That Unfortunate Marriage, Vol. 1

by Frances Eleanor Trollope

This latter accusation was true. If England had shown no maternal affection for her long-absent son, the son returned her hard-heartedness with interest. Indeed, in his case, it turned into active resentment. He got tired of country houses and town mansions where he was received but coolly. He was sarcastic and bitter on the failure of his connections to procure him a lucrative sinecure. He considered that the country was travelling downhill at break-neck speed, and, for his part, he did not feel inclined to move his little finger to impede that fatal course. Moreover, the black coffee was, nine times out of ten, utterly undrinkable. One day he shook the dust of England's inhospitable shores from off his feet, and returned to his shady haunts on the Continent—its irresponsibility, its cafés, its boulevards, and its billiards. And when he was fairly gone, all the Cheffingtons, and the Dormer-Smiths, and the Castlecombes were softened into sympathy; and with much shrugging of shoulders and shaking of heads declared that it was a heartrending spectacle to behold such a man as Augustus Cheffington ruined, crushed, eclipsed, destroyed by his unfortunate marriage.

When he went back to Belgium, he left behind him at school in Brighton his little motherless girl Miranda, familiarly called May. The Honourable Mrs. Cheffington, Augustus's mother, had advised her son to give the little girl a first-rate education, so as to mitigate as far as possible one disastrous effect of the unfortunate marriage, which was, that May had a plebeian mother. Mrs. Cheffington, known throughout all the ramifications of the family as "the dowager," was a hard-featured, selfish old woman, with a black wig, a pale yellow skin, and frowning eyebrows. She lived on a pension which would cease at her death, and she was supposed by some of her relations to be making a purse. They thought it would turn out that the dowager had considerable savings to leave behind her; and they founded this supposition on her never giving away anything during her lifetime. Mrs. Dormer-Smith, Augustus Cheffington's sister, declared that her mother made one exception to her rule of refusing assistance to any of them. She believed that Augustus, who had always been her favourite child, profited by the dowager's indulgence, and managed to extract some money from her tightly-closed purse. And it certainly was true that the old lady had paid May's school bills—so far as they had been paid at all.

But one day the Honourable Anne Miranda Cheffington took off her black wig for the last time, and relaxed her frowning eyebrows. The announcement of her death appeared in the first column of the Times, there was a brief obituary notice in a fashionable journal, and her place knew her no more.

Augustus hastened home to England on the receipt of a telegram from his sister. That is to say, he said he hastened; but he did not arrive in town until some hours after the funeral was over. Mr. Dormer-Smith was somewhat irritated by this tardiness, and observed to his wife that it was just like Augustus to keep out of the way while there was any trouble to be taken, and only arrive in time to be present at the reading of the will. Any expectations that Augustus might have founded on his mother's reluctance to give during her lifetime were quite disappointed. The dowager had no money to bequeath. She had spent nearly the last shilling of her quarter's income. In fact, there was not enough to cover the expenses of the funeral, which were finally paid several months afterwards by Mr. Dormer-Smith.

It seemed almost superfluous, under the circumstances, to have made a will at all. But the will was there. The chief item in it was a quantity of yellow old lace, extremely dirty, and much in need of mending, which was solemnly bequeathed by Mrs. Cheffington to her daughter, Pauline Augusta Clarissa Dormer-Smith. It was set forth at some length how that the lace, being an heirloom of the Cheffingtons, should have descended in due course to the wife of the eldest son, or, failing that, to the eldest daughter of the eldest son; and how this tradition was disregarded in the present case by reason of peculiar and unprecedented family circumstances. This was the dowager's Parthian dart at the unfortunate marriage. There was little other property, except the dingy old furniture of Mrs. Cheffington's house at Richmond, and a few books, treating chiefly of fortification and gunnery, which had belonged to Lieutenant-General the Honourable Augustus Vane Cheffington, the dowager's long-deceased husband.

"What the——What on earth my mother did with her money I can't conjecture!" exclaimed Augustus, staring out of the window of his brother-in-law's drawing-room the day after the funeral.

"She didn't give it to us, Augustus," returned Mrs. Dormer-Smith plaintively. "Even when my boy Cyril went to see her at the end of the holidays, just before returning to Harrow, she never tipped him. Once I think she gave him five shillings. But it's a long time ago; he was a little fellow in petticoats."

"Then what did she do with her money?" repeated Augustus, with an increasingly gloomy scowl at the gardens of the Kensington square on which his eyes rested.

"I believe that, with the exception of what she paid for May's schooling, she spent it on herself."

"Spent it on herself? That's impossible! It was a very good income indeed for a solitary woman, and she lived very quietly."