CHAPTER X.

THE SUNDONS AND THE WALSHES.

Church was nearly the only place where Lady Bell saw the world, if seeing the world it could be called, when she was shut securely into a high moth-eaten brown pew, with Squire Trevor seated by her side, and his servants ranged in rows behind her. However, Lady Bell’s wandering eyes contrived to peep over the board, to seek out and rest on a lady and gentleman in the only other pew which was on an equality with Squire Trevor’s, in the little parish church.

The lady was only a few years older than Lady Bell, who thought the stranger very handsome. She had one of those striking profiles which readily catch the eye. Her face was long and oval, with clearly cut, distinguished nose and chin, the under part of the face projecting very slightly. The fine face belonged to a fine figure. The white cardinal cape and little chip hat and plume of feathers had more of an air of fashion than Lady Bell had noticed in such articles since her happy days with the best society at Lady Lucie Penruddock’s.

The lady’s companion was young like herself, as Lady Bell remarked wistfully, though after the fashion of most of the young Englishmen of rank whom she had seen, his face lacked the freshness of youth. Still it was a pleasant prepossessing face in its suspicion of haggardness and exhaustion, and was in conjunction with a good person and the easy manner of a cultivated man of the world.

The couple used the same Prayer-Book,—that is, he looked on hers when he used a book at all. She admonished him with a reproachful smile and shake of the head, when he yawned and closed his eyes during the service. He led her out of church when the congregation were dismissed, and handing her into a landau, drove off talking and laughing with her. They were a very pretty couple, surely near and intimate relations, and they quite took Lady Bell’s fancy.

“Who are the handsome lady and gentleman?” she inquired on the first opportunity of the vicar’s wife.

“I am sure I cannot tell,” answered the lady indifferently; “I desire to keep my eyes better employed than in staring round at the skin-deep beauty or fine feathers of my fellow-worms. I dare say you mean young Sundon, of Chevely, who has taken a wife like the rest of us, and brought her down on a visit to these parts. They say he has been a wild liver, and that the friends of madam, who was a great fortune, opposed the marriage. If so, they did not need to wish her ill, in order to keep her from thriving.”

“She looks more like thriving than I who obeyed my friends,” thought Lady Bell.

“Madam Sundon will want all her wits,” continued the speaker, “to make her man pick up, that he may not squander what is left of his means and her fortune. But I neither know nor care, for it is long since I have shaken hands with the world and its gossip.”

“Young Sundon, of Chevely,” echoed Squire Trevor irritably, “the spark who stood up against his betters at Peasmarsh? I forbid you, Lady Bell, to have a word to say to any one of the pack.”

“Who speaks of having a word to say?”—she resented the prohibition nevertheless; “mayn’t a cat look at a king?” And Lady Bell did take a poor consolation in looking her fill at the comely, lighthearted young couple. In return the couple looked hard at Lady Bell, and, as she convinced herself with a swelling heart, repressed a smile at her associations, and pitied her.

At last, meeting the Sundons, when she had broken away from Mr. Trevor, and was riding with the vicar’s daughter or with a servant, the beautiful, assured-looking lady made an advance to Lady Bell. Mrs. Sundon’s was one of those faces which are full of character and latent strength. This was more true with regard to her face than to that of her bland but languid companion. Therefore she took the initiative, smiled in a friendly way, and nodded neighbour fashion, while Mr. Sundon lifted his hat, and held it till the parties had passed each other.

As for Lady Bell, she smiled, flushed, and nodded slightly in return, with a girl’s shy, inconsiderate triumph in evading the Squire’s tyrannical mandate, for smiling and nodding were not speaking to the Sundons—husband and wife.

There was one person close to Lady Bell who was ready to give her a different version of a wife’s duty to a husband than a flighty and very human subterfuge implied. That person had been regularly commissioned to lecture Lady Bell and keep an eye on her.

In introducing Lady Bell to his cousin, the vicar’s wife, the Squire had said, half in homely jocoseness, which might have been very well had there been a good understanding between the ill-matched couple, half in tart earnestness, “I give my wife into your charge, Ann; you’ll look after her, and see that she minds her duty, and does not get into scrapes.”

“I accept the charge, cousin,” responded Mrs. Walsh promptly and with the utmost gravity; “I’ll do my best for the young lady,” and she did not even add, “if she’ll allow me;” while poor, touchy, aristocratic Lady Bell, drew up her dainty figure and tossed her head in vain at the bargain made, like her marriage itself, will-he nill-he.

