Chapter V: In Hampshire Again

'I wish Jerry were here to help me,' sighed Lady Julia, as she lounged in a luxurious fauteuil in the beautiful drawing-room of Wilmothurst, with 'Cousin' Emily, on a dull afternoon of February, when the trees in the stately chase were dripping with moisture, and the reedy fens and lonesome marshes, where the bittern boomed and the heron waded, looked dreary, and the edges of the water-flags were stiff and white with frost. 'I would Jerry were here to help me with his advice. Not that his advice would help us much perhaps, Emily,' she added, querulously.

'Advice, Aunt Julia? When poor dear Jerry was here, he did nothing,' replied that young lady.

'And that was all he ever cared to do, Emily; but I have seen so little of Jerry since he joined the Rifles that I seem to be quite alone in the world.'

And she sighed a little conventional sigh, while spreading her feather fan, though a large crystal screen was placed between her and the brilliant fire that burned in a grate of steel polished like silver.

'But matters have come to a crisis with us; through me, I fear,' she added.

'Through you, aunt?'

'Yes, unfortunately.'

'How--in what way?'

'Did you not see how I turned my back upon that minx, Miss Chevenix, at the Charity Bazaar last week; cut her dead indeed, and this is the result!' exclaimed Lady Julia, tossing from her contemptuously a letter she had recently received.

'What result?' asked Emily Wilmot, too languid to open the missive in question.

'Her father will wait for the interest on the mortgages no longer, and we are ruined! Even this house of Wilmothurst may have to pass to him, and we shall have to go--to go--'

'Where, aunt?' asked Emily, becoming roused now, her light blue eyes dilated with wonder, and her nose seeming more _retroussé_ than ever.

'God alone knows where; to some obscure watering-place probably. If this insolent fellow, who certainly has not been paid for some years, would only wait till Jerry returns from the Gold Coast, and some arrangements could be made,' continued Lady Julia, in her plaintive and bleating kind of voice. 'House, lands, and all will go to Chevenix, and only a few acres will be left us. We are beggars,' she continued, with angry querulousness, but without altering a line of her smooth, handsome, and passionless face. 'We have nothing of our own--all will become his.'

'But surely, aunt, you have friends. There is Lord Twiseldown--there is Sir Jasper Dehorsey.'

'I cannot stoop to ask, and who would lend me thousands--not even money-lenders now, for there is nothing left in the shape of land to borrow on. Wilmothurst will become the property of this upstart farmer's son out and out. Jerry will have to give up everything but his commission, and go to India no doubt. Fortunately he has that resource left him; but I--I shall no longer be able to maintain even you, Emily.'

Lady Wilmot's emotions of annoyance and anger at Mr. Chevenix and the whole situation took the form of making her niece smart, while in reality she had no very genuine fear of such an awful crisis coming about, thinking that heaven or fate, or something or other, would never permit a person of her position to be so heavily visited.

'And _what_ shall I do, auntie?' asked the young lady, plaintively, but with surprise.

'You may have to go out into the world as a governess or companion.'

'Governess or companion! while Bella Chevenix----'

'Will reign here as heiress of Wilmothurst,' said Lady Julia, with the first approach to expression on her lineless face--a bitter and scornful smile.

'Oh, it is hard--very hard!'

'Very hard for _me_,' added Lady Julia, who like most of her class thought chiefly of 'number one.'

'She will make some good marriage,' said Emily, after a pause.

'She is decidedly very handsome, and has, my maid Florine tells me, magnificent hair.'

'Handsome,' queried the fair Emily; 'yes, but aunt, this is an age of belladonna, pearl powder, rouge, and heaven knows what more.'

'I hope the Gold Coast will have cured Jerry of his foolish fancy for that artful girl.'

'Her tastes are decidedly rural. I have been told that she often assists the vicar in visiting the poor, and actually teaches in his school at times.'

'Well, she is more in her place there, and acting the village Samaritan, than riding with the buckhounds, dancing at county and garrison balls, and giving herself the airs of the _habituée du monde_.'

Lady Julia had in her arms a Maltese spaniel, a wheezy, fat, and petted cur that often reposed in a mother-of-pearl basket lined with blue satin, and she was fondling it as she had never fondled Jerry when an infant--a cur that snapped viciously at every one who approached within ten yards of it or her, but which she always apostrophised and talked to as if it had been a human being; and, sooth to say, it was about as human in feeling as this earl's daughter, so far as tenderness and a capacity for loving went--loving any one at least but herself.

'Come, my sweet one, Floss,' she now exclaimed, oblivious suddenly of her approaching woes, and while it was leaping and yapping on her knee she kissed it repeatedly, and said, in a cooing voice, 'Did it want to go for a drive on this cold cold February afternoon? Then its mamma will order the carriage and take it for one.'

