“non illum nostri passunt labores,
non si frigoribus mediis hebrumque libamus
sithoniasque nives hiemis subeamus aquos?—
omnia vincit amor.”
virgil.
“and what then do you and harry think i should do? where, i should rather say, do you think i should go, for i am sure you have thought of some plan?” asked marion, later is the evening, as they still at together talking.
mr. baldwin looked at harry, and harry at mr. baldwin. this was the part of the whole they most dreaded telling her, being, as are all their sex, sad cowards when there was question breaking bad or disagreeable news.
“no permanent arrangement can be made till we hear from mr. framley, vere,” began mr. baldwin, but marion interrupted him.
“you need not, i assure you, take him into consideration with regard to my movements,” said she: “he is one of those old bachelors that think girls torments, and provided he is not asked to look out for a home for me himself, he will trouble himself very little as to what becomes of me. i daresay harry may find him a sensible adviser and he may be a good man of business, but beyond that i am sure he won’t interfere.”
“the only plan that appears at all feasible to harry and me,” resumed mr. baldwin, “is one which i fear will be very distasteful to you.” again he stopped.
“please tell me what it is,” urged marion.
mr. baldwin looked at harry beseechingly.
“it’s nothing so very dreadful,” said the boy, “all really for the present it’s the only thing to be done. it’s only aunt tremlett and mallingford, may.” he spoke lightly, but in his heart he dreaded the effect of his announcement.
but to his amazement marion took it philosophically in the extreme.
“i thought it was that,” she replied, “well, i daresay it will do very fairly, all things considered. mallingford certainly is dull, and aunt tremlett duller; but i don’t mind. i shall get on comfortably enough, and i shall have you harry, in the holidays. may i not?” she asked, appealing, to mr. baldwin.
“most assuredly,” he answered warmly, “i was thinking of that. and if miss tremlett objects to the racket of a young gentleman in her house, harry can come to me. it’s not two miles from my house to mallingford, and i can lend you a horse, or two if you like,” he said, turning to harry.
“that would be capital,” said the boy, “much more to my taste than aunt tremlett’s. though i’ll stay there part of the time if shell have me,” he added quickly, seeing that his sister looked rather disappointed.
and so marion’s future, for a time at least, was decided.
it all came to pass very soon. so soon, that ten days later she found herself, under the escort of mrs. evans and brown (about to set up a joint establishment, after “keeping company” of many years’ standing), in the railway on her way to mallingford, hardly able to realize that not yet a month had passed since the day when she saw those sad four lines in the ‘times’—when for the first time the destroying angel had passed close by her, breaking the small circle of her immediate friends. and now already another place was vacant!
it was rather a long journey to mallingford. a few years ago, when as children marion and harry used to spend the summer in the brackley cottage, the railway only went about two-thirds of the way, and the last thirty miles were traversed in the coach. now it was different. mallingford had a station of its own, at which some half dozen trains stopped in the day, so the whole of the journey was performed on the railway; at which, had she been in the mood to observe or feel interested in outside things, marion would have murmured; for long ago the stage coach part of the programme had been the children’s great delight: in fine weather at least, when they coaxed their attendants to allow them to mount up to the top of the vehicle, from whence they had a charming view of the country in general, and of the four dashing, smoking horses in particular.
but marion was sad and listless, and so long as she was left at peace to pursue the wearying circle of her own thoughts, cared little for what might be her surroundings.
she had heard nothing from ralph, received no sort of explanation of his strange conduct. and her hopes were sinking low. by cissy’s last message she was now perfectly convinced that no sort of mistake was at the bottom of his incomprehensible silence. he must, by the last mail at latest, if not sooner, have received mrs. archer’s explanation of the whole from marion’s side. that he still refrained from communicating with her must be owing to one of two causes: either his feelings to her were changed by the knowledge of the deception she had practised; or he himself had failed in the object of his visit to england, and was still fettered by the mysterious complications to which he had alluded. complications in no way removed, as she had now and then begun to fancy might prove to be the case, by the fact of her being the daughter of the distinguished politician hartford vere, instead of marion freer, the little governess.
