Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 33, December, 1873

"Oh, I know that," he said readily. "I should like to be rich beyond anything that ever happened in a drama; and I should take my chance of all the evil influences that money is supposed to exert. Do you know, I think you rich people are very unfairly treated."

"But we are not rich," said Mrs. Kavanagh, passing at the time. "Cecilia and I find ourselves very poor sometimes."

"But I quite agree with Mr. Ingram, mamma," said Cecilia—as if any one had had the courage to disagree with Mr. Ingram!—"rich people are shamefully ill-treated. If you go to a theatre, now, you find that all the virtues are on the side of the poor, and if there are a few vices, you get a thousand excuses for them. No one takes account of the temptations of the rich. You have people educated from their infancy to imagine that the whole world was made for them, every wish they have gratified, every day showing them people dependent on them and grateful for favors; and no allowance is made for such a temptation to become haughty, self-willed and overbearing. But of course it stands to reason that the rich never have justice done them in plays and stories, for the people who write are poor."

"Not all of them."

"But enough to strike an average of injustice. And it is very hard. For it is the rich who buy books and who take boxes at the theatres, and then they find themselves grossly abused; whereas the humble peasant who can scarcely read at all, and who never pays more than sixpence for a seat in the gallery, is flattered and coaxed and caressed until one wonders whether the source of virtue is the drinking of sour ale. Mr. Ingram, you do it yourself. You impress mamma and me with the belief that we are miserable sinners if we are not continually doing some act of charity. Well, that is all very pleasant and necessary, in moderation; but you don't find the poor folks so very anxious to live for other people. They don't care much what becomes of us. They take your port wine and flannels as if they were conferring a favor on you, but as for your condition and prospects in this world and the next, they don't trouble much about that. Now, mamma, just wait a moment."

"I will not. You are a bad girl," said Mrs. Kavanagh severely. "Here has Mr. Ingram been teaching you and making you better for ever so long back, and you pretend to accept his counsel and reform yourself; and then all at once you break out, and throw down the tablets of the law, and conduct yourself like a heathen."

"Because I want him to explain, mamma. I suppose he considers it wicked of us to start for Switzerland to-morrow. The money we shall spend in traveling might have despatched a cargo of muskets to some missionary station, so that—"

"Ceilia!"

"Oh no," Ingram said carelessly, and nursing his knee with both his hands as usual, "traveling is not wicked: it is only unreasonable. A traveler, you know, is a person who has a house in one town, and who goes to live in a house in another town, in order to have the pleasure of paying for both."

"Mr. Ingram," said Mrs. Kavanagh, "will you talk seriously for one minute, and tell me whether we are to expect to see you in the Tyrol?"

But Ingram was not in a mood for talking seriously, and he waited to hear Mrs. Lorraine strike in with some calmly audacious invitation. She did not, however, and he turned round from her mother to question her. He was surprised to find that her eyes were fixed on the ground and that something like a tinge of color was in her face. He turned rapidly away again. "Well, Mrs. Kavanagh," he said with a fine air of indifference, "the last time we spoke about that I was not in the difficulty I am in at present. How could I go traveling just now, without knowing how to regulate my daily expenses? Am I to travel with six white horses and silver bells, or trudge on foot with a wallet?"

"But you know quite well," said Mrs. Lorraine warmly—"you know you will not touch that money that Mrs. Lavender has left you."

"Oh, pardon me," he said: "I should rejoice to have it if it did not properly belong to some one else. And the difficulty is, that Mr. Mackenzie is obviously very anxious that neither Mr. Lavender nor Sheila should have it. If Sheila gets it, of course she will give it to her husband. Now, if it is not to be given to her, do you think I should regard the money with any particular horror and refuse to touch it? That would be very romantic, perhaps, but I should be sorry, you know, to give my friends the most disquieting doubts about my sanity. Romance goes out of a man's head when the hair gets gray."

"Until a man has gray hair," Mrs. Lorraine said, still with some unnecessary fervor, "he does not know that there are things much more valuable than money. You wouldn't touch that money just now, and all the thinking and reasoning in the world will never get you to touch it."

"What am I to do with it?" he said meekly.

"Give it to Mr. Mackenzie, in trust for his daughter," Mrs. Lorraine said promptly; and then, seeing that her mother had gone to the end of the drawing-room to fetch something or other, she added quickly, "I should be more sorry than I can tell you to find you accepting this money. You do not wish to have it. You do not need it. And if you did take it, it would prove a source of continual embarrassment and regret to you, and no assurances on the part of Mr. Mackenzie would be able to convince you that you had acted rightly by his daughter. Now, if you simply hand over your responsibilities to him, he cannot refuse them, for the sake of his own child, and you are left with the sense of having acted nobly and generously. I hope there are many men who would do what I ask you to do, but I have not met many to whom I could make such an appeal with any hope. But, after all, that is only advice. I have no right to ask you to do anything like that. You asked me for my opinion about it. Well, that is it. But I should not have asked you to act on it."

"But I will," he said in a low voice; and then he went to the other end of the room, for Mrs. Kavanagh was calling him to help her in finding something she had lost.

Before he left that evening Mrs. Lorraine said to him, "We go by the night-mail to Paris to-morrow night, and we shall dine here at five. Would you have the courage to come up and join us in that melancholy ceremony?"

