Miss Marjoribanks

It has been already mentioned in this history that a contralto had a special charm for Mr Cavendish. He was so struck that he stood stock-still for the moment, not knowing what to make of it; and then he wavered for another moment, with a sudden sense that the old allegorical crisis had occurred to him, and that Pleasure, in a magnificent gush of song, wooed him on one side, while Duty, with still small voice, called him at the other. He stood still, he wavered – for fifty seconds perhaps the issue was uncertain, and the victim was still within reach of salvation; but the result in such a case depends very much upon whether a man really likes doing his duty, which is by no means an invariable necessity. Mr Cavendish had in the abstract no sort of desire to do his unless when he could not help it, and consequently his resistance to temptation was very feeble. He was standing knocking at Mr Lake's door before half the thoughts appropriate to the occasion had got through his mind, and found himself sitting on the little sofa in Mr Lake's parlour as he used to do ten years ago, before he could explain to himself how he came there. It was all, surely, a kind of enchantment altogether. He was there – he who had been so long away from Carlingford – he who had been so deeply offended by hearing his name seriously coupled with that of Barbara Lake – he who ought to have been anywhere in the world rather than here upon the eve of his election, when all the world was keeping watch over his conduct. And it was Barbara who sat at the piano singing – singing one of the same songs, as if she had spent the entire interval in that occupation, and never had done anything else all these years. The sensation was so strange that Mr Cavendish may be excused for feeling a little uncertainty as to whether or not he was dreaming, which made him unable to answer himself the graver question whether or not he was doing what he ought to do. He did not seem to be able to make out whether it was now or ten years ago – whether he was a young man free to amuse himself, or a man who was getting stout, and upon whom the eyes of an anxious constituency were fixed. And then, after being so virtuous for a length of time, a forbidden pleasure was sweet.

Mr Cavendish's ideas, however, gradually arranged themselves as he sat in the corner of the little haircloth sofa, and began to take in the differences as well as the bewildering resemblances of the present and past. Barbara, like himself, had changed. She did not insult him, as Lucilla had done, by fresh looks and mischievous candour about "going off." Barbara had gone off, like himself, and, like himself, did not mean to acknowledge it. She had expanded all over, as was natural to a contralto. Her eyes were blacker and more brilliant in a way, but they were eyes which owned an indescribable amount of usage; and her cheeks, too, wore the deep roses of old, deepened and fixed by wear and tear. Instead of feeling ashamed of himself in her presence, as he had done in Lucilla's, Mr Cavendish felt somehow consoled and justified and sympathetic. "Poor soul!" he said to himself, as he sat by while she was singing. She, too, had been in the wars, and had not come out scatheless. She did not reproach him, nor commiserate him, nor look at him with that mixture of wonder and tolerance and pity which other people had manifested. She did not even remark that he had grown stout. He was not a man fallen, fallen, fallen from his high estate, to Barbara. She herself had fallen from the pinnacles of youth, and Mr Cavendish was still a great man in her eyes. She sang for him as she had sung ten years ago, and received him with a flutter of suppressed delight, and in her satisfaction was full of excitement. The hardworked candidate sank deeper and deeper into the corner of the sofa and listened to the music, and felt it very soothing and pleasant, for everybody had united in goading him on rather than petting him for the last month or two of his life.

"Now tell me something about yourself," he said, when the song was over, and Barbara had turned round, as she used to do in old times, on her music-stool; "I hear you have been away, like me."

"Not like you," said Barbara, "for you went because you pleased, and I went – "

"Why did you go?" asked Mr Cavendish.

"Because I could not stay here any longer," said Barbara, with her old vehemence; "because I was talked about, and looked down upon, and – Well, never mind, that's all over now; and I am sure I am very glad to see you, Mr Cavendish, as a friend."

And with that something like a tear came into her eye. She had been knocked about a good deal in the world, and though she had not learned much, still she had learned that she was young no longer, and could not indulge in the caprices of that past condition of existence. Mr Cavendish, for his part, could not but smile at this intimation that he was to be received as a friend, and consequently need not have any fear of Barbara's fascinations, – as if a woman of her age, worn and gone off as she was, could be supposed dangerous; but still he was touched by her tone.

