CHAPTER XVIII.
TOO LATE FOR REPENTANCE.
After considerable parley, and much supplication on the part of the devotee Mr. Lobyer, it had been arranged that Miss Crawford's marriage should take place on the last day of June; and for a period of six weeks prior to that date the painter found his home a place of confusion and his life a conflict.
Of course it was quite impossible that Florence should herself arrange and superintend the preparations necessary for her bridal. Matronly aid was here indispensable; and in order to give that aid efficiently, Mrs. Frederick Bushby, otherwise Aunt Jane, abandoned the care of her household to a useful maiden sister, and established herself en permanence at the Fountains. At her bidding came two estimable young persons in the dress-making line, and an estimable elderly person renowned for plain needlework; and the scrooping and snipping of these worthy people's scissors set William Crawford's teeth on edge whenever he passed the open door of the apartment in which their labours were carried on. At Mrs. Bushby's bidding came also, at all seasonable and unseasonable hours, gentlemanly-looking individuals carrying pasteboard-boxes, who were generally announced as "the young man from Regent Street," or "the young man from Wigmore Street," or a "young person with some lace from South-Audley Street, if you please," or "the white-satin boots from Oxford Street, Ma'am."
Poor William Crawford lifted his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders in utter despair when such announcements broke, time after time, upon the quiet of his meditative evening hours.
"Is there any social law which forbids a woman buying clothes after she is married?" asked the painter; "or how is it that a bride finds it necessary to stock her trunks with garments that might serve for a lifetime? Don't imagine I wince at the amount of the cheques, my dear. You may have as much money as you like, Flo; but all this business about white-satin boots and old point-lace seems such unnecessary frivolity."
Of course, on this Mrs. Bushby swooped down upon her brother-in-law, and annihilated him with feminine argumentation.
"When I was married, Madame Devy had carte blanche," said the matron, "though I was not an only daughter, and though I was going to marry a hard-working solicitor. Such a marriage as Florence is about to make is an event in society, and her trousseau will be a subject of conversation. The Wigmore-Street people have already asked permission to exhibit the cambric and Valenciennes peignoirs they are making for her; and the Oxford-Street people are going to introduce quite a new style for the Wellington boots we have ordered for riding."
William Crawford groaned aloud.
"And my daughter rides in Wellington boots!" he exclaimed. "Don't tell me any thing more about the trousseau if you please, Aunt Jane. Ask me to sign as many cheques as you like, but don't let me know the particulars. Isn't it Owen Meredith who says, 'There are some things hard to understand?' surely a young lady's corbeille de mariage is one of them."
Mrs. Bushby did not trouble herself to notice these ribald remarks. She regarded her distinguished brother-in-law with placid contempt. It is not alone my Lord Dundreary who sets down every man who differs from him as a lunatic. In Aunt Jane's opinion the royal academician was an eccentric creature, who made more money than one could suppose by painting scantily-draped young women, and who in the affairs of every-day life was little better than a fool. She suffered him to rail as he pleased against the frivolity of modern young ladies; and she revenged herself upon his cheque-book. The little people in Russell Square profited considerably by Miss Crawford's wedding; for Mrs. Bushby's calculations as to material for dresses that were to be made by the two estimable young persons were apt to err on the side of liberality; and if a few yards of silk or velvet were left, dear extravagant Flo was always the first to propose that the fabric should be converted into a frock for Fanny, or a pelisse for Lilly, or a tunic for Johnny, as the case might be.
