The lady's mile

MR. LOBYER'S WOOING.

Another season had commenced. The carriages in the Lady's Mile were gathering thicker every day, though as yet there was not a leaflet on the trees in Hyde Park, nor a ray of warm sunshine on the Serpentine. January the bitter had given place to February the uncertain, when Florence Crawford tore herself away from the blusterous delights of the Brighton Esplanade, in obedience to her father's summons. She had been staying with some stylish friends, who had taken a house on the East Cliff; while William Crawford made the best of the dark short days, working steadily at a picture which was to be one of the glories of the Academy in the coming season.

Florence Crawford had not exaggerated her wealthy admirer's devotion. Mr. Lobyer had spent the winter in perpetual rushing to and fro between London and Brighton. Another man, as deeply smitten as Mr. Lobyer, would have been content to have taken up his abode at Piccadiily-super-Mare, and to have devoted himself entirely to the society of his enchantress. But Miss Crawford's admirer could not altogether tear himself away from the companions of his bachelor life. There were winter races, and mysterious pugilistic meetings, and secret cock-fightings, and divers other entertainments connected with the animal creation, from the delights of which beauty was powerless to beguile Mr. Lobyer.

He wanted to marry Florence Crawford, and he meant to marry her. The more completely she held him at bay, and defied him by her coquetry and insolence, the more dogged he became in his determination to win her for his wife. He admired her beauty, her grace, her piquancy; and he thought it would be a fine thing to have such a woman seated at the head of his table, or sitting by his side in his mail-phaeton, with the most thoroughbred of bull-terriers on her lap, and a forty-guinea tiger-skin over her knees. He admired every thing that was gorgeous and expensive, and out of the reach of that large class of humanity whose members did not possess bankers' books, and whom he contemptuously generalised as "cads." He admired Florence Crawford because, in his own phraseology, she was the best thing he had seen in the way of girls. But he had carefully considered the prudence of the step before he committed himself by any deliberate avowal of his admiration.

"I might marry a woman with plenty of money," he thought; "but then I shouldn't have much of a choice. I like to choose my horses and dogs, and I should like to choose my wife. Florence Crawford must have some money, for she's an only child, and those painter-fellows make no end of money nowadays; and as Crawford has been a widower sixteen or seventeen years, I don't suppose there's much chance of his making an idiot of himself by marrying again."

After regarding the matter with extreme deliberation, Mr. Lobyer arrived at the conclusion that he might as well gratify his own inclination and marry the painter's daughter, whose bewitchingly disdainful airs gave a zest to his courtship.

So when Florence went back to the Fountains, she returned as the affianced wife of Thomas Lobyer; and she carried in one of her portmanteaus a casket of jewels which winked and twinkled in the cold winter sunshine when she lifted the lid to peep at her treasures.

She had left the East Cliff radiant with feminine vanity, bright with the golden halo of success; for her friends knew that before the year was out she would be mistress of Pevenshall Place and a West-end mansion; and she knew that they envied her good fortune. Mr. Lobyer's society was not eminently delightful; but Mr. Lobyer's mail-phaeton and thoroughbred steppers were absolute perfection. Mr. Lobyer's conversational powers were very limited; but the establishments of Brighton jewellers are more fascinating than any other jewel-shops in England, and are scarcely to be surpassed by the glories of the Rue de la Paix. And Mr. Lobyer had been a liberal customer in Castle Square.

William Crawford had heard of his daughter's conquest, and had been congratulated upon the brilliancy of her prospects; but he had not taken upon himself to interfere with her arrangements. The manners and ideas of modern young ladies were something past the pure-minded artist's powers of comprehension. He remembered his wife with her primitive notions and womanly tenderness, so fond, so clinging, so loving, so girlishly sentimental, so quick to be pleased with any simple pleasure, so ready to be frightened by a harsh word, or moved to tears by a tender thought; and remembering her, he was utterly bewildered by the daughter, who was so like and yet so unlike that lost darling. Whether the sentiments which Florence openly professed were the expression of her real feelings or only the fashionable cant of her sex, Mr. Crawford was at a loss to imagine; but the tone of her conversation gave him unspeakable pain. This daughter, who spoke of him as "a dear old party," and who pronounced his best picture to be "awfully jolly," was so unlike the daughter he had dreamed of welcoming to the home of his prosperity.

He knew that she was charming; that slang from her lips took a new accent, and assumed a pretty quaintness in place of its native vulgarity. He had seen that her heart needed only to be awakened by some piteous appeal, some sorrowful spectacle, to reveal itself rich in all womanly tenderness and compassion. But she was not the daughter of his dreams.

