Walter Goring. A story

Front matter

WALTEK GORING WALTER GORING. % Stag. i;y ANNIE THOMAS, AUTHOR OF "DENIS DONNE," "ON GUARD.'' " THEO LEIGH," ETC. " And yet, believe me, good as well as ill, Woman 's at best a contradiction still." IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON : CHAPMAN & HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1866. [Tlie Eight of Translation is reserved.] LONDON : J3EADEURT, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. — VERT STRANGE! 1 II. — THE BRIDE AT HOME 23 III. — MRS. FELLOWES, SENIOR, ON PROPRIETY . . 35 IV. — MASTER AND PUPIL 46 V. — A LITTLE CLOUD 70 VI. — FRANK! 92 VII. — AGAINST THE GRAIN 105 VIII. — A PAINFUL MEETING 118 IX. — HOSTESS AND GUEST 138 X. — A WALK TO THE COTTAGE 154 XI. — FRESH RESOLUTIONS 172 XII. — THE PRESCOTTS AS GUESTS AT THE HURST . 189 XIII. — TWO OFFERS [] 205 XIV. — A SYREN SMILE VI CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE XV. — DAISY WINS 235 XVI. — THE LAST DAY IN THE OLD HOME . . . 249 XVII. — THE AUCTION 265 XVIII. — " SHE SHINES ME DOWN" .....

Chapter I. Very Strange

! Young Mrs. Fellowes bad a very lender con science. Hard as it may be for those immaculate ones who never go wrong through impulse to believe it, the impulsive sinners get a goodly portion of their hell upon earth. Remorse is very apt to set in with them even before that for which they feel remorseful is fairly accomplished. Con sequently they have not so much pleasure even as an undivided interest in their current fault or folly might give them. Charlie was no exception to this hapless general rule. Her first evening's experience of The Hurst was a bitter one. It was made as miserable to her as a brace of captious, jealous, narrow-minded women, who yet have a certain amount of right on VOL. II. B their side, alone can make it. They meant her to feel sundry things, and she felt them forthwith as fully as they could desire.

They intended her to remember that she had gained much, and given nothing in this marriage. That she had brought no grist to the mill. Tbat they had been happy before she came, and were not happy now that she was there. That they had the first right to the allegiance of their son and brother ! All these things Mrs. Fellowes and Miss Dinah thought it well that Charlie should feel at once ; and all these things she felt without the smallest hesitation under their efficient treatment. Her first night in her new home was as hopeless, sleepless, miserable a one as she ever remembered to have passed. Her nerves and her conscience had it all tbeir own way with her. She raked up all tbe meaner motives by which she had been actuated in this marriage, and reviewed them sternly, and wept in her soul, owning that Nemesis had overtaken her justly.

She knew that sbe had accepted this man's love because it had opened to her a means of escape from a weary, tedious, joyless home. She knew tbat it was the desire to have an establishment and a stand-point of ber own which had led her to say " Yes," when Henry Fellowes offered her his honest unselfish love. He had put his whole capital into the firm, and she had come forward with a false promissory note, knowing that it was just a toss-up whether or not it would be eventually dishonoured. She had thought of tbe home she would have — of the position she would fill — of the taste she would be free to exercise as the idolised wife of a rich man. Now Nemesis had overtaken her. She was distrusted and disliked by his nearest relatives, and she "owned to herself that had they known the truth concerning her motives in marrying him, their dislike and distrust would have been founded on good grounds.

She was made to feel herself a mere cipher in the house where she had meant to rule a little queen. She was doomed to uncongenial companionship, from which she had not the smallest prospect of escap ing ; and sbe knew that she deserved it all, and acknowledged, that though hard, these things were but just ; for she had come to like her husband now, and so understood the nature of the sin she had sinned against him in marrying him merely for the furtherance of ber own social aims. She resolved — sensibly enough — that he should B remain in ignorance of the lax regard she had had for him in those first days when he had been brimming over with love for ber. The knowledge of it could do him no good— might possibly do him harm, in that it might render him a prey to sus picions of her all his life.

Praiseworthy as it is to cry mea cidpa, it is perhaps just as well to say it in a still small voice to oneself alone. To utter it aloud is noble, but rash. He should remain in ignorance of that early lax regard, and for the future his happiness and his honour should be all in all to her. Sbe would concentrate all her energies in furthering tbe former and redounding to the latter. She would bear and forbear for his sake — bow the neck gracefully to his mother, and suffer his sister with meek smiles. She would be as nothing in The Hurst — The Hurst ! — to be mistress of which she had married him. So, eventually, Nemesis might be appeased, and the mercenary motive of her marriage forgiven her. It was easy to come to these resolutions, and to feel humble, not to say abject, in the night, when she was worn out with remorse, sleeplessness, and disappointment.

