Volume 2 — CHAPTER XVII. HUMBLE LOVE.

When blustering March was over, and the dead season of the year had been for rich, as well as poor, got through, the widow of the lamented Cecil Vavasour commenced—for the first time since his death—making preparations for a three-months’ sojourn in London, or, as the newspapers expressed it, “Lady Millicent Vavasour, her family and suite, were about, during the ensuing season, to occupy the mansion in Bolton-square, to her ladyship belonging.”

In the course of the six years that Lady Millicent had passed in a seclusion which she had not attempted to render otherwise than irksome to her daughters, the above-named mansion had been let—as each revolving season came round—to the highest bidder. It was not a very dignified proceeding, and her children (her sons especially) had chafed both inwardly and outwardly against what they considered their mother’s “dirty economy,” in thus making money out of the family bricks and mortar. The tide of public opinion in London, as well as in the country, set strongly against the wealthy, parsimonious widow, whose accumulated riches benefited so few of the persons whom common sense, as well as the laws of nature and of precedent, pointed out as amongst those destined to reap advantage from the seed scattered by Lady Millicent’s hand; while, as regarded her ladyship’s sons, it was a melancholy fact, that for lack of a home, humanly speaking, those young gentlemen had in their nonage gone a good deal, as the saying is, “to the bad.”

During the two years following on Cecil Vavasour’s death, and while the achievement commemorative of that melancholy event still hung suspended between the second-floor front windows of the a “noble town mansion,” it was only right and proper that in the widow’s house there should be no “receptions”—no sounds of merriment, no glancings of merry twinkling feet, within the silent, solid walls of Lady Millicent’s deserted house. But when the years of mourning were at an end, and the “time for setting on of meat” had come—there arose by degrees a spirit of discontent against the widowed millionaire. On account of her children—this was the way that they, the aggrieved ones, put it—it was wrong, unmotherly on Lady Millicent’s part to hide the light of her countenance from the world. There were certain duties incumbent—as nobody would venture to deny—upon the rich, and the chief and foremost of those duties was the exercise of a genial hospitality. The good of trade too, both as regarded the expenditure of Lady Millicent’s family, in London and in the country, was not a matter to be lightly regarded. The West-end shop-keepers had a right, honest tradesmen that they were, to expect that a sixth part at least of Lady Millicent’s income—an income of say 60,000l. per annum—should find its way to their pockets. To say nothing of example—so spoke the public voice—why, what a sin and a shame it was for a lady possessed of such countless thousands, and that didn’t know how either to use or abuse them, to be set in high places, only to bring disgrace upon her order, and to encourage others, who might be of similar mind, in the degrading vice of avarice.

There is one reason which, in my humble opinion, is far too seldom pleaded in excuse for the glaring faults (glaring because of the high places of the delinquents) of the great and powerful ones of the earth; and that reason is, that the said great and powerful ones find so few who are willing to speak to them of their faults, and reason with them on their shortcomings. If it be hard—and hard we are told it is—for the rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, surely one reason for that difficulty may be found in the comparative isolation of those who are clothed in purple and fine linen, and who fare sumptuously every day. The “divinity that doth hedge a king” is not only not without its thorns, but is very instrumental in shutting majesty off from the wholesome sympathies of life; and not alone from sympathy, but from counsel, from reproof, and in some measure from the inestimable benefits of example. That same “hedge,” too, is a dangerous deadener of sound. It is seldom that those possessed of rank and riches hear either the truths or falsehoods that are reported and spread abroad concerning themselves. As Kate once pertly remarked to her brother Horace, “Who could venture to lecture Lady Millicent upon her faults?” Poor little ill-used, thoughtless, quick-witted Kate! there were the makings of a good and useful woman in her busy brain and ardent temperament; but, under her mother’s injudicious training the little head became filled with foolish fancies, the impulses of the warm young heart seemed likely to lead its owner into something very nearly approaching to scrapes; and, in short, from the rich raw material of poor Katie’s mind there sprung the plentiful growth of weeds which half civilisation invariably draws up from the soil.

