EVERYTHING went on very quietly at Oakley during these two years. Arthur’s visit at home was very brief, and not very lively. And if there was a temporary sense of relief in Lady Curtis’s mind to know that he had escaped from the influence of “those people” and “that young woman,” it soon disappeared in presence of Arthur’s melancholy looks, and in contemplation of the painful position of a man so young, who was married, and yet not married, and whose path, accordingly, could not but be full of thorns and troubles. Such a position is dangerous and difficult in any sphere; but how much more in that to which he was going, where every temptation of society would surround the young man, and every freedom would be accorded to him! The mother and sister had many a discussion over him; but how difficult it was to question him on the subject, to pry into those arrangements of his which he did not care to reveal, or to ask anything about the final causes of the separation! Arthur, for his part, did not speak on the subject; when he arrived, at first, he had let them know, in a few words, that his wife and he had parted. “Don’t ask me about it, for I can’t tell you. I don’t know how it is,” he had said to his mother. “She will not conform to my way of living, and I cannot conform to hers—that is all. There is no blame; but how it happened, don’t ask me, for I don’t know.” Lady Curtis respected the request absolutely, and inquired no more of him. But it is needless to say how interesting the subject was to her; and with what eagerness she endeavoured to get the information otherwise which Arthur would not furnish. Durant told her all that he knew personally, all that happened under his own eyes; but this was not much more satisfactory than Arthur’s silence. “He has an air of thinking that she was not so very much in the wrong after all,” Lady Curtis said. “I do not understand Lewis. You would almost think, from the letters he writes, that she had bewitched him too.”
“I don’t think so,” Lucy said quickly, with a passing look upon her face which surprised her mother.
“I don’t mean to say anything against her,” said Lady Curtis. “It is not to be supposed that she has any great fault. God forbid, Lucy! I did not mean that.”
Lucy did not make any reply. It was not, perhaps, her brother’s wife she was thinking of. And when Arthur went away, Nancy became as if she had never existed to the family. They had Arthur’s letters as in the days when nothing lay between him and home; nothing but mere distance and absence—time and space, innocent obstacles which harm no one, though they are hard enough to put up with. And his wife, whom he ceased to speak of, fell into the background with his people. To be sure, when any young man in the county, or whom they knew, made a brilliant and satisfactory marriage, Lady Curtis and Lucy would look at each other with quick interchange of glances. And Sir John would come in, in the afternoon, and set his back against the mantel-piece, while he took his cup of tea, and say with a sigh, “They seem to be making a great fuss over young Seymour’s marriage.”
“Yes,” Lady Curtis would answer with another sigh, “and no wonder—nothing could be more suitable.” They were almost angry with young Seymour for marrying as the heir to such a property ought to have married; and, probably, Lucy would launch some arrow at the new pair in sheer impatience of the praise thus accorded. “So suitable that it is unnecessary to think of love in the matter,” Lucy perhaps would say. And then Sir John would shrug his shoulders as he stood before the fire.
“Love! that’s neither here nor there; if all the follies could be collected that have been done in the name of love!” And he would shake his grey old head, and again sigh, looking with eyes of admiration at Lucy as he went slowly back to his library, not able to get young Seymour and his fine marriage out of his head. Lady Curtis broke into a smile against her will as he went away.
“You are not to think of any such folly, Lucy,” she said, “your father thinks that with your fortune you would be very happy unmarried. He says it is only poor people who need fear the fate of old maids. This is a great step for Sir John to take, who is such a Conservative.”
“Are old maids against the Tory faith?” said Lucy, not sorry to have something to say.
“Yes; it is the ancient creed that every woman should marry, and that it is only the ugly, the cross, and the unloveable that fail to attain that glorious end. What a stretch of principle this is for your father! I do not go so far even with my advanced views.”
Lady Curtis looked at her daughter curiously as she spoke. They spent their lives together, hour by hour and year by year. They had everything in common—when the post came in, they opened each other’s letters indiscriminately, the last depth of mutual confidence; read the same books, thought the same thoughts, were one in all the affairs of life; and yet in this most intimate affair of all, the mother looked at the daughter with unutterable yearnings of curiosity, not knowing what Lucy thought.
Nothing was said for some time after. Spring had come breathing over the woods, and to look between the pillars of the facade through the long windows of my lady’s room upon the avenue, was like looking into a wilderness of buds and hopes. “Here is Bertie coming again,” she said with a little impatience; then laughing, “he is one, Lucy, of whom your father is afraid.”
