CHAPTER XVI.
AT HOME IN BLOOMSBURY.
The slow days, the long weeks, the interminable months dragged themselves out, and Cecil lived alone with her husband in the stately solitude of the northern side of Brunswick Square.
The celebrated pea-green Hayne was wont to declare that his horses grew restive when he attempted to take them eastward of Temple Bar; and there are many people nowadays inferior in status to the elegant West-Indian millionaire, who shudder at the mention of Bloomsbury, and affect a serio-comic horror of the unknown latitudes on the northern side of Holborn.
Mr. O'Boyneville had no fashionable aversion to an unfashionable locality. He liked his house in Brunswick Square, because it was big and stoutly built, like himself; and, as the belief that any thing appertaining to himself must necessarily be the very best thing of its kind in existence was deeply implanted in his tranquil breast, he was serenely unconscious of any brighter region than the comfortable square in which he had taken up his abode when he first found himself able to support a household of his own.
If he had known that there were fairer places than Bloomsbury within reach of the courts of law; if he had fancied that there was any spot in or near London which would have been more pleasant for Cecil, he would have been quick to move his goods and chattels. He loved his wife honestly and truly, and would have made a heavier sacrifice to give her pleasure; but he knew about as much of a woman's tastes and prejudices as he knew of the habitudes and requirements of a white elephant; and he took Lady Cecil calmly home to the dreary, scantily-furnished Bloomsbury mansion, and left her to be happy after her own fashion in the spacious empty rooms while he went back to his work.
While he went back to his work! In those few words might have been told the dismal history of two lives. The husband went to his work, and gave his heart and soul to breaches of contract and actions for damages, to libel and divorce cases, to actions in debt, trespass, assumpsit, trover, and ejectment; and the wife saw him go out and come in, heard his tired sigh, as he sank half-exhausted into his easy chair, but remained utterly ignorant and unsympathising.
She had just at first tried to understand her husband's career, and had questioned him upon the subject of his laborious days and studious nights; but when he tried to explain some interesting case—a great will case—in which the issue of a tedious suit depended on the signification of the words "then" and "forthwith,"—whether the former was meant to specify a particular time, or had reference to some other antecedent time; and whether the latter meant "immediately" or within a convenient time after a certain event,—her mind lost itself among the complications of the law, and she was fain to confess herself mystified rather than enlightened by her husband's explanation.
He kissed her, and told her he would never plague her again with such dry details; and from that hour he very rarely talked of business in his wife's presence.
But he thought of it, and that, for Cecil, was a great deal worse. At breakfast, at dinner, when his young wife was talking to him in her brightest and most animated manner, she would stop suddenly, chilled and discouraged by the discovery that the great barrister had not heard a word of her discourse. After telling him about a new book—a fresh view of Mary Queen of Scots, by a French historian; an anti-Carlyleian essay on Frederick of Prussia; a passionate, classic tragedy, by a new poet—Cecil would look hopefully for some answering ray of interest in her husband's face, and would behold his eyes fixed and staring, and hear his lips murmuring faintly to himself, "The defendant seems to me to have no case, and the plaintiffs will be entitled to recover if Giddles and Giddles can show that the letter was posted on the twenty-first; the defendant must be held in law to be the purchaser, and therefore responsible for every bale of the cotton. The cases Slattery v. Spindleshanks, 30th Law Digest, Q.B., page 102, and Capers v. Pepper, in the Weekly Reports, are almost in point—humph!—yes, yes; but old Giddles must be kept out of the witness-box, and Giddles junior pinned to the date and postmark of that letter; and—yes, yes——"
After breakfast Mr. O'Boyneville kissed his wife, and hurried out of the house. At half-past six he came home, washed his hands in a little dressing-room at the back of his study, and sat down to dinner in the dress he had worn all day, with the dust of the law-courts in his hair, and all the dreariness of the law in his brain. Sometimes he talked a little to his wife during dinner, telling her some scrap of public news in which she did not feel the faintest interest, or reciting some legal witticism, which to her uninitiated mind appeared unspeakably stupid. After dinner he read his papers for a quarter of an hour, and then laid himself down upon a gigantic crimson-morocco-covered sofa, which looked like the relic of a departed era, a fossilised mammoth in the way of upholsterer's work, and slept peacefully until nine, when a modest and almost furtive double knock announced the advent of his clerk, who brought the evening's batch of letters and papers.
