Part 3

‘He must be mad!’ exclaimed Mr Abbot, rising and pacing the room. ‘Mad, utterly mad! Does he think that we are going to let him—an Abbot—marry the first nameless young woman who strikes his fancy? I will talk to him, and soon bring him to his senses. The estates are unentailed, thank goodness! so I have some hold over him.’

Mrs Abbot’s lip just curled with scorn, as she heard her husband’s direct commonplace plan for restoring her son’s wandering senses. She knew that such parental thunderbolts were apt to do more harm than good.

‘I would not threaten just yet,’ she said. ‘Frank is very self-willed, and may give us trouble. For my part, I intend to drive into Clifton this morning and see the girl.’

‘What folly! To give the affair your apparent sanction?’

‘No. To show her how absurd it is to fancy we shall ever allow Frank to take a wife out of his proper sphere; and to hint that if he marries against our will, her husband will be a beggar. The fact of her withholding her consent to marry him until we approve of her, shows me she is quite able to look after her own interests.’

Mr Abbot, who knew his wife’s skill in social diplomacy, offered no valid objections; so the horses were ordered, and Mrs Abbot drove to Clifton.

The mistress of Chewton Hall was a woman of about fifty-five; tall and stately, noticeably but not attractively handsome. Rising in intellect far above the level of the family into which she had married, she had started by endeavouring to mould her husband’s mind to the capacities of her own. In the early days of their married life, she had urged him unceasingly to strive for a higher position in the world than that of a mere country gentleman. She wished him to enter the political arena; to contest a borough; in fact, to change his way of living entirely. But she found the task a hopeless one. A docile husband in most things, nothing could move William Abbot from the easy groove in which his forefathers had always placidly slidden. The husband and wife were of very different natures. Perhaps the only common ground between them was their family pride and the sense of their importance. Yet while the gentleman was quite contented with the latter as it now stood, and always had stood, the lady was ambitious, and wished to augment it. But her efforts were of no avail; so at last, with a feeling touching dangerously near to contempt, she gave up attempting to sway her husband in this direction, and centred all her hopes in her only son, on whom she flattered herself she had bestowed some of her superior intellect. He should play an important part in the world. At the first opportunity, he should enter parliament, become a distinguished member of society, and, so far as possible, satisfy her ambition. Of course he must marry, but his marriage should be one to strengthen his hands both by wealth and connections. Now that he was on the threshold of man’s estate, she had turned her serious attention to this subject, and had for some time been considering what heiresses she knew who were worthy of picking up the handkerchief which she meant to let fall on his behalf. She had postponed her decision until his return from the contemplated tour. Then she would broach the subject of an advantageous matrimonial alliance to him. By broaching the subject, Mrs Abbot meant laying her commands upon her son to wed the lady she had chosen for him.

As she drove along the twelve miles of road to Clifton, and reflected on all these things, is it any wonder that her frame of mind was an unpleasant one; that her eyes grew hard, and she felt little disposed to be merciful to the owner of that pretty face which threatened to come between her and the cherished schemes of years?

The carriage stopped at the address given her by her son—a quiet little house in a quiet little street, where the arrival of so grand an equipage and so fine a pair of horses was an event of sufficient rarity to make many windows open, and maid-servants, even mistresses, crane out and wonder what it meant. Mrs Abbot, having ascertained that Miss Keene was at home, and having made known her wish to see her, was shown into a room plainly but not untastefully furnished. A piano, an unfinished drawing, some dainty embroidery, gave evidence of more refinement than Mrs Abbot expected, or, to tell the truth, hoped to find in her enemy’s surroundings. A bunch of flowers, artistically arranged, was in a glass vase on the table; and the visitor felt more angry and bitter than before, as she recognised many a choice orchid, and knew by this token that the Chewton hothouses had been robbed for Miss Keene’s sake. Mrs Abbot tapped her foot impatiently as she awaited the moment when her youthful enemy should appear and be satisfactorily crushed.

