CHAPTER VII.

AN OLD SQUIRE’S WOOING.

Squire Trevor wanted a wife. He had been long of setting about to supply the want; he was the keener in his search when he began it. His latent determination to exercise his prerogative and marry like other men whenever the fit took him, had been lately fanned into a flame by the supposed insolence of the heir-presumptive in counting prematurely on Squire Trevor, of Trevor Court, dying a bachelor.

He had not thought of coming to St. Bevis’s to find the wife whom he had in his mind, for he had only learnt accidentally from Lady Bell herself that there was a marriageable young lady at St. Bevis’s. But stumbling, as he had chanced to stumble, on Lady Bell in her strait with an untoward guest at Brooklands, and having helped her, he was drawn, by her rank, youth, and high-bred April charms, while he was not repelled by her presumed absence of fortune.

Squire Trevor actually resolved—and with him to resolve was to perform—before he came up to Squire Godwin, and ascertained that the uncle would be consenting to the sale and sacrifice of the niece, that Squire Trevor’s wife should be Lady Bell Etheredge.

When gentlemen like Squires Trevor and Godwin made up their minds to a match, a century or more ago, they did not let grass grow on their intentions, or stand on ceremony, and mince matters in bringing them to pass.

Squire Godwin’s party, on its return that May night from Brooklands to St. Bevis’s, had the benefit of Squire Trevor’s company and that of his two servants.

Mr. Trevor stayed ten days at St. Bevis’s, busy every morning during the first part of his stay, over accounts and papers with Mr. Godwin and a scrivener summoned for the purpose. Every afternoon, the guest would saunter about, ride, course, or take a turn at bowls or skittles, unwieldy as he was, to stretch his limbs. Then he would take a dish of tea in Mrs. Die’s parlour, before he sat down to play cards with his host and the chaplain.

Long before the ten days were at an end, it was an established fact, plain to the whole household, that Squire Trevor, who in these days of early marriages might have been Lady Bell Etheredge’s grandfather, was paying court to Lady Bell, and that he was only tarrying so long to have the connection settled. Nay, possibly, as the affairs of the family were in a desperate condition, the family might dispense with ceremony. Mr. Trevor might propose to marry Lady Bell off hand, since he had no time to lose, and in order to relieve himself from the trouble of another journey of several days, when he was just getting in his hay crop. In that case Mr. Trevor might carry away Lady Bell with him, and leave her to fix upon and lay in her marriage suits, by his generosity, at Trevor Court. Such marriages were arranged by old cronies, fathers and guardians, and run up in a trice, without time being granted to make mouths at them. Young lads were sent for from college, girls were called from their tambour-frames, even from their dolls, and barely informed before they went into the presence of the parson, who was always at hand, that it was to decide summarily their fate they were thus brought on the scene of action.

Lady Bell was the last person in the household at St. Bevis’s to learn what was in store for her. By the time she learned it, every preliminary had been agreed upon, the marriage contract was drawn out, the day all but named. Mr. Godwin had answered in the affirmative for his niece, Mrs. Die was perfectly indifferent.

Mrs. Kitty was indifferent and malicious at the same time, because this poor upstart fiddle-faddle Lady Bell was to pass beyond Mrs. Kitty’s authority, quitting St. Bevis’s with a bride’s honours—such as they were, of which Mrs. Kitty’s Amazon queen, Mrs. Die, had been monstrously defrauded in her day.

Even Mr. Sneyd and Mr. Greenwood looked on the marriage of Squire Trevor with Lady Bell, for the most part, favourably. What little rue the men felt was chiefly on their own account; for her sake they were inclined, on due reflection, to welcome the match as not altogether out of course, and perhaps the best thing that could be hoped for Lady Bell.

St. Bevis’s had not so fair a reputation, or such a promise of dowries for young ladies that it should draw wooers to Lady Bell. Of such wooers as would risk an association with Squire Godwin—a partnership in bets, an opposite book at Newmarket, or a night with him at cards—how many even of the likeliest young fellows would present characters half so honest for husbands as that of Squire Trevor, and rent-rolls by many degrees so unencumbered as that of Trevor Court?