Then the popular barrister arose like a giant refreshed, took a cup of tea from Cecil's attentive hands, and sipped the revivifying beverage in a dreamy manner, staring thoughtfully at his wife without seeing her, and still revolving the case of Giddles and Giddles, Liverpool brokers, and the three thousand bales of cotton. After tea he went to his study, which darksome sanctorum he rarely left until the smallest of the small hours had sounded from the clocks of St. Pancras and the Foundling.
Laurence O'Boyneville had won his position by honest hard work, and by divine right of an intellect not easily matched amongst the ranks of hard-working man. But such a man is apt to make a terrible mistake when he brings a fair young wife to his joyless home. Incessant work had become the normal state of the barrister. He did not know that his home was dreary. His life seemed pleasant enough to him; and he did not know that to a woman such a mode of existence must be simply intolerable. He gave his wife a comfortable house, and the unlimited command of money; and he fancied he had done all that was necessary. He had no time for any thing more. When his day's work was finished he was too tired to change his dress, too tired to talk without effort, too tired to go from one room to another after his dinner; and when he had recovered from the fatigue of his day's work his night's work began.
And such a life as this was the realisation of his brightest dream. For these days of unrest and excitement, for these studious nights had the young man from Shannonville toiled and struggled. He had attained a high position in his profession, and he loved his profession. What more could the heart of man desire? Venus Anadyomene divinely smiling amidst a cloud of silvery spray, radiant with vermilion and carmine, ultramarine and Naples yellow, could be no more delightful to the mind of William Crawford, the painter, than were the cases of Giddles and Giddles v. Clithery, Shavington v. The Estremadura Soap-boiling Company (limited), and many others, to Laurence O'Boyneville, Q.C.
What reason have the painter and the poet, the sculptor and the musician, to be thankful that the arts for which they slave, the labours to which they devote their lives, are beautiful for all the world as well as for the labourers! If Cecil's husband had been a painter she would have been content to stand beside his easel while his bright fancies grew into life upon the canvas. Every new picture would have been an era in her existence as well as in his. No curve of an arm or wrist, no pose of a head, no undulation of a drapery that would not have made subject for pleasant talk and spirited discussion. The painter and his wife may go lovingly hand-in-hand upon the great highway to Fame's starry temple; and if she has been his model now and then, and if she has suggested the subject of a picture, or devised some happy alteration of an attitude, she seems to have had a part in her husband's work. To all time the wives of Rubens will be associated with his genius; so long as the work of Raffaelle endures, the world will remember the woman he loved and painted.
But what part can the barrister's wife have in his triumphs? Except amongst certain sets the world does not talk much of popular barristers; and the wife of a legal luminary hears little praise of her husband from the lips of strangers. A woman must be strong-minded indeed who can interest herself in the technicalities of a dispute arising out of the purchase of sundry bales of cotton, or the winding-up of the affairs of a bubble company. There is something in the very paraphernalia of the legal profession which, on the threshold, repels all feminine sympathy. The crimson bag, the red tape, the green ferret; the slippery blue paper, which to the unprofessional pen is utterly impracticable for all literary use,—every thing seems alike symbolical of a hopeless dryness and arid barrenness, amidst which no solitary blossoms, no lonely, accidental prison-flower can put forth its tender shoots.
As the dull days crept on, so miserably alike one another, Cecil felt it was her duty to be interested in her husband's career. She read the law-reports in the Times, the pale shadows of bad puns, whereat there had been laughter, but which could bring no smile to her pensive face. She could not be interested in those dreary lawsuits, those endless disputations about sordid things. So at last she abandoned the effort, and fell back upon her own thoughts, which were sad enough sometimes.
