The Three Brides

“Gadley?  Why that’s the landlord of the ‘Three Pigeons!’” exclaimed Rosamond.  “It is Mr. Moy’s house, and he supports him through thick and thin.”

“Yes,” said Julius, “the magistrates have been on the point of taking away his license, but Moy always stands up for him.  There is something suspicious in that.”

“I heard Miss Moy, with my own ears, tell Mrs. Duncombe that he was the apple of her father’s eye,” cried Rosamond.

“He’s bribed! he’s bribed!  Oh, I see it all.  Well, go on, Anne.  If Archie isn’t at home before he is a year older—”

Anne went on.  “‘He allowed that he would have done more wisely in facing it out and standing his trial; but he said, poor fellow, that he felt as if the earth had given way under him.  There was not a soul near who believed him; they brought his father’s history against him, and moreover he had been at the races, and had been betting, though in fact he had won, and not lost, and the 201. he had become possessed of was his capital, besides the little he could draw out of the bank

“‘If he could only have seen Jenny in London she would have turned him back.  Indeed, that first stage was to consult her, but he fancied he saw the face of the Wil’sbro’ Superintendent in a cab, and the instinct of avoiding arrest carried him to Southampton, where he got a steerage berth in a sailing vessel, and came out to the Cape.  He has lived hard enough, but his Scots blood has stood him in good stead, and he has made something as an ivory-hunter, and now has a partnership in an ostrich farm in the Amatongula country.  Still he held to it that it was better he should continue dead to all here, since Mr. Bowater would never forgive him; and the knowledge of his existence would only hinder Jenny’s happiness.  You should have seen the struggle with which he said that!  He left me no choice, indeed; forbade a word to any one, until I suggested that I had a wife, and that my said wife and Julius had put me on the scent.  He was immensely struck to find that my sweet Nan came from Glen Fraser.  He said the evenings he spent there had done more to renew his home-sickness, and made him half mad after the sight or sound of us, than anything else had done, and I got him to promise to come and see us when we are settled in the bush.  What should you say to joining him in ostrich-hatching? or would it be ministering too much to the vanities of the world?  However, I’ll do something to get him cleared, if it comes to an appeal to old Moy himself, when I come home.  Meantime, remember, you are not at liberty to speak a word of this to any one but Julius, and, I suppose, his wife.  I hope—’  There, Rose, I beg your pardon.”

“What does he hope?” asked Rosamond.

“He only hopes she is a cautious woman.”

“As cautious as his Nan, eh?  Ah, Anne! you’re a canny Scot, and maybe think holding your tongue as fine a thing as this Archie does; but I can’t bear it.  I think it is shocking, just wearing out the heart of the best and sweetest girl in the world.”

“At any rate,” said Julius, “we must be silent.  We have no right to speak, however we may feel.”

“You don’t expect it will stay a secret, or that he’ll go and pluck ostriches like geese, with Miles and Anne, and nobody know it?  ’Twould be taking example by their ostriches, indeed!”

“I think so,” said Julius, laughing; “but as it stands now, silence is our duty by both Miles and Archie, and Anne herself.  We must not make her repent having told us.”

“It’s lucky I’m not likely to fall in with Jenny just yet,” said Rosamond.  “Don’t leave me alone with her, either of you; if you do, it is at your peril.  It is all very well to talk of honour and secrets, but to see the look in her eyes, and know he is alive, seems to me rank cruelty and heartlessness.  It is all to let Miles have the pleasure of telling when he comes home.”

“Miles is not a woman, nor an Irishwoman,” said Julius.

“But he’s a sailor, and he’s got a feeling heart,” said Rosamond; “and if he stands one look of Jenny, why, I’ll disown him for the brother-in-law I take him for.  By the bye, is not Raymond to know?”

“No,” said Anne; “here is a postscript forbidding my telling him or Mrs. Poynsett.”

“Indeed!  And I suppose Herbert knows nothing?”

“Nothing.  He was a boy at school at the time.  Say nothing to him, Rose.”

“Oh, no; besides, his brain is all run to cricket.”

