Chapter IV

----Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
SHAKSPEARE.

At one kind word their arms extending
To clasp the neck of him who blest
His child, caressing and carest.
BYRON.

In the romantic charm with which the fancy of the enthusiastic, though casual admirer of Morden Bay, had invested all it contained, he had considered the retired residence of the Darnell family as the chosen abode of content. He judged hastily; and yet he might have inquired farther, and reasoned more deeply without being undeceived. His opinion was founded on the tranquil beauty of the scene; and here he ran into the common error of attributing the same effect from surrounding objects on those to “the manner born,” as had just been awakened in himself, by recent comparison and contrast. It operated as a tonic on his feelings, just then palled with dissipation. ’Twas “medicine to a mind diseased;” but only daily food to those who had never known any other: innocent and salubrious no doubt, but producing no excitement, and having no other effect on the moral system than regularly excluding many temptations to vice. He would have thought, however, his hypothesis farther confirmed, if he had learned that those who dwelt there were in most comfortable worldly circumstances, removed alike from the fears of want and the desire of ostentation; that they had not even a neighbour to envy; that, human cares and ailings excepted, they were healthy alike in mind and body. And yet was it not the abode of content.

That it was not so, arose entirely from one circumstance, which would have been supposed incapable of having so much effect upon the happiness of those around, by persons unaccustomed to observe by what trivial causes the peace of families is sometimes disturbed. Mrs. Darnell was a most worthy woman, correct in all her intentions, exemplary in the discharge of all her duties, from the religious down to the domestic; but she was a person of an unfortunately minute mind, with a sort of clock-work regularity of sensations: with her, each duty, of every degree, was, in its allotted succession, of equal importance; and, undisturbed by any deviation into feeling, she not only observed them herself, but, like the dial, pointed them out to all about her. Any omission of the due decorum of any rule, she treasured up, not till it had been obliterated by subsequent punctuality, but till it was succeeded by some fresh deficiency; by which means she contrived that she should never be without a grievance: not that she was ever in consequence loud or angry; this she would have thought wrong; but she put on a most provoking appearance of patient endurance, which was exactly the sort of look her husband could least bear, and which inducing, in consequence, occasional violent ebullitions on his part, gave her the reputation amongst those who knew little of both, of suffering meekly under his violence, whilst the many more frequent occasions in which he had yielded at length, for the sake of repurchasing a smiling face at his domestic hearth, were unnoticed, because unknown.

Dick Darnell, as he was familiarly called by those who had known him in his younger days, though now turned forty, had in character much of the simplicity of a child, with warm affections, a cheerful temper, and a disposition all whose natural bias was good, though never much disciplined in the school of self-denial. It was lucky, perhaps, that he was born in a situation where temptations did not too much abound; for there were moments in which he was supposed not to have been particularly successful in resisting those that had occasionally crossed his path. Now that he was no longer very young, his appearance would be best described by the epithet hearty. His person had been handsome, and if its bulk had now increased beyond the proper proportion, it had rather become portly than unwieldy; and the good-humoured and cheerful expression of his laughing eye, seemed to inspire sympathy at first sight.

He had become acquainted with his present wife at the county town, during assize time. She was the daughter of a respectable tradesman, who was known as one of that peculiarly strict class, who put forth exclusive pretensions to monopolise righteousness; she had therefore received a very serious and unexceptionable education. Richard Darnell had done his best for many years to try to love her, and would at that very hour have been very much surprised if anybody had told him that he had not succeeded, for he always assured his acquaintance at the market-town, to which he went once a week, “that for sixteen years he had been married to his _Missus_, and he never had had so much as one occasion to find fault with her.” He dropped at these times all mention of those many occasions on which she had found fault with him, which had led to those altercations mentioned above. But there were few of his friends who had not remarked, that of late years he never found the weather so bad as it used to be when it frequently prevented his coming at all to market; but that, on the contrary, he often found the distance in returning so much longer than formerly, that when dark and wet, he could not possibly reach home over night, but stayed till the next morning. His daughter he loved better than all the rest of the world put together; and when he returned from these excursions, and had not seen her for four-and-twenty hours, he would like to sit in the chimney-corner, with her slight form resting on his capacious knee, and picking out those of his adventures by the way best suited to meet her ear, would chat on for ever and ever, and ask no other reply than to see the expression of his own laughing eye reflected in the softened likeness of his daughter’s delicate features.

But these were, in Mrs. Darnell’s idea, moments of time most completely wasted, and she would generally interrupt them by demanding,--“why Richard would not stir himself, and look after his men, whom he had left a whole day without a master’s eye,” and by informing Lucy, she thought “her hands might be more profitably employed at her needle, than in hanging idly about her father’s neck.”