Entirely absorbed by her own immediate plans—plans which had occupied her busy mind from the day when the contents of Lord Gillingham’s will startled her into the consciousness that she must do something for herself, or a decent and obscure dowagerhood would be her only portion—absorbed, I repeat, with her own cares, to the extent of troubling herself but little with the well-being even of her children, Lady Millicent, till the day when her plans were ripe for commencement, and the hour had struck when law-proceedings, with the object of setting aside her father’s will, could be entered upon, had never deemed it incumbent on her to allow her daughters more than a passing glimpse at London and its pleasures. For this seeming neglect she had her answer ready, when Lady Guernsey, or old Sir Richard Pemberton, two of the few amongst her acquaintances who ever ventured to put in a word for the young people at the Castle, suggested that a little change was good for everyone, and that both Rhoda and Kate would be probably advantaged by a moderate amount of amusement, as well as by better masters than were procurable either at Leigh or Gawthorpe.

“Young ladies in these days,” Lady Millicent would say, “learn quite soon enough, without their parents putting themselves out of the way to teach them the lesson, that the country is a bore, and that without perpetual excitement life hangs terribly heavy on their hands. For my part—people may think me selfish if they like, but I honestly confess that the coming out of my girls is a ceremony which, for their sakes as well as my own, I shall be glad to put off to the latest possible period.”

“But in the mean time,” said their outspoken champion, “how are you preparing them, my dear Lady Millicent, for the part they are to play? I am afraid that poor dear Rhoda—(I may talk without scruple of her, because, as you know, I admire her so much, and have such a real affection for her)—I am sadly afraid that Rhoda, with all her beauty, will be what my boys call nowhere. She has not an idea, poor child, no, not the very slightest, de se faire valoir. Girls with less than half her good looks would make their way twice as well from the mere fact that Rhoda is simply good and shy and unaffected, and knows no more than my toy-terrier does how to make the most of herself.”

That there was much truth at the bottom of Lady Guernsey’s remarks, no one knew better than the mother of the gentle girl who, both by nature and education, was so ill-qualified to fight, through the arduous campaign of a London season, the fierce battle of life. If Lady Millicent could be said to feel interest in, and affection for, any human being save herself, that human being was her unselfish, yielding, and not over-brilliant elder daughter. It would have been hard indeed for anyone living habitually with Rhoda Vavasour not to appreciate the gentleness of her disposition, and not to admire the unassuming rectitude of purpose which was one of her most striking characteristics; and yet, partly perhaps (at least so said that far-seeing Horace) because she seemed so good, no one, not even—with the exception of Lady Millicent—those of her own household, took so kindly to steady, quiet Rhoda, as they did to giddy-pated Kate—Kate, whom her brothers pronounced to be unfortunately plain, but who was one of the “jolliest” girls that you could ever hope to meet with, and who was withal as wilful, and as little inclined to do right on principle, as the less popular Rhoda was known to be the reverse.

“I wonder, and I always shall, what has made mamma make up her mighty mind to spend the season in London,” Kate remarked one morning early in March to her elder sister, as the two were taking the daily constitutional, of which they were both in different degrees and fashions wearied, through the shrubberies of Gillingham; “everyone—Horace among the number—made so sure that this year would pass like all the rest, and that we should stick for ever at horrid old Gillingham.”

“Don’t call it horrid, Kate; I am sure that I shall never like any place one half so well; and when we have to leave it—”

“I for one should be ready to jump out of my very skin for joy,” cried Kate, dancing forward with a kind of sidelong motion, not remarkable for gracefulness, but very suggestive of the state of mind to be expected from this young lady on the occasion of the final bidding adieu to the beautiful home of her childhood. “To think,” Kate said, sobering down after her momentary ebullition of feeling, “to think that never—never, I mean, as a matter of rule—should we be walking here, in this same walk, between those stupid, odious trees again! O, Rhoda dear, how can you take everything so quietly? I do believe that if you were to be told that our going to London was over, and that we were to stay here for the rest of our lives, you would be quite contented. So long as the school went on, and you could listen to Mr. Wallingford’s stupid sermons, you would never break your heart about anything.”

Rhoda made no reply to this thoughtless speech. Constitutionally shy (the only one of her family who had inherited her father’s life-long infirmity), this elder daughter of a wealthy house was little given to the outpouring of her inner feelings. Confidantes she had none, and so entirely undemonstrative was she of what was passing within her heart, that even her own sister had never surmised what was the one chief cause of Rhoda Vavasour’s chronic state of contentment at dull and uneventful Gillingham.

