Lady William by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

LII

‘SO that is all finished and settled and done with,’ said Leo Swinford, with no great expression of delight on his face.

‘You don’t seem to see the great happiness and satisfaction of it,’ said Lady William.

‘No, perhaps I do not. I had always the hope that I might have been of some use, of some service to you, something more both in importance and use than a mere friend.’

‘Is there anything more than a true friend?’ said Lady William, holding out her hand.

He took her hand, which was so cool and soft and white—and kind—and indifferent. As kind as could be, ready to soothe him, help him, do anything for him that he needed; and perfectly indifferent, as if he had been the little boy of ten whom Emily Plowden had been so fond of in his ingenuous childish days.

‘Yes,’ said Leo, ‘there is something more——’

‘Not according to my understanding of life. Perhaps my experience has not been a very favourable one. I like a friend—one who understands me and whom I understand—who would stand by me in any need as I would stand by him—with a nice wife and children whom I could love.’

‘Ah!’ said Leo, dropping the hand he had held. After a moment he said, in a different tone: ‘My mother has finally made up her mind that she can endure this hermitage no more.’

‘And you are going to town? It will be better for you in every way.’

‘She is going back to Paris. I have done all I could to persuade her to gather friends about her here—or in London better still. But she will not hear me. Her opinion is that Paris, even out of season, is better than London at its gayest. She will go, perhaps, to some ville de mer, and then back in October to her old apartment and her old friends.’

‘And you, Leo?’

‘I am an Englishman,’ he said, with a little air half of pride, half of self-abnegation, which created in his friend a profane inclination to laugh.

‘In spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,’

she said.

Leo laughed, too, but not with the best grace in the world.

‘It is true that I perceive drawbacks in it,’ he said. ‘The life is not—gay.’

‘No, it is not gay. You must go to town when your mother goes to her ville de mer. And in autumn you must fill the house. And then—you must marry, Leo.’

He gave her a wistful, lingering look.

‘Whom?’ he said, and then he went away.

He went away, going down the village, turning many things over in his mind. It occurred to him to remember that rush down this same street in the rain in pursuit of Mrs. Brown, while he was still fully of the mind that much was in his power to do for the woman who occupied his thoughts—and with the possibility at the end that he might rescue her from undeserved humiliation by the offer of his home and name. And then he remembered the girl whom he had met, who had entered so warmly into his search, and of her eyes shining in the lamplight and the raindrops upon her hair. The raindrops upon Emmy’s hair were certainly not moral qualifications like the unfeigned kindness of her look, the instant sympathy with which she had responded to his call, her concern about his condition of damp and discomfort. He thought of her with a rush of kind and almost tender feeling. Certainly she never looked so pretty as on that evening. And she was very like Lady William. When her mind was roused to interest, and what he in his modesty called kindness, there was nothing in Emmy of the vulgarity of her surroundings. Nor was it vulgarity, properly speaking. Mrs. Plowden, good woman, was bourgeoise, that was all. And how kind she had been! How she had stirred the whole house to attend to his comfort! Leo saw all the family running this way and that to wait upon him, and Jim turning out his wardrobe to give him whatever he liked. How kind they all were! He had never been in the smallest degree civil to them. None of the entertainments to which Mrs. Plowden had looked forward had been given at the Hall. There had not been so much as a dinner to the neighbours. Mrs. Swinford had put her veto upon anything of the kind, and Leo had felt it impossible to do anything without his mother. And yet how kind, how anxious to serve him they had all been! Leo laughed within himself at the race of civility—every one trying to be agreeable to him. And then his thoughts turned upon Emmy, who, after introducing him to the Rectory, had done nothing—had stood aloof a little from all these attentions. Why did she stand aloof? Perhaps if she had been the kindest and most active of all, doing everything for him, his vanity would have profited by that. It did still serve when he remembered that she was the only one who stood aloof. Why? Was it because Emmy felt the inclination to be a little more than kind which he had felt for Lady William? A very small matter is enough for a complacent imagination to build upon. He hesitated, with a half intention of going to the Rectory, of making a call upon—whom? His call could not be upon Emily. It would be upon her mother, who would receive it as a piece of ordinary civility. He paused, lingering at the corner where the road to the Rectory crossed the high-road in which stood the great gates and chief entrance to the Hall.

