however, hanging over the mother of the two young men, the arrival of
Lady Kew, as she was foreboding, the fierce old mother-in-law who had
worsted Lady Walham in many a previous battle.
It was what they call the summer of St. Martin, and the weather was
luckily very fine; Kew could presently be wheeled into the garden of the
hotel, whence he could see the broad turbid current of the swollen Rhine:
the French bank fringed with alders, the vast yellow fields behind them,
the great avenue of poplars stretching away to the Alsatian city, and its
purple minster yonder. Good Lady Walham was for improving the shining
hour by reading amusing extracts from her favourite volumes, gentle
anecdotes of Chinese and Hottentot converts, and incidents from
missionary travel. George Barnes, a wily young diplomatist, insinuated
Galignani, and hinted that Kew might like a novel; and a profane work
called Oliver Twist having appeared about this time, which George read
out to his family with admirable emphasis, it is a fact that Lady Walham
became so interested in the parish boy's progress, that she took his
history into her bedroom (where it was discovered, under Blatherwick's
Voice from Mesopotamia, by her ladyship's maid), and that Kew laughed so
immensely at Mr. Bumble, the Beadle, as to endanger the reopening of his
wound.
While, one day, they were so harmlessly and pleasantly occupied, a great
whacking of whips, blowing of horns, and whirring of wheels was heard in
the street without. The wheels stopped at their hotel gate; Lady Walham
started up; ran through the garden door, closing it behind her; and
divined justly who had arrived. The landlord was bowing; the courier
pushing about; waiters in attendance; one of them, coming up to
pale-faced Lady Walham; said, "Her Excellency the Frau Graefinn von Kew
is even now absteiging."
"Will you be good enough to walk into our salon, Lady Kew?" said the
daughter-in-law, stepping forward and opening the door of that apartment.
The Countess, leaning on her staff, entered that darkened chamber. She
ran up towards an easy-chair, where she supposed Lord Kew was. "My dear
Frank!" cries the old lady; "my dear boy, what a pretty fright you have
given us all! They don't keep you in this horrid noisy room facing that
----Ho--what is this?" cries the Countess, closing her sentence abruptly.
"It is not Frank. It is only a bolster, Lady Kew, and I don't keep him in
a noisy room towards the street," said Lady Walham.
"Ho! how do you do? This is the way to him, I suppose;" and she went to
another door--it was a cupboard full of the relics of Frank's illness,
from which Lady Walham's mother-in-law shrunk back aghast. "Will you
please to see that I have a comfortable room, Maria; and one for my maid,
next me? I will thank you to see yourself," the Empress of Kew said,
pointing with her stick, before which many a time the younger lady had
trembled.
This time Lady Walham only rang the bell. "I don't speak German; and have
never been on any floor of the house but this. Your servant had better
see to your room, Lady Kew. That next is mine; and I keep the door, which
you are trying, locked on other side."
"And I suppose Frank is locked up there!" cried the old lady, "with a
basin of gruel and a book of Watts's hymns." A servant entered at this
moment, answering Lady Walham's summons. "Peacock, the Countess of Kew
says that she proposes to stay here this evening. Please to ask the
landlord to show her ladyship rooms," said Lady Walham; and by this time
she had thought of a reply to Lady Kew's last kind speech.
"If my son were locked up in my room, madam, his mother is surely the
best nurse for him. Why did you not come to him three weeks sooner, when
there was nobody with him?"
Lady Kew said nothing, but glared and showed her teeth--those pearls set
in gold.
"And my company may not amuse Lord Kew--"
"He-e-e!" grinned the elder, savagely.
"--But at least it is better than some to which you introduced my son,"
continued Lady Kew's daughter-in-law, gathering force and wrath as she
spoke. "Your ladyship may think lightly of me, but you can hardly think
so ill of me as of the Duchesse d'Ivry, I should suppose, to whom you
sent my boy, to form him, you said; about whom, when I remonstrated--for
though I live out of the world I hear of it sometimes--you were pleased
to tell me that I was a prude and a fool. It is you I thank for
for bringing me to him when he was bleeding and almost a corpse, but that
God preserved him to the widow's prayers;--and you, you were by, and
never came near him."
