NOTWITHSTANDING the dissatisfaction of his family, John Parke began his married life very comfortably, and it is doubtful whether he had ever been so happy in his life before. Lord Frogmore had let the newly married pair have a house of his in Berkshire, in a good hunting neighborhood, and not very far from town. John was by no means a great hunting man, but it is a respectable occupation to fall back upon when one has nothing else to do, and he was able to keep up his character and take a moderate interest in all that was going on without very much hard riding or sacrifice of comfort. His wife rode with him to the admiration of all the hunting field. But it was not in that way that Letitia meant to gain distinction. She had known too much about horses in her earlier days. She did not intend to be a hunting lady. Still it is always something to be known for one of the best horsewomen in your county. If you do not hunt after that it shows that you have higher aspirations. And it was very good for John to know that there was one thing at least which would have made any man proud of his wife. What Letitia was much more anxious about was that everybody should call. She procured a list of all the county families within reach, and carefully compared their names with those on the visiting cards that were left at Greenpark. And gradually her high aspirations were carried out. Gradually, not all at once, but under the weighty influence of the peerage and the hunting, most people came. Letitia found herself at the apex of the happiness she most desired, when she ascertained finally that she knew everybody—scarcely one was left out, and those who were left out were the insignificant people for whose opinion nobody cared.
She made a capital wife. She knew a great deal about housekeeping and how to make a little go a long way, and as she was very quick and kept her eyes wide open wherever she went, she very soon picked up those minutiæ of comfort and domestic luxury which were not understood at Grocombe. Grocombe, in fact, passed away altogether like a dissolving view. Sometimes when she sat in the boudoir which everybody said she had made so delightful, with its soft chairs and mossy carpets, and bewildering drapery, there would come before Letitia’s eyes a vision of the shabby parlor at home with its horsehair sofa and thin Kidderminster. The curtains were maroon rep in that family abode. The cover on the table was red and blue worsted: there was not a cosy chair in the place. It is true that there was a drawing-room in Grocombe, but everything in it was falling to pieces and it was never used. What a house to have been brought up in! And what a difference between Tisch Ravelstone, the hard-riding squire’s neglected daughter, who had never been educated, or dressed, or looked after by any one, whom the parson’s wife had been sorry for, who had been invited to the vicarage out of kindness, who had once thought the vicar’s son when he returned from Oxford the most splendid of young persons, and the Honorable Mrs. John Parke in her own beautiful boudoir, with her fine dresses and respectful servants and luxurious prosperity! What a difference! Letitia never permitted it to be seen or even divined that such luxury was new to her. But sometimes there would gleam before her a fading dissolving vision of that other life, and she would ask herself was it possible? Could it ever have been? To go back to such a state of affairs now would be the most horrible misfortune. She said to herself that she would rather die. It is true that the moors were glorious round about that Yorkshire house, but Letitia had seen too much of them to care for the moors: and the stables were admirably arranged, the pride of the district, but Letitia had seen a great deal too much of them and hated stables. And when she thought of the miry ways through which she used to tramp in her Wellington boots and short skirts, and the wintry blighted fir wood, all blown one way as if the trees were shabby pilgrims going to the west, which surrounded the house and the garden in which a few straggling rose bushes and old-fashioned flowers formed a respectful border to the cabbages, Letitia drew a long breath. Oh-h! she said to herself. What a difference! what a difference! But this breath of wondering transport was only breathed when she sat alone in her boudoir and John was well out of the way, and could not look up with an “Eh? did you speak?”
