Alice Lorraine: A Tale of the South Downs

Sir Remnant Chapman returned to the house, with a heavy sigh from his withered breast. He had not the goodness in him which is needed to understand the value of a noble maiden, or even of any good girl, taken as against man’s selfishness. But in his little way, he thought of the bonds of matrimony as a check upon his son’s poor rambling life; and he knew that a lady was wanted in his house; and his great ambition was to see, at last, a legitimate grandson. “If he comes of the breed of Lorraine,” he exclaimed, “I will settle £100,000, the very day he is born, on him.”

With this in his head, he came back to try his measures with Sir Roland. He knew that he must not work at all as he had done with Lady Valeria; but put it all strictly as a matter of business, with no obligation on either side; but as if there were “landed security” for the purchase-money of Alice. And he managed all this so well, that Sir Roland, proud and high-minded as he was, saw nothing improper in an arrangement by which Alice would become an incumbent on the Lorraine estates, for the purpose of vindicating the honour of Lorraine, and saving, perhaps, the male heir thereof. Accordingly the matter was referred to the lawyers; who put it in hand, with the understanding that the trustees of the marriage-settlement, receiving an indemnity from Sir Remnant, would waive all defects, and accept as good a mortgage as could be made by deed of even date, to secure the £50,000.

Sir Roland had long been unwilling to give his favourite Alice to such a man as Captain Chapman seemed to be. Although, through his own retiring and rather unsociable habits, he was not aware of the loose unprincipled doings of the fellow, he could not but perceive the want of solid stuff about him, of any power for good, or even respectable powers of evil. But he first tried to think, and then began to believe, that his daughter would cure these defects, and take a new pride and delight in doing so. He knew what a spirited girl she was; and he thought it a likely thing enough, that she would do better with a weak, fond husband, than with one of superior mind, who might fail to be polite to her. And he could not help seeing that Steenie was now entirely devoted to her. Perpetual snubbings or silent contempt made little difference to Steenie. He knew that he must win in the end; and then his turn might come perhaps; and in half an hour after his worst set-down, he was up again, on the arm of Cognac.

Alice Lorraine, with that gift of waiting for destiny, which the best women have, allowed the whole thing to go on, as if she perceived there was no hope for it. She made no touching appeals to her father, nor frantic prayers to her grandmother; she let the time slip on and on, and the people said what they liked to her. She would give her life for her brother’s life, and the honour of the family; but firmly was she resolved never to be the wife of Stephen Chapman.

The more she saw of this man, the more deeply and utterly she despised him. She could not explain to her father, or even herself, why she so loathed him. She did not know that it was the native shrinking of the good from evil, of the lofty from the low, the brave from the coward, the clean from the unclean. All this she was too young to think of, too maidenly to imagine. But she felt perhaps, an unformed thought, an unpronounced suggestion, that death was a fitter husband for a pure girl, than a rake-hell.

Meanwhile Hilary, upon whom she waited with unwearying love and care, was beginning to rally from his sad disorder and threatening decline. The doctors, who had shaken their heads about him, now began to smile, and say that under skilful treatment, youth and good constitution did wonders; that “really they had seldom met with clearer premonitory indications of phthisis pulmonalis, complicated by cardiac and hypochondriac atony, and aggravated by symptomatic congestion of the cerebellum. But proper remedial agents had been instrumental in counteracting all organic cachexy, and now all the principles of sound hygiene imperatively demanded quietude.” In plain English, he was better and must not be worried. Therefore he was not even told of the arrangement about his sister. Alice used to come and sit by his bed, or sofa, or easy-chair, as he grew a little stronger, and talk light nonsense to him, as if her heart was above all cloud and care. If he alluded to any trouble, she turned it at once to ridicule; and when he spoke of his indistinct remembrance of the Woeburn, she made him laugh till his heart grew fat, by her mimicry of Nanny Stilgoe, whom she could do to the very life. “How gay you are, Lallie; I never saw such a girl!” he exclaimed, with the gratitude which arises from liberated levity. “You do her with the stick so well! Do her again with the stick, dear Lallie.” His mind was a little childish now, from long lassitude of indoor life, which is enough to weaken and depress the finest mind that ever came from heaven, and hankers for sight of its birth-place. In a word, Alice Lorraine was bestowing whatever of mirth or fun she had left (in the face of the coming conflict), all the liveliness of her life, and revolt of bright youth against misery, to make her poor brother laugh a little and begin to look like himself again.

