Volume 3 — CHAPTER II. A LOVER FOUND AND LOST.

“I really am at a loss to make up my mind which is the most extraordinary—the man behaving in this way without encouragement, or your being so lost to everything that is—ahem!—due to your position in life as to allow him to think, to hope, that his proposals—most impertinent ones, I must say—could meet with anything but anger and contempt.”

Lady Millicent was seated on her presidential sofa, in the room appropriated in Bolton-square to her especial use. It was a dull, dark, business-looking apartment. The “third drawing-room” it was called, and in it milady was wont to receive such visitors as clearly were not there for purposes of mere pleasure, or with the intention of ephemerally enjoying themselves—men of law, serious men, with faces fraught with the care that the craving after six-and-eightpences is wont to impress on the human countenance divine, were seen entering, clearly with a purpose, the heavy door (white-painted and gilt, but shabby and tarnished now) that led to milady’s sanctum. It was a room into which her young daughters rarely intruded; and when, on the morning in question (it was that of the very day which Honor passed so feverishly with Arthur Vavasour by her side), Rhoda, poor, timid, nervous Rhoda, was summoned to an audience with her awe-inspiring mamma, she made her entrée with a beating heart, and, though she knew not wherefore, with a strong presentment of evil. The open letter in Lady Millicent’s hand was scarcely evidence enough to awaken in her mind anything at all approaching to the truth. Rhoda was as far as the poles from imagining that the sedate rector of Switcham, the quiet, unpretending young man, whose “duties” ever seemed so much above his pleasures, could have so far allowed his mundane feelings, his passions, that were of the “earth, earthy,” to overpower his well-regulated mind, as to induce him to offer to the great lady of Gillingham—the patroness of his living, and one with whom he knew himself to be not a favourite—his humble proposals for her daughter’s hand.

Standing droopingly in the august presence, and without a word to say either in her own behalf or that of her co-delinquent, the poor girl listened in silence to the stern and very bitter words of reprobation which fell from her mother’s lips. Perhaps until she so listened—until she contrasted the hard unsympathising nature of the woman to whom she owed her birth with that of the good, thoroughly-to-be-relied-on character of the man whose letter, with dimmed eyes and a very pitying heart, she had just contrived to read and comprehend—she had never rightly known how necessary the love of him, who for so many months had been her only object and point of interest at uncongenial Gillingham, had become to her.

“I am well aware—no justly-reproachful words of yours can make me more so” (thus one sentence of poor George’s letter ran)—“that I have no right, in a worldly point of view, to hope that you would look otherwise than contemptuously on my humble offer. I have little besides my deep affection, and my prayers that God would enable me to contribute to your beloved daughter’s happiness, to lay before one who deserves every good gift that could be bestowed upon her. A small, very small private fortune—a few hundreds a year only—in addition to the income derived from my living, is all that I possess. But, if I mistake not, Miss Vavasour’s tastes are simple ones, and she might, God aiding, be happier in the quiet home which she would deign to share with me than in the turmoil of the great world, and amongst the gay and rich, of whom it is said that it is hard for them to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

“Methodistical stuff!” murmured Lady Millicent, turning over the leaves of a law-book, and delivering herself of the severe comment on her would-be son-in-law’s epistle at the moment when she rightly guessed that poor Rhoda had arrived at its conclusion. “Very bad taste, I think, my dear, of your admirer, condemning us en masse in this summary way. But now, do tell me,” laying down the pen with which she had been making notes, “what did you do at Gillingham to bring upon me such a letter as that? I should have thought—but one lives and learns—that if there existed a girl in the world who would have abstained from this kind of thing, it was you; and now I find that—”

“O, mamma!” began poor Rhoda, whose delicacy (and she was sensitively delicate) was severely wounded by this exordium,—“O, mamma, I did nothing! Indeed, indeed, I gave no—I mean—I did not lead—”

And then she stopped, poor girl, from utter inability to make herself understood by the parent whose cold unwomanly eyes were fixed with such unassisting scrutiny on her blushing face. There are mothers and mothers, even as (I was about to say) there are friends and friends: but in using such a conjunction I was wrong, for of that rare hypostasis there can be but one variety; degrees of comparison exist not in that particular noun substantive of the many which signify “to be, to do, and to suffer.” Either a friend’s love passeth the love of woman, and he sticketh closer than a brother, or he is that daily-met-with and more generally-useful thing, id est, a good-natured acquaintance, whose services, should they not chance to interfere with his own requirements, may possibly be at our disposal. But to return to Rhoda Vavasour’s natural friend—to the one being who had it in her power, and whose sacred duty it was, as far as mortal skill can do the heavenly work, to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain to the weaker and the tottering vessel, who was less able than herself to bear the burden and the heat of the day. A few words softly, wisely spoken, a kind caress, the sweet conviction, in some unknown mysterious way conveyed, that she, the mother, was the best, the most heaven-deputed guardian for her child, would have convinced that child, whose experience of life was nil, and who had seen no man save her brothers whom she could compare with the right-minded young rector of Switcham, that an engagement with that reverend gentleman might not be exactly a desirable consummation, or one, save by the good man himself, prudently as well as devoutly to be wished. Rhoda was a girl thoroughly amenable to reason, as well as one whom the silken cords of affection could have led with the lightest, tenderest touch. Delicate of frame, physically as well as mentally, she could ill bear the wear and tear of either excitement or worry; and perhaps George Wallingford had said no more than the truth when he suggested that her life, in the seclusion of a country parsonage, would probably pass more happily away than were the nervous girl to be thrown into the whirlpool of stir and fashion, there to be tossed to and fro amongst the vessels of iron, against which her frailer, humbler self would be hopelessly, maybe, bruised and broken.

