‘My dear good lady!’ cried Miss Garth, in great amazement; ‘do you really suppose that people fall in love with each other on account of similarities in their characters? In the vast majority of cases, they do just the reverse. Men marry the very last women, and women the very last men, whom their friends would think it possible they could care about. Is there any phrase that is oftener on all our lips than “What can have made Mr So-and-So marry that woman?” – or “How could Mrs So-and-So throw herself away on that man?” Has all your experience of the world never yet shown you that girls take perverse fancies for men who are totally unworthy of them?’
‘Very true,’ said Mrs Vanstone, composedly. ‘I forgot that. Still it seems unaccountable, doesn’t it?’
‘Unaccountable, because it happens every day!’ retorted Miss Garth, good-humouredly. ‘I know a great many excellent people who reason against plain experience in the same way – who read the newspapers in the morning, and deny in the evening that there is any romance for writers or painters to work upon in modern life. Seriously, Mrs Vanstone, you may take my word for it – thanks to those wretched theatricals, Magdalen is going the way with Frank that a great many young ladies have gone before her. He is quite unworthy of her; he is, in almost every respect, her exact opposite – and, without knowing it herself, she has fallen in love with him on that very account. She is resolute and impetuous, clever and domineering; she is not one of those model women who want a man to look up to, and to protect them – her beau-ideal (though she may not think it herself) is a man she can henpeck. Well! one comfort is, there are far better men, even of that sort, to be had than Frank. It’s a mercy he is going away, before we have more trouble with them, and before any serious mischief is done.’
‘Poor Frank!’ said Mrs Vanstone, smiling compassionately. ‘We have known him since he was in jackets, and Magdalen in short frocks. Don’t let us give him up yet. He may do better this second time.’
Miss Garth looked up in astonishment.
‘And suppose he does better?’ she asked. ‘What then?’
Mrs Vanstone cut off a loose thread in her work, and laughed outright.
‘My good friend,’ she said, ‘there is an old farm-yard proverb which warns us not to count our chickens before they are hatched. Let us wait a little before we count ours.’
It was not easy to silence Miss Garth, when she was speaking under the influence of a strong conviction; but this reply closed her lips. She resumed her work; and looked, and thought, unutterable things.
Mrs Vanstone’s behaviour was certainly remarkable under the circumstances. Here, on one side, was a girl – with great personal attractions, with rare pecuniary prospects, with a social position which might have justified the best gentleman in the neighbourhood in making her an offer of marriage – perversely casting herself away on a penniless idle young fellow, who had failed at his first start in life, and who, even if he succeeded in his second attempt, must be for years to come in no position to marry a young lady of fortune on equal terms. And there, on the other side, was that girl’s mother, by no means dismayed at the prospect of a connection which was, to say the least of it, far from desirable; by no means certain, judging her by her own words and looks, that a marriage between Mr Vanstone’s daughter and Mr Clare’s son might not prove to be as satisfactory a result of the intimacy between the two young people, as the parents on both sides could possibly wish for! It was perplexing in the extreme. It was almost as unintelligible as that past mystery – that forgotten mystery now – of the journey to London.
