Kate Coventry: An Autobiography

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

"Bachelor, my dear," said Aunt Deborah as he whisked by, "and not at all a bad-looking man either."

"How do you know he's a bachelor, aunt?" I naturally inquired.

"Common-sense, my dear," replied Aunt Deborah sententiously. "I judge of people by their belongings. No lady could get into that dogcart without dirtying her dress against the wheel; and if he had a wife, that handsome bay horse would go with another in her carriage instead of his. Besides, he wouldn't be so fond of his pointers if he had anything else to care for; and above all, Kate," added my aunt conclusively, "his silk handkerchief wasn't hemmed, and he'd a button wanting in the front of his shirt."

All my life I have had a sinking at my heart when I have heard the ring at that great Dangerfield front door bell. It was better in my poor uncle's time, for he would have made any place lively; but since his death the Park has relapsed into its natural solemnity, and I am quite sure that if ever I do go into a convent my sensations will be exactly like those which I have always experienced when visiting Aunt Horsingham. The moat alone is enough to give one the "blues;" but in addition to that, the thick horse-chestnuts grow up to the very windows, and dark Scotch firs shed a gloom all over the Park. Dangerfield is one of those places that seem always to be in the shade. How the strawberries ever ripen, or the flowers ever bloom, or the birds ever sing there is to me a mystery. Outside there are dark walls and yew hedges and cypresses, and here and there a copper beech, with lawns that are never mown and copses that are never thinned, to say nothing of that stagnant moat, with its sombre and prolific vegetation; whilst within, black oak wainscoting, and heavy tapestry, and winding staircases, and small, deep-set windows, and oddly-shaped rooms, with steps at the door like going down into a bath, and doors considerably up and down hill, and queer recesses that frighten one out of one's wits to go into, form altogether a domicile that would tame the wildest Merry-Andrew in a fortnight into as staid and sober and stupid a personage as the veriest Lady Superior could desire. Aunt Horsingham received us as usual with a freezing smile.

"How do you do, Kate?" said she, putting two of her cold bony fingers into my hand. "I'm afraid you will find it rather dull here after London; but it is wholesome for young people to be occasionally sobered a little."

Aunt Horsingham is tall and thin, with a turn-up nose, rather red at the point, a back that never stoops, and a grim smile that never varies. She dresses in bright colours, affecting strange and startling contrasts, both of hues and material. Her hands are always cold and seldom clean; and she has sundry uncomfortable notions about damping the spirits of youth and checking the exuberance of its gaiety which render her a perfect terror and bugbear to the rising generation. When I was a little thing, laughing, prattling, and giggling, as children will, an admonishing look from my aunt, with a gaunt finger held aloft, and a cold "Kate, don't be silly, my dear," was always sufficient to make me dull and gloomy for the rest of the day.

I should like to know indeed why children are not to be "silly." Are grown-up people always so rational in their amusements or irreproachable in their demeanour? "Let the child alone," poor Uncle Harry used to say; and once I overheard him mutter, "I've more patience with a young fool than an old one." Such training has not had a good effect on Cousin Amelia. She has been so constantly tutored to conceal her emotions and to adopt the carriage and manners of an automaton that the girl is now a complete hypocrite. It is quite impossible to make her out. If you tickled her, I don't believe you could get her to laugh; and if you struck her, I very much doubt whether she would cry. My aunt calls it "self-command;" I call it "imbecility." She shook hands with me in her provokingly patronizing manner—"hoped I had brought my horses with me" (as if I was coming to spend months at Dangerfield without Brilliant!); "supposed I had my side-saddle in the cap-box;" and showed me my room without so much as a single kind word of welcome or a cousinly caress. It was quite a relief to help dear Aunt Deborah to unpack her dressing-case, and kiss her pleasant face, and give her the warm cup of tea without which Aunt Deborah never dreams of dressing for dinner.

