Hopes and Fears or, scenes from the life of a spinster

‘Proposed by deputy?’ exclaimed Horatia, aghast.

‘No, no!’ gasped Lucilla; ‘it’s this Ireland of yours—that—that—’ and she well-nigh sobbed.

‘My bonny bell!  I knew you would not be bullied into deserting.’

‘Oh! Rashe, she was very hard on me.  Every one is but you!’ and Lucilla threw herself into her cousin’s arms in a paroxysm of feeling; but their maid’s knock brought her back to composure sooner than poor Honora, who shed many a tear over this last defeat, as, looking mournfully to Phœbe, she said, ‘I have done, Phœbe.  I can say no more to her.  She will not hear anything from me.  Oh! what have I done that my child should be hardened against me!’

Phœbe could offer nothing but caresses full of indignant sorrow, and there was evidently soothing in them, for Miss Charlecote’s tears became softer, and she fondly smoothed Phœbe’s fair hair, saying, as she drew the clinging arms closer round her: ‘My little woodbine, you must twine round your brother and comfort him, but you can spare some sweetness for me too.  There, I will dress.  I will not keep you from the party.’

‘I do not care for that; only to see Robin.’

‘We must take our place in the crowd,’ sighed Honora, beginning her toilet; ‘and you will enjoy it when you are there.  Your first quadrille is promised to Owen, is it not?’

‘Yes,’ said Phœbe, dreamily, and she would have gone back to Robin’s sorrows, but Honora had learnt that there were subjects to be set aside when it was incumbent on her to be presentable, and directed the talk to speculations whether the poor schoolmistress would have nerve to sing; and somehow she talked up Phœbe’s spirits to such a hopeful pitch, that the little maiden absolutely was crossed by a gleam of satisfaction from the ungrateful recollection that poor Miss Charlecote had done with the affair.  Against her will, she had detected the antagonism between the two, and bad as it was of Lucy, was certain that she was more likely to be amenable where there was no interference from her best friend.

The music-room was already crowded when the two made their way into it, and Honora’s inclination was to deposit herself on the nearest seat, but she owed something otherwise to her young charge, and Phœbe’s eyes had already found a lonely black figure with arms crossed, and lowering brow.  Simultaneously they moved towards him, and he towards them.  ‘Is she come down?’ he asked.

Phœbe shook her head, but at the same moment another door near the orchestra admitted a small white butterfly figure, leading in a tall queenly apparition in black, whom she placed in a chair adjacent to the bejewelled prima donna of the night—a great contrast with her dust-coloured German hair and complexion, and good-natured plain face.

Robert’s face cleared with relief; he evidently detected nothing outré in Lucilla’s aspect, and was rejoicing in the concession.  Woman’s eyes saw further; a sigh from Honora, an amused murmur around him, caused him to bend his looks on Phœbe.  She knew his eyes were interrogating her, but could not bear to let her own reply, and kept them on the ground.

He was moving towards Lucilla, who, having consigned her protegée to the good-humoured German, had come more among the guests, and was exchanging greetings and answering comments with all her most brilliant airs of saucy animation.

And who could quarrel with that fairy vision?  Her rich double-skirted watered silk was bordered with exquisitely made and coloured flies, radiant with the hues of the peacock, the gold pheasant, the jay, parrots of all tints, everything rich and rare in plumage.  A coronal of the same encircled her glossy hair, the tiny plumes contrasting with the blonde ringlets, and the bonâ fide hooks ostentatiously displayed; lesser and more innocuous flies edged the sleeves, corsage, shoes, and gloves; and her fan, which she used as skilfully as Jenny Wren, presented a Watteau-like picture of an angling scene.  Anything more daintily, quaintly pretty could not be imagined, and the male part of the assembly would have unanimously concurred in Sir Harry Buller’s ‘three cheers for the queen of the anglers.’

But towards the party most concerned in her movements, Lucilla came not; and Phœbe, understanding a desire to keep as near as might be to Miss Murrell, tried to suggest it as the cause, and looking round, saw Owen standing by Miss Charlecote, with somewhat of an uneasy countenance.

‘Terribly hot here,’ he said, restlessly; ‘suffocating, aren’t you, Honor?  Come and take a turn in the cloister; the fountain is stunning by moonlight.’

No proposal could have been more agreeable to Honora; and Phœbe was afraid of losing her chaperon, though she would rather have adhered to her brother, and the barbs of that wicked little angler were tearing him far too deeply to permit him to move out of sight of his tormentor.

