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

‘I should be very glad to go and see him, but I cannot persuade him.’

‘Why not?’

‘When a man has made up his mind, it would be wrong to try to over-persuade him, even if I believed that I could.’

‘You know the alternative?’

‘What?’

‘Just breaking with him a little.’

She smiled.

‘We shall see what Crabbe, and Augusta, and Acton will say to your taking up with a dumpy leveller.  We shall have another row.  And you’ll be broken up again!’

That was by far the most alarming of his threats; but she did not greatly believe that he would bring it to pass, or that an engagement, however imprudent, conducted as hers had been, could be made a plea for accusing Miss Fennimore or depriving her of her sisters.  She tried to express her thankfulness for the kindness that had prompted the original proposal, and her sympathy with his natural vexation at finding that a traffic which he had really ameliorated at considerable loss of profit, was still considered objectionable; but he silenced this at once as palaver, and went off to fetch his wife to try her arguments.

This was worse than Phœbe had expected!  Cecily was too thorough a wife not to have adopted all her husband’s interests, and had totally forgotten all the objections current in her own family against the manufacture of spirits.  She knew that great opportunities of gain had been yielded up, and such improvements made as had converted the distillery into a model of its kind; she was very proud of it, wished every one to be happy, and Mervyn to be saved trouble, and thought the scruples injurious and overstrained.  Phœbe would not contest them with her.  What the daughter had learnt by degrees, might not be forced on the wife; and Phœbe would only protest against trying to shake a fixed purpose, instead of maintaining its grounds.  So Cecily continued affectionately hurt, and unnecessarily compassionate, showing that a woman can hardly marry a person of tone inferior to her own without some deterioration of judgment, beneficial and elevating as her influence may be in the main.

Poor Cecily! she did the very thing that those acquainted with the ins and outs of the family had most deprecated!  She dragged Robert into the affair, writing a letter, very pretty in wifely and sisterly goodwill, to entreat him to take Mr. Randolf in hand, and persuade him of the desirableness of the spirit manufacture in general, and that of the Fulmort house in particular.

The letter she received in return was intended to be very kind, but was severely grave, in simply observing that what he had not thought fit to do himself, he could not persuade another to do.

Those words somehow acted upon Mervyn as bitter and ungrateful irony; and working himself up by an account, in his own colouring, of Robert’s behaviour at the time of the foundation of St. Matthew’s, he went thundering off to assure Phœbe that he must take an active partner, at all events; and that if she and Robert did not look out, he should find a moneyed man who knew what he was about, would clear off Robert’s waste, and restore the place to what it had once been.

‘What is your letter, Phœbe?’ he asked, seeing an envelope in Robert’s handwriting on her table.

Phœbe coloured a little.  ‘He has not said one word to Humfrey,’ she said.

‘And what has he said to you?  The traitor, insulting me to my wife!’

Phœbe thought for one second, then resolved to take the risk of reading all aloud, considering that whatever might be the effect, it could not be worse than that of his surmises.

‘Cecily has written to me, greatly to my surprise, begging for my influence with Randolf to induce him to become partner in the house.  I understand by this that he has already refused, and that you are aware of his determination; therefore I have no scruple in writing to tell you that he is perfectly right.  It is true that the trade, as Mervyn conducts it, is free from the most flagrant evils that deterred me from taking a share in it; and I am most thankful for the changes he has made.’

‘You show it, don’t you?’ interjected Mervyn.

‘I had rather see it in his hands than those of any other person, and there is nothing blameworthy in his continuance in it.  But it is of questionable expedience, and there are still hereditary practices carried on, the harm of which he has not hitherto perceived, but which would assuredly shock a new-comer such as Randolf.  You can guess what would be the difficulty of obtaining alteration, and acquiescence would be even more fatal.  I do not tell you this as complaining of Mervyn, who has done and is doing infinite good, but to warn you against the least endeavour to influence Randolf.  Depend upon it, even the accelerating your marriage would not secure your happiness if you saw your husband and brother at continual variance in the details of the business, and opposition might at any moment lead Mervyn to undo all the good he has effected.’

‘Right enough there;’ and Mervyn, who had looked furious at several sentences, laughed at last.  ‘I must get another partner, then, who can and will manage; and when all the gin-palaces are more splendiferous than ever, what will you and the parson say?’

‘That to do a little wrong in hopes of hindering another from doing worse, never yet succeeded!’ said Phœbe, bravely.

She saw that the worst was over when he had come to that laugh, and that the danger of a quarrel between the brothers was averted.  She did not know from how much terror and self-reproach poor Cecily was suffering, nor her multitudinous resolutions against kindly interferences upon terra incognita.

