can have
nothing else,” Lady Bell said plainly.
Lady Bell remained a stranger in her husband’s house, in the plenty and
snugness of Trevor Court, as in the barrenness and exposure of St.
Bevis’s. She was in greater isolation than ever; for there was no Mr.
Greenwood, and no Sneyd—friendly scamps—at Trevor Court.
In place of attaching any of her husband’s servants, Lady Bell had
contrived to repel them from the beginning; for was not their idol,
their own born and bred Squire, the reflection but slightly refined of
their doltish and dour natures? And did not the young madam start by
committing sacrilege against the idol, who, if you spoke him fair, and
took a few fierce words—it might be blows—was not so bad an idol as
times went.
Squire Trevor had his good points, which his own people knew best. He
was ready to make up, by a sort of crabbed justice, when the passion was
off him, for his surliness of manners. He could take his bottle like the
rest of the world, and even sit and soak himself into blind madness when
he was brooding on any real or fancied wrong. But he did not squander
his means on vain show or riotous living. He did not gamble away his
paternal acres, and consign his dependants to wreck and ruin with
himself, like many of his generation.
Squire Trevor was considered somewhat of a model of squirearchical
excellence down at Trevor Court, and Lady Bell by contrast a very
naughty young lady indeed, a discontented, good-for-nothing Lon’oner,
who took it upon her to be sullen or peevish, and did not at once set
herself to please her husband by implicit obedience, and by all wifely
arts as well as wifely virtues.
Trevor Court was not out of count in its neighbourhood, but, except in
doing his duty to society by keeping up rounds of visits on special
occasions, Mr. Trevor did not care for going into or receiving company.
He liked to know himself monarch of all he surveyed, and to be deferred
to in like manner—heights of regard which he could hardly attain off his
own land.
Above all, Mr. Trevor objected to presenting an open door to the
country, or to availing himself of other open doors, so soon as he had
discovered that Lady Bell, after long abstinence from the society of
young people like herself, could, when restored to it, abate her
exclusiveness, and even relax into faint dimpling smiles. “By George!”
he swore, “if she can’t smile on me and my honest household, she shan’t
on a parcel of idle young rakes and impudent hussies in their
questionable surroundings.”
It was not unlikely that Squire Trevor had some reason in his decision.
The standard of morals was low everywhere a century ago. There were many
instances then of country houses in remote districts, as there are
to-day of agricultural cottages in similar circumstances, which were
more woefully corrupt than the worst town houses.
But Lady Bell was incapable of comprehending such justification. She
regarded the deprivation enforced on her as an additional injury and
insult. And she was determined that if Mr. Trevor kept her a prisoner at
Trevor Court, he should look on her face as that of a prisoner directed
to her jailer.