Collected Works of Frances Trollope

by Frances Milton Trollope

  Had the share which the English sisters took in this intimacy been more annoying than it really was, Gertrude would very resignedly have submitted to it. But she really liked the young bride exceedingly; and though the addition of the beautiful Arabella to the coterie was not felt as an improvement by any of them, it was too inevitable to provoke either resistance or complaint.

  The young Countess Adolphe, however, did at length relieve her mind upon the subject, by setting Nurse Norris to talk about it.

  “I wish I knew what it was induced Arabella to follow Adolphe and me so, when we go to Schloss Schwanberg,” said the bride, as her loving tire-woman was arranging her beautiful hair. “Does her gossiping maid, Susan, never make any of her 6age remarks upon it, Norris?”

  Norris continued for a minute or two to brush the silken tresses which hung over her hand, without making any reply to this question; and then Lucy turned suddenly round upon her, at the risk of deranging all this beautifying brushing, and exclaimed, “Now, then, I am sure there is some mystery about it, Norris, or else you would have answered me directly. Tell me, this very moment, all about it, or I will send you home in a Dutch waggon to-morrow!”

  “Well now, Miss Lucy.... I beg your pardon, my Lady Countess!.... be so kind as to let me bide with you a little longer, and I will tell you all I know about it; but that is so little, that if I don’t add a small bit of guess-work to it, I don’t think it will be worth your ladyship’s hearing... But, Susan certainly does say, that she thinks Miss Arabella has fallen in love again.”

  “And I should not be the least surprised if she had,” replied the Countess Adolphe; “if it were not that the only man she sees, except the old baron, takes no more notice of her than if she were made of wax. Does Susan say, or think, or guess, or whatever you call it, that Arabella has fallen in love with the Baron von Schwanberg?”

  “No, Miss! No, my lady! I do beg your pardon, my darling, but you do look so very young, that I can’t get myself to remember that you are married, and a Countess.”

  “Never mind about that, you foolish old woman. I forgive you now, once and for ever, and you may call me baby if you will, till I am as old as the beautiful Arabella herself, if you will only go on with your story. Has my magnificent sister set her heart upon being Baroness von Schwanberg? Upon my word and honour, Goody, I should be delighted to hear it. Only just think of the fun!”

  “Yes, Miss.... yes, my lady. I have seen the tears come into your eyes with laughing at things she has done not half so funny. But that is not it,” replied Nurse Norris.

  “Then what is it, you silly old woman?” resumed her impatient young mistress. “There certainly is a person at the castle, that though, of course, not half-a-quarter so charming in my eyes, is quite as handsome, and I daresay some might say still handsomer, than my beautiful Count Adolphe; but I tell you, nurse, that he takes no more notice of her than if she were a stick. You won’t tell me, I suppose, that Arabella has fallen in love with him?”

  “I don’t speak of my own knowledge, my dear,” replied Norris, “for how should I? Miss Arabella never tells any of her secrets to me. But Susan says, that this great beauty and fortune that you have got the happiness of having for your sister, is fallen so over head and ears with that handsome young gentleman at the castle, that she thinks she will be after poisoning herself, or may be jumping into the river yonder, if she don’t get him.”

  The young Countess remained silent for a minute or two, and it was certainly a wicked thought that occupied her during this interval. Her rich and beautiful elder sister was an immense bore. She had bored Lucy from the very earliest moment at which she could remember her own existence; she had bored the beloved Adolphe very grievously during the earlier months of their acquaintance, and before his engagement to herself had given her a right to take possession of hum... And now she was, most unquestionably, a terrible bore to them both. “What a relief it would be, if that handsome Rupert Odenthal would marry her!” That was the thought which had entered her head; and certainly it was, considering her own opinion of her beautiful sister, a wicked thought.

  But it would have been more wicked still, if the Countess Adolphe had not been the daughter of a rich English banker.