"I--I did not come to see you--or--or--for this kind of scene, Lady
Walham," muttered the other. Lady Kew was accustomed to triumph, by
attacking in masses, like Napoleon. Those who faced her routed her.
"No; you did not come for me, I know very well," the daughter went on.
"You loved me no better than you loved your son, whose life, as long as
you meddled with it, you made wretched. You came here for my boy. Haven't
you done him evil enough? And now God has mercifully preserved him, you
want to lead him back again into ruin and crime. It shall not be so,
wicked woman! bad mother! cruel, heartless parent!--George!" (Here her
younger son entered the room, and she ran towards him with fluttering
robes and seized his hands.) "Here is your grandmother; here is the
Countess of Kew, come from Baden at last; and she wants--she wants to
take Frank from us, my dear, and to--give--him--back to the--Frenchwoman
again. No, no! Oh, my God! Never! never!" And she flung herself into
George Barnes's arms, fainting with an hysteric burst of tears.
"You had best get a strait-waistcoat for your mother, George Barnes,"
Lady Kew said, scorn and hatred in her face. (If she had been Iago's
daughter, with a strong likeness to her sire, Lord Steyne's sister could
not have looked more diabolical.) "Have you had advice for her? Has
nursing poor Kew turned her head? I came to see him. Why have I been left
alone for half an hour with this madwoman? You ought not to trust her to
give Frank medicine. It is positively----"
"Excuse me," said George, with a bow; "I don't think the complaint has as
yet exhibited itself in my mother's branch of the family. (She always
hated me," thought George; "but if she had by chance left me a legacy,
there it goes.) You would like, ma'am, to see the rooms upstairs? Here is
the landlord to conduct your ladyship. Frank will be quite ready to
receive you when you come down. I am sure I need not beg of your kindness
that nothing may be said to agitate him. It is barely three weeks since
M. de Castillonnes's ball was extracted; and the doctors wish he should
be kept as quiet as possible."
Be sure that the landlord, the courier, and the persons engaged in
showing the Countess of Kew the apartments above spent an agreeable time
with Her Excellency the Frau Graefinn von Kew. She must have had better
luck
in her encounter with these than in her previous passages with her
grandson and his mother; for when she issued from her apartment in a new
dress and fresh cap, Lady Kew's face wore an expression of perfect
serenity. Her attendant may have shook her fist behind her, and her man's
eyes and face looked Blitz and Donnerwetter; but their mistress's
features wore that pleased look which they assumed when she had been
satisfactorily punishing somebody. Lord Kew had by this time got back
from the garden to his own room, where he awaited grandmamma. If the
mother and her two sons had in the interval of Lady Kew's toilette tried
to resume the history of Bumble the Beadle, I fear they could not have
found it very comical.
"Bless me, my dear child! How well you look! Many a girl would give the
world to have such a complexion. There is nothing like a mother for a
nurse! Ah, no! Maria, you deserve to be the Mother Superior of a House of
Sisters of Charity, you do. The landlord has given me a delightful
apartment, thank you. He is an extortionate wretch; but I have no doubt I
shall be very comfortable. The Dodsburys stopped here, I see by the
travellers' book-quite right, instead of sleeping at that odious buggy
Strasbourg. We have had a sad, sad time, my dears, at Baden. Between
anxiety about poor Sir Brian, and about you, you naughty boy, I am sure I
wonder how I have got through it all. Doctor Finck would not let me come
away to-day; would I would come."
"I am sure it was uncommonly kind, ma'am," says poor Kew, with a rueful
face.