But for this, the change would have been delicious.  The white lights and deep shadows from the calm, grave moon contrasted with the long gleams of lamp-light from every window, reddened by the curtains within; the flowers shone out with a strange whiteness, the taller ones almost like spiritual shapes; the burnished orange leaves glistened, the water rose high in silvery spray, and fell back into the blackness of the basin made more visible by one trembling, shimmering reflection; the dark blue sky above seemed shut into a vault by the enclosing buildings, and one solitary planet shone out in the lustrous neighbourhood of the moon.  So still, so solemn, so cool!  Honora felt it as repose, and pensively began to admire—Owen chimed in with her.  Feverish thoughts and perturbations were always gladly soothed away in her company.  Phœbe alone stood barely confessing the beauty, and suppressing impatience at their making so much of it; not yet knowing enough of care or passion to seek repose, and much more absorbed in human than in any other form of nature.

The music was her first hope of deliverance from her namesake in the sky; but, behold, her companions chose to prefer hearing that grand instrumental piece softened by distance; and even Madame Hedwig’s quivering notes did not bring them in.  However, at the first sounds of the accompaniment to the ‘Three Fishers’ Wives,’ Owen pulled back the curtain, and handed the two ladies back into the room, by a window much nearer to the orchestra than that by which they had gone out, not far from where Edna Murrell had just risen, her hands nervously clasped together, her colour rapidly varying, and her eyes roaming about as though in quest of something.  Indeed, through all the music, the slight sounds of the entrance at the window did not escape her, and at the instant when she should have begun to sing, Phœbe felt those black eyes levelled on herself with a look that startled her; they were at once removed, the head turned away; there was an attempt at the first words, but they died away on her lips; there was a sudden whiteness, Lucilla and the German both tried to reseat her; but with readier judgment Owen made two long steps, gathered her up in his strong arms, and bore her through the curtains and out at the open window like a mere infant.

‘Don’t come, don’t—it will only make more fuss—nobody has seen.  Go to Madame Hedwig; tell her from me to go on to her next, and cover her retreat,’ said Lucilla, as fast as the words would come, signing back Honora, and hastily disappearing between the curtains.

There was a command in Lucilla’s gestures which always made obedience the first instinct even with Honora, and her impulse to assist thus counteracted, she had time to recollect that Lucy might be supposed to know best what to do with the schoolmistress, and that to dispose of her among her ladies’ maid friends was doubtless the kindest measure.

‘I must say I am glad,’ she said; ‘the poor thing cannot be quite so much spoilt as they wished.’

The concert proceeded, and in the next pause Honor fell into conversation with a pleasant lady who had brought one pair of young daughters in the morning, and now was doing the same duty by an elder pair.

Phœbe was standing near the window when a touch on her arm and a whispered ‘Help! hush!’ made her look round.  Holding the curtain apart, so as to form the least possible aperture, and with one finger on her lip, was Lucy’s face, the eyes brimming over with laughter, as she pointed to her head—three of the hooks had set their barbs deep into the crimson satin curtain, and held her a prisoner!

‘Hush!  I’ll never forgive you if you betray me,’ she whispered, drawing Phœbe by the arm behind the curtain; ‘I should expire on the spot to be found in Absalom’s case.  All that little goose’s fault—I never reckoned on having to rush about this way.  Can’t you do it?  Don’t spare scissors,’ and Lucilla produced a pair from under her skirt.  ‘Rashe and I always go provided.’

‘How is she?—where is she?’ asked Phœbe.

‘That’s exactly what I can’t tell.  He took her out to the fountain; she was quite like a dead thing.  Water wouldn’t make her come to, and I ran for some salts; I wouldn’t call anybody, for it was too romantic a condition to have Owen discovered in, with a fainting maiden in his arms.  Such a rummage as I had.  My own things are all jumbled up, I don’t know how, and Rashe keeps nothing bigger than globules, only fit for fainting lady-birds, so I went to Lolly’s, but her bottles have all gold heads, and are full of uncanny-looking compounds, and I made a raid at last on Sweet Honey’s rational old dressing-case, poked out her keys from her pocket, and got in; wasting interminable time.  Well, when I got back to my fainting damsel, non est inventus.’

‘Inventa,’ murmured the spirit of Miss Fennimore within Phœbe.  ‘But what? had she got well?’

‘So I suppose.  Gone off to the servants’ rooms, no doubt; as there is no White Lady in the fountain to spirit them both away.  What, haven’t you done that, yet?’