Oh, those solemn, heavy, silent, stupid dinners, with the massive plate and the dark oak wainscoting, and the servants gliding about like ghosts at a festival in Acheron! What a relief it would have been even to have had a clownish footman spill soup over one's dress, or ice-cream down one's back, or anything to break the monotony of the entertainment! But, no; there we sat, Aunt Horsingham remarking that the "weather was dull" and the "crops looking very unpromising;" Aunt Deborah with her eyes fixed on a portrait of the late Mr. David Jones as a boy, opposite which she invariably took her place, and on which, though representing an insignificant urchin in a high frill and blue jacket, she gazed intently during the whole repast; Cousin Amelia looking at herself in the silver dish-covers, and when those were removed relapsing into a state of irritable torpor; and as for poor me, all I could do was to think over the pleasures of the past season, and dwell rather more than I should otherwise have done on the image of Frank Lovell, and the very agreeable acquisition he would have been to such a party. And then the evenings were, if possible, worse than the dinners—work, work, work—mum, mum, mum—till tea. And after tea Aunt Horsingham would read to us, in her dry harsh voice, long passages from the Spectator, very excellent articles from the Rambler, highly interesting in their day no doubt, but which lose some of their point after an interval of nearly a century; or, worse than all, Pope's "Homer" or Cowper's "Task," running the lines into each other, so as to avoid what she called "the sing-song of the rhymes," till the poet's effusions sounded like the most extraordinary prose, cut into lengths, as we ladies should say, for no earthly purpose but to make nonsense of the whole thing. Her ladyship never went to bed till eleven; so there, having dined at half-past six to a minute, we were forced to sit three mortal hours and a half, swallowing yawns and repressing that inexplicable disorder termed the "fidgets" till the welcome bed-candles arrived. No wonder men drink and smoke and commit all sort of enormities to fill up those dreadful hours after dinner. I think if ever I take to tobacco it will be at Dangerfield.

Then of course the Hall was haunted; and of course my passage was the one which the ghost particularly affected. It was a sad story that of "the Dangerfield ghost." I have got it all out of Aunt Deborah at different times; and though I don't exactly believe in the spectre, I can't help sometimes crying over the incidents. The fact is, the Horsinghams were quite as proud of their ghost as they were of their hand; and although not a very creditable tale to any of the family, Aunt Deborah would never forgive me if I were not to relate the tragedy which conferred on Dangerfield the honour of being a haunted house.

In the reign of George II, the head of the house, Sir Hugh Horsingham, married a young wife, and brought her home to Dangerfield with the usual demonstrations and rejoicings peculiar to such an event. Sir Hugh was a dark, morose man, considerably older than his bride; stern and forbidding in his manners, but possessing deep feelings under a reserved exterior, and a courage and determination not to be daunted or subdued. Such a man was capable of great things for good or for evil; and such was the very nature on which a woman's influence might have produced the most beneficial results. But, unfortunately, young Lady Horsingham had but one feeling for her lord, and that was intense terror of his anger. She never sought to win his confidence; she never entered into his political schemes, his deeper studies, or even his country amusements and pursuits. All she thought of was how to avoid offending Sir Hugh; and ere long this one idea grew to such a pitch that she quite trembled in his presence, could scarcely answer distinctly when he spoke to her, and seemed hardly to draw breath in freedom save when out of his sight. Such a state of things could have but one ending—distrust and suspicion on one side, unqualified aversion on the other. A marriage, never of inclination, as indeed in those days amongst great families few marriages were, became an insupportable slavery ere the first year of wedded life had elapsed; and by the time an heir was born to the house of Horsingham, probably there was no unhappier couple within fifty miles of Dangerfield than dark Sir Hugh and his pretty, fair-haired, gentle wife. No; she ought never to have married him at all. It was but the night before her wedding that she walked in the garden of her father's old manor-house with a bright, open-hearted, handsome youth, whose brow wore that expression of acute agony which it is so pitiable to witness on a young countenance—that look almost of physical pain, which betokens how the iron has indeed "entered the sufferer's soul." "Ah, you may plead, 'Cousin Edward;' but we women are of a strange mixture, and the weakest of us may possess obstinacy such as no earthly consideration can overcome." "Lucy! Lucy! for the last time, think of it; for the love of Heaven, do not drive me mad; think of it once more; it is the last, last chance!" The speaker was white as a sheet, and his hollow voice came in hoarse, inarticulate whispers as he looked almost fiercely into that dear face to read his doom. Too well he knew the set, fixed expression of her delicate profile. She did not dare turn towards him; she could not have looked him in the face and persevered; but she kept her eyes fastened on the horizon, as though she saw her future in the fading sunset; and whilst her heart seemed turning to very stone she kept her lips firmly closed; she repressed the tears that would have choked her, and so for that time she conquered.