SHE took him upstairs to the morning-room, in which she had been living, and which was full of traces of her habitation and ways—the book on the table, the work, even the writing paper and the new pen which all this time she had been trying to use to answer his letter. Her heart was beating as wildly as if she had been a young girl—beating with pride, with pleasure, with gratitude, and with that satisfaction in being vindicated and re-established which it is impossible for human nature not to feel. It was no doubt a very poor foe who had thus been flung under her feet; but he had been able to humiliate and insult her. And Mary felt as proud of her deliverer as if he had faced the dragon. His very age and physical unimportance made her only the more conscious of the force and mastery he had shown—a man accustomed to command, accustomed to hold a foremost place. What a difference it had made to everything the moment he had appeared! The very atmosphere had changed. It had become impossible for any one in the world to show her anything but respect and reverence as soon as Lord Frogmore had come. What a difference! What a difference! Mary had never filled that imposing place, never had it made evident as a matter of certainty that wherever she appeared respect must necessarily attend her. She had been respected in her modesty by those who knew her. But no one had ever thought it necessary to give to Mary the first place. What a difference! The first inarticulate feeling in her mind was this which brought her up as upon a stream of new life. Everything had been different from the moment he had appeared. No more insult, no further call for self-assertion, no need to take any trouble. His presence did it all. Where he was there would always be honor, observance, regard.
These thoughts surged through her mind as she went upstairs with him through the empty house, in which all at once instinctively, without anything said, she had become as a queen. There was no longer any question in her mind as to what she should say. All was said it seemed to Mary. Could the lady who had been delivered from the dragon think what she should say to her Redcross Knight? It was ridiculous to be so highflown—and yet it was the only simile she could think of. Dragons are different in different cases—sometimes they mean only poverty, humiliation, the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes, and not any great heroic danger, which the champion can make an end of: her champion had ended for her in a moment the fear of all these things. He had made her see what would be her fate henceforward if she trusted herself to him. He was a little gentleman, of short stature, of appearance rather neat than fine, resembling anything in the world rather than St. George. He was old—was he old? surely not so old as was thought—surely not as Letitia made him out, an antediluvian, a person out of date, whom only his own egotism and the care of Rogers kept alive to keep other people out of their rights. To look at him with his active step, his eyes that grew quite bright and blue in his anger, the color as of a winter apple in his cheek, his neat well cared for person—it was almost absurd, Mary thought, to call him an old man at all.
Lord Frogmore put her in a chair when they reached the morning-room, and bade her rest a little. “I came to see if there was not an answer to my letter,” he said, “but there are other things more important to be thought of first. How long have you been here alone exposed to these impertinences? You can’t be left to run such a risk again.”
“Oh, it doesn’t really matter now—it is all over now,” said Mary, with a faint smile.
“You are trembling still,” said the old lord. “I have a thousand minds to go and thrash the fellow still.”
“Oh, no,” she said, putting out her hand as if to detain him. “I am not afraid of anything now.”
The old gentleman took the hand which she held out. “Do you mean to give me this, Mary?” he said.
Upon this she roused herself, and with a changing color made her last stand, “Oh, Lord Frogmore, I could do nothing that would be injurious to the children,” she said.
“The children—what children? There are no children,” said the old lord, thinking of himself only and his own concerns. Then he perceived her meaning with a sudden, quick start, letting her hand drop in his impatience. “What,” he said, “is it John’s children you are bringing up in this ridiculous way? My dear, when John succeeds me he will be quite rich enough to provide for his own children. I have nothing to do with them. If you put the children in my way and in the way of my happiness in my old age, they shall never get a penny from me. I shall leave everything I can away from them. Be sure you will do them harm, and not good by bringing them up between you and me.”
“Lord Frogmore—I would not do them harm for anything in the world.”
“Well,” he said, with a smile, “you will do them a great deal of harm if you bring them in between us. I remember now what Mrs. John told you. That all I had belonged to them. She is an odious woman.”
“Lord Frogmore.”