‘Oh! Lucy, stand still, please, or you’ll get another hook in.’

‘Give me the scissors; I know I could do it quicker.  Never mind the curtain, I say; nobody will care.’

She put up her hand, and shook head and feet to the entanglement of a third hook; but Phœbe, decided damsel that she was, used her superior height to keep her mastery, held up the scissors, pressed the fidgety shoulder into quiescence, and kept her down while she extricated her, without fatal detriment to the satin, though with scanty thanks, for the liberation was no sooner accomplished than the sprite was off, throwing out a word about Rashe wanting her.

Phœbe emerged to find that she had not been missed, and presently the concert was over, and tea coming round, there was a change of places.  Robert came towards her.  ‘I am going,’ he said.

‘Oh! Robert, when dancing would be one chance?’

‘She does not mean to give me that chance; I would not ask it while she is in that dress.  It is answer sufficient.  Good night, Phœbe; enjoy yourself.’

Enjoy herself!  A fine injunction, when her brother was going away in such a mood!  Yet who would have suspected that rosy, honest apple face of any grievance, save that her partner was missing?

Honora was vexed and concerned at his neglect, but Phœbe appeased her by reporting what Lucy had said.  ‘Thoughtless! reckless!’ sighed Honora; ‘if Lucy would leave the poor girl on his hands, of course he is obliged to make some arrangement for getting her home!  I never knew such people as they are here!  Well, Phœbe, you shall have a partner next time!’

Phœbe had one, thanks chiefly to Rashe, and somehow the rapid motion shook her out of her troubles, and made her care much less for Robin’s sorrows than she had done two minutes before.  She was much more absorbed in hopes for another partner.

Alas! he did not come; neither then nor for the ensuing.  Owen’s value began to rise.

Miss Charlecote did not again bestir herself in the cause, partly from abstract hatred of waltzes, partly from the constant expectation of Owen’s reappearance, and latterly from being occupied in a discussion with the excellent mother upon young girls reading novels.

At last, after a galoppe, at which Phœbe had looked on with wishful eyes, Lucilla dropped breathless into the chair which she relinquished to her.

‘Well, Phœbe, how do you like it?’

‘Oh! very much,’ rather ruefully; ‘at least it would be if—’

‘If you had any partners, eh, poor child?  Hasn’t Owen turned up?

‘It’s that billiard-room; I tried to make Charlie shut it up.  But we’ll disinter him; I’ll rush in like a sky-rocket, and scatter the gentlemen to all quarters.’

‘No, no, don’t!’ cried Phœbe, alarmed, and catching hold of her.  ‘It is not that, but Robin is gone.’

‘Atrocious,’ returned Cilly, disconcerted, but resolved that Phœbe should not perceive it; ‘so we are both under a severe infliction,—both ashamed of our brothers.’

‘I am not ashamed of mine,’ said Phœbe, in a tone of gravity.

‘Ah! there’s the truant,’ said Lucilla, turning aside.  ‘Owen, where have you hidden yourself?  I hope you are ready to sink into the earth with shame at hearing you have rubbed off the bloom from a young lady’s first ball.’

‘No! it was not he who did so,’ stoutly replied Phœbe.

‘Ah! it was all the consequence of the green and white; I told you it was a sinister omen,’ said Owen, chasing away a shade of perplexity from his brow, and assuming a certain air that Phœbe had never seen before, and did not like.  ‘At least you will be merciful, and allow me to retrieve my character.’

‘You had nothing to retrieve,’ said Phœbe, in the most straightforward manner; ‘it was very good in you to take care of poor Miss Murrell.  What became of her?  Lucy said you would know.’

‘I—I?’ he exclaimed, so vehemently as to startle her by the fear of having ignorantly committed some egregious blunder; ‘I’m the last person to know.’

‘The last to be seen with the murdered always falls under suspicion,’ said Lucilla.

‘Drowned in the fountain?’ cried Owen, affecting horror.

‘Then you must have done it,’ said his sister, ‘for when I came back, after ransacking the house for salts, you had both disappeared.  Have you been washing your hands all this time after the murder?’

‘Nothing can clear me but an appeal to the fountain,’ said Owen; ‘will you come and look in, Phœbe?  It is more delicious than ever.’

But Phœbe had had enough of the moonlight, did not relish the subject, and was not pleased with Owen’s manner; so she refused by a most decided ‘No, thank you,’ causing Lucy to laugh at her for thinking Owen dangerous.

