Chapter XIV: Bella's Dot

Lady Julia Wilmot had been in hope that when the Ashantee 'affair' was over, Jerry would settle down, 'marry money,' free his ancestral seat from encumbrance, and take a proper pride in it; but for a time after the capture of Coomassie it had seemed that she was to be afflicted by a double calamity--that the estate was lost, and Jerry might never return.

It was not in her aristocratic nature to be very much moved about anything. Excitement or enthusiasm of any kind was 'bad form,' she deemed. Thus, if she was not plunged in profound grief when she heard of the poor fellow's supposed death, neither was she greatly excited with joy when she heard that he was safe and coming home again. To this noble daughter of twenty earls, an only son more or less in the world really seemed of no great consequence, unless it were, if he 'married money,' to serve her own ends.

When tidings of Jerry's death came, she had attired herself most becomingly in fashionable mourning of the requisite depth of wear, as understood by the drapers in Regent Street. Round her white throat were narrow tuckers of yellowish-white lace, and a rustling train, spread over a crinolette, floated behind her. Now that he was safe, her mourning was relinquished, almost with a sigh, we fear, it was so becoming; and Floss's mother-of-pearl basket, which had been duly lined with black silk, was now refitted with blue satin.

She received Jerry in her usual stately fashion; gave him her cool, slim hand to press, which he did heartily, while his eyes moistened; and accorded her smooth and unlined cheek for his salute, and then his welcome ended. So ere long Jerry began to think, as Mrs. Gaskell's novel has it, that John Thornton's mamma might be wrong when she says, 'Mothers' love is given by God, John. It holds fast for ever and for ever. A girl's love is like a puff of smoke, it changes with every wind.' But then there was nothing aristocratic about stalwart John Thornton's mother.

Mr. Chevenix had always loved Jerry for his father's sake, and for the sake of the 'Wilmots of Wilmothurst,' who had been of Wilmothurst, 'and that ilk,' as the Scots would say, for time out of mind; but there his regard ended; he had small care for Lady Julia, and, when tidings came of Jerry's death, after a moderate time had elapsed he resolved to take the mortgages in hand and assert his rights--in short, to make the property, what it now almost virtually was, his own, and to request Lady Julia to leave the place, to crush her false and insensate pride in a heart that seemed without any other human sentiment.

'He has formally announced the foreclosure of the mortgages, this man Chevenix, Emily,' said Lady Julia, with some consternation--at least for her--as she opened her letters one morning. 'The crash has come at last!'

'What does that mean, aunt?' asked the young lady.

'My lawyer tells me it means the act of foreclosing--cutting off the equity of redemption, and that the money would not be taken in payment, even were poor Jerry alive and had it to pay.'

And Mr. Chevenix had chuckled as he gave these instructions, for he had endured enough of Lady Julia's aristocratic caprice, and knew how she had often treated his Bella, a girl certainly second to none, 'as if she were the dirt of the earth,' as he said, bitterly.

But Bella had deplored these sharp measures, for she felt that a strange but tender and undefinable tie bound her to Jerry Wilmot, dead or alive.

As children she and Jerry had been permitted to be playmates, and she had been somewhat of a pet with his father, the old Squire; but it was not until they had grown up, till he had been at college and then joined the Rifles, that Lady Julia felt that the intimacy was--well, unfortunate, and to be finally snubbed.

The shock given to the sensitive Bella by the perils encountered by Jerry--first the report of his death, and subsequently the account of the precarious condition in which he had embarked at Cape Coast, caused her many terrible nights and days, and nearly threw the poor girl into a fever, as she had none in whom to confide her sorrow, or her secret love; but sorrow rarely kills, and though at first fretful and resentful, with the memory of Lady Julia's want of proper affection, she was very gentle, quiet, and patient, and besought her father not to foreclose the mortgages yet a while; but he, out of all patience with non-payment of interest on one hand, Lady Julia's hauteur and insolence on the other, with the great doubt entertained of Jerry ever coming home to keep the fragment of Wilmothurst that yet accrued to him, had put the matter in the hands of his legal agents, who, curiously enough, were Messrs. Taype, Shawrpe, and Scrawly, of Gray's Inn; and things were at a serious crisis when Jerry returned home to find a deadlier enmity than ever in his mother's heart at 'that creature Chevenix and the forward minx his daughter.'

