Ought we to Visit Her?

Front matter

©W©ISI_ WM TT(© .WHS, __ SI HIE? OUGHT WE TO VISIT HER? BY MRS. EDWARDES, author or "ARCHIE LOVELL," "STEVEN LAWRENCE, YEOMAN," "SUSAN FIELDING," ETC. LONDON: KICHAED BENTLEY AND SON. 1872. [All Rights reserved.} CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAOE I. A QUESTION OF FINANCE 1 II. A QUESTION OF DUTY 10 III. ONLY DONKEYS 22 IV. THE PRINCESS CZAETORISKA .... 30 V. FORTUNATELY, THERE ARE RULES ... 36 VI. YOUNG RAWDON GAINS HIS FREEDOM . . 46 VII. THE "GRANDE DUCHESSE " WALTZES . . 53 VIII. THE BOOK OF MARTYRS 70 IX. BLOSSY'S DEPLORABLE PASSIONS ... 86 X. FADED DAFFODILS 98 XI. JANE'S FIRST TASTE OF RESPECTABILITY . . 105 XII. APPROPRIATED ANGELS . . . " .117 XIII. LADY ROSE GOLIGHTLY 133 XIV. DOMESTIC AND RETROSPECTIVE .... 142 XV. THE CIGARETTE OF PEACE .... 146 XVI. CHAMPAGNE FROM TUMBLERS . . . .164 XVII.

HAS SHE ASKED YOU 1 173 XVIII. IN THE CAMP OF THE PHILISTINES . . .179 XIX. LOVERS CONTENTS. IV CHAPTEE PAOIC XX. FRIENDS 196 XXI. "HAS THE DOLL GOT A HEART?" . . . 203 XXII. AMONG " THE PROFESSION "... . 209 XXIII. THOSE DEAR HERVEYS 220 XXIV. A MIDNIGHT MEETING 234 XXV. WITH DOUBTFUL ASSOCIATES .... 241 XXVI. RAWDON CRIES PECCAVI ! 250 XXVII. BLACKBALLED 268 XXVIII. ALONE . . 278 XXIX. HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF MALTA . . . 289 XXX. " NOTHING IS AGAINST MY PRINCIPLES !" . 297 XXXI. HOPE OR DREAD % 307 XXXII. THE SECRET OF JANE'S LIFE .... 313 XXXIII. MR. THEOBALD FOLLOWS UP HIS LUCK . . 325 XXXIV. THE RIGHT AND WRONG OF THINGS. . . 330 XXXV. WIVES — AND HUSBANDS ! 342 XXXVI. A DAYLIGHT ORGIE 349 XXXVII. ALL THE FAULT OF THE CHAMPAGNE 35C XXXVIII. SOCIETY IN FULL DRESS 367 XXXIX. "YOUR SWEET LITTLE YES"- .... 37t XL.

" GOOD-BYE FOR EVER" 3S9 XLI. ALONG THE RAILROAD TO RUIN . . . 39y XLII. FAST AND LOOSE WITH DESTINY . . . 40£ XLIII. LORD BARTY AND HIS FRIENDS . . .41: XLIV. THE CLOSING SCENE 42;. L OUGHT WE TO VISIT HER?

Chapter I

A QUESTION OF FINANCE. A sitting-room in one of the best hotels in 'Spa ; the hour, four in the afternoon ; husband and wife alone together. " Forty and eighty are certainly one hundred and twenty," says Mr. Theobald, resting his forehead on his hand, and applying himself resolutely to a sheet of paper covered with figures that lies before him. " From this subtract fifty ; add ten ; divide by six. Jenny, my dear," after a minute or more of intense men tal difficulty, " I don't know where the balance can be, but on paper, and according to all the four rides of arithmetic, we are exactly fifty pounds better off than I thought." " Then you have forgotten to put down something,'' answers Jane. " The only kind of arithmetic I believe in is counting one's cash. How much money have you got in your pocket V Jane's husband takes out a penknife, a book of cigarette paper, and four napoleons.