"We were once very good friends, Barbara," said the inconsistent man; "we have lost sight of each other for a long time, as people do in this world; but we were once very good friends."

"Yes," she said, with a slight touch of annoyance in her voice; "but since we have lost sight of each other for so long, I don't see why you should call me Barbara. It would be much more becoming to say Miss Lake."

Mr Cavendish was amused, and he was touched and flattered. Most people had been rather forbearing to him since he came back, putting up with him for old friendship's sake, or supporting his cause as that of a reformed man, and giving him, on the whole, a sort of patronising humiliating countenance; and to find somebody in whose eyes he was still the paladin of old times, the Mr Cavendish whom people in Grange Lane were proud of, was balm to his wounded soul.

"I don't know how I am to learn to say Miss Lake – when you are just as good to me as ever, and sing as you have just been doing," he said. "I suppose you say so because you find me so changed?"

Upon which Barbara lifted her black eyes and looked at him as she had scarcely done before. The eyes were as bright as ever, and they were softened a little for the moment out of the stare that seemed to have grown habitual to them; and her crimson cheeks glowed as of old; and though she was untidy, and looked worn, and like a creature much buffeted about by wind and waves, she was still what connoisseurs in that article call a fine woman. She looked full at Mr Cavendish, and then she cast down her eyes, as if the sight was too much for her. "I don't see any difference," she said, with a certain tremor in her voice; for he was a man of whom, in the days of her youth, she had been fond in her way.

And naturally Mr Cavendish was more touched than ever. He took her hand, and called her Barbara again without any reproof; and he saw that she trembled, and that his presence here made to the full as great an impression as he had ever done in his palmiest days. Perhaps a greater impression; for their old commerce had been stormy, and interrupted by many a hurricane; and Barbara then had, or thought she might have, many strings to her bow, and did not believe that there was only one Mr Cavendish in the world. Now all that was changed: and if this old hope should revive again, it would not be allowed to die away for any gratification of temper. Mr Cavendish did not remember ever to have seen her tremble before, and he too was fond of her in his way.

This curious revival did not come to anything of deeper importance, for of course just then Rose came in from her household affairs, and Mr Lake to tea; and the candidate recollected that it was time for dinner. But father and sister also gave him, in their different ways, a rather flattering reception. Mr Lake had already pledged him his vote, and was full of interest as to how things were going on, and enthusiastic for his success; and Rose scowled upon him as of old, as on a dangerous character, whose comings and goings could not be seen without apprehension; which was an unexpected pleasure to a man who had been startled to find how very little commotion his presence made in Grange Lane. He pressed Barbara's hand as he went away, and went to his dinner with a heart which certainly beat lighter, and a more pleasant sense of returning self-confidence, than he had felt for a long time. When he was coming out of the house, as a matter of course, he met with the chief of his Dissenting supporters, accompanied (for Mr Bury, as has been said, was very Low-Church, and loved, wherever he could do it, to work in unison with his Dissenting brethren) by the Rector's churchwarden, both of whom stopped with a curiously critical air to speak to the Candidate, who had to be every man's friend for the time being. The look in their eyes sent an icy chill through him, but still the forbidden pleasure had been sweet. As he walked home, he could not help thinking it over, and going back ten years, and feeling a little doubtful about it, whether it was then or now. And as he mused Miss Marjoribanks, whom he could not help continually connecting and contrasting with the other, appeared to him as a kind of jealous Queen Eleanor, who had a right to him, and could take possession at any time, should she choose to make the effort; while Barbara was a Rosamond, dilapidated indeed, but always ready to receive and console him in her bower. This was the kind of unconscious sentiment he had in his mind, feeling sure, as he mused, that Lucilla would be very glad to marry him, and that it would be very wise on his part to ask her, and was a thing which might still probably come to pass. Of course he could not see into Miss Marjoribanks's mind, which had travelled such a long way beyond him. He gave a glance up at the windows as he passed her door, and felt a kind of disagreeable satisfaction in seeing how diminished the lights were in the once radiant house. And Lucilla was so fond of a great deal of light! but she could not afford now to spend as much money upon wax as a Continental church might do. Mr Cavendish had so odd a sense of Lucilla's power over him, that it gave him a certain pleasure to think of the coming down of her pride and diminution of her lights.