There were some things, however, not so easily dropped as Grocombe—and these were its inhabitants. Letitia had five brothers, such a number for a young woman on her promotion, whose aspirations were so far removed from anything they could understand. They could all ride like centaurs, they could doctor horses as well as any vet., harness them as well as any groom, and were as conversant with the pedigrees of their quadruped nobility as the Garter-King-at-Arms is with the precedence and qualifications of dukes and earls. Letitia was not unaware that knowledge of this kind is sometimes very valuable, and that in the society of a hunting country it is much esteemed. She knew there were distinguished houses in the neighborhood in which the stud-groom was a person highly prized for his conversation and social qualities; and on such a dreadful emergency as the appearance of Will, or Jack, or Ted, or Harry at Greenpark, she had already settled in her own mind how to make the best of their qualities: but it was a thought which made her shiver. She had made up her mind that intercourse with her old home was a thing to be gradually dropped altogether. Heaven be praised there were no sisters. Had there been sisters they would not have been so easily shaken off, they would probably have insisted upon sharing Tisch’s good luck, and getting “their chance” also through her means. “Tisch!” think only of hearing that name again ringing through the house in the stentorian voice of one of the boys! If there were no more than this to be avoided it would be enough. Letitia put her hands up to her ears as if to shut out the horrible sound. No, fortunately, nobody here, nobody in her new world had ever heard that dreadful name: the Sillingers, indeed—but they were people who knew better than to perpetuate such an injury. And on the whole Letitia thought it advisable to drop them also. They were so far off. The north of Yorkshire is a long way from Berks. It is much further off than either place is, for instance, from London. Mrs. John Parke lamented in her new neighborhood that she was so far off from the old; but on the whole it was a dispensation of Providence with which she was well pleased.
In the meantime Letitia began without delay to do her duty in the station to which she had been so fortunately called. She produced with much fortitude and pride a son and heir at the end of the first year, and after that judiciously, and not with too much haste, other little Parkes, one after the other, two boys and two girls, thus establishing the family upon a broad and sturdy basis, which precluded all fear of extinction to the family honors. Three sons—such a thing had not been known in the Frogmore family since the creation of the title, which was not, however, a very old one. There could be no doubt that Lord Frogmore was pleased. He sent Mrs. John some of the family diamonds, those jewels which she had so coveted, but which were by no means as splendid as she had hoped, after the first of these events—and he made a great many jokes with his brother as the family increased. But, in fact, he was very considerate indeed, making more than jokes, a considerable addition to John’s income, and also giving up to his brother the house in Mount Street, which Mrs. John had so long coveted. It is very evident, therefore, that Letitia’s course of prosperity for the first eight years of her married life was as nearly perfect as falls to the lot of woman. Her new family had forgotten that she was plain—they all had a respect for her as a very clever woman, who had done her duty by the race. She was not, perhaps, all that they could have desired; “not what I should have chosen for my dear boy,” said Lady Frogmore. “A little sharp for my taste—but then my taste had nothing to do with it,” said the old lord. But a woman against whom nothing was to be said. Her first season in London—the first season in which she had actually a house of her own, and could be said to take the place which the future Lady Frogmore had a right to aspire to, was not, indeed, triumphant—Letitia did not aspire to triumphs—but it was, as all her progress had been, a gradual and steady advance. She did not wish to take an insecure place among the fast duchesses and the wild millionaires. She disapproved of all the votaries of dissipation. “We come to town to meet our friends, and pay our duty to our Sovereign, and see what is going on,” she said, “but our delight is in our country home.” She had said ’ome at first, as, indeed, many very well-bred persons do; but Letitia had outgrown any weakness of that kind. And she was making her way. When she met the Sillingers now she was in a position to patronize them. The girls had not made very good marriages; and what was Lady Sillinger, after all, but the wife of a country baronet, well off, but not very rich, with a nice house and very hospitable in their way, but not a great country place. The Honble. Mrs. John Parke, the future Lady Frogmore, was very good-natured, and glad to be of use to her old friends.
