CHAPTER XII.
SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.
BeforeSir Kenrick’s leave came to an end Mrs. Piper had gone to the land where there are no sordid cares, no gnawing doubts as to the honesty of servants, no heart-corroding regrets at the wastefulness and expenditure of a large household. Mrs. Piper had gone to that undiscovered country where we may fairly hope that for those who have lived harmlessly upon earth all is peace. Mr. Piper drove his smart little pony cart about the country roads and through the village street as usual, but he wore an altered countenance and crape to the top of his tall hat. He no longer had a noisy greeting for every one, no longer quoted Jeremy Bentham or William Cobbett. Never was widower more disconsolate than Ebenezer Piper. Honestly and truly he mourned the careful partner of his youth and maturity.
‘There wasn’t a finer girl in Great Yafford whenme and she was married,’ he said dolefully, after a brief eulogium of his faithful Moggie’s domestic virtues.
Mrs. Piper’s monument was to be the glory of the village churchyard. Mr. Dulcimer was too indulgent and easy to insist upon a rigid æstheticism in the memorials which the living erected in honour of the dead. There was a good deal of bad taste in God’s Acre at Little Yafford, but Mr. Piper was destined to put the cap on the edifice by the gaudiest and most expensive mausoleum that ever the chief stonemason of Great Yafford had devised or executed.
It was to be a sarcophagus of the jewel casket shape, with four twisted columns, like candlesticks, at the corners, and a tall urn surmounting the lid. Each of the columns was of a different coloured marble, the urn was dark red serpentine, with a malachite serpent coiled round it. The urn was supposed to contain Mrs. Piper’s dust, the serpent indicated that physicians and doctors’ stuff had not been wanting in the effort to keep Mrs. Piper longer upon earth. Scattered over the fluted lid of the sarcophagus were to beflowers sculptured out of coloured marble, and cemented on to the white groundwork. The sides of the sarcophagus were to be decorated with shields, richly emblazoned with the Piper arms. Mr. Piper’s arms were his own composition; his crest a ladder; his motto,Ex sese.
Altogether the monument was to be a wonderful thing, and Mr. Piper felt a pride in contemplating the sketches which the mason had caused to be made, and in picturing to himself the effect of the whole when this great work of art should be finished.
The Piper children, in black frocks, and in a state of semi-orphanage, were a little more troublesome than they had been in coloured frocks, and with an invalid mamma as a court of appeal. They brought the ghost of their lost parent into every argument.
‘I’m sure ma wouldn’t have wished me to learn three verbs in one morning,’ said Elizabeth Fry.
‘I think ma would have let me off my lessons if I had a sick headache,’ remonstrated Mary Wolstencroft.
‘I shall do my duty to you whether you like it or no,’ said Bella, resolutely.
‘Ah, you’d better take care!’ cried Brougham. ‘Ma’s in heaven, where she can see everything you’re up to, and won’t she make it disagreeable for you when you get there! If you ever do,’ added the boy, in a doubtful tone; ‘but I don’t think you stand much chance if you go on making our lives a misery with Latin grammar.’
Now that poor Mrs. Piper had laid down her load of earthly care, Miss Scratchell restricted her visits to the Park to purely professional limits. She entered the schoolroom punctually at nine, and she left it as punctually at half-past one. She no longer assisted at the children’s early dinner, a meal which Mr. Piper, when at home, shared under the name of luncheon. Bella had a keen sense of the proprieties, and did not care to sit down to luncheon with a disconsolate widower, or to give Mr. Piper any opportunity to pour his griefs into her ear, as he would fain have done very often. Mr. Piper was of a soft and affectionate nature, and when he told his griefsto a young woman he could not refrain from taking her hand, and even occasionally squeezing it. This Bella could not possibly permit. She therefore carefully avoided all conversations about the late Mrs. Piper, and, as far as was practicable, she avoided Mr. Piper himself.
‘It seems very ’ard,’ complained the widower, ‘that the time when a man feels lonesomest is a time for everybody to avide him. You might as well stop, Miss Scratchell, and eat your bit of dinner with me and the children. You won’t get lamb and sparrowgrass at home.’
‘I know I shall not,’ replied Bella; ‘but I would rather not stay, thank you, Mr. Piper.’
‘Why not?’
‘My mother wants me at home.’
‘She can’t want you more now than she did when pore Mrs. P—— was alive. You never refused to stop then.’
‘I did not like to refuse dear Mrs. Piper, when she was an invalid, and wanted every one’s sympathy.’
‘You’re a good-’earted girl,’ said Piper, approvingly.‘I know what your motive is. You think it ain’t proper to eat your bit of dinner with me, now I’m a widower, though there’s all the children to keep you in countenance. You think it might set the old tabbies up street talking.’
‘It certainly does not require much to do that,’ replied Bella, smiling. ‘But I really am wanted at home, Mr. Piper, and I mustn’t stop talking here. I am going to drink tea at the Vicarage this evening.’
‘Ah!’ sighed Air. Piper, ‘you’re a rum girl. It seems to me that everybody wants you. I shall send you round a bundle of my early sparrowgrass.’
‘Pray don’t take the trouble.’
‘Yes, I shall. It costs me about eighteen-pence a stick, so somebody may as well have the enjoyment of it. But ’orticulture is my ’obby.’
It must be observed that although Mr. Piper was a student of Cobbett, and had taught himself a little Latin, he had never been able to conquer the mysteries of his own tongue. He still spoke as badEnglish as in the days when he was a factory hand, and had never read a passage of Cobbett’s strong racy prose, or pondered over a thesis of Bentham’s.