It was but too true.  When the sun shone bright in April, and the wickets were set up, Herbert had demonstrated that his influence was a necessity on the village green; and it was true that his goodly and animated presence was as useful morally to the eleven as it was conducive to their triumphs; so his Rector suppressed a few sighs at the frequency of the practices and the endless matches.  Compton had played Wil’sbro’ and Strawyers, Duddingstone and Woodbury; the choir had played the school, the single the married; and when hay and harvest absorbed the rustic eleven, challenges began among their betters.  The officers played the county—Oxonians, Cantabs—Etonians, Harrovians—and wherever a match was proclaimed, that prime bowler, the Reverend Herbert Bowater, was claimed as the indispensable champion of his cause and country.

If his sister had any power to moderate his zeal, she had had little chance of exercising it; for Mrs. Bowater had had a rheumatic fever in March, and continued so much of an invalid all the summer that Jenny seldom went far from home, only saw her brother on his weekly visits to the sick-room, and was, as Rosamond said, unlikely to become a temptation to the warm heart and eager tongue.

* * * * *

The week-day congregation were surprised one August morning at eight o’clock by the entrance of three ladies in the most recent style of fashionable simplicity, and making the most demonstrative tokens of reverence.  As the Rector came out he was seized upon at once by the elder lady.

“Mr. Charnock!  I must introduce myself; I knew your dear mother so well when we were both girls.  I am so delighted to find such a church—quite an oasis; and I want to ascertain the best hour for calling on her.  Quite an invalid—I was so shocked to hear it.  Will the afternoon suit her?  I am only here for three days to deposit these two girls, while I take the other on a round of visits.  Three daughters are too great an affliction for one’s friends, and Bee and Conny are so delighted to be near their brother and with dear Lena Vivian, that I am very glad above all, since I find there are real church privileges—so different from the Vicar of Wil’sbro’.  Poor man; he is a great trial.”

All this was said between the church and the lych-gate, and almost took Julius’s breath away; but Mrs. Poynsett was prepared to welcome her old friend with some warmth and more curiosity.

Lady Susan Strangeways was a high-bred woman, but even high breeding could not prevent her from being overwhelming, especially as there was a great deal more of her than there had been at the last meeting of the friends, so that she was suggestive of Hawthorne’s inquiry, whether a man is bound to so many more pounds of flesh than he originally wedded.  However, it was prime condition, and activity was not impeded, but rather received impetus.  She had already, since her matutinal walk of more than a mile and back, overhauled the stores for the bazaar, inspected the town-hall, given her advice, walked through the ruins for the church, expressed herself strongly on the horrors of the plan, and begun to organize shilling cards, all before Sir Harry had emerged from his room.

She was most warm-hearted and good-natured, and tears glistened in her honest gray eyes as she saw her old friend’s helpless state.  “You don’t know how much I have improved,” said Mrs. Poynsett; “I feel quite at liberty in this chair, all owing to my good daughters-in-law.”

“Ah!  I have so pitied you for having no girls!  My dear daughters have been so entirely one with me—such a blessing in all I have gone through.”

Mrs. Poynsett of course declared her complete comfort in her five sons, but Lady Susan was sure that if she had had as many boys, instead of one son and four daughters, she should have been worn out.  Lorimer was a dear, affectionate fellow.  Those he loved could guide him with a leash of gossamer, but young men in his position were exposed to so many temptations!  There ensued a little sighing over the evils of wealth; and to see and hear the two ladies, no one would have thought that Julia Poynsett had married a young man for love—Susan Lorimer an old man for independence.

Possibly with her present principles she would not have done so; but through the vista of a long and prosperous widowhood deficiencies in the courtship were easily forgotten; and perhaps there was the more romance and sentiment now because she had been balked of it in her youth.  She had freely allowed her eldest daughter to enter a sisterhood from the purest, most unselfish motives, but there was compensation in talking of her Margaret as a Sister of Mercy.

And ere long she was anxiously inquiring Mrs. Poynsett’s opinion of Eleonora Vivian, and making confidences somewhat trying to the mother of the young lady’s ardent lover.

She was quite aware that as to fortune there could hardly be a worse match than Miss Vivian; but she was sensible enough to see that her son had a sufficiency, and generous enough to like the idea of redeeming the old estate.  Her husband had spent his latter years in a vain search for a faultless property, and his wealth was waiting for Lorimer’s settling down.  She had always regretted the having no vassals rightfully her own, and had felt the disadvantages of being Lady Bountiful only by tenant right.  To save an old estate from entirely passing out of a family, and relieve ‘a noble old wreck,’ like Sir Harry, seemed to her so grand a prospect that she could not but cast a little glamour over the manner of the shipwreck.  Still, to do her justice, her primary consideration was the blessing such a woman as Lenore might be to her son.