But the fact was, that not more than ten minutes after he had passed her door with this reflection, Lucilla, sitting with her good book on the table and her work in her hand, in the room which was not so well lighted as it used to be, heard that Mr Cavendish had been met with coming out of Mr Lake's, and that Barbara had been singing to him, and that there was no telling what might have happened. "A man ain't the man for Carlingford as takes up with that sort," Thomas said indignantly, who had come to pay his former mistress a visit, and to assure her of his brother-in-law's vote. He was a little more free-spoken than of old, being now set up, and an independent householder, and calling no man master; and he was naturally indignant at an occurrence which, regarded in the light of past events, was an insult not only to Carlingford, but to Lucilla. Miss Marjoribanks was evidently startled by the news. She looked up quickly as if she had been about to speak, and then stopped herself and turned her back upon Thomas, and poked the fire in a most energetic way. She had even taken the hearth-brush in her hand to make all tidy after this onslaught, but that was a thing that went to Thomas's heart.

"I couldn't stand by and see it, Miss Lucilla," said Thomas; "it don't feel natural;" and there was actually a kind of moisture in his eye as he took that domestic implement out of her hand. Mr Cavendish pitied Lucilla for having less light than of old, and Thomas for being reduced so low as to sweep her own hearth. But Lucilla was very far from pitying her own case. She had been making an effort over herself, and she had come out of it triumphant; after reading so many good books, it is not to be wondered at if she felt herself a changed and softened and elevated character. She had the means in her hands of doing her candidate's rival a deadly mischief, and yet, for old friendship's sake, Lucilla made up her mind to forbear.

"I will give it you, Thomas," she said, with dignity, holding the hearth-brush, which was in such circumstances elevated into something sublime, "if you will promise, never, until after the election – never to say a word about Mr Cavendish and Miss Lake. It was quite right to tell me, and you are very kind about the hearth; but you must promise never to say a syllable about it, not even to Nancy, until the election is over; or I will never give it you, nor ask you to do a single thing for me again."

Thomas was so much struck with this address that he said "Good Lord!" in sheer amazement; and then he made the necessary vow, and took the hearth-brush out of Lucilla's hand.

"No doubt he was asking for Mr Lake's vote," said Miss Marjoribanks. "They say everybody is making great exertions, and you know they are both my friends. I ought to be pleased whoever wins. But it is impressed on my mind that Mr Ashburton will be the man," Lucilla added, with a little solemnity, "and, Thomas, we must give them fair-play."

It would be vain to assert that Thomas understood this romantic generosity, but he was taken by surprise, and had relinquished his own liberty in the matter, and had nothing further to say. Indeed he had so little to say downstairs, that Nancy, who was longing for a little gossip, insulted and reviled him, and declared that since he took up with that Betsy there never was a sensible word to be got out of him. And all the time the poor man was burning with this bit of news. Many a man has bartered his free-will before under the influence of female wiles, or so at least history would have us believe; but few have done it for so poor a compensation as that hearth-brush. Thomas withdrew sore at heart, longing for the election to be over, and kept his word like an honest man; but notwithstanding, before the evening was over, the fatal news was spreading like fire to every house in Grange Lane.