It was at this moment that Jim, feeling himself much ‘out of it,’ suddenly loomed in view. Very much out of it was poor Jim once more. Mr. Osborne was so much engrossed with Florry that he had clean forgotten that Workman’s Club which he and his future brother-in-law were about to begin to organise. And Jim was aware that to go to the curate’s rooms was unnecessary, seeing he was much more likely to be found near or about the Rectory. And Mrs. Brown was gone. There was no longer the alternative of dropping in at the schoolhouse. What was he to do with himself these late afternoons when the time for work was over, and there was nothing to do? Did he think of the ‘Blue Boar’ again? I hope Jim had no hankering after the ‘Blue Boar’; but he wanted a little variety—a change, somebody to speak to who did not belong to him, who would not tell him over again the same things he had heard at breakfast and luncheon and tea. He, too, was wavering, not certain which way to go—the road that led out to the country, where he could take a walk—a very doubtful kind of pleasure—or the road that led to the ‘Blue Boar.’

No one had ever told Leo Swinford to put forth a hand to this youth, who was still lingering between good and evil. No Florence had taken upon herself to preach to him upon this text. It was no business of his; he had no responsibility in respect to Jim; but he suddenly remembered certain things he had heard, and good-nature and a good heart, which are sometimes even more efficacious, being more spontaneous, than a sense of duty prompted him. It was more self-denying than the curate’s interposition, for Leo had no Florry to please; and it was less self-denying, for he had no feeling of repulsion to the careless young fellow wavering between good and evil. He waved his hand to Jim, who was coming slowly towards him, and waited at that corner of the road.

‘You are the very man,’ said Leo, ‘whom I wished to see. Come and dine with me to-night at the Hall, will you, Plowden? It will be an act of charity, for I shall be quite alone.’

‘At the Hall!’ said Jim, startled.

‘It is far to go for a charitable object,’ said Leo, with a laugh.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean that!’ cried Jim, confused. And thus once more the ‘Blue Boar’ (which was, indeed, quite an innocent beast, and rather relieved than otherwise that the Rector’s son entered its jaws no more) was cheated of its prey.

But whether Jim, unconscious Jim, may be the means of bringing together Leo Swinford and the good Emmy, who was so like, and yet so unlike, the other Emily Plowden of the past, is a fact which lies still undiscovered in the womb of time—where also it remains as yet unknown whether the dispositions of Mab in his favour (conditionally) will ever be understood by him or carried out. Should they be, the reader may be sure that the strenuous opposition of Lady William will be a difficulty hard to surmount in the experiences of this young pair.

Mab and her mother, however, spent more than one day in town during that summer—it being decided that the young lady’s introduction to society was not to take place till she was eighteen—under the escort of Lord Will: and they went to luncheon with the family, and were most benignly received by the Marchioness, who regretted warmly that she had never up to this time made the acquaintance of her sister-in-law.

‘But you see how my time is taken up,’ she said, with a significant glance at the four tall girls (all taking after her ladyship’s family, and not a Pakenham among them, thank Heaven! she was apt to say) who assembled at luncheon, the two who were still in the schoolroom looking quite as mature as the two who were ‘out.’ Mab was the only one who was like Lord Portcullis, ridiculously like, all the family agreed. And one day they went to the Row together, where Lord Will and his sister, who accompanied the party, pointed out everybody who was anybody to Mab. They pointed out to her many people whose names she knew, and whom she looked upon with admiration and interest, and a great many who were to her quite unknown.

‘I never heard of them before,’ said little Mab, ready to yawn after a list of such names. ‘Who are they? What have they done?’

‘Oh, you little simpleton,’ said Lady Betty, ‘they are the very smartest people in town,’ for that odious adjective had just come into use at the time.

As for Lord Will, he was at that moment engaged in communicating a piece of modern history to the charming aunt, whom that young man much preferred to her daughter.

‘You know the Swinford woman’s gone off,’ he said. ‘What a release for that poor Leo who was never allowed to stir from her apron-strings!’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lady William, ‘that he will think it such a release.’

‘And, of course, you know why she’s going,’ said the young man of fashion. ‘The old witch thought everybody had forgotten her naughty ways. Well, she’s old enough, she might be allowed benefit of clergy: and she meant to go to the Drawing Room and get whitewashed, don’t you know. But H.M. has a long memory—wouldn’t have her at any price—asked what they meant by insulting her Court, bringing such a Person there. When Her Most Gracious calls a woman a Person there’s an end of her. So town don’t agree with that old lady’s health, no more does the Hall—and she’s off to her beloved France, she says, where there’s something like society—society, don’t you know, where there’s nobody that has any right to interfere.’

