Chapter XI: A Written Proposal

'Devilled kidneys, actually,' said Sir Ranald, in high good-humour, next morning at breakfast. 'I thought the anatomy of our butcher's shop seemed never to include kidneys.'

Alison was officiating at the tea-board in her plain but pretty morning-dress, and was thinking smilingly of the _tête-à-tête_ in the twilighted garden the evening before, when Archie laid some letters before her father, who glanced at them nervously. All that were in blue envelopes he knew instinctively to be duns, and thrust aside unopened. One in a square cover, that had thereon the initial C. surmounted by a coronet, he knew to be from Lord Cadbury, and opened, and read more than once, with a pleased, yet perplexed face, his brows knitted, yet his lips and eyes smiling.

'From Lord Cadbury, is it, papa?' asked Alison, after a pause.

'Yes, and concerns you.'

'Me?'

'Intimately.'

'In what way--how?' she asked, with a heart that sank with apprehension.

'By making a formal proposal through me.'

'For what?'

'Can you ask, child? Your hand.'

'Oh, papa, nonsense?' exclaimed Alison, growing very pale nevertheless, but in the desperation of her heart resolved to treat the matter with a certain degree of levity, as if too ridiculous for consideration.

The truth was that, with all the confidence given him by his wealth and position, and all the coolness acquired by many past but coarse intrigues, he had not the courage to propose personally to a girl like Alison Cheyne, but did so thus, through her father, whose selfishness and impecuniosity made him, as he was well aware, an ally.

'He writes very humbly and modestly for a man of such wealth and weight in the country,' said Sir Ranald. 'Do you wish to see his letter?'

'No, papa, I have no interest in the matter,' replied Alison, faintly.

'"She has always permitted me to take the place of a friend--better than I merited," he writes, "but that has been from the innate goodness of her heart, on which I know that I have no right to found the expectations that have drawn forth this letter." Very well expressed indeed,' added Sir Ranald, eyeing the missive through his _pince-nez_, 'and he winds up so nicely about your beauty and the wealth he can lay at your feet, and so forth.'

'And so, papa, I am to deem my face my fortune?' said Alison, still endeavouring to make light of the matter.

'Not alone.'

'What more is there, then?'

'You are a Cheyne of Essilmont.'

'How ridiculous of this man, who is old enough to be my father! And so, papa, this is my first proposal?'

'Your first, how many do you expect--you a penniless lass?'

'With a long pedigree.'

'Yes,' replied her father, with growing irritation, 'how many do you expect of any kind, as society goes now-a-days? Consider this well--or why consider at all?--but accept his offer for your own sake and mine.'

'But without love, papa?' said the girl, softly.

'You can't live on that, like the æsthetic bride in Punch, on her teapot,' exclaimed Sir Ranald. 'In asking you to marry him, I rather ask you to marry his house in Belgravia, his place here in Hampshire, his equipages, and family jewels, as I suppose he calls them.'

'Oh, papa,' said Alison, proudly and reproachfully, 'is it you, Cheyne of Essilmont, who suggest this to me?'

'Yes--I, Cheyne of Essilmont and that ilk--the bankrupt and the beggar,' he replied, with a burst of impressible bitterness.

'Papa, how can you, so proud of race, go in for vulgar mammon worship so unblushingly?'

'My poverty, but not my will, consents.'

'I thought daughters were sold only in Circassia.'

'Not at all, they sell too in Tyburnia and Belgravia to the highest bidder, and surely with all he can give you, all that he can surround us with, you might be able to tolerate him as a husband.'

But Alison could only think of Bevil Goring, and interlaced her fingers tightly beneath the tablecloth.

'There is nothing in this world like riches,' exclaimed Sir Ranald, glancing at the unopened blue envelopes, and tightening the silk cords of his sorely frayed dressing-gown. 'What riches give us let us first inquire.'

'Meat, fire, and clothes. What more? Meat, clothes, and fire,' said Alison, with a sickly smile.

'Alison--Miss Cheyne,' said her father, with increasing asperity. 'This offer of marriage is a serious matter, and not to be dismissed thus, by a quip or apt quotation.'

'You admit that it is apt?'

'I admit nothing--save that Cadbury has talked this matter over with me before.'

'I suspected as much,' said Alison, bitterly.

'Thus, if you marry him, I know that besides making noble settlements upon you he will--by a scrape of his pen--clear off nearly all the fatal encumbrances on our Scottish property; and I shall die, in old age--as I lived till ruin overtook me--Cheyne of Essilmont and that ilk.'

'And when you die, papa--' Alison began, in a broken voice.

