Beauchamp; or, The Error.

by G. P. R. James

"Good gracious!" exclaimed the fair Isabella, "who could have done such a thing as that?" and then she laughed quietly, adding, "Well, at all events I am very much obliged to them; but it was a shameful trick, notwithstanding."

"You haven't heard the whole yet, Isabella," replied Mrs. Clifford, "for we have been stopped between this and Tarningham, and should have been robbed--perhaps murdered--if two gentlemen had not come up to our rescue--good Heaven, it makes me feel quite faint to think of it." And she sat down in one of the large arm-chairs, and put her hand to her head, while her check turned somewhat pale.

"Take a little wine, my dear aunt," cried Isabella, and before Mrs. Clifford could stop her she had darted out of the room.

As soon as she was alone with her daughter, the widow lady gazed round the chamber in which she sat with a thoughtful and melancholy look. She was in the house where her early days of girlhood had passed--she was in the very room where she had gone in all the agitation of happy love as a bride to the altar. She peopled the place with forms that could no longer be seen, she called up the loved and the dead, the parents who had cherished and instructed her, the fair sister who had bloomed and withered by her side. How many happy, how many a painful scene rose to the eye of memory on that stage where they had been enacted. All the material objects were the same, the pictures, the furniture, the old oak paneling with its carved wreaths; but where were they who moved so lately beside her in that chamber--where was all that had there been done? The grave and the past--man's tomb, and the tomb of man's actions had received them, and in the short space of twenty years all had gone, fading away and dissolving into air like a smoke rising up unto heaven, and spreading out thinner and thinner, till naught remains. Herself and a brother, from whom many circumstances had detached her, were all that were left of the crowd of happy faces that remembrance called back as she sat there and gazed around. Some tears rose to her eyes, and Mary who had been standing by gazing at her face, and reading in it with the quick appreciation of affection all the emotions which brought such shadows over the loved mother's brow, knelt down beside her, and taking her hand in hers said earnestly, "Mamma, dear mamma, I know this is painful, but pray for my sake and Isabella's let the shameful deceit that has been played upon us produce a good and happy result. You are here in my uncle's house; be reconciled to him fully, I beseech you. You know that he is good-humoured notwithstanding all his faults, and I cannot but think that if those who might have led him to better things had not withdrawn from him so completely, he might now have been a different man."

Mrs. Clifford shook her head mournfully.

"My dear child," she said, "you know that it is not resentment; it was your good father who did not feel it consistent with his character and station to countenance all that takes place here."

"But for Isabella's sake," said Miss Clifford, earnestly, and before her mother could answer, the young lady of whom she spoke re-entered the room with a servant carrying some refreshments.

"Oh dear aunt," she said, while the wine and water and biscuits were placed upon a small table at Mrs. Clifford's elbow, "it makes me so glad to see you, and I have ordered the blue room at the south side to be got ready for you directly, and then there is the corner one for Mary, because it has a window both ways, and when she is in a gay mood she can look out over the meadows and the stream, and when she is in her high pensiveness she can gaze over the deep woods and hills. Then she is next to me too, so that she may have merry nonsense on one side, and grave sense on the other; for I am sure you will stay a long while with us now you are here, and papa will be so glad."

"I fear it cannot be very long, my love," replied Mrs. Clifford. "In the first place I have come it seems uninvited, and in the next place you know, Isabella, that I am sometimes out of spirits, and perhaps fastidious, so that all guests do not at all times please me. Who have you here now? There seemed a large party in the dining-room."

"Oh, there are several very foolish men," answered Sir John Slingsby's daughter, laughing, "and one wise one. There is Mr. Dabbleworth, who was trying to prove to me all dinner-time that I am an electrical machine; and in the end I told him that I could easily believe he was one, for he certainly gave me a shock, and Sir James Vestage who joined in and insisted that instead of electrical machines men were merely improved monkeys. I told him that I perfectly agreed with him, and that I saw fresh proofs of it every day. Then up by papa was sitting old Mr. Harrington, the fox-hunter; what he was saying I do not know, for I never listen to any thing he says, as it is sure either to be stupid or offensive. Then there was Charles Harrington, who lisped a good deal, and thought himself exceedingly pretty, and Mr. Wharton, the lawyer, who thought deeply and drank deeply, and said nothing but once."