LADY STANTON drove home from that visit with her heart and her eyes full. She was not intellectual, nor even clever, but a soft creature, made up of feelings easily touched, not perhaps very profound, nor likely to obscure to her the necessary course of daily living, but still true enough and faithful in their way. She might have been able to make sacrifices had she come in the way of them or found them necessary, but no such chance of moral devotion had come to her; nor had any teachings of experience or philosophy of middle age, such as works upon the majority of us, hardened her soft heart, or swept away the little romantic impulses, the quick sensibilities of youth. A nature so fresh indeed was scarcely compatible with much exercise of the intellectual faculties at all. Lady Stanton rarely read, and never under any circumstances read anything (of her own will and impulse) which rose above the most primitive and familiar elements; but on the other hand, the gentle sentimentalities which she did read went straight to her heart. She thought Mrs. Hemans the first of poets, and cried her eyes out over Mr. Dickens’s “Little Nell.” Anything about an unhappy love, or about a dead child, would move her more than Shakespeare; and she shed tears as ready as the morning dew. Practically, it is true, she had gone through a certain amount of experience like other people, and her everyday life was more or less affected by it; but in her heart Lady Stanton was still the same Mary Ridley whose gentle being had been involved in the wildest of tragic stories, even though she had come down to so commonplace a daily routine now. That story, so long past, took the place in her being of all the poetry and romance which the most of us get glorified from the hands of genius; and all her associations were attached to that one personal episode, which was unparalleled in life as she knew life. When she read one of the novels which pleased her, she would compare the situations in it with this; when she lingered over the vague melodious verses which represented poetry to her, there was always a little appropriation in her heart of their soft measures to the dim long past emergency. And now, here it was brought back upon her by every circumstance that could bring the past near. Her love—was it her love that was recalled to her? But then there was no love in it properly so called. She had taken an interest in John Musgrave, her friend’s brother—always had taken an interest in him; but she had no right to do so at any time, being betrothed to young Lord Stanton, who, for his part, had forgotten her for the sake of that dressmaker’s girl at Penninghame, to whom John Musgrave too had given his heart. What a complication it was! Mary Ridley, who had a pretty property close to his, had been destined for Lord Stanton from the beginning of time, and the boy and girl had lightly acquiesced, and had been happy enough in the parental arrangement. They had liked each other—well enough; they had been as gay as possible in the lightheartedness of their youth, and had taken this for happiness. Why should not they be happy? they were exactly suited to each other. She was the prettiest girl in the county (except the other Mary), and he was proud of her sweet looks, and fond of her, certainly fond of her; whereas she, unawakened, undisturbed, notwithstanding the interest she had always taken in John Musgrave, would have made him the most affectionate and charming wife in the world. Thus the early story had flowed on all smoothness and sunshine, the flowers blooming, the sun shining; until, one fatal day, young Lord Stanton, riding through Penninghame village on his way to the old Castle, had seen Lily, Miss Price’s assistant, at the window of the dressmaker’s parlour. Fatal day! full of all the issues of death.
It is needless to inquire what manner of woman this Lily was, for whom these two men lost themselves and their existence. She did not know of any tragedy likely to be involved, but brushed about in her homely village way through these webs of fate, twisting the threads innocently enough, and throwing the weaving into endless confusion. Whether Lord Stanton was murdered by John Musgrave, as many people thought at first, or killed accidentally in a hot, sudden encounter, as most people believed now, was a thing which perhaps would never be cleared up. The guilty man (if he was guilty) had paid the penalty of his deed in exile, in poverty, in misery, ever since. His life had been as much broken off at that point as Stanton’s was who died—and the two families had been equally plunged into woe and mourning; though indeed it was the Musgraves who suffered most, by reason of the stigma put upon them, by the shame of John’s flight and of his marriage, and by the fact that he was still a criminal pursued by justice, though justice had long slackened her pursuit. As for the Stantons, there was nobody to mourn much. Aunts and uncles and cousins console themselves sooner than fathers and mothers, and the boy brother, who had succeeded to the title, had been too young to be capable of sustained sorrow. Everybody at that time had sympathized with the young bride who had lost her future husband, and her coronet, and all the joys of life in this sudden and miserable way, for there was no concealing what the cause of the quarrel was, and that Lord Stanton had been unfaithful to the beautiful Mary. Nobody knew, however, the complication which gave her a double pang, the knowledge that not only the man who was her own property, her betrothed husband, but the man in whom, innocently in girlish simplicity, she had avowed herself to “take an interest,” had preferred to her the village Lily, who was nobody and nothing, who had not been blameless between them, and whom everybody condemned. Everybody condemned: but they loved her. Both of them! this secret and poignant addition to her trial Mary Ridley never confided to any one, but it still thrilled through and through her at any allusion to that old long past tragedy. Both of them!—the man whose best love was due to her, and the man who had caught her own girlish shy eyes, all unaware to either, somehow, innocently, unavowedly, in such a visionary way as harmed no one; both! It was hard. She wept for them both tenderly, abundantly, for the one not less than the other; and a little—with a cry in her heart of protestation and appeal—for herself, put aside, thrown over for this woman who was nothing, who was nobody, yet who was better beloved than she. All this had welled up in Lady Stanton’s heart when she saw the little girl who had Lily’s face. She had been unable to restrain the sting of old wonder and pain; the keen piercing of the old wound which she had felt to her heart. Both of them! and now a little ghost of this Lily, her shadow, her representative, had come back again to look her in the face. She cried as she drove back that long silent way by herself to Elfdale. It was seldom she had the chance of being so long alone, and there was a kind of luxury about it, not unmingled with compunction and a sense of guilt.
