IT would be vain to tell all that was said, and all that was done, and all the calculations that were gone through in the house in Berkeley Square, where Edgar’s visit had produced so much emotion. The interviews carried on in all the different rooms would furnish forth a volume. The girls, who had peered over the staircase to see him go away, and whose state of suspense was indescribable, made a dozen applications at Gussy’s door before the audience of Ada, who had the best right to hear, was over. Then Mary insisted upon getting admission in her right of bride, as one able to enter into Gussy’s feelings, and sympathise with her; and poor little Beatrice, left out in the cold, had to content herself with half a dozen words, whispered in the twilight, when they all went to dress for dinner. Beatrice cried with wounded feeling, to think that because she, by the decrees of Providence, was neither the elder sister, nor engaged to be married, she was therefore to be shut out from all participation in Gussy’s secrets.
“Could I be more interested if I was twice as old as Ada, and engaged to six Lord Grantons!” cried the poor child. And Gussy’s prospects were in that charming state of uncertainty that they would stand discussing for hours together; whereas, by the time Lord Granton had been pronounced a darling, and the dresses all decided upon, even down to the colour of the bridesmaids’ parasols, there remained absolutely nothing new to be gone over with Mary, but just the same thing again and again.
“When do you think you shall be married?” said Beatrice, tremulously.
“I don’t know, and I don’t very much care, so long as it is all right,” said Gussy, half laughing, half crying.
“But what if papa will not consent?” said Mary, with a face of awe.
“Papa is too sensible to fight when he knows he should not win the battle,” said the deliciously, incomprehensibly courageous Gussy.
There was some gratification to be got out of a betrothed sister of this fashion. Beatrice even began to look down upon Mary’s unexciting loves.
“As for your affair, it is so dreadfully tame,” she said, contemptuously lifting her little nose in the air. “Everybody rushing to give their consent, and presents raining down upon you, and you all so self-satisfied and confident.”
Mary was quite taken down from her pedestal of universal observation. She became the commonest of young women about to be married, by Gussy’s romantic side.
Alas! the Thornleighs were by no means done with sensation in this genre. Two days after these events, before Edgar had come back, Harry came early to the house one morning and asked to see his mother alone. Lady Augusta was still immersed in patterns, and she had that morning received a letter from her husband, which had brought several lines upon her forehead. Mr. Thornleigh had the reputation, out of doors, of being a moderate, sensible sort of man, not apt to commit himself, though perhaps not brilliant, nor very much to be relied upon in point of intellect. He deserved, indeed, to a considerable extent this character; but what the world did not know, was that his temper was good and moderate, by reason of the domestic safety-valve which he had always by him. When anything troublesome occurred he had it out with his wife, giving her full credit for originating the whole business.
“You ought to have done this, or you ought to have done that,” he would say, “and then, of course, nothing of the kind could have happened.” After, he would go upstairs, and brush his hair, and appear as the most sensible and good-tempered of men before the world. Mr. Thornleigh had got Mr. Tottenham’s letter informing him of the renewed intercourse between Edgar and Gussy; and the Squire had, on the spot, indited a letter to his wife, breathing fire and flame. This was the preface of a well-conditioned, gentlemanly letter to Mr. Tottenham, in which the father expressed a natural regret that Gussy should show so little consideration of external advantages, but fully acknowledged Edgar’s excellent qualities, and asked what his prospects were, and what he thought of doing.
“I will never be tyrannical to any of my children,” Mr. Thornleigh said; “but, on the other hand, before I can give my sanction, however unwillingly, to any engagement, I must fully understand his position, and what he expects to be able to do.”
But Lady Augusta’s letter was not couched in these calm and friendly terms; and knowing as she did the exertions she had made to keep Edgar at arm’s length, poor Lady Augusta felt that she did not deserve the assault made upon her, and consequently took longer to calm down than she generally did. It was while her brow was still puckered, and her cheek flushed with this unwelcome communication, that Harry came in. When he said, “I want to speak to you, mother,” her anxious mind already jumped at some brewing harm. She took him into the deserted library, feeling that this was the most appropriate place in which to hear any confession her son might have to make to her. The drawing-room, where invasion was always to be feared, and the morning-room, which was strewed with patterns and girls, might do very well for the confession of feminine peccadilloes, but a son’s ill-doing was to be treated with a graver care. She led Harry accordingly into the library, and put herself into his father’s chair, and said, “What is it, my dear boy?” with a deeper gravity than usual. Not that Harry was to be taken in by such pretences at severity. He knew his mother too well for that.