In the evening, Frank made his appearance, and announced that his father had mercilessly sentenced him to leave Combe-Raven by the parliamentary train1 the next morning. He mentioned this circumstance with an air of sentimental resignation; and listened to Mr Vanstone’s boisterous rejoicings over his new prospects, with a mild and mute surprise. His gentle melancholy of look and manner greatly assisted his personal advantages. In his own effeminate way, he was more handsome than ever, that evening. His soft brown eyes wandered about the room with a melting tenderness; his hair was beautifully brushed; his delicate hands hung over the arms of his chair with a languid grace. He looked like a convalescent Apollo. Never, on any previous occasion, had he practised more successfully the social art which he habitually cultivated – the art of casting himself on society in the character of a well-bred Incubus, and conferring an obligation on his fellow-creatures by allowing them to sit under him. It was undeniably a dull evening. All the talking fell to the share of Mr Vanstone and Miss Garth. Mrs Vanstone was habitually silent; Norah kept herself obstinately in the background; Magdalen was quiet and undemonstrative beyond all former precedent. From first to last, she kept rigidly on her guard. The few meaning looks that she cast on Frank, flashed at him like lightning, and were gone before any one else could see them. Even when she brought him his tea; and, when in doing so, her self-control gave way under the temptation which no woman can resist – the temptation of touching the man she loves – even then, she held the saucer so dexterously that it screened her hand. Frank’s self-possession was far less steadily disciplined; it only lasted as long as he remained passive. When he rose to go; when he felt the warm clinging pressure of Magdalen’s fingers round his hand, and the lock of her hair which she slipped into it at the same moment, he became awkward and confused. He might have betrayed Magdalen and betrayed himself, but for Mr Vanstone, who innocently covered his retreat by following him out, and patting him on the shoulder all the way. ‘God bless you, Frank!’ cried the friendly voice that never had a harsh note in it for anybody. ‘Your fortune’s waiting for you. Go in, my boy – go in and win.’
‘Yes,’ said Frank. ‘Thank you. It will be rather difficult to go in and win, at first. Of course, as you have always told me, a man’s business is to conquer his difficulties, and not to talk about them. At the same time, I wish I didn’t feel quite so loose as I do in my figures. It’s discouraging to feel loose in one’s figures. – Oh, yes; I’ll write and tell you how I get on. I’m very much obliged by your kindness, and very sorry I couldn’t succeed with the engineering. I think I should have liked engineering better than trade. It can’t be helped now, can it? Thank you, again. Good-bye.’
So he drifted away into the misty commercial future – as aimless, as helpless, as gentlemanlike as ever.
Chapter Nine
Three months passed. During that time, Frank remained in London; pursuing his new duties, and writing occasionally to report himself to Mr Vanstone, as he had promised.
His letters were not enthusiastic on the subject of mercantile occupations. He described himself as being still painfully loose in his figures. He was also more firmly persuaded than ever – now when it was unfortunately too late – that he preferred engineering to trade. In spite of this conviction; in spite of headaches caused by sitting on a high stool and stooping over ledgers in unwholesome air; in spite of want of society, and hasty breakfasts, and bad dinners at chop-houses, his attendance at the office was regular, and his diligence at the desk unremitting. The head of the department in which he was working might be referred to if any corroboration of this statement was desired. Such was the general tenor of the letters; and Frank’s correspondent, and Frank’s father differed over them, as widely as usual. Mr Vanstone accepted them, as proofs of the steady development of industrious principles in the writer. Mr Clare took his own characteristically opposite view. ‘These London men,’ said the philosopher, ‘are not to be trifled with by louts. They have got Frank by the scruff of the neck – he can’t wriggle himself free – and he makes a merit of yielding to sheer necessity.’
The three months’ interval of Frank’s probation in London, passed less cheerfully than usual in the household at Combe-Raven.
As the summer came nearer and nearer, Mrs Vanstone’s spirits, in spite of her resolute efforts to control them, became more and more depressed. ‘I do my best,’ she said to Miss Garth; ‘I set an example of cheerfulness to
my husband and my children – but I dread July.’ Norah’s secret misgivings on her sister’s account rendered her more than usually serious and uncommunicative, as the year advanced. Even Mr Vanstone, when July drew nearer, lost something of his elasticity of spirit. He kept up appearances in his wife’s presence – but, on all other occasions, there was now a perceptible shade of sadness in his look and manner. Magdalen was so changed, since Frank’s departure, that she helped the general depression, instead of relieving it. All her movements had grown languid; all her usual occupations were pursued with the same weary indifference; she spent hours alone in her own room; she lost her interest in being brightly and prettily dressed; her eyes were heavy, her nerves were irritable, her complexion was altered visibly for the worse – in one word, she had become an oppression and a weariness to herself and to all about her. Stoutly as Miss Garth contended with these growing domestic difficulties, her own spirits suffered in the effort. Her memory reverted, oftener and oftener, to the March morning when the master and mistress of the house had departed for London, and when the first serious change, for many a year past, had stolen over the family atmosphere. When was that atmosphere to be clear again? When were the clouds of change to pass off before the returning sunshine of past and happier times?