“not that my position would have made any difference to him personally,” she always added; “he, i know, cared for marion freer as i shall never, never be cared for again. but it might have influenced his mother if the obstacle was in any way connected with her.”
latterly she had said to herself somewhat bitterly, that so far as his advantage was concerned, there was nothing to regret.
my father dead, and a mere pittance all my portion! and the very little beauty i ever had fading already,” she thought, as she looked at herself in her old toilet glass for the last time, the morning she left london.
she was mistaken, however. but her beauty was not of a kind to be materially affected by such causes, and in this respect rose far superior to the more striking, but merely physical, loveliness of such women as florence vyse. the “sweet soul” that looked out of marion vere’s grey eyes would render them beautiful till old age; the delicate features and sensitive mouth drew their chief attraction from the truth of heart and refinement of mind of their owner. to my mind she was at all times a beautiful woman. her nature, in spite of adverse circumstances, was sound and healthy, and in a sense, even strong; for after all it is the strongest who suffer the most, that bend only, where weaker ones would break.
as geoffrey baldwin handed her on to the little platform at mallingford station, whither he had driven to meet her, he, at least, would have agreed with me. likely enough, he would have been at a loss to define his sensations with regard to her. he was not a man who troubled himself much with definitions of any kind certainly, but it is curious to reflect on the peculiar attraction this girl had for him from the first. he had seen plenty of far handsomer women, he had known some few as sweet and good. intellect he did not care for, did not understand. yet as he looked at the slight figure in its heavy mourning dress, at the fair face and sad, gentle eyes that glanced up at him with their indescribable expression or mingled womanliness and childlike appeal, there came over his honest manhood the same yearning instinct of love and protection, the same wild longing to fold her then and there in his arms, which, before now, had stirred the innermost depths of ralph severn’s heart, had indeed cost him no slight struggle to resist. i make, no secret of it at all. both these men fell love with her, as it is called, almost from the first. it was very strange. they were so utterly different, alike only in that they were brave and good and true. but as to tastes, shades of character, habits, ideas—all in short that goes to the formation of individuality, you might search high and low, far and wide, before you could find two men so radically dissimilar as the quiet, studious sir ralph severn, and the high-spirited, open-hearted, life enjoying farmer, geoffrey baldwin.
marion felt glad that her young guardian had come to meet her, and she told him so.
“it seems less desolate,” she said, “for i do not expect much of a welcome from aunt tremlett.” which expectation, for all his wish to cheer her, mr. baldwin could not find it in his conscience to disagree with.
so in silence he put her and evans into the fly he had stopped to order at the king’s arms, on his way through mallingford, he himself following in his dog-cart, “just to shake hands with miss tremlett,” he said to himself, though in reality to make sure that his charge should have what little additional comfort and support his presence might give her, on her first arrival at the not very cheerful dwelling, which, for some time to come, at least, was to be her home.
there was no mystery about miss tremlett. she was simply a narrow-minded hypochondriac, who, never having been accustomed in youth to live for any other object than her precious self, had in old age, naturally enough increased in devotion to this all-engrossing idol. she was what is called a woman of high principles and excellent judgement, meaning, i suppose that when she was young, pretty, and poor, she had refused to marry the only man she cared for because he was a struggling curate, and had done her best to secure a rich husband; failing which she had for years “devoted herself” to an odious old woman, her god-mother, in hopes of succeeding to her fortune, in which, strange to say, she had not been disappointed. and now that she was old (for the fortune did not come to her till she was fifty) she had not been guilty of any enormity, robbing a church, for instance, in consequence of which and her large fortune, she was “greatly respected” in mallingford, and at the various tea-tables always alluded to by the rector in the terms above mentioned.
it was a great feather in her cap, this taking her orphan grand-niece to live with her. many of her acquaintances, in their secret hearts, wondered at it, especially when it oozed out, as such things always do, that the great mr. vere had not left his children “overly well provided for,” as mrs. jones, of the king’s arms, expressed it to her crony, miss green, the milliner. miss green was better informed than mrs. jones, however, a few days later, for she had been working at “the cross house,” miss tremlett’s residence, and had it from mrs. thomas, the housekeeper that master and miss vere had been left “quite destitoot.”