“Mother,” he said, sitting down near her, but turning his head partially away from her gaze, “you have often said that my father wanted me—to marry.”
“To marry!—why, Harry? Yes, dear, and so he does,” said Lady Augusta; “and I too,” she added, less decidedly. “I wish it, too—if it is some one very nice.”
“Well,” said Harry, looking at her with a certain shamefaced ostentation of boldness, “I have seen some one whom I could marry at last.”
“At last! You are not so dreadfully old,” said the mother, with a smile. “You, too! Well, dear, tell me who it is. Some one you have met at your Aunt Mary’s”? Oh! Harry, my dear boy, I trust most earnestly it is some one very nice!”
“It is some one much better than nice—the most lovely creature, mother, you ever saw in your life. I never even dreamt of anything like her,” said Harry, with a sigh.
“I hope she is something more than a lovely creature,” said Lady Augusta. “Oh! Harry, your father is so put out about Gussy’s business; I do hope, dear, that this is something which will put him in good-humour again. I can take her loveliness for granted. Tell me—do tell me who she is?”
“You don’t mean to say that you are going to let that fellow marry Gussy’?” said Harry, coming to a sudden pause.
“Harry, if this is such a connection as I hope, it will smooth everything,” said Lady Augusta. “My dearest boy, tell me who she is.”
“She is the only woman I will ever marry,” said Harry, doggedly.
And then his poor mother divined, without further words, that the match was not an advantageous one, and that she had another disappointment on her hands.
“Harry, you keep me very anxious. Is she one of Mary’s neighbours? Tell me her name.”
“Yes, she is one of Aunt Mary’s neighbours and chief favourites,” said Harry. “Aunt Mary is by way of patronizing her.” And here he laughed; but the laugh was forced, and had not the frank amusement in it which he intended it to convey.
Lady Augusta’s brow cleared for a moment, then clouded again.
“You do not mean Myra Witherington?” she said, faintly. “Oh! not one of that family, I hope!”
“Myra Witherington!” he cried. “Mother, what do you take me for? It is clear you know nothing about my beautiful Margaret. In her presence, you would no more notice Myra Witherington than a farthing candle in the sun!”
Poor Lady Augusta took courage again. The very name gave her a little courage. It is the commonest of all names where Margaret came from; but not in England, where its rarity gives it a certain distinction.
“My dear boy,” she said tremulously, “don’t trifle with me—tell me her name.”
A strange smile came upon Harry’s lips. In his very soul he, too, was ashamed of the name by which some impish trick of fortune had shadowed his Margaret. An impulse came upon him to get it over at once; he felt that he was mocking both himself and his mother, and her, the most of all, who bore that terrible appellation. He burst into a harsh, coarse laugh, a bravado of which next moment he was heartily ashamed.
“Her name,” he said, with another outburst, “is—Mrs. Smith!”
“Good heavens, Harry!” cried Lady Augusta, with a violent start. Then she tried to take a little comfort from his laughter, and said, with a faint smile, though still trembling, “You are laughing at me, you unkind boy!”
“I am not laughing at all!” cried Harry, “except, indeed, at the misfortune which gave her such a name. It is one of Aunt Mary’s favourite jokes.” Then he changed his tone, and took his mother’s hand and put it up caressingly to his cheek to hide the hot flush that covered it. “Mother, you don’t know how I love her. She is the only woman I will ever marry, though I should live a hundred years.”
“Oh! my poor boy—my poor boy!” cried Lady Augusta. “This is all I wanted to make an end of me. I think my heart will break!”
“Why should your heart break?” said Harry, putting down her hand and looking half cynically at her. “What good will that do? Look here, mother. Something much more to the purpose will be to write to my father, and break the news quietly to him—gently, so as not to bother him, as I have done to you; you know how.”
“Break the news to him!” she said. “I have not yet realised it myself. Harry, wait a little. Why, she is not even——. Mrs. Smith! You mean that she is a widow, I suppose?”
“You did not think I could want to marry a wife, did you?” he growled. “What is the use of asking such useless questions? Of course she is a widow—with one little girl. There, now you know the worst!”
“A widow, with one little girl!”
Lady Augusta looked at him aghast. What could make up for these disadvantages? The blood went back upon her heart, then rallied slightly as she remembered her brother-in-law’s shopkeeping origin, and that the widow might be some friend of his.
“Is she—very rich?” she stammered.
