Hopes and Fears or, scenes from the life of a spinster

Fortunately he was beforehand with her, for both the likeness and the path through the pine woods reminded him strongly of his old friend, and he returned to the subject.  ‘So you are a great admirer of dear old Charlecote, Phœbe: you can’t remember him?’

‘No, but Robert does, and I sometimes think I do.’  (Then it came.)  ‘You think Mr. Randolf like him?’  Thanks to her hat, she could blush more comfortably now.

‘I did not see him near.  It was only something in air and figure.  People inherit those things wonderfully.  Now, my son Charlie sits on horseback exactly like his grandfather, whom he never saw; and John—’

Oh! was he going to run away on family likenesses?  Phœbe would not hear the ‘and John;’ and observed, ‘Mr. Charlecote was his godfather, was he not?’

Which self-evident fact brought him back again to ‘Yes; and I only wish he had seen more of him!  These are his plantations, I declare, that he used to make so much of!’

‘Yes, that is the reason Miss Charlecote is so fond of them.’

‘Miss Charlecote!  When I think of him, I have no patience with her.  I do believe he kept single all his life for her sake: and why she never would have him I never could guess.  You ladies are very unreasonable sometimes, Phœbe.’

Phœbe tried to express a rational amount of wonder at poor Honor’s taste, but grew incoherent in fear lest it should be irrational, and was rather frightened at finding Sir John looking at her with some amusement; but he was only thinking of how willingly the poor little heiress of the Mervyns had once been thrown at Humfrey Charlecote’s head.  But he went on to tell her of all that her hero had ever been to him and to the county, and of the blank his death had left, and never since supplied, till she felt more and more what a ‘wise’ man truly was!

No one was in the drawing-room, but Honor came down much more cheerful and lively than she had been for years, and calling Owen materially better—the doctors thought the injury to the head infinitely mitigated, and the first step to recovery fairly taken—there were good accounts of the Prendergasts, and all things seemed to be looking well.  Presently Sir John, to Phœbe’s great satisfaction, spoke of her guest, and his resemblance, but Honor answered with half-resentful surprise.  Some of the old servants had made the same remark, but she could not understand it, and was evidently hurt by its recurrence.  Phœbe sat on, listening to the account of Lucilla’s letters, and the good spirits and health they manifested; forcing herself not too obviously to watch door or window, and when Sir John was gone, she only offered to depart, lest Miss Charlecote should wish to be with Owen.

‘No, my dear, thank you; Mr. Randolf is with him, and he can read a little now.  We are getting above the solitaire board, I assure you.  I have fitted up the little room beyond the study for his bedroom, and he sits in the study, so there are no stairs, and he is to go out every day in a chair or the carriage.’

‘Does the little boy amuse him?’

‘No, not exactly, poor little fellow.  They are terribly afraid of each other, that is the worst of it.  And then we left the boy too long with the old woman.  I hear his lessons for a quarter of an hour a day, and he is a clever child enough; but his pronunciation and habits are an absolute distress, and he is not happy anywhere but in the housekeeper’s room.  I try to civilize him, but as yet I cannot worry poor Owen.  You can’t think how comfortable we are together, Phœbe, when we are alone.  Since his sister went we have got on so much better.  He was shy before her; but I must tell you, my dear, he asked me to read my Psalms and Lessons aloud, as I used to do; and we have had such pleasant evenings, and he desired that the servants might still come in to prayers in the study.  But then he always was different with me.’

And Phœbe, while assenting, could not silence a misgiving that she thought very cruel.  She would believe Owen sincere if Humfrey Randolf did.  Honor, however, was very happy, and presently begged her to come and see Owen.  She obeyed with alacrity, and was conducted to the study.  No Randolf was there, only pen, ink, paper, and algebra.  But as she was greeting Owen, who looked much better and less oppressed, Honor made an exclamation, and from the window they saw the young man leaning over the sundial, partly studying its mysteries, partly playing with little Owen, who hung on him as an old playmate.

‘Yes,’ said Owen, ‘he has taken pity on the boy—he is very good to him—has served an apprenticeship.’

Mr. Randolf looked up, saw Phœbe, gave a start of recognition and pleasure, and sped towards the house.

‘Yes, Phœbe, I do see some likeness,’ said Honor, as though a good deal struck and touched.