The mistress of Chewton-Abbot had somehow conceived the idea that the girl who had won her son’s heart was of a dollish style of beauty. She may have jumped at this conclusion from the memories of her own young days, when she found the heart of man was more susceptible to attractions of this type than to those of her own severer charms. Pretty enough, after a fashion, she expected to find the girl, but quite crushable and pliant between her clever and experienced hands. She had no reason for this impression. She had coldly declined to look at the portrait which her son, that morning, had wished to show her. Having formed her own ideal of her would-be successor at Chewton Hall, she regulated her actions accordingly. Her plan was to begin by striking terror into the foe. She wished no deception; the amenities of social warfare might be dispensed with on this occasion. Knowing the advantage usually gained by a sudden and unexpected attack, she had not revealed her name. She simply desired the servant to announce a lady to see Miss Keene.

Hearing a light step approaching the door, Mrs Abbot drew herself up to her full height and assumed the most majestic attitude she could. It was as one may imagine a fine three-decker of the old days turning her broadside, with sixty guns run out and ready for action, upon some puny foe, to show her that at a word she might be blown out of the water. Or it was what is called nowadays a demonstration in force.

The door opened, and Millicent Keene entered. Mrs Abbot bowed slightly; then, without speaking a word, in a deliberate manner looked the newcomer up and down. She did not for a moment attempt to conceal the object of her visit. Her offensive scrutiny was an open declaration of war, and the girl was welcome to construe it as such.

But what did the great lady see as she cast that hostile, but, in spite of herself, half-curious glance on the girl who came forward to greet her unexpected visitor? She saw a beautiful girl of about nineteen; tall, and, making allowances for age, stately as herself. She saw a figure as near perfection as a young girl’s may be. She saw a sweet calm face, with regular features and pale pure complexion, yet with enough colour to speak of perfect health. She saw a pair of dark-brown truthful eyes—eyes made darker by the long lashes—a mass of brown hair dressed exactly as it should be. She saw, in fact, the exact opposite to the picture she had drawn: and as Millicent Keene, with graceful carriage and a firm but light step, advanced towards her, Mrs Abbot’s heart sank. She had entirely miscalculated the strength of the enemy, and she felt that it would be no easy matter to tear a woman such as this from a young man’s heart.

The girl bore Mrs Abbot’s offensive glance bravely. She returned her bow, and without embarrassment, begged her to be seated. Then she waited for her visitor to explain the object of her call.

‘You do not know who I am, I suppose?’ said Mrs Abbot after a pause.

‘I have the pleasure of knowing Mrs Abbot by sight,’ replied Millicent in a perfectly calm voice.

‘Then you know why I have called upon you?’

The girl made no reply.

Mrs Abbot continued, with unmistakable scorn in her voice: ‘I have called to see the young lady whom my son tells me he is resolved, against his parents’ wish, to make his wife.’

‘I am sorry, Mrs Abbot, you should have thought it needful to call and tell me this.’

‘How could you expect otherwise? Frank Abbot bears one of the oldest names, and is heir to one of the best estates in the county. When he marries, he must marry a wife in his own position. What has Miss Keene to offer in exchange for what he can bestow?’

The girl’s pale face flushed; but her brave brown eyes met those of her interrogator without flinching. ‘If I thought you would understand me, Mrs Abbot, I should say that I have a woman’s true love to give him, and that is enough. He sought me, and won that love. He asked for it, and I gave it. I can say no more.’

‘In these days,’ said Mrs Abbot contemptuously, ‘persons in our station require more than love—_that_, a young man like Frank can always have for the asking.—Of what family are you, Miss Keene?’

‘Of none. My father was a tradesman. He was unfortunate in his business, and has been many years abroad trying to redeem his fortunes. With the exception of an education which, I fear, has cost my poor father many privations, I have nothing to boast of. I live with an aunt, who has a small income of her own.—Now you know my history.’