As Lord Aspendell's daughter and as Laurence O'Boyneville's wife, Lady Cecil might have had enough of dinner-parties and evening-parties, kettledrums and déjeûners; but she had grown weary of all parties long before her marriage, and was glad to escape from the set in which she had lived, and to hide herself in the remote fastnesses of Bloomsbury.
"My husband has no time for going out," she said, when her old friends asked her to their houses.
"But you can come, Cecil, and Mr. O'Boyneville can look in during the evening."
Cecil shook her head.
"He is so tired after his day's work that it would be a cruelty to ask him to go out," she said.
"And you are going to lead this dull life always, Cecil?"
"I don't care for society. I was accustomed to a solitary life with poor papa, and it suits me better than any thing else."
But Cecil, looking back upon that old life, remembered with a sigh how dear a companion her father had been. There was nothing in heaven and earth that they had not talked of; no book read by one, and not by the other; no subject so barren that it had not served for pleasant discourse, when the shabby old curtains were drawn, and the lamp lighted in the drawing-room of that dear old tumble-down cottage on the Dyke Road. Cecil did not consider what it was that constituted the grand difference between her father and her husband. She had lived amongst poor people before her marriage, but she had never lived amongst hard-working people. It was very strange to her to have to do with a person who had no leisure for the refinements and amenities of life; who gave short answers, for lack of time to be deliberate and polite; who told her "not to bother," when she asked some womanly question about his health, or his fatigues, in the midst of professional meditations. A woman has acquired sublime patience when she can meekly endure to be bidden not to "bother" her husband, and still love on.
Never until her marriage had Cecil been familiar with the people who do the work of this world; and it was scarcely strange if her husband, in workday clothes and with his workday manners, seemed to her a being of a different race from that to which belonged the high-bred idlers she had been accustomed to encounter. She knew that he loved her; she knew that he was generous, and good, and true: but this knowledge was not enough. She knew that he was clever; but her lonely days were never brightened by any ray of his intellect, her desolate evenings were never enlivened by his wit. Was he her husband? Was he not rather wedded to that inexorable tyrant which he called his profession? He loved his wife, and was anxious to please her, but not if her pleasure involved the neglect of his professional duties. If Cecil knew that she was beloved, she knew also that Giddles and Giddles and the subtle niceties of the law were nearer and dearer to her husband than she could ever be. It was the name of Giddles, mingled with scraps of an address to the court and jury, that he muttered in his fitful sleep,—it was how to avail himself of the weak points in Clithery's defence, or Shavington's, or Jones and Smith's cases, that he pondered as he brooded by the domestic hearth.
"Why did he marry me?" she thought sometimes sadly; "I am of no use to him. I am no companion for him. A home for him is only a place in which he can eat and drink and sleep, and keep some of his law-books. If I speak to him at breakfast or dinner-time, I may disturb a train of thought by some idle word; and when he is asleep on the sofa, how is he the better off for my sitting on the opposite side of the fire yawning behind my book? The man who comes to him every evening with the red bag is more to him than I am, for the man and the bag belong to his profession."
It is not to be supposed that even so busy a man as Mr. O'Boyneville lived in entire exclusion from all social intercourse with his fellow-men. There were stately dinner-parties to which he conducted his elegant young wife, and on rare occasions he gave a stately dinner at home. And then, once more, Lady Cecil was called upon to give her mind to the menu of the feast; only in these latter days there were no harassing calculations of ways and means, no balancing of fricandeau against calves' head en tortue, no weighing of lobster-cutlets against eels à la tartare. All Mr. O'Boyneville's ideas were large and liberal. His household was well organised, his servants few and efficient, his cellar richly furnished; and if the comfortable kitchen-wenches of Bloomsbury are behind the chefs and cordons bleus of Belgravia, the Bloomsbury confectioner is like "Todgers's," and can do the thing handsomely when he pleases.
But when all was done those rare and solemn entertainments were very dreary to Cecil. She tried to be interested in her husband's friends; but the legal magnates with whom the great O'Boyneville chiefly associated were not interesting to his young wife; and the wives of the legal magnates seemed to have lost all the freshness and brightness of their youth under the all-pervading influence of such cases as Giddles and Giddles v. Clithery, and Shavington v. The Estremadura Soap-boiling Company (limited).
