New Grooves ... Reprinted from 'Charles's Wain.'

Chapter I. Ethel

The curtain rises at the close of a mild September day, on a pretty English home in that county that has been brushed and combed and plaited into the semblance of a fair mosaic on a colossal scale — on the home of a Norfolk yeoman ; a man who lived in the house that his forefathers bad built three centuries ago, and who cultivated, in addition to the soil that his forefathers had won by the sweat of their brows, eight hundred acres of good arable land. That is to say, Edmund Borrodaile, Esquire, as he was called by right of those acres of his own of which mention has been made, had lived and moved and had his being here and in this way, but a very short time previous to the occur rence of the events that are to be chronicled now. Only the other day he had spoken forcibly, clearly and cleverly, as he always spoke, at a great agricultural advancement gathering, in favour of some of those latest improvements, the mere mention of which made the advocates of the non-innovation cause shiver upon their stand-points, and tremble for that torpidity which it seemed to be the main object of their stolid / souls to preserve.

Only the other day he had celebrated the finishing of twenty new airy cottages which he had built for the labourers on his estate ; only the other day his favourite greyhound had taken the first prize at the Norwich dog-show, and his promising two-year-old colt had run first in the best local race. All these things had happened only the other day, as it seemed ; and now he was lying in Swaff ham Churchyard, and his flocks and herds — the pet occupants of his stables and his kennels, — and his large and superior assortments of fanning implements, were advertised in the flowery phraseology of an auctioneer : — " For sale without reservation." Only the other day, too, something else had come to pass. His only daughter, Ethel Borrodaile, had come home from the Brighton boarding-school where she had been edu cated with the " usual " care, and at the unusual cost of two hundred a-year.

She had come home, apparently laden with physical and mental graces, and saturated, so to say, with the most elegant school-discipline ; and she had been pro nounced a great success by those who were assembled at the entertainment her proud, loving father gave in her honour " only the other day." Good blood had run in the prosperous Norfolk yeoman's veins, and he had borne about him a certain and marked look of race, which he had transmitted to his daughter. In these days of which I am writing Ethel Borrodaile had that about her which might have tempted a second King Cophetua to step down and greet her with the gladdest greeting of all to a girl — an offer of marriage, although she was not " more beautiful than day." Nevertheless she had beauty of an order that was beyond dispute — the beauty of rich, warm colouring, of suppleness of form, of intense vitality ; the beauty of untried power, and untainted youth ; of a perfectly pure organization, of a self-reliant heart, and an untroubled con science ; the beauty of one void of all desire to injure, and all dread of being injured ; the beauty of youth and unsuspicion, of fidelity and faith, of eyes bright and cloudless as a summer sky, and of warm golden hair.

This type of womanhood is not an unfrequent one. We get occasional glimpses of it at the Opera and in sequestered country parsonages. There is a breath of the South about it, yet it is devoid of all Italian languor and all Spanish fierceness. It is at the same time attractive and commanding, and the women who possess it are never either weak or wearisome. It was a girl of this order, whose re-appearance had so lately been the absorbing theme in the neighbourhood, who now sat struggling alone with the crushing feeling of desolation that would keep on creeping over her, in the gloaming of a dull September day. Routine — which is the mighty potentate in the world that always ensures obedience — had carried Ethel and Mrs. Borrodaile along through all the observances and uses of the day, just as though no gaping grave had just yawned to swallow up all their hopes and love, all their prosperity and peace, as it seemed.

No longer ago than the previous day the funeral (from which outsiders were already beginning to date events) had taken place ; and to-day they had ordered and eaten dinner, and attempted to make a selection between things they "might take" and things they " must leave"; for Edmund Borrodaile had died a bankrupt, and his widow and daughter would soon be adrift on the world with their " personalities " and nothing else. Mr. Borrodaile had been one of the directors of a local insurance company, and a fellow director had appropriated funds that did not belong to him. Neither the cause nor the consequences were at all extraordinary. When the affair exploded, the guilty man escaped to America, and it is confidently believed purchased a large tract of that land of freedom with some of his spoil ; while guiltless men in England (Mr. Borrodaile being one of them) bowed their heads to the law, which bereft them of every penny they had.