The spring and the early summer wore away. The dreaded month of July came, with its airless nights, its cloudless mornings, and its sultry days.
On the fifteenth of the month, an event happened which took every one but Norah by surprise. For the second time, without the slightest apparent reason – for the second time, without a word of warning beforehand – Frank suddenly reappeared at his father’s cottage!
Mr Clare’s lips opened to hail his son’s return, in the old character of the ‘bad shilling’; and closed again without uttering a word. There was a portentous composure in Frank’s manner which showed that he had other news to communicate than the news of his dismissal. He answered his father’s sardonic look of inquiry, by at once explaining that a very important proposal for his future benefit had been made to him, that morning, at the office. His first idea had been to communicate the details in writing; but the partners had, on reflection, thought that the necessary decision might be more readily obtained by a personal interview with his father and his friends. He had laid aside the pen accordingly; and had resigned himself to the railway on the spot.
After this preliminary statement, Frank proceeded to describe the proposal which his employers had addressed to him, with every external appearance of viewing it in the light of an intolerable hardship.
The great firm in the City had obviously made a discovery in relation to their clerk, exactly similar to the discovery which had formerly forced itself on the engineer in relation to his pupil. The young man, as they politely phrased it, stood in need of some special stimulant to stir him up. His employers (acting under a sense of their obligation to the gentleman by whom Frank had been recommended) had considered the question carefully, and had decided that the one promising use to which they could put Mr Francis Clare, was to send him forthwith into another quarter of the globe.
As a consequence of this decision, it was now therefore proposed, that he should enter the house of their correspondents in China; that he should remain there, familiarizing himself thoroughly on the spot with the tea-trade and the silk-trade for five years; and that he should return, at the expiration of this period, to the central establishment in London. If he made a fair use of his opportunities in China, he would come back, while still a young man, fit for a position of trust and emolument, and justified in looking forward, at no distant date, to a time when the House would assist him to start in business for himself. Such were the new prospects which – to adopt Mr Clare’s theory – now forced themselves on the ever-reluctant, ever-helpless and ever-ungrateful Frank. There was no time to be lost. The final answer was to be at the office on ‘Monday, the twentieth’: the correspondents in China were to be written to by the mail on that day; and Frank was to follow the letter by the next opportunity, or to resign his chance in favour of some more enterprising young man.
Mr Clare’s reception of this extraordinary news was startling in the extreme. The glorious prospect of his son’s banishment to China appeared to turn his brain. The firm pedestal of his philosophy sank under him; the prejudices of society recovered their hold on his mind. He seized Frank by the arm, and actually accompanied him to Combe-Raven, in the amazing character of a visitor to the house!
‘Here I am with my lout,’ said Mr Clare, before a word could be uttered by the astonished family. ‘Hear his story, all of you. It has reconciled me, for the first time in my life, to the anomaly of his existence.’ Frank ruefully narrated the Chinese proposal for the second time, and attempted to attach to it his own supplementary statement of objections and difficulties. His father stopped him at the first word, pointed peremptorily south-eastward (from Somersetshire to China); and said, without an instant’s hesitation: ‘Go!’ Mr Vanstone, basking in golden visions of his young friend’s future, echoed that monosyllabic decision with all his heart. Mrs Vanstone, Miss Garth, even Norah herself, spoke to the same purpose. Frank was petrified by an absolute unanimity of opinion which he had not anticipated; and Magdalen was caught, for once in her life, at the end of all her resources.