If Mr. O'Boyneville could have purchased his wife pleasure at any cost save that of his legal position, he would gladly have done so. He saw a pile of Cecil's music-books, heaped on a side-table in the bare, bleak drawing-rooms, and half an hour afterwards bade his clerk convey to Messrs. Broadwood his desire that one of the finest grand pianos that firm could supply, should be delivered without delay in Brunswick Square. Cecil felt a kind of rapture as she ran her fingers over the new keys, and heard the silvery tones of that perfect instrument; for the dowager's cottage, on which she had been wont to perform in Dorset Square, gave forth only feeble tinklings for its treble, and woolly confusion for its bass. After the pleasant surprise occasioned by the arrival of the splendid grand, after a happy day spent in desultory ramblings amongst old music-books, Cecil tripped lightly down to the hall when the banging of doors announced the arrival of her husband's hansom-cab, eager to bid him welcome.
She met him, and went with him into the dressing-room, where he was wont to make his brief toilet.
"I want to thank you a thousand, thousand times!" she said.
"Thank me, my dear! What for?" asked the barrister, washing his hands.
"The piano—the beautiful Broadwood!"
"What piano?"
The great O'Boyneville's mind was either with Giddles v. Clithery or the Spanish Soap-boiling Company. Cecil sighed. It seemed as if half the value of the gift was taken away by the indifference of the giver.
"I thank you very, very much," she said presently, but all the girlish animation had gone from her manner. "There is nothing in the world you could have given me so welcome as that delightful piano."
"I'm very glad you like it, dear; I told them to send you a good one. I caught sight of your music-books on the table in the drawing-room through the open door as I came down to breakfast yesterday morning, and I remembered that music-books couldn't be of any use to you without a piano."
After this Cecil tried to make herself happy in her husband's house. She tried to reconcile herself to his long absences, his gloomy preoccupation, his profound slumbers on the mammoth sofa. She tried to be in all things a good and dutiful wife, and to lead her own life peacefully and happily, thanking Providence for having given her so kind a protector, so honest a friend, in the person of the husband who could never be her companion. She arranged her favourite books in a little old-fashioned bookcase in the back drawing-room; she decorated the two gaunt rooms with birds and flowers, and scattered pretty inexpensive nicknacks on the ponderous rosewood tables. Whatever elegance can be imparted to two great dreary apartments, furnished by general order on an upholsterer with all that is most solid in carved rosewood, and all that is most darksome in green damask, Lady Cecil imparted to the Bloomsbury drawing-rooms. But when all was done they were too large for her loneliness, and the days and nights seemed very long in them. She had piles of new books from a mighty emporium in the neighbourhood, and she read herself almost blind sometimes before the day was done. She had a neat little brougham in which to pay visits or drive in the park, but she did not care to retain fashionable acquaintances whose ways were no longer her ways. The delights for which she pined were not the frivolous joys of Belgravian drawing-rooms, nor the glare and glitter of Tyburnian festivals. When her fancies wandered away from the Bloomsbury realities into the world of visions, they carried her to fair cities in distant lands, to sombre German forests and snow-clad Swiss mountains, towering upward in an atmosphere whose breath is like the breath of a new life revivifying a worn-out body. She thought how peaceful, how very nearly happy, the quiet autumn days spent in Devonshire with her husband had seemed to her.
Mr. O'Boyneville was not a man to do things by halves, and when he divorced himself from business the separation was always a complete one. During the brief honeymoon he had been the most devoted and submissive of husbands, the tenderest of friends, the most sympathetic of companions; but once within a shilling cab-fare of the law-courts, the husband and the lover froze into the man of business, and Giddles v. Clithery, or Jones v. Robinson, or Smith against Brown and others, reigned paramount.
