THE ball was the most brilliant and the most successful that ever had been at Blencarrow, and nothing was wanting to make it intoxicating and delightful to the boys, whose every whim had been thought of and all their partialities taken into account. Mrs. Blencarrow was perfect as a mother. She gave the young heir his place without showing any partiality, or making Bertie one whit less the beloved and favoured son of the house; and no one could say that she spoilt either of them, though she considered their every wish. They were as obedient and respectful as if they had been held within the severest discipline, and yet how they were indulged!
When everybody was preparing to go in to supper, Mrs. Blencarrow called Reginald to her in sight of all the crowd. She said to him, ‘I think you may go and fetch your friend Brown to supper, Rex. He will like to come to supper; but I am sure he will be too shy unless you go and fetch him.’
‘Oh, may I, mamma?’ said the boy.
He was enchanted with the commission. Brown was the young steward—Mrs. Blencarrow’s chief assistant in the management of the estate—the young fellow whom her husband recommended to her on his death-bed. The group which gathered round Mrs. Blencarrow, ready for the procession in to supper, thought this was the most charming way of acknowledging the claims of Brown. To have brought him to the dance would have been out of place; he would have felt himself out of it. He could not have ventured to ask anybody to dance, and to look on while you are young is dull work. But to ask him to supper was just the right compromise. The old gentlemen promised to themselves that they would notice Brown; they would ask him to drink a glass of wine (which was the custom then); they would show him that they approved of a young man who did such excellent work and knew his place so well.
It must be allowed that when he came, triumphantly led by Reginald, with Bertie dancing in front of him (‘Oh, come along, Brown; mamma says you’re to come to supper. Come along, Brown; here is a place for you’), his looks did not conciliate these country gentlemen. He was a handsome young man in a rather rough way, with that look of watchful suspicion so often to be seen on the face of a man who is afraid of being condescended to by his superiors. He was in a sort of evening dress, as if he had been prepared for the invitation, with a doubtful coat of which it was difficult to say whether it was a morning coat of peculiar cut, or an old-fashioned one for evening use. He yielded unwillingly, it seemed, to the encouragements of the boys, and he was placed far down at the other end of the table, among the children and the youngest of the grown-up party, where he was totally out of place. Had he been near the other end, where the honest country gentlemen were, quite prepared to notice and take wine with him, Brown would have been more at his ease. He cast one glance at his mistress as he passed, a look which was gloomy, reproachful, almost defiant. Scotch peasant faces get that look sometimes without any bad meaning, and Cumberland faces are very like the Scotch. He was no doubt upbraiding her for having forced him to appear at all.
At last it was all over, the last carriage rolling away, the last sleepy group of visitors sent to bed. Mrs. Blencarrow stood on her own hearth, leaning her head on the marble mantelpiece, looking down into the fire. She had been very gay to the last, smiling upon her guests; but her face when in perfect repose, and in the ease of solitude, no one near to spy upon it, was very different. Anxiety and trouble came into every line of her fine pale features. She changed her attitude after awhile, and looked straight into the darkness of the great mirror, behind the clock and the candelabra which stood in front of it. She looked into her own face with a determined, steady look, her eyes opened widely. She seemed to ask herself what she should do, but shook her head afterwards with a vague, sad smile. The mirror repeated all these changes of countenance, but gave no counsel. Someone came into the room at this moment, which made her start. It was one of the ladies staying in the house, who had forgotten something, and come back to fetch it.
‘Not gone to bed yet?’ she said.
‘No,’ said Mrs. Blencarrow; ‘after a business of this kind, however tired I may be, I don’t sleep.’
‘I know what you are doing,’ said her friend. ‘You are asking yourself, now that it’s all over, “What’s the good?”’
‘No; I don’t think so,’ she said quickly; then changed her look and said, ‘Perhaps I was.’
‘Oh, I am sure you were! and it is no good except for such pleasure as you get out of it.’
‘Pleasure!’ said Mrs. Blencarrow. ‘But the boys liked it,’ she said.
‘Oh, the boys! They were more happy than words could say. I think you measure everything by the boys.’
‘Not everything,’ she said with a sigh; and, taking up her candle, she followed her friend upstairs.
The house had fallen into perfect quiet. There was not a sound in all the upper part; a drowsy stillness was in the broad staircase, still dimly lighted, and the corridor above; only a distant echo from below, from the regions which were half underground—a muffled sound of laughter and voices—showed that the servants were still carrying on the festivity. Mrs. Blencarrow said good-night at the door of her friend’s room, and went on to her own, which was at the further end of the long gallery. She left her candle upon a small table outside, where it burned on, a strange, lonely little twinkle of light in the darkness, for half the wintry night.
Neither Kitty nor Walter could rest next day until they had eluded the vigilance of their several guardians and escaped to their usual meeting-place, where they poured into each other’s ears the dire experiences of the previous night. Kitty had been badly scolded before, but it had been as nothing in comparison with what she had suffered on the way home and after her return. Mamma had been terrible; she had outdone herself; there had been nothing too dreadful for her to say. And papa had not stood by Kitty—the best that could be said for him was that he had taken no active part in the demolition of all her hopes.
‘For I am to be sent away to-morrow to my aunt’s in Gloucestershire—fancy in Gloucestershire!’ as if there was something specially diabolical in that county.
‘You shall not be sent away; the time has come for us to take it into our own hands,’ said Walter soberly, with a strain of resolution.
