Mrs. Romney. A novel ... A new edition

Chapter I. Miss Vaughan Of Banksland

" You are not like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once, are you?" Sheridan. Mrs. Romney again ! It was too provoking! The reiteration was almost offensive ; it was becoming intolerable ; it was really more than feminine flesh and blood could bear; it was like the scarifying sting of a small blood-thirsty insect, for it raised troublesome and invidious comparisons. Elsie was not a patient person, — not one of those docile, tractable, lovable people whom it is a delight to train and discipline, — who can be drilled, exercised, and formed according to the teacher's whim and pleasure. She was as shy and wild as an unbroken colt accustomed to the sweet dews and breezes of an upland pasture and igno rant as yet of snaffle and curb and a future master ; she was full of tricks and frolics, and not averse to small tempers, that were as brief and gusty as a storm in a teacup ; and then, like most girls, she had such a good opinion of herself!

Her engagement was only four-and-twenty hours old, and she was already repenting it ; at least — yes, she was almost sure that she repented it ; she was out of humor with herself and Oliver ; and Mrs. Romney — tiresome Mrs. Romney — was the stumbling-block, the casus belli, the apple of dis cord ! And yet what had Oliver said, after all ? He had made two or three harmless remarks. In the first flush of his joy and triumph, when Elsie had yielded her perverse little self to his impassioned pleading, almost his first words had been, " Darling, how pleased Romney will be to hear this !" and then, as though by an after-thought, " and Mrs. Romney." And by and by, " You will like Mrs. Romney, Elsie ; every one likes my sister-in-law, she has such a big, grand nature. There is noth ing little about her.

I always tell Romney that he is a fortunate fellow to have such a wife." Well, she had not minded this ; she was glad to have such a favorable report of Oliver's sister-in law ; she was curious to hear all about her new connections ; so she had questioned him a little closely and anxiously on the subject of Mrs. Rom ney's good looks ; but here he had disappointed her ; she could make nothing of his descriptions : no, certainly Oliver was not good at description. " Is Mrs. Romney handsome ? — I ahvays call her Mrs. Romney: I like the name, somehow, — it pleases me better than Catherine. Well, no, not exactly, — no, certainly not," with greater decision of manner. " My taste leans more to brown hair with a ruddy gleam in it, and eyes that are as blue and soft as — well, what am I saying to make you look so shy, Elsie ?

Ah, we were talking about Mrs. Romney, were we ? Well, if you must have it, she is not handsome ; she is dark, and her features are irregular, but she has plenty of expression, and she looks uncommonly well in evening dress. She has magnificent arms and hands, — Thorold asked permission to model them for his Andro mache, — and she is altogether a very graceful sort of person." " And your brother fell in love with her ?" " Yes," with marked gravity, " Romney fell in love with her." Oliver had a tiresome habit of repeating his words, as though he delighted in them. " Men will do it, you know, and the disease is very catching. Why, even I, the most sedate and stoical of Her Majesty's officers, was not in vulnerable to — to " and here it must be owned that Mrs. Romney dropped rather suddenly out of the conversation ; she fell as heavily as a plum met into a well, as Milton says, " The lazy leaden stepping hours, whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace ;" in fact, she sank like a stone.

But the remark that had incensed Elsie, and that had brought that impatient and very improper exclamation to her lips, " Really, Captain Carfax, I am tired to death of Mrs. Romney before I have seen her !" was this : " I do hope, dear, that you and Mrs. Romney will be good friends. Her being so many years older is all the better ; for, having no mother or sister, you poor child, you must often want a word of advice ; and Mrs. Romney is so sensible, and then she has so much more experience !" There was a speech to make to a spoiled heiress, — to Miss Vaughan of Banksland ! but it only showed an absolute want of tact on Oliver's part. Certainly Captain Carfax should have known better. For it is a well-known psychological fact, and one that commends itself specially to the female mind, that if a person hitherto unknown be unduly or over much eulogized and belauded, the auditor at once becomes conscious of secret antagonism and an intense desire to pick holes and find fault with such a piece of perfection, and to view him or her in a bad light.

" The white light that beats" upon the throned and sceptred being brings out one's im perfections into stronger relief. If Mrs. Romney were, in her husband's and Oliver's eyes, this para gon of womanhood, this pink and acme of perfec tion, this chrysolite without flaw or blemish, then she — Elsie Vaughan — would only seem a very weak, faulty little person, and it behoved her at once to take up sword and spear in her own de fence. The scene, the situation, the accessories of the picture, were simply perfect : an artist might have roved amid the whole thing and laid the founda tion of his future success as a R.A., as he painted in the lights and shades of that simple, every-day, and yet wholly idyllic picture. Banksland stood high above the river; in the spring its sloping lawn looked as gay as a ball-room, with its huge horse-chestnut trees loaded with red and white blossoms, and commanded a bewitching view of deep-green meadows, where cranesbill and small yellow rock roses grew, with wild thyme and all manner of dainty herbage ; while below, the silver trail of the river gleamed between the trees, with fairy-like sails dotted here and there among the greenery.