‘Is that the reason?’ said Lady William—her heart was touched, though she was aware that she had little cause to love Mrs. Swinford. ‘I have not been very much in charity with her lately, but she was once very kind. I am sorry this should have happened. Everything that is naughty, as you say, must have been over long ago.’

‘Oh, don’t you be too sure of that,’ said Lord Will. ‘The old hag, made up for a burlesque, would have flirted with me the other day, between the showers of the venom she was shooting out upon you.’

‘Did she shoot out venom upon me?’ said Lady William. Her face lighted up for a moment with a gleam of angry indignation. And then, ‘Poor old woman!’ she said.

I am afraid Lord Will had no comprehension whatever of this misplaced pity. He stared; and he made up his mind that his handsome aunt overestimated his simplicity, and intended to take him in by that show of feeling—which was the most unlikely undertaking, seeing that Lord Will was a young man about town, and up, as he himself would have said, to all the dodges. It was trouble altogether thrown away in his case.

‘What did Will mean by H.M. having a long memory?’ said Mab, who had overheard part of this talk.

‘He means that Her Majesty remembers all about everybody—it is a point of Royal politeness—and that the Queen will not receive anybody at Court with a stain upon her name.’

‘But that is the very thing she ought to do!’ cried Mab.

She was not aware that it was improper to use vulgar pronouns in speaking of the greatest lady in the land.

Lady William made no reply. She was thinking of the long life of self-indulgence, of luxury and pleasure, a life in which no wish had been allowed to remain unfulfilled, of the woman who had sentenced herself in her youth, remorselessly, to a horrible fate—to deception and undeception, one more dreadful than the other—in order to save her own reputation: and then had turned upon her and endeavoured to ruin her for having been thus deceived. Mrs. Swinford had suffered little outwardly for all those indulgences which she had insisted upon securing for herself, and for all the wrong she had done to others. But here, at last, her lovers, her victims, her husband whom she had deceived, her friend whom she had sacrificed, were avenged. By what?—by the Lord Chamberlain’s wand across that doorway forbidding entrance to one of the most tiresome ceremonials in the world.

‘Poor old woman!’ Lady William said.

‘I don’t know who is the poor old woman,’ said Mab, ‘nor what she has done; but it’s grand of the Queen, if she is a wicked old woman, not to let her in. So, say poor woman as much as you like, mother; I approve of the Queen.’

‘I hope Her Majesty may be duly grateful, Mab,’ her mother replied.

I will not say that Mr. Francis Osborne’s family were quite satisfied that he had done as well for himself as he ought by marrying his Rector’s daughter. With his connections and prospects he might, as they said, have married anybody. But, at the same time, for a curate to marry his Rector’s daughter is a thing that is always on the cards, and the Plowdens in their way were unexceptionable; and then there was that connection with the Portcullis family, which was always something. So the Osbornes and the kindred in general exerted themselves, as they had always intended to do on fit occasion, and provided the living which was always understood to be waiting until Francis should have gained a little experience. There was the prettiest wedding in Watcham Church, which became a bower of flowers, all the old lines of its arches and pillars traced out with lilies and roses, and the dim building made bright with a festal company of old and young, which filled it as if for an Easter or a Christmas service. The procession walked from the Rectory through the little private gate to the church, with all Watcham looking on outside the hedge of the garden. Fortunately, it was very dry as well as bright, and the most delicate dresses got no harm, and the sight afforded the truest gratification to all the parishioners, great and small. When Florence had changed her wedding robes for the pretty gray gown in which she was to travel, she lingered in the old room which she had shared for nearly all her life with her sister, and kissed her inseparable Emmy with a few tears.

‘If it had not been me, it would have been you,’ Florry said. ‘One of us was bound to go the first. And it will soon be your turn, too.’

‘No,’ said Emmy, ‘I do not think I shall ever marry.’

‘Oh, what nonsense!’ Florence said. ‘He has kept beside you all day.’

Emmy disengaged herself from her sister with a gravity beyond description.

‘That will never be,’ she said. ‘You know it was only a girl’s fancy, and never, never meant anything.’

‘I know nothing of the sort,’ Florence said, ‘and I think it never meant so much as now.’

‘Florry!’ cried Emily, in sudden alarm, ‘if you ever tell, if you ever breathe a syllable——!’

‘No, I never will!’ said Florence, pursing up her lips as if to prevent any treacherous word from coming out.

And, though she had many temptations and struggles with herself, she never did—until there came a time——

THE END