To do her justice, she was thinking then of her husband, not herself; she was thinking how she could write to him, saying, “These are terrible drawbacks, but nevertheless——”
But nevertheless—Harry burst into another loud, coarse laugh. Poor fellow! nobody could feel less like laughing; he did it to conceal his confusion a little, and the terrible sense he began to have that, so far as his father and mother were concerned, he had made a dreadful mistake.
“I don’t know how rich she is, nor how poor. That is not what I ever thought of,” he cried, with lofty scorn.
This somehow appeased the gathering terror of Lady Augusta.
“I don’t suppose you did think of it,” she said; “but it is a thing your father will think of. Harry, tell me in confidence—I shall never think you mercenary—what is her family? Are they rich people? Are they friends of your uncle Tottenham? Dear Harry, why should you make a mystery of this with me?”
“Listen, then,” he said, setting his teeth, “and when you know everything you will not be able to ask any more questions. She is a cousin of your Edgar’s that you are so fond of. Her brother is the new doctor at Harbour Green, and she lives with him. There, now you know as much as I know myself.”
Words would fail me to tell the wide-eyed consternation with which Lady Augusta listened. It seemed to her that everything that was obnoxious had been collected into this description. Poor, nobody, the sister of a country doctor; a widow with a child; and finally, to wind up everything, and make the combination still more and more terrible, Edgar’s cousin! Heaven help her! It was hard enough to think of this for herself; but to let his father know!—this was more than any woman could venture to do. She grew sick and faint in a horrible sense of the desperation of the circumstances; the girls might be obstinate, but they would not take the bit in their teeth and go off, determined to have their way, like the boy, who was the heir, and knew his own importance; and what could any exhortation of hers do for Harry, who knew as well as she did the frightful consequences, and had always flattered himself on being a man of the world? She was so stupefied that she scarcely understood all the protestations that he poured into her ear after this. What was it to her that Margaret was the loveliest creature in the world? Faugh! Lady Augusta turned sickening from the words. Lovely creatures who rend peaceful families asunder; who lead young men astray, and ruin all their hopes and prospects; who heighten all existing difficulties, and make everything that was bad before worse a thousand times—is it likely that a middle-aged mother should be moved by their charms?
“It is ruin and destruction!—ruin and destruction!” she repeated to herself.
And soon the whole house had received the same shock, and trembled under it to its foundations. Harry went off in high dudgeon, not finding the sympathy he (strangely enough, being a man of the world) had looked forward to as his natural right. The house, as I have said, quivered with the shock; a sense of sudden depression came over them all. Little Mary cried, thinking what a very poor-looking lot of relations she would carry with her into the noble house she was about to enter. Gussy, with a more real sense of the fatal effect of this last complication, felt, half despairing, that her momentary gleam of hope was dying away in the darkness, and began to think the absence of Edgar at this critical moment almost a wrong to her. He had been absent for years, and she had kept steadily faithful to him, hopeful in him; but his absence of to-day filled her with a hopeless, nervous irritability and pain. As for Lady Augusta, she lost heart altogether.
“Your father will never listen to it,” she said—“never, never; he will think they are in a conspiracy. You will be the sufferer, Gussy, you and poor Edgar, for Harry will not be restrained; he will take his own way.”
What could Gussy reply? She was older than Harry; she was sick of coercion—why should not she, too, have her own way? But she did not say this, being grieved for the unfortunate mother, whom this last shock had utterly discomposed. Ada could do nothing but be the grieved spectator and sympathizer of all; as for the young Beatrice, her mind was divided between great excitement over the situation generally, and sorrow for poor Gussy, and an illegitimate, anxious longing to see the “lovely creature” of whom Harry had spoken in such raptures. Why should not people love and marry, without all these frightful complications? Beatrice was not so melancholy as the rest. She got a certain amount of pleasure out of the imbroglio; she even hoped that for herself there might be preparing something else even more romantic than Gussy’s—more desperate than Harry’s. Fate, which had long forgotten the Thornleigh household, and permitted them to trudge on in perfect quiet, had now roused out of sleep, and seemed to intend to give them their turn of excitement again.
Edgar made his appearance next day, looking so worn and fatigued that Lady Augusta had not the heart to warn him, as she had intended to do, that for the present she could not receive his visits—and that Gussy had not the heart to be cross. He told them he had been to Arden on business concerning Clare, and that Arthur Arden had come to town with him, and that peace and a certain friendship reigned, at least for the moment, between them. He did not confide even to Gussy what the cause of this singular amity was; but after he had been a little while in her company, his forehead began to smoothe, his smile to come back, the colour to appear once more in his face. He took her aside to the window, where the girls had been arranging fresh Spring flowers in a jardinière. He drew her arm into his, bending over the hyacinths and cyclamens. Now, for the first time, he could ask the question which had been thrust out of his mind by all that had happened within the last few days. A soft air of Spring, of happiness, of all the sweetness of life, which had been so long plucked from him, seemed to blow in Edgar’s face from the flowers.