CHAPTER LXIII.

BETTER THAN THE DOCTORS

Hilary’s luck was beginning to turn. For in a few days he received a grand addition to his comforts, and wholesome encouragement to get well. For after the Grower’s return to his home, and recovery from hard Sussex air (which upset him for two days and three nights, “from the want of any fruitiness about it”), a solemn council was called and held in the state apartment of Old Applewood farm. There were no less than five personages present all ready to entertain and maintain fundamentally opposite opinions Mr. Martin Lovejoy, M.G., Mrs. Martin Lovejoy, Counsellor Gregory Lovejoy (brought down by special retainer), Miss Phyllis Catherow, and Lieutenant Charles Lovejoy, R.N. Poor Mabel was not allowed to be present, for fear she should cry and disturb strong minds, and corrode all bright honour with mercy. The Grower thought that Master John Shorne, as the London representative of the house, was entitled to be admitted; but no one else saw it in that light, and so the counsel of a Kentish crust was lost.

The question before the meeting was – Whether without lese-majesty of the ancient Lovejoy family, and in consistence with maiden dignity, and the laws of Covent Garden, Mabel Lovejoy might accept the invitation of Coombe Lorraine. A great deal was said upon either side, but no one convinced or converted, till the master said, ” You may all talk as you like; but I will have my own way, mind.”

Mrs. Lovejoy and Gregory were against accepting anything: a letter written on the spur of the moment was not the proper overture; neither ought Mabel to go at last, because they might happen to want her. But the father said, and the sailor also, and sweet Cousin Phyllis, that if she was wanted she ought to go, dispensing with small formality; especially if she should want to go.

She did want to go; and go she did, backed up by kind opinions; and her father being busy with his pears and hops (which were poor and late this wet season), the fine young sailor, now adrift on shore – while his ship was refitting at Chatham – made sail, with his sister in convoy, for the old roadstead of the South Downs. Gregory (who had refused to go, for reasons best known to himself, but sensible and sound ones) wishing them good luck, returned to his chambers in the Middle Temple.

Now there is no time to set forth how these two themselves set forth; the sailor with all the high spirit of the sea, when it overruns the land; the spinster inclined to be meditative, tranquil, and deep of eye and heart; yet compelled to come out of herself and smile, and then let herself come into her smile. It is a way all kind-hearted girls have, when they know that they ought to be grave, and truly intend to be so, yet cannot put a chain on the popgun pellets of young age, health, and innocence.

Enough that they had arrived quite safely at the old house in the Coombe, with the sailor of course in a flurry of ambition to navigate his father’s horse whenever he looked between his ears. The inborn resemblance between ships and horses has been perceived, and must have been perceived, long before Homer, or even Job, began to consider the subject; and it still holds good, and deserves to be treated by the most eloquent man of the age, retiring into silence.

Mr. Hales had claimed the right of introducing his favourite Mabel to his brother-in-law, Sir Roland. For amity now reigned again between the Coombe and the Rectory; the little quarrel of the year before had long since been adjusted, and the parson was as ready to contribute his valuable opinion upon any subject, as he was when we began with him. One might almost say even more so; for the longer a good man lives with a wife and three daughters to receive the law from him, and a parish to accept his divinity, the less hesitation he has in admitting the extent of his own capacities. Nevertheless he took very good care to keep out of Lady Valeria’s way.

“Bless my heart! you look better than ever,” said the Rector to blushing Mabel, as her pretty figure descended into his strong arms, at the great house door. “Give me a kiss. That’s a hearty lass. I shall always insist upon it. What! Trembling lips! That will never do. A little more Danish courage, if you please. You know I am the Danish champion. And here is the Royal Dane of course; or a Dane in the Royal Navy, which does quite as well, or better. Charlie, my boy, I want no introduction. You are a fisherman – that is enough; or too much, if your sister’s words are true. You can catch trout, when I can’t.”

