Works of Ellen Wood, page 783
Mrs. Norris Darling (let us give her both names once in a way!) continued to examine the nurse by the help of the glass. She needed a glass just as much as you or I, reader; and had she not been surrounded by that fashionable crowd, would as soon have thought of looking at Honour through the ring of her parasol. But pretentiousness is given to many little ways pertaining to pretentiousness, and that is one of them. Mrs. Norris Darling possessed an idea that an eye-glass added immensely in some way to her dignity. She turned her glass on Honour from top to toe, in the same cool manner that other glasses are turned; and she saw a sensible-looking young woman, with a clear, fair skin, a good forehead, and truthful light blue eyes.
“Honoria Tritton?” she repeated. “You must be a relative of Mr. Carleton St. John’s housekeeper! Have you had sole charge of the baby?”
“Oh yes, madam, the sole charge.”
“It is a great responsibility,” remarked Mrs. Norris Darling, dropping the glass, and speaking, not to Honour, but to the ladies around.
Mr. St. John had taken his child from the nurse’s arms, and was fondly caressing it. His very actions, his movements, betrayed the depth of his affection, and a sharp feeling of jealousy shot through the heart of the beautiful Miss Norris as she watched him. “Will he ever love another child as he loves this one?” was the thought that arose unbidden to her mind. No, never, Miss Norris; you need not ask or wish it: man does not love another as he loves his first-born.
But her beautiful features were smooth as polished crystal as she drew near to Mr. St. John. He glanced at her with a welcoming smile.
“Do let me nurse him!” she said in low tones. “I adore children; and this one seems made to be loved.”
Mr. St. John resigned the boy to her. She carried him away into the conservatory, to a remote bench out of sight, sat down, and amused him with her gold neck-chain. The little fellow sat confidingly on her knee; one hand enclosing her fore-finger, the other grasping the glittering coil. Mr. St. John followed her.
“Look at him!” she said, her quiet face changed to rapture as she glanced at Mr. St. John. “Look at his nimble little fingers and bright eyes! How happy he is!”
“Happy in all things save one,” whispered Mr. St. John, leaning over the child, but gazing at herself. “He has no mother to love and guide him.”
Those unfathomable eyes of hers were cast down, so that the eyelids concealed them, and a crimson flush mantled to her usually pale cheeks.
“He wants a mother,” proceeded Mr. St. John; “he must have a mother. Not now will I urge it, when so many are near; but, Charlotte, you know whom I would entreat to be that mother and my beloved wife.”
A strange whirl of agitation shook her, impeding instant utterance. Mr. St. John saw the signs, and laid his hand upon her with a smile.
“Ought you to talk to me of a beloved wife?” she asked, in an impassioned tone, as she glanced momentarily up at him. “She who lies buried in her grave was yours.”
“I did not love her as I shall love you,” he hastened to avow — and in the moment’s fervour it may be that he thought he spoke truth. “Had I known you better then, I might never have chosen her.”
“Yet see how you love her child!”
“And I will passionately love any that may be born to you, Charlotte,” he whispered. But the very remark, had Mr. St. John been cool enough or wise enough to analyze it, might have told him that her heart, even now, before she was anything to him, was shaken by jealousy of the child. He was neither cool nor wise just then.
He bent his head lower and lower; he murmured vows of everlasting tenderness; he suffered his face to rest against hers, as it had once rested against that of his dying wife. She resisted not. But when a host of intruders came flocking in, she raised her haughty head, and swept on with a scornful step, as she resigned the infant into the arms of its nurse.
George St. John had loved his wife with the fresh, rapturous feelings that he could never know again; and he loved her memory. Yet, here he was, ere ten short months had elapsed, willing to swear to another that she was the first who had awakened true passion in his heart! But Caroline Carleton had faded from his sight, and Charlotte Norris stood before him in all her beauty. It is the way of man; ay, and often of woman. To remain faithful to the dead is not in marts nature.
