Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti

by Christina Rossetti

  Lucy had a sweet, plaintive voice, to which her own secret sorrow now added a certain simple pathos; and when in the twilight she sang’ Alice Grey,’ or ‘She wore a wreath of roses,’ or some other old favourite, good Miss Drum would sit and listen till the tears gathered behind her spectacles. Were tears in the singer’s eyes also? She thought now with more tenderness than ever before of the suitors she had rejected in her hopeful, happy youth, especially of a certain Mr. Tresham, who had wished her all happiness as he turned to leave her in his dignified regret. She had always had a great liking for Mr. Tresham, and now she could feel for him.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  ON the 28th of June, four letters came to Lucy by the first delivery: —

  I.

  My dear Lucy, Pray do not think me thoughtless if I once more ask whether you will sanction an extension of our holiday. Mrs. Tyke presses us to remain with her through July, and Dr.’ Tyke is no less urgent. When I hinted that their hospitality had already been trespassed upon, the Doctor quoted Hone (as he said: I doubt if it is there): —

  ‘In July

  No good-bye;

  In August

  Part we must.’

  I then suggested that you may be feeling moped at home, and in want of change; but, of course, the Doctor had still an answer ready: — Tell Lucy from me, that if she takes you away I shall take it very ill, as the homoeopath said when his learned brother substituted cocoa-nibs for champagne.’ And all the time Cousin Lucy was begging us to stay, and Jane was looking at me so earnestly: in short, dear Lucy, if ‘No’ must be said, pray will you say it; for I have been well-nigh talked over.

  And, indeed, we must make allowances for Jane, if she seems a little selfish; for, to let you into a secret, I believe she means to accept Mr. Durham if he makes her the offer we all are expecting from him. At first I was much displeased at her giving him any encouragement, for it appeared to me impossible that she could view his attentions with serious approbation: but I have since become convinced that she knows her own mind, and is not trifling with him. How it is possible for her to contemplate union with one so unrefined and ostentatious I cannot conceive, but I have no power to restrain her; and when I endeavoured to exert my influence against him, she told me in the plainest terms that she preferred luxury with Mr. Durham to dependence without him. Oh, Lucy, Lucy! have we ever given her cause to resent hef position so bitterly? Were she my own child, I do not think I could love her more or care for her more anxiously: but she has never understood me, never done me justice. I speak of myself only, not of you also, because I shall never marry, and all I have has been held simply in trust for her: with you it is, and ought to be, different.

  But you must not suffer for Jane’s wilfulness. If you are weary of our absence I really must leave her under Cousin Lucy’s, care — for she positively declines to accompany me home at present — and return to every-day duties. I am sick enough of pleasuring, I do assure you, as it is; though, were Mr. Durham a different man, I should only rejoice, as you may suppose.

  Well, as to news, there is not much worth transmitting. Jane has been to the Opera three times, and to the English play once. Mr. Durham sends the boxes, and Dr. and Mrs. Tyke never tire of the theatre. The last time they went to the Opera they brought home with them to supper Mr. Tresham, whom you may recollect our meeting here more than once, and who has lately returned to England from the East. Through some misunderstanding he expected to see you instead of me, and looked out of countenance for a moment: then he asked after you, and begged me to remember him to you when I wrote. He appeared much interested in hearing our home news, and concerned when I mentioned that you have seemed less strong lately. Pray send compliments for him when next you write, in case we should see him again.

  Mr. Hartley I always liked, and now I like his wife also: she is an engaging little thing, and gets us all to call her Stella. You, I am sure, will be fond of her when you know her. How I wish her father resembled her! She is as simple and as merry as a bird, and witnesses Mr. Durham’s attentions to Jane with perfect equanimity. As to Mr. Hartley, he seems as much amused as if the bulk of his wife’s enormous fortune were not at stake; yet any one must see the other man is in earnest. Stella is reckoned a clever actress, and private theatricals of some sort are impending. I say ‘of some sort,’ because Jane, who is indisputably the beauty of our circle, would prefer tableaux vivants; and I know not which will carry her point.

