Chapter XVII

I would detain you here some
Month or two before you venture.

How often have I told you ’twould be thus,
How often said my dignity would last
But till ’twere known.

Set on towards London.
SHAKSPEARE.

It had been a _real_ Spring-day, by which we mean one not often realized, but such a Spring-day as even smoke-dried poets fancy. Lucy was seated in her own pretty boudoir, which Castleton had arranged for her with infinite taste. She was making-up and combining with great care a nosegay of choicest flowers, which she had gathered from the neighbouring conservatory, into which on one side her apartment opened; with this she was decorating a beautiful marble vase, presented to her by her husband, which always stood on the table beside her. Castleton had been absent that morning on a distant ride, on business connected with his property; she had previously been interrupted, and was now anxious, before his return, to finish this trivial, but to her interesting occupation: for the vase never met her husband’s eye, studded with its varied scents and gaily diversified colours, without eliciting the observation, “No one could arrange these half so prettily as you.” And it required to be aware, as she was, of her manifold deficiencies, to feel the peculiar pleasure derived in hearing the repetition of these words from the lips she loved. She was still thus engaged, when Castleton entered, and throwing himself on the sofa beside her, interrupted her task by taking one of her hands in his, pressing his palm against hers--then tenderly parting her fingers, by entwining his own between them; whilst, passing his other arm round her waist, he drew her towards him, and looking fondly in her face, said to himself, “They must, at any rate, have thought her very beautiful.”

The origin of this reflection was, that on coming home by the high-road he had met his nearest neighbour, Mrs. Eresby, with her two daughters, returning from a visit they had during that morning volunteered to the bride. On perceiving him, Mrs. Eresby had stopped the carriage for a moment, and after expressing regrets at missing him, had said, “Charmed with Lady Castleton--so very natural and perfectly unaffected.”

In bowing, the only possible reply to this compliment, he thought he had intercepted the telegraph of a smile between Miss Eresby and her sister Arabella, who sat opposite to each other on the side of the carriage into which he was leaning.--“Very natural and perfectly unaffected!” he thought, as he rode home, “What has she been doing?” Certainly, if there was any quality which Castleton must have most sought to secure by such means as he had resorted to in the choice of a wife, it must have been that she should be “natural and unaffected.” And yet it is true that this testimony of the first person who had seen her to the success of his pursuit, gave him any thing but pleasure.--“So you have had visitors this morning, Lucy; how did you amuse them?”

“Oh, they seemed to amuse each other very well; there were three of them.”

“How do you mean, amuse themselves? they did not, surely, talk to each other much before you?”

“Her the others called mother didn’t.”

“My dear Lucy, I’m sure they never called her _mother_.”

“Well then, mamma perhaps it was; I will remember, my dear Lord, what you told me, never to say mother.”

“And did they make many enquiries of you? ask many questions?”

“Oh, such a many!”

“So many, dearest love, you mean to say.”

“Well, so I do, thank you; and then the mamma asked me, as she had never seen me before, if I had not been much abroad; and I said, never at all till I married; and then she said, ‘What! had I been to Paris since?’ and I find she meant foreign parts by abroad. And she told me that we ought to go to London soon; that the season was advanced, and that the Pasta would come out soon this spring. What is the Pasta--a plant?”

“A plant! no, love. Pasta is a singer’s name, you could not be expected to know that; but I hope you didn’t say any thing to show them your ignorance?”

“Oh, no; you told me, whenever I was completely puzzled, that silence was best; so I said nothing. Pasta’s the name of a singer, then! Oh, that accounts, for a moment after she the mamma said, that her daughter Arabella sang delightfully, and asked me if I would sing with her; so I said no, I’d much rather listen. That was right, warn’t it? You see I knew you’d ask me all about it, so I recollected it for you. Arabella then asked me if I would accompany her? so I said, Wherever she liked,--where did she want to go? But, I suppose, she altered her mind, for she sat down to the grand instrument you had brought here for me to begin my lessons upon; and then she sang such an extraordinary song--all coming from her throat. And the sister asked me if I understood German? and I answered, No, nor French neither.”

“That was an unnecessary addition, my love.”

“Well, so it was. Then the youngest sister explained to me, that it was a song a Swiss peasant girl sang whilst she was milking her cow; and I said that must be very difficult, to sing while milking a cow. And then the mamma asked how I knew; and I said I had _tried_ very _often_.”

“How could you, dear Lucy, volunteer such an avowal?”

“I thought you would be afraid of that; but it all did very well, for the mother said I was so amusing, had so much natural wit, and they all tried to persuade me I had said something clever.”

“Well, go on--and what then?”

“And then the lady took me aside, and began saying so much in praise of you; and when she once got me on that subject, I was ready and glib enough, I warrant you. But somehow, though I then found it so much easier to speak, I find it more difficult to recollect exactly what I said. Is not that strange? And then she said that my happiness would excite so much envy in the great world; that you had been admired, courted, nay, even loved by rich, noble, clever ladies. Why was all this? and how could you ever think to leave all these, to seek out from her quiet home your poor little Lucy?”

“Oh, that’s a story of by-gone days. These were follies of my youth, which I thought I had lived to repent.”

‘Nor knew, till seated by thy side,
My heart in all save hope the same.’

“Why, save hope, my dear Lord? What may you not only hope, but trust, from my constant devotion?”

“I did not mean to tie myself precisely to every word I uttered. It was only a quotation.

“And what is a quotation?”