So far as practical results were concerned, the sitting of the family council began and ended with the general opinion that Frank must go. Mr Vanstone’s faculties were so bewildered by the son’s sudden arrival, the father’s unexpected visit, and the news they both brought with them, that he petitioned for an adjournment, before the necessary arrangements connected with his young friend’s departure were considered in detail. ‘Suppose we all sleep upon it?’ he said. ‘To-morrow, our heads will feel a little steadier; and to-morrow will be time enough to decide all uncertainties.’ This suggestion was readily adopted; and all further proceedings stood adjourned until the next day.
That next day was destined to decide more uncertainties than Mr Vanstone dreamed of.
Early in the morning, after making tea by herself as usual, Miss Garth took her parasol, and strolled into the garden. She had slept ill; and ten minutes in the open air before the family assembled at breakfast, might help to compensate her, as she thought, for the loss of her night’s rest.
She wandered to the outermost boundary of the flower-garden, and then returned by another path, which led back, past the side of an ornamental summer-house commanding a view over the fields from a corner of the lawn. A slight noise – like, and yet not like, the chirruping of a bird – caught her ear, as she approached the summer-house. She stepped round to the entrance; looked in; and discovered Magdalen and Frank seated close together. To Miss Garth’s horror, Magdalen’s arm was unmistakably round Frank’s neck; and, worse still, the position of her face at the moment of discovery, showed beyond all doubt, that she had just been offering to the victim of Chinese commerce, the first and foremost of all the consolations which a woman can bestow on a man. In plainer words, she had just given Frank a kiss.
In the presence of such an emergency as now confronted her, Miss Garth felt instinctively that all ordinary phrases of reproof would be phrases thrown away.
‘I presume,’ she remarked, addressing Magdalen with the merciless self-possession of a middle-aged lady, unprovided for the occasion with any kissing remembrances of her own. ‘I presume (whatever excuses your effrontery may suggest) you will not deny that my duty compels me to mention what I have just seen to your father?’
‘I will save you the trouble,’ replied Magdalen, composedly. ‘I will mention it to him myself.’
With those words, she looked round at Frank, standing trebly helpless in a corner of the summer-house. ‘You shall hear what happens,’ she said, with her bright smile. ‘And so shall you,’ she added for Miss Garth’s especial benefit, as she sauntered past the governess, on her way back to the breakfast-table. The eyes of Miss Garth followed her indignantly; and Frank slip
ped out on his side, at that favourable opportunity.
Under these circumstances, there was but one course that any respectable woman could take – she could only shudder. Miss Garth registered her protest in that form, and returned to the house.
When breakfast was over, and when Mr Vanstone’s hand descended to his pocket in search of his cigar-case, Magdalen rose; looked significantly at Miss Garth; and followed her father into the hall.
‘Papa,’ she said, ‘I want to speak to you this morning – in private.’
‘Ay! ay!’ returned Mr Vanstone. ‘What about, my dear?’
‘About –’ Magdalen hesitated, searched for a satisfactory form of expression, and found it. ‘About business, papa,’ she said.
Mr Vanstone took his garden-hat from the hall table – opened his eyes in mute perplexity – attempted to associate in his mind the two extravagantly dissimilar ideas of Magdalen and ‘business’ – failed – and led the way resignedly into the garden.
His daughter took his arm, and walked with him to a shady seat at a convenient distance from the house. She dusted the seat with her smart silk apron, before her father occupied it. Mr Vanstone was not accustomed to such an extraordinary act of attention as this. He sat down, looking more puzzled than ever. Magdalen immediately placed herself on his knee, and rested her head comfortably on his shoulder.
‘Am I heavy, papa?’ she asked.
‘Yes, my dear, you are,’ said Mr Vanstone – ‘but not too heavy for me. Stop on your perch, if you like it. Well? And what may this business happen to be?’
‘It begins with a question.’