"I am punished for my cowardice," he thought. "I was afraid to face the struggles of poverty with my child in my arms. I gave her into the hands of strangers, and I am fool enough to wonder now that she is strange to me."

Miss Crawford tripped into the painting-room immediately after her arrival at the Fountains, and elevated herself on tiptoe in order to embrace her father.

"You dear old darling, how you do smell of varnish!" she cried, after bestowing a kiss upon each of his cheeks. "Are you using copal for your new picture?—dreadfully stiff stuff to work with, isn't it? And what is the new picture? You didn't tell me that in any of your letters, and I've been dying to know. I suppose I may look?"

Before the painter could reply, his daughter had planted herself before the easel, and was contemplating his unfinished work.

"As long as it's nothing about Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, or the Vicar of Wakefield, I'm satisfied," she said.

She stood looking at the picture for some minutes, and then shrugged her shoulders impatiently as she turned to the painter:

"I must give it up, papa," she exclaimed. "It's rather nice; but you must have half a page of description in the catalogue if you want people to know what it all means."

It was the picture of a page holding a horse in a woody landscape. The page wore the costume of Charles the Second's court; but the loose tumbled hair falling about the fair neck, the small jewelled hand that grasped the bridle, the delicate curves of the figure, the disorder of a dress that seemed to have been arranged by unaccustomed hands, and the shrinking terror of the pose, betrayed the sex of the pretended page. The attitude of the horse expressed as intense a terror as that which agitated the woman. The bright chestnut of his sides was darkened with sweat, the distended nostrils were flecked with foam, the eyes were dilated. The woman's face was exquisitely beautiful; but its loveliness was of the diabolical rather than the angelic order. The eyes of the disguised beauty were turned with a look of unspeakable horror towards a woodland glade, which stretched away in the background, and her disengaged hand was pressed convulsively upon her breast, as if to control the beating of her heart. On the grass, near the horse's feet, there lay an embroidered glove, and a cavalier's cloak, whose rich purple velvet and gold embroidery made a mass of colour in the foreground.

"Who is she, papa?" asked Flo. "Her dress is unutterably jolly, and her hair looks as if you had painted it with a patent tube of liquid sunshine. What a wonderful old thing you are! But allow me to inquire for the second time what it all means. A pretty woman doesn't dress herself in a ruby-velvet doublet, and hold a horse in a wood without a motive."

"The woman is the Countess of Shrewsbury, who disguised herself as a page, and held the Duke of Buckingham's horse while he fought a duel with her husband. It's not a very moral story, and I doubt if I shall exhibit it."

"But you needn't tell people what it means, papa, and I'm sure they'd never find out. Call it Lady Rachel Russell. You can invent a story about an attempted escape of her husband, or something of that kind, you know. But if you've any difficulty about the picture Mr. Lobyer shall buy it off you, papa," added Florence, with a tone that sounded rather like patronage. She was quite capable of patronising her father.

"Thank you, my dear; the picture is sold already to a person who understands pictures," answered Mr. Crawford gravely. He was standing with his back to his daughter, washing his hands in a basin that formed part of the paraphernalia of a stand on which he kept the implements of his art. The winter twilight was thickening, and the light of the low fire was hidden by a crimson screen. Flo stood in the bay window, looking out into the garden with a meditative air.

"You speak of Mr. Lobyer as if he were quite your own property, Florence," said the painter, as he walked to the fireplace and pushed away the screen. The firelight showed him his daughter's profile—her head bent, her eyes downcast, the small gloved hands trifling with her bonnet-strings.

She did not make any reply to her father's remark, and yet he could scarcely doubt that she had heard him.

"Do you really mean to marry this Mr. Lobyer?" William Crawford asked presently.

"I wish you wouldn't call him this Mr. Lobyer, papa," cried Flo impatiently. "What has he done that he should have a relative pronoun tacked on to his name, as if he were some new kind of wild animal. He has asked me to marry him ever so many times, and—and I suppose I do mean to marry him, papa—if you have no objection," added Florence dutifully.

"If I have no objection!" exclaimed the painter. "What influence have the fathers of the present day over their children that their opinion should be asked or their wishes consulted? Don't look at me so imploringly. I am not angry with you, my dear. I am only an old-fashioned fellow, and there are many things I see nowadays that mystify me. If you like Mr. Lobyer, and Mr. Lobyer is, as he seems to be, very much in love with you, I cannot make any objection to your marrying him, though I will tell you frankly——"

"Oh, pray don't, papa," cried Florence,—"pray don't tell me any thing frankly; when people talk about being frank, they are always going to say something disagreeable. It's very odd that the truth always should be so unpleasant. I know what you were going to say, papa, almost as well as if you had said it. You were going to tell me that I may marry Mr. Lobyer if I please, but that you don't like him, and that you never have liked him, and so on. The moment a girl is engaged to be married to a man, people seem to think they are privileged to abuse him."

