Pending my friend’s reply, it may easily be believed that I waited with no small anxiety and impatience, none the less that the fact of my being under the same roof with Miss Merlin gave me no more access to her society, no more information regarding her movements, than if we had been on different continents. The very first morning after her arrival she was off to hunt before I was out of bed, and returned so quietly as to frustrate my insidious intentions of waylaying her in the passage. Justine too, either taken to task by her mistress, or on some definite calculations of her own, avoided my presence altogether, and never gave me an opportunity of exchanging a syllable with her. Miss Lushington, whom I boldly confronted in her own dominions, was obviously on her high horse, and ill at ease. There could be no question but that, notwithstanding her simple and retiring habits, in accordance with the strict seclusion in which she lived, Miss Merlin’s arrival had completely altered the tone and destroyed the cordiality of the whole establishment.
True to his post, my letter must have found Quizby at the “Hat and Umbrella,” for within eight-and-forty hours of its dispatch, I received his answer; written of course on Club paper, and sealed with our handsome Club seal—a beautiful device formed of the domestic insignia from which we take our name. I opened it eagerly, and after a few commonplace lines of inquiry and gossip, I arrived, so to speak, at the marrow of its contents.
“You could not have applied, my dear Softly,” said my correspondent, “to any man in London better qualified to give you the information you require. Not only have I known Miss Merlin almost from childhood, but it was my lot in early life, when the heart is fresh and the feelings susceptible, to be by no means insensible to her charms. You ask me whether she is good-looking; and this, did I not know your extreme diffidence and scrupulous delicacy of feeling, would seem a strange question from one who is under the same roof with its object. Beauty is a matter of opinion. I need scarcely say that many years ago I thought her ‘beautiful exceedingly.’ She was then a tall pale girl, with the most thorough-bred head and neck you ever saw, with the grace and elasticity of a nymph, combined with the dignity of an empress. So haughty a young woman it has never been my fate to come across. She had full dark eyes, and very silky dark hair; regular features of the severe classical type, and the sad mournful expression, that had a great effect on me at that period. I need not be ashamed to confess it, whilst I remained an eleven-stone man I was romantic; but, like many others, increasing weight has brought with it, I trust, increasing wisdom, and I have not the slightest doubt myself that adipose matter conduces vastly to a proper equilibrium of the mind. I thought otherwise once, and Miss Merlin’s dark eyes would have led me to follow her to the end of the world—nay, even over those ghastly fences, which then, as now, it seemed to be her greatest delight to ‘negotiate,’ as I think you hunting men call it in your extraordinary vernacular. She had a wonderfully graceful figure too, as a young thing, and the narrowest, most flexible hands and feet you ever beheld. I have waltzed with her many a time—moi qui vous parle; and to think of the delicious swing with which she went down a room to the strains of Jullien and Kœnig, the musical wonders of our day, almost makes me feel as if I could waltz again. When she bridled her taper neck, and put one little foot forward from beneath her draperies, she looked like a filly just going to start for the Oaks.
“I have been thus particular in describing her, because they tell me she is very much aged and altered now; so that, whenever you do see her, you can judge for yourself of the difference between the Miss Merlin of to-day, and the damsel of a good many years ago, who made such an example of your old friend.
“But I never had a chance with her—never! She was a singular girl, not the least like most of her own age and sex. Her mother was dead; and she lived and kept house for her father, an old clergyman of eccentric habits and extraordinary learning. Being an only child, she was accustomed to have her own way from the first; and as her father never interfered in the household arrangements, and indeed seldom came out of his study upon any provocation, she had the whole management of the establishment, and conducted it with the decision and prudence of a woman of forty. To this I partly attribute her extraordinary self-reliance and self-control. She was attached to her father, and studied with him several hours a day. At the period when we used to dance together, I think Miss Merlin was as thorough a Greek scholar as any University don I know. She was a proficient in several modern languages, and my own impression is that mathematics and algebra were as completely at her fingers’-ends, as worsted-work and crochet-knitting are to the generality of her sex. Studying hard at the Parsonage, her only relaxation was to hunt. I have already said she did exactly what she pleased; and her father, though a clergyman, was a rich man, and though a rich man a liberal one. Consequently Miss Fanny, as she was called then, was allowed to keep a couple of horses for her own use, and very good ones she took care they should be. At eighteen there was not a sportsman with the X.Y.Z. that cared to follow Fanny Merlin in a quick thing over the Vale, where the fences were largest, and the Swimley twisted and twined about, like the silver lace on a green volunteer uniform, never less than eighteen feet from bank to bank. I always hated hunting, I honestly acknowledge it; but oh! the duckings I have had in that accursed Swimley, following the flutter of her riding-habit, that I would have followed, if necessary, across the Styx. The girl never looked back either, which was sufficiently provoking. No; she rode on, always in the same calm business-like manner, perfectly quiet, and perfectly straight. She cured me of following her, though, after a time; for I found it safer and easier to skirt a little, with the generality of the other sportsmen, so as to come in somewhere at the finish, and take my chance of riding with her part of the way home.
