CHAPTER XII.

PREPARING FOR THE WEDDING.

[Ill.u.s.tration (unt.i.tled)]

Meanwhile the love-affairs between the middle-aged couple were prospering well, after a fashion; after the fashion that they liked best, although it might probably have appeared dull and prosaic to younger people. Lord c.u.mnor had come down in great glee at the news he had heard from his wife at the Towers. He, too, seemed to think he had taken an active part in bringing about the match by only speaking about it. His first words on the subject to Lady c.u.mnor were,--

"I told you so. Now didn't I say what a good, suitable thing this affair between Gibson and Clare would be! I don't know when I've been so much pleased. You may despise the trade of match-maker, my lady, but I am very proud of it. After this, I shall go on looking out for suitable cases among the middle-aged people of my acquaintance.

I shan't meddle with young folks, they are so apt to be fanciful; but I've been so successful in this, that I do think it's good encouragement to go on."

"Go on--with what?" asked Lady c.u.mnor, drily.

"Oh, planning,--you can't deny that I planned this match."

"I don't think you are likely to do either much good or harm by planning," she replied, with cool, good sense.

"It puts it into people's heads, my dear."

"Yes, if you speak about your plans to them, of course it does. But in this case you never spoke to either Mr. Gibson or Clare, did you?"

All at once the recollection of how Clare had come upon the pa.s.sage in Lord c.u.mnor's letter flashed on his lady, but she did not say anything about it, but left her husband to flounder about as best he might.

"No! I never spoke to them; of course not."

"Then you must be strongly mesmeric, and your will acted upon theirs, if you are to take credit for any part in the affair," continued his pitiless wife.

"I really can't say. It's no use looking back to what I said or did. I'm very well satisfied with it, and that's enough, and I mean to show them how much I'm pleased. I shall give Clare something towards her rigging out, and they shall have a breakfast at Ashcombe Manor-house. I'll write to Preston about it. When did you say they were to be married?"

"I think they'd better wait till Christmas, and I have told them so.

It would amuse the children, going over to Ashcombe for the wedding; and if it's bad weather during the holidays I'm always afraid of their finding it dull at the Towers. It's very different if it's a good frost, and they can go out skating and sledging in the park. But these last two years it has been so wet for them, poor dears!"

"And will the other poor dears be content to wait to make a holiday for your grandchildren? 'To make a Roman holiday.' Pope, or somebody else, has a line of poetry like that. 'To make a Roman holiday,"--he repeated, pleased with his unusual apt.i.tude at quotation.

"It's Byron, and it's nothing to do with the subject in hand. I'm surprised at your lordship's quoting Byron,--he was a very immoral poet."

"I saw him take his oaths in the House of Lords," said Lord c.u.mnor, apologetically.

"Well! the less said about him the better," said Lady c.u.mnor. "I have told Clare that she had better not think of being married before Christmas: and it won't do for her to give up her school in a hurry either."

But Clare did not intend to wait till Christmas; and for this once she carried her point against the will of the countess, and without many words, or any open opposition. She had a harder task in setting aside Mr. Gibson's desire to have Cynthia over for the wedding, even if she went back to her school at Boulogne directly after the ceremony. At first she had said that it would be delightful, a charming plan; only she feared that she must give up her own wishes to have her child near her at such a time, on account of the expense of the double journey.

But Mr. Gibson, economical as he was in his habitual expenditure, had a really generous heart. He had already shown it, in entirely relinquishing his future wife's life-interest in the very small property the late Mr. Kirkpatrick had left, in favour of Cynthia; while he arranged that she should come to his home as a daughter as soon as she left the school she was at. The life-interest was about thirty pounds a year. Now he gave Mrs. Kirkpatrick three five-pound notes, saying that he hoped they would do away with the objections to Cynthia's coming over to the wedding; and at the time Mrs.