"That horrible woman against whom I always warned but you--but young men
will not take the advice of old grandmammas--has gone away these ten
days. Monsieur le Duc fetched her; and if he locked her up at Moncontour,
and kept her on bread-and-water; for the rest of her life, I am sure he
would serve her right. When a woman once forgets religious principles,
Dorkings go on Tuesday. Clara is really a dear little artless creature;
one that you will like, Maria--and as for Ethel, I really think she is an
angel. To see her nursing her poor father is the most beautiful sight;
night after night she has sate up with him. I know where she would like
to be, the dear child. And if Frank falls ill again, Maria, he won't need
a mother or useless old grandmother to nurse him. I have got some pretty
messages to deliver from her; but they are for your private ears, my
lord; not even mammas and brothers may hear them."
"Do not go, mother! Pray stay, George!" cried the sick man (and again
Lord Steyne's sister looked uncommonly like that lamented marquis). "My
cousin is a noble young creature," he went on. "She has admirable good
qualities, which I appreciate with all my heart; and her beauty, you know
how I admire it. I have thought of her a great deal as I was lying on the
bed yonder" (the family look was not so visible in Lady Kew's face),
"and--and--I wrote to her this very morning; she will have the letter by
this time, probably."
"Bien! Frank!" Lady Kew smiled (in her supernatural way) almost as much
as her portrait, by Harlowe, as you may see it at Kewbury to this very
day. She is represented seated before an easel, painting a miniature of
her son, Lord Walham.
"I wrote to her on the subject of the last conversation we had together,"
Frank resumed, in rather a timid voice, "the day before my accident.
Perhaps she did not tell you, ma'am, of what passed between us. We had
had a quarrel; one of many. Some cowardly hand, which we both of us can
guess at, had written to her an account of my past life, and she showed
me the letter. Then I told her, that if she loved me she never would have
showed it me: without any other words of reproof. I bade her farewell. It
was not much, the showing that letter; but it was enough. In twenty
differences we have had together, she had been unjust and captious, cruel
towards me, and too eager, as I thought, for other people's admiration.
Had she loved me, it seemed to me Ethel would have shown less vanity and
better temper. What was I to expect in life afterwards from a girl who
before her marriage used me so? Neither she nor I could be happy. She
could be gentle enough, and kind, and anxious to please any man whom she
loves, God bless her! As for me, I suppose, I'm not worthy of so much
talent and beauty, so we both understood that that was a friendly
farewell; and as I have been lying on my bed yonder, thinking, perhaps, I
never might leave it, or if I did, that I should like to lead a different
sort of life to that which ended in sending me there, my resolve of last
month was only confirmed. God forbid that she and I should lead the lives
of some folks we know; that Ethel should marry without love, perhaps to
fall into it afterwards; and that I, after this awful warning I have had,
should be tempted to back into that dreary life I was leading. It was
wicked, ma'am, I knew it was; many and many a day I used to say so to
myself, and longed to get rid of it. I am a poor weak devil, I know, I am
only too easily led into temptation, and I should only make matters worse
if I married a woman who cares for the world more than for me, and would
not make me happy at home."
"Ethel care for the world!" gasped out Lady Kew; "a most artless, simple,
affectionate creature; my dear Frank, she----"
He interrupted her, as a blush came rushing over his pale face. "Ah!"
said he, "if I had been the painter, and young Clive had been Lord Kew,
which of us do you think she would have chosen? And she was right. He is
a brave, handsome, honest young fellow, and is a thousand times cleverer
and better than I am."
"Not better, dear, thank God," cried his mother, coming round to the
other side of his sofa, and seizing her son's hand.
"No, I don't think he is better, Frank," said the diplomatist, walking
away to the window. And as for grandmamma at the end of this little
speech and scene, her ladyship's likeness to her brother, the late
revered Lord Steyne, was more frightful than ever.
After a minute's pause, she rose up on her crooked stick, and said, "I
really feel I am unworthy to keep company with so much exquisite virtue.
