The Earl's promise

Tacitly Kingslough had decided that Mrs. Brady was not to be visited. Just as by one consent the public sometimes agrees to condemn an untried man, so gentle and simple made up their minds not to enter the gates of Maryville.

Those of Nettie’s own class, having regard to that which they considered a mésalliance, quietly tabooed the fact of her marriage and her existence; those of a lower grade, remembering what Miss O’Hara’s father had been, and what the Rileys were, feeling if they called upon the young wife she might not feel grateful for their attentions, agreed it might be prudent for them to abstain from showing any.

Wherein they were wise. Scant civility would any one have met from Nettie, who, presuming upon an altered position, had tried to force unwelcome acquaintanceship on her. Mrs. Brady was not one to be satisfied with dry bread when she had expected to feast on cake.

She could do without either. That was what the uplifting of her little head and the defiant flash of her blue eyes silently informed society.

“She could live alone, she would live alone,” this the burden of her talk to Mrs. Hartley, who, being above or below the considerations that usually influenced the going and coming of Kingslough’s upper ten, could afford to set precedence and public opinion at defiance, hired the best covered car Kingslough boasted, and drove solemnly out to Maryville to see the bride, and give her some old-fashioned advice as to the way in which she was to order her future conduct, and make a good thing of the years that had still to come, still to be lived somehow, happily or miserably, creditably or the reverse.

“One day,” Mrs. Brady proceeded, “perhaps they” (they stood for the retired officers of the army and navy, the clergy, the attorneys and agents, the widows, old maids, poodles, and others who constituted the aristocracy of Kingslough) “may wish to know me again, and then I will have nothing to do with them.”

“When that day comes,” said Mrs. Hartley, with the coolness which exasperated so many of her acquaintances, “you will of course have as perfect a right to select the houses at which you choose to visit as the Kingslough people have now.”

“Or as I have now,” amended Nettie.

“Pardon me, I think your selection is at present confined to those at which you will not visit,” answered Mrs. Hartley. “It is of no use, Nettie,” she went on, stroking the bright, fair hair kindly and sorrowfully, “it is of no use trying to fight the world single-handed. You are very young and you are very pretty, and you have a will of your own and a temper of your own that few gave you credit for possessing; but neither youth nor beauty, nor obstinacy, nor being at bottom a little atom of a vixen will win this battle for you. If you take an old woman’s advice, you will lay down your arms, and let people imagine you are still the gentle, quiet Nettie they used to see going to school. You cannot eat your cake and have it. You knew perfectly what Kingslough thought, whether rightly or wrongly, of Mr. Brady, and still you chose to marry Mr. Brady. Now you want Mr. Brady and Kingslough as well; at least, you are bitter because Kingslough has not welcomed your return with open arms. What you ought to say to yourself now is, ‘Never mind, I have got my husband to care for and to love me, and so long as we are happy together, no slights the world chooses to put upon us can affect us much;’” and as Mrs. Hartley ended this very proper sentence, she looked closely and curiously at Nettie, who, muttering something about the heat of the room, rose and opened one of the windows.

It proved rather a long operation, but when she returned to her seat the flush Mrs. Hartley had noticed rising even to her temples had not faded quite away.

“Next time you come to see me,” Nettie began, ignoring the previous subject of conversation, “I hope you will find the house looking more comfortable. We have furniture coming from Kilcurragh, but it cannot be here for a few days.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Hartley, “furniture does not necessarily mean happiness, any more than—”

“Oh, I know that, of course!” Nettie interrupted, a little peevishly; “still one would wish to have a few chairs, and perhaps a couple of tables in a sitting-room, for all that.”

It was characteristic of Mrs. Brady that she elected to receive her visitor in the drawing-room, which looked like a barren wilderness, and contained very few more articles of furniture than when she first beheld its gaunt and pretentious nakedness, rather than in the smaller apartment where John Riley and his father had held their interview with her husband.