Kirkpatrick felt as if they would, and caught the reflection of his strong wish, and fancied it was her own. If the letter could have been written and the money sent off that day while the reflected glow of affection lasted, Cynthia would have been bridesmaid to her mother. But a hundred little interruptions came in the way of letter-writing; and by the next day maternal love had diminished; and the value affixed to the money had increased: money had been so much needed, so hardly earned in Mrs. Kirkpatrick's life; while the perhaps necessary separation of mother and child had lessened the amount of affection the former had to bestow. So she persuaded herself, afresh, that it would be unwise to disturb Cynthia at her studies; to interrupt the fulfilment of her duties just after the _semestre_ had begun afresh; and she wrote a letter to Madame Lefevre so well imbued with this persuasion, that an answer which was almost an echo of her words was returned, the sense of which being conveyed to Mr. Gibson, who was no great French scholar, settled the vexed question, to his moderate but unfeigned regret. But the fifteen pounds were not returned. Indeed, not merely that sum, but a great part of the hundred which Lord c.u.mnor had given her for her trousseau, was required to pay off debts at Ashcombe; for the school had been anything but flourishing since Mrs. Kirkpatrick had had it.

It was really very much to her credit that she preferred clearing herself from debt to purchasing wedding finery. But it was one of the few points to be respected in Mrs. Kirkpatrick that she had always been careful in payment to the shops where she dealt; it was a little sense of duty cropping out. Whatever other faults might arise from her superficial and flimsy character, she was always uneasy till she was out of debt. Yet she had no scruple in appropriating her future husband's money to her own use, when it was decided that it was not to be employed as he intended. What new articles she bought for herself, were all such as would make a show, and an impression upon the ladies of Hollingford. She argued with herself that linen, and all under-clothing, would never be seen; while she knew that every gown she had, would give rise to much discussion, and would be counted up in the little town.

So her stock of underclothing was very small, and scarcely any of it new; but it was made of dainty material, and was finely mended up by her deft fingers, many a night long after her pupils were in bed; inwardly resolving all the time she sewed, that hereafter some one else should do her plain-work. Indeed, many a little circ.u.mstance of former subjection to the will of others rose up before her during these quiet hours, as an endurance or a suffering never to occur again. So apt are people to look forward to a different kind of life from that to which they have been accustomed, as being free from care and trial! She recollected how, one time during this very summer at the Towers, after she was engaged to Mr. Gibson, when she had taken above an hour to arrange her hair in some new mode carefully studied from Mrs. Bradley's fashion-book--after all, when she came down, looking her very best, as she thought, and ready for her lover, Lady c.u.mnor had sent her back again to her room, just as if she had been a little child, to do her hair over again, and not to make such a figure of fun of herself! Another time she had been sent to change her gown for one in her opinion far less becoming, but which suited Lady c.u.mnor's taste better. These were little things; but they were late samples of what in different shapes she had had to endure for many years; and her liking for Mr. Gibson grew in proportion to her sense of the evils from which he was going to serve as a means of escape. After all, that interval of hope and plain-sewing, intermixed though it was with tuition, was not disagreeable. Her wedding-dress was secure. Her former pupils at the Towers were going to present her with that; they were to dress her from head to foot on the auspicious day. Lord c.u.mnor, as has been said, had given her a hundred pounds for her trousseau, and had sent Mr. Preston a carte-blanche order for the wedding-breakfast in the old hall in Ashcombe Manor-house. Lady c.u.mnor--a little put out by the marriage not being deferred till her grandchildren's Christmas holidays--had nevertheless given Mrs.

Kirkpatrick an excellent English-made watch and chain; more clumsy but more serviceable than the little foreign elegance that had hung at her side so long, and misled her so often.

Her preparations were thus in a very considerable state of forwardness, while Mr. Gibson had done nothing as yet towards any new arrangement or decoration of his house for his intended bride. He knew he ought to do something. But what? Where to begin, when so much was out of order, and he had so little time for superintendence?