She had not fathomed Lady Tyrrell.  No woman could do so without knowing her antecedents, but she understood enough to perceive that Eleonora was not happy with her, and this she attributed to the girl’s deep nature and religious aspirations.  Rockpier was an ecclesiastical paradise to Lady Susan, and a close bond with Lenore, to whom in London she had given all the facilities that lay in her power for persevering in the observances that were alien to the gay household at home.  She valued this constancy exceedingly, and enthusiastically dilated on the young lady’s goodness, and indifference to the sensation she had created.  “Lorimer allows he never saw her equal for grace and dignity.”

Allows!  Fancy Frank allowing any perfection in his Lenore!  Was it not possible that a little passing encomium on unusual beauty was being promoted and magnified by the mother into a serious attachment?  But Lady Tyrrell was playing into her hands, and Lenore’s ecclesiastical proclivities were throwing her into the arms of the family!

It hardly seemed fair to feign sympathy, yet any adverse hint would be treason, and Mrs. Poynsett only asked innocently whether her friend had seen her son Frank.

“Oh yes, often; the handsomest of all your sons, is he not?”

“Perhaps he is now.”

“My girls rave about his beautiful brown eyes, just as you used to do, Julia, five-and-thirty years ago.”

Mrs. Poynsett was sure that whatever she had thought of Miles Charnock’s eyes five-and-thirty years ago, she had never raved about them to Susan Lorimer, but she only said, “All my boys are like their father except Charlie.”

“But Master Frank has no eyes for any one but Miss Vivian.  Oh yes, I see the little jealousies; I am sorry for him; but you see it would be a shocking bad thing for a younger son like him; whereas Lory could afford it, and it would be the making of him.”

Mrs. Poynsett held her peace, and was not sorry that her visitor was called away while she was still deliberating whether to give a hint of the state of the case.

Lady Susan was, however, more aware of it than she knew; Lady Tyrrell had ‘candidly’ given her a hint that there had been ‘some nonsense about Frank Charnock,’ but that he could never afford such a marriage, even if his mother would allow it, all which she never would.  Besides, he had not fallen into a satisfactory set in London—why, it was not needful to tell.

When, after the drive, Lady Tyrrell, fairly tired out by her visitor’s unfailing conversation and superabundant energy, had gone to lie down and recruit for the evening, Lady Susan pressed on Eleonora a warm invitation to the house in Yorkshire which she was renting, and where Lorimer would get as much shooting as his colonel would permit.  The mention of him made Lenore blush to the ears, and say, “Dear Lady Susan, you are always so kind to me that I ought to be open with you.  Don’t fancy—”

“I understand, I understand, my dear,” broke in Lady Susan.  “You shall not be teased.  Do not the girls and I care for you for your own sake?”

“I hope so.”

The elder lady sprang up and embraced her.  Affection was very pleasant to the reserved nature that could do so little to evoke caresses.  Yet Eleonora clasped her Rockpier charm in her hand, and added, “I must tell you that so far as I can without disobedience, I hold myself engaged to Frank Charnock.”

“To Frank Charnock?” repeated Lady Susan, startled at this positive statement.  “My dear, are you quite sure of his ways?—since he has been in town I mean.”

“I know him, and I trust him.”

“I’m sure he is a fine-looking young man, and very clever, they say; dear Julia Poynsett’s son too, and they have all turned out so well,” said honest Lady Susan; “but though you have been used to it all your life, my dear, a taste for horses is very dangerous in a young man who can’t afford to lose now and then, you know.”

“I have seriously made up my mind never to marry a man who has anything to do with the turf,” said Eleonora.

“Ah, my poor dear, I can understand that,” said Lady Susan, aware how ill this told for her Lory.  “May I ask, does he know it?”

“It would insult him to say it.  None of the Charnocks ever meddle with those things.  Ah! I know your son saw him on the Derby-day; but he went down with his eldest brother and his wife—and that is a very different thing!  I stayed at home, you remember—papa had a fit of the gout.”

“My dear, I don’t want to accuse him.  Don’t bristle up; only I am sorry, both for my own little plan of having you for my very own, and because I fear there is trouble in store for you.  It can’t be palatable.”  Here Eleonora shook her head, and her worn, wearied look went to the good-natured heart.  “Dear child, you have gone through a great deal.  You shan’t be worried or fretted about anybody or anything at Revelrig.”