For it still remains to be told how Mary Ridley came to be Lady Stanton, although Lord Stanton, who was the betrothed husband of her youth, had been killed, and all that apparently smooth and straightforward story had ended in grief and separation. She had married after some years a middle-aged cousin of her dead lover, Sir Henry Stanton, who had not long before come back from India where he had spent most of his life. It was but a poor fate for the beautiful Mary. Sir Henry had left his career and a full accomplished life behind him, when he first came to settle at Elfdale to the passive existence of a gentleman in the country, who could scarcely be called a country gentleman. He had been married and had children, a family of sons and daughters, and had only a second chapter of less vivid meaning, a sort of postscriptal life, to offer her. Why she had accepted him nobody could well say,—but she made him a good wife, kind, smiling, always gentle, though sadly put to it now and then to preserve unbroken the sweet good-temper with which nature had gifted her. So fair and sweet as she was, to get only the remains of a man’s heart after all, to be made use of as their chaperon and caretaker by his big, unlovely daughters; to have her own children, two dainty, lovely, fairy girls, kept in the background,—no more than “the little ones”—of no account in the house—all these things were somewhat trying, and a strange reversal of all that life had seemed to promise her, and all that had been indicated by the early worship which surrounded her youth. But perhaps few women could have carried this inappropriate fate as well. All those contradictions of circumstances, all those travesties of what might have been, met with no gloom or sourness of disappointment in her. The very fact that she was Lady Stanton carried with it a certain aggravation, a parrot-like adhesion to the letter and change of the spirit, such as had been in the promises made to Macbeth. Mary might have thought herself the victim of a perverse fate, keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the heart, had she been perversely disposed—but instead of that, all her thoughts at the present moment were occupied with the fact that she had taken an unfair advantage of Laura and Lydia, in not telling them where she was going, that they might have come with her had they been so disposed. She had stolen a march upon them; they would think it unkind. But then she could not have gone to Penninghame had Laura and Lydia been with her. Though they were so much less concerned than she had been, they kept up the Stanton feud with the Musgraves. They had no “interest” in John—on the contrary, they were of the few who still believed that he had “murdered” Lord Stanton—and would have had him hanged if he ever returned to England. They would not have entered the house, or permitted any kind inquiries in their presence. And therefore it was that she had stolen away without letting them know, and was at present conscious—in addition to all the jumble of emotions in her heart—of a certain prick of guilt.