It will be enhanced, my lord, by the thought of the pecuniary sacrifice
which you are making, for I suppose you know that I have been hoarding--
yes, and saving, and pinching,--denying myself the necessities of life,
in order that my grandson might one day have enough to support his rank.
Go and live and starve in your dreary old house, and marry a parson's
daughter, and sing psalms with your precious mother; and I have no doubt
you and she--she who has thwarted me all through life, and whom I hated,
--yes, I hated from the moment she took my son from me, and brought
misery into my family, will be all the happier when she thinks that she
has made a poor, fond, lonely old woman more lonely and miserable. If you
please, George Barnes, be good enough to tell my people that I shall go
back to Baden
," and waving her children away from her, the old woman
tottered out of the room on her crutch.
So the wicked fairy drove away disappointed in the chariot with the very
dragons which had brought her away in the morning, and just had time to
get their feed of black bread. I wonder whether they were the horses
Clive and J. J. and Jack Belsize had used when they passed on their road
to Switzerland? Black Care sits behind all sorts of horses, and gives a
trinkgelt to postillions all over the map. A thrill of triumph may be
permitted to Lady Walham after her victory over her mother-in-law. What
Christian woman does not like to conquer another? and if that other were
a mother-in-law, would the victory be less sweet? Husbands and wives both
will be pleased that Lady Walham has had the better of this bout: and
you, young boys and virgins, when your turn comes to be married, you will
understand the hidden meaning of this passage. George Barnes got Oliver
Twist out, and began to read therein. Miss Nancy and Fanny again were
summoned before this little company to frighten and delight them. I dare
say even Fagin and Miss Nancy failed with the widow, so absorbed was she
with the thoughts of the victory which she had just won. For the evening
service, in which her sons rejoiced her fond heart by joining, she
lighted on a psalm which was as a Te Deum after the battle--the battle of
Kehl by Rhine, where Kew's soul, as his mother thought, was the object of
contention between the enemies. I have said, this book is all about the
world and a respectable family dwelling in it. It is not a sermon, except
where it cannot help itself, and the speaker pursuing the destiny of his
narrative finds such a homily before him. O friend, in your life and
mine, don't we light upon such sermons daily?--don't we see at home as
well as amongst our neighbours that battle betwixt Evil and Good? Here on
one side is Self and Ambition and Advancement; and Right and Love on the
other. Which shall we let to triumph for ourselves--which for our
children?
The young men were sitting smoking the vesper cigar. (Frank would do it,
and his mother actually lighted his cigar for him now, enjoining him
straightway after to go to bed.) Kew. smoked and looked at a star--
shining above in the heaven. "Which is that star?" he asked: and the
accomplished young diplomatist answered it was Jupiter.
"What a lot of things you know, George!" cries the senior, delighted;
"you ought to have been the elder, you ought, by Jupiter! But you have
lost your chance this time."
"Yes, thank God!" says George.
"And I am going to be all right--and to turn over a new leaf, old boy--
and paste down the old ones, eh? I wrote to Martins this morning to have
all my horses sold; and I'll never beg--so help me--so help me, Jupiter.
I made a vow--a promise to myself, you see, that I wouldn't if I
recovered. And I wrote to Cousin Ethel this morning.--As I thought over
the matter yonder, I felt quite certain I was right, and that we could
never, never pull together. Now the Countess is gone, I wonder whether I
was right--to give up sixty thousand pounds, and the prettiest girl in
London?"
"Shall I take horses and go after her? My mother's gone to bed, she won't
know," asked George. "Sixty thousand is a lot of money to lose."
Kew laughed. "If you were to go and tell our grandmother that I could not
live the night through, and that you would be Lord Kew in the morning,
and your son Viscount Walham, I think the Countess would make up a match
between you and the sixty thousand pounds, and the prettiest girl in
England: she would, by--by Jupiter. I intend only to swear by the heathen
gods now, Georgy.--No, I am not sorry I wrote to Ethel. What a fine girl
she is!--I don't mean her beauty merely, but such a noble-bred one! And