Mrs Abbot had soon seen that crushing tactics failed to meet the exigencies of the case. She put on an appearance of frankness. ‘You are candid with me, Miss Keene, and it appears to me you have plenty of common-sense. I put it to you; do you think that Mr Abbot or myself can lend our sanction to this ill-advised affair?’

The girl’s lip curled in a manner which was particularly galling to Mrs Abbot. A tradesman’s daughter, whose proper place was behind a counter, had no right to be able to assume such an expression! ‘That was for Frank, not for me, to consider, Mrs Abbot.’

‘But surely you will not marry him against our wishes?’

The girl was silent for a minute. An answer to such a question required consideration. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘We are both too young. But if, in after-years, Frank Abbot wishes me to be his wife, I will share his lot, let it be high or low.’ She spoke proudly and decisively, as one who felt that her love was well worth having, and would make up for much that a man might be called on to resign in order to enjoy it.

It was this independence, the value the tradesman’s daughter set upon herself, that annoyed Mrs Abbot, and led her into the mistake of firing her last and, as she hoped, fatal shot. ‘You are not perhaps aware,’ she said, ‘that the estate is unentailed?’

Millicent, who did not at once catch the drift of her words, looked inquiringly.

‘I mean,’ explained Mrs Abbot, ‘that my husband may leave it to whom he likes—that if you marry my son, you will marry a beggar.’

The girl rose. With all her practice, Mrs Abbot herself could not have spoken or looked more scornfully. ‘How little you know me, madam, to insult me like that! Have you so poor an opinion of your son as to fancy I cannot love him for himself? Did you marry Mr Abbot for his wealth?’—Mrs Abbot winced mentally at the question.—‘Do you think I wish to marry Francis Abbot only for the position I shall gain? You are wrong—utterly wrong!’

‘Then,’ said Mrs Abbot with the bitterness of defeat, ‘I suppose you will persist in this foolish engagement, and the only chance I have is an appeal to my son?’

‘I have promised to be his wife. He alone shall release me from that promise. But it may be long before he can claim it, and so your anxiety may rest for some time, Mrs Abbot. I have this morning received a letter from my father. He wishes me to join him in Australia. Next month, I shall sail, and it will probably be three or four years before I return. Then, if Frank wishes me to be his wife—if he says to me: “I will risk loss of lands and love of parents for your sake,” I will bid him take me, and carve out a way in the world for himself.’

A weight was lifted from Mrs Abbot’s mind. She caught the situation at once. Three or four years’ separation! What might not happen! Although she strove to speak calmly as a great lady should, she could not keep a certain eagerness out of her voice. ‘But will you not correspond during that time?’

This was another important question. Again Millicent paused, and considered her answer. ‘I will neither write nor be written to. If, eventually, I marry your son—if his love can stand the test of absence and silence—at least you shall not say I did not give him every opportunity of terminating our engagement.’

Mrs Abbot rose and assumed a pleasant manner—so pleasant that, considering the respective positions of herself and Miss Keene, it should have been irresistible. ‘I am compelled to say that such a decision is all I could expect. You must forgive me if, with my views for my son’s career, I have said anything hasty or unjust. I will now wish you good-morning; and I am sure, had we met under other circumstances, we might have been great friends.’

Whatever of dignity and majesty Mrs Abbot dropped as she put on this appearance of friendliness was taken up by the girl. She took no notice of her visitor’s outstretched hand. She rang the bell for the servant, and bowed coldly and haughtily as Mrs Abbot swept from the room.

But bravely as she had borne herself under the eyes of her inquisitor, when the rumble of the carriage wheels died away from the quiet street, Millicent Keene threw herself on the sofa and burst into a flood of tears. ‘O my love!’ she sobbed out. ‘It is hard; but it is right. It will never be, I know! It is too long—too long to wait and hope. Can you be true, when everything is brought to bear against me? Will you forget? Will the love of to-day seem but a boy’s idle dream? Shall _I_ ever forget?’

EPISODES OF LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS.