  My love, to Miss Drum. Don’t think me selfish for proposing to remain longer away from you; but, indeed, I am being drawn in two opposite directions by two dear sisters, of whom I only wish that one had as much good sense and good taste as the other.

  Your affectionate sister, CATHERINE CHARLMONT.

  II.

  My dear Lucy,

  I know Catherine is writing, and will make the worst of everything, just as if I was cut out to be an old maid.

  Surely at my age one may know one’s own mind; and, though I’m not going to say before I am asked whether I like Mr. Durham, we are all very well aware, my dear Lucy, that I like money and comforts. It’s one thing for Catherine and you, who have enough and to spare, to split hairs as to likes and dislikes; but it’s quite another for me who have not a penny of my own, thanks to poor dear papa’s blindness. Now do be a dear, and tell sister she is welcome to stay this one month more; for, to confess the truth, if I remain here alone I may find myself at my wit’s end for a pound or two one of these days. Dress is so dear, and I had rather never go out again than be seen a dowdy; and if we are to have tableaux I shall want all sorts of things. I don’t hold at all with charades and such nonsense, in which people are supposed to be witty; give me a piece in which one’s arms are of some use; but of course, Stella, who has no more arm than a pump-handle, votes for theatricals.

  The Hartleys are coming to-day, and, of course, Mr. Durham, to take us after luncheon to the Crystal Palace. There is a grand concert coming off, and a flower-show, which would all be yawny enough but for the toilettes. I dare say I shall see something to set me raving; just as last time I was at the Botanic Gardens, I pointed out the loveliest suit of Brussels lace over white silk; but I might as well ask Catherine for wings to fly with.

  Good-bye, my dear Lucy. Don’t be cross this once, and when I have a house of my own, I ‘ll do you a good turn.

  Your affectionate sister,

  JANE.

  P.S. I enclose Mr. Durham’s photograph, which he fished and fished to make me ask for, so at last I begged it to gratify the poor man. Don’t you see all Orpingham Place in his speaking countenance?

  III.

  My dearest Lucy,

  You owe me a kindness to balance my disappointment at missing your visit. So please let Catherine know that she and Jane may give us a month more. Dr. Tyke wishes it no iess than I do, and Mr. Durham perhaps more than either of us; but a word to the wise.

  Your affectionate cousin,

  LUCY C. TYKE.

  P.S. The Doctor won’t send regards, because he means to write to you himself.

  IV.

  Dear Lucy,

  If you agree with the snail, you find your house just the size for one; and lest bestial example should possess less force than human, I further remind you of what Realmah the Great affirms, — ’ I met two blockheads, but the one sage kept himself to himself.’ All which sets forth to you the charms of solitude, which, as you are such a proper young lady, is, of course, the only anybody you can be in love with, and of whose society I am bent on affording you prolonged enjoyment.

  This can be effected, if your sisters stay here another month, and indeed you must not say us nay; for on your ‘yes’ hangs a tale which your ‘no’ may for ever forbid to wag. Miss Catherine looks glummish, but Jenny is all sparkle and roses, like this same month of June; and never is she more sparkling or rosier than when the master of Orpingham Place hails her with that ever fresh remark, ‘Fine day, Miss Jane.’ Don’t nip the summer crops of Orpingham Place in the bu
d, or, rather, don’t retard them by unseasonable frost; for I can’t fancy my friend will be put off with anything less than a distinct ‘no;’ and when it comes; to that, I think Miss Jane, in her trepidation, will say ‘yes.’ And if you are a good girl, and let the little one play out her play, when she has come into the sugar and spice and all that’s nice, you shall come to Notting Hill this very next May, and while the sun shines make your hay.

  Your venerable cousin’s husband (by which I merely mean), Your cousin’s venerable husband,

  FRANCIS TYKE, M.D.

  N.B. I append M.D. to remind you of my professional status, and so quell you by the weight of my advice.

  Lucy examined the photograph of Mr. Durham with a double curiosity, for he was Mr. Hartley’s father-in-law as well as Jane’s presumptive suitor. She looked, and saw a face not badly featured, but vulgar in expression; a figure not amiss, but ill at ease in its studied attitude and superfine clothes. Assuredly it was not George Durham, but the master of Orpingham Place who possessed attractions for Jane; and Lucy felt, for a sister who could be thus attracted, the sting of a humiliation such as her own baseless hopes had never cost her.

