A Mere Chance: A Novel. Vol. 1

A Mere Chance: A Novel. Vol. 1
Ada Cambridge

A Mere Chance: A Novel. Vol. 1

CHAPTER I.

A MARSHAL NEIL ROSE

A few years ago there was a young débutante in Melbourne whose name was Rachel Fetherstonhaugh. She had risen upon the social horizon suddenly, like a new star – or, one might almost say, like a comet, so unusually bright was she, and so much talked about; and no one quite knew where she had come from. Mrs. Hardy had introduced her as her niece – everyone knew that – but there were sceptics who, having never heard of female relatives previously (except the three daughters, who had married so well), declared that she might be "anybody," picked up merely for matchmaking purposes – it being well understood that Mrs. Hardy had for an unknown period sustained life, figuratively speaking, upon the stimulus of matrimonial intrigues, and had now no more daughters to provide for.

That this pretty creature had been unseen and unsuspected until the last Miss Hardy, as Mrs. Buxton, was fairly away on her honeymoon, and almost immediately after had been introduced to society as Mrs. Buxton's successor, was a kind of circumstance that seemed, of course, bound to have a mystery at the bottom of it. But, as a matter of fact, there was no mystery. Rachel Fetherstonhaugh was a bona-fide niece, and her entrance into the Hardy family at a particular juncture could be quite easily accounted for.

Her father had been Mrs. Hardy's brother – a good-for-nothing, unlucky brother, whose clever brains could do anything but earn money, and whose pockets could no more hold it than a sieve could hold water – a brother whom, long ago, before she had become rich and fastidious, Mrs. Hardy had loved, and served, and worked for, but whom, of late years, she had – with some mild self-reproach for doing so – ignored as far as possible.

This man had married a girl without a penny, as such a man was certain to do; and his wife had left him a widower, with an only child, a few years afterwards. Since then, for fifteen years, he had rambled about from place to place, seeking his fortune in all kinds of visionary and impracticable schemes, whose collapse one after the other, never deterred him from fresh enterprises, until a sunstroke closed the list of his life's many failures at the early age of forty-five.

A formal little note was sent by his orphan daughter to Mrs. Hardy to announce this sad event; and for half an hour after receiving it the bereaved sister was inconsolable, tormenting herself with unavailing regrets for her neglect of "her own flesh and blood," and with harrowing reminiscences of loving early years.

At the end of that time, however, she had made many generous plans for her dead brother's child, which cheered and comforted her; and in time these gave place to the prudent, unemotional dictates of worldly wisdom. Mrs. Hardy dried her tears, bought herself a black bonnet, and stole out of town in a surreptitious fashion, to see what manner of niece had been thrown upon her hands.

She pictured to herself what the child's life had probably been – the motherless child of a vagabond speculator, who had lived very indifferently by his wits; and the most she hoped for was to find her a raw bush girl, rudimentally educated, and uncontaminated by the low society in which she had been brought up. For such a niece she had mapped out what seemed to be a suitable career – that of a nursery governess in some distant colony; and she had resolved to be a good friend to the girl, to set her up in clothes, and to see that she never came to want or misfortune if by any reasonable means it could be helped.

To her intense surprise her young relative turned out to be a remarkably pretty and refined young woman, obviously accustomed to the decorous and reticent poverty of people who had "seen better days" and appreciated the fact, and not raw in any sort of sense, though diffident and shy; the kind of young woman, indeed, who, it was evident at a glance, was capable under good management of bringing honour and glory upon the family.

The result was as above indicated. Rachel Fetherstonhaugh, instead of being sent into obscurity to earn her bread, was adopted in the sight of all men as a daughter of the house – that great white house at Toorak, which had achieved local fame for its profuse entertainments, its social diplomacies, and its three great marriages.

Her father's debts were paid; her wardrobe was supplemented with the very best style of new clothes – less expensive, but more becoming, than any that Mrs. Buxton and Mrs. Buxton's sisters had worn; and by and bye when, having got over the first shock and grief of her father's death, she made her appearance in public, and began to take an interest in her new life, she found herself, to her great astonishment, a personage – if not the personage – in the society around her.

It must be said, and not to her discredit, I hope, that Miss Fetherstonhaugh liked being a personage very much indeed. She had grown up a sensitive little gentlewoman, full of delicate thoughts and tastes, in the midst of dull, uncultured people of sordid cares and occupations, and of uncongenial surroundings of all sorts; and the mere physical enjoyment of her changed circumstances, in which everything was orderly, and dainty, and plenteous, and "nice," was something like the enjoyment that a flower must feel when the sun shines.