Kate—the restless and the ambitious “Kitty,” whom her brothers plagued and petted, and who was looked on as a kind of reckless “free lance” by her unsympathising mamma—had from her earliest girlhood entertained very exalted ideas of her elder sister’s beauty. There was not a tinge of womanly jealousy, not a fractional atom of the alloy of envy in Kate Vavasour’s nature. She knew herself to be almost what the world calls plain; but she had good eyes, a fine élancé figure, and the something about her which—who can say why or wherefore?—often attracts more than beauty, be that beauty ever so exalted and refined. Of that class of female attractiveness was the το καλον—the delicate charm which one man at least who knew her discovered in the fair face of Rhoda Vavasour.

George Wallingford, the incumbent of the small and not very remunerative living of Switcham, was a scholar and a gentleman; a man possessed of no exalted intellect, no world-known name either for erudition or for race. Not even amongst the untitled wealthy—the millionocracy of this busy universe of ours—was the obscure rector of Switcham acknowledged as a unit, since it was from being one of the hardest of hardworking curates in the dirtiest and wickedest of manufacturing cities, that George Wallingford had been translated to what in his eyes was comparatively heaven—namely, to the spiritual superintendence of an orderly rural population.

As a matter of course, Lady Millicent “took notice” of the clergyman of the parish. Three times a year, or thereabouts, Mr. Wallingford was invited to dine at the Castle, in addition to which act of condescension, the young rector—whom Lady Millicent pronounced to be “very well behaved,” “really quite a respectable person”—was graciously permitted to pay his devoirs from time to time at the great house, on which occasions “milady” would lay down the law in parish matters after a fashion which—although he bore the trial with outward patience—could scarcely fail to rouse what was left in George Wallingford of the old, and unregenerate man, into a somewhat unholy state of irritation.

The fact that Lady Millicent Vavasour, “civil” though she invariably was, considered him in the light of an inferior many times removed, was patent as the light of Gospel truth to the Rector of Switcham. That he did not love the lady patroness of the living he held the better for the discovery is simply adducing a proof, if proof were needed, that he was human. L’amour ne se commande pas, says the proverb; and the best of men—this excellent clerical gentleman included—can do no more than refrain from hating the individual who wounds their self-love by treating them with hauteur and condescension.

As will readily be believed, the female inhabitants of Switcham and its neighbourhood very soon after Mr. Wallingford’s installation commenced their sex’s normal practice, namely, that of finding a wife for a bachelor incumbent. Though the rectory of Switcham was very far removed from being one of the plums of church patronage, yet there were contingent advantages attached to it, to say nothing of the living being held, as in the present instance, by a tolerably good-looking young man a year or two under thirty, which caused more than one demoiselle à marier to gaze with eyes of interest on the mild-looking clergyman in his single-breasted waistcoat and neatly-trimmed whiskers, the while the said damsel pictured to herself the lonely man eating his solitary steak; or (climax of melancholy conjuration!) brewing—in the pretty drawing-room of the parsonage—his bachelor tea!

Some years elapsed (for, as the poet hath it, “hope springs responsive in the female breast”) before the spinsterhood of Mr. Wallingford’s flock came to the unpleasing conclusion that the young rector was the rara avis among birds of his feather, a non-marrying clergyman. Even after the good man’s heart had spoken, for speak it did, when its owner had been some five years at Switcham, and when Rhoda Vavasour, emancipated from governess control, was of an age to be introduced to the guests who, few and far between, were invited to partake of Lady Millicent’s grudgingly dispensed hospitality—even, as I was about to say, after George Wallingford’s seemingly obdurate heart had melted under the influence of Miss Vavasour’s shy smile and pale delicate prettiness,—the little world in which he lived knew nothing of his heart’s weakness. As how indeed should it? To no one—no not even to the friend that had ever stuck closer to him than a brother, to the school and college fellow whom hitherto he had trusted with every secret of his life, not even to the congenial spirit dwelling like himself in a pure bachelor’s body, not to the silent, caustic, woman-despising James Truscott, fellow of his college, and the most ungainly in appearance of created men, did George Wallingford confess the wondrous truth that he was in love with that bright particular star, Miss Rhoda Vavasour.