Mrs. Walsh was the wife of a hard-working clergyman, who left to her a share of his public duties and the entire management of his private concerns, including the intercourse between the parsonage and the mansion of the Squire, Mrs. Walsh’s cousin. When Mr. Walsh was not in his church or school, he was in his study; and when he was neither in church, school, nor study, he was reading or praying by some cottage bedside.

Mrs. Walsh in her own person laboured from morning till night, not only without complaint, but with a high sense of the privilege and dignity of her vocation. She brought up a large family honourably on a marvellously small income. She strengthened her husband’s hands in other respects by employing every spare moment in teaching the ignorant, reclaiming the bad, nursing the sick.

Mrs. Walsh had received a solid masculine education, classical, mathematical, theological, which enabled her to act as tutor to her sons and assistant to her husband in their studies. She despised all mere shallow, graceful, feminine accomplishments, and condemned them as waste of time. In like manner she had both a natural and acquired antipathy to fine ladies. She was well matched, and in cordial sympathy with her husband, therefore she magnified the marriage tie and enforced it in the highest measure on all less happy wives, and was amazed to find that they could dream of setting it at naught, in all its length and breadth.

Mrs. Walsh wore a steeple-crowned hat and cloth spencer when she went abroad in all weathers and on all occasions. Within doors she wore an equally high-crowned cap and voluminous frills, which were in correct keeping with her massive, aggressive face and towering, portly figure. Hers was a more formidable presence than that of a beadle or bailiff to all weak and froward recusants who were not utter reprobates, in the middle of the sluggishness and stolid stupidity of the country parish.

Mrs. Walsh was an additional and a tremendous thorn in Lady Bell’s delicate flesh, in strict fulfilment of what the parson’s wife considered her pledge to the Squire.

Mrs. Walsh had a little leisure at this time. The chronic ague and the frequent putrid fever were not so widely spread and virulent as usual, thanks, as Mrs. Walsh judged rightly, to the Lord’s blessing (but whether the exemption was to be attributed farther to her sovereign sage and ground ivy-tea, is a debatable question). The recent visit of a recruiting sergeant had enticed within the reach of the iron horse and the cat o’ nine tails some of the more troublesome young ne’er-do-wells within the bounds.

Mrs. Walsh set herself to spend her holiday in taking Lady Bell Trevor to task. Mrs. Walsh would impress on Lady Bell a new code of morals, bring her to a better frame of mind, render her a useful member of society, and a reformed young woman and wife. In what Mrs. Walsh called dealing faithfully with Lady Bell, the reformer did not hesitate at the plainest speaking, the most direct home-thrusts.

To do Mrs. Walsh justice, she dealt as faithfully with her cousin, the Squire, when her mission lay in that direction; she called him roundly a profane swearer, a man of strife, a vain and puffed-up man of the world, and coolly stood her ground in the teeth of his wrath, bidding him, “Turn me out of your doors, cousin; I don’t mind;—I shall suffer in a good cause, but it will be the worse for you, I promise you.”

The Squire did not turn her and her “overbearing conceit and Methodist cant” out of doors, though he threatened it many a time, and it was certain that she browbeat his violence in bearding it, and had more influence over him than most people.

The excellent woman rather relished the tug of war, and the coming off victoriously from the autocratic kinsman out of whose way she was careful to keep her husband, and to whom the rest of the parish cringed subserviently.

It was not of the smallest use for Lady Bell to be haughty, to be flippant, to try every effort to escape from her persecutor. Mrs. Walsh only found fresh food for her homilies in the girl’s struggles.

“I must tell you, Lady Bell, it is very senseless and unbecoming of you to take a huff at good advice;” and Mrs. Walsh proceeded to state her views and issue her censures deliberately and elaborately: “It is not the work of a rational creature to thread beads and flourish on catgut. If Squire Trevor has the gout, it is not your part to leave him alone the whole morning while you make a play of gathering roseleaves. It would set you better to be gaining a knowledge of simples, so that you might distil a remedy for his pain. But I, or any one with open eyes, can see how little you mind him—your own husband, who is one flesh and blood with you, if so be you can please and divert yourself. I should be sorry to see my Sally, who is half a year younger than you, and has no goodman of her own to study and serve, as yet, of such a light and heedless turn of mind.”

“You may give your advice, ma’am, when I ask for it,” panted Lady Bell.

“I shall not wait for such an opening—folk would have to wait long enough, if they stayed till they were bidden call in question wrong-doing.” Mrs. Walsh rose and took to walking up and down the room, like a peripatetic philosopher delivering his dogmas.

“What call have you—what title have you to speak so to me, Mrs. Walsh?” insisted Lady Bell, her cheeks a-blaze.

