Not Without Thorns

“How do you do, Captain Chancellor?” she said as she shook hands. Afterwards he fancied there had been a very slight hesitation in her manner before doing so, but at the time his complete unsuspiciousness prevented his imagining the possibility of such a thing. “It is quite an unexpected pleasure to meet you here.”

“Yes,” he answered cautiously, uncertain to what extent Eugenia might have taken Mary into her confidence, and feeling his way before committing himself; “yes, I thought my turning up would be a surprise you.”

“I thought you were still at Winsley,” said Mrs Dalrymple, also feeling her way.

“Oh dear no,” he replied. “Winsley is all very well for a fortnight, but six weeks of it would be rather too much of a good thing. I left Winsley some time ago. I am here now with an old friend of mine. Major Thanet, who has been very ill with rheumatic fever, and came down hero to recruit.”

“And are you returning to Winsley again soon?” inquired Mrs Dalrymple, her suspicion increasing that they were playing at cross purposes in some direction.

“Oh dear no,” he said again. “My leave is about up – I got a little more than my six weeks on Thanet’s account. I am due at Bridgenorth next week.”

“At Bridgenorth,” repeated Mrs Dalrymple. “Oh, indeed; and do you remain here till then?”

“Upon my word I can’t say,” replied Captain Chancellor, with an approach to impatience in his tone. “I certainly didn’t come here to sit being catechised by Mary Pevensey all the afternoon,” he said to himself, waxing wroth at Mrs Dalrymple’s cross questions and Eugenia’s non-appearance. Then suddenly throwing caution to the winds, “To tell you the truth,” exclaimed he, “my plans at present depend greatly upon yours.”

“Upon ours – may I ask why?” inquired Eugenia’s chaperone quietly, and without testifying the surprise her visitor expected.

“Because upon yours depend those of your visitor – at least so I suppose,” answered Beauchamp, coolly. “Miss Laurence is staying with you. If she stays here till next week, I shall stay too; if she goes I shall probably go too.”

“Where?” asked Mrs Dalrymple, looking up at him with a puzzled yet anxious expression on her comely face.

“To Wareborough! to ask her father to consent to her engagement to me,” he replied stoutly. “I shall either see him or write to him at once from here.”

“But – ” began Mrs Dalrymple, coming to a dead stop.

“But what?”

“You can’t marry two people.”

“Certainly not. Has any one been telling you I intended doing so,” he replied, beginning, in spite of his vexation, to laugh.

“Yes,” answered Mrs Dalrymple, naïvely. “At least, not exactly that. But I was told some time ago that you were to be married to my cousin Roma next month, and of course I believed it. Eugenia thinks so too.”

“Eugenia thinks so too,” repeated Captain Chancellor, his face darkening. “How can she possibly think so? And whoever told her such an infernal falsehood, I should like to know?” he went on angrily, for it was unspeakably annoying to him that any shadow, however distorted, of his late relations to Roma should thus follow him about – should dim the brightness of the little-looked-for consolation that had offered itself.

Mrs Dalrymple was by no means taken aback by this outburst. “It was I that told Eugenia,” she said simply.

“I beg your pardon,” exclaimed Beauchamp at once, his manner softening. “Of course you, too, were misinformed. I wonder – ” he hesitated.

“You wonder by whom?” said his hostess. “There is no reason why I should not tell you. It was Mrs Winter who mentioned it to me in a letter, as having been announced, or at least generally believed, at the Winsley Hunt Ball. And I had no reason to disbelieve it. To tell you the truth, it seemed to me to explain things a little.”

Captain Chancellor did not inquire to what things she alluded. He took up the first part of her speech.

“Who is Mrs Winter, may I ask? I don’t think I ever heard of her.”

“She is an old friend of mine,” replied Mrs Dalrymple. “Her husband is Major in the 19th Lancers, now at Sleigham. She wrote to thank me for having asked some of my friends near there to call on her – your sister especially – and in this letter she mentioned Roma’s just announced engagement.”

“But I am surprised you took such a piece of news at secondhand, my dear Mrs Dalrymple,” said Beauchamp. “Had it been true, Roma would have been sure to write to tell you.”

