The Young Step-Mother; Or, A Chronicle of Mistakes

‘I never heard anything so absurd or unjust!’ cried Albinia, too much irritated to remember anything but the sympathy of her auditor. ‘If I am to be treated in this manner, I have done striving to please them. Due respect shall be shown, but as to intimacy and confidence—’

‘I’m glad you see it so at last!’ cried Gilbert. ‘Aunt Maria has been the plague of my life, and I’m glad I told her a bit of my mind!’

What was Albinia’s consternation! Her moment’s petulance had undone her morning’s work.

‘Gilbert,’ she said, ‘we are both speaking very wrongly. I especially, who ought to have helped you.’

Spite of all succeeding humility the outburst had been fatal, and argue and plead as she might, she could not restore the boy to anything like the half satisfactory state of penitence in which she had led him from home. The giving way to her worse nature had awakened his, and though he still allowed that she should prepare the way for his confession to his father, all real sense of his outrageous conduct towards his aunt was gone.

Disheartened and worn out, Albinia did not feel equal even to going to take off her walking things, but sat down in the drawing-room on the sofa, and tried to silence the girls’ questions and chatter, by desiring Lucy to read aloud.

By-and-by Mr. Kendal was heard returning, and she rose to arrest him in the hall. Her looks began the story, for he exclaimed, ‘My dear Albinia, what is the matter?’

‘Oh, Edmund, I have such things to tell you! I have been doing so wrong.’

She was almost sobbing, and he spoke fondly. ‘No, Albinia, I can hardly believe that. Something has vexed you, and you must take time to compose yourself.’

He led her up to her own room, tried to soothe her, and would not listen to a word till she should be calm. After lying still for a little while, she thought she had recovered, but the very word ‘Gilbert’ brought such an expression of anxiety and sternness over his brow as overcame her again, and she could not speak without so much emotion that he silenced her; and finding that she could neither leave the subject, nor mention it without violent agitation, he said he would leave her for a little while, and perhaps she might sleep, and then be better able to speak to him. Still she held him, and begged that he would say nothing to Gilbert till he had heard her, and to pacify her he yielded, passed his promise, and quitted her with a kiss.

CHAPTER VII

There was a messenger at Fairmead Parsonage by sunrise the next morning, and by twelve o’clock Mr. and Mrs. Ferrars were at Willow Lawn.

Mr. Kendal’s grave brow and depressed manner did not reassure Winifred as he met her in the hall, although his words were, ‘I hope she is doing well.’

He said no more, for the drawing-room door was moving to and fro, as if uneasy on the hinges, and as he made a step towards it, it disclosed a lady with black eyes and pinched features, whom he presented as ‘Miss Meadows.’

‘Well, now—I think—since more efficient—since I leave Mrs. Kendal to better—only pray tell her—my love and my mother’s—if I could have been of any use—or shall I remain?—could I be of any service, Edmund?—I would not intrude when—but in the house—if I could be of any further use.’

‘Of none, thank you,’ said Mr. Kendal, ‘unless you would be kind enough to take home the girls.’

‘Oh, papa!’ cried Lucy, I’ve got the keys. You wont be able to get on at all without me. Sophy may go, but I could not be spared.’

‘Let it be as you will,’ said Mr. Kendal; ‘I only desire quiet, and that you should not inconvenience Mrs. Ferrars.’

‘You will help me, will you not!’ said Winifred, smiling, though she did not augur well from this opening scene. ‘May I go soon to Albinia?’

‘Presently, I hope,’ said Mr. Kendal, with an uneasy glance towards Miss Meadows, ‘she has seen no one as yet, and she is so determined that you cannot come till after Christmas, that she does not expect you.’

Miss Meadows began one of her tangled skeins of words, the most tangible of which was excitement; and Mr. Kendal, knowing by long experience that the only chance of a conclusion was to let her run herself down, held his tongue, and she finally departed.

Then he breathed more freely, and said he would go and prepare Albinia to see her sister, desiring Lucy to show Mrs. Ferrars to her room, and to take care not to talk upon the stairs.

This, Lucy, who was in high glory, obeyed by walking upon creaking tip-toe, apparently borrowed from her aunt, and whispering at a wonderful rate about her eagerness to see dear, dear mamma, and the darling little brother.

