Part 38

‘Florry, darling,’ he said, pressing her arm to his side, ‘it is very funny--but when you are a clergyman’s wife, you know----’ Poor Florry had not had the heart to mimic anybody since that April day: but now she only laughed at the reproof: she was ready to have ‘taken off’ the Archbishop of Canterbury had His Grace come in her way.

I need scarcely say that the sight of Florry coming across the lawn with her arm within that of the curate, laughing and looking up at him, while he looked down, and shook his head, and had the air of reproving, though with a smile on his face, had the greatest effect upon the people in the drawing-room who saw that scene from the windows.

‘Emmy--_Emmy!_’ cried Mrs. Plowden to her daughter, who was coming in calmly with the basket of stockings to be darned--and as soon as Emmy was within reach, her mother seized her by the skirts and pulled her forward to the window. ‘What does that mean?’ cried the Rector’s wife. Mrs. Plowden’s heart had leaped up into her throat, beating almost as fast and as tumultuously as the curate’s heart had done when he stooped down in that very spot to look for the scissors. ‘Tell me, _what_ does _that_ mean?’ she said imperiously, while Emmy in consternation gazed out, not knowing what to say.

‘Well, mamma, you are not angry, are you?’ said Emmy, with a sympathetic jump of her heart, too.

‘Angry!’ said Mrs. Plowden, and began forthwith to cry; for though she was fussy, and perhaps commonplace, she was a very devoted mother. And there was not a word to be said against Mr. Osborne--he was tolerably well off, well connected, likely to ‘get on,’ and an excellent young man--almost too good, if a fault might be hinted; and Florry liked him; and, crowning virtue of all, he had been kind to Jim. Afterwards, when the little épanchement was over which followed on the entry of these two evident lovers, after she had cried a good deal and laughed a little, and given her consent and blessed them, and retired to see whether Mr. Plowden had returned, followed by Emmy, who thought it would be well to tell the cook to have some sally-luns for tea--Mrs. Plowden expressed her sentiments more freely. ‘I should not like to marry him myself,’ she said, ‘but since Florry likes it, and everything is so suitable, I feel quite sure your father will be pleased.’

‘No,’ said Emmy thoughtfully, ‘he is very nice, but I should not like to marry him.’ Which was just as well, probably, since there was no possibility of anything of the kind. Emmy thought of Another, with whom she thought Mr. Osborne could not bear comparison. But, alas! that Other, it is to be feared, was quite as little likely to fall in Emmy’s way.

The young pair walked over to Lady William’s cottage after a while, with that satisfaction in communicating the fact of their happiness which is natural to well-conditioned friendly young pairs. I am not myself sure that Mr. Osborne, indeed, liked to be led, in triumph even to the house of so near a relation, for he had a secret dread of ridicule, which gave this young man a great deal of trouble. They met Mr. Swinford walking away from the cottage with a grave face, accompanied by little Miss Grey, who was full of excitement. I need not say that by this time, as they walked along in full view of the village, Florence no longer hung on the curate’s arm, as she had done while crossing the lawn at the Rectory. On the contrary, they were walking very demurely side by side, with the air of people who had met accidentally in the street and could not help but walk together, little as they liked it, as they were going the same way. Miss Grey’s chatter was audible almost before they came in sight of her. Her countenance was wreathed in smiles, her old-fashioned broad hat had got a little to one side, and looked more jaunty and ‘fast’ than the most fashionable headgear.

‘I could have told her years ago if I had thought it would be of any consequence,’ Miss Grey was saying; and so much preoccupied was she, that the unusual spectacle of the curate and Florence walking together, although in the most austere manner, which would have excited her so much on another occasion, did not even attract her observation now.

‘Has anything happened, Miss Grey?’ Florence asked demurely, with a secret consciousness which made her heart dance, of all she had herself to tell, and of the very great thing which had certainly happened, far greater than anything else which could possibly have taken place in Watcham. And Miss Grey remarked nothing! The young people gave a glance of amazement at each other, and Miss Grey fell in the opinion of both--but most in that of the curate, who had been so great a friend of hers, and who felt that she ought to have divined him at the first glance.