'The estate becomes yours and his--it is all one.'

('And I have promised to wait for Bevil!' thought the girl in her heart.)

'In the hope that you might yet learn to love him--indeed upon the faith that you would do so yet'--said Sir Ranald, after a pause, 'he has made me, kindly and generously, heavy advances, which I have lost unwisely, and am totally unable to repay. How then am I to act? I can but look to you to listen to him patiently and, with some consideration for me, if he speaks of his love to you again, Alison.'

To the latter it seemed that it was always himself, not her, that he considered in this proposed matrimonial bargain.

The old man was very white; his thin lips were tremulous with earnestness; his china-blue eyes lowered beneath the glance of his daughter, and his naturally proud heart was wrung with pain at the admissions he was making.

She remained silent.

'You can have no previous--no secret attachment, Alison?' said Sir Ranald, after another pause.

The existence of one dearer to her than her own life was ignored in this question.

What was she to reply? but reply she must, as he was eyeing her keenly, and even suspiciously.

'Do not be angry with me, dearest papa, but Lord Cadbury I never, never could learn to love,' she urged.

'And what about this fellow Goring?' he exclaimed, sternly, as he thought suddenly of many presents of flowers and music, with _Punch's_ and _Graphics_, &c.

'Goring,' she repeated, growing deadly pale, even to the lips.

'It cannot be that you are capable of such infernal folly and tomfoolery as to be wasting a thought on _him_?'

'He is different indeed,' said Alison, almost with anger, but added, 'believe me, papa, the man I love most in the world is yourself;' and she nestled her sweet face in his neck as she spoke.

'I have had my suspicions of Captain Goring for some time past; an empty-headed military dandy--handsome, I admit, but too handsome to have much in him,' resumed Sir Ranald, angrily--'a dangler, a detrimental, who, I have no doubt, in weak recommendation of himself could say, like the man in the play, "I have not much money, but what I have I spend upon myself."'

'Oh, papa!' exclaimed Alison, who was blushing deeply now.

'Pardon me if I wrong you, child,' said Sir Ranald; 'but in this most serious matter of your whole future life I cannot, and must not, be crossed.'

Alison felt her heart sinking, for, after this pointed and sharp allusion to Bevil Goring, it was pretty plain that his visits to Chilcote, though supposed to be casual ones at stated intervals, would have to cease.

Sir Ranald had waited for change of fortune, for something to turn up, year after year, as old Indian officers used to wait for the Deccan prize money, as a means of liquidating accumulated debt--means that never came; and now Cadbury's offer had come to hand like a trump card in the game with Fortune!

'I cannot live for ever, Alison, think of that,' said he, after a long silence.

Alison had thought of it, and loving, yea, adoring her father as she did, the fear that she should one day surely lose him made her heart shrink up and seem to die within her.

She would be alone--most terribly alone in this bleak world--when that event came to pass; and she recalled the cruel words of Lord Cadburv, that 'he could not live for ever,' with peculiar bitterness now. To whom, then, could she cling if not to Bevil Goring?

'Shall I write to Cadbury that you say "Yes," Alison?'

There were great, hopeless tears standing in her dark blue eyes, her quivering lips were tightly pressed together, and her slender white fingers were tightly interlaced, as she replied--

'Papa, I would rather die first!'

'And this is your irrevocable answer?'

'It is.'

Two days passed now--days of unspeakable misery to Alison, before whom her father again and again set all his monetary troubles, his present misery, and too probable future ruin, till her heart was wrung and her soul tortured within her by a conviction of her own selfishness in not making a sacrifice of herself and Bevil Goring; but her love of the latter on the one hand, and her horror and repugnance of Lord Cadbury on the other, prevailed, and Sir Ranald found that he could neither lure nor bend her to their purpose.

After this he wrote a letter to Cadbury full of expressions of gratitude for the honour done himself and his daughter (he snorted when he wrote the word 'honour'), and with hopes that the latter would yet see the folly of delay--(it was, he felt assured, only a little delay, she would no doubt give her acceptance). He felt himself too deeply in Cadbury's debt even to hint that she had refused to consider his proposal of marriage in any way but one--with dismay and aversion.

Lord Cadbury, however, saw precisely how the matter stood, for rumours of the meetings at the beeches had reached him, and he viciously tugged his long, white, horse-shoe-like mustaches.

Then he tore Sir Ranald's letter into minute fragments, and with an expression of anger--even of malignancy---in his cunning eyes, prepared to take the first train to town, muttering the while--

'We shall see, my pretty Alison--we shall see!'