Finally, as a compensation and triumphant conclusion of the matter, these gentlemen—Lady Bell’s most considerate and indulgent friends—were guilty of proposing in their own minds, for the innocent girl’s comfort, that she would in all probability be left a young widow,—if she played her cards well, a rich young widow,—while she had still plenty of time and opportunity to please her taste in a second husband.

But Lady Bell was utterly incredulous, dumb-foundered, adverse, obdurate, only too vehemently so to begin with.

Certainly, she had often heard of such marriages as that which she was required to make. Ay, and she had heard them insisted on as a portionless girl’s simple, solemn duty. While, on the other hand, she had known all marriages contracted rashly, impudently and in defiance of friends, characterized by no less an authority than Lady Lucie Penruddock as acts of gross impropriety and disgraceful insubordination, which ought to compromise, and did compromise, a young woman fatally, and bring upon her punishment in proportion to the offence.

Lady Bell was not able to persuade herself that her former idol, Lady Lucie, would have been on her side in this question. Lady Bell’s poor heart sunk like lead when she took Lady Lucie’s opinions into consideration. She dared not think of Lady Lucie during the tumult and rebellion of these May days at St. Bevis’s.

But through all the girl’s elaborately artificial training, there was the young heart beating fast and warm with true instincts of what meetness was, of what sympathy meant, of what “the great passion” might prove.

In the remote background of all Lady Bell’s girlishly brave proud schemes and undertakings to keep up her studies and gentlewoman’s accomplishments, to improve herself, to spend her time not amiss, even amidst the neglect and disorder of St. Bevis’s, there had hovered always the bright sweet hope of deliverance and a deliverer.

In Lady Lucie’s set Lady Bell had not been without hearing of the young loves, consecrated by tragedy, of such a couple as Lord and Lady Tavistock. She had witnessed with her own eyes “proper” young pairs rejoicing in their real union, entering on life with every assurance of the closest friendship, the tenderest intimacy till death should them part.

With her rapidly budding womanly instincts, with the fervour of her youthful recollections, Lady Bell absolutely revolted at being wedded to Mr. Trevor without her will being consulted.

The deliverer whom she had dimly anticipated in a glamour and glory of romance was not a bull-necked, stout-bodied, short-legged squire of sixty and upwards, in a brown coat and scarlet vest.

Lady Bell had owed to Squire Trevor the trifling boon of his having walked in the same direction as herself at Brooklands. Oh! how she wished she had not been so perverse as to weary of the strutting and speechifying of Lord Thorold and Miss Babbage, if sitting still would have prevented this catastrophe!

But although Squire Trevor had saved Lady Bell by a word from an unscrupulous vagabond, Lady Bell had not taken to Squire Trevor from the first. She had been disagreeably struck by his touchy vanity, his rude dictation. She was indignant, disgusted, furiously angry when she learnt the proposal which he had made of himself within the first week of their acquaintance.

But who was to help Lady Bell to assort her sentiments?

Instead of helping, every one was against her, and she was only a girl of fifteen, all the more likely to be overborne and to give in at last, because of two things, the unreasonable violence of her opposition, and her old-fashioned, factitious dignity and self-consciousness.

Lady Bell’s first tactics were sufficiently transparent; she made herself as disagreeable as possible to Squire Trevor. She never spoke to him voluntarily, and she only answered him in monosyllables.

She retreated before his approach in the wilderness garden, or under the portico, showing him the last sweep of the tail of her train. She turned her shoulder to him, polite as she was, when she was forced to encounter him in Mrs. Die’s parlour, and when, to Lady Bell’s anger and dismay, the seat next her was significantly appropriated to Squire Trevor.

She would not accept the early rose which he took from the bow-pot and offered to her.

She would not eat the bread and butter which he had, according to the homely gallantry of the generation, prepared specially for her consumption.

She refused to sing to him.

She ventured to cry aloud coldly, “Oh! Mr. Trevor, don’t make such a pother,” when he insisted on her being promoted to the card-table on the single occasion that Squire Godwin condescended to sit down for a family game, with Mrs. Die launching at her brother her madly malicious innuendoes.