Mrs. MacClaverhouse honoured her niece by dining with her now and then, and was received with stately ceremony, and treated with all courteous attention by her nephew-in-law, for whom she seemed to entertain a profound esteem. The dowager was pleased to express her approval of Mr. O'Boyneville's wines, and her commendation of her niece's cook, "though she robs you, my dear, I have no doubt, up hill and down dale," said the experienced housekeeper; "those good cooks always do. And that husband of yours is such a generous creature, that I think he must have been created to be robbed. I do hope you keep some check upon the housekeeping, and go down to the kitchen at least once a-day. I know it requires moral courage to do it, just at first; but a woman who has no moral courage is not fit to have a house of her own, or to live in lodgings either; for, long as my experience has been, I'm not able to say whether a cook's or a landlady's audacity goes furthest in such matters as lard and gravy-beef, while the amount of port and sherry such women will make away with, under pretence of hare-soup and cabinet-puddings, is something awful."
But though the dowager had every reason to be satisfied with her reception whenever she visited Brunswick Square, she did not care to go there often, for her lively spirit revolted against the dulness of Mr. O'Boyneville's mansion.
"I don't know how it is, Cecil," she exclaimed one day, "but from the first moment I entered your dining-room its effect upon me has been equally depressing. There's a something. I don't know whether it's the dark-brown curtains or that dreadful mahogany cellaret—and, oh, why do they make cellarets like sarcophaguses?—under that gigantic sideboard; but there is a something in your house that preys upon my spirits. Of course it needn't have that effect upon you, my dear, for you're accustomed to it, and habit always attaches one to things; but I'm a whimsical old woman, and this end of the town always did depress me; while if you take me up towards Islington, past all those cheap photographers and dusty little gardens, you take me to despair."
Miss Crawford was a frequent visitor at her old friend's house, though Cecil did not encourage her visits, as her coming very often involved the escort of Mr. Lobyer, who worried the birds stealthily while the two ladies were engaged in conversation, and who was generally accompanied by a diminutive terrier, or a fawn-coloured pug of unamiable disposition. Even when Florence Crawford came alone, her presence was not altogether welcome to Cecil. She was oppressively lively, and seemed to grow more and more volatile as the time appointed for her marriage with the young millionaire grew nearer. She talked of nothing but carriages and horses, Tyburnian mansions, and county splendours; and she was never weary of upbraiding Cecil upon the folly of her residence in Brunswick Square.
"If I were you I wouldn't allow my husband an hour's peace till he removed to the West-end," she said; "I hear he earns heaps of money, and it's really shameful of him to keep you here."
"My dear Florence, if I were to ask Mr. O'Boyneville to take a house at the West-end, I'm sure he would do so immediately."
"Then why in goodness' name don't you ask him?"
"Because he would be so ready to grant my request, and I don't wish to impose upon his kindness."
"Impose upon his fiddlesticks! Really, Cecil, you provoke me into being vulgar: and I wonder how it is, by-the-bye, that all great emotions have a tendency to make one vulgar. I shall lose all common patience if you insist upon talking like the good young woman in a novel. What did you marry Mr. O'Boyneville for unless it was for a handsome house and a fashionable carriage?"
"I married him because I loved him," Cecil answered gravely, "and because I hoped to make him a good wife."
Flo's piquant eyebrows elevated themselves to their utmost extent as her friend said this.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, "of course that alters the case: but you really are like the young woman in a novel, Cecil; and I could never quite bring myself to believe in that young woman."
And then the impulsive Florence pounced upon her friend, and embraced her with effusion, declaring that she loved her dearest Cecil to distraction, and that she would not for worlds say any thing to wound or distress her. "I'm such a mercenary wretch myself, dear," she said, "that I fancy every body must be made of the same contemptible stuff. The girls I meet are so like me, and all our ideas seem to run in the same groove. Do you know, Cecil, I sometimes think that if we are unbelieving and mercenary—if we worship nothing but the pomps and vanities of society—our wickedness is only the natural effect of the precepts instilled into the youthful mind by those dreadful grandmothers and maiden aunts of the old school, who were always preaching against all that is romantic and poetical, and whose dearest delight was to bray their children's brains in the stony mortar of common-sense."
