Mistress and Maid Part 21

But these two were different from others. They only saw their sister Selina, a woman no longer young, and not without her peculiarities, going to be married to a man she knew little or nothing about--a man whom they themselves had endured rather than liked, and for the sake of grat.i.tude. He was trying enough merely as a chance visitor; but to look upon Mr. Ascott as a brother-in-law, as a husband-- "Oh, Selina!

you can not be in earnest?"

"Why not? Why should I not be married as well as my neighbors?" said she, sharply.

n.o.body arguing that point, both being indeed too bewildered to argue at all, she continued, majestically,

"I a.s.sure you, sisters, there could not be a more unexceptionable offer. It is true, Mr. Ascott's origin was rather humble; but I can overlook that. In his present wealth, and with his position and character, he will make the best of husbands."

Not a word was answered; what could be answered? Selina was free to marry if she liked, and whom she liked. Perhaps, from her nature, it was idle to expect her to marry in any other way than this; one of the thousand and one unions where the man desires a handsome, lady-like wife for the head of his establishment, and the woman wishes an elegant establishment to be mistress of; so they strike a bargain--possibly as good as most other bargains.

Still, with one faint lingering of hope, Hilary asked if she had quite decided.

"Quite. He wrote to me last night, and I gave him his answer this morning."

Selina certainly had not troubled any body with her "love affairs."

It was entirely a matter of business.

The sisters saw at once that she had made up her mind. Henceforward there could be no criticism of Mr. Peter Ascott.

Now all was told, she talked freely of her excellent prospects.

"He had behaved handsomely--very much so. He makes a good settlement on me, and says how happy he will be to help my family, so as to enable you always to make a respectable appearance."

"We are exceedingly obliged to him."

"Don't be sharp, Hilary. He means well. And he must feel that this marriage is a sort of--ahem! condescension on my part, which I never should have dreamed of twenty years ago."

Selina sighed; could it be at the thought of that twenty years ago?

Perhaps, shallow as she seemed, this woman might once have had some fancy, some ideal man whom she expected to meet and marry; possibly a very different sort of man from Mr. Peter Ascott. However, the sigh was but momentary; she plunged back again into all the arrangements of her wedding, every one of which, down to the wedding-dress, she had evidently decided.

"And therefore you see," she added, as it the unimportant, almost forgotten item of discussion had suddenly occurred to her, "it's quite impossible that my sister should keep a shop. I shall tell Mr.

Ascott, and you will see what he says to it."

But when Mr. Ascott appeared next day in solemn state as an accepted lover he seemed to care very little about the matter. He thought it was a good thing for every body to be independent; did not see why young women--he begged pardon, young ladies--should not earn their own bread if they liked. He only wished that the shop were a little further off than Kensington, and hoped the name of Leaf would not be put over the door.

But the bride-elect, indignant and annoyed, begged her lover to interfere, and prevent the scheme from being carried out.

"Don't vex yourself, my dear Selina," said he, dryly--how Hilary started to hear the stranger use the household name--"but I can't see that it's my business to interfere. I marry you, I don't marry your whole family."

"Mr. Ascott is quite right; we will end the subject," said Johanna, with grave dignity while Hilary sat with burning cheeks, thinking that, miserable as the family had been, it had never till now known real degradation.

But her heart was very sore that day. It the morning had come the letter from India never omitted, never delayed; Robert Lyon was punctual as clock-work in every thing he did. It came, but this month it was a short and somewhat sad letter--hinting of failing health, uncertain prospects; full of a bitter longing to come home, and a dread that it would be years before that longing was realized.

"My only consolation is," he wrote, for once betraying himself a little, "that however hard my life out here may be, I bear it alone."

But that consolation was not so easy to Hilary. That they two should be wasting their youth apart, when just a little heap of yellow coins--of which men like Mr. Ascott had such profusion--would bring them together; and, let trials be many or poverty hard, give them the unutterable joy of being once more face to face and heart to heart--oh, it was sore, sore!