He is an exceedingly near sighted man, aud has to put up his eye-glass in order to survey his pro perty as he spreads it, in a neat row, upon the table. " Ridi culous to think" — the eye-glass falls with a clink against his watch-chain — "ridiculous to think, in the face of all these rows of figures, that we are reduced to four napoleons, Jane !" " I remember the days when I thought four napoleons riches. Why, only last Christmas I made a winter-dress for myself, and a whole suit for Blossy, with less than four napoleons. Oh, Theobald," looking suddenly up from her work, a diaphanous little blue cloud that shall presently be a bonnet, " what a queer sensation it is to think we are rich people at last ! that it doesn't matter really whether we happen to have four napoleons or forty in our pockets !"

" I don't think any sensation on the subject of money ought to be queer to us," says Mr. Theobald ; " and as to feeling rich — why, I never felt in my life before that I was a pauper till now. As long as we lived — well, on nothing particular, Jenny, the dregs of capital, ill-luck of friends, and other eccentricities of fortune — poverty was too undefined to weigh upon me. To morrow was a scoundrel with whom we had no personal acquaintance. To-day a jovial good fellow with whom we were glad to share our bottle of champagne while it lasted. Now " "Now your cousin is dead, bless him ! and we shall live in a home of our own in our own dear country," interrupts Jane, with visible pride. " I hope we shall like our own dear country when we get there," remarks Mr. Theobald. " Our home, too. We have done very well without a home hitherto ; I mean we have carried it about the Continent very conveniently — a nieershaura pipe, a work-box, and Blossy's doll !

How could we be more at home than we are at this minute here, and how, my dear Jenny, how, in the name of fortune, do you suppose we are going to keep up a place like Theobald's on our pittance of an income 1" " Pittance ! You call six hundred a-year (and we shall have every farthing of that the lawyer's letter says so) you call six hun dred a-year a pittance ! " " Six hundred a-year is enough for any man when it is not an income," replies Mr. Theobald. "Given, no capital, no position, the habits of vagrants, and the principles of — well, well, Jenny, let bygones be bygones. But, given certain conditions, and six hundred a-year, got no one knows how, and spent after the same fashion in the course of a year, is sufficient for any man, particularly if he has a wife who can make her bonnets and dresses, and sufficient sense in his own head to keep clear of England."

"The dream of my life is England," says Jane, witha certain wistfulness of tone. "Not London — I know London too well to dream about that — but the country, a jolly homelike old country-place such as Theobalds must be " " And with the society of English people, all better off than ourselves, both as regards this world and the next, for excite ment ? Ah, I hope the reality will come within a hundred miles of the dream. We have been very contented as Pariahs, my dear Jenny ; I hope we shall be equally so when we set up as Brahmins." And Mr. Theobald, again having recourse to his eyeglass, takes a meerschaum from his pocket, fills it, strikes a vesuvian, and composedly begins to smoke. " A whole batch of our nearest Chalkshire neighbours are now in Spa, Jane," he resumes after a time, " arrived here from Germany last night.

The Crosbies, pere et mere ; the young hopeful, Rawdon ; and the red-haired heiress, Miss Marsland, whom Rawdon's mamma destines him to marry. I ran against them all this morning, tnought I remembered old Crosbie's face, and, assisted by the visitor's book, found out who they were. Jenny, my dear, what will life be like when you begin your little battle for social existence with women like Mrs. Crosbie ? She is clothed in an olive-green silk of the same awful and uncom promising texture that I remember about my own sisters years ago. Virtue sits throned upon her forehead, exclusiveness in her eye " " And what does all this matter to us ? and why should there be a battle between me and anybody?" interrupts Jane. "I want these Chalkshire people to like me — well, to tolerate me, because I'm your wife ; and for Blossy to grow up " " Into a Miss Marsland ?" finishes Theobald, as his wife hesitates.

" Quite impossible, Jane. Blossy is your daughter." " Blossy hasn't got red hair," cries Jane, warming. " Blossy mayn't be a lady any more than me, but she will be a pretty I — woman some day, whether your fine country people notice her motheror not. And a pretty woman " But the sentence remains for ever incomplete. Jane gives a significant nod at the reflection of her own bright face in an opposite looking-glass, then bends it down again over her work, and at the end of another five minutes the bonnet is finished. Minute classifications of the human race are, as a rule, failures when we try to reduce them to practice. But it may be said broadly, perhaps, that women can be divided into two sections — those who know how to make a bonnet, and those who do not. Jane knows how to make a bonnet right well, and never has she felt the consciousness of triumphant art stronger in her soul than at this minute.