But Charlie was a high spirited girl, full of vitality and impatient of con- ! 5 trol, stupidity, injustice, and other wearisome things. She knew herself, though she did make these resolutions, and vow to adhere to them, that she would be subjected to a thousand temptations to break or fling them aside ; and she could not go to her husband to strengthen and aid her ! For she knew that a recital of the resolutions might possibly lead to conjectures as to the reason for forming them. High-spirited as Charlie was, she did shrink from placing the fact before her hus band that when she married him he was little more to her tban a necessary but uncoveted appendage to The Hurst. The heart of a man is delicate ground to travel over. He might not find all sufficient compensation for this fact in the one that now she had grown to regard and estimate him properly.

It was easy to come to these resolutions in the night; but uncommonly hard to hold to them in the daytime. Henry Fellowes left his wife very much to her own devices the day after his return home. He farmed his own land, and he had been away from it for some time, therefore he was naturally desirous of seeing how things had gone upon it as soon as possible. Consequently directly after breakfast he went out, and Charlie was left to herself. She had asked him before be left, " If be would show her the house ?" and he had replied, " Oh, yes ! or Dinah will, won't you, Dinah ?" which was not at all the same kind of thing. However, when her brother was fairly off, Miss Dinah bore down upon her sister-in-law with a big basket of keys in her hand, and told Mrs. Fellowes, junior, tbat if she wanted to see The Hurst she must do so at once ?

" Perhaps I could find my way about by myself,"^ Charlie answered, unwarily, " I don't want to trouble you." To which Miss Dinah replied, that " they didn't like to have people running in and out of the rooms, and therefore they kept them locked." Hearing this, Charlie subsided into silence, and followed the gaunt creature, feeling very sorry for herself. It was a dreary progress that they made. The majority of the bedrooms were locked, and when they were opened they smelt and looked like sepulchres. They had all been furnished solemnly, and their shutters were all closed. In addition tc this lively treatment, they were, one and all, the shrine for huge funereal urns, in which the corpses- ! 7 of roses and other flowers, that had once been sweet and fair, were buried with bits of bay salt.

Charlie could not help lowering her voice in these rooms, and feeling more of a miserable sinner than ever. Anything more subduing than the spectacle of the bed and window curtains, all done up in pale holland shrouds, it is difficult to imagine. "Are they never used?" Charlie asked, when they came out of the fourth deserted room. " Never ;' but they are swept every week," Miss Dinah replied. "We are very particular about that ; and as I always keep the doors locked, no one can go in, so the furniture keeps beautifully. If one isn't very careful, things soon go to rack and ruin in housekeeping." CharHe tried to look wise on the subject. "So my sister found," she said. "Ellen has been married eight years, and she has furnished her drawing-room twice." " Rather extravagant, unless her husband got a fortune with her, I think," Miss Dinah replied, fixing Charlie severely with her maiden eye.

" Well, you have seen all the up-stairs rooms now, with the exception of my mother's and mine. I suppose you don't want to see them ? " " No, thank you," Charlie replied hurriedly, " I'll go down into the drawing-room. I'm so much obliged to you for having shown me the house." " Won't you find it cold in the drawing-room ? " Miss Dinah asked. She had been on the point of walking away, but she turned round and looked at Charlie as she asked this. " Oh, no ! I '11 have a good fire made up, thank >> you. " We never have a fire in the drawing-room in the morning," Miss Dinah said, decidedly. " The dining-room is well warmed and much more com fortable, we think ; besides, my brother Henry is accustomed to find us there when he comes in at eleven, and he won't bke any change made." She walked off when she had said this, and Charlie stood gazing after her in a half-bewildered way.

" I don't like to ask him — he will think me so inquisitive, as he has never told me ; but the place must belong as much to them as it does to my husband. Why on earth did he bring me here to be nothing ! " For about an hour Charlie went and sat in her dull, ugly bedroom. " It might be made so pretty ! " she thought as she looked at the big bay window, ! 9 which it had in common with many another room in The Hurst — " it might be made so pretty ! And then in the summer I should have some place in which I could sit, without feeling uncomfortable. I wonder if there 's a library ! " She started up as she thought this, and ran down-stairs. In the hall she saw a servant on her knees, sweeping up dust that was not there. " Where 's the library, or study ? — there is one ? " she asked ; and the girl replied, " That 's the door down at the end of that passage, M'm ; shall I get the key from Miss Dinah ?