“I have the call of my conscience and the title of one who, by God’s blessing, at least knows right from wrong, however imperfectly I may put it in practice,” announced Mrs. Walsh without a moment’s hesitation, standing still and looking down from her vantage on the culprit.

“If I were not an unhappy young creature,” Lady Bell broke down at last, and wrung her hands in futile youthful pain and rage, “if Mr. Trevor, cruel old tyrant as he is, were even like other husbands——”

“Have a care, Lady Bell, have a care,” interrupted Mrs. Walsh, in extreme disdain and disgust, “if you are so far left to yourself as openly to speak evil of the man whom you have vowed—ay, madam, vowed solemnly, so that you are a forsworn and lost woman if you break your vow—to honour and obey, then I shall not know what fine lady depravity we may look for next, or in what strict keeping, for your own unhappy sake, we ought to hold you.”

“You may heap insult on insult; you may report what I have said to your cousin, Mrs. Walsh.” Lady Bell gave her foe free leave, as she nervously twirled the lace of her bodice, “that will be fair and kind, like the rest of your conduct.”

“Indeed, my lady, I shall not stick to report this, or whatever I think necessary, to my cousin Trevor, at any time.” Mrs. Walsh accepted the permission undauntedly. “Worldly honour and I have shaken hands long ago. To do my duty to God and my neighbour, is all my care.”

But Mrs. Walsh did not on this or any other occasion appeal to Squire Trevor. She was too stout-hearted a woman to call in, without reluctance, foreign aid in her battles. She might have shaken hands with worldly honour, but she had an honour of her own—she contented herself with confiding to her own husband that she “mistrusted” that young Lady Bell Trevor was either clean crazy, or on the high road to ruin.

Perhaps it came to the same thing in the end, for, acting on her convictions, Mrs. Walsh took it upon herself, in what she believed the interest of religion, virtue, and family regard, to watch and guard the unfortunate young woman, and in this Mrs. Walsh was warmly abetted by Squire Trevor, who was growing every day more jealous of and carping to his wife.

When Mrs. Walsh could not discharge her office in person, she did it in deputy by her eldest daughter. Young Sally Walsh, brought up under the hardest discipline, in her homespun linen and woollen, and barndoor buxomness, had been considerably dazzled to begin with, by the elegant apparition of Lady Bell, but having been smartly chidden by her mother for her short-sighted worldliness, she fell straightway into the opposite error.

Sally was not only forward and intrusive in her bearing towards Lady Bell, whom Sally’s mother had in such small esteem, but, from learning to entertain a poor opinion of the strange, foolish young fine lady, and her distempered state of mind, Sally proceeded, without meaning much harm—on the whole meaning good, to despise Lady Bell and to trample upon her figuratively.

Lady Bell had spirit to keep her own ground and resist being trampled on, but it was a proud, delicate spirit, and was at a discount in a contest with ruder, stronger spirits.

“I’ll go up to the Court and sit with Lady Bell,” Sally Walsh would propose, dangling her hat by its ribands, and squaring the mottled elbows which her mits left exposed. “I don’t mind though she is as mum as a mouse and as glum as an owl, I’ll keep her from going melancholy mad;” and then the young girl would say, not for a moment concealing that she looked for some benefit to herself in the benefit conferred on another, “Lady Bell may let me take the shape of a habit shirt,” or “the peaches are prime ripe in the Court gardens.”

Mrs. Walsh bade her daughter not hanker after the follies of dress, or the flesh-pots of Egypt, but she did not think the hankering in this case very unnatural or unreasonable.

“What do you think I found my lady doing?” Sally would report faithfully to her mother on her return; “Carving cherry-stones! I told her she would blind herself; but, of course, she whittled away. The Squire’s list shoes were worn out, and I said I should make him a new pair, and he said, there was a wench of some use in the world!”

“Then be thankful, child, and don’t learn bragging from poor silly Lady Bell.”

“She didn’t know how to make list shoes, mother, but she looked at me after I had the list from Tofts; she is quick, Lady Bell, for, as dandily as she is, she picked up the making in no time. There,” she said, “you can hear her, mother, in her low mincing tones, ‘now I can show Tofts how to supply Mr. Trevor with list shoes in future, you need not trouble to make any more, Miss Walsh;’ these were all the thanks I had.”

“You taught the fine lady one useful lesson,” Mrs. Walsh encouraged her daughter.

But though Lady Bell might try, and might sometimes succeed in asserting her supremacy and in distancing her foes, she could not fight with their weapons. When they invaded her privacy, invited themselves to be her companions, spied upon her, if that could be called spying which was open and bold, and all to do her good, they drove her nearly frantic.