“I should be very glad,” said Lenore, who had no fears of Lory personally, though she could not be invited on false pretences.

“You had better come when Bee and Conny meet me.  Let me see—will the retreat be over by that time?  Are you going to it?  You are an associate of St. Faith.”

“Yes, but I don’t see how I could go to the retreat.  Oh, what a relief it would be to have such a week!”

“Exactly what I feel,” said Lady Susan, somewhat to her surprise.  “It strengthens and sets me right for the year.  Dr. Easterby conducts this one.  Do you not know him?  Is not Rood House near Backsworth?”

“Yes on the other side, but he is utterly out of my reach.  Julius Charnock looks up to him so much; but his name—even more than St. Faith’s—would horrify my father.”

“You could not go direct there,” said Lady Susan; “but when once you are with me you are my charge, and I could take you.”

She considered a little.  Both she and her friend knew that all her religious habits were alien to Sir Harry, and that what he had freely permitted, sometimes shared at Rockpier, was now only winked at, and that if he had guessed the full extent of her observances he would have stormily issued a prohibition.  Could it be wrong to spend part of her visit to Lady Susan with her hostess in a sisterhood, when she had no doubt as to attending services which he absolutely never dreamt of, and therefore did not forbid?  The sacred atmosphere and holy meditations, without external strife and constant watchfulness, seemed to the poor girl like water to the thirsty; and she thought, after all the harass and whirl of the bazaar and race week, she might thus recruit her much-needed strength for the decisive conflicts her majority would bring.

Lady Susan had no doubts.  The ‘grand old wreck’ was in his present aspect a hoary old persecutor, and charming Lady Tyrrell a worldly, scheming elder sister.  It was as much an act of charity to give their victim an opportunity of devotion and support as if she had been the child of abandoned parents in a back court in East London.  Reserve to prevent a prohibition was not in such cases treachery or disobedience; and she felt herself doing a mother’s part, as she told her daughters, with some enjoyment of the mystery.  Eleonora made no promise, hoping to clear her mind by consideration, or to get Julius’s opinion.  He and his wife dined at Sirenwood, and found Joe Reynolds’s drawings laid out for inspection, while Lady Susan was advising that, instead of selling them, there should be an industrial exhibition of all curiosities of art and nature to be collected in the neighbourhood, and promising her own set of foreign photographs and coloured costumes, which had served such purposes many and many a time.

After dinner the good dame tried to talk to Rosamond on what she deemed the most congenial subjects; but my Lady Rose had no notion of ‘shop’ at a dinner-party, so she made languid answer that she ‘left all that to the curates,’ and escaped to a frivolous young matron on the other side of the room, looking on while her husband was penned in and examined on his services, and his choir, and his system, and his decorations, and his classes, and his schools, for all or any of which Lady Susan pressed on him the aid of the two daughters she was leaving at Sirenwood; and on his hint that this was beyond his parish, she repeated her strong disapproval of the Vicar of Wil’sbro’, whom she had met at dinner the night before, and besides, the school there had numerous Sunday teachers.

Julius assented, for he had no redundance of the article, and his senior curate had just started on a vacation ramble with a brother; but a sort of misgiving crossed him as he heard Herbert Bowater’s last comic song pealing out, and beheld the pleasingly plain face of a Miss Strangeways on either side of him.  Had he not fought the Eton and Harrow match over again with one of them at dinner? and had not a lawn tennis challenge already passed?

For Lady Tyrrell and Mrs. Charnock Poynsett were to have garden-parties on alternate Wednesdays, and the whole neighbourhood soon followed suit.

“You’ll find nobody at home, Jenny,” said Julius, coming out of a cottage opposite, as she rode up to Mrs. Hornblower’s, on one of the last days of August.  “Nobody—that is, but my mother.  Can you come up and see her?”

“With all my heart; but I must get down here; I’m sent for one of Herbert’s shirts.  The good boy lets mamma and aunty manage them still!  I believe their hearts would break outright if he took to shop ones, like the rest of them.  Hush, Tartar, for shame! don’t you know me?  Where’s your master?”

“At a garden-party at Duddingstone.  Your mother is better, I see.”