" " Oh, no ! " Charlie answered. She felt intui tively that the library would not be worth the key ; besides, she was chilled and dispirited by her long sojourn upstairs. So she walked into the dining room, and seated herself in a chair by the fire, and tried not to see Mrs. Fellowes' irritating expression of being hard at work mending stockings. The old lady had taken no notice of her daughter-in-law on her entrance. She had gone on darning the stockings without even so much as looking up ; but Charlie had seen the ungracious look deepen on her face, and once more my heroine's tender conscience smote her keenly. " Supposing some instinct should have taught her that I married Harry without caring a bit for him ? " she thought. " No wonder she hates me — I hate myself." Then she sat and watched Mrs. Fellowes' grim face till its intense unpleasantness goaded her into speech.

" Are you not feeling well this morning ? " she asked as gently as she could. " Quite as well as I ever can expect to feel, thank you," Mrs. Fellowes answered tartly. " I have not much in this world to make me feel well, or look well," she added, as though she rather expected to be rewarded by looking robust when she was disembodied. The reply not being framed in such a way as to make a continuance of that subject pleasant, Charlie tried another. " I like the house very much — what I have seen of it." " Do you ? ' " Yes, very much. When my husband comes in, I shall make him take me into the library, and round to the stables and gardens. I want to know all about my home as soon as I can. I wish he would make haste in ! " " Don't you think it would be better if you ! 11 employed yourself with something useful, Mrs. Henry, instead of idling about, as you have been, all the morning ?

When your husband comes in, he will be better pleased to see you with some work in your hands, than to have you wanting to run about in the damp." " He won't see me with any work in my hands," Charlie replied, laughing. "Needles are things I never interfere with by any chance." " I 'm only glad," Mrs. Fellowes rejoined, with snappish emphasis, " that you have always been so well able to afford to pay people to do your work for you ; in this family we 're obliged to do many things that we don't quite like." Charlie rose quickly, and got herself away out of the room. " I can't stand it another morning! " she thought, as she ran up for her hat and shawl. "I would rather get frost-bitten than sit in the room with that horrid grim old woman. How shall I live through it, if my husband means always to be out of the house ?

" Then she went out, and walked about in the damp November ah', because there was no corner in her husband's home where she could be at peace. There was no unkind feeling towards the man she had married, in her heart; nevertheless, she did think within herself, " It would have been better for me to have tried the other path — the path that Walter Goring pointed out. I shall get blighted here — God help me ! " Her sensations were rather curious than agree able as she walked along over the land of which her husband was lord — walked along it for the first time. There was none of the usual womanly ela tion of heart at being the wife of a man who had a stake in the country. On the contrary, there was considerable depression. The sense of her own insignificance came over her strongly as she saun tered slowly over the soil, and felt, " All tbis is his ! — and I can't have a fire when I want it ! — and am told by an old woman whom I never saw till yesterday, that I ought to be ashamed of myself because I 'm not fond of darning stockings !

I know it would be better for us all in the end if I only stood up, and asserted myself; but " "But" conscience makes cowards of us all. She could not stand up and assert herself to the mother of the man whom she had used as a ladder —a thing by means of which she had hoped to climb out of obscurity. Perhaps a better woman than Charlie St. John would never have done this ; ! 13 but, unquestionably, no woman, however good in deed, could have more bitterly — more humbly — repented herself of the error. She was far too sen sitive to be a successful sinner. She suffered too surely and too sharply to make the game worth the candle. Perhaps no bride has ever felt more aggrieved than did this girl as she walked about The Hurst grounds the day after that " coming home," which is usually a bright era in a woman's life.

Had she been left uninterruptedly to herself, she would have beguiled the period of her husband's absence by bright thoughts of his coming back — in making herself at home, and manifest in the house, as it were. But she was not left to herself. She was left to a couple of hard, honest, narrow-minded women, who were perfectly justified, from their rigorous point of view, in being unpleasant to her. All her hopes had been dashed in a sudden and unexpected way, that was in itself subversive of many of her best intentions. She could not carry her grievance to her husband, for reasons that have been given before, and she knew that none other than her husband could help her in this strait. Altogether, she felt very miserable, and very much as if she were left to herself to perish, as she walked along under the trees through which the wind came moaning on that November morning, To have come to this pass at her age.