The fête was over, and they were driving home — Mrs. Darling and her daughter. To judge by the manner of the two ladies, one might have thought it was the mother who had received so momentous a proposal; not the daughter. Charlotte sat quiet and calm, leaning back in her corner of the chariot; Mrs. Darling was flushed, restless, evidently disturbed. Mr. St. John had said to her a word of enlightenment in parting, and it startled her out of her equanimity.
“Charlotte,” she began — and not until they were drawing near the end of their homeward road, and the village of Alnwick was left behind them, did she speak—” Charlotte, I hope I misunderstood Mr. St. John?”
Charlotte lifted her eyes. “I do not know to what you allude, mamma. In what do you hope you misunderstood Mr. St. John?”
“He hinted to me that he should call to-morrow to speak to me about you. Charlotte, it will be of no use: I cannot let you marry Mr. Carleton.”
“Please not to call him by that name,” was the quiet rejoinder.
“Mr. St. John, then — what does it matter? I should not like you to marry him. Has he really asked you to be his wife?”
“Yes.”
“It must have been very sudden!”
“Not so. I think we have understood each other for some little time past.”
“Then he has been in the habit of coming to the cottage?”
“Oh yes.”
Mrs. Darling, who had raised herself in some commotion as she asked the last question, sank back again, and a look of mortification, of mental trouble, settled on her face. The carriage was approaching their door ere she spoke again, her tones betraying an agitation that was ill suppressed.
“I cannot spare you, Charlotte! Charlotte, my darling, I cannot spare you! How often have I hoped, and urged, and prayed that you would never leave me — that you would be the one to stay and cheer my old age!”
Charlotte shook her head with a smile. Had her mother been less agitated, less evidently in earnest, she might have enlarged on the unreasonableness of such a wish. As it was, she only answered playfully, that her mother need not think of old age these twenty years.
“Are you marrying him for his money — his position?” resumed Mrs. Darling.
“I am tired, mamma; I wish you wouldn’t question me. Really I can’t exactly particularize why I am marrying him.”
“You a second wife! Have you reflected, Charlotte, that Caroline Carleton was his first choice; that there’s already an heir to Alnwick who will inherit all; that George St. John has hardly a shilling beyond his entailed estates—”
“Don’t mamma!” was Charlotte’s interruption, and her brow had contracted as if in pain. “It is quite useless your saying this. I should marry George St. John, though I knew that I must beg my bread afterwards from door to door.”
A moan, as of one in sorrow too great for utterance, broke from the lips of Mrs. Darling, and she sank back in the carriage and clasped her hands in pain.
CHAPTER III.
THE UNEXPLAINED REASON.
NOT a word was spoken by either mother or daughter as they entered their home. The little French clock in the drawingroom pointed to eleven — for the festivities at the Hall had been prolonged into evening — and Charlotte, perhaps afraid of further contention, said good night, and went up at once to her chamber. Mrs. Darling threw off her cloak and bonnet and began to pace the room. It was rather a habit of hers when disturbed or vexed.
Never had she been so disturbed as now. Her ordinary crosses had been but light ones, which she scolded or talked away; this seemed to be too deep, too real, for any talking.
It might be unreasonable; every one who knew of it said it was so; but Mrs. Darling had lived in the ardent hope that her eldest daughter — more fondly cherished by her than all the rest — would never leave her, never marry. She had planned and schemed against it. Some two or three years ago, a suspicion arose in her mind that Charlotte was falling in love with George St. John, and she checked it by carrying off Charlotte, and keeping her away until the danger was over. He had married Caroline Carleton before they came back again. No one living had suspected this manœuvre on the mother’s part, or that Charlotte had been in danger of loving the master of Alnwick — if she had not loved him — except Margaret Darling. Surely it must have been unreasonable. Mr. St. John was a free man then in every sense of the word, and Charlotte’s son, had she married him and borne one, would have been the heir!
That Mrs. Darling’s love for Charlotte had always been inordinate, those about them knew. But, as a woman of the world, she might have foreseen how utterly powerless would be a mother’s love to keep her daughter always by her side. Charlotte once said to her in a joking way, that she had better put her into a convent, and make a nun of her: and indeed that would have been about the only way of preventing it. And now, in spite of her precaution, Charlotte was about to marry; to be a second wife. That fact alone brought some gall to Mrs. Darling.