“Poor Bertie!” said Lucy composedly; but she was startled into dismay when her mother suddenly burst into tears.
“To think,” said Lady Curtis, “that Bertie’s child, if he had a child, would be your father’s heir!”
“Mamma!” Lucy blushed crimson, then laughed. “He is the second son—and Arthur—”
“Arthur will never have any children,” said Lady Curtis gloomily, “if things do not change. And she is young and strong, as young as you are—why should she die to accommodate us? And Gerald Curtis is a wandering invalid. Ah! there is no fear of the Seymours—they will have their own flesh and blood after them whatever happens. But your father is growing an old man, Lucy; and Bertie—Bertie’s son will be the heir!”
“He is not even married yet; there can be no need for vexing ourselves over such a remote contingency.”
“But it will happen,” said Arthur’s mother, “though it is so remote. My boy is like Warrington, in ‘Pendennis,’ Lucy, shut off from life; no child for him, no love for him; all because of one foolish, foolish step when he was nothing but a boy!”
“But, mamma! you really do not mean that boys should be permitted to escape the consequences of such foolish steps,” cried Lucy. “How unlike you to say so!”
“Ah! one becomes unlike one’s self when it is one’s self that suffers,” said Lady Curtis with a sigh.
And then Bertie made his appearance, and all feeling was banished from her countenance. She discussed young Seymour’s marriage with interest. “Nothing could have been more suitable. So suitable that one felt something must interpose to put a stop to it. The girl of all others he ought to have married! And a charming girl—pretty and well-bred, and sweet—”
“I hear they are all immensely pleased; but I do not admire her so much as you do. She is not the style I care for,” said the Rector. “She is too charming, and too sensible, and too everything she ought to be—for me.”
“Faultily faultless,” said Lady Curtis smiling. She was pleased that he did not approve of young Seymour’s perfect wife.
“And she is heavy,” said Bertie. “I used to know her very well. Her brother was of my college. She will not be an addition to the gaiety of the family. She has not very much to say for herself.”
“All the more suitable,” Lady Curtis said, brightening visibly, “they are all heavy.” She had never liked Bertie so well. She told him the news in Arthur’s last letter, that he was liking Vienna very much, and happy in his new position; and wound up by an invitation to dinner. Lucy sat by and worked, and wondered, not without a smile about the corners of her mouth. She had no objection to her cousin, nor any alarm of him in her mind. He was “not the style she cared for,” she said to herself with a mocking echo of his speech; but that Lady Curtis, after her melancholy anticipation of the inevitable heirship of Bertie’s problematical son should be so easily mollified, amused her daughter. She let the conversation go on while she worked quietly, thinking her own thoughts. Lucy did not, perhaps, find the idea of remaining unmarried as attractive as her father did. She smiled at that too in her secret thoughts. Who is there that does not smile at it, being young? Why should there be anyone in the world who was not happy—who did not have all that the imagination desires, love and honour, and all the brightnesses and sympathy which love can give? Lucy had a private world to retire into at odd moments, a world so peopled that her fancy could not receive the idea of a lonely life. While her mother and Bertie talked, she had opened her secret door and gone in, entering into that vague sweet blessedness of dreams which is more than any vulgar reality of happiness. She heard their conversation, but it did not touch her. Her head was bent down a little over that work at which she was seldom so industrious, and even the smile was concealed that floated about her lips—that smile which was not for her family, much as she loved them. Lady Curtis had tried her best to lift the curtain, to look into that secret world of which she suspected the existence, but which she had no clue to, no thread to guide her through; but it did not occur to her to think of this at the moment when her daughter had escaped into it from her very side.
“So Bertie is coming,” said Sir John. “Why, Bertie? Yes, to be sure, he is a relation, and has a claim; but I see no reason why you should ask him so often. It looks as if you meant to throw him in Lucy’s way.”
“He will never be anything to Lucy,” said Lady Curtis, smiling.
“That is all very well; but how do you know? Girls are not like anything else. They may hate a man one week and accept him the next. I’ve lived long enough to see that.”
“You think they like to begin with a little aversion, as Mrs. Malaprop says—”
“Eh? I don’t know anything about Mrs. Malaprop. I speak from my own observation. I would not put him in Lucy’s way.”
