Mrs. Stuart

“ Stuart, her Stuart, the being who held her very life, marry another—that fair, lovely woman who had laughed her to scorn! The sunshine grew blood-red before her eyes, for one instant she reeled, and then grasped the doorpost for support. Then gradually she awoke to the fullness of her pain and humiliation. Pride was swelling in her heart; she seemed in that instant changed from a girl of glowing, living hopes to a woman who had tasted the bitterness of all earthly grief. ”

“ Philip, reining in his restive horse viciously, read the offending lines, punctuating them with admonitory digs of his heels and tugs at the bridle as the charger fretted at the fluttering paper. He looked well on horseback, and the civilian, lazily leaning against a pillar, admired him, dangling sword, jingling spurs, and all. He folded the paper methodically against his knee and handed it back. "And Miss Stuart believed all that?" he asked quietly.
"Women always believe what they see printed. She is in an awful rage, of course; but I warned you, Marsden, you know I did." ”

“ Stuart? I don’t know why, but I am sure she does not like me.”
“Margery”—and Stuart drew her back to him again and kissed her sweet lips—“we are pledged to each other, and none shall part us. Leave all to me, and it will come right. And now I have a lesson to teach you—henceforth I am Stuart, and Stuart only; don’t forget.”
“I will not,” she promised. She was silent for an instant, then said, softly: “How good you are! I will try to be worthy of you. Something tells me, Stuart, that I am not a common village girl. You will know the truth, perhaps, some day, and then you will be proud of me.” ”

“ You've done a deal for him, and he knows it, Mrs. Stuart. He don't mean to marry till he can earn enough to keep a wife as well as his mother. I shouldn't wonder if he hasn't said so much to you. It's not a subject you're over-fond of talking about, if I'm not mistaken. But Archie knows his duty, and he does mean to do it. And if he didn't, there'd be none quicker to blame him than Mrs. Dunn."
Mrs. Stuart grunted this time.
"Howsomever, I do say his mind is set on Nannie Dunn—and I don't wonder!" said Mrs. Mason. "If I was a man, I wouldn't look at another girl in the place beside her! ”

“ She sat down and wrote a long, gushing letter to her "cream-colored" cousin. Mrs. Stuart dropped her a line of thanks also, and Charley, of course, wrote, and there her adventure seemed to come to an end. Miss Stuart's letters were long and frequent. Mr. Stuart's rambling epistle alternately made her laugh and lose her temper, a daily loss with poor, discontented Edith. With the fine discrimination most men possess, he sent her, on her seventeenth birthday, a set of turquoise and pearls, which made her sallow complexion hideous, or, at least, as hideous as anything can make a pretty girl. ”

“ He debated all the while what thing he could do to win again that quick smile from Stuart. He wanted that man’s approval—more than aught else he wanted it—would force it somehow, no matter by what extravagance of action. He believed Stuart despised him, and the thought cut like rain-rods in a north-easterly. “If he doesn’t despise me, then why won’t he tell me more about his—his ideas?”
But on no subsequent visit to the Haven, was Stuart to be drawn. “My creed is the wrong sort for an engaged young man; better leave it alone. By the way, you promised that I should see your fiancée.” ”

“ Wilmot, smiling. "What of his liking for bright little Nancy Dunn?"
Mrs. Stuart's face became grim. All softness and geniality had died out of it.
"She is a good girl, Mrs. Stuart," said the Rector.
"She ain't the sort for me!" said Mrs. Stuart.
"I am sorry for that. She seems to me just the sort for your Archie."
Mrs. Stuart was silent.
"Another person can, perhaps, hardly judge for a mother in such a matter," observed Mr. Wilmot. "But take care, Mrs. Stuart. It is a serious responsibility for you to refuse your consent, if there is not a sufficient reason. ”

