Love and Life: An Old Story in Eighteenth Century Costume
could reach it; but his greeting and inquiry were cut short by the young
man’s breathless question: “Is she here?”
“Who?”
“My wife--my love. Your daughter, sweet Aurelia! Ah! it was my one
hope.”
“Come in, come in, sir,” entreated Betty, seeing how fearfully pale he
grew. “What has befallen you, and where is my sister?”
“Would that I knew! I trusted to have found her here; but now, sir, you
will come with me and find her!”
“I do not understand you, sir,” said the Major severely, “nor how you
are concerned in the matter. My daughter is the wife of your uncle, Mr.
Belamour, and if, as I fear, you bear the marks of a duel in consequence
of any levity towards her, I shall not find it easy to forgive.”
“On my word and honour it is no such thing,” said the youth, raising a
face full of frank innocence: “Your daughter is my wife, my most dear
and precious wife, with full consent and knowledge of my uncle. I was
married to her in his clothes, in the darkened room, our names being the
same!”
“Was this your promise?” Betty exclaimed.
“Miss Delavie, to the best of my ability I have kept my promise. Your
sister has never seen me, nor to her knowledge spoken with me.”
“These are riddles, young man,” said the Major sternly. “If all be not
well with my innocent child, I shall know how to demand an account.”
“Sir,” said the youth: “I swear to you that she is the same innocent
maiden as when she left you. Oh!” he added with a gesture of earnest
entreaty, “blame me as you will, only trace her.”
“Sit down, and let us hear,” said Betty kindly, pushing a chair towards
him and pouring out a glass of wine. He sank into the first, but waved
aside the second, becoming however so pale that the Major sprang to hold
the wine to his lips saying: “Drink, boy, I say!”
“Not unless you forgive me,” he replied in a hoarse, exhausted voice.
“Forgive! Of course, I forgive, if you have done no wrong by my child. I
see, I see, ‘tis not wilfully. You have been hurt in her defence.”
“Not exactly,” he said: “I have much to tell,” but the words came
slowly, and there was a dazed weariness about his eye that made Betty
say, in spite of her anxiety--“You cannot till you have eaten and
rested. If only one word to say where she is!”
“Oh! that I could! My hope was to find her here,” and he was choked by a
great strangling sob, which his youthful manhood sought to restrain.
Betty perceived that he was far from being recovered from the injury
he had suffered, and did her best to restrain her own and her father’s
anxiety till she had persuaded him to swallow some of the excellent
coffee which Nannerl always made at sight of a guest. To her father’s
questions meantime, he had answered that he had broken his arm ten days
ago, but he could not wait, he had posted down as soon as he could move.
“You ought to sleep before you tell us farther,” said the Major,
speaking from a strong sense of the duties of a host; but he was
relieved when the youth answered, “You are very good, sir, but I could
not sleep till you know all.”
“Speak, then,” said the Major, “I cannot look at your honest young
countenance and think you guilty of more than disobedient folly; but I
fear it may have cost my poor child very dear! Is it your mother that
you dread?”
“I would be thankful even to know her in my mother’s keeping!” he said.
“Is there no mistake?” said the Major; “my daughter, Mrs. Arden, saw her
at Brentford, safe and blooming.”
“Oh, that was before--before--” said Sir Amyas, “the day before she fled
from my mother at Bowstead, and has been seen no more.”
He put his hand over his face, and bowed it on the table in such
overpowering grief as checked the exclamations of horror and dismay and
the wrathful demands that were rising to the lips of his auditors,
and they only looked at one another in speechless sorrow. Presently
he recovered enough to say, “Have patience with me, and I will try
to explain all. My cousin, Miss Delavie, knows that I loved her sweet
sister from the moment I saw her, and that I hurried to London in the
hope of meeting her at my mother’s house. On the contrary, my mother,
finding it vain to deny all knowledge of her, led me to believe that she
was boarded at a young ladies’ school with my little sisters. I lived
on the vain hope of the holidays, and meantime every effort was made to
drive me into a marriage which my very soul abhorred, the contract
being absolutely made by the two ladies, the mothers, without my
participation, nay, against my protest. I was to be cajoled or else
persecuted into it--sold, in fact, that my mother’s debts might be paid
before her husband’s return! I knew my Uncle Belamour was my sole true
personal guardian, though he had never acted further than by affixing
his signature when needed. I ought to have gone long before to see him,
but as I now understand, obstacles had been purposely placed in my way,
while my neglectful reluctance was encouraged. It was in the forlorn
hope of finding in him a resource that took me to Bowstead at last, and
then it was that I learnt how far my mother could carry deception. There
I found my sisters, and learnt that my own sweetest life had been placed
there likewise. She was that afternoon visiting some old ladies, but my
uncle represented that my meeting her could only cause her trouble
and lead to her being removed. I was forced then to yield, having an
engagement in London that it would have been fatal to break, but I came
again at dark, and having sworn me to silence, he was forced to let
me take advantage of the darkness of his chamber to listen to her
enchanting voice. He promised to help me, as far as he had the power,
in resisting the hateful Aresfield engagement, and he obtained the
assistance of an old friend in making himself acquainted with the terms
of his guardianship, and likewise of a letter my father had left for
him. He has given me leave to show a part of it to you, sir,” he added,
“you will see that my father expressed a strong opinion that you were
wronged in the matter of the estates, and declared that he had hoped to
make some compensation by a contract between one of your daughters and
my brother who died. He charged my uncle if possible to endeavour to
bring about such a match between one of your children and myself. Thus,
you see, I was acting in the strictest obedience. You shall see the
letter at once, if I may bid my fellow Gray bring my pocket-book from my
valise.”