“No one would be less likely to attract Lucy’s attention. Why, Bertie! he is no more equal to Lucy—”
“As if that mattered,” said Sir John, with quiet contempt. “What do they care? You’ve had one example; you ought to know better; and you will have another before you know where you are. You are injudicious, I must say. You don’t mind whom you introduce Lucy to, my lady; and if it is not one it will be another,” he said, winding up hurriedly as Lucy came in. The parents both looked at her with that tender admiration which is, perhaps, of all admiration the most exquisite. They were not easily pleased in respect to Lucy. Her dress, her ornaments, her appearance were all surveyed with fastidious eyes; and from her shiny hair to the tip of her little satin shoe, these two difficult people could bear no imperfection in this lamp of their life. Sir John’s inspection was not so minute or so intelligent as his wife’s; he could not tell what she had on, or whether there was technical perfection in her toilette; but he was very critical about the general effect. As for Lady Curtis, she went into all the details; and they were both satisfied; it was no small thing to say. There was a little cluster of white narcissus in her hair, which her mother liked, but at which Sir John shook his head. “Is that for Bertie?” he said jealously, in his mind. Girls were strange creatures; they liked to be admired whether they cared for the man who admired them or not; and no doubt she would fall a victim to one of my lady’s protégés, if not to Bertie. This thought it was, along with disapprobation of the flowers, as something added to her toilette for Bertie’s sake, which made Sir John shake his head.
“The Rolts were to have been here to-day,” said Lady Curtis; “but I hear Mrs. John caught cold at the Seymours’, and Julia has gone to nurse her.”
“Julia is always nursing somebody,” said Sir John.
Julia was Mrs. Rolt, the wife of the agent, who was a humble relation of the Curtises; and Mrs. John Rolt was the wife of his brother, the lawyer at Oakenden, who had the affairs of the county in his hands.
“She will have heard everything about the marriage. As soon as she comes back she will rush up here, wet or dry, to tell us what the bridesmaids had on, and all about the breakfast; it is a long time,” said Lady Curtis with a sigh, “since there have been such grand doings in the county; not since Arthur came of age.”
“I am glad to hear that Arthur gets on so well in Vienna,” said the Rector, addressing himself to his uncle; “that is better than the Seymours’ junketings. I hope he’ll make a mark in diplomacy. He ought with his abilities.”
“Ah, yes,” said Sir John; “as for making a mark, that’s another thing. It’s very well for the present; but a country gentleman’s place is at home in his own county. It’s all very well now.”
“Well, Sir,” said the Rector, “some of us have no chance beyond the county, or even the parish; but when a man has a chance he ought to take advantage of it.”
“There’s nothing better than the county,” said Sir John, “and the parish for a clergyman. What would you have? You can’t do more than your duty wherever you may be. I hope Arthur will stick to his, and then I shan’t complain. If he had been at it sooner it would have been better for us all.”
“Lewis Durant has been hearing a great deal about him,” said Lady Curtis; “everything that is most satisfactory. Lewis is not much in society, I suppose, his work would not permit it; but he hears everything at the club. That is where you men get all your news. I hear all sorts of things from him; and he knows the kind of news that is most acceptable here.”
“There is a great deal in that,” said the Rector. “Some men make quite a business of it. It helps a man on wonderfully; but if Durant is rising in his profession, as you were saying, he can’t have much time for his club. Son of old Durant, the saddler, isn’t he? How odd that such men should be in clubs at all.”
Bertie Curtis knew exactly what he was doing; he was not cowed by the look of indignant wonder which met him from Lady Curtis’s eyes, nor the less open gleam of scorn and defiance which came from under Lucy’s drooped eyelids. It was Sir John the Rector meant to work upon, not the ladies, whom he knew to be partizans of his rival. Nobody had ever hinted that Durant was his rival, or that Sir John was nervous on the subject; but there are some things which reveal themselves without the aid of words.
“Not the son, the grandson,” said Sir John. “Old Durant is dead long ago, and left a very good fortune; but they’ve run through a great part of it, I fear. That is the worst of fortunes made in trade; they go as fast as they come. As for young Durant, I wish half the young men in the clubs were half as good fellows. But he is not the kind of man, one must allow, whom you would expect to see familiar in our houses.”
“What kind of men do you like to see familiar in your house?” said Lady Curtis. “Empty-headed nobodies? Lewis will always make his way. He has friends that are more worth having than we are. He goes everywhere.”
