"Ah, Laura! I see it all. It is the beau cousin. Tell me every thing. I already love you as a sister."
"You are very kind," said Miss Bell, smiling, "and--and it must be owned that it is a very sudden attachment."
"All attachments are so. It is electricity--spontaneity. It is instantaneous. I knew I should love you from the moment I saw you. Do you not feel it yourself?"
"Not yet," said Laura; "but I dare say I shall if I try."
"Call me by my name, then."
"But I don't know it," Laura cried out.
"My name is Blanche--isn't it a pretty name? Call me by it."
"Blanche--it is very pretty, indeed."
"And while mamma talks with that kind looking lady--what relation is she to you? She must have been pretty once, but is rather _passee_; she is not well _gantee_, but she has a pretty hand--and while mamma talks to her, come with me to my own room--my own, own room. It's a darling room, though that horrid creature, Captain Strong, did arrange it. Are you _eprise_ of him? He says you are, but I know better; it is the beau cousin. Yes--_il a de beaux yeux_. _Je n'aime pas les blonds ordinairement. Car je suis blonde moi--je suis Blanche et blonde_,"--and she looked at her face and made a _moue_ in the glass; and never stopped for Laura's answer to the questions which she had put.
Blanche was fair and like a sylph. She had fair hair, with green reflections in it. But she had dark eyebrows. She had long black eyelashes, which vailed beautiful brown eyes. She had such a slim waist, that it was a wonder to behold; and such slim little feet, that you would have thought the grass would hardly bend under them. Her lips were of the color of faint rosebuds, and her voice warbled limpidly over a set of the sweetest little pearly teeth ever seen. She showed them very often, for they were very pretty. She was very good-natured, and a smile not only showed her teeth wonderfully, but likewise exhibited two lovely little pink dimples, that nestled in either cheek.
She showed Laura her drawings, which the other thought charming. She played her some of her waltzes, with a rapid and brilliant finger, and Laura was still more charmed. And she then read her some poems, in French and English, likewise of her own composition, and which she kept locked in her own book--her own dear little book; it was bound in blue velvet with a gilt lock, and on it was printed the title of "Mes Larmes."
"Mes Larmes!--isn't it a pretty name?" the young lady continued, who was pleased with every thing that she did, and did every thing very well.
Laura owned that it was. She had never seen any thing like it before; any thing so lovely, so accomplished, so fragile and pretty; warbling so prettily, and tripping about such a pretty room, with such a number of pretty books, pictures, flowers, round about her. The honest and generous country girl forgot even jealousy in her admiration. "Indeed, Blanche," she said, "every thing in the room is pretty; and you are the prettiest of all." The other smiled, looked in the glass, went up and took both of Laura's hands, and kissed them, and sat down to the piano, and shook out a little song, as if she had been a nightingale.
This was the first visit paid by Fairoaks to Clavering Park, in return for Clavering Park's visit to Fairoaks, in reply to Fairoaks's cards left a few days after the arrival of Sir Francis's family. The intimacy between the young ladies sprang up like Jack's Bean-stalk to the skies in a single night. The large footmen were perpetually walking with little rose-colored-pink notes to Fairoaks; where there was a pretty housemaid in the kitchen, who might possibly tempt those gentlemen to so humble a place. Miss Amory sent music, or Miss Amory sent a new novel, or a picture from the "Journal des Modes," to Laura; or my lady's compliments arrived with flowers and fruit; or Miss Amory begged and prayed Miss Bell to come to dinner; and dear Mrs. Pendennis, if she was strong enough; and Mr. Arthur, if a humdrum party were not too stupid for him; and would send a pony-carriage for Mrs. Pendennis; and would take no denial.
Neither Arthur nor Laura wished to refuse. And Helen, who was, indeed, somewhat ailing, was glad that the two should have their pleasure; and would look at them fondly, as they set forth, and ask in her heart that she might not be called away until those two beings whom she loved best in the world should be joined together. As they went out and crossed over the bridge, she remembered summer evenings five-and-twenty years ago, when she, too, had bloomed in her brief prime of love and happiness. It was all over now. The moon was looking from the purpling sky, and the stars glittering there, just as they used in the early, well-remembered evenings. He was lying dead, far away, with the billows rolling between them. Good God! how well she remembered the last look of his face as they parted. It looked out at her through the vista of long years, as sad and as clear as then.
So Mr. Pen and Miss Laura found the society at Clavering Park an uncommonly agreeable resort of summer evenings. Blanche vowed that she _raffoled_ of Laura; and, very likely, Mr. Pen was pleased with Blanche.