The Stantons were a great county family as well as the Musgraves, but in a very different way. When the Musgraves had been at their greatest, the Stantons had been nobody. They were nothing more than persistent, thrifty folk at first, adding field to field, building on ever a new addition to their old house. Then wealth had come, and then local importance; and last of all celebrity. The first who brought anything like fame to the name, and introduced the race to the knowledge of the world, was a soldier, a general under the Duke of Marlborough, who got a baronetcy and a reputation, and had a handsome new coat of arms invented for him—very appropriately gained indeed, on the field of battle, just as the augmentation of the Musgraves’ blazon had been gained, but a few hundred years too late unfortunately, and therefore not telling for nearly so much as if it had been won in the fifteenth century. The next man was a lawyer, who so cultivated that profession that it brought his son, in the reign of the Georges, to the bench, and a peerage—and since that time the family had taken their place among the magnates of the north country. Young Walter Lord Stanton was a much greater man than John Musgrave, though not half so great a man in one sense of the word. Two or three generations, however, tell just as much upon the individual mind as twenty, and the young peer was conscious of all his advantages over the commoner, without any sense of inferiority in point of race. And now the other Lord Stanton, Geoffrey, who had succeeded that unfortunate young man, was the greatest personage of his years in the district, regarded with interest by all his neighbours and with more than interest by some; for was it not in his power to make one of his feminine contemporaries, however humble she might be by birth, and however poor in this world’s goods, a great lady?—and so long as human nature remains as it is, this cannot cease to be a very potent attraction. Indeed the wonder is that young women should not be altogether demoralized by the perpetual recurrence of such chances of undeserved, unearned elevation. Young Lord Stanton could do this. He could give fine houses and lands, a title, and all the good things of this earth to his cousin Laura, or his cousin Lydia, or any other girl in the county that pleased him. Therefore it cannot be wondered at if his appearance fluttered the dovecotes with sentiments as powerful and more pleasant than those which fill the nests at the appearance of predatory hawk or eagle. But any such flutter of feeling was held in Elfdale to be an unwarrantable impertinence on the part of the other ladies of the county. Long ago, at the time when at six years old he had succeeded to his stepbrother, there had been a tacit family understanding to the effect that one of Sir Henry’s daughters should be the young lord’s wife. Sir Henry, though old enough to have been the father of his murdered cousin would have been his heir but for Geoff—and it was universally allowed to be hard upon him that when such an unlikely chance happened, as that young Lord Stanton should die, there should be this boy coming in the way forestalling his claim. Nobody had wanted that child who was suddenly turned into a personage of so much importance—not even his father, who had married with a single-minded idea of being comfortable in his own person, and who was much annoyed by the prospect of “a second family”—a prospect which was happily, however, cut short by his own speedy death. When therefore Walter Lord Stanton was killed, it was very generally felt that Sir Henry had a real grievance in the existence of the little stepbrother, who was in the way of everybody except his poor mother, whom the old lord had married to nurse him, and who had taken the unwarrantable liberty of adding little Geoffrey to the family. Poor little Geoff! he was bullied on all hands so long as his brother lived; and then, what a change came over his life and that of his mother, who was as pale and shy as her boy! Great good fortune may change even complexion, and Geoff as he grew to be a man was no longer pale. But Sir Henry never quite got over the blow dealt him by this succession. He had not resented Walter. Walter was so to speak the natural heir—and nobody expected him to die; but when he did die, so out of all calculation, to think there should be that boy! Sir Henry did not get over it for years—it was a positive wrong not to be forgotten.
Accordingly, as a small compensation to his injured feelings, all the family had tacitly decided that Geoff should marry one of his cousins. This, it is true, was but a very small compensation, for Sir Henry was not the kind of parent who lives in his children and is indifferent to his own glory and greatness. Even now, fifteen years after the event, he was not an old man, and it made up very poorly for his personal disappointment that Laura or Lydia should share the advancement of which he had been deprived. Still it was so understood. Geoff paid many holiday visits at Elfdale, though there was no particular friendship between Sir Henry and the widowed Lady Stanton, who was Geoff’s guardian as well as his mother, and things were going smoothly enough between the young people. They liked each other, and had no objection to be together as much as was possible, and already the sisters had settled between them “which of us it is to be.” This Lydia, who was the most strong-minded, had thought desirable from the moment when she had become aware what was intended. “It does not matter at present,” she said, “we are none of us in love, and one is just as good as another, but we had better draw lots, or something—or toss up, as the boys do.” And what the mystic ordeal had been which decided this question we are unable to say, but decided it was in favour of Laura, who was the prettiest, and only a year younger than Geoff. Lydia, as soon as the die was cast, constituted herself the guardian of her sister’s fortunes so far as the young lord was concerned, and made herself into a quaint and really pretty version of a matchmaking mother on Laura’s behalf. Thus it will be seen that it was into the very heart of the opposite faction that Lady Stanton drove home with those tears in her soft eyes, and all that commotion of old thoughts in her heart. If they could have seen into it and known that it was the image of John Musgrave that had roused that commotion, what would these girls have said, towards whom she felt so guilty as having stolen a march upon them? “The murderer!” they would have cried with a shriek of horror. Lady Stanton could not, it is clear, have taken them to Penninghame with her, and surely she had a right to use her own horses and carriage; but still she felt guilty as she subdued, with all the effort she could make, the excitement in her heart.
When she went in, she retired at once upstairs, and announced herself, through her maid, to have a headache, and had a cup of tea in her own room, to which her own children, little Fanny and Annie, a pair of inseparables, came noiselessly like two doves on the wing. Annie and Fanny liked nothing in the world so much as to get mamma to themselves like this, in the stillness of her room, with everybody else shut out. One was ten and the other eleven; they were about the same height, had the same flowing curly locks of light brown hair, the same rose-tinted faces, walked in each other’s steps, or rather flew about their little world of carpeted stairs and passages, together, always in sudden soft flights—like doves, as we have said, on the wing. “Is your head very bad, mamma?” they said; and the gentle hypocrite blushed as she replied. No, it was not very bad; a little quiet would make it quite well. They took off her “things” for her, and brought her her soft white dressing-gown, in which she looked like the mother of all the doves, and let down her hair, which was not much darker, and quite as abundant as their own—and gave her her cup of tea, thus soothing every tingling nerve; and by this time Lady Stanton’s head was not bad at all, though now and then one of them would administer eau-de-cologne or rosewater. She told them of the children she had seen—little orphans who had no mother—and the two crept closer to her, to hear of that awful, incomprehensible desolation, each clasping an arm of hers with two small, eager hands. To be without a mother! Annie and Fanny held their breath in reverential silence and pity; but wondered a little that it was the little boy (“called Nello—what a funny name!”) that mamma spoke of, not the girl, who was ten (“just the same age as me”).
