Among the earliest of their visitors was Ellen Streightley, who had received a polite invitation from Katharine, a few days after her arrival in England. This invitation had included Mrs. Streightley; but there had been no serious wish on the part of Katharine that it should be accepted, and a satisfactory conviction that there was no danger of such an event. Any thing like rapprochement between his mother and his wife was beyond Robert's expectation, almost beyond his desire. They belonged to two distinct worlds of thought, feeling, habits, and ideas; and though he comprehended the fact rather by instinct than by perception, he did comprehend it too fully to be led into any danger of making an effort to bring them together, which must be unsuccessful, and might be disastrous. Mrs. Streightley's naturally quiet temper had made her accept Robert's marriage with tranquil acquiescence. Her son would be less widely parted from her than most sons from their mothers, under such circumstances; they would still have many subjects of common interest, and she must be content with that. She had never seriously expected that Robert would make a selection from their narrow circle; she had not expected that he would be attracted by the Miss Pratts and the Miss Perkinses of the Brixton connection, who exchanged patterns for Berlin-wool work and manuscript music with Ellen, who wore Oxford-Street bonnets, and took notes of Sunday's sermon and Wednesday evening's lecture. She had been content so long as Robert made no choice at all, but devoted himself exclusively to his business; and now that he had chosen a beautiful, fashionable young lady, whose habits, whose pursuits, whose very speech was all but unintelligible to her, she would be content still. Her religious principles were largely assisted by her natural temperament; and their combined action made her the most inoffensive, the most distant, and the most silent of mothers-in-law.
"But you have never seen my fine country-house, mother; you will surely come and see it," Robert remonstrated, when his mother requested him to bear her excuses to Katharine.
"I shall see it in time, my dear," she answered, "never fear; but you must let me have my own way; you know I have always had it;" and she smiled gently, with the touching smile of the old looking back upon the past "Your wife must have many friends whom she wishes to see. I could neither bear to find myself among fine people, to whom I am totally unaccustomed, nor to feel that I was excluding her friends. You will be constantly in town, Robert, and you will come and see me very often." And then she began to speak of his health, to inquire into the details of Katharine's illness at Martigny; and Robert saw that the matter must remain as it was for the present. It was, however, decided that Ellen should accept Katharine's invitation; and accordingly she made her appearance at Middlemeads within a fortnight of Katharine's installation in her new house. It would have needed a less kindly nature than Katharine's--in which, perverted as it was, true womanly feeling had its place--to resist the frank and innocent gaiety of Ellen, the naïf pleasure which she showed in the inspection of the house, her admiration of the luxurious furniture, and her surprise at finding herself in a scene of such unaccustomed splendour, and yet, after a fashion, at home there. All this was her brother's--all this was Robert's, who had been so well content with the modest comfort of the Brixton villa; and the beautiful young woman who had inspired him with tastes thus gratified, and admitted him into a circle of society of which Ellen had never before had even a glimpse, was her own sister-in-law. She had a kind of prescriptive right to be intimate with her; she wondered whether she might venture to call her "Katharine." Not on the first day of her visit certainly; for though Katharine was perfectly polite, there was no approach to familiarity in her manner; and she inquired, at luncheon, whether "Miss Streightley" would drive, in a tone which seemed to render any such sisterly appellations as "Ellen" and "Katharine" hopeless. But this did not last: they were, after all, two young girls; and the very superiority of intellect and of breeding, of which Katharine was conscious, made her readier to thaw towards Ellen, whose admiration of her brother's beautiful wife was as sincere and single-hearted as it was warm and humble. The warnings of the Rev. Decimus lost their power over the girl's imagination; she yielded to the charm which Katharine exercised over all whom she chose to attract, and was almost as much dazzled as her brother. To Robert the good understanding which subsisted between the two was a source of the purest pleasure; he loved his sister dearly, and he had a sense of her piety, her gentleness, her humility of mind, and the beneficence of such an influence, though he had never defined these things to his own mind or reasoned upon them. On the whole, these early days at Middlemeads were good days; they were a fair seedtime, and the harvest might have been blessed; but the enemy had sown the tares early, and they were destined to flourish in sinister strength.