That fit of wrath subsided, and Mervyn neither looked out for his moneyed partner, nor fulfilled his threat of bringing the united forces of the family displeasure upon his sister.  Still there was a cloud overshadowing the enjoyment, though not lessening the outward harmony of those early bridal days.  The long, dark drives to the county gaieties, shut up with Mervyn and Cecily, were formidable by the mere existence of a topic, never mentioned, but always secretly dwelt on.  And in spite of three letters a week, Phœbe was beginning to learn that trust does not fully make up to the heart for absence, by the distance of London to estimate that of Canada, and by the weariness of one month, the tedium of seven years!

‘Yet,’ said Bertha to Cecily, ‘Phœbe is so stupidly like herself now she is engaged, that it is no fun at all.  Nobody would guess her to be in love!  If they cared for each other one rush, would not they have floated to bliss even on streams of gin?’

Cecily would not dispute their mutual love, but she was not one of those who could fully understand the double force of that love which is second to love of principle.  Obedience, not judgment, had been her safeguard, and, like most women, she was carried along, not by the abstract idea, but by its upholder.

Intuition, rather than what had actually passed before her, showed Phœbe more than once that Cecily was sorely perplexed by the difference between the standard of Sutton and that of Beauchamp.  Strict, scrupulous, and deeply devout, the clergyman’s daughter suffered at every deviation from the practices of the parsonage, made her stand in the wrong places, and while conscientiously and painfully fretting Mervyn about petty details, would be unknowingly carried over far greater stumbling-blocks.  In her ignorance she would be distressed at habits which were comparatively innocent, and then fear to put forth her influence at the right moment.  There was hearty affection on either side, and Mervyn was exceedingly improved, but more than once Phœbe saw in poor Cecily’s harassed, puzzled, wistful face, and heard in her faltering remonstrances, what it was to have loved and married without perfect esteem and trust.

CHAPTER XXXII

Get thee an ape, and trudge the land
The leader of a juggling band.

    —Scott

‘Master Howen, Master Howen, you must not go up the best stairs.’

‘But I will go up the best stairs.  I don’t like the nasty, dark, back stairs!’

‘Let me take off your boots then, sir; Mrs. Stubbs said she could not have such dirty marks—’

‘I don’t care for Mrs. Stubbs!  I won’t take my boots off!  Get off—I’ll kick you if you touch them!  I shall go where I like!  I’m a gentleman.  I shall ave hall the Olt for my very hown!’

‘Master Howen!  Oh my!’

For Flibbertigibbet’s teeth were in the crack orphan’s neck, and the foot that she had not seized kicking like a vicious colt, when a large hand seized him by the collar, and lifted him in mid-air; and the crack orphan, looking up as though the oft-invoked ‘ugly man’ of her infancy had really come to bear off naughty children, beheld for a moment, propped against the door-post, the tall figure and bearded head hitherto only seen on the sofa.

The next instant the child had been swung into the study, and the apparition, stumbling with one hand and foot to the couch, said breathlessly to the frightened girl, ‘I am sorry for my little boy’s shameful behaviour!  Leave him here.  Owen, stay.’

The child was indeed standing, as if powerless to move or even to cry, stunned by his flight in the air, and dismayed at the terrific presence in which he was for the first time left alone.  Completely roused and excited, the elder Owen sat upright, speaking not loud, but in tones forcible from vehement feeling.

‘Owen, you boast of being a gentleman!  Do you know what we are?  We are beggars!  I can neither work for myself nor for you.  We live on charity.  That girl earns her bread—we do not!  We are beggars!  Who told you otherwise?’

Instead of an answer, he only evoked a passion of frightened tears, so piteous, that he spoke more gently, and stretched out his hand; but his son shook his frock at him in terror, and retreated out of reach, backwards into a corner, replying to his calls and assurances with violent sobs, and broken entreaties to go back to ‘granma.’

At last, in despair, Owen lowered himself to the floor, and made the whole length of his person available; but the child, in the extremity of terror at the giant crawling after him, shrieked wildly and made a rush at the door, but was caught and at once drawn within the grasp of the sweeping arm.

All was still.  He was gathered up to the broad breast; the hairy cheek was gently pressed against his wet one.  It was a great powerful, encircling caress that held him.  There was a strange thrill in this contact between the father and son—a new sensation of intense loving pity in the one, a great but soothing awe in the other, as struggling and crying no more, he clung ever closer and closer, and drew the arm tighter round him.

‘My poor little fellow!’  And never had there been such sweetness in those deep full tones.

The boy responded with both arms round his neck, and face laid on his shoulder.  Poor child! it was the affection that his little heart had hungered for ever since he had left his grandmother, and which he had inspired in no one.

A few more seconds, and he was sitting on the floor, resting against his father, listening without alarm to his question—‘Now, Owen, what were you saying?’

‘I’ll never do it again, pa—never!’

‘No, never be disobedient, nor fight with girls.  But what were you saying about the Holt?’

‘I shall live here—I shall have it for my own.’

‘Who told you so?’