  The idea that wealth was the most important ingredient in the earthly destiny of a human being, had grown with her growth, and strengthened with her strength; and it should be stated in her defence, that if half the wicked thought was suggested by the consciousness of the immense relief which it would be to get rid of her sister; the other half arose from the simultaneous recollection that Rupert was only librarian to the Baron von Schwanberg, although the great learning and cleverness of her beloved Adolphe had selected him as his chosen friend, on account of his wonderful intellectual superiority.

  But weighty, and mighty, and important as these thoughts were, they did their work so rapidly, that there was but a short interval of silence between the young Countess and her aged attendant, before the meditative bride said, turning sharply round to the old woman, who had resumed her hair-brush: “And pray, goody wise-woman, what has Susan seen, or heard, to put such stuff into her head?”

  “Oh! lor! my dear young lady, if I was to set about repeating one-half of Susan’s long stories, it would be time for you to go to bed before I had done.”

  “Well then, just pick out a few as quick as you can, there’s a dear old darling, and you shall tell me the rest another time. I just want to see if there is anything at all like common sense in what she says.”

  “Why, first and foremost, my dear, Susan says, that she is got back to the old way which she always takes to, in all her love fits; that is, you know, she will sometimes dress herself two or three times over in different styles, as she calls it, and then stands “before the glass, and practises, like, half shutting her eyes, and hanging her head on one side, and leaning upon her fine white arm with I don’t know how many bracelets on it, sitting before the glass all the time, and looking at her own face as if she was longing to kiss it. And this is the way, Susan says, that she always goes on when she is in love; and you know, my dear, Susan must know a little about it, because she has seen it over and over again, so very often. Well, and then she has been at the old work of flower-keeping, till the leaves all fall upon the carpet, day after day, as she presses them to her heart. And then she brought home a gentleman’s glove with her one night, when you had all been dining at the castle; and this glove she goes on sticking in under her pillow every night. But all this would be nothing, you know, my lady, in anybody else; but Miss Arabella has been going on now so many years in the same way, and we always are so sure to hear that she is going to be married after every new beginning of this sort; that, bless you, my dear, Susan knows the signs, she says, as well as she knows the figures on her sampler. And all this began, my lady, when you was a little girl at school.”

  “And pray, my good Nurse Norris, if Susan is so very observing, can she not tell us why none of all these fifty thousand love affairs ever ended in marriage? With Arabella’s fine fortune, to say nothing of her beauty, it is quite impossible that all the men who have offered to her, and been accepted too, should all turn out traitors, and forsake her.”

  “Yes, to be sure, my dear, it would be impossible to believe it; and that’s the reason, I suppose, why it never happened. Susan says, that she don’t believe that any one of all her lovers ever played her false in any way.... The fortune, you see, Miss Lucy, is such a hold-fast. No! my dear, it was none of all the gentlemen, nor was it your poor, dear papa either; for she soon gave him to understand, good, quiet gentleman, that she was independent of him. No, my dear child! It was nobody in the wide world but her own self who ever broke off any of the marriages. But Susan says, that it was no sooner settled that she was really to be married to a gentleman, till little by little, day after day, she seemed to get tired of him, and began taking to somebody else; and she knew well enough that her money always made her sure of her work. She knew, Miss Lucy
, that she might play as many queer tricks as she liked, without the least bit of danger that she would be left in the lurch to die an old maid. She is quite up to that, my dear!... Nobody ever says, or sings either, to a lady with eighty thousand pounds in her pocket,

  ‘If you will not when you may,

  When you will, you shall have nay.’

  She knows as well as everybody else, that gentlemen never do say ‘nay’ to that.”

  “You are a very wise old woman, Goody Norris,” said her young mistress, laughing heartily; “and as I don’t think this love-making sister of mine will ever fail, in some way or other, to take good care of herself, I certainly do not mean to give myself any trouble about her. It will be funny enough, to be sure, if all this English banking money should settle down at last into the pocket of a German baron’s library! But, upon my word, my greatest objection to it would be, that I think he is a great deal too good for her.”

