This and much more had Jessie Bridgeman written seven years ago, while Mount Royal was still new to her. The place and the people — at least those two whom she first knew there — had grown dearer as time went on. When Leonard came home from the University, he and his mother’s factotum did not get on quite so well as Mrs. Tregonell had hoped. Jessie was ready to be kind and obliging to the heir of the house; but Leonard did not like her — in the language of the servant’s hall, he “put his back up at her.” He looked upon her as an interloper and a spy, especially suspecting her in the latter capacity, perhaps from a lurking consciousness that some of his actions would not bear the fierce light of unfriendly observation. In vain did his mother plead for her favourite.
“You have no idea how good she is!” said Mrs. Tregonell.
“You’re perfectly right there, mother; I have not,” retorted Leonard.
“And so useful to me! I should be lost without her!”
“Of course; that’s exactly what she wants: creeping and crawling — and pinching and saving — docking your tradesmen’s accounts — grinding your servants — fingering your income — till, by-and-by, she will contrive to finger a good deal of it into her own pocket! That’s the way they all begin — that’s the way the man in the play, Sir Giles Overreach’s man, began, you may be sure — till by-and-by he got Sir Giles under his thumb. And that’s the way Miss Bridgeman will serve you. I wonder you are so shortsighted!”
Weak as Mrs. Tregonell was in her love for her son, she was too staunch to be set against a person she liked by any such assertions as these. She was quite able to form her own opinion about Miss Bridgeman’s character, and she found the girl straight as an arrow — candid almost to insolence, yet pleasant withal; industrious, clever — sharp as a needle in all domestic details — able to manage pounds as carefully as she had managed pence and sixpences.
“Mother used to give me the housekeeping purse,” she said, “and I did what I liked. I was always Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was a very small exchequer; but I learnt the habit of spending and managing, and keeping accounts.”
While active and busy about domestic affairs, verifying accounts, settling supplies and expenditures with the cook-housekeeper, making herself a veritable clerk of the kitchen, and overlooking the housemaids in the finer details of their work, Miss Bridgeman still found ample leisure for the improvement of her mind. In a quiet country-house, where family prayers are read at eight o’clock every morning, the days are long enough for all things. Jessie had no active share in Christabel’s education, which was Mrs. Tregonell’s delight and care; but she contrived to learn what Christabel learnt — to study with her and read with her, and often to outrun her in the pursuit of a favourite subject. They learnt German together, they read good French books together, and were companions in the best sense of the word. It was a happy life — monotonous, uneventful, but a placid, busy, all-satisfying life, which Jessie Bridgeman led during those six years and a half which went before the advent of Angus Hamleigh at Mount Royal. The companion’s salary had long ago been doubled, and Jessie, who had no caprices, and whose wants were modest, was able to send forty pounds a year to Shepherd’s Bush, and found a rich reward in the increased cheerfulness of the letters from home.
Just so much for Jessie Bridgeman’s history as she walks by Major Bree’s side in the sunlight, with a sharply cut face, impressed with a gravity beyond her years, and marked with precocious lines that were drawn there by the iron hand of poverty before she had emerged from girlhood. Of late, even amidst the elegant luxuries of May Fair, in a life given over to amusement, among flowers and bright scenery, and music and pictures, those lines had been growing deeper — lines that hinted at a secret care.
“Isn’t it delightful to see them together!” said the Major, looking after those happy lovers with a benevolent smile.
“Yes; I suppose it is very beautiful to see such perfect happiness, like Juan and Haidée before Lambro swooped down upon them,” returned Miss Bridgeman, who was too outspoken to be ashamed of having read Byron’s epic.
Major Bree had old-fashioned notions about the books women should and should not read, and Byron, except for elegant extracts, was in his Index expurgatorius. If a woman was allowed to read the “Giaour,” she would inevitably read “Don Juan,” he argued; there would be no restraining her, after she had tasted blood — no use in offering her another poet, and saying, Now you can read “Thalaba,” or “Peter Bell.”
“They were so happy!” said Jessie dreamily, “so young, and one so innocent; and then came fear, severance, despair, and death for the innocent sinner. It is a terrible story!”
“Fortunately, there is no tyrannical father in this case,” replied the cheerful Major. “Everybody is pleased with the engagement — everything smiles upon the lovers.”
“No, it is all sunshine,” said Jessie; “there is no shadow, if — if Mr. Hamleigh is as worthy of his betrothed as we have all agreed to think him. Yet there was a time when you spoke rather disparagingly of him.”
“My gossiping old tongue should be cut out for repeating club scandals! Hamleigh is a generous-hearted, noble-natured fellow, and I am not afraid to trust him with the fate of a girl whom I love almost as well as if she were my own daughter. I don’t know whether all men love their daughters, by-the-by. There are daughters and daughters — I have seen some that it would be tough work to love. But for Christabel my affection is really parental. I have seen her bud and blossom, a beautiful living flower, a rose in the garden of life.”
“And you think Mr. Hamleigh is worthy of her?” said Miss Bridgeman, looking at him searchingly with her shrewd grey eyes, “in spite of what you heard at the clubs?”