“I don’t know that she would,” replied Roma’s cousin. “We do not write very often, and I know she has a large circle of friends. You might as well say it was strange of me not to write to congratulate her. I did think of doing so, but other things put it out of my head. Eugenia Laurence’s illness for one thing – I was very anxious about her – and to tell you the real truth, Beauchamp,” she went on, with a sudden change of tone, and addressing him as she had been accustomed to do in his boyhood, “I did not feel very able to congratulate either you or Roma as heartily as I should have wished to do in such circumstances, considering all I had seen and observed during your stay at Wareborough. I believe now I may have done you great injustice, and I fear poor dear Eugenia had suffered unnecessarily through me. But I think you will both forgive me,” and she smiled up at him with all her old cordiality.

Captain Chancellor smiled too, with visible consciousness of no small magnanimity in so doing.

“All’s well that ends well,” he answered lightly, “though certainly in such matters it is best to take nothing on hearsay, and to be slow to pronounce on apparently inconsistent, conduct,” he added rather mysteriously. “I must confess, however, that I can’t understand Miss Laurence believing this absurd report – if she had done so till she met me again even, but after our – our conversation this morning?” he looked inquiringly at Mrs Dalrymple.

“Yes, she believes it at the present moment,” replied she. “You said something which seemed to confirm it – about ‘breaking ties,’ or something of the kind.”

“Did I?” he said, colouring a little, and not altogether pleased at so much having been repeated by Eugenia to her friend. “It is a little hard upon one to have to explain all one’s expressions at all sorts of times, you know. Of course what I said referred entirely to what my friends may think of it – Gertrude for instance – the imprudence and all that sort of thing. Of course till Gertrude sees Eugenia, it is natural for her to think a good deal about the outside part of it – prospects and position, you know. There is the strong prejudice against Wareborough and places of the kind, in the first place.”

In saying this he forgot for the moment whom he was speaking to; or if he thought of her at all, it was as Mary Pevensey, not as Mrs Dalrymple, the wife of the Wareborough mill-owner. She looked up quickly, but she had long ago learnt indifference to such allusions on her own score. Eugenia’s position, however, might be more open to discomfort therefrom.

“Then I advise Gertrude to get rid of all such prejudices at once,” said the Wareborough lady, somewhat sharply.

Captain Chancellor did not reply. He might have smoothed down the little awkwardness by some judicious hint of apology, but he was not inclined to take the trouble; he was beginning to think he had had quite enough of his old friend for the present. She had shown a somewhat undesirable readiness to place herself in loco matris towards Eugenia, one of whose attractions, to his mind, lay in the fact that marriage with her entailed upon him no Wareborough or other matron in the shape of mother-in-law.

He got up from his chair and strolled to the window. “It looks very like rain,” he observed amiably. “May I see Miss Laurence now, Mrs Dalrymple?”

Mrs Dalrymple looked uneasy – it was quite as bad as, or rather worse, she thought, than, if her twelve-year-old Minnie were grown up! In that case, at least, she could feel that the responsibility was a natural and unavoidable one, and, if she behaved unwisely, no one would have any right to scold her but Henry; but in the present instance – suppose Mr Laurence took it in his head to blame her for allowing matters to go so far without his consent? On the other hand, her soft heart was full of compassion for Eugenia, and eagerness to see her happy. Captain Chancellor read her hesitation.

“You need not feel any responsibility about it,” he said. “To all intents and purposes I assure you the thing is done. I have already written to Mr Laurence,” he took a letter out of his pocket and held it up to her, “and really it is too late to stop my seeing Eugenia. My chief reason for wishing to do so is to clear up the extraordinary misapprehension you told me of. It is only fair to me to let me put all that right. And it would be only cruel to her to leave things as they are. She is not strong, and I can’t bear her to suffer any more.” The genuine anxiety in the last few words carried the day.

“I didn’t think of not explaining things to her,” said Mrs Dalrymple, rising irresolutely from her seat as she spoke. “I could have done that. However, I daresay it is better for you to see her yourself.”

“I am quite sure it is,” said Captain Chancellor. “And to confess all my wickedness to you, had you prevented my seeing Miss Laurence here openly, I should, I assure you, have done my best to see her some other way. You could not have put a stop to either of us walking in the gardens, for instance?”

He smiled as he paid it; there was a little defiance in the smile. Mrs Dalrymple sighed gently, and shook her head.

“You were always a very self-willed little boy, Beauchamp,” she remarked, as she at last departed on her errand. Then she put her head in again at the door with a second thought.

“You will not blame me if Eugenia does not wish to see you at once?” she said. “She has been very much upset this morning, and perhaps it may be better to let her rest a little, and see you this evening.” – “And by then Henry will be back,” she added in her own mind, with a cowardly sense of satisfaction that in that case her lord and master would go shares in the possible blame.

