Evan Harrington. Complete
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He, you may be sure, was quite prepared to accept her homage. Rose he had always known to be just the girl for him; spirited, fresh, and with fine teeth; and once tied to you safe to be staunch. They walked together, rode together, danced together. Her soft humility touched him to eloquence. Say she was a little hypocrite, if you like, when the blood came to her cheeks under his eyes. Say she was a heartless minx for allowing it to be bruited that she and Ferdinand were betrothed. I can but tell you that her blushes were blushes of gratitude to one who could devote his time to such a disgraced silly creature, and that she, in her abject state, felt a secret pleasure in the protection Ferdinand’s name appeared to extend over her, and was hardly willing to lose it.
So far Lady Elburne’s tact and discipline had been highly successful. One morning, in May, Ferdinand, strolling with Rose down the garden made a positive appeal to her common sense and friendly feeling; by which she understood that he wanted her consent to his marriage with her.
Rose answered:
‘Who would have me?’
Ferdinand spoke pretty well, and ultimately got possession of her hand. She let him keep it, thinking him noble for forgetting that another had pressed it before him.
Some minutes later the letters were delivered. One of them contained Juliana’s dark-winged missive.
‘Poor, poor Juley!’ said Rose, dropping her head, after reading all that was on the crumpled leaf with an inflexible face. And then, talking on, long low sighs lifted her bosom at intervals. She gazed from time to time with a wistful conciliatory air on Ferdinand. Rushing to her chamber, the first cry her soul framed was:
‘He did not kiss me!’
The young have a superstitious sense of something incontestably true in the final protestations of the dead. Evan guiltless! she could not quite take the meaning this revelation involved. That which had been dead was beginning to move within her; but blindly: and now it stirred and troubled; now sank. Guiltless all she had thought him! Oh! she knew she could not have been deceived. But why, why had he hidden his sacrifice from her?
‘It is better for us both, of course,’ said Rose, speaking the world’s wisdom, parrot-like, and bursting into tears the next minute. Guiltless, and gloriously guiltless! but nothing—nothing to her!
She tried to blame him. It would not do. She tried to think of that grovelling loathsome position painted to her by Lady Elburne’s graphic hand. Evan dispersed the gloomy shades like sunshine. Then in a sort of terror she rejoiced to think she was partially engaged to Ferdinand, and found herself crying again with exultation, that he had not kissed her: for a kiss on her mouth was to Rose a pledge and a bond.
The struggle searched her through: bared her weakness, probed her strength; and she, seeing herself, suffered grievously in her self-love. Am I such a coward, inconstant, cold? she asked. Confirmatory answers coming, flung her back under the shield of Ferdinand if for a moment her soul stood up armed and defiant, it was Evan’s hand she took.
To whom do I belong? was another terrible question. In her ideas, if Evan was not chargeable with that baseness which had sundered them he might claim her yet, if he would. If he did, what then? Must she go to him?
Impossible: she was in chains. Besides, what a din of laughter there would be to see her led away by him. Twisting her joined hands: weeping for her cousin, as she thought, Rose passed hours of torment over Juliana’s legacy to her.
‘Why did I doubt him?’ she cried, jealous that any soul should have known and trusted him better. Jealous and I am afraid that the kindling of that one feature of love relighted the fire of her passion thus fervidly. To be outstripped in generosity was hateful to her. Rose, naturally, could not reflect that a young creature like herself, fighting against the world, as we call it, has all her faculties at the utmost stretch, and is often betrayed by failing nature when the will is still valiant.
And here she sat-in chains! ‘Yes! I am fit only to be the wife of an idle brainless man, with money and a title,’ she said, in extreme self-contempt. She caught a glimpse of her whole life in the horrid tomb of his embrace, and questions whether she could yield her hand to him—whether it was right in the eyes of heaven, rushed impetuously to console her, and defied anything in the shape of satisfactory affirmations. Nevertheless, the end of the struggle was, that she felt that she was bound to Ferdinand.
‘But this I will do,’ said Rose, standing with heat-bright eyes and deep-coloured cheeks before the glass. ‘I will clear his character at Beckley. I will help him. I will be his friend. I will wipe out the injustice I did him.’ And this bride-elect of a lord absolutely added that she was unworthy to be the wife of a tailor!
‘He! how unequalled he is! There is nothing he fears except shame. Oh! how sad it will be for him to find no woman in his class to understand him and be his helpmate!’