" I don't say anything about black lace," she bursts forth ener getically, and apropos of nothing, as is her habit ; Mr. Theobald, his feet perched on the window-sill at a higher elevation than his head, a cloud of tobacco-smoke floating upward from his lips, turns his head a good half-inch to listen ; " any one not absolutely a fool can make a bonnet out of black lace. But gauze ! blue gauze ! I should like to know whether there's a lady — yes, and what's more, a milliner — in Chalkshire that could make a bonnet like this ?" " Not one of them could look as you will look in it, my dear Jenny," says Theobald, in his pleasant lazy voice. Jane turns away with just visible impatience from the com pliment, and walking across to one of the many mirrors with which the room is lined, begins the process (a process beset with misgivings even to the fairest and youngest woman living) of " trying on" her bonnet.

To say that it is not absolute perfection, needing no after touch, no subtle inspiration of mature genius, would be only to say that the artist is mortal. It must be pinched back off the temples ; must be raised the third of an inch in diadem ; the effect must be hazarded of knotting the gauzy strings around the throat, then of letting them stream unbound upon the shoulders ; finally, one must see oneself— aided by an opposite mirror — in different angles : profile ; three-quarters ; in perspective ! " It is perfect," cries Jane, at last. " I never looked better in a bonnet in my life !" And saying this she advances and stands before her husband ; stands before him, no longer with an air of questioning or doubt, but rather with the calm consciousness of assured artistic success written on her face.

What a fresh face it is ! Mrs. Theobald has been married close upon four years, but her cheeks are just as blooming, her blue eyes as limpid, her smile as debghtfully frank, as on the day when Theobald, after a fortnight's acquaintance, made her, an unfledged ballet-girl of sixteen, his wife. She is, but scarcely looks, above the middle height of English women, has large well-balanced shoulders, an exquisite waist — if judged by a sculptor's, not a corset-maker's standard — and decidedly more of undulating, flowing ease in her movements than women of the world are prone to display. "Till I was sixteen — till the time you raised me above my station, sir — I was trained to move my limbs well," says Jane, when Theobald occasionally hints to her how vividly some trick of gait or manner brings old theatrical associations before his mind.

" And although I am in the position of a lady now, I can't remember always to be awkward." Whalebone and steel have as little share in her lithe sym metry as have Kalydor or pearl-powders with the honest car nation and white of her complexion. Everything about Jane is real ; terribly real, impostors of all classes are made to feel when they come too nigh her. She is somewhat untidy at times ; being her own milliner, a dress or bonnet, wanted for such an hour, has occasionally to be finished imperfectly as regards the length of stitches ; but clean — clean, her husband affirms with gravity, to a vice. The smell of primroses, the sweetness of April fields, all things wholesome, out-of-door, vernal are irresistibly summoned before your vision when you look at Jane. Her face is the delight of artists, the despair of ? 6 photographers.

It has not a perfect feature, and yet, with its changeful expressions and brilliant colouring, and absolute naturalness, it is so perfect ! " The good looks of youth and robust health," say her detractors, who are, without exception, of her own sex. "Her mouth is too wide, her eyes are common place. She has two distinct marks of smallpox on her forehead, and you have only to look at her in a mirror to see that her nose is not set straight on her face." Poor Jane ! And she continues charming still. On this particular afternoon — an afternoon destined, in more ways than one, to prove a landmark in her life — she is dressed in a little striped blue-and-white muslin of twenty-five francs, with a black-lace cape round her shoulders. A pair of cream coloured gloves, a white parasol, a fresh-gathered rose for her waist-bslt, lie in readiness on her work-table.

