MISS MARRABLE’S ELOPEMENT.
IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER I.
Miss Martha Marrable, a spinster lady of five-and-fifty, is the last of her race. Her only brother, Mr Clement Marrable, never married, and died twenty years ago at Baden-Baden, whither he had gone to drink the waters; and her two sisters, Maria and Lætitia, although they did marry, did not live to become middle-aged women. The elder, Maria, after becoming the wife of Mr Langton Larkspur, of the firm of Scrip, Larkspur, and Company, bankers, of Threadneedle Street, gave birth to a single child, a daughter, who was named Lucy; and the younger, Lætitia, having been led to the altar by Mr Septimus Allerton, of the firm of Allerton, Bond, and Benedict, brokers, of Pancake Lane, presented her husband with twin girls, of whom one only—and she was called Amy—survived her extreme infancy. It is therefore not astonishing that Miss Martha Marrable, a well-to-do woman without family ties, is exceedingly fond of the daughters of her two dead sisters. She usually has them to stay with her at least twice a year—once in the early summer at her house in Grosvenor Street; and once in the autumn at the seaside, or in Italy, whither she goes occasionally, accompanied—to the great wonder of the foreigners—by a courier, a man-servant, two maids, eleven boxes, and a green parrot. And as she is very kind to her nieces, and denies them nothing, it is not surprising that they are fully as fond of her as she is of them. But Miss Martha Marrable is growing old; whereas Miss Lucy Larkspur and Miss Amy Allerton are both young, and intend to remain so for some years to come. It is not, therefore, to be expected that the three ladies should invariably think exactly alike on all subjects. And indeed, I am happy to say that there are not many women who do agree with Miss Marrable upon all questions; for although she is as good-hearted an old spinster as ever breathed, she is, unfortunately, a man-hater.
I have looked into the dictionary to see what the verb ‘to hate’ signifies, and I find that it means ‘to despise,’ or ‘to dislike intensely.’ Let it not, however, be supposed that the word ‘man-hater’ is a stronger one than ought to be applied to Miss Marrable; for I am really not quite certain that it is altogether strong enough. She regards men as inferior animals, and looks down upon them with lofty contempt. ‘Who,’ she once said to her niece Lucy, ‘has turned the world upside down, filled it with poverty and unhappiness, and deluged it with blood? It is Man, Lucy. If woman had always governed the earth, we should have had no Cæsar Borgias, no Judge Jefferieses, no Bonapartes, and no Nana Sahibs.’ And yet Miss Martha Marrable can never see a vagrant begging in the street without giving him alms. The truth is, that although she detests and despises man, she pities him; just as she pities the poor idiot whom she sometimes sees grinning and gibbering by the wayside in Italy.
These being her sentiments, Miss Marrable has not, of course, many male acquaintances. She is on good, but not affectionate terms with her widowed brothers-in-law, Mr Langton Larkspur and Mr Septimus Allerton. She once a year invites her man of business, Mr John Bones, of Cook’s Court, to dine with her and them in Grosvenor Street; and she is civil to the rector of her parish, and to the medical man whom she would call in to attend her in case of illness. Yet Mr Larkspur once told Mr Allerton that this feminine dragon had had a violent love-affair when she was nineteen; and Mr Allerton—whose connection with the Marrable family is of much more recent date than that of Lucy’s father—actually declared that he could well believe it. If, however, Miss Marrable did have a love-affair in her youth, I am not inclined at this time of day to cast it as a reproach in her teeth. Boys will be boys; and girls, I suppose, will be girls, though they may live to see the error of their ways, and be none the worse for their follies. One thing is certain, and that is, that at the present time, and for at least five-and-twenty years past, Miss Martha Marrable has ceased to dream of the tender passion. She still occasionally talks vaguely of going up the Nile, or of visiting the Yellowstone Region, ere she dies; but she never contemplates the possibility of getting married; and I believe that she would as soon think of allowing a man to believe that she regarded him with anything but polite aversion, as she would think of going into business as a steeple-jack, and learning to stand on one leg on the top of the cross at the summit of St Paul’s Cathedral.
And yet Miss Martha Marrable was last year the heroine of a terrible scandal; and many of her misanthropic female friends have never since been able to completely believe her professions of hatred of man. The affair gave rise to many whispers, and was even, I understand, guardedly alluded to, with just and virtuous deprecation, in the columns of the Woman’s Suffrage Journal, as a terrible but happily rare instance of womanly weakness and frivolity; and since the true story has never been told, I feel that it is only fair to tell it, and by telling it, to defend Miss Marrable from the dastardly charges that have been made against her established reputation for good sense and unflinching contempt of the rougher sex.