She had deemed Charlotte so secure. She had never dreamt of the treason that was afloat. Their visit to her old mother in Berkshire had been prolonged until June, and all that time Charlotte had been safe under her own eye. In June, old Mrs. Darling (it was the same name, for Mrs. Darling’s second husband had been a distant cousin) grew so convalescent that they had no scruple in quitting her; and Mrs. Darling had despatched Charlotte to Alnwick under convoy of Mary Anne, who was so much older than her years, and might be thoroughly trusted. Margaret remained behind with her grandmother, and Mrs. Darling went to France to see her youngest daughter Rose, who was at school there. She only intended to be absent a fortnight; by the end of that time she meant to be at Alnwick; but ere it was concluded, she was summoned back in haste to her old mother, who had had a relapse. So that it was September before Mrs. Darling really returned to Alnwick. She arrived just in time to attend the fête at Mr. St. John’s, and she went to it without any more prevision of what was to happen than a child unborn.
It was the first time that Charlotte had been away from her, and she was blaming herself bitterly. Perhaps self-reproach was never sharper than Mrs. Darling’s as she paced the drawingroom this night. It seemed to her, now, that she might have foreseen something of the sort; that she should have kept her attractive daughter under her own eye. But she thought she had taken every precaution. She had charged Mary Anne not to admit gentlemen as visitors during her absence — unless, she had added, they were of a certain standing as to age, and married. Some few she had especially interdicted by name. Above all others would she have interdicted Mr. St. John of Alnwick, had she supposed that this would be the result; and she mentally heaped the most bitter reproaches on Mary Anne, and felt that she should like to shake her.
She turned to the bell with a sudden impulse, and rang it; indeed, Mrs. Darling was always an impulsive woman. All the servants had gone upstairs on Mrs. Darling’s entrance, except the lady’s-maid; hours were early in the quiet household. Mary Prance came in: a slender woman of five-and-thirty, with dark eyes and brown marks on her thin face; she wore a neat grey alpaca gown and small white linen wristbands and collar. A woman devoted to her mistress’s interests, but disliked by the servants, who went so far as to call her a “deceitful cat.” But Mary Prance was a clever woman, and not deceitful on the whole. She gratefully liked Mrs. Darling, who was always kind to her, and she loved the eldest daughter; but she cared for no one else in the wide world. She had entered the service as housemaid, a young girl, but her mistress had called her “Prance” from the first. Mrs. Darling — you remember the hint I gave you — could not call her servants by their simple Christian names. She turned sharply as the door opened.
“Where’s Miss Darling?”
“Miss Darling has been in bed some time, ma’am. She went at eight o’clock. Her sore-throat was painful, though a trifle easier.”
“Prance, who has visited here during my absence?” interrupted Mrs. Darling, impatiently drowning the words. “What gentlemen?”
The lady’s-maid considered for a moment, recalling the visitors. “Dr. Graves, ma’am; he has come the oftenest, I think. And Mr. Pym, and old Sir William—”
“Not those old people, Prance; I don’t care to hear about them,” said Mrs. Darling, peevishly. “I mean young men — single men.”
“Not any, I think,” answered Prance, after a pause. “Miss Darling was denied to them.”
“Mr. St. John of Alnwick has come?”
“Oh yes, Mr. St. John has come. He has come often.” With the answer, Mrs. Darling quitted the room for the chamber of her unconsciously offending daughter. The poor girl woke up, hot and startled at the unexpected entrance; at the sharp questions that so rudely assailed her ear. Not for some few moments did she understand sufficiently to answer.
Mr. Carleton St. - John? Yes, he had been there rather frequently in the past few weeks. Had Charlotte had opportunities of seeing him alone? Yes, very likely she had; it might be so.
“Did you know,” resumed Mrs. Darling, suppressing the storm of reproaches so ready to break from her lips, “that any attachment was arising between her and Mr. St. John?”
