The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 28, February, 1860

"I don't ask it. Rosa, of course, cannot become my wife till I am able to give her a worthy home. Her mother will not wish to cancel our engagement in the mean time."

"The deuse she won't! Trust her!" the consolatory brother rejoined. "Why, it will be her first natural step. The idea of her daughter betrothed to a merchant's clerk is preposterous on the face of it. You yourself must see that."

"No, I don't," Everett said, smiling.

"Oh, I suppose you intend to make a large fortune in a twelvemonth, and then return and marry?"

"No,—but in ten years,—less than that, God helping me,—if I live, I will return and marry Rosa."

"You don't say so? And poor little Rosa is to wait patiently for you all that time! By Jove! a modest expectation of yours! It's a likely notion that Miss Beauchamp will remain unmarried for ten years, because you choose to go to Canada."

"She will never marry, if she does not marry me," Everett said, with simple gravity. "It is not alone the outward sacrament of marriage that sanctifies a union. The diviner and more vital consecration that binds us together, it is too late, now, to seek to undo."

"Oh, hang it! It's of no use talking poetry to me. I don't understand that sort of thing," Captain Gray frankly said. "I'll tell you what,—it'll never do to take those transcendental ideas with you into the world. All very well to poetize and maunder about in quiet Hazlewood; but, by Jove! you'll find it won't do in practical life. Take my word for it, if you go to Canada, long before the ten years are out, Rosa Beauchamp will be wooed and won over again. 'Tisn't in nature that it should be otherwise. In books, very likely, those sort of things happen often enough,—but not in real life, my dear fellow, I assure you. When you return, it will be to find her a thriving matron, doing the honors of one of the neighboring mansions. Make up your mind to that. Foresee your future, before you decide."

Everett smiled, sadly, but trustfully. His brother's arguments neither persuaded nor disturbed him. He stood very quiet and thoughtful. Visionary-like, he saw pictures of the future, indeed,—but very different from the one just drawn. He was not afraid.

And Captain Gray left him unconvinced and unmoved. It was not probable the two brothers would see this matter in the same light. They stood on different levels. They must be content to differ.

The next conference on the subject was between Everett and Lady Beauchamp; and the mother of Rosa was, it must be admitted, a rather formidable person to encounter in such wise. She was a busy, clever, worldly woman,—kind-hearted, too, and with both a strong will and strong affections. She was one of those people in whom even an astute observer might often be deceived, by failing to give her credit for certain good qualities which are commonly coexistent with worldliness,—especially in a woman. There was a spice of something better latent amid her shrewdness and hard-headed sagacity; the echo of more generous aspirations lingered through all the noise of this earth's Babel in her heart. And so, when she heard of Everett's resolve to pay his father's debts by parting with the property, her better and higher nature warmed to the young man; and though she protested against his Quixotism, and frowned, and talked of prudence, and so forth, her busy brain was, in fact, all the while setting itself to work for his benefit. She was, in a way, fond of the young man. No woman is quite insensible to that chivalrous deference which a Visionary like Everett always manifests to womanhood, collective and individual. And though she certainly held him to be rash, foolish, unfit to deal with the world, "poetical," (a capital crime in her eyes,) and dreamy, she yet liked him, and was glad to discover a plan whereby the objections to his marriage with her daughter, under the present adverse circumstances, might be smoothed away.

She was sitting at her big desk, strewn with accounts, in the sober-looking library where she always spent her mornings, and she rose to receive her prospective son-in-law, with an aspect serious and business-like, yet not stern.

"Well, my dear Everett, what is all this that I hear about you? A very, very sad affair, of course; but you must come and tell me how you intend to act. Yes, yes,—I've heard something about it; but I don't quite understand the state of the case. I want to have a talk with you."

And she leaned her comely face upon her plump, white hand, while gravely listening to Everett's brief statement of what he had already done, and what were his plans for the future.

"You will sell Hazlewood, pay your father's debts, and begin life on your own account, by going to Canada and becoming a merchant's clerk!" She then recapitulated his plans in a sharp, pitiless tone. "Very well! and we have only to bid you good-bye and wish you success. Is it so? For it appears to me that my daughter is left entirely out of your calculations, and very properly so. You cannot, as a merchant's clerk on a hundred a year, marry Rosa Beauchamp, I presume."

"No," Everett said, steadily, and holding her, as it were, with his earnest eyes, "I cannot have Rosa for my wife till I am able to give her a home worthy of her; but you will not refuse to sanction our engagement during the years in which I shall work for that home?"

Lady Beauchamp tapped the table with her fingers in an ominous manner.

"Long engagements are most unsatisfactory, silly, not to say dangerous things. They never end well. No man ought to wish so to bind a young girl, unless he has a reasonable chance of soon being in a position to marry her. Now I ask you, have you such a chance? If you go to Canada, it may be years before you return. Just look at the thing in a common-sense light, and tell me, can you expect my daughter to wait an indefinite time, while you go to seek and make your fortune?"