“ Stuart, his shaggy gray head and keen lined face attracting considerable attention in their neighbourhood. He was in his most expansive mood; the combativeness of an hour before had disappeared, and the ardent susceptible temperament of the man was absorbed in admiration, in the mere sensuous artist's delight in a stirring and beautiful series of impressions. When the white dress disappeared through the doorway of the ballroom, he followed it with a sigh of regret, and during the scene which followed between the Prince and his intended bride, he hardly looked at the stage. ”

“ Poverty had stood between him and the realisation of a dream till, with the sight of his ideal profoundly happy as some one else's wife, had come distrust and contempt for a feeling that experience showed him did not, could not last. Why, therefore, should it enter into and disturb his life at all? Friendship? ah, that was different! Perhaps the future held a time when he would clasp hands with a life-companion; a woman to be the mistress of his home, the mother of his children. But Belle! poor little, soft Belle Stuart, with her beautiful grey eyes! ”

“ Here we have seen a part of the romance which attaches itself to the name of Stuart—in the chivalrous young prince, leading his Highlanders against the bayonets of the British, lolling idly among the Hebrides, or fallen, at the last, to be a drunkard and the husband of an unwilling consort, who in her turn loved a famous poet. But it is this Stuart, after all, of whom we think when we hear the bagpipes skirling "Over the Water to Charlie" or "Wha'll be King but Charlie?" ”

“ The Minister had surreptitiously looked at his watch, and a tiresome lady friend had said good-bye in a voice which might have been lower, and with a lament which might have been spared. Mrs. Stuart set great store upon the success of her social undertakings, and to gather a crowd of people to meet the rising star of the season, and then to have to send them home with only tea and talk to remember, was one of those failures which no one with any self-respect should allow themselves to risk. ”

“ Georgiana told him briefly. Stuart looked gloomy. "That's all right," he said, "as long as he confines himself to being company for your father. But if he takes to being company for you—lookout!"
"Absurd! He's years older than I, and he said he would be working very hard. I shall see nothing of him except at the table. Heavens! don't grudge us anything that promises to relieve the monotony of our lives even a little bit."
Stuart whistled. ”

“ Stuart is nothing if not cultivated; her light individuality floats easily on the stream of London thought, now with this current, now with that, but always in movement, never left behind. She has the usual literary and artistic topics at her fingers' end, and as she knows everybody, whenever the more abstract sides of a subject begin to bore her, she can fall back upon an endless store of gossip as lively, as brightly-coloured, and, on the whole, as harmless as she herself is. ”

“ More regretted and admired for her misfortunes and accomplishments than condemned for her sins and crimes, Mary Stuart, the beautiful Queen of Scots, lives in the recollections of posterity as a vision of incomparable grace, beauty, and loveliness, hallowed by the genius of great poets and redeemed by a tragic and cruel death. To no historical memory poetry and tradition have been more kind and more idealizing than to Mary Stuart ”

“ Mary Stuart's love life makes a piteous story, for it is the life of one who was ever seeking—seeking for the man to whom she could look up, who could be strong and brave and ardent like herself, and at the same time be more powerful and more steadfast even than she herself in mind and thought. Whatever may be said of her, and howsoever the facts may be colored by partisans, this royal girl, stung though she was by passion and goaded by desire, cared nothing for any man who could not match her in body and mind and spirit all at once. ”

“ From the shadow-side of the hulk against which Stuart leant, enumerating his ethics to the stars, a long-drawn-out sigh quivered through the air; then a low and satisfied grunt; both sounds expressive of the mood in man, when, having reached a fatuity of content too great for words, he has to resort to animal noises in which to relieve his feelings. Stuart strolled round, and stood gazing down at a reclining figure upon the sand, figure which he recognized as one-half of the lovers who had so often shattered his evening calm.
“Where’s Letty?” ”

“ Mrs. Stuart is one of some half-dozen American writers who are doing the best that is being done for English literature at the present time. Her range of dialect is extraordinary; but, after all, it is not the dialect that constitutes the chief value of her work. That will be found in its genuineness, lighted up as it is by superior intelligence and imagination and delightful humor.—Chicago Tribune.
Mrs. Stuart is a genuine humorist.—N.Y. Mail and Express.
Few surpass Mrs. Stuart in dialect studies of negro life and character.—Detroit Free Press. ”