Once, and once only, did Cecil venture to speak earnestly to Florence Crawford on the subject of her approaching marriage. All those vague allusions to the mercenary sentiments of modern damsels, which Miss Crawford was so fond of uttering, seemed to Cecil like so many excuses for her union with the rich young Manchester man. She had not the heart to ask direct questions, but she spoke very seriously—as she would have spoken to a sister.
"Remember the long, long life, dear," she said earnestly,—"the long years that are to come after the wedding-day. Women never could talk so lightly of marriage if they had any thought of the future. Think, Florence dear, it is a union that can only be broken by death—or shame and misery ten times worse than death. I can only repeat the stalest truisms; these things have been said a hundred times before to-day far better than I can say them; and yet day after day, year after year, there are wedding-favours worn, and wedding-bells rung, in honour of marriages that are only the beginning of life-long misery."
"Cecil," cried Flo impatiently, "if you talk like that I shall begin to think you repent having married Mr. O'Boyneville."
"No, no, dear, I don't repent; but I know now that I did not think seriously enough of the step I was taking."
Miss Crawford had been beating the point of her pretty little boot upon the floor, and twisting the fringe of her elegant parasol into all manner of knots and entanglements during Cecil's lecture. The piquant eyebrows were contracted into a frown, and the pretty grey eyes were filled with tears, and it was not easy to discover whether anger or sorrow were the stronger in the breast of Florence Crawford.
"I don't think I should have accepted Thomas," she said presently—and she had not yet brought herself to pronounce her lover's Christian name without making a wry face—"in fact, I'm sure I shouldn't have accepted him if I had known what being engaged would bring upon me. Every creature upon earth seems to make it his or her business to lecture me. People talk about hasty marriages and life-long misery just as if they had some occult power of knowing that Mr. Lobyer was predoomed to half murder me with a poker, like the men one reads of at the police-courts, within a week of our marriage. And yet what did I see before I was engaged? Every girl I knew eager to please the man I am going to marry, and every mother trying to beguile him into marrying her daughter. But now every thing is changed. People shake their heads when they talk of Mr. Lobyer, and my particular friends sigh and groan about my prospects as dismally as if I had set my heart upon marrying a chimney-sweep. If I was going to be sacrificed upon an altar to-morrow, like that young woman in Racine's tragedy, people couldn't go on about me worse than they do. Of course I don't pretend to say that I am romantically attached to Mr. Lobyer—first and foremost because I don't believe there are any romantic attachments in these days; and secondly, because if there are, I'm not at all the sort of person to be the subject of one."
And then, after a little pause, Miss Crawford would continue the discussion.
"I like him very well, I'm sure," she said rather thoughtfully, and somewhat as if she had not quite decided the question in her own mind, "and I don't care a straw for any one else; and I dare say I shall behave pretty well to him, though I fear it's not in my nature to behave too well to any one. So, on the whole, I really can't see that people have any right to lecture me about the unfortunate young man I'm going to marry."
After this tirade the impetuous Florence again embraced her friend, and declared herself for the twentieth time to be a frivolous mercenary creature, unworthy alike of love and friendship. But henceforward Cecil felt that it was useless to interfere with Miss Crawford's arrangements. If sorrow lay before the painter's daughter on the road that she was treading, she was too obstinately bent on going her own way to be drawn back by any friendly hand, let it hold her never so gently.
Mr. Lobyer dined in Brunswick Square one evening to meet his betrothed; on which occasion the barrister subjected him to rather a severe cross-examination. Cecil ventured next morning to ask her husband what he thought of her friend's suitor.
"It's rather fortunate for your friend and for the gentleman himself that he was born rich," answered Mr. O'Boyneville; "there are some men who seem created to distinguish themselves at the Old Bailey, and I'm afraid Mr. Lobyer is one of them. But as he is the owner of a million or two, it doesn't much matter. If he had been a poor man, he would have run through all the crimes in the statute-book; but as he has unlimited wealth, he can indulge himself by breaking four-fifths of the ten commandments without putting himself in the power of the law."