All the ridiculous and troublesome confusion was so good as to be driven away in the contentment of Humfrey Randolf’s presence, and the wondrous magnetic conviction that he was equally glad to be with her.  She lost all restlessness, and was quite ready to amuse Owen by a lively discussion and comparison of the two weddings, but she so well knew that she should like to stay too long, that she cut her time rather over short, and would not stay to luncheon.  This was not like the evenings that began with Hiawatha and ended at Lakeville, or on Lake Ontario; but one pleasure was in store for Phœbe.  While she was finding her umbrella, and putting on her clogs, Humfrey Randolf ran down-stairs to her, and said, ‘I wanted to tell you something.  My stepmother is going to be married.’

‘You are glad?’

‘Very glad.  It is to a merchant whom she met at Buffalo, well off, and speaking most kindly of the little boys.’

‘That must be a great load off your mind.’

‘Indeed it is, though the children must still chiefly look to me.  I should like to have little George at a good school.  However, now their immediate maintenance is off my hands, I have more to spend in educating myself.  I can get evening lessons now, when my day’s work is over.’

‘Oh! do not overstrain your head,’ said Phœbe, thinking of Bertha.

‘Heads can bear a good deal when they are full of hope,’ he said, smiling.

‘Still after your out-of-doors life of bodily exercise, do you not find it hard to be always shut up in London?’

‘Perhaps the novelty has not worn off.  It is as if life had only begun since I came into the city.’

‘A new set of faculties called into play?’

‘Faculties—yes, and everything else.’

‘I must go now, or my sisters will be waiting for me, and I see your dinner coming in.  Good-bye.’

‘May I come to see you?’

‘O yes, pray let me show you our cottage.’

‘When may I come?’

‘To-morrow, I suppose.’

She felt, rather than saw him watching her all the way from the garden-gate to the wood.  That little colloquy was the sunshiny point in her day.  Had the tidings been communicated in the full circle, it would have been as nothing compared with their reservation for her private ear, with the marked ‘I wanted to tell you.’  Then she came home, looked at Maria threading holly-berries, and her heart fainted within her.  There were moments when poor Maria would rise before her as a hardship and an infliction, and then she became terrified, prayed against such feelings as a crime, and devoted herself to her sister with even more than her wonted patient tenderness.

The certainty that the visit would take place kept her from all flutterings and self-debate, and in due time Mr. Randolf arrived.  Anxiously did Phœbe watch for his look at Maria, for Bertha’s look at him, and she was pleased with both.  His manner to Maria was full of gentleness, and Bertha’s quick eyes detected his intellect.  He stood an excellent examination from her and Miss Fennimore upon the worn channel of Niagara, which had so often been used as a knockdown argument against Miss Charlecote’s cosmogony; and his bright terse powers of description gave them, as they agreed, a better idea of his woods than any travels which they had read.

It was no less interesting to observe his impression of the English village-life at Hiltonbury.  To him, the aspect of the country had an air of exquisite miniature finish, wanting indeed in breadth and freedom, but he had suffered too much from vain struggling single-handed with Nature in her might, not to value the bounds set upon her; and a man who knew by personal experience what it was to seek his whole live stock in an interminable forest, did not complain of the confinement of hedges and banks.  Nay, the ‘hedgerow elms and hillocks green’ were to him as classical as Whitehall; he treated Maria’s tame robins with as much respect as if they had been Howards or Percies; holly and mistletoe were handled by him with reverential curiosity; and the church and home of his ancestors filled him with a sweet loyal enthusiasm, more eager than in those to whom these things were familiar.

Miss Charlecote herself came in for some of these feelings.  He admired her greatly in her Christmas aspect of Lady Bountiful, in which she well fulfilled old visions of the mistress of an English home, but still more did he dwell upon her gentleness, and on that shadowy resemblance to his mother, which made him long for some of that tenderness which she lavished upon Owen.  He looked for no more than her uniformly kind civility and hospitality, but he was always wishing to know her better; and any touch of warmth and affection in her manner towards him was so delightful that he could not help telling Phœbe of it, in their next brief tête-à-tête.