A great deal might be said on the subject of manuscripts. From the carefully illuminated specimens of old, preserved in our public museums, down to the hastily scribbled printer’s ‘copy’ of to-day, each bears a history, and could contribute to unfold some portion of the life of the author whose hand had wrought it. Indeed, were it possible for each written sheet to tell its own story—we here refer to manuscripts of more modern date—what a picture of intellectual endurance, disappointments, poverty, and ofttimes despair, would be brought to light; what tales of huntings amongst publishers, rebuffs encountered, and hardships undergone, would be added to literary biography.

Thackeray has himself told us how his _Vanity Fair_ was hawked about from publisher to publisher, and its failure everywhere predicted. For a long period, Charlotte Brontë’s _Jane Eyre_ shared the same fate. Again, Mr Kinglake’s carefully composed _Eothen_, the labour of several years, was destined to go the weary round of publishers in vain; and it was only when its author induced one of that cautious fraternity to accept the classic little work as a present, that he at length enjoyed the gratification of seeing it in print. The first chapter of _The Diary of a Late Physician_ was offered successively to the conductors of the three leading London magazines, and rejected as ‘unsuitable to their pages,’ and ‘not likely to interest the public,’ until Mr Warren, then a young man of three-and-twenty, and a law student, bethought himself of _Blackwood_. ‘I remember taking my packet,’ he says, ‘to Mr Cadell’s in the Strand, with a sad suspicion that I should never see or hear anything more of it; but shortly after, I received a letter from Mr Blackwood, informing me that he had inserted the chapter, and begging me to make arrangements for immediately proceeding regularly with the series. He expressed his cordial approval of that portion, and predicted that I was likely to produce a series of papers well suited to his magazine, and calculated to interest the public.’

Turning now for a moment to the disciples of dramatic authorship, we discover that their experience is similar to that of many authors. Poor Tom Robertson—that indefatigable actor and dramatist—sank into his grave almost before he saw the establishment of his fame; and John Baldwin Buckstone, during his struggling career, was in the habit of pawning his manuscripts with Mr Lacy, the theatrical publisher, in order to procure bread. Upon one occasion, when met by a sympathising actor in the street, he appeared with scarcely a shoe to his feet, and almost broken-hearted, declaring that all his earthly anticipations were centred upon the acceptance of a comedy, the rejection of which would certainly prove fatal to his existence. In the end, happily for him, the comedy was accepted.

The following anecdote is connected with the history of the Odéon, one of the first theatres in Paris. One day a young author came to ascertain the fate of his piece, which, by the way, had appeared such a formidable package upon its receipt, that the secretary was not possessed of sufficient moral courage to untie the tape that bound it. ‘It is not written in the style to suit the theatre,’ he replied, handing back the manuscript. ‘It is not bad, but it is deficient in interest.’ At this juncture, the young man smiled, and untying the roll, he displayed some quires of blank paper! Thus convicted, the secretary shook hands with the aspirant, invited him to dinner, and shortly afterwards assisted him to a successful _début_ at the Odéon. Another author once waited upon the popular manager of a London theatre inquiring the result of the perusal of his manuscript; whereupon the other, having forgotten all about it, carefully opened a large drawer, exhibiting a heterogeneous mass of documents, and exclaimed: ‘There! help yourself. I don’t know exactly which is yours; but you may take any one of them you like!’

In this instance the manager was even more considerate towards the feelings of an author than that other dramatic demigod who, it is said, was regularly in receipt of so many new pieces, good, bad, and indifferent, that he devised an ingenious method of getting rid of them. During that particular season, the exigencies of the play required a roll of papers—presumably a will—to be nightly burned in a candle in full sight of the audience; and in this way he managed to make room for the numerous manuscripts which young authors only too eagerly poured in upon him, quite unconscious of their certain fate!

