In a word, Stephen Cornington had so suddenly and so generally won golden opinions from all sorts of men, and women too, that there was no danger whatever of his wanting the means to appear in fashionable array before them as long as his admiring grandfather had the power of furnishing them.
But there was one visit made in the course of this extensive circuit by Mr. Mathews, which most certainly would have been omitted had he not felt the delightful conviction that his grandson was as accomplished and well-informed as he was elegant and handsome; and this visit was to Proctor Castle.
It was not very often that Mr. Mathews called there himself, for as the noble family were absent, the visit could only be paid to the Roman Catholic priest, who was librarian and chaplain there; and in neither of these capacities was it at all likely that Mr. Cuthbridge should have possessed much interest in the eyes of Mr. Mathews.
But Mr. Cuthbridge had the reputation throughout the whole neighbourhood of being the most learned and the most accomplished man in it, and it was for this reason that he wished to give his very particularly clever grandson the advantage of being known to, and doubtless duly appreciated by, one whose opinion in such matters was law.
Nevertheless, it is likely enough that this visit to Mr. Cuthbridge would have been one of the last paid (which it was not) had not Stephen himself, upon hearing that there was such a person as a Roman Catholic priest residing at a nobleman’s castle in the neighbourhood, expressed a very earnest wish to make acquaintance with him.
His grandfather at first, however, only smiled at his eagerness, and said, “You shall certainly go, my dear boy, because it is particularly right and proper that you should, on account of his being such a remarkably clever man. But you must not expect to find anything so agreeable as Sir Charles. No sporting talk there, my dear boy.
“But I should like to go, Sir, nevertheless, as soon as you can make it convenient. I feel so curious to see an English castle.”
“I understand, I understand,” replied his grandfather—” an inquiring mind, Stephen! That’s what it is, my good fellow; and that is exactly what your good grandmother gave me to understand I should find in you. It is not this thing, or that, but just everything that’s clever, I take it that you have a taste for.”
“Then we shall go to the castle to-morrow, grandfather. Shall we, Sir?”
Delighted by this eagerness, which, like every other manifestation in the young man, never failed to delight his proud progenitor, Mr. Mathews gave the required promise, and kept it.
Stephen was enchanted by the approach to the castle, and declared that he had never yet seen any place which he thought so beautiful.
“I hope I shall see it again, and again!” said he, quite enthusiastically. “It is nothing of a distance for me to walk, and when there is nothing particular to be done, you may depend upon it, Sir, that I shall be strolling over here. But you must not fancy that I want to steal off, and take up my abode at the castle, even if you hear that I am seen walking this way for everlasting. For, after all, my dear Sir, I shall never see any place that I really like so well as Weldon Grange.”
When the youth was presented to the priest, however, he looked more than half afraid of him, and assumed a tone of infinitely greater respect than his grandfather had ever seen him exhibit before.
This manner, however, certainly seemed to propitiate the said priest, for though he assumed nothing like familiarity towards the young man, yet he seemed evidently inclined to take a good deal of notice of him, and when they parted, he said very civilly that he hoped he should see him again.
“You are a clever fellow, Stephen!” exclaimed the chuckling Mr. Mathews, as soon as they had remounted their horses and passed the castle gates; “for somehow or other you contrive to make everybody civil to you, stranger as you are amongst them all. I should like to know, now, what it was you said to that solemn old gentleman during the minute or two that you stood talking to him in the bow-window. It was something clever, I’ll be bound for it, for I did not think he was particularly civil before that. He put on the stiff look which he often favours us all with, except perhaps my wife. I don’t think he is ever stiff with her. But every one knows that the reason for that is her being so uncommonly clever. Why, he sends her books by dozens out of the castle library.”
“Perhaps he is in hopes that he shall convert her, Sir?” said Stephen Cornington, rather gravely.
“Well! I don’t know about that, I’m sure. But I’ll tell you what, Stephen. If he knew her as well as I do, he would never take it into his head that she was to be turned into any way but her own. No, no, boy; it is nothing but her cleverness and her book-learning, and I daresay he has found out the same sort of thing in you, you sly rogue. My notion of you is, Master Stephen, that you know how to take the length of every man’s foot.”