“No, sir, never, I never should dare. But Mabel always makes me a wonder.”

“Well, perhaps we shall try some day, the Church against the Navy; and Mabel to bring us the luncheon. Well said, well said! I have made her smile; and that is worth a deal of trying. She remembers the goose, and the stuffing, and how she took in the clerk from Sussex. I don’t believe she made a bit of it.”

“I did, I did! How can you say such things? I can make better stuffing than that to-morrow. I was not at all at my best, then.”

“You are at your best now,” he replied, having purposely moved her mettle: “come in with that colour and those sparkling eyes, and you will conquer every one.”

“I want to conquer no one,” she answered, with female privilege of last word; “I only came to see poor Hilary.”

The Rector, with the fine gallantry and deference of old-fashioned days, led the beautiful and good girl, and presented her to Sir Roland. She was anxious to put her hair a little back, before being looked at; but the impetuous parson wisely would not let her trim herself. She could not look better than she did; so coy, and soft, and bashful, resolved to be by no means timid, but afraid that she could not contrive to be brave.

Sir Roland Lorraine came forward gently, and took her hand, and kissed her. He felt in his heart that he had been hard upon this very pretty maiden, imputing petty ambition to her; which one glance of her true dear eyes disproved to his mind for ever. She was come to see Hilary; nothing more. Her whole heart was on Hilary. She had much admiration of Sir Roland, as her clear eyes told him. But she had more than admiration for some one on another floor.

“You want to go upstairs, my dear,” Sir Roland said, with the usual bathos of all critical moments; “you would like to take off your things, and so on, before you see poor Hilary.”

“Of course she must touch herself up,” cried the Rector; “what do you know about young women? Roland, where is Mrs. Pipkins?”

“I told her to be not so very far off; but she is boiling down bullace plums, or something, of the highest national importance. We could not tell when this dear child would come, or we might have received her better.”

“Oh, I am so glad! You cannot receive me, you could not receive me, better. And now that you have called me your dear child, I shall always love you. I did not think that you would do it. And I came for nothing of the kind. I only came for Hilary.”

“Oh, we quite understand that we are nobodies,” answered Sir Roland, smiling; “you shall go to him directly. But you must not be frightened by his appearance. He has been a good deal knocked about, and fallen into sad trouble; but we all hope that now he is getting better, and the sight of you will be better than a hundred doctors to him. But you must not stay very long, of course, and you must keep him very quiet. But I need not tell you – I see that you have a natural gift of nursing.”

“All who have the gift of cookery have the gift of nursing,” exclaimed Mr. Hales, “because ‘omne majus continet in se minus.’ Ah, Roland, you think nothing of my learning. If only you knew how I am pervaded with Latin, and with logic!”

These elderly gentlemen chattered thus because they were gentlemen. They saw that poor Mabel longed to have their attention withdrawn from her; and without showing what they saw, they nicely thus withdrew it. Then Alice, having heard of Miss Lovejoy’s arrival, came down and was good to her, and their hearts were speedily drawn together by their common anxiety. Alice thought Mabel the prettiest girl she had ever seen anywhere; and Mabel thought Alice the loveliest lady that could exist out of a picture.

What passed between Mabel and Hilary may better be imagined duly, than put into clumsy words.

CHAPTER LXIV.

IMPENDING DARKNESS

The darkness of the hardest winter of the present century – so far as three-fourths of its span enable us to estimate – was gathering over the South Down hills, and all hills and valleys of England. There may have been severer cold, by fits and starts, before and since; but the special character of this winter was the consistent low temperature. There may have been some fiercer winters, whose traditions still abide, and terrify us beyond the range of test and fair thermometer. But within the range of trusty records, there has been no frost to equal that which began on Christmas-day, 1813.

Seven weeks it lasted, and then broke up, and then began again, and lingered: so that in hilly parts the snow-drifts chilled not only the lap of May but the rosy skirt of June. That winter was remarkable, not only for perpetual frost, but for continual snowfall; so that no man of the most legal mind could tell when he was trespassing. Hedges and ditches were all alike, and hollow places made high; and hundreds of men fell into drifts; and some few saved their lives by building frozen snow to roof them, and cuddling their knees and chin together in a pure white home, having heard the famous and true history of Elizabeth Woodcook.