“Yes, thank you—out driving with papa.  Good Rollo!” as the dignified animal rose from the hearthrug to greet her, waving his handsome tail, and calmly expelled a large tabby cat from the easy-chair, to make room for his friends.  “Well done, old Roll!  Fancy a cat in such company.”

“Herbert’s dogs partake his good-nature.”

“Mungo seems to be absent too.”

“Gone with him no doubt.  He is the great favourite with one of the Miss Strangeways.”

“Which—Herbert or Mungo?”

“Both!  I might say, I know the young ladies best by one being rapturous about Tartar and the other about Mungo.  Rollo treats both with equally sublime and indifferent politeness, rather as Raymond does.”

“What sort of girls are they?  Herbert calls them ‘awfully jolly.’”

“I’m sorry to say I never can think of any other epithet for them.  For once it is really descriptive.”

“Is it either of them in particular?”

“Confess, Joan, that’s what brought you over.”

“Perhaps so.  Edith heard some nonsense at Backsworth, and mamma could not rest till she had sent me over to see about it; but would there be any great harm in it if it were true?  Is not Lady Susan a super-excellent woman?”

“You’ve hit it again, Jenny.  Couple the two descriptions.”

“I gather that you don’t think the danger great.”

“Not at present.  The fascination is dual, and is at least a counteraction to the great enchantress.”

“That is well!  It was not wholesome!”

“Whereas, these two are hearty, honest, well-principled girls, quite genuine.”

“Yet you don’t say it with all your heart.”

“I own I should like to find something they had left undone.”

“What, to reduce them to human nature’s daily food?”

“Daily indeed!  There’s just no escaping them.  There they are at matins and evensong.”

“How shocking!  What, gossip afterwards?”

“Ask Rollo whether Mungo and Tartar don’t stand at the lych-gate, and if he finds it easy to put an end to the game at play.”

“Oh! and he said they never missed a Sunday service, or the school.  Do they distract him?”

“Whom would it not distract to see two figures walking in with hunches on their backs like camels, and high-heeled shoes, and hats on the back of their heads, and chains and things clattering all over them?”

“Aren’t they lady-like?”

“Oh! they are quite that.  Rose says it is all the pink of fashion—only coming it strong—I declare they are infectious!”

“I believe so.  I never heard so many nibbles at slang from any of you five, as from the Rector of Compton in the last five minutes.  I gather that he is slightly bothered.”

“There’s so much of it.  We are forced to have them to all the meals on Sunday, and their lectures on functions have nearly scared poor Anne to the Pilgrim level again.  They have set upon me to get up a choir-concert and a harvest-feast; but happily no one has time for the first at this season, and as to the other, I doubted whether to make this first start after such a rainy summer, and they decide me against it.  To have them decorating the church!”

“Awfully jolly,” suggested Jenny.

“Even so.  They are, if you understand me, technically reverent; they have startled the whole place with their curtsies and crossings in church; but they gabble up to the very porch; and the familiarity with which they discuss High Mass, as they are pleased to call it!  I was obliged to silence them, and I must say they took it nicely.”

“How do they suit Lena?”

“She likes them.  Lady Susan was a great help to her in London, and she feels the comfort of their honesty.  They brought her to church with them one or two mornings, but it knocked her up to walk so early.  Insensibly, I think they do Lady Tyrrell’s work in shutting her up from any of us.”

“Spite of croquet, which seems perpetual.”

“Chronic and sporadic parties make it so.  There are few days without that or something else.  Cricket or the band at the barracks.”

“People say the neighbourhood has never been so gay since Camilla Vivian’s marriage.  I sometimes wonder whether anything can be going to happen,” said Jenny with a sigh, not guessing at what Julius was thinking of; then changing her tone: “Surely Herbert does not go to it all, and leave you alone?  O, Julius! you should not let him.”

“Never mind, Jenny, there’s no more work now in the holidays than I am sufficient for; and for him, it is quite as guileless play as ever he had twenty years ago.  It will soon be over, or I should take it more seriously.”

“But it is at such a time!”

“Yes, that is the worst of it.  I have thought it over; but while he is in this mood, the making him feel victimized and interfered with has a worse effect than the letting him have his swing.”

“What is he doing now, I wonder?  Here’s his sermon-paper on the table, and a Greek Testament, and Hints on Decorating Churches, with ‘Constance Strangeways’ on the first leaf—no other book.  How long will this saturnalia last?”