Wives and Daughters (16 page)

‘A letter which you were unwilling to have seen by her father, who had tacitly trusted to your honour by receiving you as an inmate of his house. Your father’s son—I know Major Coxe well—ought to have come to me, and have said out openly, “Mr. Gibson I love—or I fancy that I love—your daughter; I do not think it right to conceal this from you, although unable to earn a penny; and with no prospect of an unassisted livelihood, even for myself, for several years, I shall not say a word about my feelings—or fancied feelings—to the very young lady herself.” That is what your father’s son ought to have said; if, indeed, a couple of grains of reticent silence would not have been better still.’

‘And if I had said it, sir—perhaps I ought to have said it,’ said Mr. Coxe, in a hurry of anxiety, ‘what would have been your answer? Would you have sanctioned my passion, sir?’

‘I would have said, most probably—I will not be certain of my exact words in a supposititious case—that you were a young fool, but not a dishonorable young fool, and I should have told you not to let your thoughts run upon a calf-love until you had magnified it into a passion. And I dare say, to make up for the mortification I should have given you, I should have prescribed your joining the Hollingford Cricket Club, and set you at liberty as often as I could on the Saturday afternoons. As it is, I must write to your father’s agent in London, and ask him to remove you out of my household, repaying the premium, of course, which will enable you to start afresh in some other doctor’s surgery.’

‘It will so grieve my father,’ said Mr. Coxe, startled into dismay, if not repentance.

‘I see no other course open. It will give Major Coxe some trouble (I shall take care that he is at no extra expense), but what I think will grieve him the most is the betrayal of confidence; for I trusted you, Edward, like a son of my own!’ There was something in Mr. Gibson’s voice when he spoke seriously, especially when he referred to any feeling of his own—he who so rarely betrayed what was passing in his heart—that was irresistible to most people: the change from joking and sarcasm to tender gravity.

Mr. Coxe hung his head a little, and meditated.

‘I do love Miss Gibson,’ said he, at length. ‘Who could help it?’

‘Mr. Wynne, I hope!’ said Mr. Gibson.

‘His heart is pre-engaged,’ replied Mr. Coxe. ‘Mine was free as air till I saw her.’

‘Would it tend to cure your—well! passion, we’ll say—if she wore blue spectacles at meal-times? I observe you dwell much on the beauty of her eyes.’

‘You are ridiculing my feelings, Mr. Gibson. Do you forget that you yourself were young once?’

‘Poor Jeanie’ rose before Mr. Gibson’s eyes; and he felt a little rebuked.

‘Come, Mr. Coxe, let us see if we can’t make a bargain,’ said he, after a minute or so of silence. ‘You have done a really wrong thing, and I hope you are convinced of it in your heart, or that you will be when the heat of this discussion is over and you come to think a little about it. But I won’t lose all respect for your father’s son. If you will give me your word that, as long as you remain a member of my family—pupil, apprentice, what you will—you won’t again try to disclose your passion—you see I am careful to take your view of what I should call a mere fancy—by word or writing, look or acts, in any manner whatever, to my daughter, or to talk about your feelings to any one else, you shall remain here. If you cannot give me your word, I must follow out the course I named, and write to your father’s agent.’

Mr. Coxe stood irresolute.

‘Mr. Wynne knows all I feel for Miss Gibson, sir. He and I have no secrets from each other.’

‘Well, I suppose he must represent the reeds. You know the story of King Midas’s barber, who found out that his royal master had the ears of an ass beneath his hyacinthine curls. So the barber, in default of a Mr. Wynne, went to the reeds that grew on the shores of a neighbouring lake, and whispered to them, “King Midas has the ears of an ass.” But he repeated it so often that the reeds learnt the words, and kept on saying them all day long, till at last the secret was no secret at all. If you keep on telling your tale to Mr. Wynne, are you sure he won’t repeat it in his turn?’

‘If I pledge my word as a gentleman, sir, I pledge it for Mr. Wynne as well.’

‘I suppose I must run the risk. But remember how soon a young girl’s name may be breathed upon, and sullied. Molly has no mother, and for that very reason she ought to move among you all as unharmed as Una herself.’
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‘Mr. Gibson, if you wish it, I’ll swear it on the Bible,’ cried the excitable young man.

