CHAPTER IX.

Mr. Tresham had loved Lucy Charlmont sincerely, and until she refused him had entertained a good hope of success. Even at the moment of refusal she avowed the liking for him which all through their acquaintance had been obvious; and then, and not till then, it dawned upon him that her indifference towards himself had its root in preference for another. But he was far too honourable a man either to betray or to aim at verifying his suspicion; and though he continued to visit at Dr. Tyke’s, where Alan Hartley was so often to be seen idling away time under the comfortable conviction that he was doing no harm to himself or to any one else, it was neither at once, nor of set purpose, that Arthur Tresham penetrated Lucy’s secret. Alan and himself had been College friends; he understood him thoroughly; his ready good-nature, which seemed to make every one a principal person in his regard; his open hand that liked spending; his want of deep or definite purpose; his unconcern as to possible consequences. Then Lucy,—in whom Mr. Tresham had been on one point woefully mistaken,—she was so composed and so cordial to all her friends; there was about her such womanly sweetness, such unpretentious, dignified reserve towards all: her face would light up so brightly when he, or any other, spoke what interested her, not seldom, certainly, when he spoke:—even after a sort of clue had come into his hands, it was some time before he felt sure of any difference between her manner to Alan and to others. When the conviction forced itself upon him, he grieved more for her than for himself; he knew his friend too intimately to mistake his pleasure in being amused for any anxiety to make himself beloved; he knew about Alan much that Lucy did not and could not guess, and from the beginning inferred the end.

In the middle of that London season Catherine and Lucy returned to Brompton-on Sea; and before August had started the main stream of tourists from England to the continent, Mr. Tresham packed up his knapsack, and, staff in hand, set off on a solitary expedition, of undetermined length, to the East. He was neither a rich nor a poor man; had been called to the bar, but without pursuing his profession, and was not tied to any given spot; he went away to recruit his spirits, and, having recovered them, stayed on out of sheer enjoyment. Yet, when one morning his eye lighted on the Hartley-Durham marriage in the ‘Times’ Supplement, home feeling stirred within him; and he who, twenty-four hours earlier, knew not whether he might not end his days beside the blue Bosphorus, on the evening of that same day had started westward.

He felt curious, he would not own to himself that he felt specially interested, to know how Lucy fared; and he felt curious, in a minor degree, to inspect her successful rival. With himself Lucy had not yet had a rival; not yet, perhaps she might one day, he repeated to himself, only it had not happened yet. And then the sweet, dignified face rose before him kind and cheerful; cheerful still in his memory, though he guessed that now it must look saddened. He had never yet seen it with a settled expression of sadness, and he knew not how to picture it so.

Mr. Drum—or Mr. Gawkins Drum, as he scrupulously called himself, on account of a certain Mr. Drum, who lived somewhere and went nowhere, and was held by all outsiders to be in his dotage—Miss Drum’s brother, Mr. Gawkins Drum, had for several years stood as a gay young bachelor of sixty. Not that, strictly speaking, any man (or, alas! any woman) can settle down at sixty and there remain; but at the last of a long series of avowed birthday parties, Mr. Drum had drunk his own health as being sixty that very day; this was now some years ago, and still, in neighbourly parlance, Mr. Drum was no more than sixty. At sixty-something-indefinite Gawkins brought home a bride, who confessed to sixty; and all Brompton-on-Sea indulged in a laugh at their expense, till it oozed out that the kindly old couple had gone through all the hopes and disappointments of a many years’ engagement, begun at a reasonable age for such matters, and now terminated only because the bedridden brother, to whom the bride had devoted herself during an ordinary lifetime, had at last ended his days in peace. Mr. and Mrs. Gawkins Drum forestalled their neighbours’ laugh by their own, and soon the laugh against them died out, and every one accepted their house as amongst the pleasantest resorts in Brompton-on-Sea.