“A fico for what I heard at the clubs!” exclaimed the Major, blowing the slander away from the tips of his fingers as if it had been thistledown. “Every man has a past, and every man outlives it. The present and the future are what we have to consider. It is not a man’s history, but the man himself, that concerns us; and I say that Angus Hamleigh is a good man, a right-meaning man, a brave and generous man. If a man is to be judged by his history, where would David be, I should like to know? and yet David was the chosen of the Lord!” added the Major, conclusively.
“I hope,” said Jessie, earnestly, with vague visions of intrigue and murder conjured up in her mind, “that Mr. Hamleigh was never as bad as David.”
“No, no,” murmured the Major, “the circumstances of modern times are so different, don’t you see? — an advanced civilization — a greater respect for human life. Napoleon the First did a good many queer things; but you would not get a monarch and a commander-in-chief to act as David and Joab acted now-a-days. Public opinion would be too strong for them. They would be afraid of the newspapers.”
“Was it anything very dreadful that you heard at the clubs three years ago?” asked Jessie, still hovering about a forbidden theme, with a morbid curiosity strange in one whose acts and thoughts were for the most part ruled by common sense.
The Major, who would not allow a woman to read “Don Juan,” had his own ideas of what ought and ought not to be told to a woman.
“My dear Miss Bridgeman,” he said, “I would not for worlds pollute your ears with the ribald trash men talk in a club smoking-room. Let it suffice for you to know that I believe in Angus Hamleigh, although I have taken the trouble to make myself acquainted with the follies of his youth.”
They walked on in silence for a little while after this, and then the Major said, in a voice full of kindness:
“I think you went to see your own people yesterday, did you not?”
“Yes; Mrs. Tregonell was kind enough to give me a morning, and I spent it with my mother and sisters.”
The Major had questioned her more than once about her home, in a way which indicated so kindly an interest that it could not possibly be mistaken for idle curiosity. And she had told him, with perfect frankness, what manner of people her family were — in no wise h
esitating to admit their narrow means, and the necessity that she should earn her own living.
“I hope you found them well and happy.”
“I thought my mother looked thin and weary. The girls were wonderfully well — great hearty, overgrown creatures! I felt myself a wretched little shrimp among them. As for happiness — well, they are as happy as people can expect to be who are very poor!”
“Do you really think poverty is incompatible with happiness?” asked the Major, with a philosophical air; “I have had a particularly happy life, and I have never been rich.”
“Ah, that makes all the difference!” exclaimed Jessie. “You have never been rich, but they have always been poor. You can’t conceive what a gulf lies between those two positions. You have been obliged to deny yourself a great many of the mere idle luxuries of life, I dare say — hunters, the latest improvements in guns, valuable dogs, continental travelling; but you have had enough for all the needful things — for neatness, cleanliness, an orderly household; a well-kept flower-garden, everything spotless and bright about you; no slipshod maid-of-all-work printing her greasy thumb upon your dishes — nothing out at elbows. Your house is small, but of its kind it is perfection; and your garden — well, if I had such a garden in such a situation I would not envy Eve the Eden she lost.”
“Is that really your opinion?” cried the enraptured soldier; “or are you saying this just to please me — to reconcile me to my jog-trot life, my modest surroundings?”
“I mean every word I say.”
“Then it is in your power to make me richer in happiness than Rothschild or Baring. Dearest Miss Bridgeman, dearest Jessie, I think you must know how devotedly I love you! Till to-day I have not dared to speak, for my limited means would not have allowed me to maintain a wife as the woman I love ought to be maintained; but this morning’s post brought me the news of the death of an old Admiral of the Blue, who was my father’s first cousin. He was a bachelor like myself — left the Navy soon after the signing of Sir Henry Pottinger’s treaty at Nankin in ‘42 — never considered himself well enough off to marry, but lived in a lodging at Devonport, and hoarded and hoarded and hoarded for the mere abstract pleasure of accumulating his surplus income; and the result of his hoarding — combined with a little dodging of his investments in stocks and shares — is, that he leaves me a solid four hundred a year in Great Westerns. It is not much from some people’s point of view, but, added to my existing income, it makes me very comfortable. I could afford to indulge all your simple wishes, my dearest! I could afford to help your family!”
He took her hand. She did not draw it away, but pressed his gently, with the grasp of friendship.
“Don’t say one word more — you are too good — you are the best and kindest man I have ever known!” she said, “and I shall love and honour you all my life; but I shall never marry! I made up my mind about that, oh! ever so long ago. Indeed, I never expected to be asked, if the truth must be told.”
“I understand,” said the Major, terribly dashed. “I am too old. Don’t suppose that I have not thought about that. I have. But I fancied the difficulty might be got over. You are so different from the common run of girls — so staid, so sensible, of such a contented disposition. But I was a fool to suppose that any girl of — —”
“Seven-and-twenty,” interrupted Jessie; “it is a long way up the hill of girlhood. I shall soon be going down on the other side.”