Over, this sad subject, of which we must presume her to be accurately cognizant, Rose brooded heavily. By mid-day she gave her Grandmother notice that she was going home to Juliana’s funeral.
‘Well, Rose, if you think it necessary to join the ceremony,’ said Lady Elburne. ‘Beckley is bad quarters for you, as you have learnt. There was never much love between you cousins.’
‘No, and I don’t pretend to it,’ Rose answered. ‘I am sorry poor Juley’s gone.’
‘She’s better gone for many reasons—she appears to have been a little venomous toad,’ said Lady Elburne; and Rose, thinking of a snakelike death-bite working through her blood, rejoined: ‘Yes, she isn’t to be pitied she ‘s better off than most people.’
So it was arranged that Rose should go. Ferdinand and her aunt, Mrs. Shorne, accompanied her. Mrs. Shorne gave them their opportunities, albeit they were all stowed together in a carriage, and Ferdinand seemed willing to profit by them; but Rose’s hand was dead, and she sat by her future lord forming the vow on her lips that they should never be touched by him.
Arrived at Beckley, she, to her great delight, found Caroline there, waiting for the funeral. In a few minutes she got her alone, and after kisses, looked penetratingly into her lovely eyes, shook her head, and said: ‘Why were you false to me?’
‘False?’ echoed Caroline.
‘You knew him. You knew why he did that. Why did you not save me?’
Caroline fell upon her neck, asking pardon. She spared her the recital of facts further than the broad avowal. Evan’s present condition she plainly stated: and Rose, when the bitter pangs had ceased, made oath to her soul she would rescue him from it.
In addition to the task of clearing Evan’s character, and rescuing him, Rose now conceived that her engagement to Ferdinand must stand ice-bound till Evan had given her back her troth. How could she obtain it from him? How could she take anything from one so noble and so poor! Happily there was no hurry; though before any bond was ratified, she decided conscientiously that it must be done.
You see that like a lithe snake she turns on herself, and must be tracked in and out. Not being a girl to solve the problem with tears, or outright perfidy, she had to ease her heart to the great shock little by little—sincere as far as she knew: as far as one who loves may be. The day of the funeral came and went. The Jocelyns were of their mother’s opinion: that for many reasons Juliana was better out of the way. Mrs. Bonner’s bequest had been a severe blow to Sir Franks. However, all was now well. The estate naturally lapsed to Lady Jocelyn. No one in the house dreamed of a will, signed with Juliana’s name, attested, under due legal forms, being in existence. None of the members of the family imagined that at Beckley Court they were then residing on somebody else’s ground.
Want of hospitable sentiments was not the cause that led to an intimation from Sir Franks to his wife, that Mrs. Strike must not be pressed to remain, and that Rose must not be permitted to have her own way in this. Knowing very well that Mrs. Shorne spoke through her husband’s mouth, Lady Jocelyn still acquiesced, and Rose, who had pressed Caroline publicly to stay, had to be silent when the latter renewed her faint objections; so Caroline said she would leave on the morrow morning.
Juliana, with her fretfulness, her hand bounties, her petty egoisms, and sudden far-leaping generosities, and all the contradictory impulses of her malady, had now departed utterly. The joys of a landed proprietor mounted into the head of Sir Franks. He was up early the next morning, and he and Harry walked over a good bit of the ground before breakfast. Sir Franks meditated making it entail, and favoured Harry with a lecture on the duty of his shaping the course of his conduct at once after the model of the landed gentry generally.
‘And you may think yourself lucky to come into that catalogue—the son of a younger son!’ said Sir Franks, tapping Mr. Harry’s shoulder. Harry also began to enjoy the look and smell of land. At the breakfast, which, though early, was well attended, Harry spoke of the adviseability of felling timber here, planting there, and so forth, after the model his father held up. Sir Franks nodded approval of his interest in the estate, but reserved his opinion on matters of detail.
‘All I beg of you is,’ said Lady Jocelyn, ‘that you won’t let us have turnips within the circuit of a mile’; which was obligingly promised.
The morning letters were delivered and opened with the customary calmness.
‘Letter from old George,’ Harry sings out, and buzzes over a few lines. ‘Halloa!—Hum!’ He was going to make a communication, but catching sight of Caroline, tossed the letter over to Ferdinand, who read it and tossed it back with the comment of a careless face.
‘Read it, Rosey?’ says Harry, smiling bluntly.