And was the painter's daughter of so shallow and frivolous a nature as to find perfect happiness in days spent in milliners' show-rooms and before the counters of haberdashers? Was the society of Thomas Lobyer, who hung about the Fountains after his own loutish fashion at all hours of the day and evening, all-sufficient to satisfy the desires of her heart and mind? She seemed happy, for a young lady who laughs a great deal, and talks almost unceasingly, and pirouettes round the room on the points of her pretty little feet, with the smallest possible provocation, is generally supposed to enjoy a plethora of happiness. But that very close observer—who, like the typical policeman, is never in the way when he is wanted—might have perceived a shade of fever and hurry in Miss Crawford's gaiety which rarely goes along with unalloyed content. Perfect happiness is apt to be very quiet. There is a solemn hush, a delicious repose in real joy, a delight too deep for words: and such delight had no place in the heart of Florence Crawford. She was pleased with her fine clothes; she was pleased with her jewels. She had more diamond hearts and crosses and crescents than she could count. She had an eagle newly alighted on a monster carbuncle, that looked like a block of translucent red-currant jelly. She had been satiated with suites of turquoise and opal, and had learned to discover a "feather" in a fifty-guinea emerald ring. She was pleased with the carriages which Mr. Lobyer showed her at the makers' in Long Acre, and the horses that had been selected at one of Tattersall's crack sales, for her especial benefit. She was pleased with her visits to the upholsterer who was making new furniture for her rooms at Pevenshall, and who submitted his designs for her approval with as deferential an air as if she had been affianced to a prince of the blood-royal. There are some follies to which womanhood on the sunny side of twenty is prone to stoop, and Miss Crawford was weak enough to be just a little intoxicated by the homage she received in the character of Thomas Lobyer's plighted wife and a little inclined to forget that the enjoyment of all the glories and grandeurs derived from Mr. Lobyer's wealth involved a life-long alliance with Mr. Lobyer himself. And if the modern Iphigenia is so base a creature as to immolate herself of her own free will before the hymeneal altar, she is rarely without some kind female relation to urge her to the fatal step, and to push her forward with relentless hand, should she shrink from the consummation of the sacrifice. Aunt Jane lost no opportunity of vaunting her niece's good fortune, or of praising Mr. Lobyer—who, for his part, was barely civil to the obliging matron, and was apt to lapse into a state of despondent sulkiness when he found her in constant attendance upon her niece.
No, for the modern Iphigenia there is no such thing as turning back. The days hurried by the plighted bride with relentless haste. The obsequious upholsterer bade his men work night and day, in order that the Pevenshall splendour should be completed in due time. The coachmaker of Hatton Garden would have immolated himself on the floor of his workshop rather than have disappointed such a customer as Mr. Lobyer. The inestimable young women worked as if for a wager. The French milliner who made Miss Crawford's gala-dresses declared that she had broken faith with duchesses in order to keep her promises to the future Mrs. Lobyer. Flo tried to count the days that yet remained of her unfettered girlhood, but they seemed to slip away from her with a rapidity that defied all powers of calculation. Aunt Jane grew busier and busier as the days grew fewer; and the servants' bell at the Fountains had little rest from the hands of tradesmen's boys. Flo's pretty bed-chamber was transformed into a chaos of parcels and bonnet-boxes, trunks and packing-cases. Glittering caskets of perfumery, mother-of-pearl glove-boxes, and enamelled handkerchief-boxes, wonderful boudoir inkstands in lapis-lazuli and ormolu, embroidered sachets, and perfumed pincushions,—all the feminine delights of M. Rimmel's emporium,—were scattered upon dressing-tables and writing-tables, waiting to be packed. Every day the industrious females at work in the spare bed-room brought some newly-finished garment to swell the heap of silk and moire, muslin and cashmere, that was piled upon the sofa. Flo contemplated all these treasures with a bewildered face sometimes when she was quite alone; and there was some shadow of sadness in the bewilderment of her countenance.
"I wonder whether I am much better or wiser than the savages who are so fond of beads and feathers," she thought.
The modern Iphigenia has very little time for reflection. Poor Flo's life was a perpetual fever during those last days which were so difficult to count. Aunt Jane was never weary of discussing the bridal grandeurs, the bridesmaids' toilettes, the breakfast, the continental tour, the arrangements at Pevenshall. The only person whose equable spirits seemed entirely undisturbed by the excitement of this period was the bridegroom himself, who took matters as coolly as if he had gone through the same important crisis twenty times before, and had become thoroughly blasé as to the emotions involved therein. He paid daily visits to the Fountains with laudable devotion, and he conversed with his future wife as much as it was in him to converse with any one, which was not very much; but he still clung fondly to the companionship of miniature bull-terriers and fawn-coloured pugs, and might be seen seated in the brougham that was too small for him, taking his airing in the park with a fawn-coloured pug on his knee.
The time came very speedily when Flo found it easier to count the remaining hours of her unfettered girlhood than it had been to count the days. On the last day Mrs. Bushby went back to Russell Square to see to the finishing touches of her two elder girls' toilette, and to secure the Bloomsbury hair-dresser for the arrangement of their tresses on the all-important morning. These juvenile cousins were to swell the train of Miss Crawford's bridesmaids, and were to exhibit themselves in marvellous costumes of pale-blue glacé silk and tulle.