Stephen shook his head and pretended to look modest, which only caused Mr. Mathews to laugh heartily. “You may take everybody else in, my fine fellow; but you will never take in me! Why! don’t I know what I was myself at your age? Wasn’t I up to everything? I’ll bet ten to one now, that if any one was to ask the priest at this moment, what he thought of you, he would answer that he thought you the cleverest, and, perhaps, Stephen, he might say, too, the handsomest lad that he had seen for many a day.” But Stephen again only looked modest, and said nothing in reply.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Nor many days were permitted to elapse before Lady Otterborne returned the visit of Mrs. Mathews and her young companion, and on this occasion, and on this only, was Janet allowed to make her appearance in the drawing-room, although the condemned black silk frock was still her only habit of ceremony. But Mrs. Mathews, though often literally and absolutely blind to the richness and elegance of her neighbours’ dresses, had contrived to discover that the toilet of Lady Otterborne was quite as simple, though not quite so uncouth as her own, and she had therefore no more objection to Janet’s thus appearing before her, than she would have had to exhibit a beautiful picture to a connoisseur, even although she had no frame to put it in.
And she was amply rewarded for her courage and her confidence, by the very evident interest which Lady Otterborne took in conversing with this natural, fresh-minded, intelligent, and beautiful new acquaintance. Greatly did Mrs. Mathews enjoy the watching this, and her pleasure perhaps would have been greater still, had her friend Herbert accompanied his mother as he usually did, whenever she made a visit at the Grange.
Had he not been an engaged man, Mrs. Mathews would have proudly abstained from all wishes on the subject, but as it was, it would have pleased her to have seen the mother’s rather fastidious judgment in favour of her Janet, confirmed by her still more fastidious son.
Not only, however, did he not accompany his mother upon this occasion, but when, a day or two afterwards, he did call at the Grange, he sauntered about the garden instead of entering the housed while he sent in his card to the lady of the mansion with these words written upon it with a pencil: “Can I see you by yourself for a few minutes?
Mrs. Mathews and Janet were sitting very comfortably, tête-à-tête, when this card was delivered to the former; and had the request which required her dismissing her new darling from her presence, been made by any one who was not a darling of longer standing, it would certainly not have been complied with. As it was, however, Mrs. Mathews condescended to say, “Desire Mr. Otterborne to come into my book-room;” and having given this answer, she kissed Janet and sent her off, adding to her words of dismissal, “It is very strange of him, Janet; but he says he must see me alone, and I never, since he was born, refused Herbert Otterborne anything he asked.”
Janet decidedly agreed in thinking that it was very strange of him; but she did not seem to think that she could make any resistance to the sentence of banishment thus passed upon her, and she was therefore very quietly lodged in her own pretty room long before Herbert Otterborne had climbed the corkscrew staircase which led to the favourite retreat of his old f
riend.
The sight of him immediately banished all the anger of Mrs. Mathews, for he looked ill and out of spirits. “You have some bad news to tell me, I am sure, Herbert. I trust that your dear mother is not ill?”
“No! Thank God! my mother is not ill, though ill at ease in mind, as well as her unfortunate son. You say I have bad news for you, Mrs. Mathews. But, no! I bring no news at all. My father, I find, has already announced the news to you.
And it is quite true, my dear old friend — it is quite true that I am going to be married to Miss Steyton.”
“Most heartily do I wish you may be happy, my dear boy,” replied Mrs. Mathews, with a painful and perfectly involuntary contraction of her brow; “but you do not come here to be told that, for you know it already, Herbert.”
“Yes,” he replied, “I am quite sure that if your wishes could make me happy, I should have nothing left to complain of; neither do I intend to complain. But, I cannot marry Emily Steyton without explaining to you, my dear kind old friend, how it came about, for you know, though, thank Heaven! nobody else does, how far I am from loving her. Whether it was most your fault or my fault, I don’t know; but certain it is that we have very freely compared notes together concerning her from the first week, I believe, that she returned from school up to the present NOW. I wish this had not been the case; I heartily wish that no human being knew how very, very far she is from pleasing me in any way. Do not think, however, that I am come here now to ask you for any promise of secrecy on the subject. You are quite as certain to avoid any disclosure of my confidential confessions as I am to wish that you should do so. What I come for is to exculpate myself, in your eyes, from the charge either of caprice or inconsistency. I am not capricious in this matter, because my opinions and my feelings respecting this young lady are precisely what I expressed to you when we last conversed together about her. Nor is there any inconsistency in my conduct. But in order to prove this, I must tell you many painful things. Will you have patience to listen to me?”