Rather to his surprise, Rose took the letter. Study her eyes if you wish to gauge the potency of one strong dose of ridicule on an ingenuous young heart. She read that Mr. George Uplift had met ‘our friend Mr. Snip’ riding, by moonlight, on the road to Beckley. That great orbed night of their deep tender love flashed luminously through her frame, storming at the base epithet by which her lover was mentioned, flooding grandly over the ignominies cast on him by the world. She met the world, as it were, in a death-grapple; she matched the living heroic youth she felt him to be, with that dead wooden image of him which it thrust before her. Her heart stood up singing like a craven who sees the tide of victory setting toward him. But this passed beneath her eyelids. When her eyes were lifted, Ferdinand could have discovered nothing in them to complain of, had his suspicions been light to raise: nor could Mrs. Shorne perceive that there was the opening for a shrewd bodkin-thrust. Rose had got a mask at last: her colour, voice, expression, were perfectly at command. She knew it to be a cowardice to wear any mask: but she had been burnt, horribly burnt: how much so you may guess from the supple dissimulation of such a bold clear-visaged girl. She conquered the sneers of the world in her soul: but her sensitive skin was yet alive to the pangs of the scorching it had been subjected to when weak, helpless, and betrayed by Evan, she stood with no philosophic parent to cry fair play for her, among the skilful torturers of Elburne House.
Sir Franks had risen and walked to the window.
‘News?’ said Lady Jocelyn, wheeling round in her chair.
The one eyebrow up of the easy-going baronet signified trouble of mind. He finished his third perusal of a letter that appeared to be written in a remarkably plain legal hand, and looking as men do when their intelligences are just equal to the comprehension or expression of an oath, handed the letter to his wife, and observed that he should be found in the library. Nevertheless he waited first to mark its effect on Lady Jocelyn. At one part of the document her forehead wrinkled slightly.
‘Doesn’t sound like a joke!’ he said.
She answered:
‘No.’
Sir Franks, apparently quite satisfied by her ready response, turned on his heel and left the room quickly.
An hour afterward it was rumoured and confirmed that Juliana Bonner had willed all the worldly property she held in her own right, comprising Beckley Court, to Mr. Evan Harrington, of Lymport, tailor. An abstract of the will was forwarded. The lawyer went on to say, that he had conformed to the desire of the testatrix in communicating the existence of the aforesaid will six days subsequent to her death, being the day after her funeral.
There had been railing and jeering at the Countess de Saldar, the clever outwitted exposed adventuress, at Elburne House and Beckley Court. What did the crowing cleverer aristocrats think of her now?
On Rose the blow fell bitterly. Was Evan also a foul schemer? Was he of a piece with his intriguing sister? His close kinship with the Countess had led her to think baseness possible to him when it was confessed by his own mouth once. She heard black names cast at him and the whole of the great Mel’s brood, and incapable of quite disbelieving them merited, unable to challenge and rebut them, she dropped into her recent state of self-contempt: into her lately-instilled doubt whether it really was in Nature’s power, unaided by family-portraits, coats-of-arms, ball-room practice, and at least one small phial of Essence of Society, to make a Gentleman.
CHAPTER XLIV. CONTAINS A WARNING TO ALL CONSPIRATORS
This, if you have done me the favour to read it aright, has been a chronicle of desperate heroism on the part of almost all the principal personages represented. But not the Countess de Saldar, scaling the embattled fortress of Society; nor Rose, tossing its keys to her lover from the shining turret-tops; nor Evan, keeping bright the lamp of self-respect in his bosom against South wind and East; none excel friend Andrew Cogglesby, who, having fallen into Old Tom’s plot to humiliate his wife and her sisters, simply for Evan’s sake, and without any distinct notion of the terror, confusion, and universal upset he was bringing on his home, could yet, after a scared contemplation of the scene when he returned from his expedition to Fallow field, continue to wear his rueful mask; and persevere in treacherously outraging his lofty wife.
He did it to vindicate the ties of blood against accidents of position. Was he justified? I am sufficiently wise to ask my own sex alone.
On the other side, be it said (since in our modern days every hero must have his weak heel), that now he had gone this distance it was difficult to recede. It would be no laughing matter to tell his solemn Harriet that he had been playing her a little practical joke. His temptations to give it up were incessant and most agitating; but if to advance seemed terrific, there was, in stopping short, an awfulness so overwhelming that Andrew abandoned himself to the current, his real dismay adding to his acting powers.
The worst was, that the joke was no longer his: it was Old Tom’s. He discovered that he was in Old Tom’s hands completely. Andrew had thought that he would just frighten the women a bit, get them down to Lymport for a week or so, and then announce that matters were not so bad with the Brewery as he had feared; concluding the farce with a few domestic fireworks. Conceive his dismay when he entered the house, to find there a man in possession.