But if Aunt Jane had deserted her post upon this last day, she was not the person to leave disorder or confusion behind her. Every arrangement had been completed before the matron's departure. The formidable deed of settlement, which secured Miss Crawford a yearly income that might have satisfied a countess's requirements as to pin-money, had been executed with all due ceremony. The handsome trunks for the continental tour, the gigantic packing-cases that were to be sent straight to Pevenshall, were labelled, and Florence looked with a vague sense of confusion at the addresses in which she was entitled "Mrs. Lobyer." The smallest details had been carefully supervised by the indefatigable matron before she departed to spend a busy day in the bosom of her own house-hold.
"I am going away quite easy in my mind, dear," said Aunt Jane, when Florence escorted her to the porch; "for I don't think there has been an iota forgotten. You will see me again at nine o'clock to-morrow morning, with the children. And now, my love, be sure you take plenty of rest, for I want you to look your best and brightest to-morrow."
There was nothing left to be done,—no more shopping, no more solemn interviews with the French milliner, no more excitement of any kind whatever, but a dead, sullen calm. No sooner had Aunt Jane's hired brougham driven away from the gates of the Fountains, than Florence Crawford's spirits sank as suddenly as the wind drops sometimes on a sultry summer's day. She went up stairs to her room, and on her way thither had occasion to pass those boxes whose primly-written labels had become obnoxious to her.
"It is such an ugly name," she thought; "nobody could like to be called Mrs. Lobyer."
In the bed-room Miss Crawford found the new maid who had been engaged to attend her in her altered estate; and if, in such moments of unreasonable depression, one individual can be more antipathetic than another, that individual is a new maid. The young person was busying herself with the arrangements of the dressing-table, and Florence fled from her as from a pestilence; but not before she had caught a glimpse of the wedding-dress laid out on the sofa like a shroud, and looking almost as ghastly in its spotless whiteness.
"She'd want to talk to me if I stayed," thought Flo, as she hurried from her abigail's presence; "and I should have to hear all about her last place, and her anxiety to please me and understand my ways, and so on: as if I had any particular ways, except always losing my things and leaving my keys about."
Miss Crawford wandered into the drawing-room, and thence into an apartment which served as a library. The windows were all open, the birds were singing in the conservatory-passage that led to the painter's sacred chamber, the warm June sunlight shone upon dazzling flower-beds, and sparkled amid the waters of those marble basins which gave a name to William Crawford's abode. All things were looking their gayest and brightest; but poor Flo's heart sank amid this summer radiance. She closed the venetian-shutters, and seated herself in the darkest corner of the shadowy room.
She was quite alone. Mr. Lobyer had pleaded some especially important engagement of a business character as an excuse for his absence on this day, and Flo had told her father's servant that she would be at home to no one. She had the long summer hours to herself, and her aunt had entreated her to rest. If repose consists in sitting motionless in an easy-chair, with fixed eyes and idle hands, Flo certainly obeyed Mrs. Bushby's injunction; for the little clock on the chimneypiece recorded the passage of more than one hour while the bride-elect sat in the same attitude, with sad eyes fixed on one spot in the carpet, and listless hands loosely intertwined in her lap.
She aroused herself at length from this melancholy meditation; but she sighed more heavily than a millionaire's bride-elect has any right to sigh as she lifted her head and looked dreamily round the room.
"I don't know what is the matter with me to-day," she thought. "I seem to have grown sick of my life all at once; and if I am ever so tired, I must go on living just the same. It is not every body who can die at a moment's notice, like Shelley's Ginevra."
Miss Crawford sighed heavily for the second time, and turned to the book-shelves near her with an impatient gesture.
"I don't suppose there is a creature in this world whose life will bear thinking about," she said. "What is it that dreadful person in the play says? 'These deeds must not be thought after these ways; so, it will make us mad!' I'm sure my life has been all hurry and excitement ever since I left school—one perpetual contest with other girls, as to which of us should wear the best dresses, and know the nicest people, and go to most parties. I sometimes think things might have happened differently if I had had time to think and had been less influenced by other girls."