Miss Drum, however, felt less leniently towards her brother and sister-in-law, and deliberately regarded them from a shocked point of view. The wedding took place at Richmond, where the bride resided; and the honeymoon came to an end whilst Lucy entertained her old friend, during that long visit at Notting Hill, which promised to colour all Jane’s future.

‘My dear,’ said Miss Drum to her deferential listener; ‘My dear, Sarah,’—and Lucy felt that offending Sarah could only be the bride,—‘Sarah’ shall not suffer for Gawkins’ folly and her own. I will not fail to visit her in her new home, and to notice her on all proper occasions, but I cannot save her from being ridiculous. I did not wait till I was sixty to make up my mind against wedlock, though perhaps’—and the old lady bridled—‘I also may have endured the preference of some infatuated man. Lucy, my dear, take an old woman’s advice: marry, if you mean to marry, before you are sixty, or else remain like myself; otherwise, you make yourself simply ridiculous.’

And Lucy, smiling, assured her that she would either marry before sixty or not at all; and added, with some earnestness, that she did not think she should ever marry. To which Miss Drum answered with stateliness: ‘Very well; do one thing or do the other, only do not become ridiculous.’

Yet the old lady softened that evening, when she found herself, as it were, within the radius of the contemned bride. Despite her sixty years, and in truth she looked less than her age, Mrs. Gawkins Drum was a personable little woman, with plump red cheeks, gentle eyes, and hair of which the soft brown was threaded, but not overpowered, by grey. There was no affectation of youthfulness in her gown, which was of slate-coloured silk; nor in her cap, which came well on her head; nor in her manner to her guests, which was cordial; nor in her manner to her husband, which was affectionate, with the undemonstrative affectionateness that might now have been appropriate had they married forty years earlier.

Her kiss of welcome was returned frostily by Miss Drum, warmly by Lucy. Mr. Drum at first looked a little sheepish under his sister’s severe salutation. Soon all were seated at tea.

‘Do you take cream and sugar?’ asked the bride, looking at her new sister.

‘No sugar, I thank you,’ was the formal reply. ‘And it will be better, Sarah, that you should call me Elizabeth. Though I am an old woman your years do not render it unsuitable, and I wish to be sisterly.’

‘Thank you, dear Elizabeth,’ answered Mrs. Gawkins, cheerily; ‘I hope, indeed, we shall be sisterly. It would be sad times with me if I found I had brought coldness into my new home.’

But Miss Drum would not thaw yet. ‘Yes, I have always maintained, and I maintain still, that there must be faults on both sides if a marriage, if any marriage whatever, introduces dissension into a family circle. And I will do my part, Sarah.’

‘Yes, indeed;’ but Sarah knew not what more to say.

Mr. Drum struck in,—‘Lucy, my dear’—she had been a little girl perched on his knee when her father asked him years before to be trustee,—‘Lucy, my dear, you’re not in full bloom. Look at my old lady, and guess: what’s a recipe for roses?’

‘For shame, Gawkins!’ cried both old ladies; one with a smile, the other with a frown.

Still, as the evening wore on. Miss Drum slowly thawed. Having, as it were once for all, placed her hosts in the position of culprits at the moral bar, having sat in judgment on them, and convicted them in the ears of all men (represented by Lucy), she admitted them to mercy, and dismissed them with a qualified pardon. What most softened her towards the offending couple was their unequivocal profession of rheumatism. When she unbendingly declined to remain seated at the supper-table one minute beyond half-past ten, she alleged rheumatism as her impelling motive; and Gawkins and Sarah immediately proclaimed their own rheumatic experience and sympathies. As Miss Drum observed to Lucy on their way home, ‘Old people don’t confess to rheumatism if they wish to appear young.’

Thus the feud subsided, though Miss Drum to the end of her life occasionally spoke of her sister-in-law as ‘that poor silly thing,’ and of her brother as of one who should have known better.

Whilst, on her side, Mrs. Gawkins Drum remarked to her husband, ‘What a very old-looking woman that Miss Charlmont is, if she’s not thirty, as you say. I never saw such an old, faded-looking woman of her age.’