"I don't wish to abuse Mr. Lobyer, my dear. If you are really attached to him"—Flo shrugged her shoulders impatiently—"and if you really think you can be happy as his wife, I have nothing to say against the marriage. I suppose if I were a very prudent man, I ought to rejoice at the idea that my little girl can never know what worldly misfortune is; but——"

"But what, papa?" cried Flo. She had untied her bonnet-strings, and had thrown the fragile structure of velvet and feathers aside in her impatience. The fact is, Miss Crawford had not returned from Brighton in the best possible humour, and her father's grave manner annoyed her. "The Hinchliffe girls were never tired of congratulating me, papa," she said; "and Mrs. Hinchliffe declared I was the luckiest creature in Christendom. And Aunt Jane called—she has taken a house in Marine Square for the children—and the Hinchliffes asked her to dinner, and of course they would tell her all about Mr. Lobyer, and she was delighted, and went away in such spirits, declaring that if I have a town-house she will make my uncle move from Russell Square to Tyburnia. But now I come home you snub me and throw cold water upon me, and make me feel as if I were a kind of criminal. It's very cruel of you, papa."

"My dear child, I have no wish to be cruel. And so the Hinchliffes are delighted, and Aunt Jane is delighted, because you are going to marry Mr. Lobyer. It is not because he is handsome, I suppose, for I have seen much handsomer men; and it can't be because he is clever, for I must confess that to me he seems rather stupid. Why is it such a grand thing to marry Mr. Lobyer, Flo? and why are the Hinchliffes envious, and Aunt Jane in spirits? Is it because he is rich? Ah, to be sure, that's what it is, of course. He is rich, and we are a wealthy nation; and to marry the wealthiest bachelor of the season is the supremest felicity to which a young lady can attain. I begin to understand it all now; but I am such an old-fashioned man, Flo, that I like the old idea of love in a cottage best."

"Papa," said Florence, after a pause, "mamma's marriage was a love-match, and she loved you very dearly—as you deserve to be loved, you dear disagreeable old darling—and I know that she never repented having married you; but when you were very, very poor, did you never feel sorry for having taken her from the comfortable home in Russell Square, and the carriage, and the servants, and the friends, and all that she lost when she became your wife?"

"Yes, Flo," answered the painter sadly; "God knows I had my hours of remorse and bitterness."

"But you had no need to be remorseful, papa," cried Flo, who perceived that she had touched too sad a memory, "for mamma loved you dearly, and she was happier with you than she would have been in a palace—even if people were generally happy in palaces, which, as far as I can ascertain, they are not. But I'm not like mamma. I have been brought up among rich people, and the thought of poverty frightens me. I look at houses sometimes in which people exist, and are tolerably happy, I suppose, in their own miserable way, and I think that I couldn't live in such a house or in such a neighbourhood. Do you remember taking me up to some place near Islington to see one of Mr. Foley's pictures? Islington seemed like a new world to me, and I felt that I should commit suicide if I lived there a week. To be out of reach of the parks, to have no horse to ride, no pretty dresses to wear, no nice fashionable friends to visit, to ride in omnibuses, and wear old-fashioned bonnets, and go through life shabby and dowdy and neglected—oh, what utter misery it all seems! I know all this sounds selfish and horrible, papa; but I have been brought up to be selfish and horrible."

"I dare say your feelings are perfectly natural, my dear," replied Mr. Crawford, "but I don't understand them. I don't understand you. I understand nothing about the age in which I live. All I can say to you is to implore you to think seriously before you take so serious a step as that you talk of so lightly. It seems the fashion to talk lightly of solemn things nowadays; and no one would imagine from the manner in which people discuss a marriage that it was to be the affair of a lifetime. You are very young, Flory, and you can afford to wait. If you feel that you can be happy with Mr. Lobyer, marry him: but if you have the slightest doubt upon that point, let no inducement upon earth tempt you to become his wife. The unhappy marriages of the present day end in the divorce court. But, as I said before, you can afford to wait."

