Not Without Thorns

“Yes,” she whispered, her mouth still quivering, “I suppose you do, or,” with an attempt at playfulness, “you wouldn’t have asked me. And I don’t want to put it off, Beauchamp, for it isn’t as if you were living here and I could often see you. Then I shouldn’t mind. But every time you go away I can’t help fancying something may go wrong and you may never come back. And it would be dreadful for you to go away – ever so far off, isn’t it? – just now. I should feel dreadfully superstitious about it,” – she gave a little shiver – “oh, it would be miserable!”

“Yes, and all the trousseau, and the remarks of Mrs Grundy and Mr Jones Robinson!” said Captain Chancellor.

“Those things would not trouble me much,” said Eugenia, quickly. “I wish you would not think all women are like that, Beauchamp.”

But he was in a good humour again by now, so he stroked her pretty hair fondly and told her, whatever being “like that” might mean, he certainly did not think any other woman was like her. And she smiled and was quite happy again, and asked him to promise never to look at her so coldly or speak so harshly, which he did.

“But something must have put you out a little, Beauchamp,” she went on, waxing bolder. “I thought so when you first came in. Are you much troubled about your cousin?”

“I am sorry, very sorry, both for him and for his family,” replied Captain Chancellor. “But do believe me, Eugenia, there is nothing wrong.”

And with this she had to be content. Not that she distrusted him; his tone sounded perfectly sincere, and she did not in the least suspect him of wishing to deceive her. She only fancied that he did not like to cloud the present to her by folly sharing with her his sorrow and anxiety, and this seemed to her a mistake.

A little silence ensued, for Eugenia would not press her inquiries further. Suddenly Beauchamp spoke again.

“I am really losing my head to-day,” he said. “I had another letter to tell you of, that I received at the same time as my sister’s.” He felt in his pocket again. “Ah yes, here it is.”

He glanced at it for a moment, then put it into her hands. It was from Roma, written in a very different tone from Mrs Eyrecourt’s stiff little note, and, though nominally addressed to Beauchamp, evidently intended for them both.

“An idea has struck me,” wrote Roma, “that though Gertrude cannot now be at Wareborough for your marriage, I might manage to be there instead of her, if you and Eugenia (I may call her so, may I not?) would like it. I do not like the idea of no one of your own side of the house being present. We leave town on Tuesday – Gertrude, as she will have told you, and the children, to join the Chancellors at Torquay, and I to go north again for a month. This is sooner than we had intended, so I have not made any plans for my journey, but I am sure Mary Dalrymple will take me in, if you will ask her about it. Please answer by return, and then I can write to her myself. I do hope my proposal will not be unwelcome.”

“How very nice of her!” exclaimed Eugenia, with sparkling eyes. “I am delighted she is coming. Of course we should have asked her at first if we had known she would care to come. I am so pleased, are not you, Beauchamp?”

“Oh, yes, I don’t mind. I have no objection to her coming,” said Captain Chancellor, indifferently and somewhat absently. He had taken another letter from his pocket and had been glancing over it while Eugenia read Roma’s note. Now he folded it up and put it away, but the perusal of it seemed to have brought a little cloud again to his face.

“Beauchamp, you are very ungrateful. You don’t deserve your cousin – Miss Eyrecourt I mean – to be so good to you,” said Eugenia, reproachfully.

“Don’t I? I fancy I fully deserve all the goodness I get from her,” replied Beauchamp, with a tinge of bitterness in his tone which made Eugenia tell him he had certainly been rubbed the wrong way by some one or something, he was so moody and captious, which little scolding he took in good part and exerted himself to a greater appearance of amiability, till the few hours of his visit were over and he was due again at Bridgenorth.

It was Mrs Eyrecourt’s letter that had irritated and excited him. In it she told him of Roger’s unmistakably hopeless state, mingling regrets that he could not be with the poor boy, “who is so fond of you, you know,” with hints of her sisterly interest in the vast change impending in his own prospects. “I cannot pretend not to think of what is coming as it affects you, dearest Beauchamp. I fear I have always been inclined to be ambitious for you, and now when my pride in you seems likely to have the gratification of seeing you in such a position as the head of your house has always had the power, if he had the will, to fill, I fear I shall not be easily content. I shall expect great things of you. But I am forgetting – I must not run on as if I still held the first place with you. Other ties and influences must now naturally come before mine. And oh, how earnestly I trust I may agree with you that you have done wisely just now! I own that I felt hurt at your having so completely refrained from consulting or confiding in me, but I have tried to put aside all such personal feeling and to believe you may have had reason for acting so strangely to me. So do not imagine that I am the least prejudiced, and remember always that your interests can be dearer to no one than to your sister.”

It was all very reasonable and natural and sisterly, and no doubt Beauchamp should have felt properly grateful and gratified. But all the same the immediate effect of the letter was to make him very cross; and but for Eugenia’s simplicity and unsuspicious sweetness, this last visit to Wareborough might have been a last indeed. And had such a catastrophe occurred, it is hardly to be supposed that Mrs Eyrecourt would have taken it much to heart.

Nothing of the kind came to pass, however. Thursday arrived, a bright, sunny day; the guests respectively made their appearance, and Eugenia Laurence was married to Beauchamp Chancellor without more ado, finding it, when it came to the point, a harder matter to say farewell to father and sister and to “home,” even though only a dingy old house in a dull Wareborough street, than she had at all been able to anticipate. And it was in tears after all that the bride, whose fondest hopes were realised, who believed herself to be most happy among women, left her father’s house, henceforward to be to him very desolate.