“not one brass farthing between them, mrs. jones, i do assure you,” she said, “and his debts, they do say, something awful.”
to which communication mrs. jones replied by an impressive “in-deed.”
miss tremlett had been influenced by various motives, when on hearing of her nephew’s death, she had authorized geoffrey baldwin to offer her house as a temporary home for marion. for one thing, in her heart, as in most others, there was a soft spot, and in her way, she had loved and been proud of hartford vere. then again, though to some extent grasping and money-loving, she was not on the whole ungenerous or stingy. there was one thing she loved better than money and that was herself and her own comfort, and it occurred to her that even if marion should be left very scantily provided for, she would cause but little additional expense in her household, and would be all the more ready to repay her aunt’s kindness by making herself a useful and agreeable companion. the effect on her nerves of a cheerful young person about the house would, her medical man informed her, be decidedly beneficial. any way, it would do no harm to try. she had been rather disagreeably well lately, and felt in want of a little excitement. and if marion failed in all else, there was one point on which it was quite impossible she should disappoint her. the girl’s presence in her house would, at all events, give her something new to grumble about!
so much as to aunt tremlett. as to mallingford itself there is not very much to say. it was (in those days at least, possibly the last few years may have improved it) an intensely stupid little town. dull, with a dullness that to those fortunate people who have had no personal experience of small provincial town life, altogether baffles description. and worse than dull—spiteful, ill-naturedly gossiping, and conceited, with the utterly hopeless conceit, only seen to perfection in the stupidest or people and societies. conservative of course, to the back-bone, in everything—the more objectionable and undesirable the object of its conservatism, the more stolidly, bull-doggishly tenacious grew mallingford. instance the long resistance to the introduction of gas lamps in the streets and public buildings, the still prevailing cobble stones in the market-place, the stiflingly high pews in the peculiarly hideous church, and, last not least, the universally signed petition against that most noisy and blustering of innovators—the railway.
the only liberals in mallingford were its numerous young ladies, who, on the subject of the fashions, became positively rabid. though their admirers of the opposite sex were few, for the census reported but one single gentleman to every eight or ten equally marriageable damsels, there were really few things a mallingford girl would have hesitated to do, for the sake of being the first to be seen in the high street with the latest fashion, whatever it might be, coal-scuttle bonnets or pork-pie hat, high-heeled hoots or paris crinoline!
there were good gentle souls in mallingford, too, of course, as, heaven be praised, there are in most places in this wicked world; but the prevailing spirit of the little town, the placid stupidity, unrelieved, save by occasional snappish outbursts of party-spirit, the ludicrous pretension and would-be exclusiveness of its reigning families, the airs of the half-educated daughters of the same—these things and many other of a similar nature would need a keener pen than mine to do justice to them! very laughable, very contemptible no doubt, were it not that from so surely passing away, is giving place, not merely to another, but to a better state of things.
it may seem exaggerated to speak so gravely of the foibles and absurdities of county town society as it existed in mallingford some few years ago, as possibly it still exists in other yet more “conservative” places of the kind. if it appear so i can only say that to me it comes naturally to speak seriously of things i have myself felt strongly—absurdities if you like, but worse than absurdities, for they have sprung from deep rooted error, and their influence, again, has, in its turn, been an evil one. besides which, it is necessary to a right comprehension of my heroine’s life and character, that the nature of the social atmosphere into which at this critical period of her history she was thrown, should be, to some extent at least, understood and justly appreciated.
over the cobble stones, in the fly from the king’s arms, marion was rattled to her destination. “the cross house,” as it was called, its name from its vicinity to the old market place (now, wonderful to say, deserted in favour of a more convenient site), in the centre of which, though no longer surrounded by booths and stalls, still stood in respectable decay the pride of mallingford, the venerable cross. queer things that ancient monument must have seen in its day; strange sights if all be true that is to be read concerning it, in the “guide to mallingford and its neighbourhood,” changes many and marvellous even in this sturdy little stronghold of conservatism! of its antiquity, there can be no doubt, for it was already aged in 1641, when by some special good luck, or over-sight on the part of the fanatic destroyers, it escaped the fate of its fellow monuments.