And the sudden discovery that certain shy conjectures about her personal appearance (which she had hardly had leisure or heart to attend to) were confirmed by the best authority – to know herself a pretty girl, and to see that society paid her homage accordingly – this was an experience that no woman born, being in possession of her faculties, could help delighting in. And having all the grateful consciousness of the value of life and its good things that nature gives to the young and healthy, unspoiled by artificial sentiment, her delight was unbounded, and consequently unconcealed.

Rachel Fetherstonhaugh was, as her uncle said, "A modest, good girl, with no nonsense about her." All the same, she was proud and glad of her fair, clear-cut features, and her pensive, large, sweet eyes that were full of tender suggestions, for which no authority existed when she lifted them meekly to an admirer's face; and that figure which with all its slenderness had the curves of beauty everywhere, and those waves of ruddy auburn hair.

"I am so glad I am not plain," she once said to her cousin, Mrs. Thornley (who strange to say did not repeat the remark to all her friends with disparaging comments, but responded confidentially with a sympathising kiss, and said she could quite understand it). "I have always thought that it must be the most charming thing in the world to be a really pretty woman. And now I know it."

On a grey afternoon in the beginning of May this young lady was enjoying the luxury of a slow drive up and down Collins Street, shopping with her aunt. She nestled in a soft corner of a well-appointed Victoria, with a great rug of native bearskins about her knees, showing her delicate fresh face, like a well-hung picture, to the crowd of passers-by on the pavement, and yet sitting just enough above them to see into the shop-windows over their heads; and she felt – though she did not formulate the sentiment – perfectly happy and satisfied.

If the truth must be told, she found the sight of more or less well-dressed men and women, streaming up and down the busy street, more interesting than the most lovely landscape she had ever seen. She took as much pleasure in the exquisite fit of her gloves as in the exquisite colour and fragrance of a Marshal Neil rose that she wore in her button-hole; and she had never seen a moonrise or a sunset that had fascinated her more than that sealskin jacket in Alston and Brown's window, which she observed was exactly the size for her. It is not, therefore, to be supposed that she is a heroine unworthy of the name.

At Alston and Brown's Mrs. Hardy stepped out of her carriage for perhaps the fifth time. She was a very large, masculine kind of woman, with a remarkably fine Roman nose, of which she was excessively proud, and justly, for it had been a valuable weapon to her in the battle of life, literally carrying all before it. When he had got over the effect of her nose, the beholder of Mrs. Hardy's person, as a rule, was pleasantly impressed by it. It had a generous and a regal air.

"My dear," she said to her young companion, "I only want to match some lace. Will you go in with me, or will you stay where you are?"

"I think I will stay, if you please, aunt," replied Rachel. "The carriage is so comfortable, and I like to look at the street."

"Don't look too much," said Mrs. Hardy, smiling anxiously. "There are all kinds of office clerks and people mixed up with the crowd at this hour."

"I don't want to look at men," said Miss Fetherstonhaugh, with more dignity than one would have given her credit for. "It is the ladies' dresses I like to see – and the horses."

Mrs. Hardy marched into the shop with that imposing mien which became more and more pronounced as she grew older and stouter, and her social successes accumulated; and her niece sat still in her corner, and looked for a long while at the sealskin jacket.

"All my cousins have sealskin jackets," she mused, "but I don't think they had them until they were married. Perhaps I shall have one when I am married. I can't expect my aunt to buy me one, of course; she has bought me so many pretty things. How lovely and soft that brown fur is! How well it would suit my complexion! If my husband is rich, and asks me what I should like for my first birthday present, I shall not have any difficulty in making up my mind. I wonder will he be rich? like Mr. Thornley, and Mr. Buxton, and Mr. Reade. At any rate, he must not be poor; if he is, I won't have him. I know enough of poverty" – with a little shudder and a sudden solemnity in her face – "and I don't mean to run into it again if I can help it."

Here she fell into a rather mournful reverie, thinking of her old life, with its shifts and privations – of her poor father, who had been so happy through it all, never feeling the weight of the petty debts and dishonours that lay like lead on her – of her struggles to keep his affairs straight – of her prayers that she might not live to despise and desert him, which was a temptation that grew with her growing years – and as she thought, she gazed absently, tenderly, pensively, not on the sealskin jacket, but on the faces of the passers-by. She had no idea how excessively interesting and pretty she looked to those passers-by with that expression in her eyes.

