THAT which Lady Curtis had reproached Durant for not doing was done by the lawyers so successfully that Arthur Curtis was driven almost frantic, and swore wild oaths of vengeance upon his family. Sir John’s ambassador was not held back by any delicacy. He offered a sum which made Mrs. Bates tremble, and moved her husband to declare, with emphasis, that they had never thought of going against Sir John—that, of course, they wouldn’t go against Sir John. Mr. Bates had a reverence for the upper classes which was almost sublime. He made no radical revolutionary demand of excellence from them—he did not even require that they should benefit, or be especially civil to himself. Anyhow, and under any circumstances, he was willing to give himself up to be trodden under the feet of any Sir John, if need was; and that he should oppose one, after his will was fully known, seemed impossible. Especially a Sir John with a bag of money in his hand.
“Let him marry our Nancy after Sir John Curtis, his excellent father, has spoke against it! You couldn’t do such a thing, Sarah,” he said, “and when there is a nice bit of money coming in for doing what is only our dooty—”
“Our duty is first to Nancy,” said Mrs. Bates doubtfully, “and if we were to say it shouldn’t be, who can tell if she’d obey us? Nancy has a spirit of her own.”
That this was true they both had good occasion to know. But it was a great temptation. The lawyer gave them to understand that if Nancy could be withdrawn from the field, and Arthur allowed to go free—(this was how they all put it, making believe that Arthur was a kind of caged bird, to be let loose, or kept in a cage at will)—a thousand pounds might be forthcoming. A thousand pounds! never before in all their lives had such a sum been dangled before the eyes of this pair. There seemed so many things that they could do with it. It would portion off, they thought, all the children. With two hundred a piece, Matilda and Sarah Jane would be heiresses, and Charley might have a little more to start him in business; and a sum left in the bank for a rainy day. What a heavenly prospect it was! “Was there any sweetheart in the world,” the tax-collector asked, “that was worth it?” and Mrs. Bates shook her head emphatically and said, “No—certainly not!” But then would Nancy see that? Girls had their own ways of thinking; and on the other side was her sweetheart, and the marriage that was all settled, that everybody knew of—Mrs. Bates felt that even to herself this would be a bitter pill—to countermand all the preparations for the wedding, and give all the neighbours a right to say that the Bates’ had overreached themselves, and pride was having a fall. This, no doubt, would be a tremendous price to pay; but, a thousand pounds! They talked it over until it seemed to them both that not to have this thousand pounds would be at once a deception and a wrong. The Lord knew it was not for themselves they wanted it. But Mr. Bates was more and more strongly of opinion that to prefer a sweetheart to this sum of money, that would be the making of the family, was something beyond mortal perversity. He was for sending her away at once to a brother of his who lived in Wapping, without leaving her time to communicate with Arthur.
“But you must lock her up when she gets to Wapping,” said Mrs. Bates regretfully, “or she’d write to him straight off to let him know where she was—and where would be the gain?”
“Well, Sally, we’d have had nothing to do with it, you know,” said Mr. Bates, not liking to put the suggestion into words—but yet feeling that if the thousand pounds was paid, and circumstances happened after, over which they had no control—why, they could have no control over circumstances—and nobody would ask them to give back the money. Mr. Bates’ wits had been sharpened by his tax-collecting, but his wife was not so clever.
“If we take the money, we’ll have to do the work,” she said, “and it’s all very well to talk, but who’ll manage Nancy? That girl do scare me.”
“Fudge! you can manage her if you like. What girl can stand out again her mother?” said Bates.
“It is a deal you know,” said his wife with mingled grandeur and scorn; “but I’ll sound Nancy. I think sometimes that she’s a bit tired of him. He’s a gentleman, and has nice ways; but he’s not so desperate in earnest like as John Raisins is after Sarah Jane.”
“Ah! that’s the kind of husband to get for your girls. A steady young fellow doing a good business, with a nice shop and a nice house. That’s the man for my money,” said Mr. Bates.