Andrew flew into such a rage that he committed an assault on the man. So ungovernable was his passion, that for some minutes Harriet’s measured voice summoned him from over the banisters above, quite in vain. The miserable Englishman refused to be taught that his house had ceased to be his castle. It was something beyond a joke, this! The intruder, perfectly docile, seeing that by accurate calculation every shake he got involved a bottle of wine for him, and ultimate compensation probably to the amount of a couple of sovereigns, allowed himself to be lugged up stairs, in default of summary ejection on the point of Andrew’s toe into the street. There he was faced to the lady of the house, who apologized to him, and requested her husband to state what had made him guilty of this indecent behaviour. The man showed his papers. They were quite in order. ‘At the suit of Messrs. Grist.’
‘My own lawyers!’ cried Andrew, smacking his forehead; and Old Tom’s devilry flashed on him at once. He sank into a chair.
‘Why did you bring this person up here?’ said Harriet, like a speaking statue.
‘My dear!’ Andrew answered, and spread out his hand, and waggled his head; ‘My—please!—I—I don’t know. We all want exercise.’
The man laughed, which was kindly of him, but offensive to Mrs. Cogglesby, who gave Andrew a glance which was full payment for his imbecile pleasantry, and promised more.
With a hospitable inquiry as to the condition of his appetite, and a request that he would be pleased to satisfy it to the full, the man was dismissed: whereat, as one delivered of noxious presences, the Countess rustled into sight. Not noticing Andrew, she lisped to Harriet: ‘Misfortunes are sometimes no curses! I bless the catarrh that has confined Silva to his chamber, and saved him from a bestial exhibition.’
The two ladies then swept from the room, and left Andrew to perspire at leisure.
Fresh tribulations awaited him when he sat down to dinner. Andrew liked his dinner to be comfortable, good, and in plenty. This may not seem strange. The fact is stated that I may win for him the warm sympathies of the body of his countrymen. He was greeted by a piece of cold boiled neck of mutton and a solitary dish of steaming potatoes. The blank expanse of table-cloth returned his desolate stare.
‘Why, what’s the meaning of this?’ Andrew brutally exclaimed, as he thumped the table.
The Countess gave a start, and rolled a look as of piteous supplication to spare a lady’s nerves, addressed to a ferocious brigand. Harriet answered: ‘It means that I will have no butcher’s bills.’
‘Butcher’s bills! butcher’s bills!’ echoed Andrew; ‘why, you must have butcher’s bills; why, confound! why, you’ll have a bill for this, won’t you, Harry? eh? of course!’
‘There will be no more bills dating from yesterday,’ said his wife.
‘What! this is paid for, then?’
‘Yes, Mr. Cogglesby; and so will all household expenses be, while my pocket-money lasts.’
Resting his eyes full on Harriet a minute, Andrew dropped them on the savourless white-rimmed chop, which looked as lonely in his plate as its parent dish on the table. The poor dear creature’s pocket-money had paid for it! The thought, mingling with a rush of emotion, made his ideas spin. His imagination surged deliriously. He fancied himself at the Zoological Gardens, exchanging pathetic glances with a melancholy marmoset. Wonderfully like one the chop looked! There was no use in his trying to eat it. He seemed to be fixing his teeth in solid tears. He choked. Twice he took up knife and fork, put them down again, and plucking forth his handkerchief, blew a tremendous trumpet, that sent the Countess’s eyes rolling to the ceiling, as if heaven were her sole refuge from such vulgarity.
‘Damn that Old Tom!’ he shouted at last, and pitched back in his chair.
‘Mr. Cogglesby!’ and ‘In the presence of ladies!’ were the admonishing interjections of the sisters, at whom the little man frowned in turns.
‘Do you wish us to quit the room, sir?’ inquired his wife.
‘God bless your soul, you little darling!’ he apostrophized that stately person. ‘Here, come along with me, Harry. A wife’s a wife, I say—hang it! Just outside the room—just a second! or up in a corner will do.’
Mrs. Cogglesby was amazed to see him jump up and run round to her. She was prepared to defend her neck from his caress, and refused to go: but the words, ‘Something particular to tell you,’ awakened her curiosity, which urged her to compliance. She rose and went with him to the door.
‘Well, sir; what is it?’