She looked at him with an air of bland candor, while thus appealing to his "common sense." Everett's aspect remained unchanged, however, in its calm steadfastness.

"I would not bind her," he said, "unless she herself felt it would be a comfort and a help, in some sort, during the weary years of separation, so to be bound. And that she does feel it, you know, Lady Beauchamp."

"My dear Sir, you are not talking reasonably," she rejoined, impatiently. "A young girl like Rosa, in love for the first time, of course wishes to be bound, as you say, to the object of her first love. But it would be doing her a cruel injustice to take her at her word. Surely you feel that? It is very true, she might not forget you for six months, or more, perhaps. But, in the course of time, as she enters on life and sees more of the world and of people, it is simply impossible that she should remain constant to a dreamy attachment to some one thousands of miles away. She would inevitably wish to form other ties; and then the engagement that she desires to-day would be the blight and burden of her life. No. I say it is a cruel injustice to let young people decide for themselves on such a point. Half the misery in the world springs from these mistakes. Think over the matter coolly, and you will see it as I do."

"It is you who do Rosa injustice," Everett answered, and paused. "Were it to be as you wish," he added, "and we to separate utterly, with no outwardly acknowledged tie to link us, no letters to pass between us, no word or sign from one to the other during all the coming years,—suppose it so,—you would shadow our lives with much unnecessary misery; but you are mistaken, if you think you would really part us. You do not understand."

"Nonsense! You talk like a young man in love. You must be reasonable."

Lady Beauchamp, by this time, had worked herself into the usual warmth with which she argued all questions, great and small, and forgot that her original intention in speaking to Everett had only been to set before him the disadvantages of his plans, in order that her own might come to the rescue with still greater brilliancy and effect.

"You must be reasonable," she repeated. "You don't suppose I have not my child's happiness at heart in all I plan and purpose? Trust me, I have had more experience of life than either of you, and it is for me to interpose between you and the dangers you would blindly rush upon. Some day you will both thank me for having done so, hard and cruel as you may think me now."

"No, I do not think you either hard or cruel. You are mistaken, simply. I believe you desire our happiness. I do not reproach or blame you, Lady Beauchamp," Everett said, sadly.

"Come, come," she cried, touched by his look and manner to an immediate unfolding of her scheme, "let us look at things again. Perhaps we shall not find them so hopeless as they look. If I am prudent, Everett, I am not mercenary. I only want to see Rosa happy. I don't care whether it is on hundreds a year, or thousands. And the fact is, I have not condemned your plans without having a more satisfactory one to offer to your choice. Listen to me."

And she proceeded, with a cleared brow, and the complacency of one who feels she is performing the part of a good genius, setting everything to rights, and making everybody comfortable, to unfold the plan she had devised, by which Everett's future was to be secured, and his marriage with Rosa looked to as something better than a misty uncertainty at the end of a vista of years.

Everett must go into the Church. That was, in fact, the profession most suited to him, and which most naturally offered itself for his acceptance. His education, his tastes, his habits, all suited him for such a career. By a happy coincidence, too, it was one in which Lady Beauchamp could most importantly assist him through her connections. Her eldest son, the young baronet, had preferment in his own gift, which was to say, in hers; and not only this, but her sister's husband, the uncle of Rosa, was a bishop, and one over whom she, Lady Beauchamp, had some influence. Once in orders, Everett's prosperity was assured. The present incumbent of Hollingsley was aged; by the time Everett was eligible, he might, in all probability, be inducted into that living, and Rosa might then become his wife. Five hundred a year, beside Miss Beauchamp's dowry, with such shining prospects of preferment to look forward to, was not an unwise commencement; for Rosa was no mere fine lady, the proud mother said,—she was sensible and prudent; she would adapt herself to circumstances. And though, of course, it was not such an establishment as she well might expect for her daughter, still, since the young people loved one another, and thought they could be happy under these reduced circumstances, she would not be too exacting. And Lady Beauchamp at last paused, and looked in Everett's face for some manifestation of his joy.

Well,—of his gratitude there could be no question. The tears stood in his earnest eyes, as he took Lady Beauchamp's hand and thanked her,—thanked her again and again.

"There, there, you foolish boy! I don't want thanks," cried she, coloring with pleasure though, as she spoke. "My only wish is to see you two children happy. I am fond of you, Everett; I shall like to see you my son," she said. "I have tried to smooth the way for you, as far as I can, over the many difficulties that obstruct it; and I fancy I have succeeded. What do you say to my plan? When can you be ordained?"

Everett sighed, as he released her hand, and looked at her face, now flushed with generous, kindly warmth. Well he knew the bitter change that would come over that face,—the passion of disappointment and displeasure which would follow his answer to that question.

He could never enter the Church. Sorrowfully, but firmly, he said it,—with that calm, steady voice and look, of which all who knew him knew the significance. He could not take orders.

Lady Beauchamp, at first utterly overwhelmed and dumfounded, stood staring at him in blank silence. Then she icily uttered a few words. His reasons,—might she ask?