“No, mamma, I never knew it,” replied Mary Anne, fully awake now. “I did not think of such a thing. Has it arisen?”
“Yes, it has arisen, you unhappy, careless creature, and I fear that she’s going to marry him,” retorted Mrs. Darling. “You are a hundred years older than Charlotte in staid experience. I entrusted her to your charge here as I might a younger sister, and you have suffered her to meet George St. John, and this is the result! I shall never forgive you, Mary Anne. Did I not warn you that I would have no single men calling here during my absence?”
“But — but — Mr. St. John is not a single man,” returned the unfortunate Mary Anne, too bewildered to collect her senses. “I’m sure I did not think of him as anything but a widower steeped in grief. It seems only the other day that his wife died. I did not think of him at all as a marrying man.”
Neither, in point of fact, had Mrs. Darling, or she might have expressly interdicted his visits by name, as she had those of others.
Mary Anne Darling was collecting her wits. She sat up in bed, thinking possibly that might help her. “Mamma, you cannot really expect to keep Charlotte unmarried! Remember her beauty. If it were me or Margaret, you might—”
“You or Margaret!” screamed Mrs. Darling, excessively incensed at something or other in the words. “I wish you were both going to be married to-morrow! or to-night, for the matter of that.”
“I was going to ask you, mamma,” pursued Mary Anne, meek still in spite of the covert sneer, “what objection you can possibly have to her marrying Mr. St. John?”
“That’s my business and not yours,” said Mrs. Darling, tartly.
Mary Anne had never heard her mother altogether so cross, never seen her so vexed, and the girl wondered excessively. Hitherto, she had supposed the objection which existed to Charlotte’s marrying, and which she had not failed to detect, arose from an exalted idea on her mother’s part that no one likely to present himself was worthy of Miss Norris in a worldly point of view. But surely this could not apply to Mr. St. John of Alnwick! She spoke again, pursuing her train of thought.
“He will be Sir George St. John sometime, mamma; he will be more wealthy than he is now. It is really a better match than even Charlotte could have hoped for.”
“I would give every shilling I possess in the world, rather than Charlotte should marry him!” spoke Mrs. Darling, in low, determined tones. “I would sacrifice half the years I have yet to live to keep her with me always! I shall never forgive you, Mary Anne. When you found that George St. John was taking to come here, you ought to have sent me word.”
“Mamma, listen. I have told you that I never thought of such a thing as that Mr. Carleton St. John came, or could come, with any such idea; he, who has only just lost his wife. But if I had thought of it, if I had known it, what would have been my will against Charlotte’s? It might have pleased her that he should be admitted; and you know you have taught us to give way to her in all things.”
“Then you might have written to me. I repeat to you, Mary Anne, that I shall never forgive you.”
“It must be, that he was previously married — that Charlotte’s children will not inherit,” cried Mary Anne, speaking aloud in her wonder, as she strove to find reasonable grounds for the objection to Mr. St. John. “But—”
“Hold your tongue,” interrupted Mrs. Darling. “You have done mischief enough, without seeking for reasons that may not be disclosed.”
More and more surprised grew Mary Anne. The last words were not spoken in reproach or anger, but in a tone of deep, bitter pain. They bore a sound of wailing, of lamentation; and she could only stare after her mother in silence, as Mrs. Darling quitted the room not less abruptly than she had entered it.
Mary Anne Darling lay down again, and curled the clothes round her with a pettish movement, feeling excessively aggrieved. But that was nothing new. She and Margaret had suffered all their lives through Charlotte, and had never rebelled. Miss Norris had been first and foremost; had received all the love, all the consideration, all the care; the house had only seemed to go on in reference to the well-being and convenience of its eldest daughter.
Brought up to this from their earliest years, Mary Anne and Margaret Darling had accepted it as one of life’s obligations. But the young lady was feeling now that she was being unjustly censured. If there did exist any objection to Mr. Carleton St. John, Charlotte should be blamed for falling in love with him, or else be made to relinquish him. But Miss Darling did not believe in any objection: she thought her mother only wished to keep Charlotte to herself in her jealous affection. — that she could not bear to part with her.
