Chapter III: Marry in Haste, Etc

Yes! Mrs. Frazer was ill, and John Merapie silent, and Mr. Westwood in existence, and Miss Caldera truthfully candid as ever, and Belerma Square had not grown one whit more cheerful during her absence, and yet still Mina was glad, thankful to be back. It is true she did not quite comprehend the deliberate badness of Miss Warmond’s nature: much as she had seen, much as she had discovered, she did not fully understand the utter worthlessness and deceit which were covered by so fair a mantle of beauty and of grace; but she had found out enough, and suffered sufficiently, to render her grateful to leave luxury and scenery and fashion behind, and find herself once more amongst those who pretended nothing, but loved her much.

Miss Caldera was right: the girl had learnt a great deal when she returned to be contented in John Merapie’s town house. She had taken her first lesson in the world, tasted one drop out of the cup of fashionable life, and found it wonderfully bitter; she had become convinced that one word of praise or kindness uttered by a sterling steady friend, aye, even a sentence of warning or rebuke spoken by such an one in loving sincerity, is more really valuable than all the deceitful compliments and flattering falsehoods which hollow hearts can dictate and fulsome tongues whisper.

She returned, not very strong perhaps, but still much better, with a colour in her cheek and a light in her eye, and a style in her manner, carriage, and deportment, which she had learnt from Cecilia. For she was at that age when association is everything, when accent is improved, an air of fashion conferred, ideas of elegance implanted, by being brought into contact with persons whose every movement, tone, gesture, tells that they have mixed in _le beau monde_, and that its usages and customs and ceremonies are familiar to them as household words. “Wonderfully improved in appearance,” even her mother thought her. She retained her former manner, it is true, but the brusqueness, living in a secluded solitary kind of way had formerly caused her to acquire, was almost gone; the tone of her voice bordered occasionally on the very confines of liveliness, her step had lost its languor, her face its melancholy; quiet and reserved she seemed still at intervals, but, taking her on the whole, a decided change for the better had been effected by her Highland trip; perhaps the mountain air might have benefited her health, which, for a considerable period previous to her departure—indeed, almost from her childhood—was anything rather than good; perhaps the “rubbing up” she had got, the mixing with other people besides her own exclusive home circle, the being drawn out of herself and forced to think of others and their concerns, exercised a beneficial influence on her mind; perhaps the glimpse she had gained of “fairy land,” of fine ladies and clever gentlemen, and the other beings who move in that sphere we call, _par excellence_, ‘the fashionable world,’ had tended to reconcile her considerably to a mere terrestrial common-place existence in Belerma Square: at all events Mina came home to her uncle’s, altered,—not for the worse.

And if, after the first peaceable fortnight, she and Miss Caldera did again commence to have various little “tilts” of opinion, still they never signified, and were by no means so frequent as of yore, for the governess had apparently arrived at the determination of permitting Mr. Alfred Westwood to manage his matrimonial plans as best he could without her interference; and as this was the only point on which she and Mina had been wont to have arguments, that might almost have been termed quarrels, they plodded on together without any greater differences of opinion arising between them than served to prevent their tongues growing rusty by want of sufficient exercise.

Occasionally, indeed, Malcolm became a very serious bone of contention for both to try their teeth on, for that young gentleman, whose chances of a commission seemed far off as ever, grew day by day so much more useless and indolent and fashionable than had been his wont before, (and “Goodness knows,” said Miss Caldera, “he was bad enough in those respects always”) that the worthy governess at last fairly lost all patience on the subject, and frequently asserted, “He ought to be ashamed of himself.”

“But what can he do?” demanded Mina, who was very fond and proud of her brother, “what can he do?”

“Work,” responded the lady; “is not that what men are sent into the world for, and what right has he, blessed with youth, health, and talent, to be standing idle, whilst older and better men are toiling wearily from day to day?”

“He has no profession,” suggested the girl.

“Let him choose one, then,” replied Miss Caldera, “or rather let him get rid of some of his absurd dandyism and family pride and dreamy anticipations, and settle quietly down at business and become a useful member of society.”

“Like uncle John?” added Mina.

“He will never be like any one half so good,” remarked Miss Caldera warmly, for she thought Mina’s words implied a sneer, which they did not.

Her former charge looked for a minute or two up at the clear blue heavens, then she said in a deprecating tone,

“I do not think I have any pride, or absurdity, or ‘notions,’ as you call them, and yet I should not like Malcolm to do what he styles, ‘put himself into harness’ and be buried alive at Wapping, and sit there the whole day leaning over a desk, writing from morning till night, and thinking of nothing but money—money—money—till he grew a regular old city merchant like some of my uncle’s friends: I cannot fancy my brother ‘a business man.’”