The sense of the sudden destruction which had come upon them drove some of these men to drinking : Mr. Borrodaile simply died of it. A long, laboured sigh from a sofa in the far corner roused the girl from the dream of dejection she had been indulging in for the last hour by one of the windows. She roused herself with a start, and stood up at once erect and lithe under her burden of sorrow. Then, even by the failing light that faintly filled the room, it could be seen that though her eyelids were swollen with crying, there was no languor, no faintness of spirit in the depths of her sweet grey eyes. There was plenty of power and much of repose in them, and as beseemed her eighteen years there was also much of womanly tenderness, and of a latent power of love. She moved across the room and half-sat half-knelt by the side of the sofa ; and she put out her little, strong, nervous, slender hand and touched her mother's cheek gently.

" I'm going to ring for the lamp," she said : " why should we be in the dark because we are unhappy ?" Her voice was clear and sweet as a silver bell as she asked the question ; but with all its clearness and sweetness there was an element of stir and animation in it that caused Mrs. Borrodaile to rouse herself from her recumbent position — the position of conven tional grief — and regard her daughter wistfully. " My dear child," she said in the most amiable and void of-suggestion monotone, " I do wish you would curb that restless spirit of yours: on such an occasion I should have thought, Ethel, that even you could have been contented to—" " Sit down and be indefinite, mamma?" the girl interrupted, "no, that's just what I can't do — and live." Then she contra dicted her words by sitting down, or rather by subsiding down in a half-sitting posture, and kissing the half-turned-away cheek, and caressing the limp form of the woman who at length repiningly got up, and presented a sitting figure of the bereaved Mrs. Borrodaile to the observation of any one who might be disposed to look at her.

We will avail ourselves of the inestimable benefit conferred, and look at her as she sits there in the light of the lamp that has just been brought in by her daughter's order. A woman with a moderately good physique undoubtedly, of middle height and middle size, and those " forty-five years " that are so generally " fat and well hking "; obviously, too, a woman who has never worn herself nor worried herself by taking thought for aught more than the details of the day. The lines in her fresh face are all owing to the death of her husband, and to the necessity that has been laid upon her of clearing out from the comforts round about her as soon as possible. The pallor on her cheeks is all owing to the death of her husband — and to that other cause ! The sudden supine ness which has seized her is a mere collapse ; she has always been an alert and lively dame hitherto ; in short, she is at this epoch one of the many women to whom it is not given to "suffer and be strong."

She would defend her womanly prerogative of suffering to the verge of the direst deed her mind can compass, and avow truthfully enough that she can be miserable and despairing with the best or the worst !■ But to be these things in any other than a passive way is beyond her, and she would look upon sitting up straight, and speaking out loud under her afflictions, as direct inspirations from the Evil One, whom she still accredits with a tail and cloven hoofs and a transpontine Mephistophelian strut. And Ethel is not like-minded to her mother. Does any mother reading this wincingly admit with a twinge of jealous pain that her daughter, too, has gone away from her, has gone out ? Does any daughter reading this flutter half-fearfully under the conviction that unwittingly her mind has wandered into new grooves, from which she would rather give up life than return ; into paths that her mother and her mother's mother never dreamt of treading, which may lead her — whither?

" Oh! Ethel ; this is. a sad, sad trial that has come upon us ; your poor father ! against my advice I'm sure ; and however we shall get out by the 30th of September, and what we are to do when we are out." Then she fell to weeping again, and Ethel rose up, and turned the lamp up higher. Her pose as she did so would have inspired an artist ; the lines of her full, supple young figure, each one as remarkable for strength as grace, — the turn of the head, that was wrapped about with such a wealth of dark golden hair, — the clear, firm gaze of the undrooping eyes that were longing for more light! Surely one would have been safe in prophesying an æsthetic career for her ! Querulously the bereft widowed woman spoke again : " Ethel, have you no regard for the price of oil, now? " Not a bit more than I ever had," the girl answered, " Mother, don't get as poor in spirit as you are in purse suddenly.

I must surely be good for something — be worth something, I mean ; and you have me left." There was a world of promise, of protection, of power in the way in which she turned to her mother as she said this. But Mrs. Borrodaile saw none of it; her eyes were blinded by the unshed tears that she was ready to let fall about her altered condition. " If your poor father had only listened to me, none of this might have happened perhaps," she whimpered, in her helplessness casting obloquy on the memory and the mind of the one she had always delighted to honour in his life in a way that would have savoured of inconsistency and injustice if she had not been " only a woman." " But, mamma, you did'nt understand the subject, did you? " I knew nothing about it," Mrs. Borrodaile said, rousing into animation at once ; " I knew nothing about it ; according to my idea, it's not a woman's province to go studying subjects connected with business matters that appertain solely to men."