He might just as well—and it needed no stern Mentor to remind him of the fact—have set his affections upon an empress. Never even by a glance (at least not to his own knowledge) had he hinted to the object of his senseless passion, that with a dreary and a hopeless, and yet with an all-engrossing love he watched and dreamed of, sighed and prayed for her. It was intensely foolish and unmanly, the more foolish and unmanly inasmuch as the great lady of Gillingham never allowed the comparatively lowly born rector to forget his place. If kindly-natured, charitable George Wallingford did in his heart believe the well-sounding axiom that “’tis only noble to be good,” the flattering unction was not laid so soothingly to his soul as to enable him to act, as regarded pretty Rhoda Vavasour, on the cheering conviction. It may be in the abstract perfectly true that

but judging of things (the only really reliable test) on their marketable value, we shall, I greatly fear, be obliged to own that, individually considered, the coronets, and the blue blood have in this wicked world the best of it.

But carefully under lock and key as the reverend George kept his secret, there was one who discovered its existence, and who, having so discovered it, was ever, with true feminine inquisitiveness, peering behind the veil of the good man’s heart for further and more satisfactory information. Rhoda Vavasour’s first sensation, when the fact (in some subtle and inexplainable manner) of Mr. Wallingford’s hopeless passion became apparent to her, was one of actual fear. In an instant there rose up before her a vision of Lady Millicent’s stern and astonished face, a face in which none of her children had ever traced a sign of tenderness, or the faintest line of sympathy or pity. It was to that very hardness, to the repellant influence felt by timid shrinking Rhoda whenever her thoughts turned to or her eyes rested on her mother’s unloving countenance, that might mainly be attributed the encouragement—for she did in her silent, gentle way encourage the young clergyman to hope—which Rhoda gave to the Rector of Switcham. But there was yet another, and perhaps an equally powerful, reason for the “underhand deceit,” the “grovelling tastes,” as Lady Millicent would have, and indeed did in later days describe them, that were displayed at that period of her life by her daughter. Nature had endowed poor Rhoda with a susceptible heart, and a strong propensity to cling. In default of any other object on which to fix her affections, and of some more suitable prop round which to twine, it was only in the common order of things that to the sole stay within her reach, the tendrils (heartstrings is perhaps the most appropriate word) of Rhoda’s inner woman should have wound themselves round the engaging young parson, to whose exhortations, delivered in a voice singularly pleasing, she meekly listened, and who enjoyed in Lady Millicent’s pet schoolroom, and sometimes by the bedside of the sick, golden opportunities of looking, at least, unutterable things. There could scarcely be a stronger proof of retenue, both on the part of the rector and that of the young lady, than the actuality that Kate, who was usually so ready at discovering love-affairs, never once suspected the truth as regarded her sister. Not even the grand phenomenon, the mighty puzzle of Rhoda’s contentment at Gillingham, had sufficed to warn the rather precocious maiden that quiet, pretty Rhoda—Rhoda, who looked, as the old saying goes, “as if butter would not melt in her mouth”—was in love with, and meekly ambitious to marry the obscure young man at whom Lady Millicent, while she deigned to patronise him, decidedly turned up her aristocratic nose.

The reason for Rhoda’s silence when Kate alluded to the rector—a silence which, had Miss Kitty been in an investigating mood, that quick-witted damsel would speedily have speculated on the cause—must be now fully apparent to the reader. For a moment the shy girl thought and feared that her secret was discovered, and that, in shrinking mortification, she would be compelled to endure the wondering, kindly-meant questionings of her younger sister. The next words, however, spoken by the loquacious Kitty dissipated her alarm; and feeling intensely grateful for the reprieve, Rhoda listened with sympathising ears to the chattering girl’s remarks and surmises.