“I doubt not of your words, my young friend; your father was a gentleman
of a high and scrupulous honour. But why all this hide-and-seek work?--I
hate holes and corners!”
“You will see how we were driven, sir. My mother came in her turn to
see my uncle, and obtain his sanction to her cherished plan, and when he
absolutely refused, on account of Lady Aresfield’s notorious character,
if for no other, she made him understand that nothing would be easier
than to get him declared a lunatic and thus to dispense with his
consent. Then, finding how the sweet society of your dear daughter had
restored him to new life and spirit, she devised the notable expedient
of removing what she suspected to be the chief cause of my contumacy,
by marrying the poor child to him. He scouted the idea as a preposterous
and cruel sacrifice, but it presently appeared that Colonel Mar
was ready to find her a debauched old lieutenant who would gladly
marry--what do I say?--it profanes the word--but accept the young lady
for a couple of hundred pounds. Then did I implore my uncle to seem to
yield, and permit me to personate him at the ceremony. Our names being
the same, and all being done in private and in the dark, the whole
was quite possible, and it seemed the only means of saving her from a
terrible fate.”
“He might--or you might, have remembered that she had a father!” said
the Major.
“True. But you were at a distance, and my mother’s displeasure against
you was to be deprecated.”
“I had rather she had been offended fifty times than have had such
practices with my poor little girl!” said Major Delavie. “No wonder the
proposals struck me as strange and ambiguous. Whose writing was it?”
“Mine, at his dictation,” said the youth. “He was unwilling, but
my importunity was backed by my mother’s threats, conveyed through
Hargrave, that unless Aurelia became his wife she should be disposed of
otherwise, and that his sanity might be inquired into. Hargrave, who
is much attached to my uncle, and is in great awe of my Lady, was
thoroughly frightened, and implored him to secure himself and the young
lady by consenting, thinking, too, that anything that would rouse him
would be beneficial.”
“It is strange!” mused the Major. “A clear-headed punctilious man
like your uncle, to lend himself to a false marriage! His ten years of
melancholy must have changed him greatly!”
“Less than you suppose, sir; but you will remember that my mother is
esteemed as a terrible power by all concerned with her. Even when she
seemed to love me tenderly, I was made to know what it was to cross her
will, and alas! she always carries her point.”
“It did seem a mode of protection,” said Betty, more kindly.
“And” added the youth, “my uncle impressed on me from the first that
he only consented on condition the I treated this wedlock as betrothal
alone, never met my sweet love save in his dark room, and never revealed
myself to her. He said it was a mere expedient for guarding her until
I shall come of age, or Mr. Wayland comes home, when I shall woo her
openly, and if needful, repeat the ceremony with her full knowledge.
Meanwhile I wrote the whole to my stepfather, and am amazed that he has
never written nor come home.”
“That is the only rational thing I have heard,” said the Major.
“Though--did your uncle expect your young blood to keep the terms?”
“Indeed, sir, I was frightened enough the first evening that I ventured
on any advances, for they startled her enough to make her swoon away.
I carried her from her room, and my uncle dragged me back before the
colour came back to that lovely face so that the women might come to
her. That was the only time I ever saw her save through the chinks of
the shutters. Judge of the distraction I lived in!”
Betty looked shocked, but her father chuckled a little, though he
maintained his tone of censure “And may I inquire how often these
distracting interviews took place?”
“Cruelly seldom for one to whom they were life itself! Mar is, as you
know, colonel of my corps, and my liberty has been restrained as much
as possible; I believe I have been oftener on guard and on court-martial
than any officer of my standing in the service; but about once in a
fortnight I could contrive to ride down to a little wayside inn where I
kept a fresh horse, also a livery coat and hat. I tied up my horse in
a barn on the borders of the park, and put on a black vizard, so as
to pass for my uncle’s negro in the dark. I could get admittance to my
uncle’s rooms unknown to any servant save faithful Jumbo--who has been
the sole depository of our secret. However, since my mother’s return
from Bath, where the compact with Lady Aresfield was fully determined,
the persecution has been fiercer. I may have aroused suspicion by
failing to act my part when she triumphantly announced my uncle’s
marriage to me, or else by my unabated resistance to the little
termagant who is to be forced on me. At any rate, I have been so
intolerably watched whenever I was not on duty, that my hours of
bliss became rarer than ever. Well, sir, my uncle charges me with
indiscretion, and says my ardour aroused unreasonable suspicions. He
was constantly anxious, and would baulk me in my happiest and most
tantalising moments by making some excuse for breaking up the evening,