If Jerry had never in his tender boyhood been fondled in this manner, how often had he felt in after-life that much of the attention his mother _did_ at any time bestow upon him was due less to any maternal instinct or love than to his position and means as Squire of Wilmothurst and to family pride and vanity.

'A letter, my lady,' said a tall footman, presenting one on a salver, and withdrawing noiselessly.

'Another from this man Chevenix already. Again! really, really, what can this person want now!'

She tore it impatiently open, the diamonds on her white fingers sparkling as she did so, and her delicately pencilled eyebrows were elevated as she read with aristocratic surprise and impatience:--

'"With reference to my letter of this morning about the mortgages, dear Lady Julia, take all the delay you may wish. They shall not be foreclosed till time has soothed the awful blow that has fallen upon you."'

'Blow!' exclaimed Lady Julia. 'What blow?--what can the man mean?'

'Read on, auntie--there is something more.'

'"The fall of your son so gallantly in Western Africa is a circumstance to be deplored indeed by all--but more than all by those who knew him."

'Good heavens--good heavens--good heavens!' said Lady Julia thrice, in a low yet fretful voice, as if she scarcely understood the situation; 'it is all some dreadful mistake; Jerry--Jerry--a mistake, Emily. I saw nothing of it in the _Post_ or _Times_ this morning.

She was trembling excessively now, and Emily's eyes were full of hot welling tears. Neither of the ladies had seen the fatal intelligence from the seat of war, for, as they all read only the fashionable intelligence, they had heeded transactions on the Gold Coast as much they did those that may be occurring in the mountains of the moon.

However, to do them justice, both were thunderstruck--impressed as much as it was in their frozen nature to be--when Emily, after rushing for the morning paper, found the brief telegram or paragraph to which, no doubt, Mr. Chevenix referred:

'_Coomassie in flames. Army falling back on the Gold Coast; but the rivers rising fast. Chief casualties--Captain Dalton, Rifles, severely wounded; Captain J. Wilmot, do., killed and carried off by the enemy._'

The fashionable aunt and niece, at whose pleasant doors grief and sorrow seldom or never came, sat for a time as if stunned. Chevenix and his mortgages were alike forgotten; they could but think of Jerry and strive to realize the--to them--almost impossible situation, while the dull and depressing afternoon stole on.

How could it be, or why was it, that Jerry, so jolly and manly--the son of such a cold and feeble-minded woman of rank and fashion, who had done her best, but failed, to spoil or pamper him--was reserved for such a fate as this!

He had escaped the battle of Amoaful, the passage of the Prah, the fighting prior to the capture of Coomassie, and all the perils of death by fever and toil to perish thus, when the wretched end had been achieved and the troops must have been on their homeward way.

Poor Jerry! The life of the mess and the life of Wilmothurst when at home, where, in consideration of his five feet ten inches and irreproachable moustache, he had been latterly permitted to be termed a 'son,' and not, as his mother would have wished, a 'boy.'

Lady Julia Wilmot had never posed in society save as a beauty, and the great consideration that was ever shown her was due to that beauty and her birth and position as an earl's daughter; but not to any brilliant qualities of head--still less of amiability of heart. Thus in many ways she was a fair average example of 'the upper ten.'

So now it may be said of her and Cousin Emily on this disastrous occasion,

'Some natural tears they shed, but wip'd them soon.'

And their first thoughts were of a suitable and handsome tablet to Jerry's memory in the Vicarage Church, and of fashionable mourning for themselves and the household. It would all cast a gloom over their return to town after Easter in March, when a 'brief season' would commence--if they went to town at all, for 'thank Heaven,' added Lady Julia, 'no one shall accuse me of not doing my duty to my son. I shall order my mourning at Jay's, and certainly will not wear one of those frightful bonnets with long--what is it now, John?'

A tall footman, with a face of woe made up for the occasion, and a manner adapted to it--for the news had spread like wildfire over all the house and vicinity, and when many genuine tears were shed in the servants' hall, where Jerry was a prime favourite with the women folks--brought in a card, announcing

'Miss Chevenix.'

'Chevenix again--this is intolerable! Did you say not at home?'

'I said you were engaged--severially indispoged, my lady,' he replied, shaking his cauliflower-looking head solemnly.

'Yet--she would come in.'

'Yes, my lady.'

'And at a time like this--when we are plunged in unutterable woe! Such confident assurance!'

The door was thrown open, and Bella Chevenix came swiftly forward as the servant withdrew.

But in this we are anticipating a little.