to marion in her childhood it had not been without appalling associations, for besides whispers of a heretic or two burnt to death at its base, there was a more ghastly legend of a modern sapphira struck dead on the spot by what some good people used to call “a special dispensation of providence,” as an awful warning to succeeding generations. marion’s nurse told her this pretty little story one day when the perfectly truthful child persisted in refusing to confess to a sin she had not committed; but it had an opposite effect to that anticipated. “if, then, i say i broke the jug, nurse, when i know i did not, god would perhaps kill me like the woman. which way of putting it was rather beyond the nurse’s logical powers. fortunately the real delinquent was afterwards discovered, and the little girl came off with flying colours!
as the fly stopped at the door of the cross house, geoffrey’s bright face appeared. he rang the bell, and notwithstanding the forbidding frowns of the prim, crabbed looking maid-servant, who answered the summons, stood his ground bravely, and carried out his intention of assisting at the first meeting of aunt and niece. they were almost strangers to each other, for the years during which they had not met had changed the girl from a child to a woman, and had nearly effaced from her recollection the personal appearance of her aunt, who had done little to attract of attach her young relative to herself.
marion and mr. baldwin were shown into a room at the back of the house, on the first floor. a pleasant bright room it might have been, had its owner been a pleasant or bright person, for it looked out on an old-fashioned walled-in garden, which too, might easily have been rendered pretty and attractive, instead of formal and bare. an untidy, neglected garden is an unpleasant sight, but hardly less so to my mind is a faultlessly neat one, if stiff, ungraceful and prim—the one might quite as justly as the other be described as “uncared for.” no person who cares for a garden as it should be cared for, would be content with doling out to it the minimum of unlovely, unloving attention, necessary to keeping it merely in order—that particular kind of lifeless, stunted order which is one of the ugliest things i know.
so, as might be expected from the glance at the garden on entering, the room was very dreary, uninviting and colourless. the dingy library in the london house where we first met marion was charming in comparison, for it, though dull and gloomy, always looked warm and comfortable, which was far from being the case with miss tremlett’s drawing-room. in the literal sense it was not cold, for winter and summer, spring and autumn, it was kept at an equal temperature by all means of tiresome inventions—patents most of them—self-adjusting ventilators and equalising stoves, pipes with hot air and pipes with cold, on which the credulous lady spent a small fortune in the course of each year. still it always looked cold. it was so oppressively grey—drab rather. so obtrusively neutral, if such an expression be permissible; that one almost felt as if the most glaring mixture of colours would be preferable! i wonder, by the way, whence has arisen the notion so common to people of very small taste or no taste at all, that so long as they stick to greys and drabs and slate colour, they are perfectly unimpregnable, however terribly they may mingle the shades, or, which is almost as bad, distress more sensitive organizations by unbroken monotony of dingy gloom.
“i must say i like quiet colours,” you will hear said with a self-satisfied smile by the most hopelessly commonplace and least educated of your acquaintance.
“quiet colours!” just as well, my dear madam, might you be proud of being stone deaf or lame of one leg, as of your incapability of admiring one of the most exquisite of our material gifts, that of colour. a pity truly that you and others of your refined tastes had not a hand in the arrangement of things in general; this world for instance, how very much more tasteful and less “vulgar” it would have been, had it been left to your unexceptionable greys and drabs! not that greys and drabs are not good in their place, beautiful even, as a background to more vivid hues, a repose to the eye after the luxury of greens and blues and scarlets, which nature has the bad taste to love and cherish so fondly. but only fancy a whole world of greys and drabs! oh, intensity of blue sky; oh, fields of emerald green; flowers of every conceivable perfection of colour; from deepest, richest, crimson, through golden gleams, to faintest blush of rose; oh, beautiful bright radiant things, what a dreary, ugly world this would be without you! but we, being more refined, in our tastes, some of us, prefer “quiet colours” as we call them. rather i think, would i endure the agony of mrs. butcher’s sunday bonnet before me in church, a perfect mass of utterly unassorted reds and greens and yellows, but in its way an innocent, “vulgar” barbaric expression of delight, untutored and, spontaneous, in the colour-beauty so profusely bestowed; rather i think this, than the other extreme, of cold, presumptuous scorn of this great gift, which results—in what? in a dungeon of a drawing-room like that of the unlovable miss tremlett at mallingford! from which by-the-by we have wandered an inexcusably long way.