Towards the end of August, Miss Marrable and her two nieces left London for North Wales, and after a long and tiresome journey, reached Abermaw, in Merionethshire, and took rooms at the Cors-y-Gedol Hotel. They were accompanied, as usual, by the two maids and the green parrot; but the courier and the man-servant, being males, and their services not being imperatively required, they were left behind in London. Lucy had just celebrated her twenty-third birthday, and Amy was just about to celebrate her twenty-first; and—although I am sorry to have to record it—I am by no means astonished that they were both in love. Lucy, during the whole of the previous season, had been determinedly flirting with a designing young artist named Robert Rhodes; and Amy, younger and less experienced than her cousin, had been carrying on, even more sentimentally, with Mr Vivian Jellicoe, who, being heir to a baronetcy, found that position so arduous and fatiguing, that he was quite unfitted for any active occupation of a laborious character. Of course Miss Marrable knew nothing of these affairs. Had she suspected them, she would perhaps have not taken her nieces with her to Abermaw; for it happened that at that very watering-place, Sir Thomas Jellicoe and his son Vivian were staying when the three ladies, the two maids, and the green parrot arrived. But no foresight on Miss Marrable’s part could have prevented Mr Robert Rhodes from following Lucy to North Wales. That adventurous artist had made up his mind to spend the autumn in Miss Larkspur’s neighbourhood; and even if Miss Marrable had carried off her elder niece to Timbuctoo or the Society Islands, Mr Rhodes would have gone after the pair by the next train, steamboat, diligence, or caravan available.
Upon the morning, therefore, after Miss Marrable’s arrival at Abermaw, she and her nieces were comfortably installed at the Cors-y-Gedol Hotel; while at the Red Goat, close by, Sir Thomas Jellicoe and Vivian occupied rooms on the first floor, and Mr Rhodes had a bedroom on the third.
In the course of that afternoon, Miss Martha Marrable, accompanied by her nieces, and followed at a respectful distance by the two maids, walked in the sunshine upon the hard sands that stretch, for I do not know how many hundred yards at low water, between the rocky hills behind the little town and the margin of Cardigan Bay. The weather was hot and sultry, and the unrippled sea looked like molten lead in the glare. Much exercise was therefore out of the question; and ere long, the three ladies sat down on the seaward side of a rush-grown sandhill to read, leaving the two maids to stroll farther if they chose to do so, and to explore at their leisure the unaccustomed wonders of the seashore.
Miss Martha having arranged her sunshade to her satisfaction, opened a little volume on The Rights of the Slaves of England, while Lucy devoted herself to one of Ouida’s novels, and Amy plunged deep into Keats. In five minutes The Rights of the Slaves of England fell heavily to the sand; and in three minutes more, Miss Marrable was emitting sounds which, but that I know her to be a woman who has no weakness, I should call snores. From that moment, Lucy and Amy, as if by common consent, read no more.
‘Lucy,’ said Amy mysteriously to her cousin, ‘I have seen him.’
‘So have I,’ said Lucy.
‘What a curious coincidence!’
‘Not at all. He told me that he intended to follow us.’
‘What! Vivian told you?’
‘O no! Bother Vivian! You are always thinking of Vivian. I mean Robert.’
‘He here too!’ exclaimed Amy. ‘I meant Vivian. I saw him half an hour ago, with his father.’
‘Well, I advise you not to let Aunt Martha know too much,’ said Lucy. ‘If she suspects anything, she will take us back to London this afternoon.’
Miss Marrable murmured uneasily in her sleep. A fly had settled on her chin.
‘Hush!’ exclaimed the girls in unison, and then they were silent.
Not long afterwards, they caught sight of two young men who were walking arm-in-arm along the sand, a couple of hundred yards away.
‘Look! There they are!’ whispered Lucy. ‘Aunt must not see them. We must go and warn them.’ And, stealthily accompanied by her cousin, she crept away from Miss Marrable, and ran towards the approaching figures.
I need not describe the greetings that ensued. Such things are the commonplaces of seaside encounters between young men and young women who have likings for each other, and they have been described a thousand times. Suffice it to say that, a few minutes later, Lucy and Robert were sitting together under the shadow of a bathing-machine, while Amy and Vivian were confidentially talking nonsense a dozen yards off. More than half an hour elapsed ere the girls returned to Miss Marrable; but fortunately the excellent spinster was still murmuring sleepily at the fly on her chin; and when she awoke, she had no suspicion that she had been deserted by her charges. As she walked back with them to the hotel, nevertheless, as if with a strange intuitive comprehension of danger in the air, she held forth to them upon her favourite topic—the unfathomable baseness of man; and gravely warned them against ever allowing themselves even for a single moment to entertain any feeling, save one of polite aversion to the hated sex.