“By all means beg Miss Laurence to do just as she likes,” replied Beauchamp, urbanely. “I can call again at any hour this evening she likes to name, if she prefers it to seeing me now.”

His misgivings, however, were of the slenderest. When he was left alone, he strolled again to the window, and stood looking out, but without seeing much of what was before him. He was thinking, more deeply perhaps than he had ever thought before; and when at last he heard the sound of the door opening softly, he started and looked round, not without a certain anxiety. But it was as he had expected, Eugenia herself, – and, oh, what a transfigured Eugenia! Never yet had he seen her as he saw her now. Notwithstanding the still evident fragility of her appearance, there was about her whole figure a brightness, a soft radiance of happiness impossible to describe. Her brown hair seemed to have gained new golden lights; her eyes, always sweet, looked deeper and yet more brilliant; there was a flush of carnation in her cheeks over which lugubrious Major Thanet would have shaken his head, which Beauchamp at the moment thought lovelier than any rose-tint he had ever seen.

She came forward quickly, – more quickly than he advanced to meet her. He seemed almost startled by her beauty, and looked at her for a moment without speaking. He could hardly understand her perfect absence of self-consciousness, her childlike “abandon” of overwhelming joy.

“Beauchamp, oh, Beauchamp,” she exclaimed, as their hands met, “she has told me it was all a mistake, and, oh, I am so very happy!”

So she was, unutterably happy. Life for her, she felt, could hold no more perfect moment than this, and that there could be anything unbecoming in expressing her happiness, above all to him to whom she owed it, who shared it, as she believed, to the full, never in the faintest degree occurred to her. She did not think her lover cold or less fervent in his rejoicing than herself; she trusted him too utterly for such an idea to be possible to her, even had there been more cause for it than there really was. For, after the first instant, Captain Chancellor found it easy to respond to her expressions of thankfulness and delight; found it too by no means an unpleasing experience to be hailed by this lovely creature as the hero of her dreams, the fairy prince whom even yet she could hardly believe had chosen her – a very Cinderella as she seemed to herself in comparison with him – out of all womankind to be his own. And, even if a shade more reserve, a trifle more dignity, would have been better in accordance with his taste, his notion of the perfectly well-bred bearing in such circumstances, after all, was there not every excuse for such innocent shortcoming, such sweet forgetfulness? She was so young, he reflected, had seen nothing, or worse than nothing, of society, – for far better for a girl to be brought up in a convent than in the mixed society of a place like Wareborough, – it was only a marvel to see her as she was. And deeper than these reflections lay another consciousness of excuse in his mind, which yet, even to himself, he would have shrunk from the bad taste of putting into words, – the consciousness that it was not every girl whose bridegroom elect was a Beauchamp Chancellor!

“What a child it is!” he murmured to himself, as he stroked back the sunny brown hair from the white temples, and looked smilingly down into the liquid depths of the sweet, loving eyes. There would be a great deal to teach her, he thought to himself; some things perhaps he must help her to unlearn; but with such a pupil the prospect of the task before him was not appalling. Suddenly there recurred to him the memory of the misapprehension of his words of which Mrs Dalrymple had told him. This must be set right at once, – his fiancée must be taught to view such things differently, to recognise the established feelings of the world – his world – on such matters.

“Eugenia, my dearest,” he began, rather gravely, and the gravity reflected itself in her face as instantly as a passing cloud across the sun is mirrored in the clear water of the lake beneath, “I want to ask you one thing. How could you distrust me, misinterpret me so, as Mrs Dalrymple tells me you did?”

“I never for an instant distrusted you,” she answered quickly. “At the worst – at the very worst – I never doubted you. I believed you were bound in some way, – bound by ties which in honour you could not break; but, Beauchamp, I never blamed you, or doubted that we should not have been separated had it been in your power to avoid it. Distrust you? Oh, no; I knew too well. I judged you by myself.”

“My darling!” he replied, kissing her again. Her sentiments were very pretty, very romantic, and so forth, and not objectionable considering she was a woman, but still hardly to the purpose. And, woman though she was, she must learn to take less poetical and high-flown, more conventional and “accepted,” views of things. Yet notwithstanding his pleasing sense of masculine superiority, he had winced a little inwardly while she spoke. For a moment there flashed before him an impulse of perfect honesty and candour, a temptation to tell her what small ground she had had for this innocent faith of hers, – a sort of yearning to be loved by her for what he was, and no more.