‘I should think, indeed, something has happened,’ cried Miss Grey. ‘I have just been telling your dear aunt Emily, Lady William, that I was at her marriage. And she is so pleased, it has been quite a little _fête_ for me. Think of Lady William, the darling, being so pleased that I was there, and I always frightened she should find out, fearing she would think it a liberty! I am sure I might have told her years ago if I had thought she would have liked it. It made quite a little sensation, Mr. Swinford can tell you. It agitated her a little, poor darling, to think of that time at all; and yet she was so pleased.’

‘She never speaks of her marriage,’ said Florence carelessly. Oh! what waste of sentiment to think of people making a fuss about a marriage of twenty years ago when they might hear at first hand of one that was going to be now!

‘No, she never speaks of it; and I had taken it into my head that she did not like to go back upon it. We never knew him, and I don’t know why people should have taken an unfavourable impression; but to see her agitation and her change of colour when I spoke! Ah, my dear Florry, there are many things in this world that are never thought of in our philosophy! She must have been thinking of him many and many a day when we thought there was no such thing in her mind.’

It surprised Miss Grey a little, it must be allowed, to see that the curate stood by all this time, and did not stalk on about his business, leaving Florry to go also her own way; and afterwards she thought of it with a little surprise and a question to herself. But, in the meantime, she was much more taken up with what was in her own mind.

‘I thought,’ cried Florry when they had passed on, ‘that we carried it written all over us; and yet she never found out anything! Miss Grey, too, who knows so many things.’

‘It proves,’ said the curate loftily, ‘how much more largely the most trivial incident in our own experience bulks in our eyes than the greatest event in another’s. I must say I am surprised that Miss Grey should be so obtuse--Miss Grey, of all people in the world.’

He was perhaps, to tell the truth, a little offended, too.

They went into the cottage, where Lady William was in the course of writing a letter, for which the Rector seemed to be waiting to give it his approval. Lady William was writing hurriedly, sometimes pausing to listen to something he said, but, I fear, not giving him the devoted attention which the Rector felt that he merited. Mr. Osborne was not a very common visitor at the cottage, and Lady William stopped her writing to give him a reception a little more ceremonious than usual.

‘Will you excuse me for a moment,’ she said, ‘while I finish a letter? It is an important one, which must be ready for this post, and my brother must see it before it goes.’

And then there ensued a curious pause. Mab did her best to entertain the visitors, discoursing to them on what she in her innocence still believed to be the principal event of the day--for Miss Grey’s revelation did not strike Mab as particularly exciting, and she had thought her mother’s interest in it quite out of proportion with the importance of the subject. And she felt the appearance of Florence and the curate together to be another proof of the momentous nature of the morning’s event; for what could have brought them here but a desire to settle about Mrs. Brown’s successor? So Mab began, thinking, no doubt, this was the chief matter in their thoughts, to talk of Mrs. Brown.

‘I was there yesterday,’ she said, ‘she might have given me a hint. I was there almost all the morning; the afternoon was a half-holiday. She might have said she was going away.’

‘My dear,’ cried Florry, a little impatient, ‘if she had intended to tell, there were other people whom she was more likely to tell than you.’

‘She told me a great many things,’ said Mab, ‘and I was interested in her. But, Mr. Osborne, there is a very nice girl, who was a pupil teacher, in one of the houses down by Riverside. She would do very well till you can get somebody, if you like to try her. I meant to have told Uncle James, but Uncle James is so full of that business of mother’s.’

‘Just as you are about the schoolmistress, Mab,’ said Florence, with a laugh.

Mr. Osborne did not make any remark, but he, too, thought--to fuss about Lady William’s business, whatever it might be, to make a commotion about the very ordinary and commonplace fact that Miss Grey had been present at a certain wedding twenty years ago--what a waste of emotion, what folly it was, when there was here, waiting for the telling, a piece of news so much more interesting! He exchanged a glance with Florence, and they both laughed at human absurdity and the blindness even of fathers and aunts, the latter especially, who are supposed to have an eye for events of the kind of which these two were so conscious. And then that everlasting affair about the schoolmistress! To be sure, somebody must be found and something done; but to thrust it upon them now!