Mrs. Hartley sat on the dilapidated sofa while Nettie tried to look comfortable on a very hard and very high, straight-backed chair. Three windows, reaching from the floor almost to the ceiling, looked out on the weed-grown garden and the tangled wilderness beyond, so that the visitor had plenty of light to view the old-fashioned chimney-piece, on the white marble of which cupids disported themselves, holding wreaths that seemed almost black with dirt—black and grimy as the wings of the cupids.

Nevertheless a handsome chimney-piece—handsome and fantastic, like the great chandelier that hung in the centre of the room, and seemed to Mrs. Hartley’s critical eye to stand in as much need of a scrubbing as the floor itself, from contact with which she had carefully preserved her own dress, and would fain have advised Nettie to guard her muslin, had that young lady seemed more amenable to common sense, and less sensitive concerning the loss of social position induced by her marriage.

To Mrs. Hartley it did not signify in what rank Mrs. Brady was now supposed to be, and she felt sorry to notice how much it appeared to signify to Nettie. She had known girls make foolish matches before, and she had seen them put up with the consequences, but never before had she beheld a young wife battling like Nettie against the results entailed by her own act.

Dimly she began to fancy that the girl had married less for love of Mr. Brady than for weariness of her monotonous life, and that now, when the new life promised to be as monotonous as the old, and there was, besides no hope of escape from it, the hitherto unsuspected side of Nettie’s character was beginning to crop up. But Mrs. Hartley, though partly right, was yet greatly wrong, both in her premises and the results she deduced from them.

Nettie had staked everything she owned—everything that seemed of value to her—in order to gain her husband, and now she knew he was not worth the price at which she purchased him. She had made a mistake which she would never be able to remedy. No; not if she lived for a hundred years, and it was not in her nature to forgive society for deserting and leaving her to bear the consequences of her error as best she might, all alone.

She had taken her own course, and that course had made her bankrupt. The world might have helped to render the lot she had chosen happier, but virtually the world had turned its back upon her and said, “You may carry your burden as best you can. You may bear your trouble as well as you are able.”

That was the secret of Nettie’s anger and Nettie’s petulance. Her heart was bleeding, and not a hand was stretched forth to stanch it. Such fearful isolation, such utter desertion were almost maddening to Nettie, who had always thought a good deal of herself, and to whom it never occurred for one moment that when she went off with Mr. Brady, she took leave of her relatives and society at the same time.

She could have quarrelled with her own shadow. She would have liked to strike some one, to scold as a very virago, and so get rid of even a part of the anger and sorrow, and disappointment and humiliation that were raging within her. She had gone as far as she dared with Mrs. Hartley, but to no purpose. She had tried to exhibit her grievances, and her sensible visitor plainly said she had none; implying rather, indeed, that society and her relatives were aggrieved instead. It was all very hard upon Nettie, and had Mrs. Hartley only suspected how thoroughly the girl already realized the completeness of her mistake, she might have dealt more gently with the blue-eyed beauty, whose pretty face had brought such ruin on her life.

As it was, Mrs. Hartley felt a little provoked with her former favourite.

Elderly people are apt to be a little severe upon young ones when the ways and thoughts of the latter are beyond their comprehension; and Mrs. Hartley was severe in her judgment of Nettie, more especially when their conversation turned, as it soon did, upon Miss Moffat.

“You have heard from Grace, I suppose?” said Mrs. Hartley.

“I have. She told you she had written to me, of course?”

Mrs. Hartley wondered at the “of course,” but contented herself, with answering “Yes.”

“Did she tell you also what she had sent me?”

“No; I do not think, whatever her faults may be, Grace is a girl to talk to one friend about any gift she might intend to make to another.”