As for Katharine, the genuine affection and admiration with which her sister-in-law regarded her soon began to be sweet and precious to her; her former life had been isolated from all such ties of girlish friendship and confidence, and she had despised them in theory, holding them among the missish follies which she laughed at and held herself above. She had aspired to the reputation of a woman of the world, and she had attained it; and in right of it had no intimacies except of convenience, and no relations with her own sex except those of the most superficial social observance. To Katharine, therefore--who had not, since she left the elegant establishment in which she had acquired all the graces with which nature had not previously supplied her, had any more congenial companion for the hours not absolutely demanded by society than Lady Henmarsh--the novelty of such a friendship as that offered her by Ellen Streightley possessed an ineffable charm. The purity, the simplicity, the very narrowness of the girl's mind pleased her; the unquestioning submission with which she received her opinions, the unqualified admiration which she evinced in every look and word, conveyed, by their simple sincerity, the subtlest charm of flattery. Katharine felt that Ellen's presence did her good; that the peace of mind which pervaded her diffused a tranquil and wholesome atmosphere around her: she did not know whence came the salutary influence; she had never been taught to recognise piety and principle by their peaceable fruits; but she felt all that she did not analyse; and above all she became conscious that she was beginning to live less for herself--that she was acquiring new, unselfish, and harmless interests. Her heart had begun to soften in those days; she was won by the artless confidence of the girl to whom she was an object of wondering admiration, and the wrath and bitterness of her soul began to subside.
The last thing in the world to occur to such a mind as that of Ellen Streightley would have been such a possibility as a marriage without perfect affection and confidence. She had never met with an instance of any thing so dreadful and unnatural out of a novel; and the Rev. Decimus disapproved of novels, so that she had discontinued their perusal, and had even had the hardihood to endeavour to induce Katharine to do likewise, and to substitute the interesting details of the Missionary Record, over which she was accustomed to shiver and cry a good deal. Thus, Ellen never doubted for a moment that Katharine's had been, in the language of young ladies, "a love-match;" and the matter-of-course way in which she took this for granted, founded all her talk to Katharine upon it, and treated her brother and his wife as absolutely one in undivided interest and unreserved confidence, though, no doubt, a conclusive evidence of Ellen's own dullness of perception, had all the good effect which an opposite quality, and the exercise of the most perfect tact, could have produced. It was impossible to resist the influence of this frank and perfect belief in the mutual good faith of their relation; it was impossible to resist the gay and happy simplicity which persisted in believing in its ideal; and, but for the sore spot in Katharine's heart, so obstinately hidden, and the sorer spot in Robert's conscience, which ever and anon pained him horribly and vainly, the angel of peace might have found an abiding resting-place with them then. The soft rustle of his wings was often audible to both in those early days; to which they were destined to look back in the future with vain yearning and regret.
"Were you not surprised, Robert, to hear of Hester's good fortune?" said Ellen Streightley to her brother one morning, as the little party were engaged in the pleasing occupation of reading their letters, of which an unusually large number had been laid upon the breakfast-table.
"Yes," said Robert, raising his eyes from a letter which he had been reading with a moody and troubled expression. "Yes, I was indeed, and very much pleased. She was an admirable example of industry and courage. I never could bear to think of a woman having to work; that is a man's part in life. Is your letter from Hester?" he asked, in a tone of interest.
"O yes," said Ellen; "Hester is just the same to me as ever, though Matilda Perkins said she wouldn't be, and I must be very silly to imagine a rich heiress would care about me. I can't think how people can be so mean; can you, Robert? Only fancy any one imagining that money can influence people in that way! I am ashamed to say she made me feel almost afraid of Hester; and I cannot tell you how relieved I was when I found her just the same. I was very near confessing to her that I had wronged her in my thoughts; but then I knew they were not my thoughts, but Matilda Perkins's; and I had no business to tell her sins, you know; and after all, perhaps she was not so much to blame,--she did not know Hester as well as I do."
Katharine, who had laid aside her letters, and was now busily crumbling bread into a saucer half-full of cream--an operation which her beautiful little Maltese dog, Topaze, watched with placid but appreciative interest--smiled at the ingenious eagerness with which Ellen sought to exculpate one friend and to exalt another. Robert's attention strayed from his sister; his eyes were following the movements of his wife's slender fingers. She placed the saucer on the ground and called her dog.
"Here, Topaze, come and eat your breakfast!--And now, Ellen, tell me all about this wonderful Miss Gould. She is tremendously rich, isn't she, and very handsome, blue, and bel esprit, and all the rest of it?"