Lady William had finished the letter, which was the one she had begun in the morning with the admission which Mr. Plowden thought so rash of the burning down of the chapel. She had struck out the line in which she said ‘one witness of my marriage is alive, but----.’ What she wrote was as follows:

‘There are two witnesses of my marriage alive, one Miss Grey, The Nook, Watcham, who will make an affidavit, or see anybody you may send to take her evidence; the other, Mrs. Artémise Mansfield. I do not know at this present moment where to find the latter, but she will appear if necessary. There is also a record in a diary of my father’s which I am told would hold good in law----’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Plowden doubtfully, ‘I suppose that is all right, Emily; Miss Grey’s evidence, of course, makes all the difference. Still, I can’t see why you should be so anxious to confess to them that the chapel is burnt down.’

‘They would discover that fact themselves: and they might think we knew it all the time, and had chosen that place on purpose to have a good excuse.’

‘Who is thinking ill of her fellow-creatures now?’ said the Rector. ‘Yes, yes, I suppose it will do--with my father’s diary and Miss Grey to back you up, you may say anything you please. Yes, I think you may send it, and I think I may congratulate Mab now. Yes, I believe we may allow ourselves to think that it is all right now.’ He watched while Lady William folded up and put the letter into its envelope. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, so as to be heard by all, ‘this has been a very interesting day. There was first that untoward act of the schoolmistress going away--which indeed I must not call untoward, for she was not the sort of person for the place: but that also had to do with you, Emily: and then the quite unhoped-for, unthought-of discovery that Miss Grey had gone to see you married in such an easy, natural way; and then the great fact, to be announced to-day for the first time, that little Mab is an heiress. Do you hear, Florry? Could you have believed such a thing? The finest piece of news! that our little Mab is an heiress. She has come into a great deal of money. She will be able to take her proper position, which is far better than anything we can give her in Watcham. Mab,’ said the Rector, rising up and looking round him, as he had a way of doing when addressing a much larger audience, ‘has come into a fortune of fifty thousand pounds--as to-day.’

A little shriek broke from Florence--it came against her will. It was not wonder and sympathy, as might have been expected from her, but an intolerable sense of the contrariety and distraction of things. ‘Oh, papa!’ There was a protest in it against Mab, Mab’s mother, and all that could happen to those secondary persons. What did anything matter in comparison with what she herself had to tell? And they were all in a conspiracy against her to prevent her from getting it out!

At last, however, there arrived a crisis, as the Rector got his hat and prepared to go away. The curate rose, too.

‘I’ll go with you, if you will permit me. There is something I want to talk to you about,’ said Mr. Osborne, with a visible blush, which Lady William, looking suddenly up, caught, and started a little to behold, feeling for the first time some thrill in the air of the new thing.

‘Oh yes, to be sure, the schoolmistress,’ the Rector said. He gave a little sigh of impatience. ‘To be sure, that is a thing that must be attended to,’ he said.

‘No, it is not the schoolmistress. It is something much more important,’ said Mr. Osborne, at the end of his patience. There was something in the tone of his voice this time which made them all look up.

‘Ah?’ said Mr. Plowden, half alarmed.

‘Oh!’ said Lady William, sitting upright, bending forward to catch the new light. Mab did not say anything, but her eyes turned upon Florence with a certain illumination too. Florence, excited, exasperated, and worn out with the suspense which had been so little expected, was on the point of bursting into tears. Mr. Osborne took her hand, and pressed it so that she gave another little shriek of excitement and almost pain, as he followed the Rector out; and there was Florence left half sobbing, angry, full of the news which was so much greater than any of the others--even Mab’s fortune, which she did not in the least believe in--which nobody would take the trouble to understand.

‘Florry, dear child, what is this?’ cried Lady William, while the big steps of the gentlemen were heard, one following the other, from the door.