She took a book from one of the shelves haphazard; but there is a Nemesis who governs and pervades the trifles of every-day life. The book on which Miss Crawford's careless hand happened to fall was a volume of the Waverley novels, containing The Bride of Lammermoor; and in the mind of a young lady who is about to make a mercenary marriage that sad story is likely to awaken painful ideas. Poor old George III. had a fancy to read Shakespeare's Lear at that time when he, like the legendary monarch, was old and distraught; and his physicians ordered that the pitiful tragedy should be kept from his hands; but the king was wiser than his medical attendants, and knew where to find the play in spite of them. He asked for Colman's Dramatic Works, which his unsuspecting servants willingly gave him, and amongst which he knew there was the modern playwright's adaptation of the grand old play. He read the tragedy, and was found by his daughters weeping. "I am like poor Lear," he said piteously; "but I have no Goneril and Regan—only two Cordelias." One can fancy the scene a touching one, and the king's daughters melted into tears that were not entirely bitter as they bent over the sorrowful old man, amidst whose madness there was so much wisdom.
Flo turned the leaves of Sir Walter's masterpiece listlessly at first; but who can read half-a-dozen pages of that wondrous story and not be interested? The sweet romance was very familiar to her; but she read on, charmed anew by the sad tender record of an "o'er true tale." She read on till her tears fell fast, and a vague sense of her own disquietudes seemed strangely blended with the sorrows of Lucy Ashton. She sat reading till her father's step on the tiled floor of the conservatory startled her from her abstraction.
"Are you all alone, my darling?" asked the painter tenderly, as his daughter laid aside her book, and rose to greet him.
"Yes, papa; I have been alone all day."
"But where is Aunt Jane?"
"She has gone to the Square to see to the children's dresses for to-morrow," answered Flo with a sigh.
The thought of that bridal finery carried her back from Lucy Ashton's omen-haunted courtship to all the frivolous splendours of her own wedding.
"Why didn't you come to me, dear?" asked the painter: "I should have liked to have had you with me on this last day."
"I thought you were working hard, papa, and I didn't like to interrupt you. And—and—I felt rather melancholy to-day. This house seems such a dear old place now I'm going to leave it: and I love you so dearly, papa, though I have never given you any proof of my love."
She clung to him as she spoke, and hid her face upon his breast. There were a few tears upon the collar of Mr. Crawford's coat when Flo lifted her head and slipped her hand through his arm, to lead him towards the dining-room.
"Tell me that I have not been a very wicked daughter, papa," said Flo pleadingly. "I'm sure I feel as if I were Goneril and Regan and those two dreadful sisters in Balzac's Père Goriot all in one."
"My pet, you have been a charming daughter," answered the painter, smiling.
"Yes, papa, but not a good one."
"As good as you have been charming, my darling, though just a little bewildering sometimes in the way of slang phrases and Wellington boots. There, there, let me see my own bright Flo again. I suppose it's only natural that this last day should make you a little melancholy; but a lady of fashion ought not to be melancholy, even on the last day of her girlhood. I have always had a vague idea that nobody ever cried on the Piccadilly side of Oxford-Street. Of course people must die everywhere, and there are grand funerals, and hatchments on house-fronts, and court-mourning at the West-end; but I did not think fashionable people were ever sorry. They seem to me like actors and pantomimists, obliged to put private griefs aside in order to comply with the exigencies of public life. Come, darling, we are to dine tête-à-tête to-day. You must imagine yourself a woman of fashion, who has taken a fancy for entertaining a popular painter."
"I had rather be your loving daughter, papa, and forget all about fashion," Flo answered sadly.
All the feverish gaiety of the last few weeks had departed, leaving a very real sadness in its place. But Miss Crawford was not the sort of person to abandon herself weakly to any morbid feelings. She saw her father's eyes fixed upon her in earnest watchfulness, and shook off her despondency with one of those heroic efforts of which even frivolous women are capable. She talked gaily all through the cosy little tête-à-tête dinner, which the painter found very agreeable after that surfeit of Aunt Jane's society, from which he had suffered of late. Throughout that pleasant dinner there was a tacit avoidance of all allusion to the grand event so near at hand. Flo talked of any thing and every thing except Mr. Lobyer and the future.
"Papa," she cried suddenly, as they sat listlessly trifling with some strawberries after the table had been cleared, "let us spend the evening in your painting-room. I know it is your pet retreat, and I want to be a dutiful daughter for once in my life."
She crept behind the painter's chair, encircled his head with her arms, and kissed him on the forehead. So had his young wife stolen behind him sometimes, to administer consolation, during those dreary days in Buckingham Street, when he had seated himself before his easel to stare blankly at his hopeless work, prostrate in body and mind. His daughter's touch recalled those departed days with all their mournful associations. He took one of the little caressing hands, and pressed it gently to his lips.