‘Nonsense. As if your word, if it’s worth anything, was not enough! We’ll shake hands upon it, if you like.’

Mr. Coxe came forward eagerly, and almost squeezed Mr. Gibson’s ring into his finger.

As he was leaving the room, he said, a little uneasily, ‘May I give Bethia a crown-piece?’

‘No, indeed! Leave Bethia to me. I hope you won’t say another word to her while she is here. I shall see that she gets a respectable place when she goes away.’

Then Mr. Gibson rang for his horse, and went out on the last visits of the day. He used to reckon that he rode the world around in the course of the year. There were not many surgeons in the county who had so wide a range of practice as he; he went to lonely cottages on the borders of great commons; to farmhouses at the end of narrow country lanes that led to nowhere else, and were overshadowed by the elms and beeches overhead. He attended all the gentry within a circle of fifteen miles round Hollingford; and was the appointed doctor to the still greater families who went up to London every February—as the fashion then was—and returned to their acres in the early weeks of July. He was, of necessity, a great deal from home, and on this soft and pleasant summer evening he felt the absence as a great evil. He was startled into discovering that his little one was growing fast into a woman, and already the passive object of some of the strong interests that affect a woman’s life; and he—her mother as well as her father—so much away that he could not guard her as he would have wished. The end of his cogitations was that ride to Hamley the next morning, when he proposed to allow his daughter to accept Mrs. Hamley’s last invitation—an invitation that had been declined at the time.

‘You may quote against me the proverb, “He that will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay.” And shall have no reason to complain,’ he had said.

But Mrs. Hamley was only too much charmed with the prospect of having a young girl for a visitor; one whom it would not be a trouble to entertain; who might be sent out to ramble in the gardens, or told to read when the invalid was too much fatigued for conversation; and yet one whose youth and freshness would bring a charm, like a waft of sweet summer air, into her lonely shut-up life. Nothing could be pleasanter, and so Molly’s visit to Hamley was easily settled.

‘I only wish Osborne and Roger had been at home,’ said Mrs. Hamley, in her low soft voice. ‘She may find it dull, being with old people, like the squire and me, from morning till night. When can she come? the darling—I am beginning to love her already!’

Mr. Gibson was very glad in his heart that the young men of the house were out of the way; he did not want his little Molly to be passing from Scylla to Charybdis;
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and, as he afterwards scoffed at himself for thinking, he had got an idea that all young men were wolves in chase of his one ewe-lamb.

‘She knows nothing of the pleasure in store for her,’ he replied; ‘and I am sure I don’t know what feminine preparations she may think necessary, or how long they may take. You’ll remember she is a little ignoramus, and has had no ... training in etiquette; our ways at home are rather rough for a girl, I’m afraid. But I know I could not send her into a kinder atmosphere than this.’

When the squire heard from his wife of Mr. Gibson’s proposal, he was as much pleased as she at the prospect of their youthful visitor; for he was a man of a hearty hospitality, when his pride did not interfere with its gratification; and he was delighted to think of his sick wife’s having such an agreeable companion in her hours of loneliness. After a while he said,—‘It’s as well the lads are at Cambridge; we might have been having a love-affair if they had been at home.’

‘Well—and if we had?’ asked his more romantic wife.

‘It would not have done,’ said the squire, decidedly. ‘Osborne will have had a first-rate education—as good as any man in the county—he’ll have this property, and he’s a Hamley of Hamley; not a family in the shire is as old as we are, or settled on their ground so well. Osborne may marry when he likes. If Lord Hollingford had a daughter, Osborne would have been as good a match as she could have required. It would never do for him to fall in love with Gibson’s daughter—I should not allow it. So it’s as well he’s out of the way.’

‘Well! perhaps Osborne had better look higher.’

‘Perhaps! I say he must.’ The squire brought his hand down with a thump on the table, near him, which made his wife’s heart beat hard for some minutes. ‘And as for Roger,’ he continued, unconscious of the flutter he had put her into, ‘he’ll have to make his own way, and earn his own bread; and, I’m afraid, he’s not getting on very brilliantly at Cambridge. He must not think of falling in love for these ten years.’