But now before this style of things set in, in bitter earnest, nobody on the South Down hills could tell what to make of the weather. For twenty years the shepherds had not seen things look so strange like. There was no telling their marks, or places, or the manners of the sheep. A sulky grey mist crawled along the ground even when the sky was clear. In the morning, every blade and point, and every spike of attraction, and serrated edge (without any intention of ever sawing anything), and drooping sheath of something which had vainly tried to ripen, and umbellate awning of the stalks that had discharged their seed, were, one and all alike, incrusted with a little filmy down. Sometimes it looked like the cotton-grass that grows in boggy places; and sometimes like the “American blight,” so common now on apple-trees; and sometimes more like gossamer, or the track of flying spiders. The shepherds had never seen this before; neither had the sheep – those woolly sages of the weather. The sheep turned up their soft black eyes with wonder towards the heavens, – the heavens where every sheep may hope to walk, in the form of a fleecy cloud, when men have had his legs of mutton.

It is needless to say that this long warning (without which no great frost arrives) was wholly neglected by every man. The sheep, the cattle, and the pigs foresaw it, and the birds took wing to fly from it; the fish of the rivers went into the mud, and the fish of the sea to deep water. The slug, and the cockroach, the rat and the wholesome toad, came home to their snuggeries; and every wire-worm and young grub bored deeper down than he meant to do. Only the human race straggled about, without any perception of anything.

In this condition of the gloomy air, and just when frost was hovering in the grey clouds before striking, Alice Lorraine came into her father’s book-room, on the Christmas-eve. There was no sign of any merry Christmas in the shadowed house, nor any young delighted hands to work at decoration. Mabel was gone, after a longer visit than had ever been intended; and Alice (who had sojourned in London, under lofty auspices) had not been long enough at home to be sure again that it was her home. Upon her return she had enjoyed the escort of a mighty warrior, no less a hero than Colonel Clumps, the nephew of her hostess. The Colonel had been sadly hacked about, in a skirmish soon after Vittoria, when pressing too hotly on the French rear-guard. He had lost not only his right arm, but a portion of his one sound leg; and instead of saying his prayers every morning, he sat for an hour on the edge of his bed and devoted all his theological knowledge to the execration of the clumsy bullet, which could not even select his weak point for attack. This choler of his made much against the recovery of what was left of him: and the doctors thought that country air might mitigate his state of mind, and at the same time brace his body, which sadly wanted bracing. Therefore it had been arranged that he should go for a month to Coombe Lorraine, posting all the way, of course, and having the fair Alice to wait on him – which is the usual meaning of escort.

At the date of this journey, the Colonel’s two daughters were still away at a boarding-school; but they were to come and spend the Christmas with his aunt in London, and then follow their father into Sussex, and perhaps appear as bridesmaids. Meanwhile their father was making himself a leading power at Coombe Lorraine. He naturally entered into strict alliance with his aunt’s friend, Lady Valeria, and sternly impressed upon everybody the necessity of the impending marriage. “What earthly objection can there be?” he argued with Mrs. Pipkins, now Alice’s only partisan, except old Mr. Binns, the butler; “even if Captain Chapman is rather lazy, and a little too fond of his wine-glass; both points are in her favour, ma’am. She will manage him like a top, of course. And as for looking up to him, that’s all nonsense. If she did, he would have to look down upon her; and that’s what the women can’t bear, of course. How would you like it now, Mrs. Pipkins? Tut, tut, tut, now don’t tell me! I am a little too old to be taken in. I only wish that one of my good daughters had £50,000 thrown at her, with £20,000 a-year to follow.”

“But perhaps, sir, your young ladies is not quite so particular, and romantic like, as our poor dear Miss Alice.”

“I should hope not. I’d romantic them. Bread and water is the thing for young hussies, who don’t know on which side their bread is buttered. But I don’t believe a bit of it. It’s all sham and girlish make-believe. In her heart she is as ready as he is.”