"My darling," he said very softly, "you remind me of your mother."
It was the first time he had ever said this in all his intercourse with his daughter.
They went together to the painting-room, and sat in the great bay-window, through which the soft evening air crept towards them, like a soothing influence. The painter sat in his favourite easy-chair, looking dreamily towards the western sunlight, warm and golden behind a foreground of sombre green. Flo brought a low ottoman to her father's feet and seated herself upon it, with her folded arms resting on his knee, and her head drooping a little upon those round white arms. Not very far away from them, rapid broughams were hurrying to and fro in the shadowy park, bearing airily-attired beauty to the elegant solemnity of patrician dinner-tables, but in the painter's garden the faint sighing of summer winds among the leaves and the twitter of one belated bird alone broke the stillness.
Within the twilit painting-room neither William Crawford nor his daughter seemed inclined to break the spell of that summer silence. Amid the brightest and happiest surroundings there is always some touch of melancholy in the atmosphere of a summer evening, and to-night Florence Crawford was not especially happy.
"Papa," she said at last, after they had both abandoned themselves for some time to a thoughtful silence, "if I were going to live with you two more years, I think I should be a very different kind of daughter from the creature I have been."
She laid a contemptuous emphasis on the word creature, as in the extremity of self-humiliation.
"But why, why, darling?"
She did not reply to his question, but went on with her self-upbraiding.
"I would never call a picture of yours 'jolly' again. Had Rubens any daughters, I wonder?—surely with two or three wives he could scarcely escape daughters; and were they hateful, pert creatures like me, and did they call that wonderful picture he painted for the Arquebusiers 'jolly,' if there was any Flemish equivalent for that horrid word? I know how horrible it is now, since"—"since I've heard Mr. Lobyer use it," Miss Crawford had been about to say; but she pulled herself up suddenly, and continued, "since I've heard it worn threadbare by all kinds of people. Oh, papa," she cried with sudden enthusiasm, "I know what a great man you are, and how proud I ought to be of being able to call myself your daughter! I do know that, though I seem so vain and frivolous: and I know that your 'Aspasia' is the greatest picture that ever was painted—'bar none,' as Mr. Lobyer would say."
The little bit of slang escaped poor Flo's lips in the midst of her sentiment; but the painter was too deeply moved to be cognizant of the vile phrase which concluded his daughter's exordium. He took her up in his arms and kissed her tenderly.
"My dearest girl," he said, with an assumed gaiety, "we do not expect to find the wisdom of all the sages under these crinkled golden locks; and if you have called my pictures 'jolly,' I am sure the epithet is infinitely more civil than many my critics have applied to them. Besides, you are to be as much my daughter in the future as you have been in the past, and I shall expect Mrs. Lobyer to be as deeply interested in my work as Miss Crawford has been. And now, dear, come into the drawing-room and sing to me. We must not prove ourselves unworthy of the blessing of Aunt Jane's absence by lapsing into melancholy."
Upon this Florence embraced her father, and protested vehemently that he was the best and dearest of created beings. And then before he had time to recover himself, she buried her face in his breast, and sobbed aloud.
"Papa, tell me that you don't think me a wicked mercenary creature," she cried; "pray, pray tell me that you don't think I'm that."
Who shall find words wherewith to set down the glory of that ceremonial which was performed on the following day at a fashionable temple? a temple the priests of which were broadly accused of Puseyite tendencies, and on whose communion-table there glittered brazen candlesticks. All the nursemaids of the neighbourhood dragged their charges to behold the splendour of Miss Crawford's bridal train; and the fashionable reporters were more than usually grandiloquent in their descriptions of the wedding.
Nevertheless it was very much like other weddings, except in the one grand fact that the bride shed no tears.
"I didn't cry, you see, papa," she said, when she found herself for a few moments alone with her father after the ceremony. "I feel myself quite a woman of fashion."
The brilliant Florence did not inform her father that she had been crying all through the previous night, and that copious applications of cold water and eau-de-Cologne had alone prevented her appearing at the fashionable altar with swollen red circles surrounding her pretty grey eyes.
The express-train that bore Mr. Lobyer and his bride to Dover on the first stage of their continental tour rushed past many a pleasant rustic dwelling, nestling deep amid summer verdure: and, looking down at humble homesteads and cottage-gardens, warmly tinted by the westering sun, the millionaire's wife thought sadly:
"I wonder whether the people who live in cottages marry for love?"