“She sent me this!” Nettie exclaimed, pulling out of her belt an extremely beautiful and expensive watch, which. Mrs. Hartley recognized as one formerly belonging to Miss Moffat. “She said in her letter she would have bought me a new one—” for a moment the speaker’s voice trembled, and she hesitated before finishing her sentence, “but in that case she must wait until her father went to Dublin, and she did not want to wait, and, besides that, she had worn this so constantly, it was like sending me a piece of herself, as she could not come to see me. And there was something besides the watch and chain.” Here Nettie, apparently on the brink of a confidence, broke off abruptly.

“I wanted to return her presents,” she went on, after a pause, and Mrs. Hartley noticed how nervously and passionately the fingers of her clasped hands laced and twisted round and about, in and out of one another. “I would have sent them back, but Mr. Brady would not let me. I would not have kept anything in the house sent by a person who thought herself too good to come and see me; but I could not help myself. It is not with any goodwill I wear this thing. I would rather Gracie had come to see me than that anybody had given me ten thousand pounds; and if she did not like to do that, she ought not to have made me presents, and I told her so; Mr. Brady could not prevent my doing that, and I did it.”

“Then you ought to be ashamed of your ungrateful childishness!” exclaimed Mrs. Hartley; “and I only wish Mr. Brady could have prevented such an exhibition of temper. It is nothing but temper which is the matter with you, Nettie; and if you do not take care, you will lose the few friends who have remained true to you, and who will remain true to you if you choose to let them, foolish and inconsiderate though your conduct may have been.”

“Friends!” repeated Nettie scornfully, but tears filled her eyes as she spoke, and Mrs. Hartley, seeing them, relented.

“You have friends, dear,” she said. “John Riley is your friend, so am I, so is Grace. I am an old woman, and free to go where and to whom I choose; but Grace is not free, she cannot come to see you, she cannot set up her own opinion against that of all her advisers. She has no mother; you know yourself how little of a protector Mr. Moffat is capable of being, and till she marries it behoves her to be careful and prudent. I think I may safely say, had Grace been Mrs. Riley, you would have seen her here the day she heard of your arrival: as it is—”

“She ought to have taken no notice of me, I should have felt it less,” finished Nettie. “Tell her though, Mrs. Hartley,” she went on, kneeling before that lady, and resting her arms across her lap, while she turned up her face, which looked at the moment pathetically beautiful, towards her mentor, “tell her I am sorry for writing that nasty letter; tell her I did not mean half nor a quarter what I said in it; but I was angry, I was hurt; she ought not to have sent me money, it was like buying me off. It was treating me like a beggar.”

“It is difficult to please every one,” remarked Mrs. Hartley; “I am treated frequently like a thief, because I do not send money to those who have no right to it. But proceed. How did Grace happen so far to forget what was due to your feelings as to make this present?”

“Do not laugh at me—oh! don’t,” entreated Nettie; “I thought Grace was fond of me, and it seemed so hard, so cold!”

“Grace is fond of you, and she is neither hard nor cold. What did she say?”

“You can see her letter, if you care to read it,” Nettie answered; and she went into the next room and fetched Miss Moffat’s epistle.

It was a simple, loving scrawl—Grace wrote an abominable hand—and told how earnestly the writer hoped Nettie would be happy, and how she wished she could go and see her, and how she sent a little token by which Nettie would know she was not forgotten; and how, thinking there must be many things Nettie might want to buy in the way of dress, she enclosed her some money, which she hoped Nettie would take from her as if she was her sister.

Nothing could have been more tenderly or delicately worded—there was not a sentence, not a syllable in the letter which could have given offence to any one who happened to be in a better frame of mind than was Mrs. Brady’s case when she received it.

Never before, Mrs. Hartley felt, had she quite appreciated Grace Moffat. Certainly there was a sweetness and softness about her mentally which Nettie lacked.

“You did not stand in need of this money,” she said, folding up the letter and returning it, “or else you never could have resented a kindness so gracefully offered, or the feeling which prompted that kindness. What was the amount of her enclosure?”

“Fifty pounds,” answered Nettie, slowly and reluctantly.

