CHAPTER IX.

LADY BELL TREVOR.

According to the fashion of the time, though it was only two or three days’ journey to Trevor Court, Squire Trevor and his young wife made it a progress from one friend’s house to another, where the Squire in person announced his marriage, presented his bride, was roasted and toasted, and regaled with the first instalment of his wedding rejoicings by the good-will of his neighbours.

The practice was so far lucky in Lady Bell’s case, it gave her no time to reflect on what had happened in all its importance, so that the reaction which had already set in after the overstrained resignation and meekness of her last moments at St. Bevis’s, was only a silent rebellion.

Lady Bell, even at fifteen, had too much spirit and sense to feel inclined to exhibit to strangers her wrongs and misery, and the extent of the sacrifice which she had just celebrated. She did not dissolve in floods of tears—she controlled herself, and was only thought very pale (but she was a pale, dark-eyed beauty at any time), proud, and shy,—a grand, but not very attractive, young madam for old Squire Trevor.

Nevertheless, it was in a state of chronic rebellion that Lady Bell reached Trevor Court. What good was the rebellion to do then? She never asked herself. Fifteen does not often ask such questions when it but writhes under a sense of betrayal and wretchedness.

Trevor Court was not like St. Bevis’s. It was a fine, well-preserved old place, with noble stacks of warm red-brick chimneys, seen first from amidst coeval dark green yews on a broad green terrace.

It had a stone-seated porch and an oaklined chimney corner, with great delf platters hanging by strings on each side of the richly-carved wood chimney-piece.

It had a best parlour answering to a drawing-room, where the spindle-legged chairs were made of cane, the hangings and chair-covers were lemon colour, and there were Indian ornaments and egg-shell china—altogether so cold, fantastic, and fragile in its details, that nobody would have dreamt of occupying it, except for the reception of company.

There were blue, red, and green bedrooms, each with its enormous bed like a coloured hearse, its square of Persian carpet in the middle of the floor, and its ebony escritoire. Everything was in keeping and in order, and was, next to his sovereign self, the pride of Squire Trevor’s heart and the delight of his eyes.

“Look up, and look out, here is my place, my lady;” so Squire Trevor introduced Trevor Court, its venerable beauties fresh with the perennial freshness of early summer, to Lady Bell.

“Is this Trevor Court?” sighed Lady Bell, scarcely stirring herself in her corner of the chariot.

It was with intense mortification, almost exceeding that with which he had heard her first address him as a man who might be her father, and afterwards repel with disgust his clumsy blandishments, that Mr. Trevor discovered Trevor Court was lost on Lady Bell.

She saw in it only a better sort of prisonhouse. She was not grateful for the change from the wreck at St. Bevis’s. At St. Bevis’s there had still been something like freedom and hope. Trevor Court signified slavery and despair.

Lady Bell was not nearly old enough, or mercenary enough, to weigh with appreciation the substantial evidences of respectability and comfort. Her burdened heart and soul were not free to admit a sense of beauty.

Lady Bell looked round her with lacklustre eyes. No comment of satisfaction or word of praise dropped from her tightly-locked lips.

“Welcome, your honour! Welcome, madam, and long life and prosperity! Many happy returns of the day! Hoorah! hoorah!” broke the stiff, oppressive silence. The greeting burst in set form, and simultaneously, from the pliant dependants and consequential old servants in quilted gowns like Mrs. Kitty’s, in worsted stockings, and worsted lace setting off their livery, in gardeners’ green aprons and countrymen’s round hats, which were at that moment waved lustily in the air.

The worst was to come; for resentment and anguish at fifteen are very liable to merge into petulance, alternating with heaviness. Lady Bell received the demonstration haughtily and cavalierly. She was the mistress of these folks, in spite of herself, and against her will. Their making merry provoked her when she did not desire their service.

It had been right that she should put the best face upon matters while she was in other people’s houses; but since she had come home, if home meant anything, and as Squire Trevor’s marriage had been too unpremeditated to admit of the assistance of strangers in the “home-coming,” she need make no farther pretence.