They were many, Everett said. Even if no other hindrance existed, in his own mind and opinions, his reverence for so sacred an office would not permit him to embrace it as a mere matter of worldly advantage to himself.

"Grant me patience, young man! Do you mean to tell me you would decline this career because it promises to put an end to your difficulties? Are you quite a fool?" the lady burst out, astonishment and anger quite startling her from all control.

"Bear with what may at first seem to you only folly," Everett answered her, gently. "I don't think your calmer judgment can call it so. Would you have me take upon myself obligations that I feel to be most solemn and most vital, feeling myself unfitted, nay, unable, rightly to fulfil them? Would you have me commit the treachery to God and man of swearing that I felt called to that special service, when my heart protested against my profession?"

"Romantic nonsense! A mere matter of modest scruples! You underrate yourself, Everett. You are the very man for a clergyman, trust me."

But Everett went on to explain, that it was no question of under-estimation of himself.

"You do not know, perhaps," he proceeded, while Lady Beauchamp, sorely tried, tapped her fingers on the table, and her foot upon the floor,—"you do not know, that, when I was a boy, and until two or three years ago, my desire and ambition were to be a minister of the Church of England."

"Well, Sir,—what has made you so much better, or so much worse, since then, as to alter your opinion of the calling?"

"The reasons which made me abandon the idea three years since, and which render it impossible for me to consider it now, have nothing to do with my mental and moral worthiness or unworthiness. The fact is simply, I cannot become a minister of a Church with many of whose doctrines I cannot agree, and to which, indeed, I can no longer say I belong. In your sense of the word, I am far from being a Churchman."

"Do you mean to say you have become a Dissenter?" cried Lady Beauchamp; and, as if arrived at the climax of endurance, she stood transfixed, regarding the young man with a species of sublime horror.

"Again, not in your sense of the term," Everett said, smiling; "for I have joined no sect, attached myself to no recognized body of believers."

"You belong to nothing, then? You believe in nothing, I suppose?" she said, with the instinctive logic of her class. "Oh, Everett!" real distress for the moment overpowering her indignation, "it is those visionary notions of yours that have brought you to this. It was to be expected. You poets and dreamers go on refining your ideas, forsooth, till even the religion of the ordinary world isn't good enough for you."

Everett waited patiently till this first gust had passed by. Then, with that steady, calm lucidity which, strange to say, was characteristic of this Visionary's mind and intellect, he explained, so far as he could, his views and his reasons. It could not be expected that his listener should comprehend or enter into what he said. At first, indeed, she appeared to derive some small consolation from the fact that at least Everett had not "turned Dissenter." She hated Methodists, she declared,—intending thus to include with sweeping liberality all denominations in the ban of her disapproval. She would have deemed it an unpardonable crime, had the young man deserted the Church of his fathers in order to join the Congregation, some ranting conventicle. But if her respectability was shocked at the idea of his becoming a Methodist, her better feelings were outraged when she found, as she said, that he "belonged to nothing." She viewed with dislike and distrust all forms of religion that differed from her own; but she could not believe in the possibility of a religion that had no external form at all. She was dismayed and perplexed, poor lady! and even paused midway in her wrathful remonstrance to the misguided young man, to lament anew over his fatal errors. She could not understand, she said, truly enough, what in the world he meant. His notions were perfectly extraordinary and incomprehensible. She was deeply, deeply shocked, and grieved for him, and for every one connected with him.

In fact, the very earnestness and sincerity in their own opinions of a certain calibre of minds make them incapable of understanding such a state of things. That a man should believe differently from all they have been taught to believe appears to them as simply preposterous as that he should breathe differently. And so it is that only the highest order of belief can afford to be tolerant; and, as extremes meet, it requires a very perfect Faith to be able to sympathize and bear patiently with Doubt.

There was no chance of Lady Beauchamp's "comprehending" Everett in this matter. There was something almost pathetic in her mingled anger, perplexity, and disappointment. She could only look on him as a headstrong young man, suicidally bent on his own ruin,—turning obstinately from every offered aid, and putting the last climax of wretchedness to his isolated and fallen position by "turning from the faith of his fathers," as she rather imaginatively described his secession from Orthodoxy.

And, as may be concluded, the mother of Rosa was inexorable, as regarded the engagement between the young people. It must at once be cancelled. She could not for one moment suffer the idea of her daughter's remaining betrothed to the mere adventurer she considered Everett Gray had now become. If, poor as he was, he had thought fit to embrace a profession worthy of a gentleman, the case would have been different. But if his romantic notions led him to pursue such an out-of-the-way course as he had laid out for himself, he must excuse her, if she forbade her child from sharing it. Under present circumstances, his alliance could but be declined by the Beauchamp family, she said, with her stateliest air. And the next minute, as Everett held her hand, and said good-bye, she melted again from that frigid dignity, and, looking into the frank, manly, yet gentle face of the young man, cried,—

"Are you quite decided, Everett? Will you take time to consider? Will you talk to Rosa about it, first?"