“Indeed!” angrily retorted Miss Caldera; “and pray, my dear, what can you fancy your brother?”

“An officer,” replied Mina.

“A nonsense!” exclaimed her friend.

“I don’t see why he should not,” said his sister; “he is handsome enough, and daring enough, for anything, and my father was in the army, and many of our relations; I really do not see why Malcolm should not be an officer, if he choose.”

“Well, I do,” answered Miss Caldera; “for he has so provoked your uncle, that I can see plainly he will never buy him a commission.”

“Then we must get him one some other way, that is all,” replied Mina, so quietly, that Miss Caldera began to think her almost as foolish as her brother, and told her so; at which the girl laughed, and said she believed her friend imagined both of them to be perfect simpletons, but that, indeed, she was mistaken.

“That may be,” responded the governess, in a manner, however, which clearly implied the unspoken mental addition of “but I don’t believe I am.”

Meanwhile, very shortly after her return to London, the old laird’s niece received a long letter from Cecilia, so full of “dears” and “loves” and “darlings” and all sorts of fond expressions, that it fairly astounded the recipient, and induced her almost to believe she must have misunderstood her friend, and felt displeased with her on very slight insufficient grounds.

Cecilia hoped her “pet” would come and be one of her bridesmaids, for she was to be married in the autumn, and though Mr. Malcolm Frazer and she had not parted on the _very_ best terms, she hoped he had not quite forgotten her, and desired best and kindest remembrances to him. And she gave an account of her cousin’s wedding, and said how _very_ lonely Glenfiord seemed after Mina’s departure, and filled half a sheet with wishes that they were living close to each other, and asked how she was contriving to exist in that dreadful Belerma Square, and made particular inquiries concerning the state of Mrs. Frazer’s health, and said that if Mr. Merapie were going to retire, and thought of purchasing an estate in the Highlands, there was a beautiful property to be sold not a mile from Glenfiord; how delightful it would be if Mina could induce him to buy it; and she wound all up by saying, “Of course my engagement is no secret now. Ever dear, dear Mina, your affectionately attached—CECILIA WARMOND.”

Miss Caldera smiled when she finished reading through the epistle her former pupil handed to her for perusal, and in answer to Mina’s question, “Well, what do you think of it?” she said briefly, “Not much;” which reply, undoing the effect the letter had produced, brought the individual who was so happy as to be called by Miss Warmond “friend” back to her preconceived opinion of that young lady, and caused her to doubt if every word traced in that fair, delicate, Italian hand were true, and whether the one half at least of the contents of the epistle did not sound, as Miss Caldera, who never could resist a saw or a proverb, said, “a vast deal too sweet to be altogether wholesome.” Also, on Mina’s informing her brother of the projected marriage, he curtly rejoined,

“Oh! yes, I knew all about it long ago; she told me she was engaged to Allan after she had drawn me on to propose—hang her!” and, in fact, so much evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, was produced just about this period in Miss Warmond’s disfavour, that poor Mina began to be thoroughly convinced she was very far from what she ought to be—very, very far, indeed, from being the sort of person she had fancied that bright spring morning, when she threw her arms around the beautiful neck and said she was so glad, so very glad Cecilia was to become her cousin.

“What is making Mr. Allan Frazer marry such a creature?” demanded Miss Caldera, as she folded up the letter with an air of supreme contempt; “what in the world has possessed him?”

“I am sure I do not know,” replied Mina, and it was true, for she felt Allan’s love for the General’s daughter was nothing remarkable, and she had speculated often concerning what could, as Miss Caldera said, “have possessed him.”

But Allan Frazer himself knew, and that was sufficient; he was aware of how he had longed to be free—of a painful interview between himself and his uncle, which terminated with his saying, “Oh! if she would only give me up,” a thing she had not the remotest intention of doing, either for him or anybody else.

For, as far as she was capable of loving man or woman, she loved the laird’s grandson—loved him for himself, his appearance, his talents, and the sort of celebrity he had acquired; further than all this, she stuck to him because he desired to cast her off, and showed her he did; and, because she fancied he cared for Mina, “that little, insignificant, uneducated child,” and she was determined as he had once proposed for her he should marry her, or else she would know the reason why.

“If you have not changed your mind,” said Allan; coldly, to her one day, when, at length, some kind of an explanation had become unavoidable, “if you have not changed your mind, or repented your choice, or come to the conclusion that I am not qualified to make you happy,—if, in one word, you wish me to fulfil my engagement, I am ready to do so; if not——”

“You will start for London and resume your interrupted flirtation with Mina Frazer,” she added, with an angry laugh.