Yet when she went up from the parlor, where the newly-affianced couple sat together, "making-believe" a pa.s.sion that did not exist, and acting out the sham courtship, proper for the gentleman to pay and the lady to receive--when she shut her bedroom door, and there, sitting in the cold, read again and again Robert Lyon's letter to Johanna, so good, so honest; so sad, yet so bravely enduring--Hilary was comforted. She felt that true love, in its most unsatisfied longings, its most cruel delays, nay, even its sharpest agonies of hopeless separation, is sweeter ten thousand times than the most "respectable" of loveless marriages such as this.

So, at the week's end, Hilary went patiently to her work at Kensington, and Selina began the preparations for her wedding.

CHAPTER XV.

In relating so much about her mistresses, I have lately seemed to overlook Elizabeth Hand.

She was a person easy enough to be overlooked. She never put herself forward, not even now, when Miss Hilary's absence caused the weight of housekeeping and domestic management to fall chiefly upon her. She went about her duties as soberly and silently as she had done in her girlhood; even Miss Leaf could not draw her into much demonstrativeness: she was one of those people who never "come out"

till they are strongly needed, and then-- But it remained to be proved what this girl would be.

Years afterward Hilary remembered with what a curious reticence Elizabeth used to go about in those days: how she remained as old-fashioned as ever; acquired no London ways, no fripperies of dress or flippancies of manner. Also, that she never complained of anything; though the discomforts of her lodging-house life must have been great--greater than her mistresses had any idea of at the time.

Slowly, out of her rough, unpliant girlhood, was forming that character of self-reliance and self-control, which, in all ranks, makes of some women the helpers rather than the helped, the laborers rather than the pleasure-seekers; women whose constant lot it seems to be to walk on the shadowed side of life, to endure rather than to enjoy.

Elizabeth had very little actual enjoyment. She made no acquaintances, and never asked for holidays. Indeed she did not seem to care for any. Her great treat was when, on a Sunday afternoon, Miss Hilary sometimes took her to Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's; when her pleasure and grat.i.tude always struck her mistress--may, even soothed her, and won her from her own many anxieties. It is such a blessing to be able to make any other human being, even for an hour or two, entirely happy.

Except these bright Sundays, Elizabeth's whole time was spent in waiting upon Miss Leaf, who had seemed to grow suddenly frail and old. It might be that living without her child six days out of the seven was a greater trial than had at first appeared to the elder sister, who until now had never parted with her since she was born; or it was perhaps a more commonplace and yet natural cause, the living in London lodgings, without even a change of air from room to room; and the want of little comforts and luxuries, which, with all Hilary's care, were as impossible as ever to their limited means.

For Selina's engagement, which, as a matter of decorum, she had insisted should last six months, did not lessen expenses. Old gowns were shabby, and omnibuses impossible to the future Mrs. Ascott of Russell Square; and though, to do her justice, she spent as little as to her self-pleasing nature was possible, still she spent something.

"It's the last; I shall never cost you any more," she would say, complacently; and revert to that question of absorbing interest, her trousseau, an extremely handsome one, provided liberally by Mr.

Ascott. Sorely had this arrangement jarred upon the pride of the Leaf family; yet it was inevitable. But no personal favors would the other two sisters have accepted from Mr. Ascott, even had he offered them--which he did not--save a dress each for the marriage, and a card for the marriage breakfast, which, he also arranged, was to take place at a hotel.

So, in spite of the expected wedding, there was little change in the dull life that went on at No. 15. Its only brightness was when Miss Hilary came home from Sat.u.r.day to Monday. And in those brief glimpses, when, as was natural, she on her side, and they on theirs, put on their best face, so to speak, each trying to hide from the other any special care, it so fell out that Miss Hilary never discovered a thing which, week by week, Elizabeth resolved to speak to her about, and yet never could. For it was not her own affair; it seemed like presumptuously middling in the affairs of the family.

Above all, it involved the necessity of something which looked like tale-bearing and backbiting of a person she disliked, and there was in Elizabeth--servant as she was--an instinctive chivalrous honor which made her especially anxious to be just to her enemies.

