G. J. Whyte-Melville

“ Nature is a more impartial mother than we are prone to believe, and the rich man need not always be such an object of envy only because he is rich.
But pretty Blanche Kettering enjoyed the glitter and the excitement, and the pleasures of her London life, even as the opening flower enjoys the sunshine and the breeze. It requires a season or two to take the edge off a fresh, healthy appetite, and ennui scowls in vain upon the very young. Gingham thought her young lady had never looked so well as she did to-day, of all days in the year the one in which Blanche was to be presented. ”

“ No, that is no dragoon’s step: it is familiar, too, and yet he cannot remember where he has heard it. Is he dreaming? Over the doctor’s shoulder peers a well-known face, embrowned with travel, but with the old kind, frank expression beaming through those manly features. In another instant Charlie is clasping Frank Hardingstone’s strong hand in his own two emaciated ones, and after an abortive “How are ye, old fellow?” and a vain effort to laugh off his emotion, is sobbing once more like a woman or a child. ”

“ Blanche was a very pretty girl, certainly, even in a court dress, trying as is that costume to all save the dark, tall beauties, who do indeed look magnificent in trains and feathers; but then the Anglo-Saxon blonde has her revenge next morning in her simple déshabillé at breakfast—a period at which the black-eyed sultana is apt to betray a slight yellowness of skin, and a drowsy, listless air, not above half awake. Well, they are all very charming in all dresses—it’s lucky they are so unconscious of their own attractions. ”

“ An ample duchess is before her with a red-haired daughter, but everywhere around her there is room to breathe, and walk, and to be seen. Through an open door she catches a glimpse of the Presence and the stately circle before whom she must pass. Good-natured royalties, of both sexes, stand smiling and bowing, and striving to put frightened subjects at their ease, and carrying their kind hearts on their handsome open countenances; but they are all whirling round and round to Blanche, and she cannot tell uniforms from satin gowns, epaulettes from ostrich plumes, old from young. ”

“ Blanche, Blanche, you think yourself very unhappy; but little do you know the struggle going on in the bosom of that faithful friend with whom you are now so unjustly at variance. Little do you guess that she has torn the one only image, the fulfilment of the ideal of a lifetime, from her heart, and vowed to worship it no more; and prayed that the very thought which made the sunshine of her existence might pass away; and all for you. So it is in life: we make a sacrifice which costs us nothing; we give that which perhaps we are all well satisfied to get rid of ”

“ Not so with the sons of toil in town—there, all enjoyment is artificial, all pleasure must be paid for—the air they breathe will support life, but its odours are far different from those of the wild flower. If their eyes are ever gladdened by beauty, it is but the pomp and splendour of their fellow-creatures, on which they gaze with sneering admiration—half envy, half contempt. If their ears are ever ravished by music, there is a tempting demon wafting sin into their hearts upon the sounds—there is a mocking voice of ribaldry and vulgar revelry accompanying the very concord of heaven. ”

“ James’s Street, envying the privileged grandees with the entrée through St. James’s Park, our pretty heiress would fain have been back in her garden-bonnet, tying up her roses, and watching her carnations, and idling about in the deep shades of her leafy paradise. Not so the chaperon. She was full of the important occasion. It was her pleasure to present Miss Kettering, and her business to arrange how that maidenly patronymic should be merged in the title of Mount Helicon: for this she was herself prepared to lapse into a dowager. Who but a mother would be capable of such a sacrifice? ”

“ The mortal is engaged with a mortal enemy. Those waving robes turn to a leopard-skin kaross, the glorious figure to an athletic savage, and the immortal beauty to the grinning, chattering lineaments of a hideous Kaffir. Charlie bounds at him like a tiger—they fight—they close—and he is locked in the desperate embrace of life or death with his ghastly foe. Charlie is undermost! His enemy’s eyes are starting from their sockets—his white teeth glare with cannibal-like ferocity—and his hand is on the boy’s throat with a grip of iron. ”