‘At least you will vouchsafe to trust yourself with me for the Lancers,’ said Owen, as Cilla’s partner came to claim her, and Phœbe rejoiced in anything to change the tone of the conversation; still, however, asking, as he led her off, what had become of the poor schoolmistress.

‘Gone home, very sensibly,’ said Owen; ‘if she is wise she will know how to trust to Cilly’s invitations!  People that do everything at once never do anything well.  It is quite a rest to turn to any one like you, Phœbe, who are content with one thing at a time!  I wish—’

‘Well, then, let us dance,’ said Phœbe, abruptly; ‘I can’t do that well enough to talk too.’

It was not that Owen had not said the like things to her many times before; it was his eagerness and fervour that gave her an uncomfortable feeling.  She was not sure that he was not laughing at her by putting on these devoted airs, and she felt herself grown up enough to put an end to being treated as a child.  He made her a profound bow in a mockery of acquiescence, and preserved absolute silence during the first figures, but she caught his eye several times gazing on her with looks such as another might have interpreted into mingled regret and admiration, but which were to her simply discomfiting and disagreeable, and when he spoke again, it was not in banter, but half in sadness.  ‘Phœbe, how do you like all this?’

‘I think I could like it very much.’

‘I am almost sorry to hear you say so; anything that should tend to make you resemble others is detestable.’

‘I should be very sorry not to be like other people.’

‘Phœbe, you do not know how much of the pleasure of my life would be lost if you were to become a mere conventional young lady.’

Phœbe had no notion of being the pleasure of any one’s life except Robin’s and Maria’s, and was rather affronted that Owen should profess to enjoy her childish ignorance and naïveté.

‘I believe,’ she said, ‘I was rude just now when I told you not to talk.  I am sorry for it; I shall know better next time.’

‘Your knowing better is exactly what I deprecate.  But there it is; unconsciousness is the charm of simplicity.  It is the very thing aimed at by Rashe and Cilly, and all their crew, with their eccentricities.’

‘I am sorry for it,’ seriously returned Phœbe, who had by this time, by quiet resistance, caused him to land her under the lee of Miss Charlecote, instead of promenading with her about the room.  He wanted her to dance with him again, saying she owed it to him for having sacrificed the first to common humanity, but great as was the pleasure of a polka, she shrank from him in this complimentary mood, and declared she should dance no more that evening.  He appealed to Honora, who, disliking to have her boy balked of even a polka, asked Phœbe if she were very tired, and considering her ‘rather not’ as equivalent to such a confession, proposed a retreat to their own room.

Phœbe was sorry to leave the brilliant scene, and no longer to be able to watch Lucilla, but she wanted to shake Owen off, and readily consented.  She shut her door after one good night.  She was too much grieved and disappointed to converse, and could not bear to discuss whether the last hope were indeed gone, and whether Lucilla had decided her lot without choosing to know it.  Alas! how many turning-points may be missed by those who never watch!

How little did Phœbe herself perceive the shoal past which her self-respect had just safely guided her!

‘I wonder if those were ball-room manners?  What a pity if they were, for then I shall not like balls,’ was all the thought that she had leisure to bestow on her own share in the night’s diversions, as through the subsequent hours she dozed and dreamt, and mused and slept again, with the feverish limbs and cramp-tormented feet of one new to balls; sometimes teased by entangling fishing flies, sometimes interminably detained in the moonlight, sometimes with Miss Fennimore waiting for an exercise, and the words not to be found in the dictionary; and even this unpleasant counterfeit of sleep deserting her after her usual time for waking, and leaving her to construct various fabrics of possibilities for Robin and Lucy.

She was up in fair time, and had written a long and particular account to Bertha of everything in the festivities not recorded in this narrative, before Miss Charlecote awoke from the compensating morning slumber that had succeeded a sad and unrestful night.  Late as they were, they were down-stairs before any one but the well-seasoned Rashe, who sat beguiling the time with a Bradshaw, and who did not tell them how intolerably cross Cilly had been all the morning.

Nor would any one have suspected it who had seen her, last of all, come down at a quarter to eleven, in the most exultant spirits, talking the height of rodomontade with the gentlemen guests, and dallying with her breakfast, while Phœbe’s heart was throbbing at the sight of two grave figures, her brother and the curate, slowly marching up and down the cloister, in waiting till this was over.

