THE next day after, being the Saturday, our little Easter party assembled; first our neighbors the Sedgwicks, who were a party in themselves. Ten years before, Hugh Sedgwick had been the finest gentleman in our neighborhood, which he filled with amazement and consternation when he chose to fall in love with and marry little Clara Harley, whom, in the most literal sense of the word, he married out of the school-room, and who was just seventeen years old. But now that five children had followed this marriage, nobody could have supposed or believed in the existence of any such great original contrast between the husband and wife. Either Mr. Sedgwick had grown younger, or Clara older, than their years. He who now called Maurice Harley a prig, had been himself the prince of prigs—according to the estimate of the country gentlemen, his neighbors—in his day; but that day was long departed. Hugh Sedgwick, fastidious, dilettante fine gentleman, as he had been, was now the solicitous father of little children, and not above giving very sound advice upon measles and hooping-cough—while Clara, who had gradually blossomed out into fuller and fuller bloom, had scarcely yet attained the height of her soft beauty, despite the little flock of children round her. Nobody in the county made such a toilette as little Mrs. Sedgwick. I suspect she must have had carte blanche as to her milliner’s bills; and when they entered the Hilfont drawing-room, Clara, with her pretty matronly self-possession, her graceful little figure, round and full as one of her own babies, and her lovely little face, with all its cloudless lilies and roses—nobody could have believed in the time when his good neighbors shrugged their shoulders and laughed at Hugh Sedgwick’s choice. She sat down, I remember, by Miss Polly Greenfield—dear old Miss Polly in her primeval drapery—that crimson satin gown which I had known all my life. Such a contrast they made in the bright youth and pale age of the two faces, which came together lovingly in a kiss of greeting! Since her brother, Sir Willoughby, had married, Miss Polly’s habits had changed greatly. She had thrown aside her old brown riding-dress and the stiff man’s hat she used to wear when she rode with Sir Willoughby. And when her old horse and her old groom were old enough to be pensioned off in their respective paddock and cottage, Miss Polly set up a pony-carriage, more suitable to her years. Her niece, a young widow of twenty, a poor, little, disconsolate soul, who was all the trouble in the world to Miss Polly, had made a second marriage, and left her two little children to the care of their grandaunt. They were little girls both, and the tender old woman was very happy in their society—happier a hundred times than when she had been mistress of Fenosier Hall. But to hear how little Clara, who once had stood somewhat in awe of Miss Polly, talked to her now!—advising her how to manage little Di and Emmy, telling how she regulated her own Clary, who, though a good deal younger, was very far on for her age—with what a sweet touch of superiority and simplicity the dear little matron looked down from her wifely and motherly elevation upon pale old Miss Polly, who was neither mother nor wife! Clara was quite ready at the same moment to have bestowed her matronly counsels upon me.
After the Sedgwicks, Alice Harley, all by herself, as became one who felt herself at home, and was all but a daughter of the house, came into the room. Alice was plain in her dress to the extreme of plainness. That she assumed an evening dress at all was somewhat against her convictions, and in compassion to my weakness and prejudice; but the dress was of dark colored silk, made with a studied sobriety of cut, and lack of ornament. Instead of sharing Clara’s round soft loveliness, Alice had grown slender and pale. Unimaginative people called her thin. Out of her girlish beauty had come a face full of thoughtfulness and expression, but not so pretty as some people expected—perhaps, because somehow or other, the ordinary roselight of youth had failed to Alice. Half by choice, half by necessity, she had settled down into the humdrum useful existence which the eldest daughter of a large family, if she does not elude her fate by an early marriage, so often falls into. Various “offers” had been made to her, one of which Mrs. Harley, divided between a mother’s natural wish to see her daughter properly “settled,” and a little reluctance, not less natural, to part with her own household counsellor and helper, had given a wavering support to. Alice, however, said No, coldly, and not, as I thought, without the minutest possible tinge of bitterness answered the persuasions which were addressed to her. She was rather high and grandiloquent altogether on the subject of marriage, looking on with a half-comic, disapproving spectator observation at little Clara’s loving tricks to her husband, whom that little matron had no awe of now-a-days, and discoursing more than seemed to me entirely necessary upon the subject. Alice was somewhat inclined to the views of those philosophers (chiefly feminine, it must be confessed) who see in the world around them, not a general crowd of human creatures, but two distinct rows of men and women; and she was a little condescending and superior, it must also be admitted, to that somewhat frivolous antagonistic creature, man. The ideal man, whom Alice had never—so she intimated—had the luck to light upon, was a demigod; but the real male representatives of the race were poor creatures—well enough, to be sure, but no more worthy of a woman’s devotion than of any other superlative gift. With sentiments so distinct and prononcés, Alice had not lived all these years without feeling some yearning for an independent sway and place of her own, as one may well suppose—which tempted her into further speculations about women’s work, and what one could do to make a place for one’s self, who had positively determined not to be indebted for one’s position to one’s husband. Such was the peculiar atmosphere out of which Alice Harley revealed herself to the common world. She was deeply scornful of that talk about people which pleased my boy so much, and so severe upon gossip and gossips, that I had on more than one occasion seriously to defend myself. There she stood in her dark-brown silk dress beside little Clara’s flowing toilette and vivacious nursery talk, casting a shadow upon pale Miss Polly in her crimson satin. Alice was as much unlike that tender old soul, with her old maidenly restraints and preciseness, her unbounded old womanly indulgence and kindness, as she was unlike her matronly younger sister; and I confess that to myself, in all her perverseness, knowing as I did what a genuine heart lay below, there was quite a charm of her own about the unmarried woman. She was so conscious of her staid and sober age, so unconscious of her pleasant youth, and the simplicity which, all unknown to herself, lay in her wisdom. Such was my Alice; the same Alice who, keeping silent and keeping her brothers and sisters quiet in the nursery, while she knew her father lay dying many a long year ago, adjured me with unspeakable childish pathos—“Oh, don’t be sorry for me! I mustn’t cry!”
I do not know how it was that, while I contemplated Alice on her first appearance with a kind of retrospective glance at her history, there suddenly appeared above her the head of Mr. Reredos. He was a middle-sized, handsome man, with a pale complexion and dark hair—very gentlemanly, people said—a man who preached well, talked well, and looked well, and who, even to my eyes, which were no way partial, had no particular defect worth noticing, if it were not the soft, large, white hands without any bones in them, which held your fingers in a warm, velvety clasp when you shook hands with the new rector. I don’t know how he had managed to come in without my perceiving him. And strong must have been the attraction which beguiled Mr. Reredos to neglect the duty of paying his respects to his hostess, even for five minutes. It was not five minutes, however, before he recollected himself, and came with his soft white hand and his sister on his arm. His sister was so far like himself that she was very pale, with very black hair, and an “interesting” look. She did not interest me very much; but I could not help hoping that perhaps in this sentimental heroine Maurice Harley, for the time being, might meet his fate. I thought that would be rather a comfortable way of shelving those members of our party; for Maurice, though he was a very fine gentleman, not to say Fellow of his College, afflicted my soul with a constant inclination to commit a personal assault upon him, and have him whipped and sent to bed.
However, to be sure, we had all the elements of a very pleasant party about us—people who belonged to us, as one may say. Derwent, who liked to see a number of cheerful faces about him, was in the lightest spirits; he paid Clara Sedgwick compliments on her toilette, and “chaffed” (as he called it—I am not responsible for the word) Alice, whom he had the sincerest affection for, but loved to tease, and took Miss Polly in to dinner, while little Derwie did the honors of the nursery to a party almost as large, and quite as various. I fear we made rather a night of feasting than a penitential vigil of that Easter Eve.