“Why can’t people get over all their crying beforehand and in private, I wonder,” said Mr Thurston, rather gruffly, as he stood among the other guests to watch the departure of the hero and heroine of the day. He spoke half to himself, but the young lady standing beside him made answer to his remark.

“It is no real test of feeling to cry when one is excited. I fancy it is a mere physical result of the sort of fuss a girl is kept in for some time before. Where a bride is really unhappy she would probably exert herself to hide her feelings.”

“Then you think Eugenia Laurence – I beg her pardon, Mrs Chancellor – is really happy? At least that is the inference from what you say,” inquired Gerald.

“I did not mean to imply anything,” answered Roma, lightly. “I only said her crying or not crying had nothing to say to her real feelings. But if you want to know my real opinion – I am almost a stranger to her, remember – I do think she is very, perfectly happy.”

She raised her keen but kindly dark eyes to Mr Thurston as she spoke, and looked him full in the face. “Far better for him to have done at once and for ever with all sentimentalism about her,” was the thought in her mind. “She is thoroughly and pathetically in love with Beauchamp and has never cared a straw for Mr Thurston, and the more completely he realises this the better for every one concerned.” Nevertheless she rather expected to detect some sign of remaining soreness – he had been so very deeply in earnest about the girl, the Eugenia of his dreams, when she had last seen him that night at Brighton at the Montmorrises’ – to find him shrink from her unpalatable expression of belief in the perfect happiness of Beauchamp’s wife. She was disappointed. Mr Thurston only looked grave, and his voice was completely free from effort or constraint when he spoke again.

“I am very glad, very thankful that you think so,” he said. “I am very much in earnest in my hopes that she will be happy, that she has chosen well for herself. And of course, though you know her slightly, you must know him – Captain Chancellor – well, therefore your opinion has great weight with me.”

His eyes, the deep-set, penetrating grey eyes, whose expression, now she saw them again, seemed curiously familiar to her – were fixed on her this time. Roma felt uncomfortable; it was not easy to allow one’s words to be taken for more than their value under the scrutiny of Gerald Thurston’s gaze. A slight look of embarrassment crept over her face. “Yes,” she began, “Beauchamp and I are very old friends; very good friends too. I have a great regard for him. I think he has a great many good qualities but – I did not exactly mean – I don’t quite – ” she floundered more and more desperately as she became conscious of the increasing gravity of her hearer’s expression, then suddenly she came to a dead stop.

Mr Thurston did not appear to pity her confusion. He remained silent for a minute, as if half expecting her to speak again, then he said, quietly —

“I wish you would not be afraid of telling me what you really do mean. We seem fated to be confidential with each other at rather short notice, don’t we? And I don’t think you will consider my interest in what we were speaking of unnatural.”

“No, indeed I do not,” returned Roma, cordially. “And I should be very sorry for you to misunderstand me or attach more weight to what I may say or not say than it is worth. Only when I said I thought Eugenia perfectly happy, I suppose I meant that she thinks herself so.”

“But thinking herself so is being so, is it not?” said Gerald, smiling slightly.

“Yes,” said Roma, doubtfully, “I suppose it is. But, to speak quite plainly,” she went on, growing tired of beating about the bush and not altogether relishing Mr Thurston’s pertinacity, “what I really mean is that I should not consider the fate of being Beauchamp’s wife the happiest in the world. But Eugenia thinks so, and long may she continue to do so.”

She spoke with a little impatience. Gerald felt puzzled.

“But you like him, don’t you?” he said. “He has been almost a sort of brother to you, has he not?”

“Yes, I like him and I think well of him. I wouldn’t for worlds have you imagine I do not. But I think Eugenia in many ways too good for him, and if she ever wakes to this the chances are she will not do him justice then, any more than she does now.” She spoke sadly and seriously. Mr Thurston understood her now, and saw that no shadow of personal feeling had influenced her former speech. His face, too, was grave as he answered her.

“But is she certain to awake?” he said.

“Of that you can judge better than I,” answered Roma.

“And, after all, sooner or later everyone must awake,” he went on, as if speaking to himself.

“Except those who have never been asleep,” said Roma. “The longer I live the more thankful I am that I was born an eminently practical person, in no way inclined to exaggerated belief in any one. There is not a grain of tragedy in my composition.”

“I remember your saying something of that kind to me the first time we met,” said Gerald. “I was rather sceptical then, and I don’t know that I am in a more believing frame of mind now. I don’t think you quite know the meaning of your words.”

“Oh yes, I do,” said Roma, laughing. “However, the subject is not worth discussing.”

Gerald saw she did not care for more talk about herself, and when he spoke again it was in a different tone.

“Are they – Captain Chancellor and his wife – likely to be much in your neighbourhood?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I hardly think so. Their plans are rather uncertain, I fancy,” replied Roma, remembering the frail, fast-waning life which alone stood between Beauchamp and a very different future to that anticipated by Eugenia and her friends. “Of course as long as he stays in the army they must go wherever he is sent. Still, no doubt I shall see them sometimes, and,” she hesitated a little, “if my friendship is worth having, you may be sure Eugenia shall have it, such as it is. I think I have fallen a good deal in love with her myself,” she smiled, and then blushed a little, as she remembered to whom she was speaking.

“Thank you,” said Gerald, as fervently as if he had been seeking the goodwill of a new relation for a young, inexperienced sister.

Roma stayed two days at Wareborough before continuing her journey north. She saw Mr Thurston again once or twice, but their talk was confined to general subjects, and Eugenia was not mentioned, save casually, by either of them.

Volume Two – Chapter Nine.

A Short Honeymoon

And the sunshine you recall —
Ah, my dear, but is it true?
Did such sunshine ever fall
Out of any sky so blue?
Half I think you dreamed it all.

    M. Brotherton.