Almost everybody said the same thing; and all the credit the poor girl got for her scorn of a golden niddering, was to be looked upon as a coy piece of affectation and thanklessness. All this she was well aware of. Evil opinion is a thing to which we are alive at once; though good opinion is well content to impress itself on the coffin. Alice (who otherwise rather liked his stolid and upright nature) thought that Colonel Clumps had no business to form opinion upon her affairs; or at any rate, none to express it. But the Colonel always did form opinions, and felt himself bound to express them.

“I live in this house,” he said, when Alice hinted at some such phantasy; “and the affairs of this house are my concern. If I am not to think about the very things around me, I had better have been cut in two, than made into three pieces.” He waved the stalk of his arm, and stamped the stump of the foot of his better leg, with such a noise and gaze of wrath, that the maiden felt he must be in the right. And so perhaps he may have been. At any rate, he got his way as a veteran colonel ought to do.

With everybody he had his way. Being unable to fight any more, he had come to look so ferocious, and his battered and shattered body so fiercely backed up the charge of his aspect, that none without vast reserve of courage could help being scattered before him. Even Sir Roland Lorraine (so calm, and of an infinitely higher mind), by reason perhaps of that, gave way, and let the maimed veteran storm his home. But Alice rebelled against all this.

“Now, father,” she said on that Christmas-eve, when the house was chilled with the coming cold, and the unshedden snow hung over it, and every sheep, and cow, and crow, and shivering bird, down to the Jenny-wren, was hieing in search of shelter; “father, I have not many words to say to you; but such as they are, may I say them?”

Sir Roland Lorraine, being struck by her quite unwonted voice and manner, rose from his chair of meditation, left his thoughts about things which can never be thought out by mankind, and came to meet what a man should think of foremost – his child, his woman child.

“Lallie, my dear,” he said very gently, and kindly looking at her sad wild eyes, whose difference from their natural softness touched him with some terror – “Lallie, now what has made you look like this?”

“Papa, I did not mean to look at all out of my usual look. I beg your pardon, if indeed I do. I know that all such things are very small in your way of regarding things. But still, papa – but still, papa, you might let me say something.”

“Have I ever refused you, Alice, the right to say almost everything?”

“No; that you have never done, of course. But what I want to say now is something more than I generally want to say. Of course, it cannot matter to you, papa; but to me it makes all the difference.”

“My dear, you are growing sarcastic. All that matters to you matters a great deal more to me, of course. You know what you have always been to me.”

“I do, papa. And that is why I find it so very hard to believe that you can be now so hard with me. I do not see what I can have done to make you so different to me. Girls like me are fond of saying very impudent things sometimes; and they seem to be taken lightly. But they are not forgiven as they are meant. Have I done anything at all to vex you in that way, papa?”

“How can you be so foolish, Lallie? You talk as if I were a girl myself. You never do a thing to vex me.”

“Then why do you do a thing to kill me? It must come to that; and you know it must. I am not very good, nor in any way grand, and I don’t want to say what might seem harsh. But, papa, I think I may say this – you will never see me Stephen Chapman’s wife.”

“Well, Lallie, it is mainly your own doing. I did not wish to urge it, until it seemed to become inevitable. You encouraged him so in the summer, that we cannot now draw back honourably.”

“Father, I encouraged him?”

“Yes. Your grandmother tells me so. I was very busy at that time; and you were away continually. And whenever I wanted you, I always heard ‘Miss Alice is with Captain Chapman.’”

“How utterly untrue! But, O papa now, you got jealous! Do say that you got jealous; and then I will forgive you everything?”

“My dear, there is nothing to be jealous of. I thought that you were taking nicely to the plan laid out for you.”

“The plan that will lay me out, papa. But will you tell me one thing?”

“Yes, my dear child, a hundred things; if you will only ask them quietly.”

“I am not making any noise, papa; it is only that my collar touched my throat. But what I want to know is this. If anything should happen to me, as they say; if I should drop out of everybody’s way, could the money be got that you are all so steadfastly set upon getting? Could the honour of the family be set up, and poor Hilary get restored, and well, and the Lorraines go on for ever? Why don’t you answer me, papa? My question is a very simple one. What I have a right to ask is this – am I, for some inscrutable reason (which I have had nothing to do with), the stumbling-block – the fatal obstacle to the honour and the life of the family?”