" Then you can hardly regret that my poor father didn't listen to you," Ethel said, with blunt thoughtfulness. " Yet who is to counsel a man if his wife does not ? " Mrs. Borrodaile said, bridling promptly; "what better counsellor, in fact, can a man have than the wife who must stand and fall with him — whose interests are identical with his? I desired nothing better than to be the recipient of his joys and sorrows and plans," Mrs. Borrodaile continued, in a burst of irrelevant woe that was perplexing to Ethel, accustomed as she was to kindred ebullitions. " I am sure of that, dear," the daughter said, caressing her mother ; " but as we are talking about it, you won't mind my saying this, I am sure: — what would have been the use of papa taking counsel with you about a subject that you were not competent to give counsel upon? and you said you knew nothing about it," she added, deprecatingly.

" My dear Ethel," Mrs. Borrodaile said, soaring away at once into heights of experience and maternity, " I am older than you ! and have lived longer in the world ! you will not deny this." Ethel nodded acquiescence in this undeniable statement. " Consequently, I may say, without arrogating too much, I think that I know rather better than you can know what a wife's duty is ; and I hold it to be one of a wife's chiefest and most important duties to warn her husband when she sees him plunging headlong into ruin : see what's come of it in this case," Mrs. Borrodaile said, relapsing abruptly into irrelevancy, as she glanced round the handsomely-furnished room, from which she would soon be torn. " Poor mamma ! poor dear mother ! " Ethel said, pityingly ; " who knows better than I do that you would have saved my father the loss of the least thing he had, if you could !

I only wanted to try and trace out, for my own guidance, the line between wishing to do what is best, and knowing how to set about doing what is best." "What do you mean?" Mrs. Borrodaile said, with the same severity she would have brought to bear on any dereliction from the social duties she had been brought up to esteem, which Ethel or another might possibly be guilty of. " If a person wishes to do what is right, he or she can do it, depend upon it." Ethel shook her head. " The drawing-master used to say that the greatest difficulty he met witli in teaching his art was to get his pupils to perceive, — not to get them to reproduce what they once perceived." " I confess these strong-minded distinctions are beyond me," Mrs. Borrodaile said, languidly. " If they're anything, they're subtle distinctions, not strong-minded," Ethel said, laughing.

" They're all nonsense," Mrs. Borrodaile said sharply ; " as if one person doesn't see as much as another when they're both looking at the same thing— unless one of them happens to be blind," she added hesitatingly; "but what all this has to do with your poor father having declined to listen to my advice — advice which would have averted this ruin — I can't see, I can't for the life of me see." Mrs. Borrodaile having got upon the firm and frequently travelled ground of the slight that had been offered to her emanations of the spirit in the shape of intuitive fears, cantered off quite briskly again. Ethel made no reply. She traced the line that had linked the two subjects together clearly enough. But it is paralyzing to the faculties of youth to batter its argumentative power against stone walls.

" Ring for my glass of sherry and biscuit, dear," Mrs. Borrodaile said, after a long pause, during which pause she had been softly napping, and Ethel had been " perceiving " many things very clearly, though her eyes were only fixed on the flame of the lamp. "Oh dear! Oh dear! only another fortnight here, and then poverty and misery. I do wish Poonah painting would sell now, I used to do that very nicely when I was a girl." " I must be worth something," Ethel said, pausing with her hand on the bell; "I was thinking what I was worth, mother dear, that's why I didn't answer you before." " Your education has cost a great deal — the sums and sums that have been lavished upon it ! " " I don't hke to allow myself to feel that it has all been a mistake," the girl said, slowly coming back and standing over the sofa, " I fear it — but I don't want to let myself believe it yet."

"A mistake! after being at such a school, under such masters ! " Mrs. Borrodaile almost screamed : " not but what I always told your poor dear father that he was educating you above your sphere." " A woman can't be educated above her sphere," Ethel said quickly ; " that's not the mistake I meant ; but I haven't learnt any one thing well enough to justify me in teaching it to another ; there ! " the girl cried, " I have worded my fear — how I hope it is a false one !" " It will break my heart if you go out as a governess, Mrs. Borrodaile sobbed. "Yet I can't be anything else I suppose," Ethel said mournfully. Then she hazarded the suggestion that she might be a cook perhaps. "And I shall be left alone to perish," Mrs. Borrodaile moaned betweeen the sips of her sherry. " No, Ethel, your going out as a governess I should positively forbid, if I thought for one instant that you were serious ; with your beauty; ridiculous!