“Upon my word, Miss Grace, when you come into your own, you will do things right royally!” remarked Mrs. Hartley. She was astonished at the idea of Miss Moffat proffering such a sum, and yet while blaming the girl’s reckless generosity, as she privately styled it, she was touched by it sensibly. Middle-aged people, who, having learned the value of money, look at a shilling twice before they spend sixpence, are not always displeased at the spectacle of a lavish liberality on the part of young folks. Nevertheless, she intended to remonstrate with Miss Moffat, to point out the evil and folly of her pecuniary ways, and read her a lecture, which she well knew beforehand would be answered with many an “Ah, no!” and “Dear Mrs. Hartley,” and “Well, but,” and earnest excuse and playful protest, uttered by that soft, sweet, stealing voice which was—the Englishwoman confessed it with shame—almost reconciling her to the Irish accent.

“If you really do not require the money, Nettie, I should return the whole or part of it,” said Mrs. Hartley, forgetful apparently of the statement Mrs. Brady had made when the subject of Grace was first broached.

“I cannot,” Nettie answered.

“What, spent it all already!”

“No,” she replied; “I have given it away,” and once again the tell-tale colour flamed in Nettie’s cheeks.

No good purpose was to be served in continuing that conversation, so Mrs. Hartley immediately guessed, and changed it.

“Grace has refused John Riley,” she began.

“So I hear.”

“How did you hear it?”

“John told me, and I am very sorry. I did not say I was sorry to Grace because she might not believe me, but I am. She will never meet with any person one half so fond of her for herself as John.”

“I agree with you there,” said Mrs. Hartley briskly; “but why do you imagine Grace would not have believed you felt sorry, if you told her you did?”

“Oh! because I used to be foolish about things,” answered Nettie, looking straight down the dreary expanse of uncarpeted floor that stretched between her and the other end of the room.

“About what things?” asked Mrs. Hartley.

“About lovers and husbands, and other nonsense of that sort,” Nettie replied, as if she were five hundred years old. “I thought no girl could care for a man unless he was handsome; and John is not handsome, you know. You remember the saying, Mrs. Hartley, that it is better to be ‘good than bonny.’ I did not believe anybody could be good who was not bonny. I have learned better since then.”

Mrs. Hartley did not care to inquire “since when?” so she merely remarked,—

“You were therefore, I suppose, always influencing Grace against him?”

“She did not need any influencing,” was the calm reply. “She did not care for him—not—not in that way, and she did think he wanted her money as much as herself; perhaps he did, he has not much of his own to spare; and then she met Mr. Somerford, and he took her fancy with his playing and singing, and talk about painting, and rubbish of that sort. No,” added Nettie abruptly, reverting to the question of Miss Moffat’s rejected lover, “we did not often speak about John. She always said she never intended to marry any one; and of course I had to listen, and seem to believe her.”

“You did not think she expressed her real intention, then?” suggested Mrs. Hartley.

“I am not sure. I think Grace is likely enough to stay single all her days; unless she marries Mr. Somerford, or some person like him; and I hope she will not marry Mr. Somerford, I do, from my heart.”

“Why, Nettie?”

“Because I do not think he is good enough for her. He has nothing inside his head excepting selfishness and the roots of his curly-black hair,” criticized Mrs. Brady, whose ideas on the subject of physiology were vague in the extreme.

Mrs. Hartley laughed. Disparagement of that handsome scion of a worthless stock was very music to her ears.

“And besides,” proceeded Nettie, “I am certain Grace would never be happy, stuck up amongst the peerage. I know she and the countess are now never separate; but she must be a greatly altered girl if she cares very much for being intimate with the nobility. However, there is no knowing,” finished the speaker sententiously. “I suppose we are none of us exactly what we seem,” and blue eyes and golden curls relapsed into reverie.

“Where is your husband?” inquired Mrs. Hartley, after a moment’s pause. She had hoped to see him, and she did not wish to end her visit without doing so.

