THE FAIR SOPHIA.
Had I waited a day or two, I should have had no occasion to ask Teresa
Lovett if her family formed the English population of St. Pucelle. The
news of my arrival spread like wild-fire, and before a week was over my
head, I had been introduced to every individual, English or Belgian, in
the place. The very first whom I had the pleasure of meeting was Miss
Sophia Markham, who ran in—Miss Markham never walked—on the morning
following my arrival. As soon as I entered the room I recognised her,
from the description given me the night before. She was so wonderfully
infantile in dress, manner, and conversation. She was a woman of
forty—of forty-five—perhaps even fifty years of age, but she was very
well preserved and looked much younger. And this preservation had been
accomplished, not by means of cosmetics, but by the lack of them. Miss
Markham was wise in her generation. She knew that powder and paint never
yet hid wrinkles effectually, and that to dye the hair a different
colour from that which nature has bestowed upon it, is to violate one of
the first principles of art.
But this fact must not lead one to suppose that she was not intensely
vain of her personal appearance, and took any amount of trouble to
maintain it. For years past she had never gone to bed without plastering
her face with cold cream, in order to keep her skin soft and unwrinkled.
Each grey hair, as it made its unwelcome appearance, had been sedulously
rooted out, and she spent hours before the looking-glass, brushing and
oiling the remainder. She had bestowed equal attention on her teeth and
her complexion and her figure, and the result was, that in middle life,
though she could not look a girl (as she fondly persisted in thinking
that she did), Miss Sophia Markham had certainly contrived to drop at
least ten years of her existence. She was a short woman, with a large
head, and very small hands and feet, of which she was inordinately vain.
She had fine eyes and good teeth; a large nose and a small brain. But,
after the fashion of most mortals, she was so shortsighted as to be
quite unable to distinguish in what she excelled and in what she did
not, and persisted in imagining that her fleshy nose was a pert
_retroussé_, and her mind of a ponderous and weighty order, equal in
value to that of any of her peers.
As a child, she had given promise of a prettiness that had never been
fulfilled. This was unfortunate, as her parents’ undue admiration had
taught her to believe her pretensions would be realised, and after their
death she had refused to be convinced that their judgment had proved
false. She had been left alone in the world with a small income barely
sufficient to procure the necessaries of life, and from an early period
it had been borne in upon her mind that she must be dependent for its
luxuries upon her friends. Miss Sophia knew which side her bread was
buttered well enough. She found that, in order to be welcome in other
people’s houses and allowed to stay there as long as she chose, she must
give them a _quid pro quo_ for their hospitality over and above the
charms of her mind and person, and the questionable merit of her
talents. Some she had to fawn upon and flatter till they were full to
surfeiting with praises of themselves: for others she was compelled to
exercise her skill in needlework, and slave at making caps and dresses
wherewith to adorn their persons and recoup them for the food she was
consuming: to others, again, she acted as a foil or a blind, or in any
other useful capacity that a woman past her _première jeunesse_ can
fill, although she would have been quite faithless and unbelieving had
she been told so.
At St. Pucelle she was staying, as Tessie had told me, with a couple of
the name of Carolus, who were spending a few months on the Continent. It
was easy to guess why _they_ had come together. Mrs. Carolus, although
older than Miss Markham, was newly-married, and possessed scarcely any
knowledge of French. Mr. Carolus also, who was again many years senior
to his wife, was fussy, taciturn, and given, about every other day, to
making sudden resolutions to return to England and his merchant’s
office, which Mrs. Carolus was anxious to prevent. She found, therefore,
in Miss Markham at once a companion, an interpreter, and an advocate to
plead against and turn the rash intentions of her husband.
At the same time, the two ladies appeared to be of very congenial
temperaments, if abusing each other behind their backs and everybody
else in common might be taken in evidence of the fact.
On the first occasion of my meeting Miss Sophia Markham, she was attired
in a white muslin dress striped with a tiny line of blue, that might
have been put on a child of ten: a pelerine edged with lace, the pattern
of which she had borrowed from Angela; and a broad-brimmed hat, trimmed
with the same material and ornamented with a bunch of red cherries and
leaves, that bobbed about in the most tempting manner each time she
moved. In her arms she carried a little beast of a terrier, that snapped
at every one who approached within a few yards of it, and which she
spoke of and addressed as if it had been a human being.