Whatever comes, I insist that we make a home and keep together." " I wonder what poor mamma is trying to shadow out in her brain," Ethel thought that night : " how happy I have been till now — and how very unconscious of my own utter uselessness !" Then poor weary harassed eighteen put its head on the pillow, and, for that night at least, was troubled with no more carking doubts and fears. There is a good deal of pathos in the majority of partings. Quite as much, and to the full as true pathos in the tearing one self away from the places as from the people who have endeared the places to us. The fact " No more by thee my steps shall be, for ever and for ever " is not a lamentable thing in itself very often, when the bare fact alone is taken into consideration. But then it becomes impossible to consider the bare fact alone ; a thousand associations, some tender, some sad ; some true, some lacking the genuine ring of the metal, but all touching, crop up as the hour of parting approaches.

And we regret the dear old house, that was neither wind nor water tight, maybe, but where we have lived and loved, and suffered worse things than smoky chimneys, quite as keenly as we do the commodious modern mansion replete with every convenience. The home that after the 30th of September was no longer to be the home of the Borrodailes was very dear to the hearts of the two desolate women who were going out from it. All the elder woman's married life had been spent in it, and she loved it as we do love inanimate things that tend to the fur therance of our comfort. And to Ethel it was dear in a way that was warmer than the domestic one that made the severing of the tie hard to endure to her mother. In the dear old manor-house, the possession of which entitled the Borrodailes to rank immediately after, if not with the county families, the girl had had her first romance.

It was a romance that had been speedily nipped by the cold frost of parental prudence, and by that fell foe to love's young dream, expediency. But the vision of it had been long in leaving her, and indeed it had not left her quite what she was before. She had not been disappointed, as the phrase is : that is, no man had lied to her as men may not lie to one another unpunished. But in her very young girlhood her interest had been roused by the second son of an old family in the neighbourhood to whom the Borrodailes were very lesser lights indeed. Her interest had been roused by Mr. Ernest Burroughes, and her admiration had been excited by a resolve he made five years ago when he attained his majority. A family living had been kept open for him, — a good living of some seven or eight hundred a year, — and he was blind to his own interests, his own people said, and insisted on entering another of the learned professions, wherein he would taste the sweets of pennilessness for some years to come, at least.

Moreover, not one of the Burrougheses had ever been known to descend to the practice of medicine before. However, he decided on doing so, and Ethel Borrodaile thought him a hero for his decision. It was in the first flush of her seventeenth summer that the girl met him at some of those traps for the unwary — garden-parties in the country. And after these parties his sisters, who were rigid in their guardian ship of the matrimonial rights of the family, were very bitter against Miss Borrodaile, and spoke of her as " that pretty farmer's daughter," a phrase that was as detrimental socially as it was bad grammatically. It will be understood from these hints that Ethel's gleam of romance had been of the briefest description ; nevertheless she had had it : and for the fuller portrayal of her character it would have been mentioned, even had it not been necessary to introduce the name of the man who will play a prominent part in this drama of life.

It had been brief — very brief indeed. Still, it had been long enough for many things about her to bear the impress of it. Down there, by the laurel hedge that separated one side of the wide lawn from the by-road, she had stood one sunny day in June watching him gentle a colt the purchase of which he was negotiating with her father. Even now, in these late September days, the variegated foliaged geraniums that he had got cuttings of from his father's gardener were blooming finely in the octagon bed before the drawing-room window. A little shudder thrilled through her when she saw the auctioneer's men mutilating the plants by dragging heavy articles that were to be sold in the open air carelessly hither and thither over the bed that she had tended herself. She chased the shudder away with a smile presently, telling herself that those things did not concern her now, and that probably Mr. Weston, the man who had bought the property, would not care about such refinements as octagon beds and variegated foliage.

On the whole, she did not wish him to care for them ; they were sacred to her and to a time. She wished that her conscience would allow her to go out in the dark, when there was no one about, and destroy that little patch of luxuriant beauty. " If he has a wife and daughters, they shall arrange the garden for themselves, and not have the benefit of my plans," she told herself: and then she drew a fancy sketch of the old place metamorphosed by the cockney tastes of their successors, and wondered just a little what Mr. Ernest Burroughes would think of the change if he ever -rode down that by-road again. Daily and hourly the girl had to combat her mother's prejudices and soothe her mother's fears, and smooth the way to their departure. It was very hard work, for they had so little to depart upon.

