Running the Gauntlet: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

[CHAPTER V]

GEORGIE.

If, twelve months before the production of Mr. Spofforth's play (which necessarily forms a kind of Hegira in this story), you had told Georgie Stanfield that she was destined to be the wife of a baronet, the mistress of a house in one of the best parts of London, the possessor of horses and carriages, and all the happiness which a very large yearly income can command, your assertions would have been met, not with ridicule--for Georgie was too gentle and too well-bred for that--but with utter disbelief. Her whole life had been passed in the little Devonshire village of which her father was vicar, and it seemed to her impossible that she could ever live anywhere else. To potter about in the garden during the summer in a large flapping straw hat and a cotton gown, to tie up drooping flowers and snip off dead leaves; to stand on the little terrace dreamily gazing over the outspread sea, watching the red sails of the fishing-smacks skimming away to the horizon, or the trim yachts lying off the little port--the yachts whose fine-lady passengers, and gallant swells all blue broad-cloth and club-button, seen at a distance,--were Georgie's sole links with the fashionable world; to visit and read to the bed-ridden old women and the snuffling, coughing old men; to superintend the preparation of charitably-dispensed gruel and soup; to traverse Mavor's Spelling-book up and down, up and down, over and over again, in the company of the stupid girls of the village-school; to read the Cullompton Chronicle to her father on Thursdays, and to copy out his sermon on the Saturday evenings,--these had been the occupations of Georgie Stanfield's uneventful life.

She had not had even the excitement of flirtations, a few of which fall to the lot of nearly every girl, be she pretty or plain, rich or poor, town or country-bred. The military depots are now so numerous that it is hard, indeed, if at least a couple of subalterns cannot be found to come over any distance in the rumbling dog-cart hired from the inn in the provincial town where they are quartered; and though in Georgie's days there was no croquet,--that best of excuses for social gathering and mild flirtation,--yet there were archery-meetings, horticultural shows, and picnics. Failing the absence of the military, even the most-out-of-the-way country village can produce a curate; and an intending flirt has merely to tone-down certain notions and expand others, to modify her scarlets and work-up her grays, and she will have, if not a very exciting, at all events a very interesting, time in playing her fish. But there were no barracks within miles of Fishbourne, nor any temptations there to have attracted officers from them, if there had been. There were no resident gentry in the place, and the nearest house of any importance--Weston Tower, the seat of old Lady Majoribanks--was twenty miles off, and old Lady Majoribanks kept no company As for the curates, there was one, certainly; but Mr. Lucas had "assisted" Georgie's father for the last eighteen years, was fifty years old, and had a little wife as slow and as gray as the old pony which he used to ride to outlying parts of the parish.

Besides, if there had been eligible men in scores, what had they to do with Georgie Stanfield, or she with them? Was she not engaged to Charles Mitford?--at least, had she not been so affianced until that dreadful business about something wrong that brought poor Charley into disgrace? and was that sufficient to permit her to break her plighted word? Mr. Mitford, Charles's father, had been a banker and brewer at Cullompton, and had had a country cottage at Fishbourne, a charming little place for his family to come to in the summer; and Mr. Stanfield had been Charley's tutor; and when the family were away at Cullompton in the winter, Charley had remained at the vicarage; and what so likely as that Charley should fall in love with Georgie, then a tall slip of a girl in short petticoats and frilled trousers and very thin legs, with her hair in a net; or that Georgie should have reciprocated the attachment? Both the fathers were delighted at the arrangement; and there was no mother on either side to talk of extreme youth, the chance of change, or to interpose other womanly objections. There came a time when Charley, then a tall handsome fellow, was to go up to Oxford; and then Georgie, to whom the outward and visible frill period was long past, and who was a lovely budding girl of sweet seventeen, laid her head on his breast on the night before he went away, and promised never to forget him, but to be his and his alone.