"Oh, yes, papa," cried Miss Crawford, "and while I am waiting and deliberating, some designing minx will pounce upon Mr. Lobyer and marry him before I know where I am. What a dear, unsophisticated thing you are, and what a dreadful worldly wretch I am, papa! But you see I am not so much worse than other people. There is your model Gretchen, your favourite Cecil Chudleigh, who was always lecturing me about my mercenary sentiments; yet you see, after all, she has married a great lumbering Irish barrister, only because he has two or three thousand a-year."

"But Lady Cecil may be very much attached to Mr. O'Boyneville."

"Yes, papa," answered Flo pertly, "she may; but then, on the other hand, she mayn't. Attached to him, indeed!—a man whose coats and collars were made in the year one, and must have been old-fashioned then, I should think, if Adam had decent taste in dress."

"But he can change his coats and collars. And really O'Boyneville is a very good fellow, and a very clever one."

"Yes, papa, but what woman ever cared about such cleverness as that? A man whose greatest achievement is to cross-examine some stupid witness, and set a stupid jury laughing at his stupid jokes. No, you dear innocent parent, Cecil did not care two straws about that uncultivated Queen's Counsel; but she married him because he is well off, and can give her what people call a good home. A good home in Brunswick Square! Poor Cecil, I am dying to call upon her, and hear how she endures her existence in Bloomsbury!"

After this Miss Crawford contrived to turn the conversation. She talked of her father's pictures,—the Countess of Shrewsbury, the larger classical subject which he was going to finish before the first of May,—any thing and every thing except Mr. Lobyer: and after dining tête-à-tête with Mr. Crawford, Florence retired to array herself in blue gauze, and returned to the drawing-room to await a friendly dowager, who was to call for her at ten o'clock, and beneath whose sheltering wing she was to appear at a party to which Mr. Lobyer had also been bidden.

The master of Pevenshall Place and the Lobyer mills called on the painter next day, and made a formal demand for the hand of his daughter.

"You won't find me illiberal in the matter of settlements, Mr. Crawford," said the rich man, as the painter deliberated with a clouded brow and a thoughtful aspect. "Let your lawyer name his own terms, and fight the business out with my fellow. When I fall in love with a beautiful woman I'm not the sort of man to spoil my chance by a niggardly policy," said Mr. Lobyer, whose tone was rather calculated to convey the idea that Florence Crawford was not the first beautiful woman with whom he had fallen in love.

But the painter was too much struck by the first part of the young man's speech to pay much attention to the latter portion.

"My dear Sir," he exclaimed, "I dare say what you have just been saying is very generously intended; but you must remember that we are not making a bargain. My daughter is not one of my pictures, to be disposed of to the highest bidder; and I assure you I have my fancies even about the disposal of them, and don't always care to sell them to the person who offers me most money. If I consider your proposal at all, I must consider it as it affects my daughter's future happiness, not her purse. I suppose a settlement is a usual thing with a man of your wealth; and in that case I am willing that you should do what is fair and just, if you marry my daughter. But I cannot for a moment allow you to put forward your money as an inducement to me, when you propose to become the husband of my only child."

Mr. Lobyer, for once in his life, was thoroughly astounded. Here was "a painter-fellow, who would sell you a picture, by Ged, Sir, and thank you humbly for your patronage, ridin' the high horse and givin' himself the airs of a dook!"

This was what the great Lobyer said afterwards to his chief toady and confidant; but he was completely subdued at the time, and was fain to sue most humbly for permission to make Florence Crawford his wife.

"I do not see very well how I can withhold my consent," returned the painter, with a sigh, when he responded to Mr. Lobyer's very meekly-worded appeal. "You have already proposed to my daughter, and she has accepted your proposal—subject to my approval, she tells me very dutifully. I think it is rather too late for me to interfere, Mr. Lobyer, especially as there seems no particular reason why I should interfere. If my daughter loves you, and if you love her as truly and purely as a man ought to love the woman he marries, I cannot say no. All I ask is that you will not be in a hurry, that you will wait—a year at the least. I want to know you better before I trust my daughter's happiness to your keeping."

But Mr. Lobyer protested that a year under such circumstances would be an eternity, or something to that effect; and after considerable supplication on the part of Miss Crawford's lover, who talked of himself in a dejected way,—as "the most devoted fellow that ever was, you know;" and as "a fellow who wanted to settle down in his own home, and all that sort of thing, you know,"—the painter consented that the year of probation should be reduced by one-half, and that at the end of six months Mr. Lobyer might claim his bride, always provided that his future father-in-law had reason to think well of him in the mean time.

After this the young man departed triumphant, but with a certain air of sulky discomfiture about him in the midst of his triumph.