The sunshine, the blue sky, the red roofs of the boat-houses, and the milky whiteness of geese waddling over the common, gave vivid coloring to the picture ; while in the foreground, the garden at Banksland, Elsie's roses, and her own charming little white-gowned self, her striking personality, and the quiet, languid-looking man stretched at her feet, made up the idyll. Oliver Carfax was by no means a handsome man ; in the opinion of his mother, Lady Carfax, all the beauty of the family had centred in the person of his brother Romney, who was indeed a prince among men, though he had an Englishman's un consciousness of the fact. If Romney were proud of anything, it was of his keen eye and straight aim and his remarkably good taste in choosing a wife: for the rest, he had plenty of excellent mus cle, kept himself in good condition, had a horror of growing stout and of missing a shot, and rather liked to be told that he had a good tailor ; men, even the best of them, having their private weak ness.

Oliver looked small and pale and a trifle insig nificant beside his brother's splendid proportions and magnificent physique ; but he had a way with him that people could not overlook. He was a soldier, and he looked the character to the life; and he had no nonsense about him, except a habit of half closing his eyes as though he had weak sight, and a slow, indifferent way of speaking when people were strange to him, that rather aggravated them, because they fancied he was bored and did not like them ; and in nine cases out of ten they were right. On Elsie herself he had made a distinctly unfavorable impression. She had seen him for the first time at the Trentham ball : it was the evening of her greatest triumph, for more than one susceptible youth had fallen an easy prey to the young heiress's charm.

" An orphan, no encum brances, and a tidy little fortune of her own, — by Jove! it will just suit me down to the ground: and as for looks, there is not a girl in the place to hold a candle to her; plenty of go, too, — just my sort." These were the inward reflections of more than one young aspirant to Miss Vaughan's favor. Elsie was quite ready to do her part, to smile on them and answer their neat little speeches with the bright intelligence that seemed natural to her : she was outwardly gracious to all her partners, but she preferred the tall handsome ones ; and she was secretly chagrined to find that Captain Carfax had put down his name on her programme for three valses. Certainly she must own, however, that he danced well, exceedingly well ; he had a gliding smoothness of step that suited her to a nicety; but a fair, pale man with half-closed eyes and a quiet drawl that appeared to her a little affected was not to her taste.

He seemed half asleep, he was bored, he wanted waking up ; she felt inclined to say something rude to him, something that would rouse him from his lethargy, that would make him open his eyes, and — but here Elsie grew suddenly hot, and unfurled her fan a little nervously, while she fixed her eyes on a spurred heel before her. She had had a shock; she was just going to open her lips, the first word of the flippant little speech was about to be spoken, when suddenly Captain Carfax's heavy lids had raised themselves of their own accord, and a glance so keen and searching, so full of life, had met hers, that she had become suddenly dumb and confused ; and he was speaking, too, with the utmost animation and friendliness : " I knew we should get on awfully; your step just suits mine, Miss Vaughan : shall we have another turn ? the last was perfect ; if you are not tired, — thanks;" and she was whirled round the room again, — no, not whirled, — that word would hardly convey the smooth firm precision with which Cap tain Carfax guided her through the maze of dan cers ; it was the very poetry of motion.

He did not say much to her, — Oliver was one who talked by fits and starts, — but somehow his silence was eloquent and pregnant with meaning; a sort of weight attached to his simplest sentences; when he said, later on, " You must have an ice," Elsie somehow felt that that frigid form of refreshment had become an imperative necessity to her. There was quite a crowd round the door when she made her appearance from the cloak-room; she had a bewildering blue hood trimmed with white fur that dazzled the young men's eyes ; a blue hood ever after seemed to them the loveliest article of femi nine attire that they had ever seen. " There is rather a deep step ; let me assist you," and Captain Carfax was by her side ; no one had seen him push his way to the front ; yet a moment before he had been in the hall.