“Don’t say anything more, my dear. She is an odious woman. You have not found it out, because you think everybody as good as yourself. She it is who is the cause of the impudence of her servants as well as of any other wrong things. No, my dear, let Mrs. John and her brats go by. I am an old man, Mary, that is the worst of it. I can’t hope to stand by you very long. Do you think you can like me well enough to give me the best chance of living to be a Methuselah? I’ll live as long as ever I can if you’ll share my life with me, Mary, my dear.”
“Oh, Lord Frogmore!” she said.
And, as a matter of fact, Mary said very little more. They came to understand each other very thoroughly without many words on her part. When the hour of luncheon arrived it produced no tray carried by the under-housemaid, as was usual, but John, the footman, in his best livery to announce that my lord was served in the dining-room. “You mean Miss Hill is served,” said the old gentleman, sternly. And John humbly begged his lordship’s pardon. Saunders kept out of sight, not trusting himself in Lord Frogmore’s presence. And the way in which Lord Frogmore talked at lunch was soon reported all over the house, and carried an universal shudder. “I shall lose no time in letting my brother know what has been going on,” he said. “And I don’t think you should stay here any longer. Mrs. John would be unhappy if she knew to what you are exposed.”
“Oh,” said Mary; “they will be kinder now.”
“Kinder! I could not let any lady run such a risk. I suppose they know that you would not say anything as long as you could help it. That is the penalty of being too good.”
“They did not think at all,” said Mary. “They supposed I was to be a spy and tell everything. But don’t please take much notice, Lord Frogmore. In another month Mr. Parke and Letitia will be back again.”
“You must not remain another night,” said the old gentleman. “Allow me to have the pleasure of taking you home. I cannot consent to your remaining here.”
John went downstairs much and deeply impressed. He told the assembled company in the servants’ hall that his lordship had said nothing to him personally. “But the rest of you may just get ready to go. Mr. Saunders won’t get even his month’s warning. That much I can tell you, and you’ll have to clear out—but there’s nothing against me.”
“Nobody can say,” said cook, “as I’ve shown any incivility to Miss ’Ill. I’m one as likes Miss ’Ill. I always did say as you was going too far.”
“I’ve never said a word good, bad, or indifferent,” said the housemaid, “since the first day: and then it was John as sauced her, and I only looked on.”
“I never sauced her,” cried John.
Saunders alone was silent. His confederates had all given him up as is inevitable in such circumstances, and it was very evident that there was no help possible for him. There was dismay also in the nursery, but in those regions the authorities held apart and did not compromise themselves in the servants’ hall.
Mary, however, felt herself taken hold of as by a little beneficent providence when she was taken in hand by Lord Frogmore. He arranged at once a little programme for her. It was too late now to go up so far as Yorkshire that afternoon, so he permitted her to remain for the night at Greenpark, to pack and arrange for her journey. He himself in the meanwhile would remain at the railway hotel near the station, and in the morning he would come for her and take her home. It was very startling to Mary to be thus swept away. She had herself strongly developed the instinct of putting up with what was disagreeable—with the certainty that there were many things in life which it was impossible to mend, and which had to be borne as cheerfully as possible. But Lord Frogmore had no mind to put up with anything. The idea of enduring a moment’s annoyance which could be prevented seemed folly to the imperative old gentleman. The difference was that he had always had it in his power to prevent the greater part at least of the annoyances of life, whereas Mary never had possessed that power. He whirled her away next day in a reserved carriage with all the luxury with which it was possible to surround a railway journey—she who had been accustomed to a humble corner in the second class! and deposited her that evening in the vicarage in a tumult of joy and excitement which it would be impossible to describe. The old people, the vicar and his wife, were indeed full of alarm, terrified by the telegram that announced Mary’s immediate return, and troubled to think that something must have happened to account for so sudden and important a journey. They had comforted each other by the reflection that it could not be Mary’s fault. Mary who was always so good and patient. But an event so sudden is always alarming, and it took them a long time to understand the rights of the matter, and what Lord Frogmore had to do with it and what they had to do with him. Old Mr. Hill was not very much older than Lord Frogmore, but he was not nearly so lively either in intelligence or in physique, and it required a great deal of explanation to make him understand the real state of the case. Mary going to marry—that old gentleman! This was the first thought of the unsophisticated household. The thought that Mary was to become Lady Frogmore did not penetrate their minds till some time after. As for Mary herself the process was quite different. She had actually forgotten that Lord Frogmore was an old gentleman nearly as old as her father, and the idea of being Lady Frogmore had become quite familiar, and caused her no excitement. She was still troubled about Letitia, and the possible money to the children, but otherwise she had begun to regard her own prospects with a satisfied calm. It is astonishing how quickly the mind accustoms itself to a new resolution even when it entails a revolution in life. Mary was surprised, and even a little offended, that her family should have so much difficulty in understanding her position. “My dear,” her mother said, “I hope you have well considered what you are going to do. Lord Frogmore is a very nice gentleman, but he is only five years younger than your father. I looked him up in the peerage. Mary, he is sixty-six.”