Thus matters went on for a week or more, Lucy and Amy meeting their lovers every day in secret, and Miss Marrable suspecting nothing. Although she knew Sir Thomas Jellicoe and his son, she treated them, whenever she encountered them, with such freezing courtesy, that they did not seek her society. As for Robert Rhodes, she did not know him; and he therefore escaped her lofty slights.
But in due time a crisis arrived; and in order that the full bearings of the situation may be properly understood, I must briefly explain the characters of Miss Martha Marrable’s undutiful nieces.
Lucy Larkspur has but little romance in her composition; she has strong feelings, but not much sentiment; and she is one of those girls who are perfectly open with their hearts. She loved Robert Rhodes, and, as she knew quite well that he also loved her, she made no secret to him of her affection for him. Amy Allerton, on the other hand, is, and always has been, sentimentally inclined. She believes, rightly or wrongly, that it is a very charming thing to
Let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek;
and she would as soon have thought of permitting Vivian Jellicoe to think that she loved him, as of attempting to win and woo the Sultan of Turkey. The consequence was that Miss Marrable, who fondly imagined that she knew all the thoughts of her elder niece, trusted her much more than she trusted her younger. She regarded Lucy as an open book that might be easily read, and Amy as a kind of oracular voice that, while saying or appearing to say one thing, might mean exactly the opposite. Miss Marrable was destined to discover that she was to some extent wrong in her estimate, so far, at all events, as Lucy was concerned; and her discovery of her error was, I grieve to say, accompanied by a good deal of pain and mortification.
Ten days had passed; and the two pair of lovers had made considerable progress. Amy, it is true, had not declared herself to Vivian, who, being a bashful young man, had, perhaps, not pressed her sufficiently; but Lucy and Robert understood one another completely, and were secretly engaged to get married at the earliest opportunity. Vivian’s bashfulness could not, however, endure for an unlimited time. One morning, he and Amy found themselves together on the rocks behind the town, and the opportunity being favourable, he screwed up his courage, told her that he had never loved any one but her; and obtained a coyly given promise that she would be his.
Natures like Amy’s, when they once take fire, often burn rapidly. On Monday, she became engaged to Vivian Jellicoe; on Tuesday, Vivian begged her to name a day for the wedding, and she refused; and on Wednesday, Vivian, knowing the peculiar sentiments of Miss Martha Marrable, and doubtful also, perhaps, whether his father would not throw impediments in the way of his early marriage, proposed an elopement; and Amy, with some hesitation, consented.
When she returned from her secret meeting with her lover, she of course confided her plan to her cousin. ‘How foolish you are,’ said Lucy; ‘you know that your father would not have you do that for the world; and you will make an enemy of Aunt Martha, who is like a mother to us girls.’
‘But she would never agree to our marrying, if we consulted her,’ objected Amy; ‘and if she knew anything of our plans, I am sure that she would manage to frustrate them. She is a dear old thing, but—— Well, she is peculiar on those points.’
‘I have told you what I think,’ said Lucy, with an assumption of wisdom that was perhaps warranted by her superior age. ‘Don’t be foolish.’
But Amy was already beyond the influence of counsel. She persisted in her intention, and even claimed Lucy’s sympathy and assistance, which, of course, Lucy could not ultimately withhold.
Ere an elopement can be successfully carried out, in the face especially of the jealous watchfulness of a man-hating spinster lady of middle age, numerous preparations have to be made; and, in the case of Vivian and Amy, the making of these preparations involved correspondence. Amy, therefore, bribed one of her aunt’s maids to act as a go-between; and the maid in question, with a fidelity that is rare, and at the same time a treachery that, I fear, is common in her kind, promptly carried Vivian’s first letter to her mistress.
Miss Martha Marrable without scruple tore open the envelope and angrily perused its contents. ‘My own Amy,’ ran the audacious communication—‘Let us settle, then, to go on Wednesday. At nine o’clock in the evening, a carriage-and-pair shall be ready to take us to Harlech, where you can stay for the night with the Joneses, who are old friends of ours; and on Thursday by mid-day we shall be married, and, I trust, never afterwards parted again. We can arrange the details between this and then. But write, and tell me that you agree.—Your ever devoted
Vivian.’