CHAPTER XLVII.BELL BURLEIGH.
There was to be a wedding in St. James’s Church, Boston, and the persons most interested were Isabella Helena Burleigh and B. Franklin Irving, whose bridal cards were sent to Beechwood one morning a few weeks after Laura’s death. It was to be a most brilliant affair, and was creating considerable excitement both in Belvidere and in Boston, where by virtue of her boasted blood, which she traced back to Elizabeth’s time, and by dint of an indomitable will, Miss Burleigh was really quite a belle. It was herbloodwhich had won upon Mrs. Walter Scott, who said she thought more of family pedigree than money, and Miss Burleigh’s pedigree was without taint of any kind. So Mrs. Walter Scott was pleased, or feigned to be so, and went to Boston, and tookrooms at the Revere, at fifteen dollars per day, and had her meals served in her private parlor; and Frank brought down his own horses and carriage, and took another suite of rooms, and paid at the rate of twenty dollars per day for all his extravagances in the way of cigars and wine, and friends invited to dinner. His evenings he spent with his bride-elect in her home on Beacon Street, where everything betokened that the proprietors were not rich in worldly goods, if they were in blood.
The Burleighs were very poor, else the spirited Bell, who had more brains than heart, had never accepted Frank Irving. She knew just what he was, and, alone with her young sister Grace, mimicked him, and called him “green,” and when she was with him in company, shivered, and grew hot and cold, and angry at some of his remarks, which betokened so little sense.
He was gentlemanly to a certain extent, and knew all the ins and outs of good society; but he was not like the men with whom Bell Burleigh had associated all her life; not like the men she respected for what was in their heads rather than in their purse. But as these men had thus far been unattainable, and the coffers at home were each year growing lower and lower as her father grew older and older, Bell swallowed all sentiment, and the ideas she had once had of a husband to whom she could look up, and accepted Frank Irving and Millbank.
But not without her price. She made Frankpayfor herbloodand charms, and pay munificently, too. First, one hundred thousand dollars were to be settled on herself, to do with as she pleased. Next, sister Grace and her father were both to live with her at Millbank, and Frank was to clothe and support Grace as if she were his own sister. Then, her brother Charlie’s bills at college must be paid, and after he was graduated he must come to Millbank as his home until he went into business.
These were Bell’sterms, and Frank winced a little and hesitated, and when she had told him to take time to consider, hetook it and did consider, and decided that it would not pay, and went for a few weeks to New York, where at the Fifth Avenue Hotel he came again upon the Burleighs. Bell knew just how to manage him, and ere he had been there three days he was as much in love with her as ever, and madly jealous of every one who paid her marked attentions. Thepriceshe asked seemed as nothing compared with herself, and one evening after she had been unusually fascinating and brilliant, and had snubbed him dreadfully, he wrote a note accepting her terms, and begging her to name an early day and put him out of torture. In her dressing-gown, with her own hair falling about her shoulders and her braids and curls of false hair lying on the bureau, Bell read the note, and felt for a moment that she despised and hated the man who wrote it, just because he had acceded to her unreasonable demands.
“I wish he had decided otherwise. I would almost rather die than marry him,” she thought, while her eyes put on a darker look and her face a paler hue.
Then she thought of the home on Beacon Street, of the pinching poverty, the efforts to keep up appearances, of her father growing so old, and of herself, not so young as she was once,—twenty-eight, the Bible said, though she passed for twenty-five; then she thought of Charlie, her young brother, and glanced at Grace, her only sister, who lay sleeping so quietly before her. All the love Bell Burleigh had was centred in her father, her brother, and in Grace, the fair young girl, with soft blue eyes and golden hair, who was as unlike her sister as possible, and who was awakened by Bell’s tears on her face, and Bell’s kisses on her brow.
“What is it, Bell?” she asked, sitting up in bed, and rubbing her eyes in a sleepy kind of way.
Bell did not say, “I have sold myself for you.” But—“Rejoice, Grace, that we are never again to know what poverty means; never to pinch and contrive and save and do things we are ashamed of in order to keep up. I am going to marry Mr. Irving, and you are all to live with me at Millbank.”