" You are coming with me, Theobald ?" For a long minute Mr. Theobald's eyes and pipe have been literally sending forth incense at the shrine of Jane's vanity. " Do now, like a good old soul ! It isn't much trouble to walk as far as the avenue, and then, if these Chalkshire people are about " " Oh ! you are afraid of the Chalkshire Mrs. Grundy, already, are you, Jenny ? Well, I'll come and do a little respectability, for her edification, by-and-by, if I can remember not to fall asleep meanwhile. As a precautionary measure, hadn't you better take Blossy for your chaperon now ?" " Blossy went out with Elize after her dinner. Young monkey, see what she has been doing here !" Jane picks up a hideously battered doll, into whose dropsical body shreds of blue crape, ribbon, and other odds and ends of finery, are thickly pinned.

" Isn't that taste ? What, not for a baby only three years old ! And see, she's actually cut Nancy's hair short on the forehead, to be in the fashion, bless her heart !" " Bless her — bless her !" says Theobald, stretching out his hand theatrically over Nancy's battered head. The colour rises into Jane's cheeks. " Oh, you always turn "things into ridicule ; you never see any cleverness in what the child does — but 7 do. Very likely she won't be accomplished, book-clever, as your fine county ladies are, but she'll be able to work at her needle, to use her hands, to be useful, Mr. Theo bald ! and, as far as I can see, those are the first accomplishments men require from their wives." Mrs. Theobald puts Nancy tenderly aside, takes up her gloves and parasol, and moves towards the door. " If Blossy can use her hands (and her tongue) as her dear mother does, Jenny, she'll be a treasure, an inestimable treasure, to the man who is fortunate enough to win her."

" Yes — you mean so much of that ! I know so well what your compliments are worth !" But she turns, half mollified. A word can thaw, as a word can chill the girl, so long as the word be spoken by Theobald's lips. Mr. Theobald raises himself from his reclining position, and takes his pipe from between his lips. " I mean it always when I say flattering things of you, my love. If Blossy only inherits half of her mother's admirable qualities, she will be " " Make haste, please. I don't want to lose more than I can help of the band. If poor little Blossy inherits my gifts? " " She will be an exceedingly charming woman, Jane. A good milliner ; on occasion, a good cook ; a perfect dancer ; a thorough adept in the art of making any young fool who is taken by her pretty face miserable ; and to her husband at all times the most excellent company in the world."

The blood is not iii Jane's cheeks alone now. It stains her forehead, her throat ; an angry tremble comes round her lips. "A cook — a milliner — a dancer. Oh, I understand you, Theobald — a dancer ! And this, after four years, is the highest praise you can find to give mes Theobald by now is thoroughly amused. No sarcasm, how ever bitter, can scathe his well-oiled spirit. How shall he guess that a jest, lightly spoken, lightly meant, may have power to wound Jane's jealous heart to the quick ! " I dare say I could find much more if you would give me time to think. You have faults, Jenny, of course, who has not? But experience will cure these — experience and the salutary advice of judicious female friends, to which our altered position in life will now enable you to have access. There are my sisters—a little crooked-tempered, a little straight-laced, certainly, but an epitome of all female wisdom and propriety in them selves, Charlotte especially.

Then, if you behave very well, you may get to know our neighbour, Mrs. Crosbie ; perhaps, in time, the archdeacon's wife, and " " And you think sermons preached to me by any of these women will do me, Jane Theobald, good ? Where is their right to preach ? They are better born ; they have nev§r worked for their bread ; have never toiled at a rehearsal, or grilled up among the gas battens in a transformation scene ! Does this entitle them to mount the pulpit ?"■ " Morally, no ; socially, yes ?" "Then I hate such socialism." Theobald successfully represses a smile ; " and I despise such morality. And if any of them were to preach to me, and I was to listen — which I shouldn't — it would demoralise — yes, demoralise me '" "Don't use strong language, my dear. It is a question exclusively of finance.

If we had come into six thousand a year, instead of six hundred, we should be the nicest people in Chalk shire, Jenny, and want sermons from no man." "I've read in the papers," goes on Jane, her tone waxing hotter and hotter ; " I've read in the papers lately about the grand model markets set up in Bethnal Green, and such places — set up for the poor. Bishops and lords at the opening cere mony, no selling on Sundays, cleanliness, ventilation, marble slabs — every advantage ! And the poor won't go to them, and will sooner get worse things, and pay dearer to their old friends the costermongers in the gutter.'' " The poor are proverbially an ungrateful set of devils," is Mr. Theobald's cheerful generalisation. " They are human beings, and I feel as they do," says Jane. '• Perhaps because I belong to the vagrant classes myself — I don't know about that— but I feel as they do.