She declined to drink her own health, not to say Squire Trevor’s, in the ale which had been broached, and the claret which had been drawn. She was forced to pledge her household in return; but she only touched the flagon with her lips. She was compelled, too, to take the Squire’s arm, and walk, accommodating her steps to his pursy gait; but she walked like a naughty child, with as few smiles and curtseys as she could bestow between the rows of retainers. She clutched her skirt and riding-gloves, to prevent any willing hand freeing her from the encumbrances.

There was something pathetic as well as ludicrous in the forlornness of the unmagnanimous behaviour that showed both singleness of heart and extreme youthful folly in the friendless girl; but it incensed Squire Trevor beyond measure.

Without the indiscretion, he might have felt inclined, as he had carried his point and gained his end, to be in good humour with his bride and the rest of the world.

True, he had married on a mere impulse, and in a spirit of contradiction. His fancy for Lady Bell, who was showing herself intractable and exasperating, hardly deserved the name even of passion. The accidents of her situation, and of the opportune manner in which she had crossed his path, together with her rank, had as much to do with his fancy as any gust of passion, though the girl, in her right mind, was attractive enough. He was but slightly acquainted with her. He had no familiarity with girls, not much with women of more mature age. He would, under any circumstances, have been shy and awkward, would not have known what to do with Lady Bell after he had got her, and would soon have found her in his way, even if she had conducted herself with amazing self-restraint and tact.

But he might not have betrayed speedy symptoms of moroseness and violence had he not felt deeply injured.

As it was, Lady Bell, who had been used, in her experience of mankind as master, simply to Squire Godwin’s supercilious scorn, had cause within her very first day at Trevor Court to dread Squire Trevor’s awfully furious temper. She had married the worst-conditioned John Trot in Gloucestershire, and she had set his teeth on edge in crossing his threshold.

She saw him fretting and fidgeting,—

“Lazy tykes, not to have finished with the hay crop. Who set them to hoist flags and busk arches? I’ll let them know I’ll marry every day in the year, without freeing them from their tasks. Zounds! one of the young horses broke her neck in the quarry.—I’ll break more necks before I’ve done, the fiends take them!”

She witnessed the storm gathering and rising, while he stamped here and clattered there, till it reached a roar, which, for shame’s sake, was not directed against her as yet, but which suddenly took her into the general offence.

The entire household cowered in the middle of their holiday, keeping before the untimely blast. Lady Bell cowered, too, secretly.

From that moment’s height of startled dismay she was in fear of her life whenever the Squire rampaged, swore, and (especially after his dinner and bottle of port) flung about the furniture, dashed down his pipe, kicked the very live coals from the grate over the room, and drove the dogs, with their tails between their heels, flying from the house.

But, notwithstanding, the girl was not tamed or cured of her sauciness; her spirit might be broken in time, but it was not broken at once, though it had recoiled before Squire Godwin’s irony. There was that in her which rose naturally against the physical terror of brute force, though it might overwhelm her ultimately.

Lady Bell kept as far as she could out of sight and sound of the Squire’s “rages;” but when they were over, leaving him in a condition of stupid exhaustion and dogged affront, she went her own way again, as if the rages had never been. Her way was very much the same way that she had pursued at St. Bevis’s, of carrying on always more listlessly her slender studies, and of working out idly her manifold minute devices.

“Hadn’t you better take a sensible piece of work into your hands in place of reading fools’ verses and French books—no good comes from France—or wasting your time with trumpery drawing and flowering?” Thus Mr. Trevor had sought to lay the ungentle yoke on her in the first lustre of the honeymoon. “I thought all proper brought-up young women, whether they were Lady Bells or not, without a penny to bring to their husbands”—he illustrated the position candidly—“were taught to keep accounts, and help to make their own clothes, like my cousin at the parsonage, even if they could not raise paste and feed poultry.”