The latter knew of Jerry's arrival; her heart had beat responsive to the clangour of the village bells, the music of the volunteer band which preceded the carriage in which he came, and the cheers of the warm-hearted rustics, who unharnessed the horses and drew it along; and ere long she heard with pity and anxiety from Mademoiselle Florine, whom she chanced to meet, that he was confined to his room--even to his bed--by a return of the treacherous jungle-fever, which is apt to recur at times unexpectedly for months after recovery is thought certain; and while in this condition, helpless and incapable of action, he was galled and tormented, and his jealousy was roused by his mother and cousin Emily with the real information of how the matter of the mortgages stood; that Lord Twesildown had heard of them, and with an eye to possessing Wilmothurst and Langley Park intended to degrade himself by proposing for Bella Chevenix, now that she would be a Hampshire heiress, as his mother, Lady Ashcombe, had the very bad taste to inform them.

And Jerry writhed in his bed when he heard of these things, and times there were when he wished that after all he had found his grave, like many more, on the wooded banks of the Prah.

Twesildown had an estate, though a rather encumbered one; but he had also a title and undeniable good looks. Jerry was now well-nigh a landless man. Bella had suspected, he feared, the purity and disinterestedness of his love, and thus circumstances, he thought, were all against her viewing him with favour.

If the worst came to the worst, and he were sold up, he would effect an exchange for India, and think of her no more.

No more--how hard it was!

Just then, in his soreness of heart, Jerry was not sorry that a legitimate fit of illness detained him in the house at Wilmothurst, and separate from Bella; for he was hourly stung by tidings--exaggerated in some instances--that Lord Twesildown was daily giving her drives with his mother, and mounts of his best horses; and, as he was known to be rather impecunious, and quite _au fait_ of the fact that Bella Chevenix was her father's heiress, Jerry felt jealous, mortified, and bitter. He even sorely regretted the 'gushing' farewell letter he had written to her before entering Coomassie; and could little conceive that even now, in a silken case, she wore that letter in her bosom!

It was quite evident how hotly jealous he was of Twesildown, and this sentiment Cousin Emily left nothing undone or unsaid to fan.

'How you chatter, cousin,' said he, impatiently.

'I am like the brook, you think, on this subject,' said Emily, with one of her sweetest smiles.

'What brook?'

'I go on for ever.'

'By Jove, you do--and with a will, too!' said Jerry, who was now stretched at full length in a hammock netting between two trees on the lawn, lazily enjoying one of the last box of cigars he might open in Wilmothurst, as his family were contemplating a removal therefrom, and for where was quite undecided.

Mr. Chevenix had courteously left his card for Jerry, so Bella knew that, come what might, the latter in common civility would call ere long; and to that event she was looking forward now; but days passed, and Jerry came not.

And so while Bella, remembering the tenor of her last farewell meeting with Jerry, and that of the treasured letter, which amounted to a declaration, was eating her heart out with disappointment that he made no effort to see her, he was daily being 'primed up' by Cousin Emily with jealousy of Twesildown; and _this_ was the time to which he and she had both looked forward so eagerly!

The bitterness of this situation was enhanced to Jerry by the knowledge that his ancient inheritance of Wilmothurst was Bella's _dot_ and known to be such by Twesildown, to whom it was a lure quite as much as her undoubted brilliance and beauty.

'There is the devil to pay and pitch-hot here about the mortgages,' he wrote to Bevil Goring; 'and moreover, old fellow, I am sorely disappointed in my love affair. I have read that what "drives one man to drink drives another to the _demi-monde_." Whether of the two is worse, the immortal gods can tell. Either remedy is worse than the disease, I fancy! But anyway a few months more will see me again broiling up country, and going in for iced drinks and Chinsurah cheroots.'