In attempting to sketch a biography of Miss Markham as it came to my
knowledge, little by little, I have made one grand omission, which is to
state that, throughout her varied career, she had never lost, and
evidently never would lose, the hope of being married. When she was
young, nothing but a duke or a marquis could have satisfied her sense of
what befitted her merits; in riper years, a baronet or a general would
not have been rejected without consideration: now, she would have sworn
to love, honour and obey anything, so long as it was in the shape of a
man. From the youth of eighteen or twenty to the octogenarian, she could
not be made to believe but that the whole race of man had been formed
but for one purpose: to admire, follow, and fall in love with her. Yet
she was by no means a specimen, at least outwardly, of what is termed ‘a
spiteful old maid.’ All Miss Markham’s speeches were placid, and her
words oil and honey. Even when she intended to sting most sharply, it
was done under cover of the greatest amiability and the very best
intentions, and she never lost an opportunity of wounding the self-love
of others by encouraging and patronising them for that which they
believed they did better than anything else. But I have spent too much
time on a description of Miss Markham’s failings. She must come forward
now and speak for herself.
When I first entered the room where she was sitting, I found her engaged
in an animated conversation with the ‘little maid,’ on the component
parts of a certain ball-dress which she had worn the month before at
Paris.
‘Yes! it was so pretty, dear, the prettiest dress in the room, everybody
said so—all pink and white silk—the very palest pink, you know—and
little rosebuds peeping out every here and there from the trimming, and
one gentleman said I looked just like a little rosebud myself in the
midst of my pink and white drapery! He! he! he!’
At this juncture my entrance was perceived, and an introduction gone
through.
‘_Marsh!_’ exclaimed Miss Markham, as if she had not heard my name
before; ‘are you any relation to the Marshes of Northampton?’
‘No! I have never heard of them.’
‘They were great friends of mine—indeed, Walter Marsh wanted to marry
me—he! he! he!—only I wouldn’t have him. He always used to call me “the
pocket Venus;” and when I refused him, his family thought he would have
gone out of his mind.’
‘You are so hard-hearted, Sophia! you have refused so many people,’
cried Tessie, laughing; but Miss Markham did not perceive that the laugh
was against herself.
‘Well, one cannot marry every one, you see, and perhaps my early
experience has made me rather particular. I was engaged to Lord
Vauxhall, you know, before I was sixteen. Such a handsome man, and with
an income of ten thousand a year. Ah! I was very foolish in those days.’
‘Why didn’t you marry him?’ asked Ange.
‘Well, dear, I broke off the engagement myself. I had been taught to
look higher by my dear father, who did not think any man in the world
good enough for me. Mrs. Carolus cannot understand such a thing. She
evidently married the first man who asked her—and such a man, too! If
you could only see the way he mumbles his food, it is enough to make one
leave the dinnertable. And they go on in the most absurd manner for
people of their age. She calls him “Willy,” and if he does anything she
disapproves of, she says he’s “a naughty boy.” Did you ever hear
anything like it? I have found out, from some things Mrs. Carolus has
told me, that she must be past sixty herself. Why, she was at a
finishing school when King William died. And as for Mr. Carolus, he must
be ten or fifteen years older. He has had a wife before, and twelve
children. I think he ought to have been ashamed of himself for marrying
again. But as for her, poor thing! I expect it was her only chance, so
you can scarcely wonder at her taking it. And I _have_ heard—but mind
you don’t mention my name—that she was not _too_ particular in her
younger days, and so I dare say it was rather unexpected her receiving
an offer of marriage at all. My friends the Willoughbys met some people
in Norfolk this spring, who lived in the same place as Mrs. Carolus’s
family, and I hear they had some very queer stories to tell about her
sisters and herself.’
‘Isn’t it a great pity,’ said Tessie, quietly, ‘that people should
trouble themselves to take away the character of a woman who is a
perfect stranger to them?’
‘Oh! but she was not a perfect stranger, my dear! They knew her well—by
repute, that is to say. And, indeed, from all one hears, she must have
been quite notorious some twenty or thirty years ago.’
‘Is it wise of you to stay with her, then?’ asked Ange, innocently.
I found afterwards that the little maid was very much in the habit of
putting awkward questions in the most aggravatingly innocent manner. The
present one caused Miss Markham to redden up like a peony.
‘As for that matter, Ange,’ she retorted, ‘I might go far enough, I
expect, before I found any one to stay with against whose advantage
there is not to be heard some story or other. I dare say Mrs. Carolus is
no worse than many of your own friends; Lucy Edgecombe for instance, who
ran away with and married a man against her parents’ wishes, and found
out afterwards that he had a wife already in America. That was a nice
little scandal, wasn’t it?’