She could not help it; loving wife as she was now, or would have been had she been let, she had a feeling of having done so poorly with her life. To have brought her wonderful capacity for both pain and pleasure into such a commonplace market as this promised to be ! To have put herself, with her capabilities, into a position where she would be liable to such very little things in the way of troubles and annoyances. She pictured herself growing middle-aged in this companionship which she knew would grow more and more loathsome to her daily. Middle-aged under the auspices of the grim woman with the three-cornered shawl ! Old under the eyes of the sister who carried the keys of every room into which she (Charlie) desired to go, and who went by the name of Dinah ! To be helpless before them ; to have nothing beyond tbem; to have to trim her sails to the wind that suited them ; to learn to tolerate the life they liked !

She felt that she had wrapped up her talent in a napkin with a vengeance, as she thought ! 15 over these things, and knew them to be partly deserved, for had she not married solely and wholly for the sake of being free, unfettered, well-placed, and well-established ? The future of nothingness that had loomed before her in Robert Prescott's house had not been so dark a thing as this ; for this was clearly a judgment on the lightness with which she had suffered herself to be wooed and won without an atom of love on her part. After a time she reached the entrance to a little grass-grown lane, guarded by a little wicket-gate. She turned into it, and walked on scarcely heeding where she was going, till she came to a wall that was built across the road and into the meadows on either side. Suddenly she remembered the right of way question between old Mr. Goring and old Mr. Fellowes, of which her husband had told her, and she knew that she must be on the border of the Goring Place estate.

The thought brought back very pleasant memo ries of the man who now owned it, of the man who had once on a time — ah ! how long ago it seemed now !— fired her ambition in that drawing-room at Roehampton, and since then had said a few frank friendly words to her in a soft tone on the pier at Brighton. Their intercourse had been but a brief thing, but somehow or other it was very deeply graven on her mind. It had been but a brief slight thing, but she felt that it had been one of the sweetest, most graceful experiences of her life, and so she was grateful to the man who had given it to her. Is it a fact, that " women's hearts are made for minstrels' hands alone," and that they do lack half their tone when played by other fingers ? Certain it is that we, none of us, think that lady ill-endowed to whom nature " gave sense, good humour, and a poet," and the latter does not rank as the lesser good.

Thinking of him, and thinking of him kindly, the forlorn young bride who was so left to herself was seized with a great desire to see a bit of Goring Place. For a few minutes she seriously thought of trying to scale the wall ; but she gave up that idea quickly, for the wall was slippery with November damp. Then she leant against the par tition that had been made in ill temper, and went into a day-dream, wherein she saw herself altered and aged, and still a mere nothing at The Hurst ; and that yellow-haired girl whom she had met in the road near Portslade on the night of her own ! 17 engagement — the mistress of Walter Goring's home and heart. " And there will be no mother and sister to keep her out of either," she thought with a sore feeling ; " and if there were, no mother or sister could choke the way to Walter Goring's heart."

Then she pulled her hat a little lower over her eyes, and drew her shawl more closely around her, and set off back through the drift that was worse than rain, in that there was more want of purpose about it, to regain The Hurst, and, she hoped, have some luncheon. Meanwhile Henry Fellowes had come in, well pleased with the way in which all things had gone during his absence, and anxious to communicate his good pleasure to his wife. " Where's Charlie ? " he asked, the instant he opened the door of the dining-room, where his mother still sat darning stockings in a way that was enough to make a man curse the loom in which they were made. " Mrs. Henry is gone out most imprudently," the old lady replied, looking up at her son over her spectacles. " Gone out walking?" " Yes ; I told her that you would be more pleased YOL.

II. to find her in with some work in her hands when you came back; but Mrs. Henry does not like work, and does, I am sorry to see, like to have her own way. " Well, mother, and why not ? I can't have her walking about in this weather after that illness of hers, though," he continued, going to the window, and looking for his wife on the grass plot. " Why do you call her ' Mrs. Henry ' always, mother ? " " It is difficult to know what to call her, Henry," his mother replied ; " her head is like a boy's, and she has a boy's name, by which I cannot bring myself to address her. If you wish it, and she wishes it, I do not mind calling her Charlotte, which is what her godfathers and godmothers meant to be her name, if sbe ever had any." Mrs. Fellowes had commenced her speech with much calm deliberation, but she wound it up with a degree of vicious haste and excitement that was bad for her needle.