“Do not have recourse to any painful explanations, my dear Herbert, in order to preserve my good opinion,” said Mrs. Mathews; “I know you too well to believe that you would wilfully do wrong in any way.”
“Don’t refuse to hear me, Mrs. Mathews!” said the young man earnestly. “It will be a comfort if you will let me open my heart to you; for I do not believe that I am false by nature, and yet I dare not, on this subject, tell the truth, even to my own mother. Will you listen to me?”
“You know I will,” said Mrs. Mathews, with an affectionate smile, but with some sadness too, for she felt certain that she was going to hear a tale of sorrow.
“It will be no news to you to hear that my father has mortgaged his estate to the last possible shilling; — that is a fact, I believe, with which everybody is familiar,” said he.
Mrs. Mathews did not say “Yes,” but she looked it.
“For the last few years,” he resumed, “everything has seemed to go on very smoothly, in consequence of the large legacy left to my mother; but now that resource fails.”
“You do not mean to say, Herbert, that your father has spent thirty thousand pounds of ready money since that legacy came to him?” said Mrs. Mathews, almost with a look of terror.
“Every shilling of it,” replied poor Herbert, covering his eyes with his hand.
“Good Heaven! What madness! What sinful madness!” she exclaimed. “And your mother, Herbert?”
“Ay! there’s the grief. My mother has no idea that this money is gone. She believes that he has been squandering the interest; but, excepting his frequent dinner-parties, she has never witnessed any great increase of expenditure at home.
She has a notion, I believe, that he occasionally plays when he is in town; but little guesses, poor angel, that he has lost everything he could dispose of, and that he is absolutely and completely a ruined man.”
“Do not go on, my dear boy! I see it all now!” exclaimed Mrs. Mathews. “You are going to sacrifice yourself for the sake of your mother?”
“Certainly I am,” he replied; “and you would do exactly the same thing, Mrs. Mathews, were you in my place. But it is not to tell you this that I come here now. The fact must be too obvious to you for it to be at all necessary that I should point it out. The point upon which I wish to enlighten you is this: — You must not suppose that I have been such a villain as to ask a girl, for whom I do not care a farthing, to give herself and her fortune to me, merely because my father is a ruined man. It is not I who proposed this marriage, it was Mr. Steyton.”
“Well, Herbert! the father has shown himself a wise man. He has made a good choice. I am only afraid that it may have been as much for the sake of the title, which you are to inherit, as for the high character you bear, that he has selected you.”
“It is for neither, Mrs. Mathews. The proposal, as he coarsely told me himself, comes from his daughter. His communication to me was in this wise: First, he told me that his daughter would have eighty thousand pounds sterling paid down to her husband on the day of her marriage. Next, that she was as good as she was handsome. Thirdly, that she had assured him, in confidence, that she never would be married to any man but me. Fourthly, that she had never been contradicted in her life. Fifthly, that he was certain that she would die if she were contradicted now And, sixthly and lastly, if eighty thousand pounds were not considered enough by way of a fortune, he could easily make it double if I made a point of it.”
“And to this proposal you said ‘Yes,’” said Mrs. Mathews, fixing her eyes upon the floor.
“To this proposal I said ‘No,’ my good friend, and so I should have thought you would have guessed. I did the thing, however, as civilly as I could, — pretending to laugh very heartily, and to suppose that he was only jesting with me. After trying — of course in vain — to convince me he was in earnest, he left me, and I began to compliment myself upon the manner in which I had got out of the scrape, when my father desired to see me in the billiard-room, which was the safest place he could have chosen, for it was a room that my mother never entered.