His spirits came back; he laughed and rattled till Laura wondered to hear him. It was not the same Pen, yawning, in a shooting jacket, in the Fairoaks parlor, who appeared, alert and brisk, and smiling and well dressed, in Lady Clavering's drawing-room. Sometimes they had music.
Laura had a sweet contralto voice, and sang with Blanche, who had had the best continental instruction, and was charmed to be her friend's mistress. Sometimes Mr. Pen joined in these concerts, or oftener looked sweet upon Miss Blanche as she sang. Sometimes they had glees, when Captain Strong's chest was of vast service, and he boomed out in a prodigious bass, of which he was not a little proud.
"Good fellow, Strong--ain't he, Miss Bell?" Sir Francis would say to her. "Plays at _ecarte_ with Lady Clavering--plays any thing, pitch and toss, pianoforty, cwibbage, if you like. How long do you think he's been staying with me? He came for a week with a carpet bag, and, Gad, he's been staying here thwee years. Good fellow, ain't he? Don't know how he gets a shillin, though, begad I don't, Miss Laura."
And yet the chevalier, if he lost his money to Lady Clavering, always paid it; and if he lived with his friend for three years, paid for that too--in good humor, in kindness and joviality, in a thousand little services by which he made himself agreeable. What gentleman could want a better friend than a man who was always in spirits, never in the way or out of it, and was ready to execute any commission for his patron, whether it was to sing a song or meet a lawyer, to fight a duel or to carve a capon?
Although Laura and Pen commonly went to Clavering Park together, yet sometimes Mr. Pen took walks there unattended by her, and about which he did not tell her. He took to fishing the Brawl, which runs through the park, and passes not very far from the garden-wall. And by the oddest coincidence, Miss Amory would walk out (having been to look at her flowers), and would be quite surprised to see Mr. Pendennis fishing.
[Illustration]
I wonder what trout Pen caught while the young lady was looking on? or whether Miss Blanche was the pretty little fish which played round his fly, and which Mr. Pen was endeavoring to hook? It must be owned, he became very fond of that healthful and invigorating pursuit of angling, and was whipping the Brawl continually with his fly.
As for Miss Blanche, she had a kind heart; and having, as she owned, herself "suffered" a good deal in the course of her brief life and experience--why, she could compassionate other susceptible beings like Pen, who had suffered too. Her love for Laura and that dear Mrs.
Pendennis redoubled: if they were not at the Park, she was not easy unless she herself was at Fairoaks. She played with Laura; she read French and German with Laura; and Mr. Pen read French and German along with them. He turned sentimental ballads of Schiller and Gothe into English verse for the ladies, and Blanche unlocked "Mes Larmes" for him, and imparted to him some of the plaintive outpourings of her own tender muse.
It appeared from these poems that this young creature had indeed suffered prodigiously. She was familiar with the idea of suicide. Death she repeatedly longed for. A faded rose inspired her with such grief that you would have thought she must die in pain of it. It was a wonder how a young creature (who had had a snug home, or been at a comfortable boarding-school, and had no outward grief or hardship to complain of) should have suffered so much--should have found the means of getting at such an ocean of despair and passion (as a run-away boy who _will_ get to sea), and having embarked on it, should survive it. What a talent she must have had for weeping to be able to pour out so many of Mes Larmes!
They were not particularly briny, Miss Blanche's tears, that is the truth; but Pen, who read her verses, thought them very well for a lady--and wrote some verses himself for her. His were very violent and passionate, very hot, sweet, and strong: and he not only wrote verses; but--O, the villain! O, the deceiver! he altered and adapted former poems in his possession, and which had been composed for a certain Miss Emily Fotheringay, for the use and to the Christian name of Miss Blanche Amory.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A LITTLE INNOCENT.
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Every house has its skeleton in it somewhere, and it may be a comfort to some unhappy folks to think that the luckiest and most wealthy of their neighbors have their miseries and causes of disquiet. Our little innocent muse of a Blanche, who sang so nicely and talked so sweetly, you would have thought she must have made sunshine where-ever she went, was the skeleton, or the misery, or the bore, or the Nemesis of Clavering House, and of most of the inhabitants thereof. As one little stone in your own shoe or your horse's, suffices to put either to torture and to make your journey miserable, so in life a little obstacle is sufficient to obstruct your entire progress, and subject you to endless annoyance and disquiet. Who would have guessed that such a smiling little fairy as Blanche Amory could be the cause of discord in any family?