The spare room did not look expectant of guests, and felt still less so. It struck Winifred as very like the mouth of a well, and the paper showed patches of ancient damp. One maid was hastily laying the fire, the other shaking out the curtains, in the endeavour to render it habitable, and Lucy began saying, ‘I must apologize. If papa had only given us notice that we were to have the pleasure of seeing you,’ and then she dashed at the maid in all the pleasure of authority. ‘Eweretta, go and bring up Mrs. Ferrars’s trunks directly, and some water, and some towels.’

Winifred thought the greatest mercy to the hunted maid would be to withdraw as soon as she had hastily thrown off bonnet and cloak, and Lucy followed her into the passage, repeating that papa was so absent and forgetful, that it was very inconvenient in making arrangements. Whatever was ordinarily repressed in her, was repaying itself with interest in the pleasure of acting as mistress of the house.

Mrs. Ferrars beheld Gilbert sitting listlessly on the deep window-seat at the end of the passage, resting his head on his hand.

‘Well!’ exclaimed Lucy, ‘if he is not there still! He has hardly stirred since breakfast! Come and speak to Mrs. Ferrars, Gilbert. Or,’ and she simpered, ‘shall it be Aunt Winifred?’

‘As you please,’ said Mrs. Ferrars, advancing towards her old acquaintance, whom she would hardly have recognised, so different was the pale, downcast, slouching figure, from the bright, handsome lad she remembered.

‘How cold your hand is!’ she exclaimed; ‘you should not sit in this cold passage.’

‘As I have been telling him all this morning,’ said Lucy.

‘How is she?’ whispered the boy, rousing himself to look imploringly in Winifred’s face.

‘Your father seems satisfied about her.’

At that moment a door at some distance was opened, and Gilbert seemed to thrill all over as for the moment ere it closed a baby’s cry was heard. He turned his face away, and rested it on the window. ‘My brother! my brother!’ he murmured, but at that moment his father turned the corner of the passage, saying that Albinia had heard their arrival, and was very eager to see her sister.

Still Winifred could not leave the boy without saying, ‘You can make Gilbert happy about her, can you not? He is waiting here, watching anxiously for news of her.’

‘Gilbert himself best knows whether he has a right to be made happy,’ said Mr. Kendal, gravely. ‘I promised to ask no questions till she is able to explain, but I much fear that he has been causing her great grief and distress.’

He fixed his eyes on his son, and Winifred, in the belief that she was better out of their way, hurried to Albinia’s room, and was seen very little all the rest of the day.

She was spared, however, to walk to church the next morning with her husband, Lucy showing them the way, and being quiet and agreeable when repressed by Mr. Ferrars’s presence. After church, Mr. Dusautoy overtook them to inquire after Mrs. Kendal, and to make a kind proposal of exchanging Sunday duty. He undertook to drive the ponies home on the morrow, begged for credentials for the clerk, and messages for Willie and Mary, and seemed highly pleased with the prospect of the holiday, as he called it, only entreating that Mrs. Ferrars would be so kind as to look in on ‘Fanny,’ if Mrs. Kendal could spare her.

‘I thought,’ said Winifred to her husband, ‘that you would rather have exchanged a Sunday when Albinia is better able to enjoy you?’

‘That may yet be, but poor Kendal is so much depressed, that I do not like to leave him.’

‘I have no patience with him!’ cried Winifred; ‘he does not seem to take the slightest pleasure in his baby, and he will hardly let poor Albinia do so either! Do you know, Maurice, it is as bad as I ever feared it would be. No, don’t stop me, I must have it out. I always said he had no business to victimize her, and I am sure of it now! I believe this gloom of his has broken down her own dear sunny spirits! There she is—so unlike herself—so anxious and fidgety about her baby—will hardly take any one’s word for his being as healthy and stout a child as I ever saw! And then, every other moment, she is restless about that boy—always asking where he is, or what he is doing. I don’t see how she is ever to get well, while it goes on in this way! Mr. Kendal told me that Gilbert had been worrying and distressing her; and as to those girls, the eldest of them is intolerable with her airs, and the youngest—I asked her if she liked babies, and she growled, “No.” Lucy said Gilbert was waiting in the passage for news of mamma, and she grunted, “All sham!” and that’s the whole I have heard of her! He is bad enough in himself, but with such a train! My poor Albinia! If they are not the death of her, it will be lucky!’

‘Well done, Winifred!’

‘But, Maurice,’ said his impetuous wife, in a curiously altered tone, ‘are not you very unhappy about Albinia?’

‘I shall leave you to find that out for me.’

‘Then you are not?’

‘I think Kendal thoroughly values and appreciates her, and is very uncomfortable without her.’