Elsie could have declared that her fan had been in her hand when she left the cloak-room ; it was one she greatly prized, for it had belonged to her mother ; the loss took away all the pleasure of a successful evening, and she laid down her programme and her gloves on her toilet table with a sense that Solomon was right after all, and that all was vanity and vexation of spirit ; and there was certainly a suspicion of moisture in her bright eyes as she arrived at this lugubrious conclusion. Her delight was un bounded, then, when the next afternoon, just as Morgan was setting the tea-table, Captain Carfax was announced, and she saw him entering her drawing-room with the fan in his hand ; his mous tache twitched a little as he heard her exclaim, " Oh, the dear thing ! how good of you to bring it, Captain Carfax !

Where did you find it ? Did I drop it in the hall or on the steps, or did I leave it in the cloak-room?" Elsie remembered after wards that none of these questions had been an swered ; the finding of the fan remained a mystery, until, months afterwards, Oliver informed her that he had quietly taken it out of her hand as she was getting into the carriage. " I wanted a pretext for calling. It was rather a clever device, eh, Elsie?" " No, sir, it was nothing of the kind !" she re turned, indignantly ; " it was an infamous robbery : you stole my fan ; and I cried — I actually cried — over the loss." " Oh, come, now, no exaggeration ; exchange is no robbery, — I learned that in the nursery: if I stole your fan, you had stolen my heart already ; it was love at first sight ; when I wrote my name in your programme I knew it was all up with your humble servant."

Elsie never knew why she had accepted Captain Carfax, which she did quite meekly the moment he asked her; she told him afterwards rather crossly that he had given her no chance, — meta phorically, he had carried her off her feet. " I did not in the least wish to be engaged," she remarked, thoughtfully, as he was about to bid her good-night that evening, and her tone was a little reproachful; the spoiled child had always been used to speak her mind on every occasion. Oliver had risen, but he sat down again and caressed his moustache : it was not much of a moustache, being sandy in color and a trifle wiry. " No, I suppose not," he observed, after an interval of silence. " You put too strong a pressure on me. I al ways told Uncle George" — Uncle George was Elsie's guardian and sole relative — "that I never intended to be engaged until I was three-and twenty."

" Ah, we often make a false shot," he returned, cheerfully. " I once told Romney that I was cut out for an old bachelor, but he did not believe me : so we were both wrong, you see. You will find it awfully jolly, being engaged, when you once get used to it ; I like it already." And with this he took his leave. Elsie made up her mind that she would send him a note the next morning releasing him from his engagement. " I promised too quickly," she thought of saying; " I should prefer to have my three years of freedom, after all ;" but she somehow lacked courage to send the note ; but, being an impulsive girl, she showed it to him when he came, just to see how he took it; but he only read it and screwed it up in his hand smiling, and went on with the conversation. He hoped Rom ney would ask him to take her down to the Frythe ; he would have a month's leave of absence in June, and it would be capital sport driving her in Rom ney's dog-cart or riding with her about Fordham ; and he drew such a pleasant description of the Frythe and Fordham that Elsie quite longed for the invitation, and the talk flowed on smoothly until Oliver's injudicious speech about Mrs. Rom ney awoke her smouldering ire.

" I am quite sure that I shall detest Mrs. Rom ney." Elsie looked provokingly pretty as she made this speech ; the sunshine was in her eyes, and she had contrived a screen with Oliver's hat, the truth being that he had offered it to her for the purpose. " My object in life is to get sunburnt," he assured her, solemnly, as she looked apologetically at his closely-cropped head : his hair looked almost bleached in the sunshine : a phrenologist, however, would have been profoundly satisfied with the shape and formation, the bumps of concentrativeness, cautiousness, firmness, and benevolence being well developed. Oliver had a pebble in his hand ; the gravel path was behind him and offered him a store of small missiles ; he had made up his mind to hit a knob of wood in a garden chair at some distance.

When Elsie had uttered her fractious little speech, he took aim, and the pebble grazed the knob. "Good," he observed, briefly, and his tone showed self-satisfaction ; then he turned lightly on his side and took Elsie's hand. " You are very young, dear," he said, in an amused tone, " but you will grow older and wiser every year. I rather admire your downright speeches, they are so thoroughly honest. Poor Mrs. Romney ! well, I will not say any more about her just now; she shall plead her own cause." Oliver was really behaving very generously, but he had only been engaged twenty-four hours, and he was far too happy to quarrel with his fiancee ; he was more in love with Elsie than the girl knew or even guessed ; she had not the faintest notion of the real nature of the man to whom she had plighted her troth, — of his depth of character, and his strong tenacity of purpose; his manner was misleading, his assumed languor hid him like a mask.