“It was hard that such devotion as mine should not have met with better success. You, my dear Softly, who are fond of that uncomfortable diversion which men call hunting, can scarcely appreciate what I had to undergo; but when I tell you that in addition to unintermitting agitation of mind, I suffered from constant abrasion of body, you will pity, though you cannot sympathise with, my distress. Apprehension, amounting to actual funk, is a disagreeable sensation enough; but to be partially flayed alive, and that on portions of the person called into daily use by a man of sedentary habits, amounts to a cruel and unbearable infliction. I wonder whether she ever pitied me! I am inclined to think she scarcely thought about me at all.
“At one time, however, our acquaintance seemed likely to ripen into intimacy; and it happened that at the same period a detachment from a regiment of Hussars was quartered in our neighbourhood. The Captain hunted of course, so did the Lieutenant; and two harder riders never dirtied their coats with the X.Y.Z., nor washed them, when dirty, in the Swimley brook. Also they danced, dined, drank, and flirted, as is the custom of their kind. But the Cornet was an exception to the rule. Strange anomaly! a Cornet of Hussars, who seldom, when off duty, got upon a horse; who did not waltz or give conundrums, or squeeze young ladies’ hands; who retired from mess early, not to smoke nor play whist, nor get into scrapes, but to practise on the pianoforte; whose general appearance was sedate and steady, though, to do him justice, he was a good-looking fellow enough, in a manly Anglo-Saxon style, and, in short, whose whole character and habits appeared more those of a travelling tutor than a dissipated young officer of Dragoons.
“And yet Miss Merlin fell in love with Cornet Brown. Where they met, has always been to me a mystery; and when they did meet, I cannot conceive what they found to talk about, for they had not two ideas in common. He did not even read; for, with all his quiet habits, the Cornet was as ignorant upon most topics of general information, as if he had been the fastest and idlest of his kind. His sole passion was music, and Miss Merlin did not know a note. Nevertheless, she fell in love with him—over head—such a fall as she never had in her life before, even in the Vale. She gave up hunting; she parted with her horses; she altered her whole habits and disposition and appearance, as a woman will, to identify herself the more with the man she loves. A good many of us in that part of the country had entered for the race; but we saw it was all up now—Brown in a canter, and the rest nowhere.
“The Cornet, too, seemed fond of her, in his own undemonstrative way. When not practising the pianoforte in his barrack-room, he was generally to be found at the Rectory; and as he never interfered with old Merlin, who indeed hardly knew him by sight, he would have suited him as well for a son-in-law as anybody else. The thing seemed to go on swimmingly, his brother-officers laughed at him, and we all thought the Cornet and Fanny Merlin were engaged.
“But this deserving young officer had an elder brother, whose views in some peculiar points it did by no means suit that his junior should commit matrimony, and the elder Brown appeared ere long upon the scene of action. He came down to stay at the barracks, where he made himself so agreeable to the Hussars, that they seriously proposed to him that he should make interest at the Horse Guards for the transfer of his brother’s commission to himself. He didn’t know a note of music—the elder Brown; but he talked, and he drank, and he smoked, and he rode, and, in short, was as jolly a fellow as ever kept a mess-table in a roar. Also, he made a slight acquaintance with Miss Merlin—not, I am bound to state, with any ulterior views; for he had a wife and promising little family of his own. He was a man of energy, you see—this gentleman—and when he meant a thing, why he went and did it without delay.