‘I suppose so. People do miss a maid-of-all-work. I should not so much mind it, if she had been only his slave, but to be so to all those disagreeable children of his too! And with so little effect. Why can’t he send them all to school?’

‘Propose that to Albinia.’

‘She did want the boy to go somewhere. I should not care where, so it were out of her way. What creatures they must be for her to have produced no more effect on them!’

‘Poor Albinia! I am afraid it is a hard task: but these are still early days, and we see things at a disadvantage. We shall be able to judge whether there be really too great a strain on her spirits, and if so, I would talk to Kendal.’

‘And I wonder what is to come of that. It seems to me like what John Smith calls singing psalms to a dead horse.’

‘John Smith! I am glad you mentioned him; I shall desire Dusautoy to bring him here on Monday.’

‘What! as poor Albinia would say, you can’t exist a week without John Smith.’

‘Even so. I want him to lay out a plan for draining the garden. That pond is intolerable. I suspect that all, yourself included, will become far more good-tempered in consequence.’

‘A capital measure, but do you mean that Edmund Kendal is going to let you and John Smith drain his pond under his very nose, and never find it out? I did not imagine him quite come to that.’

‘Not quite,’ said Maurice; ‘it is with his free consent, and I believe he will be very glad to have it done without any trouble to himself. He said that Albinia thought it damp, and when I put a few sanatory facts before him, thanked me heartily, and seemed quite relieved. If they had only been in Sanscrit, they would have made the greater impression.’

‘One comfort is, Maurice, that however provoking you are at first, you generally prove yourself reasonable at last, I am glad you are not Mr. Kendal.’

‘Ah! it will have a fine effect on you to spend your Christmas-day tete-a-tete with him.’

Mrs. Ferrars’s views underwent various modifications, like all hasty yet candid judgments. She took Mr. Kendal into favour when she found him placidly submitting to Miss Meadows’s showers of words, in order to prevent her gaining access to his wife.

‘Maria Meadows is a very well-meaning person,’ he said afterwards; ‘but I know of no worse infliction in a sick-room.’

‘I wonder,’ thought Winifred, ‘whether he married to get rid of her. I should have thought it justifiable had it been any one but Albinia!’

The call on Mrs. Dusautoy was consoling. It was delightful to find how Albinia was loved and valued at the vicarage. Mrs. Dusautoy began by sending her as a message, John’s first exclamation on hearing of the event. ‘Then she will never be of any more use.’ In fact, she said, it was much to him like having a curate disabled, and she believed he could only be consoled by the hopes of a pattern christening, and of a nursery for his school-girls; but there Winifred shook her head, Fairmead had a prior claim, and Albinia had long had her eye upon a scholar of her own.

‘I told John that she would! and he must bear it as he can,’ laughed Mrs. Dusautoy; and she went on more seriously to say that her gratitude was beyond expression, not merely for the actual help, though that was much, but for the sympathy, the first encouragement they had met among their richer parishioners, and she spoke of the refreshment of the mirthfulness and playful manner, so as to convince Winifred that they had neither died away nor been everywhere wasted.

Winifred had no amenable patient. Weak and depressed as Albinia was, her restlessness and air of anxiety could not be appeased. There was a look of being constantly on the watch, and once, when her door was ajar, before Winifred was aware she exerted her voice to call Gilbert!

Pushing the door just wide enough to enter, and treading almost noiselessly, he came forward, looking from side to side as with a sense of guilt. She stretched out her hand and smiled, and he obeyed the movement that asked him to bend and kiss her, but still durst not speak.

‘Let me have the baby,’ she said.

Mrs. Ferrars laid it beside her, and held aloof. Gilbert’s eyes were fixed intently on it.

‘Yes, Gilbert,’ Albinia said, ‘I know what you will feel for him. He can’t be what you once had—but oh, Gilbert, you will do all that an elder brother can to make him like Edmund!’

Gilbert wrung her fingers, and ventured to stoop down to kiss the little red forehead. The tears were running down his cheeks, and he could not speak.

‘If your father might only say the same of him! that he never grieved him!’ said Albinia; ‘but oh, Gilbert—example,’ and then, pausing and gazing searchingly in his face, ‘You have not told papa.’

‘No,’ whispered Gilbert.

‘Winifred,’ said Albinia, ‘would you be so kind as to ask papa to come?’