“That shows again just what a deal you know,” said she, “Sarah Jane would rather have had Mr. Durant, that lawyer fellow, if he had offered, than half a dozen of Johnny Raisins. That’s how it is with girls. A gentleman! that’s all their cry. And I won’t say but I like ’em best myself,” Mrs. Bates said after a pause. “They have a different way with them; but these are things that women take more notice of than men.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said the tax-collector, piqued by the suggestion.
“You know, William,” said Mrs. Bates solemnly, “that if it hadn’t been for your genteel ways, and what you may call a genteel business, not like a shop, or that sort of thing, that I’d never have married you.”
“Oh, I like that!” he said. But he was on the whole pleased to think his occupation still struck his wife as a genteel business. “I’ve got to give an answer to the gentleman to-morrow, Sally. There’s not much time to lose.”
“I’ll sound Nancy,” said Mrs. Bates, but she shook her head.
“Sound her! I’d pack her off to Sam,” said the father; but that only showed how little he knew.
And Nancy, as Mrs. Bates divined, on being sounded, was furious. She had no words to express her indignation. She rushed out in hot haste to find Arthur, and denounce his family to him. He had left Mr. Eagles, and was living in lodgings on the Green, and there Nancy flew in hot haste, tapping at his window, which was on the ground floor, and calling him forth. She would have gone in, but it had been evident to her that this was not the kind of thing that pleased Arthur. She burst forth into a furious assault upon his family the moment he joined her.
“If it was not just giving in to them, I’d never see you more,” she said, “that is what you call gentlefolks—to come undermining, offering money, insulting folks that are a deal better than themselves!”
“Trying to ruin my happiness,” said Arthur, with flashing eyes; “that is not the thing you seem to think of.”
“How can I, when it’s me that’s insulted?” cried the girl. “Oh! I’d like to give them a bit of my mind. I’d just like to tell my lady what a girl like me thinks of her. I’d like to tell her that, just to spite her. Just to show how I despise her, I’d marry you if you hadn’t a penny.”
“Nancy, my mother has nothing to do with this,” said Arthur, to whom, as was natural enough, this form of moral obligation was not the most delightful. “I don’t mean to say that you have not a perfect right to be indignant. But it is not my mother that is to blame.”
“Oh, yes, so you think,” cried the girl; “but it’s always women that do the worst things. I’m not afraid of men. They may stab you bold to your face, but they don’t do this sort of sneaking, cruel thing. I’d give anything I’ve got in the world just for one half-hour with my lady, her and me.”
“My mother has nothing to do with it,” repeated Arthur; but though he was convinced on this point, his mother, who had nothing to do with it, suddenly appeared to him as an enemy; and he, too, felt a hot resentment against her in his heart. And when he had taken Nancy home, which he did somewhat against her will, for she did not think his escort at all necessary; he rushed to Mr. Rolt, the lawyer, and poured such floods of wrath upon him that the veteran almost quailed. He wrote to Sir John that evening that Arthur was quite impracticable, and that “affairs must take their course.” “If I had known earlier, something might have been done, for the parents did not seem unwilling to compromise,” he wrote, which made Sir John, in his turn, curse the old formalist.
“If I had but gone myself!” he said.
Lady Curtis was completely innocent of this mission; perhaps she would not have disapproved of it, but certainly she herself would have gone more delicately to work. She was informed of it by a furious letter from Arthur, which cost her many tears.
“If it is your doing, mother, if you have thus insulted the girl who ought to be like your own daughter, then I can only say that you have lost your son,” he wrote; and the two ladies in Berkeley Square shed tears of anguish and indignation over this cruel letter.
“This is likely to endear the girl to me, is it not?” said Lady Curtis, when she could speak.
“Oh, he does not mean it, he cannot mean it!” cried Lucy, with sobs in her voice.