To convince Lady Millicent of this truth would, however, have required eloquence far greater than that possessed by the lowly-born clergyman, who certainly had not chosen the very likeliest way in the world to gain his ends. As milady had truly said, there were but two ways of accounting for the reverend gentleman’s preposterous conduct, and neither of those two ways was calculated to throw a roseate hue over the matter. That Rhoda—her favourite, because her most submissive, daughter—had degraded herself to the degree of giving encouragement to “the man” for whose audacity no words were sufficiently severe, caused as much surprise and indignation to the magnificent widow as if she had systematically and kindly encouraged her child to pour out into the maternal breast her cares, her sorrows, and her joys. That a heart, young and love-requiring, will, in default of home aliment, seek elsewhere for its natural, and in some cases even necessary, food, this mother, engrossed by her own plans and projects for personal aggrandisement and power, had never yet suspected. Lady Millicent—a stay-at-home, “domestic” woman, a “widow indeed,” and one of those constitutionally prudent matrons against whom the tongue of scandal never had for a single instant wagged—was precisely one of those individuals with whom self-deception is the very easiest thing in life. Her hopes and wishes, her thoughts and fancies, never—that she could truly have said—soared above or beyond the boundaries of her own property; and the interests of her children, she had taught herself to believe, were the groundwork and the motive power of all the hard, unwomanly business that she had set herself to do.

“You are not aware, perhaps,” she said coldly to the poor girl who stood unconsciously doubling down and plaiting with her trembling fingers the fringe of the table-cover that hung near her,—“you are not aware, I daresay, that, unless I succeed—for the benefit of my younger children—in a law-suit which is in progress, your fortune, as well as Katherine’s, will be very trifling indeed. Had your poor father lived, there would, of course, have been an opportunity of remedying this evil, this injustice,” she added firmly, and with a stress upon the word which poor Rhoda was far too much engrossed by her own troubles to notice. “I tell you this, not that you may suppose that, under any circumstances, you could have been permitted to disgrace your family by marrying this extraordinarily presumptuous person, but because I wish you to understand that a good marriage may be positively necessary, both for you and for Katherine. By the way, now that we are on this disagreeable subject, will you allow me to ask whether she—whether your sister, who seems to me to be self-willed and forward enough for anything—knew of this—this disgraceful entanglement: for entanglement, Rhoda,” she went on severely, “there must have been. Poor as my opinion naturally is of the intellect of a person who could write such a letter as that” (pointing to it contemptuously), “quoting Scripture too in such a personal and impertinent manner, still I cannot believe that the man could have been such an egregious fool, could have been so preposterously silly, as to have written to me, if you—just look at me, will you, instead of at the carpet—had not said or done something to authorise his presumption.”

The cold eyes fixed upon the now tearful face before her seemed to command as well as to expect an answer. None, however, came; so, still more authoritatively, Lady Millicent—could she find no better way of improving her talents (id est, her children) and of showing her appreciation of the legacy committed to her charge, than by thus torturing the feelings of Cecil Vavasour’s young daughter?—Lady Millicent pressed the question to which she had hitherto received none but the least comprehensible of replies.

“Answer me. Really I have no more time to waste. Had you any idea that this Mr. Wallingford intended making the application which strikes me as so extraordinary?”

With some difficulty, Rhoda managed to stammer forth a negative. “Indeed no,” she said; “and, mamma, Kate knew no more about it than I did. I never told her—I mean, I—”

She stopped suddenly, her face the colour of the setting sun when, “cradled in vermilion,” it throws its red reflection over slope and mountain, land and river. On her cheek and brow and slender neck the tell-tale witness rushed; and Lady Millicent—well aware that her guileless daughter knew and felt that she had committed herself—said, even more coldly than before:

“You are a poor dissembler, Rhoda. You may go to your room now. Of course you allowed this man, this hypocritical good clergyman, to lead you into deception. You let him fancy—for it is only fancy on your part—that—”

“O mamma,—dear mamma,” the girl cried in an agony of shame and grief, “if you would only listen to me,—only believe that I never did, never could have done all you say! I wish I could tell you how it was; and yet it seems—indeed it does—as if I had nothing—nothing really to tell. We used to meet—Mr. Wallingford and I—sometimes at the school, and at the poor people’s cottages. He is so good, mamma,” gaining a little courage when she found herself listened to without rebuke. “If you could but know how much the sick and the old think of him, and all he does for them, you would not wonder at—”

“At his doing one of the most unprincipled acts of which a man can be capable,” sneered Lady Millicent. “He was perfectly well aware—he says so in his letter—that I should be intensely angry at his presumption; and yet—really, Rhoda, I have no patience with your folly and wrongheadedness—you stand up for this priggish, formal, underhand—”

“But he has not been underhand, mamma. As Mr. Wallingford is not here to tell you so himself, I must say the truth; and that is, that never till the day before we left Gillingham did he say one word that you might not have heard, and then he only”—and the colour deepened on her cheek—“said that he should miss me—should think of me till I came back, and that he hoped I would not quite forget Gillingham and—and ‘good things’ while I was away.”