He was able to render a great service to Miss Charlecote.  Mr. Brooks’s understanding had not cleared with time, and the accounts that had been tangled in summer were by the end of the year in confusion worse confounded.  He was a faithful servant, but his accounts had always been audited every month, and in his old age, his arithmetic would not carry him farther, so that his mistress’s long absence abroad had occasioned such a hopeless chaos, that but for his long services, his honesty might have been in question.  Honora put this idea away with angry horror.  Not only did she love and trust the old man, but he was a legacy from Humfrey, and she would have torn the page from her receipts rather than rouse the least suspicion against him.  Yet she could not bear to leave any flaw in Humfrey’s farm books, and she toiled and perplexed herself in vain; till Owen, finding out what distressed her, and grieving at his own incapacity, begged that Randolf might help her; when behold! the confused accounts arranged themselves in comprehensible columns, and poor old Brooks was proved to have cheated himself so much more than his lady as to be entirely exonerated from all but puzzle-headedness.  The young man’s farmer life qualified him to be highly popular at the Holt.  He was curious about English husbandry, talked to the labourers, and tried their tools with no unpractised hand, even the flail which Honor’s hatred of steam still kept as the winter’s employment in the barn; he appreciated the bullocks, criticized the sheep, and admired the pigs, till the farming men agreed ‘there had not been such an one about the place since the Squire himself.’

Honora might be excused for not having detected a likeness between the two Humfreys.  Scarcely a feature was in the same mould, the complexion was different, and the heavily-built, easy-going Squire, somewhat behind his own century, had apparently had nothing in common with the brisk modern colonial engineer; yet still there was something curiously recalling the expression of open honesty, and the whole cast of countenance, as well as the individuality of voice, air, and gestures, and the perception grew upon her so much in the haunts of her cousin, where she saw his attitudes and habits unconsciously repeated, that she was almost ready to accept Bertha’s explanation that it was owing to the influence of the Christian name that both shared.  But as it had likewise been borne by the wicked disinherited son who ran away, the theory was somewhat halting.

Phœbe’s intercourse with Humfrey the younger was much more fragmentary than in town, and therefore, perhaps, the more delicious.  She saw him on most of the days of his fortnight’s stay, either in the mutual calls of the two houses, in chance meetings in the village, or in walks to or from the holy-day services at the church, and these afforded many a moment in which she was let into the deeper feelings that his first English Christmas excited.  It was not conventional Christmas weather, but warm and moist, thus rendering the contrast still stronger with the sleighing of his prosperous days, the snowshoe walk of his poorer ones.  A frost hard enough for skating was the prime desire of Maria and Bertha, who both wanted to see the art practised by one to whom it was familiar.  The frost came at last, and became reasonably hard in the first week of the new year, one day when Phœbe, to her regret, was forced to drive to Elverslope to fulfil some commissions for Mervyn and Cecily, who were expected at home on the 8th of January, after a Christmas at Sutton.

However, she had a reward.  ‘I do think,’ said Miss Fennimore to her, as she entered the drawing-room, ‘that Mr. Randolf is the most good-natured man in the world!  For full three-quarters of an hour this afternoon did he hand Maria up and down a slide on the pond at the Holt!’

‘You went up to see him skate?’

‘Yes; he was to teach Bertha.  We found him helping the little Sandbrook to slide, but when we came he sent him in with the little maid, and gave Bertha a lesson, which did not last long, for she grew nervous.  Really her nerves will never be what they were!  Then Maria begged for a slide, and you know what any sort of monotonous bodily motion is to her; there is no getting her to leave off, and I never saw anything like the spirit and good-nature with which he complied.’

‘He is very kind to Maria,’ said Phœbe.

‘He seems to have that sort of pitying respect which you first put into my mind towards her.’

‘Oh, are you come home, Phœbe?’ said Maria, running into the room.  ‘I did not hear you.  I have been sliding on the ice all the afternoon with Mr. Randolf.  It is so nice, and he says we will do it again to-morrow.’

‘Ha, Phœbe!’ said Bertha, meeting her on the stairs, ‘do you know what you missed?’

‘Three children sliding on the ice,’ quoted Phœbe.

‘Seeing how a man that is called Humfrey can bear with your two sisters making themselves ridiculous.  Really I should set the backwoods down as the best school of courtesy, but that I believe some people have that school within themselves.  Hollo!’

For Phœbe absolutely kissed Bertha as she went up-stairs.

‘Ha?’ said Bertha, interrogatively; then went into the drawing-room, and looked very grave, almost sad.