Captain Carfax did not always choose to be understood : he had not yet willed to reveal himself to his young betrothed. But in spite of his generosity Elsie felt herself aggrieved. Miss Vaughan of Banksland was an important person. She did not want to be forgiven and patted on the head like a naughty little girl, so she said, severely, " You talk so much of Mrs. Romney, and so little of your mother. I am more anxious to see Lady Carfax. Miss Dalton told me that she is very handsome." " She is a good-looking woman," he returned, quietly. " You know my father is an invalid, Elsie, and my mother devotes herself to him ; that is why Romney lives at the Frythe, instead of having a house of his own, that he may be at hand to manage everything ; the house is so big, and my mother wished it. She and my father have the east wing to themselves."

" I wonder Mrs. Romney likes such an arrange ment," observed Elsie, a little disdainfully. If Oliver had asked her to live with his parents — well, she would have had but one answer to that. " Mrs. Romney is one who never consults her own wishes," returned Oliver, gravely. " Romney said that it was his duty to consider his parents, and that he would like to live at the Frythe, so she said at once that she wished it too. Now, then, shall I take you for a row on the river ?" but he seemed so sure of Elsie's consent that he jumped up from the grass and shook himself, as though to prepare for action. Elsie half thought of saying, " No," by way of testing her power, but she changed her mind, and arrayed herself instead in a smart boating-dress, and a sailor hat that suited her to perfection, and they spent the rest of the afternoon among the swans and sedges.

Chapter II. Captain Carfax Has His Way

Mur. We are men, my liege. Mac. Ay, in the catalogue ye go sor men. Macbeth. One lovely afternoon in June, when every winged creature great or small was doing its little best to swell creation's mighty symphony, its " Lieder ohne Worte," as some one has said, and all young things were gambolling on the earth out of mere wantonness and exuberance of life, Elsie Vaughan sat in the corner of a first-class compartment be moaning her hard fate with silent bitterness and self-pity, and deriving an immense though morbid pleasure from the process. Elsie was perusing her own feelings and pros pects with the same concentration of industry with which Captain Carfax was seemingly studying his Times ; but she was too engrossed with her own thoughts to notice sundry keen and amused glances levelled in her direction.

When Elsie looked at Oliver, which she did occasionally, rather haugh tily and with a touch of defiance, he was always engrossed in his leader, and presented a blank and expressionless visage. At such moments Oliver looked decidedly plain. Elsie considered herself the most miserable of girls, because she had been engaged three whole weeks, and had not yet made up her mind whether she liked or detested her bonds, and was now on her way to be interviewed by Oliver's relatives. Being a shy little mortal, in spite of her conceit, Elsie was in a state of nervous collapse, — the thought of Mrs. Romney being the sole irritant. She was more than ever determined that Mrs. Romney would be her bete noire, the wolf in sheep's clothing who would ruin all her pleasure at Fordham. Elsie had come to the con clusion that an engaged person resembled a bird with its wings clipped ; her flights were curtailed and regulated by a masculine will : Miss Vaughan had at times a humiliating consciousness that she had found her master.

Now and then she felt as though she almost hated this quiet smooth tongued man who made her pretty speeches and told her that she was young. As Elsie was nine teen, she objected to be considered young ; besides which, Oliver was only five-and-twenty, — which proved he was not a Methuselah, — and ought not to give himself airs. But on the whole she respected him, and her hatred must have been in embryo, as they had enjoyed a good deal of boat ing together during his brief visits to Banksland, and his letters had been eagerly read and answered with a great deal of painstaking care, the slightest erasure necessitating a clean copy. How tenderly Captain Carfax had laid aside these neat girlish epistles, with their faint fragrance of rose-leaves, their formal beginnings and small stilted sentences, and the rush of words at the end !

Elsie's post script resembled herself, and revealed her mean ing with blunt honesty. When she told Oliver that she was not sure that she wanted to see him, that she was quite happy with Uncle George, but that he might come if he liked, she meant every word she said, and Oliver believed her, but he came all the same, and made himself so agreeable that she was sorry when he returned to Aldershot. Elsie hardly knew how Oliver managed her, but she was conscious that she was managed: the idea fretted her at times and brought on one of her contradictory humors. On one or two occa sions she had behaved very badly to her fiance, but he had never seemed to notice it ; once the snub had been publicly administered, and her chaperon, Mrs. Fielding, had given her a sharp reprimand ; for she was a determined sort of per son, and had known Elsie's mother.