  Each of her correspondents was answered with judicious variation in the turn of the sentences. To Jane she wrote dryly, returning Mr. Durham’s portrait wrapped in a ten-pound note; an arrangement which, in her eyes, showed a symbolic appropriateness, lost for the moment on her sister. Catherine she answered far more affectionately, begging her on no account to curtail a visit which might be of importance to Jane’s prospects; and on the flap of the envelope, she added compliments to Mr. Tresham.

  CHAPTER IX.

  Mr. TRESHAM had loved Lucy Charlmont sincerely, and until she refused him had entertained a good hope of success. Even at the moment of refusal she avowed the liking for him which all through their acquaintance had been obvious; and then, and not till then, it dawned upon him that her indifference towards himself had its root in preference for another. But he was far too honourable a man either to betray or to aim at verifying his suspicion; and though he continued to visit at Dr. Tyke’s, where Alan Hartley was so often to be seen idling away time under the comfortable conviction that he was doing no harm to himself or to any one else, it was neither at once, nor of set purpose, that Arthur Tresham penetrated Lucy’s secret. Alan and himself had been College friends; he understood him thoroughly; his ready good-nature, which seemed to make every one a principal person in his regard; his open hand” that liked spending; his want of deep or definite purpose; his unconcern as to possible consequences. Then Lucy, — in whom Mr. Tresham had been on one. point wofully mistaken, — she was so composed and so cordial to all her friends; there was about her such womanly sweetness, such unpretentious, dignified reserve towards all: her face would light up so brightly when he, or any other, spoke what interested her, not seldom, certainly, when he spoke: — even after a sort of clue had come into his hands, it was some time before he felt sure of any difference between her manner to Alan and to others. When the conviction forced itself upon him, he grieved more for her than for himself; he knew his friend too intimately to mistake his pleasure in being amused for any anxiety to make himself beloved; he knew about Alan much that Lucy did not and could not guess, and from the beginning inferred the end.

  In -the middle of that London season Catherine and Lucy returned to Brompton-on-Sea; and before August had started the main stream of tourists from England to the continent, Mr. Tresham packed up his knapsack, and, staff in hand, set off on a solitary expedition, of undetermined length, to the East. He was neither a rich nor a poor man; had been called to the bar, but without pursuing his profession, and was not tied to any given spot; he went away to recruit his spirits, and, having recovered them, stayed on out of sheer enjoyment. Yet, when one morning his eye lighted on the Hartley-Durham marriage in the ‘Times’ Supplement, home feeling stirred within him; and he who, twenty-four hours earlier, knew not whether he might not end his days beside the blue Bosphorus, on the evening of that same day had started westward.

  He felt curious, he would not own to himself that he felt specially interested, to know how Lucy fared; and he felt curious, in a minor degree, to inspect her successful rival.

  With himself Lucy had not yet had a rival; not yet, perhaps she might one day, he repeated to himself, only it had not happened yet. And then the sweet, dignified face rose before him kind and cheerful; cheerful still in his memory, though he guessed that now it must look saddened. He had never yet seen it with a settled expression of sadness, and he knew not how to picture it so.

  Mr. Drum — or Mr. Gawkins Drum, as he scrupulously called himself, on account of a’ certain Mr. Drum, who lived somewhere and went nowhere, and was held by all outsiders to be in his dotage — Miss Drum’s brother, Mr. Gawkins Drum, had for several years stood as a gay young bachelor of sixty. Not that, strictly speaking, any man (or, alas! any woman) can settle down at sixty and there remain; but at the last of a long series of avowed birthday parties, Mr. Drum had drunk his own health as being sixty that very day; this was now some years ago, and still, in neighbourly parlance, Mr. Drum was no more than sixty. At sixty-something-indefinite Gawkins brought home a bride, who confessed to sixty; and all Brompton-on-Sea indulged in a laugh at their expense, till it oozed out that the kindly old couple had gone through all the hopes and disappointments of a many years’ engagement, begun at a reasonable age for such matters, and now terminated only because the bedridden brother, to whom the bride had devoted herself during an ordinary lifetime, had at last ended his days in peace. Mr. and Mrs. Gawkins Drum forestalled their neighbours’ laugh by their own, and soon the laugh against them died out, and every one accepted their house as amongst the pleasantest resorts in Brompton-on-Sea.