“At any rate, you are more than twenty years my junior. I was a fool to forget that.”
“Dear Major Bree,” said Jessie, very earnestly, “believe me, it is not for that reason, I say No. If you were as young — as young as Mr. Hamleigh — the answer would be just the same. I shall never marry. There is no one, prince or peasant, whom I care to marry. You are much too good a man to be married for the sake of a happy home, for status in the world, kindly companionship — all of which you could give me. If I loved you as you ought to be loved I would answer proudly, Yes; but I honour you too much to give you half love.”
“Perhaps you do not know with how little I could be satisfied,” urged the Major, opposing what he imagined to be a romantic scruple with the shrewd common-sense of his fifty years’ experience. “I want a friend, a companion, a helpmate, and I am sure you could be all those to me. If I could only make you happy!”
“You could not!” interrupted Jessie, with cruel decisiveness. “Pray, never speak of this again, dear Major Bree. Your friendship has been very pleasant to me; it has been one of the many charms of my life at Mount Royal. I would not lose it for the world. And we can always be friends, if you will only remember that I have made up my mind — irrevocably — never to marry.”
“I must needs obey you,” said the Major, deeply disappointed, but too unselfish to be angry. “I will not be importunate. Yet one word I must say. Your future — if you do not marry — what is that to be? Of course, so long as Mrs. Tregonell lives, your home will be at Mount Royal — but I fear that does not settle the question for long. My dear friend does not appear to me a long-lived woman. I have seen traces of premature decay. When Christabel is married, and Mrs. Tregonell is dead, where is your home to be?”
“Providence will find me one,” answered Jessie, cheerfully. “Providence is wonderfully kind to plain little spinsters with a knack of making themselves useful. I have been doing my best to educate myself ever since I have been at Mount Royal. It is so easy to improve one’s mind when there are no daily worries about the tax-gatherer and the milkman — and when I am called upon to seek a new home, I can go out as a governess — and drink the cup of life as it is mixed for governesses — as Charlotte Brontë says. Perhaps I shall write a novel, as she did, although I have not her genius.”
“I would not be sure of that,” said the Major. “I believe there is some kind of internal fire burning you up, although you are outwardly so quiet. I think it would have been your salvation to accept the jog-trot life and peaceful home I have offered you.”
“Very likely,” replied Jessie, with a shrug and a sigh. “But how many people reject salvation. They would rather be miserable in their own way than happy in anybody else’s way.”
The Major answered never a word. For him all the glory of the day had faded. He walked slowly on by Jessie’s side, meditating upon her words — wondering why she had so resolutely refused him. There had been not the least wavering — she had not even seemed to be taken by surprise — her mind had been made up long ago — not him, nor any other man, would she wed.
“Some early disappointment, perhaps,” mused the Major—”a curate at Shepherd’s Bush — those young men have a great deal to answer for.”
They came to the hyacinth dell — an earthly paradise to the two happy lovers, who were sitting on a mossy bank, in a sheet of azure bloom, which, seen from the distance, athwart young trees, looked like blue, bright water.
To the Major the hazel copse and the bluebells — the young oak plantation — and all the lovely details of mosses and flowering grasses, and starry anemones — were odious. He felt in a hurry to get back to his club, and steep himself in London pleasures. All the benevolence seemed to have been crushed out of him.
Christabel saw that her old friend was out of spirits, and contrived to be by his side on their way back to the boat, trying to cheer him with sweetest words and loveliest smiles.
“Have we tired you?” she asked. “The afternoon is very warm.”
“Tired me! You forget how I ramble over the hills at home. No; I am just a trifle put out — but it is nothing. I had news of a death this morning — a death that makes me richer by four hundred a year. If it were not for respect for my dead cousin who so kindly made me his heir, I think I should go to-night to the most rowdy theatre in London, just to put myself in spirits.”
“Which are the rowdy theatres, Uncle Oliver?”
“Well, perhaps I ought not to use such a word. The theatres are all good in their way — but there are theatres and theatres. I s
hould choose one of those to which the young men go night after night to see the same piece — a burlesque, or an opera bouffe — plenty of smart jokes and pretty girls.”
“Why have you not taken me to those theatres?”
“We have not come to them yet. You have seen Shakespeare and modern comedy — which is rather a weak material as compared with Sheridan — or even with Colman and Morton, whose plays were our staple entertainment when I was a boy. You have heard all the opera singers?”
“Yes, you have been very good. But I want to see ‘Cupid and Psyche’ — two of my partners last night talked to me of ‘Cupid and Psyche,’ and were astounded that I had not seen it. I felt quite ashamed of my ignorance. I asked one of my partners, who was particularly enthusiastic, to tell me all about the play — and he did — to the best of his ability, which was not great — and he said that a Miss Mayne — Stella Mayne — who plays Psyche, is simply adorable. She is the loveliest woman in London, he says — and was greatly surprised that she had not been pointed out to me in the Park. Now really, Uncle Oliver, this is very remiss in you — you who are so clever in showing me famous people when we are driving in the Park.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 694