“I am afraid that what Horace says is right,” continued Kate, “and that it is this odious law-business which we have heard hinted at so long that takes mamma to London. One good thing is, that she cannot mean to keep us quite as much out of fun and amusement as she does here. Haven’t you noticed how she has gradually been giving up the righteous dodge? For ages—as we all know—balls were desperately wicked, and operas a positive abomination. It was only in the country that, according to mamma, there was any chance of being saved; whereas I heard Horace say only the other day, that people could inflame themselves quite as much with idols under green trees as in the excitements of a London season. I heard him say, too—”

“O Katie,” Rhoda broke out, “don’t, pray don’t, repeat the things—I mean that kind of thing—that Horace says! I cannot bear the remarks he makes about mamma; and I think that if you were not to encourage him, he would leave them off. And besides, I don’t know how it is, but I always feel guilty when I see mamma after we have been abusing her.”

She spoke very seriously, for little as Lady Millicent had either deserved the filial love or encouraged the confidence of her children, it nevertheless jarred against the girl’s sense of what was right and fitting when she heard the others talk, as they were wont to do, à cœur ouvert, of her mother’s small hypocrisies and underground plans.

Kate laughed merrily. “We abusing her! I like that! Fancy you saying what you think about milady! No, no; the time for that isn’t come yet. But wait till you’re tried, that’s all. It takes longer to provoke you than it does to irritate either of us. And then, if mamma is fond of anyone in the world, she is of you; I suppose because you are so very meek, always ready to let her think she is in the right, let her do what she will. But about this muslin, Rhoda. Hammond says there certainly is not enough for both; so I suppose, as it will not do for Miss Vavasour to look skimping before the eyes of London, you had better take the whole. Ah me!” stretching herself rather wearily as she stood before the cheval glass, and then letting her arms fall with a sigh too deep-drawn to have emanated from so young a breast; “ah me! how I wish I had a mother—a mother, I mean, like Lady Guernsey or Lady Pemberton, or even—don’t be shocked, you aristocratic thing!—even like Mrs. Clay. I want a motherly mother—one who would love and pet, and bore people about me—one that I could tell things to, and that would listen, and not look as if she thought one a fool. And besides—though that sounds horrid, I daresay—I should be glad of a mother who would care whether I looked nice, and who would give you, now that you are ‘coming out,’ enough of an allowance for you to dress as well as other girls. Sixty pounds a-year! Why, Lina de Lacy had that when she was fifteen, and mamma is twice as rich as Lady Guernsey. I wonder how you will manage! Run in debt, I suppose, like Arthur. Poor Atty! But it will be worse for you than for him, if you are forced by money difficulties to marry someone that you don’t love, and—”

“I shall never do that,” Rhoda said, but in a voice so low that Kate could scarcely catch the words.

“So you think now; but, as I said before, wait till you are tried. And there is another thing, darling—you will have to marry for my sake. Only think, Rho dear, how happy we should be together! You with a nice home of your own, with no one to object to your ordering the carriage when you pleased, with no cross looks if you were a minute too late for prayers, with—”

Rhoda interrupted her by a laugh. “You might exchange bad for worse,” she said sapiently. “All husbands are not like Lord Guernsey, and I suspect that very few homes are so happy as Sophy’s was. I daresay, if we could look into the insides of many people’s houses, we should see plenty of girls a good deal more to be pitied than we are. And, Katie dear, whether that be so or not, one thing is certain, namely, that it is wrong—wicked even, I think—to be discontented, and to abuse mamma. Whatever she does or says, we have no right to sit in judgment on, or to find fault with. Don’t be put out with me for preaching, dear Katie. I know I am not half so clever as you are; but—”

“But you are fifty times as good!” cried Kate; “and I believe in my heart that because you are so good and so patient, mamma does love you a little bit; while as for the rest of us—but what is the use of thinking about it?”—dashing a tear impetuously from her eyes as she asked herself the painful question. “Thinking over it won’t give one affection or kindness or sympathy; so I for one shall try to do without what would—at least so I fancy—make one contented anywhere and everywhere.”

The simple philosophy of the girl of seventeen, though in some respects rational enough, was, however, based upon very erroneous principles. The example of her more highly-valued sister might have demonstrated to her that “patience does its perfect work,” and that the most selfish of mortals, and those least to be affected by the claims of kindred and the universal prejudices of consanguinity, can yet be influenced, both as regards their conduct and their sensibilities, by the deference which real goodness never fails to obtain for those who, knowing what is right, do, as the poet adds, “always practise what they know.”