"If a fellow were a pauper there couldn't be more row about the business," he muttered, as he stepped into that unapproachable phaeton which had been such a success on the West Cliff. "I never knew before to-day that fellows with half-a-million of money were so plentiful that people, whose daughters they want to marry, need turn up their noses at 'em."

Mr. Crawford went back to his painting-room, after the interview with his future son-in-law, very grave of aspect. He went to his painting-room for comfort as a devotee might go into a church. His largest easel occupied the centre of the room, with a great blank canvas upon it, while the Countess of Shrewsbury was turned ignominiously to the wall.

He took some dingy brownish tint from his pallet, and sketched the outline of a woman's form upon the fair white canvas. No map of confused and wavy lines preceded the perfect outline, but every stroke was sharp, precise, and permanent. Where other men indulged in a chalky network of vague curves and undulations, William Crawford drew a firm and lasting outline with his brush. The long labours of years had made him the first of modern draughtsmen, as well as the greatest of modern colourists.

But to-day Mr. Crawford's work did not afford him that serene pleasure which it was his wont to feel when he stood before his easel. His brush was less rapid than usual; and after standing for some moments staring at his canvas without seeing it, he turned with an impatient sigh, and began to walk up and down the room.

"I do not like thee, Dr. Fell," he muttered, with his hands plunged deep in the pockets of his velvet morning-coat. "I'm not at all clear about the reason, but I do not like thee; and I wish—I wish—my pretty little impertinent Florence were going to marry any one else in this world rather than you, my worthy Fell. But the girls of the present day are past my comprehension—and the women too, for the matter of that. Yes, Mrs. Champernowne, the women too!"

The painter sighed more heavily than before as he said this. He took a little note from his waistcoat-pocket presently, and from the half-listless, half unwilling manner in which he unfolded the miniature sheet and glanced at the half-dozen lines inscribed thereon, it was evident that he had read the note before.

And yet it was no very important document. It was only a woman's epistle—half of remonstrance, half of invitation. But the tiny sheet of paper was a marvel of delicate emblazonry in the way of crest and arms, monogram and address, and the paper exhaled a rare and subtile perfume, as of myosotis or orange-blossom.

"Shall I go to her?" thought the painter. "I made up my mind to keep clear of her for this year at least, and already I am tempted to waver. She won't leave me alone; she won't let me work in peace, and forget her if I can. What is it to her that I have worked and waited for twenty years to win the place I hold? What is it to her? She likes to see me in her drawing-room, and to exhibit me to the people amongst whom she lives. I suppose I am a kind of lion in my way, and that she likes to show me in my cage. What does it matter to her if she distracts me from my work? It pleases her to keep me in an intermittent fever of perplexity and despair. What am I to her amongst a hundred admirers? I am only something different from the rest of them. She has her museum of lovers, as she has her cabinets of china, her collection of antique silver, her orchids, her Angora cats: and I am a curious specimen of the genus painter—very hopeless. Shall I go to her to be fooled, as I have been fooled, year after year, ever since I have been worth a place in her exhibition? No, no, Mrs. Champernowne. Nenni, as the citizens of Ghent said to Philip van Artevelde. One might do something with Van Artevelde, by-the-bye, and the quaint old costumes, and the queer peaked roofs of the houses, and the infuriated burghers, clamorous for their leader's blood. Nenni, Mrs. Champernowne, I will not go near you. I have my great picture to paint between this and the 28th of April, and I have to hold my own against the critics; so I will send you my daughter with a pretty message, and I will invite you to my painting-room on the last day in April, with the connoisseurs and the amateurs, and the art-critics on the newspapers, and the unknown strangers who come to stare at the painter, under pretence of looking at his pictures."

But when Mr. Crawford had spent about three hours at his easel, he laid down his pallet and brushes, and looked at the clock upon the mantelpiece—the infallible clock upon which weary models cast furtive glances as the day wore on, to see when another hour had expired, and another shilling had been earned.

"I can't go on any longer without a young person, as Flo calls my professional model," said Mr. Crawford; "and I think I should like to show her my sketch before I go seriously to work at the picture. Her taste is perfect, and she might suggest something; besides which it's getting too dark for work," added the painter, rather irrelevantly.

The "she" of whom he spoke so vaguely was Mrs. Champernowne, and he wanted to find an excuse for going to her. He took a small canvas from amongst others leaning against the wall, and slipped it into a green-baize cover. He rang the bell, told the servant to fetch a cab, and then retired into a dressing-room that adjoined the larger chamber, where he exchanged his velvet painting-coat for the broadcloth of everyday life.