“ But to-day, the General and Blanche are almost stupefied, and can think of nothing but Charlie—dear, dear, lost Charlie. The old man sits rocking to and fro, in violent paroxysms, frightful in one of his age—who would have thought he had so much feeling left in him?—and Blanche is exhausted with weeping, and lies with her face buried, and her long golden hair trailing over the sofa cushions, incapable of thought or exertion. ”

“ Why is it that we so sedulously strive to deceive ourselves about the lapse of time? Why do we so wilfully close our eyes to that certainty that every passing moment brings an instant nearer? It must come! Why will we not look the shape steadily in the face? We are not afraid to front our fellow-man in the struggle for life and death; why should we shrink from the shadowy foe, from whom there is no escape? Perhaps, like all other distant horrors, it will lose half its terrors when it does approach—perhaps it will turn out a friend after all. Man lives in the future ”

“ In the meantime, whilst the higher characters of our drama are fluttering their gaudy hour in the bright sunshine of fashionable life, whilst the General and Blanche and Mary, and Mount Helicon and D’Orville and Lacquers, and all of that class are driving and dining, and dressing and flirting, and otherwise improving their time, grim Want is eating into the very existence of some amongst our humbler friends, and Vice, too often the handmaid of Penury, is shedding her poison even on the scanty morsel they wrest from the very jaws of danger and detection. ”

“ That slender, graceful figure was lithe and wiry as the panther’s—those symmetrical limbs could toil, those little feet could walk and run, after a Hercules would have been blown and overpowered; and when standing up to his wicket, rousing a horse, or putting him at a fence, there was a game sparkle in his eye that, to use Frank Hardingstone’s expression, “meant mischief.” Some of these good-looking young gentlemen are “ugly customers” enough when their blood is up, and Cousin Charlie, like the rest, had quite as much “devil” in his composition as was good for him. ”

“ When the beggar-maiden sets her affections on King Cophetua, without a hope, in these days, of the famous fabulous mésalliance being perpetrated, the fact that it does not, in reality, remove him one iota farther than before from her humble self, helps but little to assuage the pang inflicted on her infatuated heart by his Majesty’s nuptials with one of his own degree. The impossible may be increased in love, if not in logic, and Mary was lying awake and desponding, long after Blanche had forgotten all the excitement and changes of the evening in happy, dreamless slumbers. ”

“ But “fight who will and die who may,” the outward world goes on much the same notwithstanding. The clock goes round, and dinner-time arrives; and whatever may be the sorrow brooded over and locked up in the inner life, we dress for dinner when the time comes, and look in the glass and dry our eyes, and have a glass of sherry after our soup; and the tyrant Custom, and the motley jester Society, bid us sit between them; and this woos from us a vapid smile, and that lays his iron hand upon our brow and dares us to stir; and we are all the better for the hypocrisy and the restraint. ”

“ With them marched Charlie, conspicuous in his blue lancer uniform, now respectfully addressing his superior officer, now jesting good-humouredly with his temporary comrades. The sun rose on a jovial, light-hearted company; when next his beams shall gild the same arid plains, the same twining mimosas, the same glorious landscape, shut in by the jagged peaks of the Anatola mountains, they will glance back from many a firelock lying ownerless on the sand; they will deepen the clammy hue of death on many a bold forehead; they will fail to warm many a gallant heart, cold and motionless for ever. ”

“ Blacklamb, as she swept down to supper on Lord Mount Helicon’s arm, her dark, haughty features writhing with something between a smile and a sneer, while she caught a glimpse of Blanche’s well-cut profile, and one of Lacquers’s faultless boots in a mirror opposite their retreat. “Will it be, do you think?” she added with a softening expression, for all women warm towards a love-affair, and even Mrs. Blacklamb, with her many faults, was a very woman, perhaps rather too much so, in her heart of hearts. ”