“Mr. Brady,” said Nettie (it was a noticeable feature in the young wife’s conversation that since the day when General Riley and his son came upon her, standing by the broken sun-dial, she had never spoken of her husband as such, or addressed or referred to him by his Christian name); “Oh! he has gone down the Lough as far as Port Clune, to look at some cattle he is thinking of buying. It saves ten or twelve miles going by water instead of round the headlands; but he cannot be back before the evening. I am sorry it has so happened; he will be grieved to have missed you.”

It struck Mrs. Hartley that although Mr. Brady might possibly be grieved, Mrs. Brady was certainly not sorry; but she was rising to take her leave, taking Nettie’s statement apparently for granted, when the door opened, and the person of whom they had been speaking walked in.

At sight of a visitor he hesitated for a moment, then came across the room and said how glad he was to see Mrs. Hartley, how proud to make her acquaintance.

“I did not know any one was here,” he added (which must have been a mere figure of speech, since he had seen Mrs. Hartley’s car, and learned from the servant to whom it belonged), “or I should not have appeared before you in such a plight.”

“Where have you been? what have you been doing?” inquired his wife.

“I have been in the water,” he replied, “bringing Lady Glendare back to land. She got out of her depth, or caught by a current, or something of that sort, and would most likely have been part of her way back to England by this time, had we not happened to be passing.”

“You ought to change your clothes at once,” remarked Mrs. Hartley, practical and unemotional as ever.

“There is no hurry,” answered Mr. Brady, laughing. “Mr. Moffat insisted on my taking an internal antidote against cold; and, besides, salt water never hurts anybody.”

“And the countess?” inquired Nettie.

“Oh! there is not much the matter with her beyond fright. She was terrified. Miss Moffat, I suspect, has not come off so well. She was sitting at the door of the bathing-box when Lady Glendare’s maid screamed, and in one moment (by George, I never saw anything so quick or so well done in my life) she was out along the rocks (how she kept her footing I cannot imagine), and made one leap after her ladyship. I was near the countess by that time, and Calpin had rowed in shore, so we saved them both; but Miss Moffat is hurt, I know, though she will not confess it. What a girl that is!” finished Mr. Brady reflectively; “what a spirit she has! The first words she said to the countess, as Calpin and I were carrying her ladyship up to Bayview, were, ‘Of course there is no fear of the election now?’ I rather fancy the election was a matter of secondary importance to Lady Glendare at that moment; but Miss Moffat was right, nevertheless.”

Mrs. Hartley looked straight at Mr. Brady while he uttered the foregoing sentence. He was a handsome man, no one could deny that; handsome after his kind; and there was really nothing in the words he spoke calculated to annoy any one. But there was a manner about him that offended the lady’s taste. More especially she hated the tone in which he alluded to Grace; and she felt angry with Grace for having made any remark capable of repetition in the presence of such a person.

“I am certain that your husband ought not to be standing here in his wet clothes,” she said, turning to Nettie. “If you name an evening when you and Mr. Brady can come and take a cup of tea with me, I will not intrude any longer upon you to-day.”

“I do not think,” Nettie was beginning, when Mr. Brady interrupted her,—

“Annette and I have not so many engagements, Mrs. Hartley, that we need hesitate about accepting yours,” he said. “Any evening which suits you will be agreeable to us.”

“Thursday, then?” suggested the lady.

“Thursday, with many thanks,” he replied.

“You know what that means, I suppose?” remarked Nettie, when he returned, after helping Mrs. Hartley into her car. “She does not want us to call when we might meet other visitors, but asks us to tea when she will take good care to have nobody there.”

Nettie had not lived behind the scenes of high life in Kingslough for nothing.

“Never mind,” returned her husband, “it is the thin edge of the wedge;” and he went out to state to some of his astonished labourers that he wanted the drive weeded, gravelled, and rolled, and that they were to set about putting it in order immediately.