Winifred was forced to obey, though feeling much to blame as Mr. Kendal rose with a sigh of uneasiness. Gilbert still stood with his hand clasped in Albinia’s, and she held it while her weak voice made the full confession for him, and assured his father of his shame and sorrow. There needed no such assurance, his whole demeanour had been sorrow all these dreary days, and Mr. Kendal could not but forgive, though his eye spoke deep grief.

‘I could not refuse pardon thus asked,’ he said. ‘Oh, Gilbert, that I could hope this were the beginning of a new course!’

Albinia looked from Gilbert to his little brother, and back again to Gilbert.

‘It shall be,’ she said, and Gilbert’s resolution was perhaps the more sincere that he spoke no word.

‘Poor boy,’ said Albinia, half to herself and half aloud, ‘I think I feel more strong to love and to help him!’

That interview was a dangerous experiment, and she suffered for it. As her brother said, instead of having too little life, she had too much, and could not let herself rest; she had never cultivated the art of being still, and when she was weak, she could not be calm.

Still the strength of her constitution staved off the nervous fever of her spirits, and though she was not at all a comfortable patient, she made a certain degree of progress, so that though it was not easy to call her better, she was not quite so ill, and grew less irrational in her solicitude, and more open to other ideas. ‘Do you know, Winifred,’ she said one day, ‘I have been thinking myself at Fairmead till I almost believed I heard John Smith’s voice under the window.’

Winifred was obliged to look out at the window to hide her smile. Maurice, who was standing on the lawn with the very John Smith, beckoned to her, and she went down to hear his plans. He was wanted at home the next day, and asked whether she thought he had better take Gilbert with him. ‘It is the wisest thing that has been said yet!’ exclaimed she. ‘Now I shall have a chance for Albinia!’ and accordingly, Mr. Kendal having given a gracious and grateful consent, Albinia was informed; but Winifred thought her almost perverse when a perturbed look came over her, and she said, ‘It is very kind in Maurice, but I must speak to him.’

He was struck by the worn, restless expression of her features, so unlike the calm contented repose of a young mother, and when she spoke to him, her first word was of Gilbert. ‘Maurice, it is so kind, I know you will make him happy—but oh! take care—he is so delicate—indeed, he is—don’t let him get wet through.’

Maurice promised, but Albinia resumed with minutiae of directions, ending with, ‘Oh! if he should get hurt or into any mischief, what should we do? Pray, take care, Maurice, you are not used to such delicate boys.’

‘My dear, I think you may rely on me.’

‘Yes, but you will not be too strict with him—’ and more was following, when her brother said, ‘I promise you to make him my special charge. I like the boy very much. I think you may be reasonable, and trust him with me, without so much agitation. You have not let me see my own nephew yet.’

Albinia looked with her wistful piteous face at her brother as he took in his arms her noble-looking fair infant.

‘You are a great fellow indeed, sir,’ said his uncle. ‘Now if I were your mamma, I would be proud of you, rather than—’

‘I am afraid!’ said Albinia, in a sudden low whisper.

He looked at her anxiously.

‘Let me have him,’ she said; then as Maurice bent over her, and she hastily gathered the babe into her arms, she whispered in quick, low, faint accents, ‘Do you know how many children have been born in this house?’

Mr. Ferrars understood her, he too had seen the catalogue in the church, and guessed that the phantoms of her boy’s dead brethren dwelt on her imagination, forbidding her to rejoice in him hopefully. He tried to say something encouraging of the child’s appearance, but she would not let him go on. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘he is so now—but—’ then catching her breath again and speaking very low, ‘his father does not dare look at him—I see that he is sorry for me—Oh, Maurice, it will come, and I shall be able to do nothing!’

Maurice felt his lip quivering as his sister’s voice became choked—the sister to whom he had once been the whole world, and who still could pour out her inmost heart more freely to him than to any other. But it was a time for grave authority, and though he spoke gently, it was almost sternly.

‘Albinia, this is not right. It is not thankful or trustful. No, do not cry, but listen to me. Your child is as likely to do well as any child in the world, but nothing is so likely to do him harm as your want of composure.’

‘I tell myself so,’ said Albinia, ‘but there is no helping it.’

‘Yes, there is. Make it your duty to keep yourself still, and not be troubled about what may or may not happen, but be glad of the present pleasure.’

‘Don’t you think I am?’ said Albinia, half smiling; ‘so glad, that I grow frightened at myself, and—’ As if fain to leave the subject, she added, ‘And it is what you don’t understand, Maurice, but he can’t be the first to Edmund as he is to me—never—and when I get almost jealous for him, I think of Gilbert and the girls—and oh! there is so much to do for them—they want a mother so much—and Winifred wont let me see them, or tell me about them!’