“With Mina Frazer! heaven forbid!” ejaculated Allan; “no, no; Mina is too good and gentle-hearted to flirt with, and as to marrying, if she ever do commit the folly, I trust the fates will provide her a better husband than I feel I am competent to make any one: no, no,” he said again, in a less hurried tone, “I am fond of her as a cousin, as a sister, as a dear, good, truthful little girl; she always rises to my mind like a pure pleasant memory of childhood, or something very close to childhood: never say that again, Cecilia; I cannot bear to have even Mina’s name mentioned in connection with that horrid word.”

“I spoke thoughtlessly,” responded Miss Warmond, who felt she had ventured a little too far on dangerous ground, “and it was wrong for me so to do, as you were talking seriously concerning a serious subject.”

“Our marriage!” acquiesced Allan. “You have now had a long period to reflect upon the matter, and I wish to know if you are still of opinion that I am an individual with whom you could endure to pass years—a life time. I do not desire to hold you bound because of any engagement between us: I have endeavoured not to deceive you in any point, whether relating to my family, circumstances, or self; you have seen everything as it is, had ample opportunities of judging for yourself. I am well aware that I can offer you no home equal to some others, the doors of which would open gladly to receive you; and therefore I ask you to consider yourself as perfectly free, and to decide for the second time, as if it were the first, whether you will take me as I am and my fortunes as they are, or whether we shall part now, never to meet again excepting, perhaps, as friends.”

Cecilia knew what this speech meant just as well as the person who uttered it: she knew he was really asking her to set him free, though he worded the sentence as if it were he conceding that boon to her; she read down into the depths of his heart and saw that his love for her, vehement, wild, romantic as it had been, was gone; she felt he was yearning with a soul-sick longing to be set at liberty; that he was waiting, like a criminal to hear his doom, dreading lest she would accept him. Cecilia knew and saw all these things, and yet, and perhaps because of them, she held him to the contract he had madly rushed into and would not give him up.

There was a burning fury raging in her heart; if she had hated Allan Frazer she would still have forced him to marry her: she resolved to be revenged, even though, in working out that vengeance, she should wound herself; jealousy, anger, resentment, affection, mortified vanity, determined obstinacy, a truly feminine spirit of contradiction, and a lamentable deficiency of womanly feeling and womanly pride, urged her on, and, amidst a torrent of, for once, perfectly genuine tears, she sobbed forth the decision, which it was death to the laird’s grandson to hear, “She would marry him.”

The fiat had been pronounced that sealed and blasted his destiny for life; like the victim who feels the last plank drawn from beneath his feet; like the child of care, on whose bosom the chill hand of misfortune has just stamped some ineffaceable mark; like the bereaved one who is told of the death of a friend, loved better than land or gold or station; like the merchant who hears his wealth has vanished and that he is left a beggar, so Allan Frazer listened to her final resolution; and when at length he slowly and gloomily quitted the apartment, it was with that look of fixed despair in his face, which marks so unmistakeably the man who feels his peace is wrecked, his happiness destroyed, his future blighted.

Moore, in one of his songs, tells us how wretched man would be

“If, when deceived in love,
He could not fly to hate.”

Which may be strictly true, not merely in poetry, but in fact, when the parties who hate are compelled to separate.