‘Oh, what does it matter?’ cried Florry, ‘you are all so full of your own affairs. We came to tell you, thinking you would be interested; but you would not let us speak; and to see papa standing there talking about the finest piece of news! “Mab, our little Mab, is an heiress,”’ cried the irreverent girl, getting up and looting round exactly as he had done, and with all his solemnity, ‘“Mab has come into a fortune.”’

‘Florry, Florry, spare your father!’ cried Lady William, with an irrepressible laugh.

And then Florry, who, notwithstanding her white frock, and her agitated heart, and her girl’s face, had been the Rev. James Plowden in person for one malicious, humorous, angry moment, dropped into her chair and fell a-crying in her own character and no other.

‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘to think that you should be so stupid, Aunt Emily, you that always see everything. When we came expressly to tell you! Good gracious, what are fortunes, or schoolmistresses, or Miss Greys, or anything, in comparison with it being all right, all right and everything settled between Edward and me?’

LI

Notwithstanding Miss Grey’s testimony and all that had happened to make her quite sure of her position, it cannot be denied that Lady William awaited the lawyers’ reply to her letter with some anxiety. How does an uninstructed woman know what lawyers may do? They may find the clearest evidence wanting in something, some formality which may invalidate the whole. Had she not heard a hundred times of the difference between moral certainty and legal evidence? They might allege something of this sort, and perhaps, for anything she could tell, insist upon a trial, and the public appearance of witnesses, and the discussion of her marriage in the papers, a possibility which made Lady William’s heart sick. I am not at all sure (but then I know little more about law than Lady William did) that had Messrs. Fox and Round been pettifogging lawyers, and their clients petty and unknown people, they might not have attempted something of the kind; but, as a matter of fact, they had never advised their clients to do anything in the matter, and Lord Portcullis, who remembered his sister-in-law very well, and all the circumstances of Lord William’s death, had never entertained a doubt on the subject.

‘Certificates?’ he said, ‘why, I have seen the woman!’ as if that was more than certificates; and Lord Portcullis was not a man who was ignorant of the evil that exists in the world, or who was at all in a general way an optimist about women. It had been the Marchioness, more hasty, and more disposed to think that by a bold coup anything could be done, who hoped to secure the whole of Lord John’s fortune in that way. When she found that this was impossible (though she always retained a secret conviction that Lady William was ‘just as much Lady William as my old housekeeper is!’) my Lady Portcullis thought of another way--a way, indeed, which had been one of the two things she had thought of in sending her son Will to see into the affair.

‘If we can’t have it in any other way we might at least marry it’, she said to her husband. ‘If Will got it in the end it would not be altogether lost.’ And this was how it happened that the gay Guardsman, cursing his luck, was sent down again to Watcham to pay a visit ‘at that hole of an old Hall, with that dreadful witch of an old woman,’ as he expressed it to his friends, in the first burst of the opening season, when everything had a special zest, and all was delightful, fresh, and new. Lord Will’s petition to be received so soon again was the first thing which revealed, to the Swinfords at least, that against Lady William there was now no further word to say.

‘Why don’t you come up to town?’ that young gentleman said at dinner, where Mrs. Swinford was not present. ‘What good can it do, Swinford, to bury yourself down here? Why, man alive! it’s not even the country; it’s not much better than a suburban villa. Fine place, I allow, and all that; curious old relic of grandpapa, don’t you know; but grandpapa is such a very recent relation, it is not much worth your while keeping this up.’

‘Thanks for your kindness,’ said Leo; ‘I may say, also, if that is not too much, that, had I not been here, it would, my dear Will, have been less convenient for you.’

‘Ah yes,’ said the young man, ‘less convenient, but much nicer, if the truth must be told; for to come down here a-fortune-hunting, don’t you know, is about the last thing in the world to please me.’

‘Oh, that is it!’ said Leo.

‘That’s it, to be sure,’ said the other. ‘A cousin, too; and it is not such a heavy price to put oneself up for. There’s half-a-dozen little Americans about town, or Australians, or whatever you like to call them, that are much better worth than that, if a man is to make a sacrifice of himself,’ said poor Lord Will.