No doubt he was acting under a momentary weakness he was about to betray the plot and take his chance of forgiveness; but her towering port, her commanding aspect, restored his courage. (There may be a contrary view of the case.) He enclosed her briskly in a connubial hug, and remarked with mad ecstasy: ‘What a duck you are, Harry! What a likeness between you and your mother.’
Mrs. Cogglesby disengaged herself imperiously. Had he called her aside for this gratuitous insult? Contrite, he saw his dreadful error.
‘Harry! I declare!’ was all he was allowed to say. Mrs. Cogglesby marched back to her chair, and recommenced the repast in majestic silence.
Andrew sighed; he attempted to do the same. He stuck his fork in the blanched whiskerage of his marmoset, and exclaimed: ‘I can’t!’
He was unnoticed.
‘You do not object to plain diet?’ said Harriet to Louisa.
‘Oh, no, in verity!’ murmured the Countess. ‘However plain it be! Absence of appetite, dearest. You are aware I partook of luncheon at mid-day with the Honourable and Reverend Mr. Duffian. You must not look condemnation at your Louy for that. Luncheon is not conversion!’
Harriet observed that this might be true; but still, to her mind, it was a mistake to be too intimate with dangerous people. ‘And besides,’ she added, ‘Mr. Duffian is no longer “the Reverend.” We deprive all renegades of their spiritual titles. His worldly ones let him keep.’
Her superb disdain nettled the Countess.
‘Dear Harriet!’ she said, with less languor, ‘You are utterly and totally and entirely mistaken. I tell you so positively. Renegade! The application of such a word to such a man! Oh! and it is false, Harriet quite! Renegade means one who has gone over to the Turks, my dear. I am almost certain I saw it in Johnson’s Dictionary, or an improvement upon Johnson, by a more learned author. But there is the fact, if Harriet can only bring her—shall I say stiff-necked prejudices to envisage it?’
Harriet granted her sister permission to apply the phrases she stood in need of, without impeaching her intimacy with the most learned among lexicographers.
‘And is there no such thing as being too severe?’ the Countess resumed. ‘What our enemies call unchristian!’
‘Mr. Duffian has no cause to complain of us,’ said Harriet.
‘Nor does he do so, dearest. Calumny may assail him; you may utterly denude him—’
‘Adam!’ interposed Andrew, distractedly listening. He did not disturb the Countess’s flow.
‘You may vilify and victimize Mr. Duffian, and strip him of the honours of his birth, but, like the Martyrs, he will still continue the perfect nobleman. Stoned, I assure you that Mr. Duffian would preserve his breeding. In character he is exquisite; a polish to defy misfortune.’
‘I suppose his table is good?’ said Harriet, almost ruffled by the Countess’s lecture.
‘Plate,’ was remarked in the cold tone of supreme indifference.
‘Hem! good wines?’ Andrew asked, waking up a little and not wishing to be excluded altogether.
‘All is of the very best,’ the Countess pursued her eulogy, not looking at him.
‘Don’t you think you could—eh, Harry?—manage a pint for me, my dear?’ Andrew humbly petitioned. ‘This cold water—ha! ha! my stomach don’t like cold bathing.’
His wretched joke rebounded from the impenetrable armour of the ladies.
‘The wine-cellar is locked,’ said his wife. ‘I have sealed up the key till an inventory can be taken by some agent of the creditors.’
‘What creditors?’ roared Andrew.
‘You can have some of the servants’ beer,’ Mrs. Cogglesby appended.
Andrew studied her face to see whether she really was not hoisting him with his own petard. Perceiving that she was sincerely acting according to her sense of principle, he fumed, and departed to his privacy, unable to stand it any longer.
Then like a kite the Countess pounced upon his character. Would the Honourable and Reverend Mr. Duflian decline to participate in the sparest provender? Would he be guilty of the discourtesy of leaving table without a bow or an apology, even if reduced to extremest poverty? No, indeed! which showed that, under all circumstances, a gentleman was a gentleman. And, oh! how she pitied her poor Harriet—eternally tied to a most vulgar little man, without the gilding of wealth.
‘And a fool in his business to boot, dear!’
‘These comparisons do no good,’ said Harriet. ‘Andrew at least is not a renegade, and never shall be while I live. I will do my duty by him, however poor we are. And now, Louisa, putting my husband out of the question, what are your intentions? I don’t understand bankruptcy, but I imagine they can do nothing to wife and children. My little ones must have a roof over their heads; and, besides, there is little Maxwell. You decline to go down to Lymport, of course.’