A brother of Mrs. Borrodaile, an old army man, who had held good posts both in India and England, and so had been able to lay up good store for himself, came down to " investigate matters," as he termed it ; and when he had investigated, and bitterly reviled his sister and niece, and the memory of his dead brother-in law, for what was no fault of theirs,— when he had done these things, he magnanimously proposed to allow the widow sixty pounds a-year. As he was a childless widower, and as no human being besides his late wife's sister benefited by his wealth, it is to be hoped that his gorgeous generosity will meet with its due reward. It boots not to delay in the telling the tale of what followed ; they were to leave on the following morning, and Ethel was making a melancholy progress round the house, bidding fare well to all the dearly-loved old things amongst which she had grown up.

She was in the drawing-room alone, bending over a beautiful little carved ebony cabinet, inlaid with ivory and brass, that her father had given to her many years ago to keep perfumes and letters and trifles in. There had been a question raised as to whether or not she might keep this ; but the decision had gone against her. It was of value, and might sell for a large sum, and so it belonged to her late father's creditors. She opened it now, and took out some dried roseleaves that had been embalmed about the time the colt was tried down the by-road, and as she opened the window and scattered the leaves to the wind she said aloud — " Even my poor little cabinet must go ; " and as she said it the door was opened softly and the servant ushered a gentle man into the room. A plain man, of about forty, with a square jaw, and a good many harsh lines in his face; with close-cropped hair, and a certain scowling look in his eyes that came from his being short-sighted.

A man who might have been a horsey country gentleman, or a well-to-do retired jockey in his best clothes, judging from his appearance and costume, which consisted of a prominent gold fox's head fastening down the exuberant folds of a blue neck-tie, a short shooting-coat, tights and gaiters. " I must introduce myself, Miss Borrodaile," he said in a voice that was not at all in accord with the slang style of his dress. " My name is Weston, and my mission is to beg that your mamma and yourself will do me the honour of remain ing here as long as it is perfectly convenient for you to do so." Ethel bowed, and beat about vaguely for an instant or two in her mind for words in which at the same time she could express her thanks for the courtesy and her profound sense of the utter impossibility of acceding to it.

" You are very kind, but — the auction is to-morrow," she said with a glance that implied " You stupid man ! how could we stay here without things?" " There will be no auction. I have been fortunate enough to purchase everything. I must not hope to see your mamma : wiU you be kind enough to convey my compliments and wishes to her."- " But you shall see mamma," Ethel said impulsively, passing him on her way to look for her mother. Then she paused, and came back to him: " Mr. Weston, I wish we could stay here for a week, just to show you how grateful we are for your kindness; but it's out of the question; — don't you under stand? — we should have to go over all the ground again." He understood her perfectly ; but he lacked the power of making that perfect comprehension of his clear. " God bless her! she's but a child," he thought, wistfully regarding her as she went out of the room.

Then he went up to the little stand that held the ebony cabinet, and he touched the inanimate box with as chivalrous a tenderness as he would have touched a woman's hand. " Poor little trifle ! she regretted even you : — what an unclouded creature it is." " Mamma, Mr. Weston is here." " The man that is going to turn us out," Mrs. Borrodaile said, rousing herself up : " What indelicacy to come here to night, vaunting his pride of ownership." " He wants to see you to — " Ethel began. " No, Ethel, no ! " Mrs. Borrodaile interrupted, " that is asking too much; the son of a London tradesman, however wealthy that tradesman may be, cannot be expected to know how to treat my miserably forlorn situation delicately ; but you ought to know, and you ought to have spared me." " He wants to tell you that he has bought all the things ; that there will be no auction ; that he is in no hurry to come in ; and that he hopes you will do him the honour of staying here as long as it suits you," Ethel gabbled out as quickly as she could.

Mrs. Borrodaile took her handkerchief from her eyes and looked at her daughter. " You have seen him ? " "Yes; he is in the drawing-room." " Is there any wife with him? " "No," Ethel said, impatiently, "he's alone. " " He wouldn't be alone if there was a wife to come," Mrs. Borrodaile said, rising up, and dragging the little shawl that always carefully enwrapt her, in woe more closely, about herself. " I shall see him, Ethel, for your sake." It was like a dream to Ethel when she went to bed that night. Things swam about her, and she felt sure of nothing, not even of herself. "Mamma" had abruptly altered her plans, and instead of going to the cheap lodging which her brother had taken for them in one of the secluded grots of Kentish Town, they were going to remain on at the Manor House. That question as to whether Mr. Weston had a wife or not was set at rest satisfactorily.