But not even the sympathy of her children, and the trance of interest which kept them breathless, could make Lady Stanton speak of the little girl. Her mother’s face! that face which had taken the best of everything in existence from Mary Ridley—how could Lady Stanton speak of it? She made some efforts to get over the feeling, but not with much success. But the rest restored her, and enabled her to appear, her headache quite charmed away, and her nerves still, at dinner. She took a little more care with her toilette than usual, by way of propitiation to the angry gods. And though Laura and Lydia were not much short of twenty years younger than their stepmother, it would have been an indifferent judge who had turned from her to them even in the fresh bloom of their youth. She came downstairs very conciliatory, ready to make the best of everything, and to make amends to them for all disloyal thoughts, and for having cheated them of their drive.
“I hope your head is better, my Lady,” said Laura. “We have been wondering all the afternoon wherever you had gone.”
The girls had a certain strain of vulgarity in them somehow, which could not be quite eradicated from their speech.
“I went out for a drive as usual,” said Lady Stanton. “I thought I heard you say that you meant to walk.”
“Oh yes; we wanted to walk to the village to settle about the school children,” said Laura; and Lydia added, “But I am sure we never said so,” and looked suspiciously at her stepmother.
“I went by the Langdale woods, and all the way to Penninghame water,” said the culprit, very explanatory. “The lake looked so cold. I should not like to live near it. It chills all the landscape, and I am sure puts dreary thoughts into people’s heads. And as I was there, Henry,” she added, addressing her husband, “I did what you will think an odd thing.” Lady Stanton’s bosom heaved a little, and her breath came quick. It would have been far easier to say nothing about it; but then she knew by experience that everything gets found out. She made a momentary pause before the confession which she tried to treat so lightly. “I ran in for a moment to the old Castle and saw Mary—Mary, you know. We were great friends, she and I, when we were young, and it was such a temptation passing the old place.”
“What whim took you near the old place?” said Sir Henry, gruffly. “I cannot think of any place in the world that should lie less in your way.”
“Well, that is true,” she said, breathing a little more freely now that the worst was told, “and the proof of it is that I have not been there for years.”
“I hope it will be still longer before you go again,” said her husband.
He did not say any more because of the servants, and because he had too much good sense to do or say anything that would lessen his wife’s importance; but he was not pleased, and this troubled her, for she had a delicate conscience. She looked at him wistfully, and was imprudent enough in her anxiety to pursue the subject, and make bad worse.
“It is strange to see an old friend whom you have known when you were young, after so many years,” she said; “though Mary is not so much altered as I am. You remember her, Henry? She was always so pretty; handsomer than—any one I know.”
It was on her lips to say “handsomer than ever I was,” which was the real sentiment in her mind—a sentiment partly originating in the semi-guilt and humility produced by the consciousness of having grown stout, a kind of development which troubles women. She was very deeply aware of this, and it silenced all the claims of vanity. She had lost her figure; whereas Mary was still slim and straight as an arrow. Whatever might have been once, there was now no comparison between the two.
“Do you mean Miss Musgrave?” cried the girls, one after the other. “Miss Musgrave! that old creature—that old maid—that man’s sister?”
“She is no older than I am,” said Lady Stanton, with a flush on her face; “she was my dear friend in the old days. She is beautiful still, as much as she ever was, I think, and good; she has always been good.”
“That will do,” said Sir Henry interposing. “We need not discuss the family; but I think you will see, my dear, that there could not be much pleasure in any intercourse at this time of day—whatever might have been the case when you were young.”
“Intercourse—there could never be any intercourse,” cried Lydia, coming to the front. “Fancy, papa! intercourse with such people—after all that has happened! That would be tempting Providence; and it would be an insult to Geoff.”
“Let Geoff take care of his own affairs,” said Sir Henry, angrily; and he gave a forcible twist to the conversation, and threw it into another channel; but Lady Stanton was very silent all the evening afterwards. She had wanted to conciliate, and she had not succeeded; and how indeed could she, among her hostile family, keep up any intercourse with her old friend?