And there sat Lucilla inventing adventures for an imaginary tour to be brought out on her return by the name of ‘Girls in Galway’—‘From the Soirée to the Salmon’—‘Flirts and Fools-heads,’ as Owen and Charles discontentedly muttered to each other, or, as Mr. Calthorp proposed, ‘The Angels and the Anglers.’  The ball was to be the opening chapter.  Lord William entreated for her costume as the frontispiece, and Mr. Calthorp begged her to re-assume it, and let her cousin photograph her on the spot.

Lucilla objected to the impracticability of white silk, the inconvenience of unpacking the apparatus, the nuisance of dressing, the lack of time; but Rashe was delighted with the idea, and made light of all, and the gentlemen pressed her strongly, till with rather more of a consent than a refusal, she rose from her nearly untasted breakfast, and began to move away.

‘Cilla,’ said Mr. Prendergast, at the window, ‘can I have a word with you?’

‘At your service,’ she answered, as she came out to him, and saw that Robert had left him.  ‘Only be quick; they want to photograph me in my ball-dress.’

‘You won’t let them do it, though,’ said the curate.

‘White comes out hideous,’ said Lucilla; ‘I suppose you would not have a copy, if I took one off for you?’

‘No; I don’t like those visitors of yours well enough to see you turned into a merry-andrew to please them.’

‘So that’s what Robert Fulmort told you I did last night,’ said Lucilla, blushing at last, and thoroughly.

‘No, indeed; you didn’t?’ he said, regarding her with an astonished glance.

‘I did wear a dress trimmed with salmon-flies, because of a bet with Lord William,’ said Lucilla, the suffusion deepening on brow, cheek, and throat, as the confiding esteem of her fatherly friend effected what nothing else could accomplish.  She would have given the world to have justified his opinion of his late rector’s little daughter, and her spirits seemed gone, though the worst he did was to shake his head at her.

‘If you did not know it, why did you call me that?’ she asked.

‘A merry-andrew?’ he answered; ‘I never meant that you had been one.  No; only an old friend like me doesn’t like the notion of your going and dressing up in the morning to amuse a lot of scamps.’

‘I won’t,’ said Lucilla, very low.

‘Well, then,’ began Mr. Prendergast, as in haste to proceed to his own subject; but she cut him short.

‘It is not about Ireland?’

‘No; I know nothing about young ladies; and if Mr. Charteris and your excellent friend there have nothing to say against it, I can’t.’

‘My excellent friend had so much to say against it, that I was pestered into vowing I would go!  Tell me not, Mr. Prendergast,—I should not mind giving up to you;’ and she looked full of hope.

‘That would be beginning at the wrong end, Cilla; you are not my charge.’

‘You are my clergyman,’ she said, pettishly.

‘You are not my parishioner,’ he answered.

‘Pish!’ she said; ‘when you know I want you to tell me.’

‘Why, you say you have made the engagement.’

‘So what I said when she fretted me past endurance must bind me!’

Be it observed that, like all who only knew Hiltonbury through Lucilla, Mr. Prendergast attributed any blemishes which he might detect in her to the injudicious training of an old maid; so he sympathized.  ‘Ah! ladies of a certain age never get on with young ones!  But I thought it was all settled before with Miss Charteris.’

‘I never quite said I would go, only we got ready for the sake of the fun of talking of it, and now Rashe has grown horridly eager about it.  She did not care at first—only to please me.’

‘Then wouldn’t it be using her ill to disappoint her now?  You couldn’t do it, Cilla.  Why, you have given your word, and she is quite old enough for anything.  Wouldn’t Miss Charlecote see it so?’

To regard Ratia as a mature personage robbed the project of romance, and to find herself bound in honour by her inconsiderate rattle was one of the rude shocks which often occur to the indiscriminate of tongue; but the curate had too much on his mind to dwell on what concerned him more remotely, and proceeded, ‘I came to see whether you could help me about poor Miss Murrell.  You made no arrangement for her getting home last night?’

‘No!’

‘Ah, you young people!  But it is my fault; I should have recollected young heads.  Then I am afraid it must have been—’

‘What?’

‘She was seen on the river very late last night with a stranger.  He went up to the school with her, remained about a quarter of an hour, and then rowed up the river again.  I am afraid it is not the first time she has been seen with him.’

‘But, Mr. Prendergast, she was here till at least ten!  She fainted away just as she was to have sung, and we carried her out into the cloister.  When she recovered she went away to the housekeeper’s room—’ (a bold assertion, built on Owen’s partially heard reply to Phœbe).  ‘I’ll ask the maids.’