I hate advantages that have a do-me-good flavour in them " " Certainly, my dear, but " " I was born among people, among ideas that no man or woman of your class of life can understand. You raised me from them, Theobald, and if I've become, as you say sometimes, 'an imitation better than the reahty of a lady,' it has been by living with you, and getting hold of your outward manners simply, but at heart " " Jennie !'" " At heart I've never given up my old associates, or my love for them, or my belief that their lives are as good as other lives, and I never will. No, not if all the ladies from all the counties in England were to preach to me at once. I'd be like the un grateful, heathen poor. I'd keep to the costermongers still." After this there is silence for a minute. Mr. Theobald is the first to speak.

"Come here, Jenny, child," holding out his hand to her, kindly. " No, thank you. I can hear quite as well where 1 am.'' "Do you know the meaning of the word 'logic'?" " Of course I do. I wasn't pretending to talk logic. I was talking common sense ; yes, and I was speaking from my heart, straight out, as you — as you, Theobald, never do !" " Do you know, in the very least, how all this animated discussion began?" " I know how it will end." She has moved across the room,. and looks at him, her fingers on the handle of the door. " You said something just now about my having to do battle with fine ladies like this Mrs. Crosbie, the fine ladies of your class, sir, in Chalkshire. A few minutes afterwards you tell me of the good I may get if I choose to listen, humbly and gratefully, to their advice.

Very well. Now, I'll tell you the truth plainly. If our going to England, and our living at Theobalds is to make me a liypocrite—I mean if I am to choose between becoming a hypocrite, and declaring war to the knife with every fine lady in Chalkshire, I have made my choice already. War to the knife!" Having uttered which trenchant declaration, Jane, bike a whirlwind (in blue and white muslin,) sweeps away from the room and down the staircase of the hotel, and Mr. Theobald is left alone to enjoy his pipe and cull the honey of his own reflections.

Chapter II

A QUESTION OF DUTY. All is bright, sunshiny, cheerful, in the out-of-door world. The season is crude as yet, for it is scarcely past the middle of June ; but there are visitors enough to give an air of quasi occupation to the streets and avenues of the little mountain town. And to those whose tastes affect sweet sunshine and verdant country, rather than princesses and archdukes, early summer is assuredly the time when Spa has most charms. It is now the gayest hour of the afternoon, and down in the Avenue of the Four Hours a band is playing. How pleasant it is to catch the distant notes, prolonged, hushed, heightened at intervals by the arena of wooded hills which form the walls of the al fresco concert-room ! How gloriously the sun streams through the linden boughs, turning the courtyard pavement of the Hotel Bellevue into a mosaic work of ever-shifting gold !

What an altogether palatable thing mere existence is ! What an excellent place is this best of all possible worlds to live in ! " Each one of us," says Gothe, " must be drunk once." Emma Marsland, yonder plain-looking English girl, who is eating cakes and drinking afternoon coffee under the shadow of the lindens, is drunk to-day ! She shows, I must admit, few outward signs by which you could guess at her condition. Emma has been brought up in a school that holds betrayal of feehng as a forfeiture of the sex's dignity. Hers, too, is a face not destined by nature to be the index of the soul. But still, for all her calm exterior, the wine of life runs warm and tingling through her veins ; the joyfullest cup we any of us taste, from our birth to our burying, is at her lips. Emma Marsland loves, and believes herself to be loved in return.

For one day — as likely as not, one only, out of a perfectly sober, common-place life — every beat of the little heiress's heart, every breath she draws, is intoxication. " How good the coffee always is abroad, mamma." Not very poetic ; but this is what she says, not what she thinks. " And the kuchen" (Emma has learnt German for seven years in Chalkshire, and pronounces the word coo-ken,) " so crisp and short, better even than we got on the Rhine. I wonder whether they put much butter in them ?" " I should hope not, for your sake, Emmy," remarks a masculine voice at her side. " The dish was brought out, full, a minute ago, and you and mother have pretty nearly emptied it already." " Oh, Eawdon, what a shame ! Mamma, do you hear what Rawdon accuses us of ? " And poor Emma laughs and laughs again, a rather tittering little school-girl laugh, at Rawdon's exquisite stroke of humour.