"I say, Strong," one day the baronet said, as the pair were conversing after dinner over the billiard-table, and that great unbosomer of secrets, a cigar; "I say, Strong, I wish to the doose your wife was dead."
"So do I. That's a cannon, by Jove. But she won't; she'll live forever--you see if she don't. Why do you wish her off the hooks, Frank, my boy?" asked Captain Strong.
"Because then, you might marry Missy. She ain't bad-looking. She'll have ten thousand, and that's a good bit of money for such a poor old devil as you," drawled out the other gentleman. "And gad, Strong, I hate her worse and worse every day. I can't stand her, Strong, by gad, I can't."
"I wouldn't take her at twice the figure," Captain Strong said, laughing. "I never saw such a little devil in my life."
"I should like to poison her," said the sententious baronet; "by Jove I should."
"Why, what has she been at now?" asked his friend.
"Nothing particular," answered Sir Francis; "only her old tricks. That girl has such a knack of making every body miserable that, hang me, it's quite surprising. Last night she sent the governess crying away from the dinner-table. Afterward, as I was passing Frank's room, I heard the poor little beggar howling in the dark, and found his sister had been frightening his soul out of his body, by telling him stories about the ghost that's in the house. At lunch she gave my lady a turn; and though my wife's a fool, she's a good soul--I'm hanged if she ain't."
"What did Missy do to her?" Strong asked.
"Why, hang me, if she didn't begin talking about the late Amory, my predecessor," the baronet said, with a grin. "She got some picture out of the Keepsake, and said she was sure it was like her dear father. She wanted to know where her father's grave was. Hang her father! Whenever Miss Amory talks about him, Lady Clavering always bursts out crying; and the little devil will talk about him in order to spite her mother.
To-day when she began, I got in a confounded rage, said I was her father, and--and that sort of thing, and then, sir, she took a shy at me."
"And what did she say about you, Frank?" Mr. Strong, still laughing, inquired of his friend and patron.
"Gad, she said I wasn't her father: that I wasn't fit to comprehend her; that her father must have been a man of genius, and fine feelings, and that sort of thing: whereas I had married her mother for money."
"Well, didn't you?" asked Strong.
"It don't make it any the pleasanter to hear because it's true, don't you know," Sir Francis Clavering answered. "I ain't a literary man and that; but I ain't such a fool as she makes me out. I don't know how it is, but she always manages to--to put me in the hole, don't you understand. She turns all the house round her in her quiet way, and with her confounded sentimental airs. I wish she was dead, Ned."
"It was my wife whom you wanted dead just now," Strong said, always in perfect good humor; upon which the baronet, with his accustomed candor, said, "Well, when people bore my life out, I _do_ wish they were dead, and I wish Missy were down a well, with all my heart."
Thus it will be seen from the above report of this candid conversation that our accomplished little friend had some peculiarities or defects of character which rendered her not very popular. She was a young lady of some genius, exquisite sympathies and considerable literary attainments, living, like many another genius, with relatives who could not comprehend her. Neither her mother nor her step-father were persons of a literary turn. Bell's life and the Racing Calendar were the extent of the baronet's reading, and Lady Clavering still wrote like a school girl of thirteen, and with an extraordinary disregard to grammar and spelling. And as Miss Amory felt very keenly that she was not appreciated, and that she lived with persons who were not her equals in intellect or conversational power, she lost no opportunity to acquaint her family circle with their inferiority to herself, and not only was a martyr, but took care to let every body know that she was so. If she suffered, as she said and thought she did, severely, are we to wonder that a young creature of such delicate sensibilities should shriek and cry out a good deal? Without sympathy life is nothing; and would it not have been a want of candor on her part to affect a cheerfulness which she did not feel, or pretend a respect for those toward whom it was quite impossible she should entertain any reverence?
If a poetess may not bemoan her lot, of what earthly use is her lyre?
Blanche struck hers only to the saddest of tunes; and sang elegies over her dead hopes, dirges over her early frost-nipt buds of affection, as became such a melancholy fate and muse.
Her actual distresses, as we have said, had not been, up to the present time, very considerable; but her griefs lay, like those of most of us, in her own soul--that being sad and habitually dissatisfied, what wonder that she should weep? So Mes Larmes dribbled out of her eyes any day at command: she could furnish an unlimited supply of tears, and her faculty of shedding them increased by practice. For sentiment is like another complaint mentioned by Horace, as increasing by self-indulgence (I am sorry to say, ladies, that the complaint in question is called the dropsy), and the more you cry, the more you will be able and desirous to do so.