“No,” said the mother, unconsciously taking up Nancy’s argument, with that curious contempt of the men involved in such a quarrel which is so strangely characteristic of women; “no, it is not him, it is her; and this is the influence my boy, my only boy, is to be under all his life!”
What could Lucy say? There was nothing further to be said or done.
And it may be supposed that as the day approached, and they knew that he who had been the object of deepest concern and affection to both, the son who had been his mother’s favourite, the brother whom his sister had looked up to and regarded with a semi-worship so long as he would let her, was about to go through the most important act of his life without their presence or sympathy—excitement ran very high in the veins of the two ladies. Sir John called them home by every post, having in his mind a secret dread that they might do something or say something to compromise him, or at least themselves, in respect to Arthur; and Lady Curtis, without ever saying why, made excuses to remain, now a week, now a day longer. She did not even tell herself why; she would not allow the thought to form itself, that, perhaps, even at the last moment, Arthur might appear, at least to ask her forgiveness and blessing, if not to tell her that he had repented and abandoned this evil way. She stayed in Berkeley Square, trembling every time there was a knock at the door, gazing wistfully from the window at passing cabs and carriages. When Durant came in a Hansom, one wintry evening, he was received with open arms at the door; and the disappointment and impatience in Lady Curtis’s face at the sight of him, was very far from flattering.
“Oh!” she cried, “I thought it was—” and burst into tears.
When Lucy tried to say that he could not come now, that to desert his bride now would be unmanly and treacherous, her mother turned upon her with a dumb rage which was terrible to see. She hoped till the very eve of the marriage—the time fixed for which Durant had informed them of. And that evening Lucy made a prayer, which her mother was deeply angered by at first, but finally yielded to. Lucy begged, with tears, to be allowed to go and witness her brother’s marriage, from a distance, at least. She promised to do nothing and say nothing which would betray her; to keep her veil down, not to speak to him, not to give him any token of her presence. All this Lucy promised, and at last she carried her point. They spent a miserable evening together, Durant coming in late to bring them the last news. He had found out the hour, and all about the wedding arrangements, and he was too happy to put himself at Lucy’s service to escort her to Underhayes. Lady Curtis’ old maid, who had known Arthur all his life, and who could not be kept from knowing all the family affairs, was to go with them; and Durant pledged himself to meet them at the railway, and take care of them, and see that they were protected from any contact with the family of Arthur’s bride. In the prospect of this, Durant was, perhaps, not so downcast about Arthur’s unhappy marriage as he ought to have been, and Lady Curtis surprised sundry signs of unseemly satisfaction in him.
“I do not think Mr. Durant is nearly so true a friend to my poor boy as I should have expected,” she said, with a suspicious cloud on her face, when he went away.
“Oh, mamma, I am sure he is very fond of Arthur,” said Lucy. She too had seen, perhaps, the glimpses of satisfaction which burst through his gravity; but then Lucy, better informed than her mother, set them down to the right cause.
“He may be fond of Arthur, but he does not see as we do that this is destruction to him,” said Lady Curtis, putting her handkerchief to her wet eyes.
“I am sure he will be his warm friend in any trouble.”
“Well, my dear, let us hope so; for he will want all his friends. I think so myself,” said Lady Curtis. “In any trouble! What do you call this but trouble? If he had lost everything he had in the world, it would not be half so bad; but men have such strange ways of looking at things. If he were to break his leg or get a bad illness, which would not be half so serious——”
“Oh, mamma!” cried Lucy, putting out two fingers of her pretty hand to avert the evil omen.
“Well, well, you know that is not what I mean. God forbid my boy should be ill, away from home, among strangers!” cried Lady Curtis. “It would be strange if you had to faire les cornes for anything his mother said; but what would illness be in comparison with this? In that case, Mr. Durant would be perfect, I feel sure of it; but now——”
“I think he was pleased to see how your heart melted to poor Arthur, and to know of this,” said Lucy, pointing to a letter which lay on the table. Was it for her to say that there was still something else which made Durant still more glad?