There was another old friend who at this period was brought to her mind by an unexpected encounter at one of the exhibitions, which is a place where the poor may meet the rich without anything surprising being in it. Letitia, in the course of her cursory survey of the pictures, found before her a group which she recognized—or rather it would be more just to say she recognized one of the members of it. She looked, she turned away her head, she looked again. Yes, certainly, it was! it was! the very vicar’s daughter who had always been kind to Letitia Ravelstone, who had been held up to her as a model, whose neat frocks and pinafores it had been a vain effort to emulate. The name of the vicar’s daughter was Mary Hill, one of the most commonplace of names, yet capable of no such horrible travesty as that nickname of Tisch, which had been the burden of Letitia’s youth—yet she had always been prettier than Letitia, as well as more neat and carefully dressed. Mrs. John Parke stood in her fashionable London garments, in what might be called the height of her dignified maternal—but not too maternal—position (for Letitia had preserved her figure and was still slim) and gazed upon the companion of her youth. Miss Hill looked forty, though she was not quite so much as that. She was dressed in a grey alpaca, very simply made. She had a close little bonnet of the same color, tied with pink ribbons under her chin. She was as neat as she used to be in the old days when she was held up as an example to Tisch Ravelstone. She was accompanied by two elderly ladies of homely respectability, one of whom called to her continually, “Mary, Mary, you have not looked at this.” They were doing the honors of the pictures to her, not sparing her one. She had a catalogue in her hand, but between that and the lady who called Mary, Mary, and the other who stopped before all the worst pictures and said, with a wave of her hand, “This is one that has been a great deal talked about,” their gentle country cousin was evidently a little confused. She smiled, and allowed herself to be dragged in two directions at once. Letitia stood and watched with a sensation which was very mingled. There was good in it and there was evil, a sense of triumph which so swelled her bosom that had her dress not been so perfectly fitted some of the buttons must certainly have burst, but along with this a certain sense of kindness, of pleasure in such a kind face. If it had been anybody but Mary Hill not even the delight of showing how different she herself was from Tisch Ravelstone would have made Mrs. Parke pause. But a softer impulse touched her breast. She stood still where she was until Mary, in one of the many gyrations she had to make to please her companions, turned round full upon her and recognized her with a start and a cry. Letitia, in the excitement of the moment, actually forgave her old friend, whose cry was “Tisch!”
“It is surely Mary Hill,” she said, advancing in her turn, with all the magnificence of which she was capable, and that was no small matter. “I have been looking at you for five minutes wondering; but it is you. And you have not changed a bit.”
“Oh, no; how should I change? But you; now I look at you again I wonder that I recognized you at all. It was the first glance. I felt it could be no one else.”
“It makes a great difference to be married and have a number of children,” said Letitia with genial dignity. “You have never married, Mary.”
“Oh, no,” said Mary, with a faint laugh.
“And are you just at home—as you used to be?”
“Just at home—as I used to be. We are all older, the boys are out in the world, and little Fanny too, as a governess; but Annie and I are just the same, taking care of father and mother.”
“They can’t want two of you to take care of them.”
“That is true,” said Mary, with a faint change of color, “but we had no education—we elder ones—and we can’t teach, and there’s nothing else for a girl to do.”
“A girl!” said Letitia under her breath, looking at Mary in her gentle middle-agedness from top to toe. But she perceived that the two elderly ladies, who had hitherto kept at a distance overawed by her fashionable appearance, were now consulting together with evident intention of advancing, so she added quickly, “I am so glad to have seen you. Come and see me, please, in the morning before one, at 300, Mount street, Berkeley Square—the park end—will you? Come to-morrow, Mary, please.”
“I will indeed,” said Mary, with fervor. “It is the finest thing I have seen in London, dear Tishy, the face of an old friend: and as kind as ever,” she said with a glance of tender gratitude. She had not perhaps quite expected, nor had Letitia expected, that any such soft sentiment should have arisen in her bosom, if truth be told.
“Don’t call me that, for heaven’s sake,” cried Letitia, waving her hand as she hurried away. And so the two elderly ladies were balked, and Mrs. Parke left the exhibition with a new plan taking form in her mind—a plan which would be a great kindness, yet very useful to herself—a plan which was to produce fruits of an importance almost awful to Letitia, yet at this moment altogether hidden, and the very possibility of them, from her eyes.