Lady Millicent laughed scornfully.

“For Gillingham read Mr. Wallingford, and for good things the delights, I suppose, of Switcham Parsonage,—boiled leg of mutton and what is called, I believe, a parlour-maid to wait upon you. My dear Rhoda, be thankful that such a fate as becoming the wife of a poor country parson is not in store for you. And now, my dear, you may go, as I said before, to your own room. There is no occasion to make this sort of thing public. I shall of course answer Mr. Wallingford’s letter, and I think I may venture to say that we are not likely to be troubled further on the subject. There, there, that will do; I am very much engaged this morning,”—arresting the words which she could see were hovering on her daughter’s lips,—“and I can afford to waste no more time on such nonsense as this.”

The head and eyes resolutely bent upon the folio before her, the decided tone of a voice whose stern, determined accents Rhoda knew and understood full well, convinced the timid girl that appeal there was none, and that nothing remained for her but to obey. With a heavy heart she ascended the stairs to the chamber that she called her own, and which, opening into a smaller one appropriated to Kate, enabled that lighter-spirited young lady to overhear through the keyhole of the door the hardly suppressed sobs which broke from the breast of the unhappy Rhoda.

“My darling, what is the matter?” cried the younger girl, rushing in impetuously,—for Kate’s strong points were certainly neither prudence nor self-control,—“what is the matter, you poor dear?” And tumbling on her knees by the side of her weeping sister, Kate began sobbing too by sheer force of sympathy.

A very few words sufficed to put the latter au fait of the secret—secret, alas, no longer—which Rhoda had so long and so sedulously kept. Kate listened with eager ears and widely-distended eyes to the details, stammered forth incoherently, of this first love episode in the family. As a love affair, it was certainly not without its interest; but with that interest, and in spite of her sisterly compassion, Katie certainly did feel a little surprise at the singularity of Rhoda’s choice. She made no allowance for the utter absence of competitors for her sister’s favour; all that was patent to this damsel of fast proclivities—who thought Sunday-schools a bore, and who hoped some day to be wooed by a lover of a widely different type—was the fact that Mr. Wallingford had straight hair, was anything but “jolly,” had the misfortune to possess scanty whiskers, did not smoke, and, to sum up all his defects in one comprehensive word, was a “parson.”

“I can’t the least understand how Rhoda can care for him,” she said an hour afterwards to her eldest brother, to whom she had just narrated the provoking circumstance that her sister, who was in love with that stupid Mr. Wallingford, had cried so long and so bitterly that she wasn’t fit to be seen,—“a man who is always talking ‘good,’ and who, of course, thinks it’s wicked to be jolly. Can you make it out, Arthur? I suppose it was all done by staring at each other, for I never saw them speaking, or seeming as if anything was going on.”

“Of course you didn’t,” her brother said, as he settled his cravat in the pier-glass over the mantelshelf (he was going to ride—his usual morning avocation—with Honor Beacham, and naturally wished to look his best on the occasion),—“of course you didn’t. Girls when they are in love (and the best girls too) will deceive even other women,—a very different affair, I can tell you, from taking in a man; and if you think, my dear Katie—”

“O don’t bother about that now,” Kate said impatiently. “I asked you whether you can believe that Rhoda really likes Mr. Wallingford. I can’t fancy his being a lover: horrid creature, I call him! Now, Arthur, do attend one moment. I want to know whether I ought to be glad or sorry that mamma has put an end to the business, and—”

“Glad, to be sure,” said Arthur, taking up his gloves, and troubling himself less than was altogether brotherly about poor Rhoda’s first and, as the preoccupied young man considered, thoroughly uninteresting love-affair,—“glad! Why it’s the most disgusting piece of folly I ever heard of. Such bad taste too! But it’s all my mother’s fault. If a gushing young woman like Rhoda had seen some good-looking young fellows every now and then, she would never have got spooney on such a slow prig of a parson as George Wallingford. An excellent young man, I daresay, in his way; but excellent young men haven’t much of a pull in these days, except when girls haven’t anyone else to talk to. Trust me, it won’t be long, if I know anything about such matters, before Miss Rhoda finds another lover ready to knock this spooney fellow out of her head.” And Arthur Vavasour, satisfied with this summary settlement of a question which probably appeared to him in the light of a very commonplace affair indeed, hurried away to his appointment in Stanwick-street—hurried to the presence of the still pure-hearted woman, for the love of whose bright eyes the silly young man was ready to lose his all of peace on earth, the goodwill of friends and kindred, and that much-prized but unexplainable thing for which no other nation save our own can boast even the simple name—the name, that is, of Respectability.