Chapter XLVIII

It is probable that Mr Cavendish considered the indulgence above recorded all the more excusable in that it was Saturday night. The nomination was to take place on Monday, and if a man was not to be supposed to be done with his work on the Saturday evening, when could he be expected to have a moment of repose? He had thought as he went home – for naturally, while putting himself so skilfully in the way of temptation, such questions had not entered into his mind – that the fact of to-morrow being Sunday would effectually neutralise any harm he could have been supposed to have done by a visit so simple and natural, and that neither his sister nor his committee, the two powers of which he stood in a certain awe, could so much as hear of it until the election was over, and all decided for good or for evil. This had been a comfort to his mind, but it was the very falsest and most deceitful consolation. That intervening Sunday was a severer calamity for Mr Cavendish than half a dozen ordinary days. The general excitement had risen so high, and all the chances on both sides had been so often discussed and debated, that something new was as water in the desert to the thirsting constituency. The story was all through Grange Lane that very night, but Carlingford itself, from St Roque's to the wilderness of the North End, tingled with it next morning. It is true, the Rector made no special allusion to it in his sermon, though the tone of all his services was so sad, and his own fine countenance looked so melancholy, that Mr Bury's devoted followers could all see that he had something on his mind. But Mr Tufton at Salem Chapel was not so reticent. He was a man quite famous for his extempore gifts, and who rather liked to preach about any very recent public event, which it was evident to all his hearers could not have found place in a "prepared" discourse; and his sermon that morning was upon wickedness in high places, upon men who sought the confidence of their fellows only to betray it, and offered to the poor man a hand red with his sister's (metaphorical) blood.

But it would be wrong to say that this was the general tone of public opinion in Grove Street; most people, on the contrary, thought of Mr Cavendish not as a wolf thirsting for the lamb's blood, but rather himself as a kind of lamb caught in the thicket, and about to be offered up in sacrifice. Such was the impression of a great many influential persons who had been wavering hitherto, and inclining on the whole to Mr Cavendish's liberal principles and supposed Low-Church views. A man whose hand is red metaphorically with your sister's blood is no doubt a highly objectionable personage; but it is doubtful whether, under the circumstances, an enlightened constituency might not consider the man who had given a perfectly unstained hand to so thoroughly unsatisfactory a sister as more objectionable still; and the indignation of Grange Lane at Barbara's reappearance was nothing to the fury of George Street, and even of Wharfside, where the bargees began to scoff openly. Society had nothing worse to say than to quote Mrs Chiley, and assert that "these artist people were all adventurers"; and then Grange Lane in general could not forget that it "had met" Barbara, nor dismiss from its consideration her black eyes, her level brows, and her magnificent contralto; whereas in the other region the idea of the Member for Carlingford marrying "that sort!" cast all the world into temporary delirium. It was a still more deadly offence to the small people than to the great. And the exceptional standing which poor Mr Lake and his daughter Rose used to lay claim to – the "rank of their own" which they possessed as artists – was a pretension much more disagreeable to the shopkeepers than to society in general. Thus in every sense Mr Cavendish had done the very worst for himself by his ill-timed indulgence; and his guilt was about the same with most of his critics whether he meant perfectly well and innocently, or entertained the most guilty intentions ever conceived by man.

And all his misfortunes were increased by the fact that the intervening day was a Sunday. Barbara Lake herself, who did not know what people were saying, and who, if she had known, would not have cared, came to church, as was natural, in the morning; and under pretence that the family pew was full, had the assurance, as people remarked, to come to the middle aisle, in that same silk dress which rustled like tin, and made more demonstration than the richest draperies. The pew-opener disapproved of her as much as everybody else did, but she could not turn the intruder out; and though Barbara had a long time to wait, and was curiously inspected by all the eyes near her while she did so, the end was that she got a seat in her rustling silk not very far from where Lucilla sat in deep mourning, a model of every righteous observance. As for poor Barbara, she too was very exemplary in church. She meant nobody any harm, poor soul. She could not help the flashing of those big black eyes, to which the level line above them gave such a curious appearance of obliqueness – nor was it to be expected that she should deny herself the use of her advantages, or omit to "take the second" in all the canticles with such melodious liquid tones as made everybody stop and look round. She had a perfect right to do it; indeed it was her duty, as it is everybody's duty, to aid to the best of their ability in the church-music of their parish, which was what Lucilla Marjoribanks persisted in saying in answer to all objections. But the effect was great in the congregation, and even the Rector himself was seen to change colour as his eye fell upon the unlucky young woman. Mr Cavendish, for his part, knew her voice the moment he heard it, and gave a little start, and received such a look from his sister, who was standing by him, as turned him to stone. Mrs Woodburn looked at him, and so did her husband, and Mr Centum turned a solemnly inquiring reproachful gaze upon him from the other side of the aisle. "Oh, Harry, you will kill me with vexation! why, for goodness' sake, did you let her come?" his sister whispered when they had all sat down again. "Good heavens! how could I help it?" cried poor Mr Cavendish, almost loud enough to be heard. And then by the slight, almost imperceptible, hum around him, he felt that not only his sister and his committee, but the Rector and all Carlingford, had their eyes upon him, and was thankful to look up the lesson, poor man, and bury his face in it. It was a hard punishment for the indiscretion of an hour.