“Oh, Lucy! as if my heart required to be melted towards my son, my only boy!”
And then you may be sure Lucy cried; what could a girl do?
It can scarcely be said that these preparatory days were much more cheerful to Arthur. Everybody had dropped away from him. He had the prospect in a few days of what people are pleased to call happiness. He was to marry the bride of his choice, and to take her away with him, the two by themselves, the Elysium of the primitive imagination; and Arthur was very much in love. He believed that as soon as they got away, when he had once separated this rose of his from all the domestic thorns surrounding her, he would be perfectly happy. It was the one redeeming point in the difficulties of the moment that he entirely believed this. Then, at least, he thought he was sure of blessedness; and that prospect made much possible that would not have been possible otherwise. But to be cut off from all companionship of his own class, even from Mr. Eagles, and the “men” who frequented Mr. Eagles’ intellectual workshops; to be separated from his family whom he loved, though he was angry with them, to have nothing to do, though on ordinary occasions he was not disposed to do very much—this isolation was very hard upon Arthur. He had no society but that of the Bates’ household, and was often left to amuse himself as he could in the stuffy parlour, without even Nancy, who had naturally a great many things to do on the eve of her wedding, which brides in rich households are not called upon to think of. Arthur winced when he had to endure the companionship of the tax-collector or his son Charley, unsweetened by Nancy’s presence; and it must be allowed that as the time approached which was to bind him for ever to the family, his toleration of them, which during his courtship had been unbounded, began to give way. It began to be very hard to put up with Mr. Bates’ rum-and-water, and the railleries of Sarah Jane; and Matilda and Mrs. Bates, both of whom were “sensible,” began to perceive this—the mother with resentment, the daughter with a certain sympathy. Matilda intimated to her mother that “it was touch and go with Arthur,” and that she “wasn’t surprised;” but the father and son and Sarah Jane remained happily unaware that they were not the best of company for Nancy’s future husband, whom they called freely by his Christian name, making him “quite at home.” This gave him an eagerness to push on the wedding, which was quite the proper thing in the circumstances. He would have had it a week earlier if he could have persuaded them to depart from any of the grandeur they intended, and as it was, he chafed and grumbled at the delay in a way, which as Mrs. Bates remarked, was “most flattering” for them all. But poor Arthur had no intention of flattering. He could do nothing but sit in his lodgings, or in the Bates’ parlour, and watch the progress of the hours. After the wedding he vowed to himself he would change all that; there would be an entire revolution in his life; he would escape with his Nancy into a better and fresher air, and when they asked about the return of the pair, he did his best to evade the question.
“I don’t think we must bind ourselves to anything, Mrs. Bates. If Nancy likes Paris we may stay there—or if we can get as far as Italy——”
“Oh, I shan’t stay very long, mamma,” said Nancy, “I daresay I shall soon get tired among foreigners.”
“Shouldn’t I like to see you,” cried Mrs. Bates, “you that know the language! What a good thing it is you that is going, and not Matilda or Sarah Jane.”
“Oh I should soon have got on,” said the latter personage. “I should soon have picked it up, commeng vous portez vous; I know a little already.”
“But not like Nancy, who had French for five quarters at Miss Woodroof’s, when your poor dear aunt was alive. My sister was one that thought a great deal of education—”
“I wish you would not all talk together,” said Nancy, whose temper was not improved by her important position. “I hated it. I never learned a word I could help. I’ll let Arthur do all the talking; and as soon as ever we can, you’ll see us home.”
“On the contrary,” said Arthur, with secret uneasiness, “you will like Paris so well that you will never wish to leave it. It is so gay and bright; and if we can go on as far as Italy—that is what I should like most.”
“Anyhow, you will be back before Christmas?”
“Oh, Christmas! long before that!” said Nancy.
Arthur said nothing; but he recorded a vow in the depths of his heart.