But hatred, or even indifference, is a commodity of rather questionable utility to start with in the line matrimonial; so Allan Frazer thought, yet still he did start with nothing beside it, excepting, perhaps, a little contempt and a great deal of anger, as a happy benedict: and he found, as time went on, he was never likely to become a bankrupt, for his stock in trade increased rather than diminished, and when people congratulated him and admired her, the new-made husband turned away sick and dispirited; for the beauty that had won was impotent to retain, the grace and the accomplishments had grown distasteful to his soul, her soft low voice affected him sadly, as a melody—no matter how sweet it may be—that awakens disagreeable memories palls on the ear of the listener and causes him to desire to fly from the sound of it: where she dwelt was a place to be absent from as much as possible; in one word, the doom of many of his race was upon him, only he had repented sooner than they. The change, he was conscious of before marriage, but that, perhaps, made the sorrow only the greater, for the lady, not desiring the engagement to be cancelled, he had felt himself bound in honour to make her his bride; and thus Cecilia carried her point, as she would have carried any other on which she had once set her mind, even had the same been going up to her neck in Loch Lomond and finishing her earthly experiences there: and if she did not get all she wanted, why Allan got nothing he desired, and that was an immense advantage gained, considerably more than half the battle; it was indeed almost the whole of it, so the General’s daughter consoled herself by thinking at times—when the conviction forced itself upon her that both had been worsted in the struggle, that she had paid a high price for something not particularly well worth having, that, in short, for the sake of loving him a little, it had been scarcely worth while to persist in tying herself, whether he would or no, to a husband who loved her not at all. But whatever she thought about the business signified not; there was nothing now to be done but make the best of it, for they were married. Oh! yes, there could not be the least doubt about that fact; they were married one bright sunshiny morning in the autumn, as Cecilia wrote to her “Dear Mina” was to be the case; and the ceremony proved a very sublime affair indeed, for an Indian commander-in-chief—or, to speak more correctly, a commander-in-chief who had been in India—honoured the nuptials with his presence; and his niece, Lady Matilda Cintra, looked charming, as one of the bridesmaids; and, in brief, so many grandees, gathered from far and near, came in carriages and pairs and carriages and fours, flanked by outriders and surrounded with a sort of halo of liveries and crests and coats of arms and pedigrees, to see one person, at least, made miserable, that the leading Edinburgh paper of that period devoted a paragraph to the affair; and it got stuck somehow in the _Morning Post_, and cards went flying about to the houses of the great and the noble and the wealthy; and John Merapie, who hated humbug, read the passage through from beginning to end, and then told a city friend, who asked if the bridegroom were not a connexion of his, that he believed he was cousin or something of that kind to the children (Mina and Malcolm), and that the bride had wanted his niece to be one of the bridesmaids, but, he was thankful to say, she was too sensible to run mad after folly and fashion and Mechlin veils and lords and ladies and—humbug.

All of which impressing the city friend with a magnificent idea of the grandeur of Mrs. Frazer’s Highland relations and of the wealth and sense of her brother—a man who could afford to talk lightly of a commander-in-chief and a Lady Matilda Cintra—he turned over thenceforth a new leaf in his behaviour towards the family in Belerma Square, and found out that Malcolm and Mina had the “stamp of aristocrats about them and no mistake.” “Real true blues,” he remarked to an acquaintance who had extensive dealings in indigo, and who, therefore, stupid as he generally was, understood that style of praise, and grunted forth an acquiescence thoroughly genuine and sincere, though he did outrage Lindley Murray and mangle Dr. Johnson horribly during the performance.

And that paragraph was perused by many another besides John Merapie and his city friends.

Alfred Westwood learned it off by heart, and then silently cursed some mysterious parties, and communed for hours with himself, after which he took a fixed resolution. Miss Caldera glanced through it and said, she “hoped they’d be happy.” Mina skimmed the list of fashionables over the governess’s shoulder, and sighed, she knew not why, to find so grand a lady was actually her cousin.

Mrs. Frazer got her son to read all about the wedding aloud for her edification, and though he sneered when he came to the part about the lovely, amiable, and accomplished bride, still the whole thing gratified his Highland pride and snobbish nonsense. The cards so beautifully tied together and inscribed, Mr. Allan Frazer—Mrs. Allan Frazer, to the end that they might be better seen, were taken carefully out of the highly enamelled envelope and placed on the top of the papier maché basket John Merapie’s sister had filled with bits of pasteboard collected during previous years, on which were printed the names of grandees, who had forgotten such an individual as herself ever existed.

Well, well, it was a harmless vanity, a reminiscence of more fashionable days, a sort of silent denial that Belerma Square was a proper place for her to reside in, a mute protest against the injustice of shutting her out for ever from intercourse with “the persons moving in the sphere of life she had formerly been accustomed to.”

I once heard a tale of an individual who _stole_ a card, having the name of a peeress traced on it, and who, if the story were not a fiction, preserved it among lesser and more ignoble cards till it grew yellow with the action of time, worn with the process of perpetual fingering. Poor Mrs. Frazer did not carry her absurdity so far as this; she merely exhibited to, or rather placed within view of, curious visitors what was _bonâ fide_ her own, acquired legitimately in other times; and finally, as if by accident, so disposed the heap, that the last precious _morceaux_ the fates were pleased to send her should be seen by everybody at a glance: only did this, and got Malcolm to read her a dreary newspaper paragraph through.

One other person permitted his eyes to wander over that chronicle of the goodly company who went to see Miss Warmond transformed into Mrs. Frazer; and, when he concluded, a darker shade came on Ernest Ivraine’s brow, and he sighed as he looked at the swamps of Paradise to find Mina’s relatives appeared to be, not merely rich, but aristocratic; that to the beautiful land of her birth she had so many ties; that Malcolm’s assertions regarding their family were quite correct; that his own impressions had been a little wrong. Ernest’s hand trembled slightly as he laid down the paper which a sycophantish neighbour sent his father day after day; why it should have done so he knew best; “she was nothing to him—nothing;” he said so constantly, and tried to believe the statement correct.