The Vicar of Wrexhill

by Frances Milton Trollope

"At least, sir, you must let me consult my mother about it," said Helen, contriving to keep the table between them, and believing that he was there only in consequence of his being intoxicated. "Let me ask my mother's consent, Mr. Corbold."

Corbold laughed aloud. "You think me tipsy, my sweet girl; but if I am, trust me it's no more than just to give me courage to teach you your duty. My charming Helen! let go the table, and understand the thing at once. My cousin. Mr. Cartwright is under some obligations to me, and he means to settle them all by giving me a pretty fortune with you; and as he knows that unhappily you are not converted as yet, and have shown yourself not over christian-like in return for my love, it is he himself who invented this scheme of having you sent up here when all the servants were out of the house—and of my being here ready to meet you, and to teach you your duty to him, and to your mother, and to your heavenly father, and to me;—and so now you know all and every thing, and I have got the key of the room in my pocket.—And will you consent to be my wife, beginning from this very minute?"

Dreadful as Helen's terror was, her senses did not leave her; on the contrary, all the strength of her mind seemed to be roused, and her faculties sharpened, by the peril that beset her. She doubted not for a moment that his statement respecting Mr. Cartwright's part in this villany was true, and that she was indeed left in the power of this detested being, with no help but the protection of Heaven and her own courage. She fixed her eye steadily on that of Corbold, and perceived that as he talked, the look of intoxication increased; she therefore skilfully prolonged the conversation by asking him, if indeed she must be his wife, where they were to live, whether her sister Fanny might live with them, whether he ever meant to take her to London, and the like; contriving, as she did so, to push the table, which still continued between them, in such a direction as to leave her between it and the door of her mother's bed-chamber. Corbold was evidently losing his head, and appeared aware of it; for he stopped short in his replies and professions of passionate love that he was making: and exclaiming with an oath that he would be trifled with no longer, he suddenly thrust the table from between them, and again threw his arms round Helen's waist.

She was not, however, wholly unprepared to receive him. On first approaching the table that had hitherto befriended her, she perceived on it a large vial of spirits of hartshorn: this she had taken possession of, and held firmly in her hand; and at the moment that Corbold bent his audacious head to kiss her, she discharged the whole contents upon his eyes and face, occasioning a degree of blindness and suffocation, that for the moment totally disabled him. He screamed with the sudden pain, and raised his hands to his tortured eyes. Before he removed them, Helen had already passed through her mother's bed-room, and was flying by a back staircase to the servants' room below. Without waiting to see if she were pursued, she opened a back door that led into the stable-yard, and, after a moment's consideration, proceeded across it, into a lane which led in one direction to the kitchen gardens, and in the other into the road to Oakley.

Even at that moment Helen had time to remember that if she turned her steps towards the kitchen gardens, she should pass by a park gate which would immediately lead her to all the safety that the protection of an assembled multitude could give. But she remembered also that in a few hours she should again be left in the hands of Mr. Cartwright, and, inwardly uttering a solemn vow that nothing should ever again make her wilfully submit to this, she darted forward, unmindful of her uncovered head, and, with a degree of speed more proportioned to her agitation than her strength, pursued the short cut across the fields to Oakley, and entering the grounds by the gate which led to the lawn, perceived Sir Gilbert, Lady Harrington, and their son, seated on a garden bench, under the shelter of a widely spreading cedar-tree.

Helen knew that she was now safe, and she relaxed her speed, slowly and with tottering steps approaching the friends from whom, notwithstanding their long estrangement, her heart anticipated a warm and tender welcome. Yet they did not rise to meet her.

"Perhaps," thought she, "they do not know me;" and it was then she recollected that her hair was hanging dishevelled about her face without hat or cap to shelter it. She was greatly heated, and her breath and strength barely sufficed to bring her within a few yards of the party, when totally exhausted, she sat down upon the turf, and burst into tears.

Colonel Harrington had not written the letter to Helen, which the Vicar of Wrexhill destroyed, without having put both his parents in his confidence. Lady Harrington's fond affection for her god-daughter, which her enforced absence had in no degree lessened, rendered the avowal of her son's attachment a matter of unmixed joy; and though Sir Gilbert declared that he would as soon stand in the relation of brother to his Satanic Majesty as to Cartwright, he at length gave his apparently sulky consent with perhaps as much real pleasure as his lady herself.

Both the one and the other, however, knew perfectly well that their son would have been an excellent match for Helen, even when her father was alive, and would, as it was supposed, have given her a fortune of forty thousand pounds; and they felt some degree of triumph, neither unamiable nor ungenerous in its nature, at the idea of securing to one at least of poor Mowbray's family a station in society that not even their connexion with Mr. Cartwright could tarnish.

The whole family understood the position of things at the Park too well to be surprised at no answer being sent express to Colonel Harrington's letter, and the following post was waited for with pleasurable though impatient anxiety. But when it arrived without bringing any answer, and another and another followed with no notice taken of a proposal of marriage, which, as Sir Gilbert said, the proudest woman in England might have been glad to accept, the misery of the young man himself, and the anger and indignation of his parents, were about equally vehement.