“Is that all?” said Mary. “Letitia speaks as if he were a hundred: but, mother, for a woman, forty is almost as old.”
“Oh, what nonsense,” said Mrs. Hill, “more than a quarter of a century of difference. It is a great temptation in a worldly point of view, my dear, but Mary——!”
Mr. Hill was a venerable person of large bulk, whose voice came out of the depths of his throat, and who was, Mary said to herself with energy, a hundred years older than Lord Frogmore. He had a large head, with heavy white hair, and always a solemn aspect. This big white head he shook slowly at his daughter and said, mumbling, “You must think it well over. My child, you must think it well over—we mustn’t do anything rashly.” As if it were possible to deliberate further when everything was settled, when Mary had brought her old lover home and accepted his escort and allowed him to disentangle her from her troubles. She felt vexed and angry with the objections, which proved what excellent people, how unworldly, and how simple-minded her parents were.
“What I think of is Tisch—and what a fuss she will be in,” said Agnes, Mary’s sister, in whose voice there was perhaps a note of exultation over the discomfiture of Letitia. This it was that made Mary falter and grow pale. Her just duty was to write to Letitia, and how, oh, how, was this to be done! The other remarks of her family only made her impatient with their futility—as if she did not like Lord Frogmore as well, nay better, for being old and having need of her! But Letitia! She put it off for three days pleading to herself that she was tired; that she must have a rest; that until Lord Frogmore went away she could do nothing. To tell the truth it was a relief when Lord Frogmore went away. The shabby little vicarage on the edge of the moors was not congenial to him. He did not know what to say to the mumbling old vicar, who was so very conscious of being only five years older than his intending son-in-law, but who was a-hundred years older as Mary truly felt. And there was but one spare room at the vicarage, the chimney of which, being very little used, smoked when a fire was lit (the Hills themselves had no fires in their bedrooms on the theory that it was a piece of self-indulgence and extravagance, though coal was cheap enough), and there was not a corner for Rogers, without whom Lord Frogmore was not at his ease, nor taken care of as he required to be. These drawbacks a bridegroom of twenty-six or thirty-six might have made a jest of, but at sixty-six it is another matter. And Mary was very glad when he went away. He was to return in a fortnight for the marriage with a special licence, though there was just time for the banns to be proclaimed in Grocombe church three Sundays, a formula which the vicar would not dispense with. Mary saw the old lord away with a sense of satisfaction. But she went back to the vicarage with a cold trembling all over her. The letter to Letitia could be put off no longer.
Truth compels us to say that it was a most specious letter—a letter in which innocence was made to look like guilt, a letter full of excuses, of explanations, of deprecations, trying to show how she could have done nothing else, how no harm could follow, and yet that the culprit was conscious of a thousand dreadful consequences. The effort of writing it made Mary ill. She kept her bed in a fever of anxiety and excitement, counting the hours till Letitia should receive it, thinking, with her heart in her mouth, “Now she has got it, what will she say? What will she do?”
It did not take a very long time to show what Letitia meant to say and do. Mary thought the world had come to an end when she heard by return of post, as it were, a carriage, that is a cab from the nearest station rattle up to the door with every crazy spring and buckle jingling as if in fury, and heard a whirlwind in the passage, and, rising up, tremblingly beheld her mother’s little parlor fill, as by an excited crowd, with two impetuous figures—Letitia, pale with passion, and behind her the imposing form of the Dowager Lady Frogmore.