‘But so long as your brother Pontoon is well and strong, the Americans don’t care much, do they, for a courtesy title?’

‘They’re getting awfully well up,’ confessed the other in a doleful tone, ‘got their peerage at their fingers’ ends, and care nothing for younger brothers, that’s the truth; and I’m sure I don’t want to marry any of them, nor any girl that I know of. I say, Swinford, you don’t know how well off you are, you lucky beggar, to be all there is of your family. I don’t mean to say that I’m not a bore to Pontoon, and all that, having to be provided for somehow--as much as he is to me, standing in my way.’

‘You think it would be a better arrangement having only one son?’

‘One child, that’s what I should recommend; like the French do,’ said this victim of English prejudices. He was not aware that his grammar was bad, and would not have cared had he known. There are some people who are above grammar, just as there are many who are below it. He sighed, and added, as if that was a dreadful fact that needed no comment: ‘There are four girls, and none of them married.’ A second sigh after he had made this announcement was something like a groan.

‘They are almost too young for that, as yet,’ said Leo, with good nature.

‘Too young! This will be Addie’s third season, and not so much as a nibble. If you don’t think that serious, by Jove, I do--and Betty treading on her heels, and the little ones beginning to perk their heads out of the schoolroom. The poor old mother, it’s enough to turn her gray. And when she bids me up and do something for myself, I can’t turn on her, Swinford, I can’t indeed, though it’s hard on a fellow all the same. It ought all to have come to us, it ought indeed--without any encumbrance, the advertisements say.’

‘The encumbrance,’ said Leo, who was half angry and half amused, ‘is not a thing you will find it so easy to reckon with, my poor Will. She has her own ways of thinking, and a will of her own.’

‘Ah!’ said Lord Will, with much calm. He was not afraid, it would appear, of Mab. He thought of the little roundabout thing whom he had seen on his previous visit, not, certainly, with much alarm, but with a sense that if she resisted his advances (which was so very unlikely) he would not be inconsolable. Anyhow, he would have done what duty and his parents required of him. It was very satisfactory to him that Mrs. Swinford did not come downstairs that evening, for the recollection of his last interview with her was not agreeable to him in the present changed circumstances. How he was to explain to her the _motif_ of his conduct now, and how the failure of all her information--her hints and prophecies of evil--was to be got over, did there ever again ensue a _tête-à-tête_ between the hostess and her visitor, he could not tell. Mrs. Swinford was much more alarming to Lord Will than the little cousin whom he came to woo.

The first assurance received by Lady William that all was well was thus conveyed to her by the second visit of the young man who bore her husband’s name, who came stalking into the cottage alone on the morning after his arrival as if he had been one of the intimates there, and addressed her as Aunt William, to her great surprise and agitation. Not a word did Lord Will say of his uncle’s money or the proceedings of Messrs. Fox and Round. Watcham was so handy for town, was what the young man said. It was so easy to run down for a breath of fresh air: and boxed up in town, as it was his hard fate to be, nobody could think what a pleasure it was to get into the country from time to time.

‘I had no idea that you were such a lover of the country,’ Lady William said.

‘Not the country in the abstract,’ said Lord Will; ‘but a pleasant little place like this within an hour’s ride--with such a pleasant fellow as Swinford always throwing open his doors--a man with really a nice place, and the best _chef_ I’ve met with, out of the very best houses, don’t you know.’

‘Yes, I see,’ said Lady William; ‘I should not think of asking you to meet _my_ cook after that.’

‘Oh, delighted,’ said Lord Will. ‘I don’t demand a _chef_ like Swinford’s everywhere; besides, there’s not a dozen of his quality in the world--brought him from Paris with them, don’t you know. Women don’t often care much for what they eat--but when they do----!’

‘Yes,’ said Lady William, with great gravity, ‘when women are bad, as people say, they are worse than men; which is a compliment or not, according as we receive it.’

‘There is nothing bad, my dear aunt, in being particular about what you eat.’

‘Nothing in the world, or I should be a great sinner. We both like nice things, both Mab and I.’