Indeed, volumes might be written upon the difficulties sometimes encountered in climbing the literary ladder, and whilst the more persevering have ultimately achieved the goal of their ambition, others have been fated to see their writings consigned to oblivion, and have themselves perhaps sunk into an early grave, consequent upon the disappointments and privations endured. When the poet Chatterton was found lying dead in his garret in Brook Street, his manuscripts had been strewn upon the floor, torn into a thousand pieces. Thus much good literature has often been lost to posterity. A number of instances, too, might be cited wherein persons have risen from their deathbed to destroy their manuscripts, and which task has either proved so distressing to their sensibilities, or fatiguing to their physical powers, that they immediately afterwards expired. It is placed upon record how Colardeau, that elegant versifier of Pope’s Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, recollected at the approach of his death that he had not destroyed what was written of a translation of Tasso; and unwilling to intrust this delicate office to his friends, he raised himself from his bed, and dragging his feeble frame to the place where the manuscript was deposited, with a last effort he consumed it in the flames. In another example, an author of celebrity directed his papers to be brought to his bed, and there, the attendant holding a light, he burned them, smiling as the greedy flames devoured what had been his work for years.

Few authors willingly destroy any manuscript that has cost them a long period of toil and research, though history records numerous examples where the loss of certain manuscripts has almost proved an irremediable misfortune to their author. The story of Mr Carlyle lending the manuscript of the first volume of his _French Revolution_ to his friend John Stuart Mill, and its accidental destruction by fire, is well known. A similar disaster once happened to M. Firmin Abauzit, a philosopher who had applied himself to every branch of human learning, and to whom the great Newton had remarked, among other compliments: ‘You are worthy to distinguish between Leibnitz and me.’ It happened on one occasion that he had engaged a fresh female servant, rustic, simple, and thoughtless, and being left alone in his study for a while, she declared to herself that she would ‘set his things to rights;’ with which words she deliberately cleared the table, and swept the whole of his papers into the fire, thus destroying calculations which had been the work of upwards of forty years. Without one word, however, the philosopher calmly recommenced his task, with more pain than can readily be imagined. Most readers also will remember the similar misadventure which occurred to Sir Isaac Newton.

Of manuscripts which have perished through the ignorance or malignancy of the illiterate, there are numerous instances. The original ‘Magna Charta,’ with all its appendages of seals and signatures, was one day discovered, by Sir Robert Cotton, in the hands of his tailor, who with his shears was already in the act of cutting up into measures that priceless document, which had been so long given up as for ever lost. He bought the curiosity for a trifle; and caused it to be preserved, where it is still to be seen, in the Cottonian Library, with the marks of dilapidation plainly apparent. The immortal works of Agobart were found by Papirius Masson in the hands of a bookbinder at Lyons, the mechanic having long been in the habit of using the manuscript sheets for the purpose of lining the covers of his books. Similarly, a stray page of the second decade of Livy was found by a man of letters concealed under the parchment of his battledore, as he was amusing himself at that pastime in the country. He at once hastened to the maker of the battledore; but alas! it was too late—the man had used the last sheet of the manuscript of Livy about a week before!

A treatise printed among the works of Barbosa, a bishop of Ugento, in 1649, fell into the possession of that worthy, it is said, in a rather singular manner. Having sent out for a fish for his table, his domestic brought him one rolled up in a piece of written paper, which excited the bishop’s curiosity so much, that he forthwith rushed out to the market, just in time to discover and rescue the original manuscript from which the leaf had been torn. This work he afterwards published under the title of _De Officio Episcopi_.

The manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci suffered greatly from the wilful ignorance of his relatives. Once, when a curious collector of antiquities chanced to discover a portion of his writings by the merest accident, he eagerly carried them to one of the descendants of the great painter; but the man coldly observed that ‘he had a great deal more in his garret, which had lain there for many years, if the rats had not destroyed them.’

Cardinal Granville was in the habit of preserving his letters, and at his death, he left behind him a prodigious number, written in all languages, and duly noted, underlined, and collated by his own hand. These relics were left in several immense chests, to the mercy of time and the rats; and subsequently, five or six of the chestsful were sold to the grocers as waste paper. It was then that an examination of the treasure was made; and as the result of the united labours of several literary men, enough of the papers to fill eight thick folios were rescued, and afterwards published.