Grace was wide awake now, and looking earnestly in her sister’s face for a moment, said:
“Youmarry that Mr. Irving,you, Bell? There is not a thing in common between you, unless you love him. Do you?”
“Hush, Grace; don’t speak ofloveto me,” and Bell’s voice had in it a hard, bitter tone. “I parted company with that sentiment years ago, before you could understand. You have heard—of—Dr. Patterson, missionary to India? I would once have gone with him to the ends of the earth, but mother said I was too young, too giddy, and theBoardthought so, too. I was not quite seventeen, and I defied those old fogy ministers to their faces, and when they asked me so coldly if I supposed myself good enough to be a missionary, I answered that I was going for the love I bore toFred, and not to be a missionary, or because I thought myself good as they termed goodness. And so it was broken off, and Fred went without me, and as they said he must have a wife, he took a tall, red-haired woman many years his senior, but who, to her other qualifications, added the fact that she was aprofessor, and believed herself called to a missionary life. She is dead now, and her grave is on the banks of the Ganges. But Fred’s life and mine have drifted widely apart; I am no wife for him now. I have grown too hard, and reckless, and selfish, and too fond of the world, to share his home in India. And so all I have to remind me of the past as connected with him isoneletter, the last he ever wrote me, and a lock of his hair,—black hair, nottow color,” and Bell smiled derisively, while Grace knew that she was thinking of Frank, whose hair, though not exactly tow color, was far from being black.
Bell paused a moment, and then went on:
“You know how poor we are, and how we struggle to keep up, and how much father owes. Our home is mortgaged for more than it is worth, and so is every article of any value in it. I should like brains if I could get them set off with money, but as I cannot, I have concluded to take the money. I have counted the cost. I know what I am about. I shall be Mrs.Franklin Irving, and pay our debts, and keep you all with me,—and—be—happy.”
She said the last very slowly, and there was a look of pain in the eyes of this girl who had once thought to be a missionary’s wife, and who had in her many elements of a noble woman. She did not tell Grace the price she had put upon herself That was something she would rather her young sister should not know, and when Grace, whose ideas of marriage were more what Bell’s had been in the days of the Fred Patterson romance, tried to expostulate, she stopped her short with,—“It’s of no use; my mind is made up. I have told you what I have because I knew you would wonder at my choice, and I wanted you to know some of the causes which led me to make it. I want your love, your respect, your confidence, Grace, I want—”
Bell’s lip quivered a little, and she bowed her dark head over her sister’s golden one, and cried a little; then sat erect, and the old proud, independent look came back to her face, and Bell Burleigh was herself again,—the calm, resolute, cool-headed woman of the world, who had sold herself for money and a home.
They met in the wide entrance hall to the dining-room next morning, Frank and Bell, and while he stood for a moment, waiting for his paper, she said a word to him, and they walked together into breakfast an engaged pair, with quite as much love and sentiment between them as exists in many and many an engagement which the world pronounces so eligible and brilliant.
Bell had some shopping to do that morning, and Frank did not see her again till just before dinner, when he met and escorted her to his mother’s private parlor, where she was to receive the priceless boon of Mrs. Walter Scott’s blessing. That lady had heard the news of her son’s engagement with a good deal of equanimity, considering there was no money to be expected. Like many people of humble birth, Mrs. Walter Scott set a high value on family and blood, and, as Bell’s were both of the firstwater, she accepted her as her future daughter-in-law, wishing to herself that she was not quite so independent, and resolute, and strong-minded, as the absence of these qualities would render her so much more susceptible to subjugation, for Mrs. Walter Scott meant to subjugate her.
As Mrs. Franklin Irving, she would, of course, be the nominal mistress of Millbank; but it would be only nominal. Mrs. Walter Scott would be the real head; the one to whom every body would defer, even her daughter-in-law. But she said nothing of this to Frank. She merely told him she was willing, that Miss Burleigh was a girl of rare talent and attainments that she had a great deal of mind, and intellect, and literary taste, and would shine in any society.
