A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day
“And have you been very ill? You look ill.”
“I am better now, dearest.”
“Dearest! Don't call me names. How dare you keep speaking to me when I
request you not?”
“But I can't excuse myself, and obtain my pardon, and recover your
love, unless I am allowed to speak.”
“Oh, you can speak to my aunt Molineux, and she will read you a fine
lesson.”
“Where is she?”
“Nobody knows. But there is her house, the one with the iron gate. Get
her ear first, if you really love me; and don't you ever waylay me
again. If you do, I shall say something rude to you, sir. Oh, I'm so
happy!”
Having let this out, she hid her face with her hands, and fled like the
very wind.
At dinner-time she was in high spirits.
The admiral congratulated her.
“Brava, Bell! Youth and health and a foreign air will soon cure you of
that folly.”
Bella blushed deeply, and said nothing. The truth struggled within her,
too, but she shrank from giving pain, and receiving expostulation.
She kept the house, though, for two days, partly out of modesty, partly
out of an honest and pious desire to obey her father as much as she
could.
The third day Mrs. Molineux arrived, and sent over to the admiral.
He invited Bella to come with him. She consented eagerly, but was so
long in dressing that he threatened to go without her. She implored him
not to do that; and after a monstrous delay, the motive of which the
reader may perhaps divine, father and daughter called on Mrs. Molineux.
She received them very affectionately. But when the admiral, with some
hesitation, began to enter on the great subject, she said, quietly,
“Bella, my dear, go for a walk, and come back to me in half an hour.”
“Aunt Molineux!” said Bella, extending both her hands imploringly to
that lady.
Mrs. Molineux was proof against this blandishment, and Bella had to go.
When she was gone, this lady, who both as wife and mother was literally
a model, rather astonished her brother the admiral. She said: “I am
sorry to tell you that you have conducted this matter with perfect
impropriety, both you and Bella. She had no business to show you that
anonymous letter; and when she did show it you, you should have taken
it from her, and told her not to believe a word of it.”
“And married my daughter to a libertine! Why, Charlotte, I am ashamed
of you.”
Mrs. Molineux colored high; but she kept her temper, and ignored the
interruption. “Then, if you decided to go into so indelicate a question
at all (and really you were not bound to do so on anonymous
information), why, then, you should have sent for Sir Charles, and
given him the letter, and put him on his honor to tell you the truth.
He would have told you the fact, instead of a garbled version; and the
fact is that before he knew Bella he had a connection, which he
prepared to dissolve, on terms very honorable to himself, as soon as he
engaged himself to your daughter. What is there in that? Why, it is
common, universal, among men of fashion. I am so vexed it ever came to
Bella's knowledge: really it is dreadful to me, as a mother, that such
a thing should have been discussed before that child. Complete
innocence means complete ignorance; and that is how all my girls went
to their husbands. However, what we must do now is to tell her Sir
Charles has satisfied me he was not to blame; and after that the
subject must never be recurred to. Sir Charles has promised me never to
mention it, and no more shall Bella. And now, my dear John, let me
congratulate you. Your daughter has a high-minded lover, who adores
her, with a fine estate: he has been crying to me, poor fellow, as men
will to a woman of my age; and if you have any respect for my
judgment--ask him to dinner.”
She added that it might be as well if, after dinner, he were to take a
little nap.
Admiral Bruce did not fall into these views without discussion. I spare
the reader the dialogue, since he yielded at last; only he stipulated
that his sister should do the dinner, and the subsequent siesta.
Bella returned looking very wistful and anxious.
“Come here, niece,” said Mrs. Molineux. “Kneel you at my knee. Now
look--me in the face. Sir Charles has loved you, and you only, from the
day he first saw you. He loves you now as much as ever. Do you love
him?”
“Oh, aunt! aunt!” A shower of kisses, and a tear or two.
“That is enough. Then dry your eyes, and dress your beautiful hair a
little better than _that;_ for he dines with me to-day!”
Who so bright and happy now as Bella Bruce?
The dreaded aunt did not stop there. She held that after the peep into
real life Bella Bruce had obtained, for want of a mother's vigilance,
she ought to be a wife as soon as possible. So she gave Sir Charles a
hint that Baden was a very good place to be married in; and from that
moment Sir Charles gave Bella and her father no rest till they
consented.
Little did Richard Bassett, in England, dream what was going on at
Baden. He now surveyed the chimneys of Huntercombe Hall with
resignation, and even with growing complacency, as chimneys that would
one day be his, since their owner would not be in a hurry to love
again. He shot Sir Charles's pheasants whenever they strayed into his
hedgerows, and he lived moderately and studied health. In a word,
content with the result of his anonymous letter, he confined himself
now to cannily out-living the wrongful heir--his cousin.
One fine frosty day the chimneys of Huntercombe began to show signs of
life; vertical columns of blue smoke rose in the air, one after
another, till at last there were about forty going.
Old servants flowed down from London. New ones trickled in, with their
boxes, from the country. Carriages were drawn out into the stable-yard,
horses exercised, and a whisper ran that Sir Charles was coming to live
on his estates, and not alone.
Richard Bassett went about inquiring cautiously.
The rumor spread and was confirmed by some little facts.