Enemy, however, is a large word to use; and yet day by day her feelings grew more bitter toward the person concerned--namely. Mr.

Ascott Leaf. It was not from any badness in him: he was the sort of young man always likely to be a favorite with what would be termed his "inferiors;" easy, good-tempered, and gentlemanly, giving a good deal of trouble certainly, but giving it so agreeably that few servants would have grumbled, and paying for it--as he apparently thought every thing could be paid for--with a pleasant word and a handful of silver.

But Elizabeth's distaste for him had deeper roots. The princ.i.p.al one was his exceeding indifference to his aunts' affairs, great and small, from the marriage, which he briefly designated as a "jolly lark," to the sharp economies which, even with the addition of Miss Hilary's salary, were still requisite.--None of these latter did he ever seem to notice, except when they pressed upon himself; when he neither scolded nor argued, but simply went out and avoided them.

He was now absent from home more than ever, and apparently tried as much as possible to keep the household in the dark as to his movements--leaving at uncertain times, never saying what hour he would be back, or if he said so, never keeping to his word. This was the more annoying as there were a number of people continually inquiring for him, hanging about the house, and waiting to see him "on business;" and some of these occasionally commented on the young gentleman in such unflattering terms that Elizabeth was afraid they would reach the ear of Mrs. Jones, and henceforward tried always to attend to the door herself.

But Mrs. Jones was a wide awake woman. She had not let lodgings for thirty years for nothing. Ere long she discovered, and took good care to inform Elizabeth of her discovery, that Mr. Ascott Leaf was what is euphuistically termed "in difficulties."

And here one word, lest in telling this poor lad's story I may be supposed to tell it harshly or uncharitably, as if there was no crime greater than that which a large portion of society seems to count as none; as if, at the merest mention of the ugly word debt, this rabid author flew out, and made all the ultra virtuous persons whose history is here told fly out, like turkeys, after a bit of red cloth which is a very harmless sc.r.a.p of red cloth after all.

Most true, some kind of debt deserves only compa.s.sion. The merchant suddenly failing; the tenderly reared family who by some strange blunder or unkind kindness have been kept in ignorance of their real circ.u.mstances, and been spending pounds for which there was only pence to pay; the individuals, men or women, who, without any laxity of principle, are such utter children in practice, that they have to learn the value and use of money by hard experience, much as a child does, and are little better than children in all that concerns L. S.

D. to the end of their days.

But these are debtors by accident, not error. The deliberate debtor, who orders what he knows he has no means of paying for; the pleasure loving debtor, who can not renounce one single luxury for conscience'

sake; the well-meaning, lazy debtor, who might make "ends meet," but does not, simply because he will not take the trouble; upon such as these it is right to have no mercy--they deserve none.

To which of these cla.s.ses young Ascott Leaf belonged his story will show. I tell it, or rather let it tell itself, and point its own moral; it is the story of hundreds and thousands.

That a young fellow should not enjoy his youth would be hard; that it should not be pleasant to him to dress well, live well, and spend with open hand upon himself as well as others, no one will question.

No one would ever wish it otherwise. Many a kindly spendthrift of twenty-one makes a prudent paterfamilias at forty, while a man who in his twenties showed a purposeless n.i.g.g.ardliness, would at sixty grow into the most contemptible miser alive. There is something even in the thoughtless liberality of youth to which one's heart warms, even while one's wisdom reproves.--But what struck Elizabeth was that Ascott's liberalities were always toward himself, and himself only.

Sometimes when she took in a parcel of new clothes, while others yet unpaid for were tossing in wasteful disorder about his room, or when she cleaned indefinite pairs of handsome boots, and washed dozens of the finest cambric pocket-handkerchiefs, her spirit grew hot within her to remember Miss Hilary's countless wants and contrivances in the matter of dress, and all the little domestic comforts which Miss Leaf's frail health required--things which never once seemed to cross the nephew's imagination. Of course not, it will be said; how could a young man be expected to trouble himself about these things?