  “Well, my lady, of course you know best,” returned the old woman, demurely. “But if the young gentleman is as wise as we hear he is handsome, he might manage, I should think, to be the last of her lovers, and the first of her husbands, without troubling himself much about her goodness. Money is a very fine thing, my lady!”

  The effect of this conversation on the young bride was not, perhaps, exactly what it ought to have been. The state of affairs, as described by her sagacious old nurse, appeared to her to promise a very considerable portion of fun; and her imagination immediately set to work to devise scenes, and arrange circumstances, in the best possible manner, for the purpose of extracting amusement from this new amourette of her fair inflammable sister.

  Her firm conviction that the object of this tender passion did not, in the very slightest degree, return it, only added zest to the jest; and there would be novelty, too, in seeing how the beauteous Arabella would contrive to render herself a bright example of persevering study, and, in short, altogether devoted to literature!”

  She had already seen her, upon one occasion, become so devoted to art, that the Royal Academy was, for several months, the only place in London where real enjoyment could be tasted. At another, her whole soul was, as she declared, absorbed in music. At one time, she was so enthusiastic a Puseyite, that the majority of her acquaintance did not scruple to declare that she had evidently made up her mind to become a member of the church of Rome; as she had, in fact, been heard to say, that Dr. P. had but one fault... “he did not go far enough!” But from this peril of perversion, she had been saved by the excessively fine eyes of a young man who, as he said, gloried in confessing that he, at least, was not ashamed of avowing himself to be purely evangelical.

  The next aspirant for the safely-funded eighty thousand, was a man of fashion; and while his reign lasted, all memory of the banking concern was ungratefully forgotten, and the Peerage was never, by any chance, permitted to be beyond reach of her hand....

  All these had, in their day, afforded infinite amusement to the saucy young Lucy; and she now recollected, with great satisfaction, that she had never as yet enjoyed the gratification of seeing her beautiful sister devoted to literature.

  Notwithstanding her own very great felicity as a wife, and the genuine pleasure she took in the society of her new friend Gertrude, she now became conscious that her happiness would very decidedly be greater still, if she could but have the fun of watching one of Arabella’s tender passions, with her beloved Adolphe at her side to enjoy the joke with her! Nay, she was not without hope that she might manage to inspire her dear, darling, sober Gertrude, with a sufficient spirit of fun also, to make her capable of enjoying the scenes she was quite sure she should be able to get up for her amusement. Nor did her plot end here; for being, in truth, despite a great deal of childish, mad-cap nonsense, a kind-hearted little personage; she bethought her that she might really do a very good thing, if she could manage to keep alive this new passion of Arabella’s long enough to bring it to the old-fashioned conclusion of marriage.

  She had not witnessed the great delight which Adolphe had testified upon meeting again the only companion and friend to whom he had ever strongly attached himself, without feeling sufficiently interested about him to lead her to find out, as nearly as might be, who, and what he was; and this had, naturally enough, led to the conviction, that it would be a monstrous good thing for him if he could marry such a fortune as Arabella’s!”

  She only wondered she had never thought of it before Nurse Norris had put it into her head! But she supposed that her dulness on the subject had been caused by the unmistakable indifference of the young man.... And this thought caused her to pause, and think a little, if thought it might be called; which led her to decide at last, that the less Rupert liked Arabella, the more fun there would in getting him to marry her; and that as, of course, Arabella must at last marry somebody or other, her money could not be better disposed of, than in making Adolphe’s particular friend a rich man!

  This last decisive thought being, decidedly, a very important thought, was digested in silence; that is to say, she did not then and there communicate to Nurse Norris the conclusion at which she had arrived; but having, rather more quietly than usual, awaited the skilful old woman’s assurance, that her beautiful head was quite perfect, she descended to the drawing-room with the comfortable assurance that she might set to work upon her scheme immediately, as the Schloss Schwanberg family were a part of the Company expected at dinner.