At last, one fine day, when the chimneys were all smoking, the
church-bells began to peal.
Richard Bassett heard, and went out, scowling deeply. He found the
village all agog with expectation.
Presently there was a loud cheer from the steeple, and a flag floated
from the top of Huntercombe House. Murmurs. Distant cheers. Approaching
cheers. The clatter of horses' feet. The roll of wheels. Huntercombe
gates flung wide open by a cluster of grooms and keepers.
Then on came two outriders, ushered by loud hurrahs, and followed by a
carriage and four that dashed through the village amid peals of delight
from the villagers. The carriage was open, and in it sat Sir Charles
and Bella Bassett. She was lovelier than ever; she dazzled the very air
with her beauty and her glorious hair. The hurrahs of the villagers
made her heart beat; she pressed Sir Charles's hand tenderly, and
literally shone with joy and pride; and so she swept past Richard
Bassett; she saw him directly, shuddered a moment, and half clung to
her husband; then on again, and passed through the open gates amid loud
cheers. She alighted in her own hall, and walked, nodding and smiling
sunnily, through two files of domestics and retainers; and thought no
more of Richard Bassett than some bright bird that has flown over a
rattlesnake and glanced down at him.
But a gorgeous bird cannot always be flying. A snake can sometimes
creep under her perch, and glare, and keep hissing, till she shudders
and droops and lays her plumage in the dust.
CHAPTER IX.
GENERALLY deliberate crimes are followed by some great punishment; but
they are also often attended in their course by briefer
chastisements--single strokes from the whip that holds the round dozen
in reserve. These precursors of the grand expiation are sharp but
kindly lashes, for they tend to whip the man out of the wrong road.
Such a stroke fell on Richard Bassett: he saw Bella Bruce sweep past
him, clinging to her husband, and shuddering at himself. For this,
then, he had plotted and intrigued and written an anonymous letter. The
only woman he had ever loved at all went past him with a look of
aversion, and was his enemy's wife, and would soon be the mother of
that enemy's children, and blot him forever out of the coveted
inheritance.
The man crept home, and sat by his little fireside, crushed. Indeed,
from that hour he disappeared, and drank his bitter cup alone.
After a while it transpired in the village that he was very ill. The
clergyman went to visit him, but was not admitted. The only person who
got to see him was his friend Wheeler, a small but sharp attorney, by
whose advice he acted in country matters. This Wheeler was very fond of
shooting, and could not get a crack at a pheasant except on Highmore;
and that was a bond between him and its proprietor. It was Wheeler who
had first told Bassett not to despair of possessing the estates, since
they had inserted Sir Charles's heir at law in the entail.
This Wheeler found him now so shrunk in body, so pale and haggard in
face, and dejected in mind, that he was really shocked, and asked leave
to send a doctor from a neighboring town.
“What to do?” said Richard, moodily. “It's my mind; it's not my body.
Ah, Wheeler, it is all over. I and mine shall never have Huntercombe
now.”
“I'll tell you what it is,” said Wheeler, almost angrily, “you will
have six feet by two of it before long if you go on this way. Was ever
such folly! to fret yourself out of this jolly world because you can't
get one particular slice of its upper crust. Why, one bit of land is as
good as another; and I'll show you how to get land--in this
neighborhood, too. Ay, right under Sir Charles's nose.”
“Show me that,” said Bassett, gloomily and incredulously.
“Leave off moping, then, and I will. I advise the bank, you know, and
'Splatchett's' farm is mortgaged up to the eyes. It is not the only
one. I go to the village inns, and pick up all the gossip I hear
there.”
“How am I to find money to buy land?”
“I'll put you up to that, too; but you must leave off moping. Hang it,
man, never say die. There are plenty of chances on the cards. Get your
color back, and marry a girl with money, and turn that into land. The
first thing is to leave off grizzling. Why, you are playing the enemy's
game. That can't be right, can it?”
This remark was the first that really roused the sick man.
Wheeler had too few clients to lose one. He now visited Bassett almost
daily, and, being himself full of schemes and inventions, he got
Bassett, by degrees, out of his lethargy, and he emerged into daylight
again; but he looked thin, and yellow as a guinea, and he had turned
miser. He kept but one servant, and fed her and himself at Sir Charles
Bassett's expense. He wired that gentleman's hares and rabbits in his
own hedges. He went out with his gun every sunny afternoon, and shot a
brace or two of pheasants, without disturbing the rest; for he took no
dog with him to run and yelp, but a little boy, who quietly tapped the
hedgerows and walked the sunny banks and shaws. They never came home
empty-handed.
But on those rarer occasions when Sir Charles and his friends beat the
Bassett woods Richard was sure to make a large bag; for he was a cool,
unerring shot, and flushed the birds in hedgerows, slips of underwood,
etc., to which the fairer sportsmen had driven them.
These birds and the surplus hares he always sold in the market-town,
and put the money into a box. The rabbits he ate, and also squirrels,
and, above all, young hedgehogs: a gypsy taught him how to cook them,
viz., by inclosing them in clay, and baking them in wood embers; then
the bristles adhere to the burned clay, and the meat is juicy. He was
his own gardener, and vegetables cost him next to nothing.