‘Ah! poor Lucy!’ said Ange, her bright eyes filling with tears; ‘it has
been a most terrible grief and misfortune for her—you know that, Miss
Markham. I am sure I can never think of her without crying. She used to
be such a bright merry girl when we knew her in Rille, two years ago.
And it broke her poor old father’s heart.’
‘Oh yes! I dare say. These scandals always do break the heart of
somebody or other, and generally the one who is least to blame in the
matter. But that doesn’t alter the fact. Why do you let Ange wear her
hair so much over her eyes, Tessie? It is not _bong tong_ at all. The
Paris ladies all wear their hair taken off the forehead, as I do. But
then you must have a high, intellectual forehead for that style to suit
you.’
‘Papa likes her to wear it so,’ said Tessie.
‘And I am not a Paris lady, and I have not a high intellectual
forehead,’ interposed Ange. ‘So I’m much better as I am.’
‘Perhaps so, my dear. Indeed your forehead is not high. Arthur Thrale
was remarking only the other day that you had more of the _paysanne_
than the _ancienne noblesse_ air about you.’
‘Yet I should like to see papa’s pedigree placed by that of Arthur
Thrale,’ cried Tessie, indignantly. ‘We have some of the best blood in
England in our veins, though we are so poor. Papa has often said so, and
Mrs. Carolus told us the other day that Mr. Thrale’s father is a large
linendraper in one of the suburbs of London.’
‘Of course Mrs. Carolus will run the poor boy down, because he is so
absurdly devoted to me. She has tried all she can to get him for
herself, without success.’
‘Oh! Sophia! what can you be thinking of?’ exclaimed Tessie. ‘Why,
Arthur Thrale is young enough to be——’
‘What?’ demanded Miss Markham, sharply.
‘Mrs. Carolus’s grandson,’ replied Tessie, saving herself by a grand
_coup d’état_.
‘So he may be,’ said Miss Markham, drawing a long breath of relief, ‘but
that makes no difference to her. Her jealousy of me is proverbial. She
has even said—he! he! he!—that I have tried to turn “Willy’s” affections
from her.’
‘There goes papa,’ remarked Ange, more with the intention of diverting
attention from the folly of their visitor than anything else, as she
pointed out Mr. Lovett walking past the window on his way to the town.
‘Well, good-bye then, dears, I can’t stay any longer,’ exclaimed Miss
Markham with sudden energy, as she jumped up and kissed the two girls.
‘Adieu! Miss Marsh; I hope we shall soon meet again. Come! my sweet
little Toodles,’ to the terrier, who was leaping and yapping round her;
‘did it want to go for a walk? Then its mammy shall take it for one, the
dear little angel’; and off she tripped, with the dog at her heels, in
the same direction as that taken by Mr. Lovett.
‘I wonder,’ said Ange thoughtfully, as she watched her from the open
window, ‘why Sophia Markham always pretends to like papa so much. She is
generally so bitter against old men and women. But just look at her now,
Hilda. She is actually taking his arm. And oh! do see the cherries
bobbing up and down in his face, I should catch one in my mouth if I
were he. But do you think she is in earnest, Hilda, or is it humbug?’
‘How can I tell, Ange? I have only seen the woman for an hour. But even
from that short experience, I should feel very much disposed to call it
“humbug.” Miss Markham has not the face of a true woman, neither would I
like to have her for my friend.’
‘I observed that you were very silent during her visit.’
‘I was listening to what she said, and judging her out of her own mouth;
and I do not think your father would have cared for the style of
conversation she kept up with you this morning. It was worse than idle.’
‘I think papa rather likes Miss Markham than otherwise,’ remarked Ange.
‘He is always pleased when she spends the evening here.’
‘Because she is such an abominable flatterer,’ said Tessie. ‘She praises
up his appearance, and his preaching, and his daughters to him, till he
does not know whether he is on his head or his heels. Any one would like
it.’
‘Oh! Tessie! you do not suppose that papa could be influenced by a woman
like that, just because she flattered him,’ cried Ange, with holy
horror.
‘Well, no, perhaps not,’ replied Tessie, dubiously, whilst I thought
myself that Mr. Lovett must be the saint his little daughter made him
out, and not a man, if he were proof against flattery, even from Miss
Markham.
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