“ Frank Hardingstone had seen it all. Unobserved himself among the pedestrians that thronged the footway, he had marked Blanche and her cavalier as they paced slowly down the Ride, had marked the girl’s flush of triumph as her admirer drew closer and closer to her side, had marked that nameless “something” between the pair which people can never entirely conceal when they “understand each other,” and had drawn his own conclusions from the sight. ”

“ With all our prejudices in her favour, and our awe-struck admiration of her dress, we cannot help thinking she would look yet lovelier in a plain morning gown, with no ornament but a rose or two; and that Mary Delaval’s stately beauty and commanding figure would be more in character with those splendid robes of state. But Mary is only a governess, and Blanche is an heiress; so the one remains up-stairs, and the other goes to Court. What else would you have?
It is difficult for an inferior at any time to obtain an interview with a superior, and nowhere more so than in London. ”

“ Hardingstone will very likely marry her, and everybody will be happy and contented but me. Ah! well, there must always be some one sacrificed; and I suppose I must be the victim this time; but it is hard to give up all my hope, all my sunshine—to have no future any more. Yes; I hear the autumn wind sighing round the house. I am not yet twenty; and it will be all autumn to me for the rest of my life. Oh, it is hard—very hard!” and Blanche pressed her brow against the chimney-piece and wept bitterly.
“Blanche, dearest Blanche, what is it?” ”

“ But never mind the gentlemen, Blanche; there will be half-a-dozen here to dinner to-day. To return to yourself—you have a bright career before you, but never think it is traced out only for your own enjoyment. As a girl, you may in your position be an example to your equals, and a blessing to your dependents—think what a deal of good you can do even about a place like this; and then, should you marry, your influence may be the means of leading your husband and family into the right way. ”

“ Mary should have loved such a man as Frank, and vice versâ—here was the beau idéal that each had formed of the opposite sex. Frank was never tired of crying up a woman of energy and courage, one who could dare and suffer, and still preserve the queenly dignity which he chose to esteem woman’s chiefest attraction; and so he neglected the gem, and set his great, strong heart upon the flower. Well, we have often seen it so; we admire the diamond, but we love the rose. ”

“ So forward be it! and we will not apologise for shifting the scene some thousands of miles, and taking a peep at our friend Cousin Charlie, fulfilling his destiny in that heaven-forsaken country called Kaffirland. When it rains in South Africa it rains to some purpose, pelting down even sheets of water, to which a thunderstorm at home is but as the trickling of a gutter to the Falls of Niagara—Nature endues her whole person in that same leaden-coloured garment, and the world assumes a desolate appearance of the most torpid misery. ”

“ Frank felt inclined to quarrel with the world in general, and buttoned his coat with savage energy when the poor crossing-sweeper held out her toil-worn hand for a penny. He relented too, and gave her money, and felt ashamed that he should have thought for an instant of visiting his own afflictions on that hard-working creature, the more so as a sailor-looking man in front of him had evidently given a trifle to the poor industrious woman. ”

“ Such a mind, when convinced of truth, is doubly strong; and Lacquers listened, much admiring, though, it must be confessed, not always quite understanding the deductions of his mentor. Yet was he too, ere long, stirred with a noble ambition, a desire to fulfil his destiny in life with some credit to himself and benefit to his fellow-creatures—a longing to be useful in his generation—to feel that he was part of the great scheme, and, however humble might be his task, yet that its fulfilment was a fair condition of his very existence, and was conducive to the well-being of the whole. ”

“ On what trifles do the moods and tempers of the human mind depend! The child set up a crow of delight to see its father, instead of the hideous howl in which it had been indulging, and stretched out its little arms with a welcome that went straight to the drunkard’s heart. In another moment he was dancing the little thing up and down in perfect good humour; and poor Gingham, thoroughly overcome, was leaning her head against his shoulder in a paroxysm of reconciled affection, and going through that process of relief known to ladies by the expressive term of “having a good cry.” ”