But perhaps of all the people concerned it was the Rector who was the most to be pitied. He had staked his honour upon Mr Cavendish's repentance, and here was he going back, publicly to wallow in the mire – and it was Sunday when such a worldly subject ought not to be permitted to enter a good man's mind, much less to be discussed and acted upon as it ought to be if anything was to be done; for there was little more than this sacred day remaining in which to undo the mischief which a too great confidence in human nature had wrought. And then, to tell the truth, the Rector did not know how to turn back. It would have been hard, very hard, to have told all the people who confided in him that he had never had any stronger evidence for Mr Cavendish's repentance than he now had for his backsliding; and to give in, and let the other side have it all their own way, and throw over the candidate with whom he had identified himself, was as painful to Mr Bury as if, instead of being very Low-Church, he had been the most muscular of Christians. Being in this state of mind, it may be supposed that his sister's mild wonder and trembling speculations at lunch, when they were alone together, were well qualified to raise some sparks of that old Adam, who, though well kept under, still existed in the Rector's, as in most other human breasts.

"But, dear Edward, I would not quite condemn him," Miss Bury said. "He has been the cause of a good deal of remark, you know, and the poor girl has been talked about. He may think it is his duty to make her amends. For anything we can tell, he may have the most honourable intentions – "

"Oh, bother his honourable intentions!" said the Rector. Such an exclamation from him was as bad as the most dreadful oath from an ordinary man, and very nearly made Miss Bury drop from her chair in amazement. Things must have gone very far indeed when the Rector himself disregarded all proprieties and the sacredness of the day in such a wildly-daring fashion. For, to tell the truth, in his secret heart Mr Bury was himself a little of the way of thinking of the people in Grove Street. Strictly speaking, if a man has done anything to make a young woman be talked about, every well-principled person ought to desire that he should make her amends; but at the same time, at such a crisis there was little consolation in the fact that the candidate one was supporting and doing daily battle for had honourable intentions in respect to Barbara Lake. If it had been Rose Lake, it would still have been a blow; but Rose was unspeakably respectable, and nobody could have said a syllable on the subject: while Barbara, who came to church in a tin gown, and rustled up the middle aisle in it, attracting all eyes, and took such a second in the canticles that she overwhelmed the choir itself – Barbara, who had made people talk at Lucilla's parties, and had been ten years away, wandering over the face of the earth, nobody could tell where – governessing, singing, play-acting, perhaps, for anything that anybody could tell! A clergyman, it is true, dared not have said such a thing, and Mr Bury's remorse would have been bitter could he have really believed himself capable even of thinking it; but still it is certain that the unconscious, unexpressed idea in his mind was, that the honourable intentions were the worst of it – that a candidate might be a fool, or even an unrepentant sinner, and after all it would be chiefly his own concern; but that so much as to dream of making Barbara Lake the Member's wife, was the deepest insult that could be offered to Carlingford. The Rector carried his burden silently all day, and scarcely opened his lips, as all his sympathetic following remarked; but before he went to bed he made a singular statement, the complete accuracy of which an impartial observer might be disposed to doubt, but which Mr Bury uttered with profound sincerity, and with a sigh of self-compassion. "Now I understand Lucilla Marjoribanks," was what the good man said, and he all but puffed out the candle he had just lighted, with that sigh.