" You are glad enough to get your own sherry-and-bitters of an afternoon, — you know you are, Rawdon, and you ought to be content, and not envy mamma and me our coffee and coo-ken. Don't you know they take the place of five o'clock tea to us now we are abroad ?" "Do they !" returns Rawdon, in the absent tone of a man who does not know a word he is saying. " La, la, la, la, lira . . ." He follows, half aloud, the opening bars of the distant waltz music, then is seized with a mighty yawn, which he strives gallantly, but in vain, to stifle in its birth ; and then lie crosses his arms, pulls his hat a little over his eyes, gazes up at as much blue sky as the lindens leave visible, and begins to whistle. He is bored, poor young fellow, but unconsciously ; takes no livelier interest in Emmy and the dead level of Emmy's small talk than he has done any time during his twenty-two years of life, but is unaware of his lack of interest.

If his mother would allow him to smoke he would be happier than he is, doubtless ; and if his mother and Emma would retire to their own apart ments in the hotel, and leave him and his father to their newspapers and their pipes, he would be happier still. Other anarchy is there none in Rawdon Crosbie's spirit. And yet all the combustible materials wanted for rebellion are ready stored there, waiting only the chance spark that shall kindle them into a flame. Does not every day's experience show us that this slumbering, negative, acquiescent kind of discontent is the very symptom of all others that tells surest when men's hearts are ripe for revolt ? I have spoken at length of Jane Theobald ; let me give a few words to the group of English people who are drinking their coffee beneath her window ; the Chalkshire neighbours, who are to be Jane's enemies, or friends, her monitors or her execu tioners, as fate may elect.

Mrs. Crosbie was a noted beauty in her youth. She is fifty years old now, but has not forgotten the trick of smile, the turn of head, the downcast bend of the eyelids, which were her strong points when she was the " beautiful Juliana Hervey." The beautiful Juliana Hervey who, after a dozen seasons' fruitless title-hunting, bestowedherself at eight-and-twentyupon Mr. Crosbie, a country gentleman of small means, smaller pretensions, and without a connection in the world worth mentioning. She is dressed always by the first milliner of her part of Chalkshire, adopts with unflinching courage whatever she believes to be the latest fashion of the day, and at the present moment wears a dress, bonnet, and shawl, each unde niable of its kind, but the sum total of whose effect absolutely sets your teeth on edge with its cruel discordancy.

Were you to talk to Mrs. Crosbie of dress as of a thing relative rather than final, hint to her of subtle combinations of colour, of artistic license, of subduing fashion to the age and complexion of each particular votary, I think she would at once have doubts as to the correctness of your moral character. All the best people about Lidlington employ the same milliner, as they con sult the same doctor, attend the same church, and talk the same scandal. And as long as the best people of the neighbourhood supply the cue, either to her thoughts, words, or actions, Mrs. ■Crosbie's conscience is at rest. She is a woman who never moves out of the safe and narrow groove of class prejudice. She knows, and wants to know, nothing about the abstract truth of things. She wants only to dress and dine, calumniate and pray, die and be buried as a woman belonging by birth to the Landed Gentry of her country should, and is content to debit Providence with the results.

Young Rawdon Crosbie, aged twenty-two years, and a lieutenant in Her Majesty's regiment of artillery, is a fail average specimen of his nation and class. Across his broad forehead is the genuine " gunner sunmark," or insignia of his craft ; his limbs, displayed by one of those knickerbocker cos tumes which our countrymen love to wear upon their travels, bear witness to the beneficial results of seven years' classical training on the heights of Harrow. His face is an honest red and-brown Englishman's face, by no means handsome in its present unfledged condition, but giving you an impression that it may become even strikingly so a few years later on. The head, with its close shorn black hair, is compact and solid, not precisely an intellectuallooking head, and yet a head that looks " full of brains," fuller of them indeed than Master Rawdon's speech and actions up to the present time would seem to betoken.