“How should we like a Consulship?” he said, bending down to whisper in her ear.
“A what?” cried Gussy, astonished. She thought for the moment that he was speaking of some new flower.
Then Edgar took Lord Newmarch’s letter from his pocket, and held out the postscript to her, holding her arm fast in his, and his head close to hers.
“How should you like a Consulship?” he said.
Then the light and the life in his face communicated itself to her.
“A Consulship! Oh! Edgar, what does it mean?”
“To me it means you,” he said—“it means life; it means poverty too, perhaps, and humility, which are not what I would choose for my Gussy; but to me it means life, independence, happiness. Gussy, what am I to say?”
“Say!” she cried—“yes, of course—yes. What else? Italy, perhaps, and freedom—freedom once in our lives—and our own way; but, ah! what is the use of speaking of it?” said Gussy, dropping away from his arm, and stamping her foot on the ground, and falling into sudden tears, “when we are always to be prevented by other people’s folly, always stopped by something we have nothing to do with? Ask mamma, Edgar, what has happened since you went away.”
Then Lady Augusta drew near, having been a wondering and somewhat anxious spectator all the time of this whispered conversation, and told him with tears of her interview with Harry.
“What can I do?” she cried. “I do not want to say a word against your cousin. She may be nice, as nice as though she were a duke’s daughter; but Harry is our eldest son, and all my children have done so badly in this way except little Mary. Oh! my dears, I beg your pardon!” cried poor Lady Augusta, drying her eyes, “but what can I say? Edgar, I have always felt that I could ask you to do anything, if things should ever be settled between Gussy and you. Oh! save my boy! She cannot be very fond of him, she has known him so little; and his father will be furious, and will never consent—never! And until Mr. Thornleigh dies, they would have next to nothing, Oh! Edgar, if she is sensible, and would listen to reason, I would go to her myself—or Gussy could go.”
“Not I,” said Gussy, stealing a deprecating look at Edgar, who stood stupefied by this new complication—“how could I? It is terrible. How can I, who am pleasing myself, say anything to Harry because he wants to please himself?—or to her, who has nothing to do with our miserable and mercenary ways? Oh! yes, they are miserable and mercenary!” cried Gussy, crying in her turn; “though I can’t help feeling as you do, though my mind revolts against this poor girl, whom I don’t know, and I want to save Harry, too, as you say. But how dare I make Harry unhappy, in order to be happy myself? Oh! mamma, seek some other messenger—not me!—not me!”
“My darling,” said Lady Augusta, “it is for Harry’s good.”
“And it was for my good a little while ago!” cried Gussy. “You meant it, and so did they all. If you could have persuaded me to marry some one I cared nothing for, with my heart always longing for another, you would have thought it for my good; and now must I try to buy my happiness by ruining Harry’s?” cried the girl; “though I, too, am so dreadful, that I think it would be for Harry’s good. Oh! no, no, let it be some one else!”
“Edgar,” said Lady Augusta, “speak to her, show her the difference. Harry never saw this—this young woman till about a fortnight since. What can he know of her, what can she know of him, to be ready to marry him in a fortnight? Oh! Edgar, try to save my boy! Even if you were to represent to him that it would be kind to let your business be settled first,” she went on, after a pause. “A little time might do everything. I hope it is not wrong to scheme a little for one’s own children and their happiness. You might persuade him to wait, for Gussy’s sake—not to make his father furious with two at a time.”
Thus the consultation went on, if that could be called a consultation where the advice was all on one side. Edgar was fairly stupefied by this new twist in his affairs. He saw the fatal effect as clearly as even Lady Augusta could see it, but he could not see his own way to interfere in it, as she saw. To persuade Harry Thornleigh to give up or postpone his own will, in order that he, Edgar Earnshaw, might get his—an object in which Harry, first of all, had not the slightest sympathy—was about as hopeless an attempt as could well be thought of; and what right had he to influence Margaret, whom he did not know, to give up the brother, in order that he himself might secure the sister? Edgar left the house in as sore a dilemma as ever man was in. To give up Gussy now was a simple impossibility, but to win her by persuading her brother to the sacrifice of his love and happiness, was surely more impossible still.