That implement broke — snapt off short — and Mrs. Fellowes sought for its fellow with tears in her eyes, and a trembling throughout her frame caused by righteous resentment. " Don't call her Charlotte ; she doesn't like it," ! 19 he said carelessly, as he walked towards the, door. He was exceedingly unobservant of feminine tem pers and tremblings and troubles. " I'll go and look for her. I have some news that will please her, I think ; and, mother, see tbat luncheon is on the table by half-past one, will you ? " The old lady sighed assent. " You wish to dine late then, Henry ?" " Yes ; at six or half-past, I don't care." Then he went into the hall and found an old cap, and went out into the garden to search for his wife. When he was gone his mother summoned the cook, and that functionary agreed with her to her heart's content as to the shamefulness of altering hours that had been held to be the only good and proper ones at which to feed in that house for more years than could be easily counted.

" However, we'll dine at half-past six for the future, cook ; and when I'm dead, perhaps Mr. Henry wdl remember that years ago Doctor Oldfield said, ' My dear lady, I won't answer for your bfe if you don't dine punctually at two o'clock constantly.' Those were his words, cook — not that I should wish Mr. Henry to think of them for a moment ; of course I'm nothing." o "I've no patience with such ways," the sym pathetic cook rejoined. "Ah!" Mrs. Fellowes resumed, bitterly, "young people are very different now, very different indeed, to what they were fifty years ago ; then we dined when it suited our fathers and mothers." "Well, there, ma'am, don't take on; Mr. Henry will know better some day." " I sincerely hope he never may know, cook. I'm only an old woman hastening to my grave. I don't want my son's conscience to be burdened with the thought that his folly made his mother's last days miserable.

Yes ; harricot beans and Jerusalem artichokes and celery will be vegetables enough, I think ; but there, I can hardly think at all to-day." " Ah, ma'am, master would find the difference if he hadn't you to think for him. The young lady seems, by what they tell me, to be very nice spoken and likely, but no more head than nothing for housekeeping, I should say." In reply to which Mrs. Fellowes gave a fierce little "Ah!" and then a lachrymose groan, and then dropped a few tears in amongst the darning cotton. As she uttered no words, however, Cook ! 21 was obliged to feel herself dismissed ; but she had a pretty little tale to carry back to the kitchen. In about five minutes from the moment of Henry Fellowes leaving the house he met his wife, and the way in which she sprang to meet him caused him straightway to forget any small annoyance his mother might have caused him.

In fact, this loyal hearted honest gentleman was just as much to blame as all the rest. Being gifted witb a certain thickness of skin, he did regard things that were dagger-blows and spear-thrusts to another as mere pin-pricks. He was not readily annoyed, and he was very quick to forget annoyances. He could always walk out into the fresh air and forget any number of feminine frowns. He had been used to his mother being disagreeable, and his sister un sympathetic, for so many years, that he regarded their being so as quite in the order of nature. He did not heed them ; they were powerless to ruffle him, and he forgot how sorely his sensitive young wife must suffer through them. " I am so glad to see you, Harry ; I have had such a wretched morning," she cried ; and had he responded in any way the whole story, despite her resolutions, would have come out then.

But he did not respond ; he only tucked her hand into his arm, and replied — "Yes; you shouldn't have come out in the rain, my darling. I shall be having you laid up. I find everything has gone on capitally on the farm, Charlie. My bailiff is a brick." " I wish you had taken me over the farm with you. I have been down to the end of a lane trying to peer over at Goring Place." " By-the-way, I have some news for you, Charlie. I met Goring out riding, and he wants me to let a house — a very pretty cottage I have in the village — to a friend of his, a widow lady, who wishes to come and live here ; another neighbour for you." " Mrs. Walsh ? " Charlie cried, interrogatively. " Yes ; that's the name. Do you know her ? " " Slightly — yes ; it was at her house that I first met Walter Goring. She's a widow, I know, now ; and so she wants to come and live here ? how very, very strange."

Chapter II. The Bride At Home

Tiie neighbourhood about Deneham was gene rally spoken of by its inhabitants as a remarkably lively and sociable one. It was not too thickly studded with county magnates. Walter Goring was the sole large landed proprietor — with the exception of Lord Harrocoats — in the vicinity ; and Lord Harrocoats cannot be said to count, since he was rarely visible to the eyes of the profane in that part of the world. Society in those regions was composed chiefly of the families of men who had " places," and farmed their own land, but who had no land beyond that which they kept in their own hands ; and of gentlemen-farmers who rented so many acres that they were of more power, parochially and locally, than the men of small ■estates. Henry Fellowes was one of the latter class. The Hurst was a mansion, and the land surrounding it was his own.