Frank did not care a picayune for Bell’s talents, or attainments, or literary taste. Indeed he would rather of the two that she had less of these virtues, and did not overshadow him so completely as he knew she did. Still he was in love with her, or thought he was, and extolled her to his mother, but did not speak of the hundred thousand dollars as a marriage settlement, or of the arrangement about the Judge and Charlie and Grace. He would let these things adjust themselves; and he had faith in Bell’s ability to manage her own matters quietly, and without his aid.
She was looking very beautiful when he led her to his mother, arrayed in her heavy purple silk with the white ermine on the waist and sleeves, and Mrs. Walter Scott thought what a regal-looking woman she was. There was a deep flush on her cheek and a sparkle in her black eyes, and her white teeth glittered between the full, pouting lips which just touched Mrs. Walter Scott’s hand, as she stood to receive the blessing.
When they went into dinner that night after the blissful interview, there was about Frank a certain consciousness of ownership in the beautiful girl who walked beside him and on whose finger a superb diamond was shining, the seal of her engagement, and those who noticed them particularly, and towhom Miss Burleigh was known, guessed at the new relations existing between the two.
This was in the winter, and before Magdalen’s parentage was discovered. Since then the course of true love had run pretty smoothly for once, and Frank had only felt a single pang, and that when he heard who Magdalen Lennox was. Then for a moment all his former love for her came back, and Bell Burleigh, who chanced to be at Millbank for a day or so, wondered what had happened to him that he was so absent-minded and indifferent to her blandishments. She was very gracious to him now, feeling that there was something due him for all his generosity to her, and as she could not give him love in its truest sense, she would give him civility at least and kindliness of manner and a show of affection. So when she saw the shadow on his face, and with a woman’s intuition felt that something more than mere business matters had brought it there, she spoke to him in her softest manner and sang him her sweetest songs and wore his favorite dress, and twice laid her hand on his, and asked what was the matter that he looked so gloomy; had he heard, bad news? He told her no, and kissed her forehead, and felt his blood tingle a little at this unusual demonstration from hisfiancée, and so fickle and easily soothed was he, that beneath the influence of Bell’s smile the shadow began to lift, and in the letter of congratulation which he wrote to Magdalen there was nothing but genuine sympathy and rejoicing that she had found her home at last and a sister like Alice Grey.
He did not tell of his engagement; he was a little ashamed to have Magdalen know that he was so soon “off with the old love and on with the new;” and so she did not suspect it until every arrangement was complete and the day for the bridal fixed. Great was the expenditure for silks and satins and laces and jewelry, and not only New York and Boston, but Paris, too, was drawn upon to furnish articles of clothing rare and expensive enough for a bride of Bell Burleigh’s fastidious taste and extravagant notions. Frank, who grew more and more proud of his conquest, and consequently more and more inlove with his bride-elect, insisted upon furnishing the bridal trousseau, and bade her spare neither money nor pains, but get whatever she wanted at whatever cost. And Bell accepted his money, and spent it so lavishly that all Boston was alive with gossip and wonder. There were to be six bridesmaids, and three of them were to accompany the happy pair for a week or so at Frank’s expense; and Frank never flinched a hair, even when presented with the Paris bill, in which were charges of one hundred dollars and more for just one article of underclothing. All Bell’s linen came ready made from Paris, and such tucks and ruffles and puffs and flutings and laces had never been seen before in Boston in so great profusion. And Bell bore herself like a queen, who had all her life been accustomed to Parisian luxury. There was no doubt of her gracing Millbank or any other home, and Frank each time he saw her felt more than repaid for the piles and piles of money which he paid out for her.
At Millbank there was also dressmaking proceeding on a grand scale, and though Mrs. Walter Scott’s wardrobe differed somewhat from Bell’s, inasmuch as it was soberer and older,—the silks were just as heavy and rich, and the laces just as expensive. New furniture, new table-linen, and new silver came almost daily to Millbank, together with new pictures, for one of which the sum of two thousand dollars was paid. When old Hester Floyd heard of that she could keep quiet no longer, but vowed “she would go to Belvidere and visit Mrs. Peter Slocum, who was a distant connection, and would be glad to have her a spell, especially as she meant to pay her way.”
When Hester resolved to do a thing she generally did it, and as she was resolved to go to Belvidere she at once set herself to prepare for the journey.