Next to hanging about her father’s neck, her mother thought that the most useless way in which Lucy’s hands were sometimes employed, was holding a book. That is, to do her justice, she drew the distinction between the use of a book as an amusement, or as a duty; as the latter she not only very properly enjoined the lecture of the Psalms and Lessons of the day, but enforced it so regularly, that one of Lucy’s delinquencies, to which most frequent plaintive allusion was made, was, that _once_ she had inadvertently read the Evening Lesson in the morning, a fault which it was impossible to undo, but by doubling it, and reading the Morning in the Evening. All reading beyond this, whether history or fiction, she treated alike as vanity.

The duty of letters she did not consider as that of a standing army to be sent abroad on the sea of knowledge, to extend the empire of the mind; but merely as a sort of local militia, to be called out at stated times on this one home service.

Such limitations as in this respect she put upon herself, she would have exacted from Lucy, had not the latter been taught differently in the course of the frequent visits she made to the aunt, mentioned above. This aunt was an unmarried sister of Dick Darnell’s: some years his junior, she had come to establish herself, within the memory of Lucy, at a small but neat cottage round the next point, which had originally been built as a house of occasional call in bad weather, by a gentleman who had been sailing about in a yacht on that coast.

She was a lone woman, who had evidently had her sorrows, not yet forgotten by herself, though never obtruding their chilling contagion on the spirits of her young visitors, who always found her anxious to participate in their cheerfulness, though even at their thoughtless years they sometimes noticed the effort that it required to enable her to assume an appearance contradicted by the care-worn character of her beauty, which, striking as that beauty still was, did not give the idea of a person so much younger than her brother as she really was.

It was curious to trace what is called a family likeness in two persons so totally unlike. Her form was altogether of another mould, and different habits had given the deportment of a different rank in life. If the resemblance could be traced to any definite feature, it lurked in the benevolent smile of the mouth, of which her’s was the miniature copy of his, though that which gave to his its joyous character, the sparkle of his laughing eye, if it ever had existed in her’s, was now prematurely obscured. She lived entirely alone, with the attendance only of one maid servant, and dependant for society, (if she could be called dependant on that which she did not seem to require) upon the frequent visits of her niece, the occasional calls of her brother, or his nephew George, and those, luckily, more rare occasions on which Mrs. Darnell found her way as far as her cottage, mildly to murmur over her grievances. Though always cheerfully receiving these separate visitors, the same disposition which, when she first came into the neighbourhood, made her decline her brother Richard’s hospitable offer, to lodge her under his roof, seemed still to induce her to avoid the full family reunion at their own house; and the only place where she met them altogether, (and this she rarely missed,) was weekly in their common pew, at the Parish Church, three miles off. It is impossible to conceive two persons more different in the detail of their dispositions, than Mrs. Darnell and this sister-in-law. The one with every thing to make a home happy and comfortable, yet (one could almost as little tell how, as why,) contriving to turn every thing into a grievance: the other, to whom the world seemed to have done its worst, to have separated as an isolated being from its interests, yet the chosen confidant even of the changeful fancies of children, and occasionally sought as the depositary of the complaints of her whom she so little resembled.

The fact was, that Alice Darnell had unconsciously assumed over her sister-in-law that influence which a strong mind can hardly fail of exerting over a weak one. This prevented her mother from objecting, as she otherwise might have done, to the loss of time occasioned by the frequent visits of Lucy to her aunt. There might, perhaps, be another reason for this. Alice Darnell, though still young, was in a precarious state of health, which had indeed been given by Richard as the reason for his sister’s wishing to retire there; and, as curiosity was not one of the flaws of his wife’s character, she had always believed this to be the only cause of that measure; but Miss Darnell’s fortune, for her rank in life, seemed considerable, and whom was she to leave it to? This was a consideration which often crossed Mrs. Darnell’s mind, as she had been educated in a school in which, in the midst of pious contempt for the vanities of this world, a beneficial distinction was always taken between its empty pleasures and its solid advantages.

Alice Darnell had not what, in the enlarged sense, would have been called a library, but she had some shelves well-stored with the common editions of the English classics. Lucy generally found her aunt occupied among these, but one thick octavo, she remarked, was a constant favourite. It was a compendious volume, for it contained all Shakspeare. In answer to her niece’s question, “Why she read it so often?” she said, “This is the world in which alone I wish to live. As long as this little book is left me, I am less alone, more in the midst of human nature, than in the most crowded city.”

For once she spoke more according to her own feelings than to the capacity of her she was addressing: she perceived her mistake. The little girl could not understand her, but her curiosity was roused; she anxiously listened to her aunt, who commenced reading to her selected passages, in a manner which added all the charm of voice and delivery to what was in itself so well calculated to interest; and from that time forward one of the most eagerly anticipated pleasures of her visits to her aunt was to cry with “Constance,” or to tremble at “Lady Macbeth;” she never saw a storm without thinking of poor “King Lear;” cultivated her _red roses_, out of sympathy for the “House of Lancaster,” and neglected the _white ones_, out of mere spite to “Richard III.”