Ah, those promises never to forget--those whispered words of love breathed by lips trembling under the thick cigar-scented moustache into delicate little ears trellised by braids fresh from the fingers of the lady's-maid! They are not much to the Corydons of St. James's Street, or the Phyllises of Belgravia. By how many different lips, and into how many different ears, are the words whispered and the vows breathed in the course of one London season! I declare I never pass through any of the great squares and streets, and see the men enclosing the balconies with striped calico, that I do not wonder to myself whether, amongst all the nonsense that has been talked beneath that well-worn awning-stuff, there has been any that has laid the foundation for, or given the crowning touch to, an honest simple love-match, a marriage undertaken by two people out of sheer regard for each other, and permitted by relatives and friends, without a single thought of money or position to be gained on either side. If there be any, they must be very few in number; and this, be it observed, not on account of that supposed favourite pastime of parents--the disposal of their daughters' hands and happiness to the highest bidder, the outcry against which has been so general, and is really, I believe, so undeserved. The circumstance is, I take it, entirely ascribable to the lax morality of the age, under which a girl engages herself to a man without the slightest forethought, often without the least intention of holding to her word, not unfrequently from the increased opportunities such a state of things affords her for flirting with some other man, and under which she can break her engagement and jilt her lover without compromising herself in the least in the eyes of society. Besides, in the course of a London life these vows and pledges are tendered so often as to be worn almost threadbare from the number of times they have been pledged; and as excess of familiarity always breeds contempt, the repetition of solemn phrases gradually takes from us the due appreciation of their meaning, and we repeat them parrot-wise, without the smallest care for what we are saying.

But that promise of love and truth and remembrance uttered by Georgie Stanfield on the sands at Fishbourne, under the yellow harvest-moon, with her head pillowed on Charles Mitford's breast and her arms clasped round his neck, came from a young heart which had known no guile, and was kept as religiously as was Sir Galahad's vow of chastity. Within a year after Charley's departure for Oxford, his father's affairs, which, as it afterwards appeared, had long been in hopeless confusion, became irretrievably involved. The bank stopped payment, and the old man, unable to face the storm of ignominy by which he imagined he should be assailed, committed suicide. The smash was complete; Charles had to leave the University, and became entirely dependent on his uncle, Sir Percy Mitford, who declined to see him, but offered to purchase for him a commission in a marching regiment, and to allow him fifty pounds a year. The young man accepted the offer; and by the same post wrote to Georgie, telling her all, and giving her the option of freeing herself from the engagement. It Was a gentlemanly act; but a cheap bit of generosity, after all. He might have staked the fifty pounds a year his uncle had promised him, on the fidelity of such a girl as Georgie Stanfield, more especially in the time of trouble. Her father, too, with his old disregard of the future, entirely approved of his daughter's standing by her lover under the circumstances of his altered fortune; and two letters--one breathing a renewal of love and trust, the other full of encouragement and hope--went away from Fishbourne parsonage, and brought tears into the eyes of their recipient, as he sat on the edge of a truckle-bed in a whitewashed room in Canterbury Barracks.

The vow of constancy and its renewal were two little epochs in Georgie's quiet life. Then, not very long after the occurrence of the last,--some six months,--there came a third, destined never to be forgotten. There had been no letter from Charley for some days, and Georgie had been in the habit of walking across the lawn to meet the postman and question him over the garden-wall.

One heavy dun August morning, when the clouds were solemnly gathering up together, the air dead and still, the trees hushed and motionless, Georgie had seen the old man with a letter in his hand, and had hastened, even more eagerly than usual, across the lawn, to be proportionately disappointed when the postman shook his head, and pointing to the letter, said, "For the master, miss." The next minute she heard the sharp clang of the gate-bell, and saw her father take the letter from the postman's hand at his little study-window. Some inward prompting--she knew not what--kept Georgie's eyes on her father. She saw him take out his spectacles, wipe then, and carefully adjust them; then take the letter, and holding it at nearly arm's length, examine its address; then comfortably settling himself in his armchair at the window, prepare to read it. Then Georgie saw the old man fall backward in his chair, his hand dropping powerless by his side, and the letter fluttering from it to the ground. Without uttering a cry, Georgie ran quickly to the house; but when she reached the study, Mr. Stanfield was sitting upright in his chair, and had picked the letter from the floor.

"Papa dearest," said Georgie, "you gave me such a fright. I was watching you from the garden, and I thought I saw you faint. O papa, you are ill! How white and scared you look! What is it, papa darling?--tell me."