  Miss Drum, however, felt less leniently towards her brother and sister-in-law, and deliberately regarded them from a shocked point of view. The wedding took place at Richmond, where the bride resided; and the honeymoon came to an end whilst Lucy entertained her old friend, during that long visit at Notting Hill, which promised to colour all Jane’s future.

  ‘My dear,’ said Miss Drum to her deferential listener; ‘My dear, Sarah,’ — and Lucy felt that that offending Sarah could only be the bride, — ‘Sarah’ shall not suffer for Gawkins’ folly and her own. I will not fail to visit her in her new home, and to notice her on all proper occasions, but I cannot save her from being ridiculous. I did not wait till I was sixty to make up my mind against wedlock, though perhaps’ — and the old lady bridled — ’I also may have endured the preference of some infatuated man. Lucy, my dear, take an old woman’s advice: marry, if you mean to marry, before you are sixty, or else remain like myself; otherwise, you make yourself simply ridiculous.’

  And Lucy, smiling, assured her that she would either marry before sixty or not at all; and added, with some earnestness, that she did not think she should ever marry. To which Miss Drum answered with stateliness: ‘Very well; do one thing or do the other, only do not become ridiculous.’

  Yet the old lady softened that evening, when she found herself, as it were, within the radius of the contemned bride. Despite her sixty years, and in truth she looked less than her age, Mrs. Gawkins Drum was a personable little woman, with plump red cheeks, gentle eyes, and hair of which the soft brown was threaded, but not overpowered, by grey. There was no affectation of youthfulness in her gown, which was of slate-coloured silk; nor in her cap, which came well on her head; nor in her manner to her guests, which was cordial; nor in her manner to her husband, which was affectionate, with the undemonstrative affectionateness that might now have been appropriate had they married forty years earlier.

  Her kiss of welcome was returned frostily by Miss Drum, warmly by Lucy. Mr. Drum at first looked a little sheepish under his sister’s severe salutation. Soon all were seated at tea.

  ‘Do you take cream and sugar?’ asked the bride, looking at her new sister.

  ‘No sugar, I thank you,’ was the formal
reply. ‘And it will be better, Sarah, that you should call me Elizabeth. Though I am an old woman your years do not render it unsuitable, and I wish to be sisterly.’

  ‘Thank you, dear Elizabeth,’ answered Mrs. Gawkins, cheerily; ‘I hope, indeed, we shall be sisterly. It would be sad times with me if I found I had brought coldness into my new home.’

  But Miss Drum would not thaw yet. ‘Yes, I have always maintained, and I maintain still, that there must be faults on both sides if a marriage, if any marriage whatever, introduces dissension into a family circle. And I will do my part, Sarah.’

  ‘Yes, indeed;’ but Sarah knew not what more to say.

  Mr. Drum struck in, — ’Lucy, my dear’ — she had been a little girl perched on his knee when her father asked him years before to be trustee, — ’Lucy, my dear, you’re not in full bloom. Look at my old lady, and guess: what’s a recipe for roses?’

  ‘For shame, Gawkins!’ cried both old ladies; one with a smile, the other with a frown.

  Still, as the evening wore on, Miss Drum slowly thawed. Having, as it were once for all, placed her hosts in the position of culprits at the moral bar, having sat in judgment on them, and convicted them in the ears of all men (represented by Lucy), she admitted them to mercy, and dismissed them with a qualified pardon. What most softened her towards the offending couple was their unequivocal profession of rheumatism. When she unbendingly declined to remain seated at the supper-table one minute beyond half-past ten, she alleged rheumatism as her impelling motive; and Gawkins and Sarah immediately proclaimed their own rheumatic experience and sympathies. As Miss Drum observed to Lucy on their way home, ‘Old people don’t confess to rheumatism if they wish to appear young.’