" How could you treat Captain Carfax so rudely, Elsie ? I was quite ashamed of you. You are far too old to sulk like a baby," she had said, so severely that Elsie had first quarrelled with her and had then burst into tears, and in the end had begged Oli ver's pardon. Perhaps her worst punishment was the way Oliver received her apology. " There is no need of this between you and me, darling," he had said, quietly. " I understand you better than you do yourself. But don't try it on at the Frythe, or my mother and Mrs. Romney will think you younger than you are." Self-com mand is learned later in life ; it was in this way Oliver took his revenge. For a day and a half Elsie went about her own house like a whipped kitten, and Captain Carfax and Mrs. Fielding ex changed glances. Oliver knew that the object of his idolatry was only a child woman, and had not grown into her full stature of womanhood ; but nothing could exceed his reverence.

She was crude, airified, and full of whimseys, but then, as he told Mrs. Romney, her mother had died before Elsie was eight years old. " Mr. Brudenell — Uncle George, as she calls him — is an old bachelor, and does not understand girls ; and Mrs. Fielding, good creature as she is and devoted to Elsie, is only a married old maid. Ask Romney what I mean by that, if you do not understand me." But Mrs. Romney thought that she understood Oliver's meaning very well, and put down his letter with a stifled sigh. " Men of Oliver's calibre like to educate their wives, at least discipline them, before they marry them," she said later on to her husband as they discussed the letter, as they discussed most things, in Romney's smoking-room. " A full-fledged wife would not suit him at all. She is more a child than a woman ; I can read that between the lines ; but Oliver will love her all the better for the trouble she gives him.

Oliver is a Carfax." And somehow the last few words were as soft as a caress. " I always said you were the cleverest woman I ever knew, Catherine," returned her husband, ad miringly. "You ought to have married Oliver, for as far as cleverness goes you two are a match : Oliver, confound the fellow's impudence, has more brains in his little finger than I have in my whole body." But, as usual when Romney made these humble speeches, his wife only looked at him with worshipping eyes : he was a king among men, and yet his Kitty, as he loved to call her, satisfied him. Elsie's great fault in Captain Carfax's eyes was that she was an heiress ; this was a serious blemish, and nearly prevented him from proposing to her ; but he learned two or three proverbs by heart, such as " Gold is dross," " Manners makythe man," " Faint heart ne'er won fair lady," and a few others ; and when he felt his pride was sufficiently well nourished, and Elsie's filthy lucre had shrunk to its right proportions in the scale of the universe, he made tracks, as the people say, and his chariot wheels ceased to drive heavily.

So much in life depends on one's own philoso phy. If Diogenes had been thin-skinned, and had cared more for people's opinion than for his own stoicism, he would hardly have lived in a tub with contented equanimity : and even Simeon Stylites, unsupported by a supernatural love of asceticism and maceration, might have repented and bemoaned himself on his pillar. No one could long look dignified in the pillory, even before the rotten eggs appeared ; dignity requires the use of the limbs, or at least the free carriage of the head. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus remarks somewhat pithily, " Constantly, and, if it be possible, on the occasion of every impression on the soul, apply to it the principles of Physic, of Ethic, and of Dialectic." This is vague, at least to the feminine understand ing : he is better where he says, " No man will hinder thee from living according to the reason of thy own nature : nothing will happen to thee con trary to the reason of the universal nature."

Captain Carfax's bumps or rather organs of ac quisitiveness and firmness being unusually promi nent, nothing, humanly speaking, could hinder him from making love to the young heiress ; and as Oliver generally succeeded when he gave his mind to a thing, Elsie's chances of escape were nil. He was admiring her with all his heart at that moment. If she looked so pretty in the dumps, he was the luckiest fellow in the world ; for of course every woman had her little tempers, and so long as she did not look ugly or sour, and the temper was not of the sullen or vindictive kind, he thought he could put up with it ; but when Elsie's mouth drooped at the corners in that irresistible way, his stoicism, albeit ofthe Diogenes or Simeon Stylites sort, vanished in a moment. He was ab surd, he was a fool, but he could not bear the child to look unhappy, and so — and so — but any lover over age could predict exactly how Oliver would act, and what he would say.

" Do you feel better now, darling, — just a tiny bit happier ?" " Yes — oh ! I don't know," and then, clasping her little gray-gloved hands, which had somehow got mixed up with Oliver's, she continued rather hysterically, " but I have been so dreadfully un happy, — and you did not care." " How do you know ? Were you looking at me?" Oliver put this atrocious question quite calmly, but Elsie flamed up in a moment : " No, of course not. Why should I look at you, when you have made me so miserable ? I never wanted to come to Fordham ; you ought not to have asked me to do such a thing; no girl ought to be put in such a position ; and I have been crying. What will Mrs. Romney think of me? Oh, if I were only safe with Uncle George and Aunt Minnie!" — this being Mrs. Fielding's sobriquet; and here Elsie dabbed her face with a small modi cum of French cambric that she called a hand kerchief.