“Does he, indeed?” said the Rector; “and his profession, what becomes of his profession? His father—or grandfather, was it?—would not have approved of that; but lawyers, though everybody says they are so hardworking, have a great deal of leisure, I think. How different a clergyman is, now—”
“Cousin Bertie, were you not at Epsom or somewhere the other day?” said Lucy, whose indignation was almost beyond words.
“Yes; I went down with Gerald, who has to be amused, poor fellow; but I did not think anyone knew,” the Rector said, hastily; at which Sir John, though perhaps it was not quite polite, shook his head.
“The turf is all very well,” he said. “It suits some men well enough; but a clergyman should not get the name of it, Bertie. I don’t like it for a clergyman.”
“Nor I, Sir; you are perfectly right, as you always are. I may have liked horses too much in my younger days—not wisely, but too well, perhaps—we all have some weakness; but I hope since I took orders there has been nothing to object to,” said the Rector, looking his astonished uncle full in the face, with mild defiance. And what could Sir John say thus boldly encountered? “Poor Gerald is a wretched invalid,” he continued, “sick of everything. I never saw such a blasé washed out being. He has had too much of what people call life, and he’s tired enough of it all. They think at home that his health depends upon keeping him amused—that’s why I went,” said Bertie, with all the innocence imaginable. “We’ve all got to amuse him, and you might just as well try to amuse this table. He is bored to death with everything. But then, he always was my father’s favourite, and he can do no wrong.”
There was a pause, for this Gerald, the eldest son, who was bored with everything, and in bad health, and possessed every attribute disliked by Sir John, was, failing Arthur, the heir presumptive of Oakley; and this passed through the minds of all the party, bringing a pang of unhappiness with it, as the Rector knew it would do.
“Is he likely to marry I wonder?” said Sir John.
“That is the only foolish thing he has omitted to do. It is far from being a foolish thing with most people; but with him, worn out in body and mind, old before his time—and without a penny, why should he marry?”
“I am not so sure of that,” said Sir John, with a sigh; and then he broke out hastily with an exclamation and question, in which a stranger would have seen little coherence. “Lord, what a strange world it is! How many boys are there of the Seymours?” he said.
That was the bitterest thought to them. Young Seymour to marry somebody so very suitable, and failing him, if he had not married, half-a-dozen boys to succeed! whereas Arthur had put himself out of court, and made all succession in the direct line impossible; and there were only Anthony’s sons to follow. Anthony’s sons! the thought was gall and wormwood to them both. Gerald, a worn out young roué, and Bertie; one of them must come after Arthur, who had cut off himself, or at least cut off all following, all blessings of succession. And such a suitable marriage as young Seymour had made! What wonder if it went to their hearts.
“I’ve seen Durant at Epsom too,” said the Rector, forgetting, for the moment, his own line of self-defence; “he’s very much about, I think; here and there, and wherever one goes. Men of his class lay themselves out to please; they have more motive, I suppose, than men of more assured position.”
“Mr. Durant,” said Lady Curtis, hotly, “lays himself out, if you like the expression, Bertie, to be of use to his friends. He has got from his Maker one of the kindest hearts that ever beat, and consequently he is welcome wherever he is known.”
“There is justice though in what Bertie says,” said Sir John, coming up with his heavy forces to conclude the argument. “A young fellow like that may be very friendly, but you can’t take his friendship for nothing, my lady; and what would you ladies say who make so much of him, if the tradesman’s grandson asked for one of your daughters? That would open your eyes.”
Sir John felt that he had made a great coup when he said this, and he was glad of the opportunity of saying it; but nevertheless he was a little afraid of the consequences.
“Take another glass of wine,” he said, hurriedly, pushing the decanter towards his nephew. “You’ll excuse me not sitting long to-night, for I’ve something to do.”
This cut short any indignant remonstrance that might have been on Lady Curtis’s lips. She and Lucy took the hint and went away; but they did not say anything to each other, as they certainly would have done had anyone but Durant been in question. To tell the truth, the great curiosity in Lady Curtis’s curious and lively mind was on this subject of Durant. What did Lucy think of him? What did he think of Lucy? But as neither one nor the other had spoken to her on the subject, how could she interfere? She stole many a look at her daughter as they went to their tranquil occupations together. Perhaps Lucy’s eyes were heavier than usual, less ready to meet her mother’s; but she said not a word on the subject; and from Lady Curtis’s side, after that utterance of her husband’s, what was there to say?