Bella and Beatrix were good friends still, but not such friends as they had been a year or even six months ago. There was a restraint on both sides. Beatrix could not have told why it was, but it seemed to her that there was a change in herself, and a still greater change in Bella. Bella knew very well what it was that made her uncomfortable in Miss Harefield’s society. It was the sealed letter in its hiding-place in Bella’s shabby old bedroom. That sealed letter weighed like a load of iron upon Bella’s conscience when she found herself in Beatrix’s company; and yet she was glad that she had done this thing, if it had been the means of parting Cyril and Beatrix.
She would like to have seen them parted even more irrevocably, so that under no circumstances could time or chance bring them together again. She was in this temper of mind when she went to spend the evening at the Vicarage, after her little talk with Mr. Piper in the stone portico at the Park.
It was about a week since Sir Kenrick had made his offer and had been rejected. He had taken a wonderful fancy to fishing for pike after that catastrophe, and had brought home some very handsome specimens of that ravenous tribe, for the Vicarage cook to stuff and bake, and serve with savoury sauces for the three o’clock dinner.
‘I think I shall have to protest, like the highland gillies when they got too much salmon, if Kenrick goes on bringing home pike in this way,’ said Mr. Dulcimer, when the cover was lifted and the hungry-jawed scaly monster appeared before him.
Kenrick was off in the early gray to his fishing grounds, so he and Beatrix only met of an evening. He was very polite to her, and evidently bore no malice. Hope was not altogether extinguished in his breast. He had much confidence in Mrs. Dulcimer, who had said that something must be done. Kenrick had not the faintest idea what this inveterate match-maker meant to do, but he felt that her friendship would stick at nothing which a clergyman’s wife might do without peril to her soul.
‘Bella,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer after tea, ‘I want toshow you the things I’ve made for the missionary basket. You might be able to help me a little, perhaps.’
‘I shall be delighted, dear Mrs. Dulcimer,’ answered Bella, inwardly lamenting that it had pleased God to call her to that station of life in which her friends always felt themselves justified in asking her to work for them.
A young woman of fortune like Miss Harefield might be as idle or as selfish as she pleased. Nobody ever thought of asking for payment in kind for any favour they showed her; but everybody who did any kindness to penniless Bella Scratchell wanted to extort recompense for his or her civility in needlework or some sort of drudgery.
‘Come up to my room and look at the things, dear,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer; and then it occurred to Bella that her hostess had something particular to say to her. She had heard from Cyril that day, perhaps, or had got news of him by a side wind. Bella’s heart beat ever so fast at the idea.
They went up to Mrs. Dulcimer’s bedroom, a large old-fashioned chamber, with an immense four-postbedstead and flowery chintz curtains, a muslin-draped dressing-table, adorned with a great many china pots, and a pin-cushion that was a noteworthy feature. Mrs. Dulcimer’s devotional books—with a great many markers in them, looking as if they were read immensely—were arranged on either side of the looking-glass. She used to read Taylor’s ‘Holy Living’ while Rebecca put her hair in papers of an evening. She did not read the ‘Holy Dying.’ It seemed a great deal too soon for that.
There was a bright fire, and the chintz-covered sofa was wheeled in front of it. Between the fire and the sofa was Mrs. Dulcimer’s work-table, and on the table the missionary basket full of ingenious trifles, useful or useless. Babies’ socks, muffatees, pincushions of every shape and design, and a variety of the aggravating family of mats.
‘Bella,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, when they were seated on the sofa, ‘I have something particular to say to you.’
And then the Vicar’s wife told Bella her plan for marrying Kenrick and Beatrix, and how Beatrix had refused Kenrick on account of her attachment to his cousin.
‘Isn’t it a pity, Bella?’ she asked, after lengthily expounding all this.
‘Yes,’ answered Bella, looking thoughtful, ‘they would have suited each other very well, I should think.’
‘Think!’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘There’s no thinking about it. They were made for each other.’
Mrs. Dulcimer’s couples always were made for each other. It is odd how many of them turned out misfits.
Bella was reflecting that if Beatrix were happily married to Sir Kenrick Culverhouse, her sin about the sealed letter would weigh less heavily on her conscience—or, indeed, need not weigh at all. What can any one ask more than happiness? And, in the eye of the world, Kenrick was a much more suitable husband for a young woman of fortune than Cyril could possibly be.
‘Now I have been thinking,’ continued Mrs. Dulcimer, sinking to a mysterious undertone, ‘that perhaps if Beatrix could be made to think that Cyril was fickle and inconstant, and that before he left Little Yafford he had got to care for someone else—you,for instance,’ whispered Mrs. Dulcimer, making a little stab at Bella with her forefinger, ‘it might cure her of her foolish attachment to him. It is ridiculous that she should go on caring for a man who doesn’t love her, when there is a noble young fellow who does love her passionately, and can make her Lady Culverhouse. If she could only be made to think that Cyril was fond of you, Bella, without actual falsehood,’ concluded Mrs. Dulcimer, with a strong emphasis upon the qualifying adjective, as much as to say that in so good a cause she would not mind sailing rather near the wind.
‘I’m sure I don’t know how it is to be done,’ said Bella, with a meditative air. ‘Beatrix is so self-opinionated. It is not as if she were a weak-minded pliable girl. She is as hard as rock.’
‘But you are so clever, Bella. You could manage anything. If I were to say now that I always thought Cyril was very fond of you—and I did think so for a long time, as you know, dear—and if you were to say something that would sustain that idea. We need neither of us tell an actual story.’
‘Of course not,’ answered Bella, piously. ‘Doyou suppose I would tell a story, dear Mrs. Dulcimer?’
‘Indeed no, my love. I know how truthful you are.’
Thus it was agreed between the Vicar’s wife and her ductileprotégéethat, somehow or other, Beatrix was to be persuaded that her lover had been doubly false to her; false in abandoning her because evil tongues maligned her, false in preferring another woman.