"Oh yes," he said, "if I may go down to the station to see you away afterward."

"I think if we got you so far we should persuade you to go with us," Mrs. Kavanagh said with a smile.

He sat silent for a minute. Of course she could not seriously mean such a thing. But at all events she would not be displeased if he crossed their path while they were actually abroad.

"It is getting too late in the year to go to Scotland now," he said with some hesitation.

"Oh most certainly," Mrs. Lorraine said.

"I don't know where the man in whose yacht I was to have gone may be now. I might spend half my holiday in trying to catch him."

"And during that time you would be alone," Mrs. Lorraine said.

"I suppose the Tyrol is a very nice place," he suggested.

"Oh most delightful," she exclaimed. "You know, we should go round by Switzerland, and go up by Luzerne and Zurich to the end of the Lake of Constance. Bregenz, mamma, isn't that the place where we hired that good-natured man the year before last?"

"Yes, child."

"Now, you see, Mr. Ingram, if you had less time than we—if you could not start with us to-morrow—you might come straight down by Schaffhausen and the steamer, and catch us up there, and then mamma would become your guide. I am sure we should have some pleasant days together till you got tired of us, and then you could go off on a walking-tour if you pleased. And then, you know, there would be no difficulty about our meeting at Bregenz, for mamma and I have plenty of time, and we should wait there for a few days, so as to make sure."

"Cecilia," said Mrs. Kavanagh, "you must not persuade Mr. Ingram against his will. He may have other duties—other friends to see, perhaps."

"Who proposed it, mamma?" said the daughter calmly.

"I did, as a mere joke. But of course, if Mr. Ingram thinks of going to the Tyrol, we should be most pleased to see him there."

"Oh, I have no other friends whom I am bound to see," Ingram said with some hesitation, "and I should like to go to the Tyrol. But—the fact is—I am afraid—"

"May I interrupt you?" said Mrs. Lorraine. "You do not like to leave London so long as your friend Sheila is in trouble. Is not that the case? And yet she has her father to look after her. And it is clear you cannot do much for her when you do not even know where Mr. Lavender is. On the whole, I think you should consider yourself a little bit now, and not get cheated out of your holidays for the year."

"Very well," Ingram said, "I shall be able to tell you to-morrow."

To be so phlegmatic and matter-of-fact a person, Mr. Ingram was sorely disturbed on going home that evening, nor did he sleep much during the night. For the more that he speculated on all the possibilities that might arise from his meeting those people in the Tyrol, the more pertinaciously did this refrain follow these excursive fancies: "If I go to the Tyrol I shall fall in love with that girl, and ask her to marry me. And if I do so, what position should I hold, with regard to her, as a penniless man with a rich wife?"

He did not look at the question in such light as the opinion of the world might throw on it. The difficulty was what she herself might afterward come to think of their mutual relations. True it was, that no one could be more gentle and submissive to him than she appeared to be. In matters of opinion and discussion he already ruled with an autocratic authority which he fully perceived himself, and exercised, too, with some sort of notion that it was good for this clear-headed young woman to have to submit to control. But of what avail would this moral authority be as against the consciousness she would have that it was her fortune that was supplying both with the means of living?

He went down to his office in the morning with no plans formed. The forenoon passed, and he had decided on nothing. At mid-day he suddenly be-thought him that it would be very pleasant if Sheila would go and see Mrs. Lorraine; and forthwith he did that which would have driven Frank Lavender out of his senses—he telegraphed to Mrs. Lorraine for permission to bring Sheila and her father to dinner at five. He certainly knew that such a request was a trifle cool, but he had discovered that Mrs. Lorraine was not easily shocked by such audacious experiments on her good nature. When he received the telegram in reply he knew it granted what he had asked. The words were merely, "Certainly, by all means, but not later than five."

Then he hastened down to the house in which Sheila lived, and found that she and her father had just returned from visiting some exhibition. Mr. Mackenzie was not in the room.

"Sheila," Ingram said, "what would you think of my getting married?"

Sheila looked up with a bright smile and said, "It would please me very much—it would be a great pleasure to me; and I have expected it for some time."

"You have expected it?" he repeated with a stare.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"Then you fancy you know—" he said, or rather stammered, in great embarrassment, when she interrupted him by saying,

"Oh yes, I think I know. When you came down every evening to tell me all the praises of Mrs. Lorraine, and how clever she was, and kind, I expected you would come some day with another message; and now I am very glad to hear it. You have changed all my opinions about her, and—"

Then she rose and took both his hands, and looked frankly into his face.

"—And I do hope most sincerely you will be happy, my dear friend."

Ingram was fairly taken aback at the consequences of his own imprudence. He had never dreamed for a moment that any one would have suspected such a thing; and he had thrown out the suggestion to Sheila almost as a jest, believing, of course, that it compromised no one. And here, before he had spoken a word to Mrs. Lorraine on the subject, he was being congratulated on his approaching marriage.

"Oh, Sheila," he said, "this is all a mistake. It was a joke of mine. If I had known you would think of Mrs. Lorraine, I should not have said a word about it."

"But it is Mrs. Lorraine?" Sheila said.