“A quotation is the vehicle in which imagination posts forward, when she only hires her Pegasus from memory. Or sometimes it is only a quit-rent, which the intellectual cultivator, who farms an idea, pays to the original proprietor; or rather,”--(seeing that he was not making the matter more intelligible by his explanation,)--“or rather, it is when we convey our own thoughts by the means of the more perfect expressions of some favourite author.”

“But then, surely _you_ need not be driven to borrow, whose own words always sound to me like a book. As for poor me, I wish I could talk in quotations for ever; then I need not fear to make these mistakes, which, as it is, I am afraid I am always like to do.”

There was so much modesty, so lively a sense of her own deficiencies, with so anxious a desire to remedy them, that Castleton could not, upon the whole, derive other than a pleasant impression from the result of this interview.

It has been said that Lucy’s boudoir had been furnished in a manner that showed the most studied care in the selection, the most unlimited expenditure in the profusion of articles of luxury. Perhaps Castleton had even rather exceeded in this respect, from knowing how different had been the habits of her early life, and rather wishing that she should, whilst they were still alone, get over the trouble of being at her ease, rather than let the world witness the awkwardness of her first impressions, and the difficulty of her first endeavour not to be astonished at so much that was new.

But there was one department to which he had prudently devoted his attention, and this from a higher motive, an anxious desire to cultivate the taste of his pupil-bride, in a manner which might be an enjoyment, not a task. Her room had been hung with the choicest “_chefs-d’œuvre_” both of ancient and modern art: the most attractive subjects, treated in the most skilful manner, in an assortment of cabinet pictures of various masters. This, at least, thought Castleton, is an art for which she has shown a wonderful aptitude: poetry I cannot as yet hope that she should fancy or comprehend; and of any incipient love of general literature I as yet see no symptom; but this is a taste which cannot fail to refine such a character as hers. From Claude and from Poussin she may learn that classical association will adorn and idealize even the material beauties of nature; and from the good conception of some historical subject by the great Italian masters, she may reverse the usual routine, and from admiration of the manner in which these subjects are treated, derive a taste for the subjects themselves. Then, thought he, I shall always have the agreeable reflection, that it was by me alone this taste was first formed, and that it was by a mutual partiality for this art that community of feeling was first established between us. Castleton had mistaken the effect for the cause; he was not aware, that whilst she had readily followed all the movements of the pencil, it was the hand that had guided it, not the lines that it traced, which had given it peculiar value in her eyes. Another morning he had been again absent on the business which had taken him from home the day of Mrs. Eresby’s visit; and at the door of the boudoir he was met by Lucy, who had watched for his returning step, and, drawing him in after her with more than her usual demonstrations of delight at seeing him again, with a most triumphant “Look there!” directed his attention to the costly frames which, under his special direction, had been carefully fitted to the varied gems of art mentioned above, but which were, instead, now filled with flimsy drawings upon different coloured papers; and upon nearer inspection he discovered them to be his own hasty sketches, which had been thrown aside with the character he had assumed, and forgotten in the attainment of the object of that assumption.

“Lucy, you cannot really have been so foolish, so childish, as to remove those beautiful pictures for such wretched daubs as these?” This was uttered hastily, and the look of triumph passed away at the same moment from Lucy’s previously elated countenance, as, in a desponding tone, she “bade him see that the pictures were still there,” and that she had occupied herself that morning in cutting with care and adapting the sketches to the different frames that hung round her room, which operation had been completed by neatly attaching the papers in each corner of the pictures with pins.

“Take them down again, for heaven’s sake!” said Lord Castleton; “it is a bitter disappointment to me, to see you had no taste whatever for the beauties of these gems, which I selected for you with so much care, and which, at least, I hoped you might appreciate. I wish you would try, at least, to know the things you ought to admire.”

“I am sure I always admired these,” said Lucy, sorrowfully, laying the rejected sketches in a heap before Lord Castleton, and adding to herself in a lower tone, “so pretty, and so like!” on observing the upper one of the heap to be a home view of Bankside Farm, and its old orchard and now deserted garden. But her husband’s good-humour was not restored by the gentle submission of her looks and manners; he took the sketches in his hand, and as he turned them over rapidly, and as each and every one in which Morden Bay was commemorated recalled the scene of some unpleasant event, some degrading doubt, some unworthy conflict, which he wished for ever to blot from his own mind, and hide from the prying curiosity of others, with a sudden impulse he crushed them firmly together in his hands, and then flung them on the blazing fire before him. Lucy at first started forward to save them, but her habitual obedience and respect checked her first hasty movement. She gazed fixedly on the blazing memorials of her childhood home; and the first bitter tears she had shed since her marriage chased each other down her cheeks, as she exclaimed, “Oh, what a pity to destroy them! I loved them so; they were among the few, the very few things which reminded me of you and dear Bankside Farm together.”

“Nay, do not distress yourself so, my dear Lucy. You need, I hope, nothing to remind you of me, now I am always with you; and the rocks and the trees of Morden Bay, for it was only inanimate forms that were there commemorated, will remain the same till you see them again,--the same the last as the first time you beheld them. But it is the solitude in which you have been sometimes left lately which has made you gloomy. Business makes it necessary that I should soon go to London; we will start next week, and then you will be too much occupied with seeing, and being seen, to have leisure for these morbid reflections.”

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY SAMUEL BENTLEY,
Dorset-street, Fleet-street.

Transcriber’s Note:

Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These were left unchanged, as were jargon, dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings. Misspelled words were not corrected. Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_. Final stops missing at the end of sentences were added. One unnecessary apostrophe was removed.