  Fortunately for the gratification of Count Adolphe, and the fair ladies he had attached to him, the Baron de Schwanberg had not abandoned the idea that it was necessary, or, at least, highly desirable, that he should be always attended by his suite; and Rupert, therefore, as well as his mother, in her capacity of dame de compagnie, accompanied him on the present occasion.

  The Countess Adolphe watched their entry with a sort of sparkling satisfaction, which made her look extremely pretty; while her Venus-like sister, draped, as to the ivory shoulders, in transparent lace, and eyes melting with a sort of dreamy softness, that caused the wicked Lucy to rub her little hands with uncontrollable glee, seemed to see only one of the group which entered; but that one received a smile which the Baroness Gertrude saw, though it is highly probable that the baron’s librarian did not.

  CHAPTER XXXVII.

  WHATEVER varieties may be found in the social habits and manners of the various drawing-rooms of Europe, there is at least one hour in every day, during a portion of which it would be difficult to find any external variety at all.

  When a mixed party are assembled in a drawing-room, awaiting a summons to the dinner-table, I believe that it will invariably be found that the gentlemen separate themselves from the ladies, and stand chatting together in groups till the welcome summons arrives which unites them together in pairs, in the order that etiquette or inclination may dictate.

  The party assembled at this hour in Count Steinfeld’s drawingroom, on the day that his son’s bride had held at her toilet the conversation with her attendant which was related in the last chapter, consisted of about a score of persons, among whom were the Baron von Schwanberg, his daughter, and suite.

  The gentlemen of the party had grouped themselves at two of the windows, for the purpose of chatting at their ease, and of admiring the beautiful garden upon which the said windows opened.

  Gertrude, as usual, had placed herself beside the young Countess Adolphe; but did not, as usual, find her full of gay spirits and laughing chit chat. On the contrary, she not only seemed incapable of replying to what was said to her, but it appeared very doubtful whether she had heard a single word of it.

  Puzzled to account for this unusual want of attention in her new friend, Gertrude ceased to address her, and turned her attention to other individuals in the apartment.

  It did not take her long to discover the cause of the volatile Lucy’s pre-occupation.

  On the opposite side of the room to that now occupied by the gentlemen, stood a richly-carpeted oval table, almost covered with
books and engravings; and around, or near this table, were congregated the sofas and easy chairs on which the ladies were seated.

  One fair deserter from this group, had, for some reason or other (perhaps to examine the dimensions of some particularly fine tree), stationed herself in a graceful attitude of meditation at one of the windows.

  It required no second glance to show Gertrude that this solitary fair one was Miss Morrison. There was, indeed, no chance that any other could be mistaken for her; for who else could have found so beautiful an attitude in which to place themselves, merely for the sake of looking out of a window?

  From the picturesque individual ‘who had thus withdrawn from the female group, Gertrude’s eyes wandered back again to the friend who sat beside her; and then she discovered why it was that Lucy had paid so very little attention to all she had said to her.

  Lucy’s eyes were not so large, nor so meltingly soft as those of her elder sister, but there was no want of speculation in those laughing eyes of hers; and a less intelligent observer than Gertrude, would have found no difficulty in discovering that their merry mistress was at that moment very particularly amused by the discoveries they were making for her.

  And then, of course, Gertrude’s eyes took the same direction as those of her friend; and truly she found that there was wherewithal to be amused by what they looked upon.

  The groups which occupied the window at which the beautiful Arabella had stationed herself, consisted of Count Adolphe, his friend Rupert, and two gentlemen of the neighbourhood, who were discussing with them the details of a tremendous thunderstorm which had occurred in a distant part of the country; an account of which had reached them by the newspapers of the morning. Miss Morrison, of course, clasped her beautiful, ungloved hands, and she listened; and every soft feature seemed to express to the utmost extent of its power, both the agitation of terror, and the sympathy of pity.