“ Stuart has changed her mind." Mrs. Stuart prided herself on not changing her mind. Infallible people never do change their minds; for why should they ever become wiser to-day than they were yesterday?
Still, without condescending to change her mind, or to acknowledge that she had been mistaken, Mrs. Stuart had certainly obtained a new view of the question. And the grand puzzle was—how to beat a retreat without seeming to do so?
CHAPTER XXIV. THE RECTOR'S WISH.
EXACTLY one quarter of an hour after Mrs. Mason's departure, there came a rap at the door. Mrs. Stuart went to open it. ”

“ Next morning the queen was awakened by the sound of trumpets and bugles: it had been decided the day before that she should set out that day for Hamilton, where reinforcements were looked for. The queen donned an elegant riding-habit, and soon, mounted on Rosabelle, appeared amid her defenders. The shouts of joy redoubled: her beauty, her grace, and her courage were admired by everyone. Mary Stuart became her own self once more, and she felt spring up in her again the power of fascination she had always exercised on those who came near her. ”

“ Mary Stuart was then in the full bloom of her beauty, beauty even more brilliant in its mourning garb—a beauty so wonderful that it shed around her a charm which no one whom she wished to please could escape, and which was fatal to almost everyone. ”

“ A pretty hero for a play!—The pedantic, selfish, ambitious, and cowardly son of Mary Stuart, who kissed the hand reeking with his mother’s blood, and held out the Scottish crown to be an awmous-dish, into which Elizabeth disdainfully threw her niggard charity, like an old maid depositing a farthing in the plate at the Magdalen Hospital door. ”

“ Some people said she was a nun; in which case she must have been a Sister of Charity, as she appears not to have been confined to a cloister. After some time, young Stuart either became faithless to the lady or was suddenly recalled to Scotland by his parents, and had got into his carriage at the door of the hotel, when his Dido unexpectedly made her appearance, and stepping on the forewheel of the coach to address her lover, he ordered the postilion to drive on; the consequence of which was that the lady fell, and one of the wheels going over her forehead, killed her. ”

“ A world in which dwelt Stuart the metaphysician, who, stronger even than Stuart the leprechaun, recognized with dismay an ability to slip out of the trio and its pattern, its march-rhythm and its corkscrew wit; get glimpses of himself as a bit of a fool; of the whole edifice they had raised, as absurd, exaggerated; doubting whether such close comradeship with two girls, save with the outlook and excuse of pure masculinity, did not contain an element—yes, though he loathed the term, an element of the fantastic? ”

“ Stuart; there are certain little follies about her; she is too apt to regard every distinguished dinner-party she and Stuart attend as an event of enormous and universal interest, and beyond London society her sympathies hardly reach, except in that vague charitable form which is rather pity and toleration than sympathy. But she is kindly, womanly, soft; she has no small jealousies and none of that petty self-consciousness which makes so many women wearisome to the great majority of plain men, who have no wish to take their social exercises too much au sérieux. ”

“ And yet when two days later the dilatory postman brought in the English mail, John Raby's face paled, not so much with anxiety, as with speculation.
"Have you been running up bills already?" he asked, lightly, as he threw an unmistakably business envelope over to her side of the table along with some others.
"You wouldn't be responsible, at all events," she replied with a laugh, "for it is addressed to Miss Belle Stuart."
"I am not so sure about that," he retorted, still in the same jesting way. "It is astonishing how far the responsibility of a husband extends." ”

“ By that time, however, subsequent facts had enlightened her as to Philip's possible meaning, and the sight of her former partner being inveigled away from waltzing to the billiard room by the senior subaltern, made her turn so pale that John Raby, on whose arm she was leaning, thought she was afraid.
"He won't be allowed to come back, Miss Stuart," he said consolingly. "And I apologise in the name of the committee for the strength of the champagne."
Belle's mouth hardened. "There is no excuse for that sort of thing. There never can be one." ”