‘Unless he marries a fortune,’ said Mrs. Hamley, more by way of concealing her palpitation than anything else; for she was unworldly, and romantic to a fault.

‘No son of mine shall ever marry a wife who is richer than himself, with my good will,’ said the squire again, with emphasis, but without a thump. ‘I don’t say but what, if Roger is gaining five hundred a year by the time he’s thirty, he shall not choose a wife with ten thousand pounds down; but I do say, if a boy of mine, with only two hundred a year—which is all Roger will have from us, and that not for a long time—goes and marries a woman with fifty thousand to her portion, I will disown him—it would be just disgusting.’

‘Not if they loved each other, and their whole happiness depended upon their marrying each other,’ put in Mrs. Hamley, mildly.

‘Pooh! away with love! Nay, my dear, we loved each other so dearly we should never have been happy with any one else; but that’s a different thing. People are not like what they were when we were young. All the love nowadays is just silly fancy, and sentimental romance, as far as I can see.’

Mr. Gibson thought that he had settled everything about Molly’s going to Hamley before he spoke to her about it, which he did not do until the morning of the day on which Mrs. Hamley expected her. Then he said,—‘By the way, Molly! you are to go to Hamley this afternoon; Mrs. Hamley wants you to go to her for a week or two, and it suits me capitally that you should accept her invitation just now.’

‘Go to Hamley! This afternoon! Papa, you’ve got some odd reasons at the back of your head—some mystery, or something. Please, tell me what it is. Go to Hamley for a week or two! Why, I never was from home before this without you in all my life.’

‘Perhaps not. I don’t think you ever walked before you put your feet to the ground. Everything must have a beginning.’

‘It has something to do with that letter that was directed to me, but that you took out of my hands before I could even see the writing of the direction.’ She fixed her grey eyes on her father’s face, as if she meant to pluck out his secret.

He only smiled and said,—‘You’re a witch, goosey!’

‘Then it had! But if it was a note from Mrs. Hamley, why might I not see it? I have been wondering if you had some plan in your head ever since that day—Thursday, was not it? You’ve gone about in a kind of thoughtful, perplexed way, just like a conspirator. Tell me, papa’—coming up at the time, and putting on a beseeching manner—’ why might not I see that note? and why am I to go to Hamley all on a sudden?’

‘Don’t you like to go? Would you rather not?’ If she had said that she did not want to go he would have been rather pleased than otherwise, although it would have put him into a great perplexity; but he was beginning to dread the parting from her even for so short a time. However, she replied directly,—

‘I don’t know—I dare say I shall like it when I have thought a little more about it. Just now I am so startled by the suddenness of the affair, I haven’t considered whether I shall like it or not. I shan’t like going away from you, I know. Why am I to go, papa?’

‘There are three old ladies sitting somewhere, and thinking about you just at this very minute; one has a distaff in her hands, and is spinning a thread; she has come to a knot in it, and is puzzled what to do with it. Her sister has a great pair of scissors in her hands, and wants—as she always does, when any difficulty arises in the smoothness of the thread—to cut it off short; but the third, who has the most head of the three, plans how to undo the knot; and she it is who has decided that you are to go to Hamley. The others are quite convinced by her arguments; so, as the Fates have decreed that this visit is to be paid, there is nothing left for you and me but to submit.’

‘That is all nonsense, papa, and you are only making me more curious to find out this hidden reason.’

Mr. Gibson changed his tone, and spoke gravely now. ‘There is a reason, Molly, and one which I do not wish to give. When I tell you this much, I expect you to be an honourable girl, and to try and not even conjecture what the reason may be,—much less endeavour to put little discoveries together till very likely you may find out what I want to conceal.’

‘Papa, I won’t even think about your reason again. But then I shall have to plague you with another question. I have had no new gown this year, and I have outgrown all my last summer frocks. I have only three that I can wear at all. Betty was saying only yesterday that I ought to have some more.’

‘That’ll do that you have got on, won’t it? It’s a very pretty colour.’

‘Yes; but, papa’ (holding it out as if she was going to dance), ’it’s made of woollen, and so hot and heavy; and every day it will be getting warmer.’