At length he came to the wise decision of asking one of the Miss Brownings, for old friendship's sake, to take the trouble of preparing what was immediately requisite; and resolved to leave all the more ornamental decorations that he proposed, to the taste of his future wife. But before making his request to the Miss Brownings, he had to tell them of his engagement, which had hitherto been kept a secret from the townspeople, who had set down his frequent visits at the Towers to the score of the countess's health. He felt how he should have laughed in his sleeve at any middle-aged widower who came to him with a confession of the kind he had now to make to Miss Brownings, and disliked the idea of the necessary call: but it was to be done, so one evening he went in "promiscuous," as they called it, and told them his story. At the end of the first chapter--that is to say, at the end of the story of Mr. c.o.xe's calf-love, Miss Browning held up her hands in surprise.

"To think of Molly, as I have held in long-clothes, coming to have a lover! Well, to be sure! Sister Phoebe--" (she was just coming into the room), "here's a piece of news! Molly Gibson has got a lover!

One may almost say she's had an offer! Mr. Gibson, may not one?--and she's but sixteen!"

"Seventeen, sister," said Miss Phoebe, who piqued herself on knowing all about dear Mr. Gibson's domestic affairs. "Seventeen, the 22nd of last June."

"Well, have it your own way. Seventeen, if you like to call her so!"

said Miss Browning, impatiently. "The fact is still the same--she's got a lover; and it seems to me she was in long-clothes only yesterday."

"I'm sure I hope her course of true love will run smooth," said Miss Phoebe.

Now Mr. Gibson came in; for his story was not half told, and he did not want them to run away too far with the idea of Molly's love-affair.

"Molly knows nothing about it. I haven't even named it to any one but you two, and to one other friend. I trounced c.o.xe well, and did my best to keep his attachment--as he calls it--in bounds. But I was sadly puzzled what to do about Molly. Miss Eyre was away, and I couldn't leave them in the house together without any older woman."

"Oh, Mr. Gibson! why did you not send her to us?" broke in Miss Browning. "We would have done anything in our power for you; for your sake, as well as her poor dear mother's."

"Thank you. I know you would, but it wouldn't have done to have had her in Hollingford, just at the time of c.o.xe's effervescence. He's better now. His appet.i.te has come back with double force, after the fasting he thought it right to exhibit. He had three helpings of black-currant dumpling yesterday."

"I am sure you are most liberal, Mr. Gibson. Three helpings! And, I daresay, butcher's meat in proportion?"

"Oh! I only named it because, with such very young men, it's generally see-saw between appet.i.te and love, and I thought the third helping a very good sign. But still, you know, what has happened once, may happen again."

"I don't know. Phoebe had an offer of marriage once--" said Miss Browning.

"Hush! sister. It might hurt his feelings to have it spoken about."

"Nonsense, child! It's five-and-twenty years ago; and his eldest daughter is married herself."

"I own he has not been constant," pleaded Miss Phoebe, in her tender, piping voice. "All men are not--like you, Mr.

Gibson--faithful to the memory of their first-love."

Mr. Gibson winced. Jeannie was his first love; but her name had never been breathed in Hollingford. His wife--good, pretty, sensible, and beloved as she had been--was not his second; no, nor his third love.

And now he was come to make a confidence about his second marriage.

"Well, well," said he; "at any rate, I thought I must do something to protect Molly from such affairs while she was so young, and before I had given my sanction. Miss Eyre's little nephew fell ill of scarlet fever--"

"Ah! by-the-by, how careless of me not to inquire. How is the poor little fellow?"

"Worse--better. It doesn't signify to what I've got to say now; the fact was, Miss Eyre couldn't come back to my house for some time, and I cannot leave Molly altogether at Hamley."

"Ah! I see now, why there was that sudden visit to Hamley. Upon my word, it's quite a romance."

"I do like hearing of a love-affair," murmured Miss Phoebe.

"Then if you'll let me get on with my story, you shall hear of mine,"

said Mr. Gibson, quite beyond his patience with their constant interruptions.