She had grown piteous and incoherent, and a glance from Winifred told him, ‘this is always the way.’

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘you will never be fit to attend to them if you do not use this present time rightly. You may hurt your health, and still more certainly, you will go to work fretfully and impetuously. If you have a busy life, the more reason to learn to be tranquil. Calm is forced on you now, and if you give way to useless nervous brooding over the work you are obliged to lay aside for a time, you have no right to hope that you will either have judgment or temper for your tasks.’

‘But how am I to keep from thinking, Maurice? The weaker I am, the more I think.’

‘Are you dutiful as to what Winifred there thinks wisest? Ah! Albinia, you want to learn, as poor Queen Anne of Austria did, that docility in illness may be self-resignation into higher Hands. Perhaps you despise it, but it is no mean exercise of strength and resolution to be still.’

Albinia looked at him as if receiving a new idea.

‘And,’ he added, bending nearer her face, and speaking lower, ‘when you pray, let them be hearty faithful prayers that God’s hand may be over your child—your children, not half-hearted faithless ones, that He may work out your will in them.’

‘Oh, Maurice, how did you know? But you are not going? I have so much to talk over with you.’

‘Yes, I must go; and you must be still. Indeed I will watch over Gilbert as though he were mine. Yes, even more. Don’t speak again, Albinia, I desire you will not. Good-bye.’

That lecture had been the most wholesome treatment she had yet received; she ceased to give way without effort to restless thoughts and cares, and was much less refractory.

When at last Lucy and Sophia were admitted, Winifred found perils that she had not anticipated. Lucy was indeed supremely and girlishly happy: but it was Sophy whose eye Albinia sought with anxiety, and that eye was averted. Her cheek was cold like that of a doll when Albinia touched it eagerly with her lips; and when Lucy admonished her to kiss the dear little brother, she fairly turned and ran out of the room.

‘Poor Sophy!’ said Lucy. ‘Never mind her, mamma, but she is odder than ever, since baby has been born. When Eweretta came up and told us, she hid her face and cried; and when grandmamma wanted to make us promise to love him with all our hearts, and not make any difference, she would only say, “I wont!”’

‘We will leave him to take care of that, Lucy,’ said Albinia. But though she spoke cheerfully, Winifred was not surprised, after a little interval, to hear sounds like stifled weeping.

Almost every home subject was so dangerous, that whenever Mrs. Ferrars wanted to make cheerful, innocent conversation, she began to talk of her visit to Ireland and the beautiful Galway coast, and the O’Mores of Ballymakilty, till Albinia grew quite sick of the names of the whole clan of thirty-six cousins, and thought, with her aunts, that Winifred was too Irish. Yet, at any other time, the histories would have made her sometimes laugh, and sometimes cry, but the world was sadly out of joint with her.

There was a sudden change when, for the first time her eye rested on the lawn, and she beheld the work of drainage. The light glanced in her eye, the colour rose on her cheek, and she exclaimed, ‘How kind of Edmund!’

Winifred must needs give her husband his share. ‘Ah! you would never have had it done without Maurice.’

‘Yes,’ said Albinia, ‘Edmund has been out of the way of such things, but he consented, you know.’ Then as her eyes grew liquid, ‘A duck pond is a funny subject for sentiment, but oh! if you knew what that place has been to my imagination from the first, and how the wreaths of mist have wound themselves into spectres in my dreams, and stretched out white shrouds now for one, now for the other!’ and she shuddered.

‘And you have gone through all this and never spoken. No wonder your nerves and spirits were tried.’

‘I did speak at first,’ said Albinia; ‘but I thought Edmund did not hear, or thought it nonsense, and so did I at times. But you see he did attend; he always does, you see, at the right time. It was only my impatience.’

‘I suspect Maurice and John Smith had more to do with it,’ said Winifred.

‘Well, we wont quarrel about that,’ said Albinia. ‘I only know that whoever brought it about has taken the heaviest weight off my mind that has been there yet.’

In truth, the terror, half real, half imaginary, had been a sorer burthen than all the positive cares for those unruly children, or their silent, melancholy father; and the relief told in all ways—above all, in the peace with which she began to regard her child. Still she would provoke Winifred by bestowing all her gratitude on Mr. Kendal, who began to be persuaded that he had made an heroic exertion.