However, a gentleman came by presently, a well-preserved young man of fifty or sixty, with a waxed moustache, and a slender umbrella carried musketwise over his shoulder; and his attention was violently arrested.

"Where have I seen that charming creature?" he asked himself, imploring his memory, which had a great store of miscellaneous treasures, to be quick and help him. "Surely I have been introduced to her somewhere. Oh, of course! it is old Hardy's niece, or ward, or whatever she is. Good day, Miss Fetherstonhaugh," turning back when he had nearly passed her, and making a profound obeisance with his hat off. "Fine afternoon for a drive."

She recognised him immediately. She had danced a quadrille with him at her memorable first evening "out," and she had learned a great deal of him since from the gossip of her aunt's circle. There was a time, she had been told, when he was nearly becoming a member of the family himself. He was a great merchant – or an ex-merchant rather – who had dealt in some mysterious commodity that had brought enormous profits; and he had risen by all kinds of good luck, from no one knew what depth of social insignificance to the proud position of a man of fashion about town, whom ladies delighted to honour.

"Good day, Mr. Kingston," she responded, looking very pink and bright, and a little flurried as she returned his salutation. She had the daintiest complexion that ever adorned a youthful face, and whenever she was startled or embarrassed, however slightly, she blushed like a rose. Mr. Kingston, accustomed to appraise the charms of his female friends with an almost brutal impartiality, was unjustifiably touched and flattered by this innocent demonstration. He was really very glad he had remembered who she was before he had lost so good an opportunity for looking at and talking to her.

"I don't think it is a very fine afternoon," she remarked presently, as the gentleman seemed to find himself for once a little at a loss for a subject; and she smiled at him through her blushes, which went and came suddenly and delicately, as if they were breathed over her by the air somehow. "It has been looking grey, like rain, ever since we started; and it is rather cold, don't you think?"

"Is it? Ah! so it is. But we must expect cold weather in May. I suppose it is rather strange to you to be finding winter coming on at this season?"

"No. Why should it be strange to me?"

"I thought – I am sure somebody told me – that you were recently out from England."

"Oh, dear, no," she replied, frankly. "I was born in this colony, and have lived in it all my life."

"In the name of fortune, where?"

"In different places; at Sandhurst, at Ballarat, and on the Upper Murray, and in little townships here and there in the bush; and sometimes in Melbourne."

"I am sure I never saw you in Melbourne until I met you at that dance the other night," he protested earnestly. "I never should have forgotten your face if I had once seen it."

"I daresay not," she said, and she was angry to find herself blushing again. "I was but a child when I lived in Melbourne before, and – and my home was not in Toorak then."

Mr. Kingston understood. She had been a poor relation in those days, and the Misses Hardy were unmarried. He had a constitutional antipathy to poor relations, and he was a little disappointed. For a few seconds he kept silence, while he wondered what her antecedents could have been. Then he looked at her again, and she was regarding him with a curious gravity of demeanour, almost as if she had divined his thoughts. There was a meek majesty about her that commanded his respect, and that he considered was excessively becoming.

After all, what did it matter about her antecedents? Did she not look a thoroughly well-bred little woman, sitting there in her furs and soft cushions, with her head held so straight? Did he not hear other men – better men than he from a genealogical point of view – singing her praises wherever he went? Whatever she had been, she was a distinguished personage now, whose acquaintance it behoved a veteran lady-killer to cultivate, and that without delay.

"I am very glad your home is in Toorak now," he said gallantly. "I have some land there myself, quite close to your uncle's place."

"Indeed," murmured Rachel.

"Yes, and I am going to build on it soon. I have just got the plans out from home – capital plans. I shall bring them in for Mrs. Hardy's opinion. When my house is built we shall be neighbours. You will have to help me, you and your aunt, with the furnishing and all that sort of thing that ladies understand."

"I don't think I understand much about it," she said; "but I shall like to see it done. I am very fond of pretty furniture. Will your house be very big?"

"Oh, nothing out of the way. I'm not going to spend more than twenty thousand pounds on it. My friends tell me I ought to do the thing properly when I am about it; but I don't see the fun of locking up a lot of money in bricks and mortar. I might want to change my residence any day, you see."

Rachel looked at him with awe. There was a flippancy in the way he spoke of that twenty thousand pounds which almost shocked her.

"If you are going to build a palace," she said, "don't talk of asking my help. I have never had anything to do with that kind of thing."