“Let me tell you, sir,” retorted Lady Bell with considerable courage, “that though I am Lady Bell who never pretended to bring a penny to a husband—as it is not my fault that I have one—I can keep accounts, and help to make my clothes when it is needful. But I choose to have other occupations when those that you have been so good as to point out to me, fail me. I suppose you do not wish me to make accounts, that I may add them up, or to cut out and stitch together more clothes than I can wear? As for raising paste, I confess I have seen that left to the cook; and for poultry—we had only sparrows in town.”

“A fig for town—a sink of corruption,” protested Mr. Trevor, reddening like a turkey-cock at the insulting idea that town could be held superior to Trevor Court. “I’m of the mind of Lord Mulcaster, who had it put into the articles of his marriage contract, that my lady was neither to go to town, nor to wear diamonds.”

“I did not know that the question was of going to town or wearing diamonds,” cried Lady Bell with a grimace. “I thought you were speaking of raising paste and feeding poultry.”

“Can’t you bide in your own house, Bell,” the Squire would bully his wife another time, because he himself seldom indulged in exercise beyond stumping to his offices, riding round a field or two on his cob, and playing a game of bowls or skittles with his servants. He was disturbed by the young girl’s girlish restlessness. He hated to have her doing what he did not care to do—without him too.

“No, I can’t, Mr. Trevor. I must have breath and motion, if I can have nothing else,” Lady Bell said plainly.

Lady Bell remained a stranger in her husband’s house, in the plenty and snugness of Trevor Court, as in the barrenness and exposure of St. Bevis’s. She was in greater isolation than ever; for there was no Mr. Greenwood, and no Sneyd—friendly scamps—at Trevor Court.

In place of attaching any of her husband’s servants, Lady Bell had contrived to repel them from the beginning; for was not their idol, their own born and bred Squire, the reflection but slightly refined of their doltish and dour natures? And did not the young madam start by committing sacrilege against the idol, who, if you spoke him fair, and took a few fierce words—it might be blows—was not so bad an idol as times went.

Squire Trevor had his good points, which his own people knew best. He was ready to make up, by a sort of crabbed justice, when the passion was off him, for his surliness of manners. He could take his bottle like the rest of the world, and even sit and soak himself into blind madness when he was brooding on any real or fancied wrong. But he did not squander his means on vain show or riotous living. He did not gamble away his paternal acres, and consign his dependants to wreck and ruin with himself, like many of his generation.

Squire Trevor was considered somewhat of a model of squirearchical excellence down at Trevor Court, and Lady Bell by contrast a very naughty young lady indeed, a discontented, good-for-nothing Lon’oner, who took it upon her to be sullen or peevish, and did not at once set herself to please her husband by implicit obedience, and by all wifely arts as well as wifely virtues.

Trevor Court was not out of count in its neighbourhood, but, except in doing his duty to society by keeping up rounds of visits on special occasions, Mr. Trevor did not care for going into or receiving company. He liked to know himself monarch of all he surveyed, and to be deferred to in like manner—heights of regard which he could hardly attain off his own land.

Above all, Mr. Trevor objected to presenting an open door to the country, or to availing himself of other open doors, so soon as he had discovered that Lady Bell, after long abstinence from the society of young people like herself, could, when restored to it, abate her exclusiveness, and even relax into faint dimpling smiles. “By George!” he swore, “if she can’t smile on me and my honest household, she shan’t on a parcel of idle young rakes and impudent hussies in their questionable surroundings.”

It was not unlikely that Squire Trevor had some reason in his decision. The standard of morals was low everywhere a century ago. There were many instances then of country houses in remote districts, as there are to-day of agricultural cottages in similar circumstances, which were more woefully corrupt than the worst town houses.

But Lady Bell was incapable of comprehending such justification. She regarded the deprivation enforced on her as an additional injury and insult. And she was determined that if Mr. Trevor kept her a prisoner at Trevor Court, he should look on her face as that of a prisoner directed to her jailer.