He had to tell her of not unsimilar barbarities on his side. His mother had written to her trustees. She expected Mr. Wadsett from Edinburgh, who was also her man of business (for her property was in Scotland), next day.
‘To-morrow is the crisis for both of us; we must simply take it into our own hands and forestall them,’ said Walter. ‘I knew that one day it would come to this. If they force it on us it is their own doing,’ he said, with a look of determination enough to make any trustee tremble.
‘Oh, Walter!’ cried Kitty, rubbing her head against his shoulder like the kitten she was.
His resolute air gave her a thrill of frightened delight. Usually she was the first person in all their conjoint movements; to be carried along now, and feel it was not her doing, but his, was a new, ecstatic, alarming sensation, which words could not express.
They then began to consider without more ado (both feeling themselves elevated by the greatness of the crisis) what was to be done. Kitty had fondly hoped for a postchaise, which was the recognised way of romance; but Walter pointed out that on the railway—still a new thing in that district—there was an early train going to Edinburgh, which they could enter far more easily and with less fear of being arrested than a postchaise, and which would waft them to Gretna Green in less time than it would take to go ten miles in a carriage. Gretna Green was still the right place to which lovers flew; it was one of the nearest points in Scotland, where marriage was so easy, where the two parties to the union were the only ones concerned.
Kitty was slow to give up the postchaise, but she yielded to Walter’s argument. The train passed very early, so that it would be necessary for her to start out of the house in the middle of the night, as it were, to join her lover, who would be waiting for her; and then a walk of a mile or two would bring them to the station—and then! Their foolish hearts beat high while they made all the arrangements. Kitty shivered at the idea of the long walk in the chill dark morning. She would have so much preferred the sweep of the postchaise, the probable rush in pursuit, the second postchaise rattling after them, probably only gaming the goal ten minutes too late. She had imagined that rush many a time, and how she might see her father or brother’s head looking out from the window, hurrying on the postilion, but just too late to stop the hasty ceremony. The railway would change it all, and would be much less triumphant and satisfactory; but still, if Walter said so, it must be done, and her practical imagination saw the conveniences as well as the drawbacks.
Walter walked back with Kitty as near as he dared to The Leas, and then Kitty walked back again with him. They thus made a long afternoon’s occupation of it, during which everything was discussed and over again discussed, and in which all the responsibility was laid on the proper shoulders, i.e., on those of the parents who had driven them to this only alternative. Neither of them had any doubt as to the certainty of this, and they had at the same time fair hopes of being received back again when it was all over, and nothing could be done to mend it. After this, their people must acknowledge that it was no manner of use struggling, and that it behoved them to think of making some provision for the young pair, who after all were their own flesh and blood.
Kitty did not undress at all, considering the unearthly hour at which she was to set out. She flung off her evening dress into a corner, reflecting that though it must be prepared after, instead of before, her marriage, she must have a trousseau all the same, and that no bride puts on again her old things after that event. Kitty put on her new winter dress, which was very becoming, and had a pretty hat to match it, and lay down to snatch an hour or two’s rest before the hour of starting. She woke reluctantly to the sound of a handful of pebbles thrown against her window, and then, though still exceedingly sleepy and greatly tempted to pay no attention to the summons, managed at last to rouse herself, and sprang up with a thump of her heart when she recollected what it was—her wedding morning! She lighted a candle and put on her hat, studying the effect in the glass, though she knew that Walter was blowing his fingers with cold below; and then, with a fur cloak over her arm, she stole downstairs. How dark it was, and how cold! The country black with night, nothing visible but the waving, close to the house, of some spectral trees. But Walter pulled her hand through his arm the moment she slipped out, and her spirits rose. Two can face the darkness where one would shrink before it. They had the strangest, merriest walk—stumbling in the maddest way, jolting over stiles, going astray into ploughed fields, rousing all the dogs in all the farms and cottages for miles round—but at last found their way, worn out with stumbling and laughing, to the station, where the train had not yet arrived. And then came the rush and sweep through the night, the arrival in the gray morning at the station, the rousing up of the grim priest known as ‘the blacksmith’—though I am not sure that this was his trade. Kitty found time to smarten herself up a little, to straighten the brim of her hat and put it on as if she had taken it fresh out of its bandbox, and to put on her white gloves—the only things truly bride-like, which she had put in her pocket before she left home—and then the ceremony, whatever it was, was performed, and the boy and girl were made man and wife.
After it was all over, Kitty and Walter looked at each other in the gray morning light with a pale and frightened look. When the thing was done the excitement suddenly failed, and for a moment everything was black. Kitty cried a little, and Walter, if it had not been for his pride of manhood, was very near following her example. What awful thing was it they had done? Kitty was the first to recover her courage.
‘I am dreadfully hungry,’ she said, ‘and so tired. Walter, do go and see if we can have some breakfast anywhere. I must have some breakfast, or I shall die.’ Kitty was very fond of this alternative, but had shown no intention of adopting it as yet.
‘I’ll go on to that public-house over there; but won’t you come too, Kitty?’
‘No; go and order breakfast, and then come and fetch me. I’ll look over the books and see who have gone before us,’ said Kitty.
He left her seated, half leaning over the table, studying the records which she had spread out before her. At that moment Kitty had a great sympathy for everybody who had been married, and a wondering desire to know what they had felt.