He closed the door, however, and pointing to the chair I was to take, placed himself opposite to me. He began by boasting that he had never plagued me about business from the hour I was born to that which then found us together; and then he began to give me a long history of his embarrassments, not one of which had been occasioned, he said, by any ill-conduct of his own, but by a series of misfortunes, and by the most cursed ill-luck that ever persecuted any man. But it is idle for me to repeat all he said, the result is the only thing important. He then — for the first time certainly — made me understand the nature of the dilemma in which he found himself. He has no power, it seems, to mortgage anything that is left of the estate, beyond his own life interest. Of the legacy of thirty thousand pounds left to my mother, he told me that not more than a few hundreds remained; but he told me, moreover, that when these were drawn for and gone, no earthly power could prevent an execution being sent into the house. ‘For myself,’ said he, ‘I give you my honour, Herbert, I do not care sixpence about it. I am used to difficulties — they are nothing to me — they really do not affect me in the least; but I own to you that I shall be sorry to see your mother driven from the house, and all the furniture seized, and sold by auction. Perhaps you will not mind it, Mr. Herbert,’ he added, very jocosely; ‘but I shall find it very disagreeable.’ I was quite certain, long before he had got to this point, that the interview would not end without some mention being made of Miss Steyton’s attachment to me; and sure enough the transition was a very easy one, from the disagreeable necessity of seeing my mother without a bed to lie upon, and the having the gratification of telling her that every incumbrance was paid, and that she could not by possibility ever hear of pecuniary difficulties again as long as she lived.
“I will honestly confess to you, my good friend,” continued the agitated young man, “that as long as my father remained with me, I was too vehemently irritated by
all the atrocities to which directly, or indirectly, he had pleaded guilty, to feel at all inclined to aerified myself for the sake of enabling him to continue his course as a man of fashion about town; and I told him that I did not feel such a degree of attachment to the young lady as could justify my proposing to her. He received my refusal with the stoicism of a man who has hardened himself too completely to feel anything very strongly. Before he left me, however, he made me promise that I would not have the barbarity as he called it, of opening my mother’s eyes to the real state of his affairs. ‘I shall, doubtless, have to fly the country before long,’ said he, ‘and this will be a better mode by which to make her understand the real state of the case, than a helpless and hopeless statement of accounts. You must therefore pledge me your word that you will not betray to her what I have now told you.’ This promise I very readily gave, for I perfectly agreed with him in thinking that no good could arise from announcing what was inevitable, before the period arrived at which it must of necessity be met and endured. And so we parted. Whether he had sufficient knowledge of me, and of my profound attachment to my matchless mother, to anticipate what followed, I know not, but certain it is that I had not long brooded in solitude upon the fate which awaited her, before my resolution began to relax, and then, as we all do, I suppose, when tempted by some strong motive to do what we know to be rather doubtful in its righteousness, I began to accuse myself of being over scrupulous. And then I proceeded to doubt the sanity of the judgment which could conceive that the plunging such a mother as mine into all the miseries of pecuniary embarrassment, and that for the whole of her remaining life, was a more virtuous act than the accepting the hand of a beautiful and generous young girl, whose greatest fault seemed to be that she loved me too well. I had not very long contemplated the subject in this light before I began to tremble at my own selfishness, and to feel that what had at first appeared to me as a crime, chiefly because it was disagreeable to me, was in fact the only line of conduct for me to pursue if I really wished to act rather in conformity to duty than inclination. The rest, my dear Mrs. Mathews, is soon guessed, and soon told. I am happy to say that I did not hesitate long as to the course I intended to pursue after I had once made up my mind as to what, according to my judgment, had the most of right and the least of wrong in it. I deemed it to be discreetest and best to avoid all preliminary discussion with my mother concerning the alliance I was about to form. In truth, I feared that she might cross-examine me a little more closely than I wished, and therefore I never touched upon the subject at all till matters were so far advanced as to enable me to tell her that I had offered to Emily Steyton and had been accepted. I can scarcely tell which was the most painful moment — whether it was that in which I learned, upon the very best authority, that my father was utterly ruined, or that in which I had to meet the earnest melancholy look of my mother, at the moment in which I announced to her my engagement. Alas! I understood that look so very well. I daresay, dear soul! that she thought herself very forbearing because she uttered no exclamation indicative either of sorrow or dismay; but her look spoke both too intelligibly for me to profit much by her forbearance. But, thank Heaven! all that is over, everything is settled and arranged in the most pompous style possible. My father has had the discretion to say nothing to me concerning my sudden change of purpose, and my poor mother has only once or twice endeavoured to make me say something in explanation of the feelings which have induced me to select for my wife a young lady whom she certainly had reason to think I did not admire much more than she did herself.”
Collected Works of Frances Trollope Page 399