CHAPTER XIII.
THE FIRST OBSTRUCTION IN A CERTAIN SCHEME OF AMBITION AND REVENGE.
During Phœbe’s visit to her old home, Lord Verner called twice. His lordship was particularly gracious, and evidently deeply enamoured of Amy.
When he came Amy was careful to put on her best smiles. It seemed to Phœbe as if she delighted in watching the effect of her little sallies of pleasantry and wit upon the love-sick earl. She humoured and petted him in her conversation, and at the same time triumphed over him. She seemed to give way to all his whims, and yet had her own way.
His lordship had at first been all anxiety that the marriage should be particularly quiet, and Amy had appeared to enter into his plans in this respect; but now he was for all sorts of extravagant demonstration, and Amy led him on so far, that it would be impossible to give up any important points in the general display.
And she looked so fresh, and bright, and happy in his love, and Lord Verner appeared to be so proud of her, that Phœbe almost began to believe that happiness would come of the union.
No one could say that Amy would not fill her high station so far as appearance, and carriage, and manners were concerned. She looked every inch a countess already. And she knew it; for she took all manner of pains to set off her graceful, well defined figure. Dainty robes of well studied colour to throw up her clear, but dark complexion; scarlet bands in her black hair, with a simple diamond star that did not sparkle more brightly than her own bright eyes. Pretty ruffles on her wrists, and about her neck, and dainty shoes upon her feet, that now and then peeped forth from beneath her embroidered petticoat; she had a powerful fascination for Earl Verner. She seemed to be unconscious of her charms, and this made her doubly attractive.
What would his lordship have said if he could have overheard that conversation between his betrothed and her friend with the sweet Miranda face? He would not have been more surprised, we suspect, than Mr. Lionel Hammerton, who was in India all this time, blissfully ignorant of all that was going on at Barton,—blissfully ignorant of the recent changes. If any one had told him that his thorough-going old bachelor brother was engaged to be married, he would have treated it as a good joke. And supposing the gossip had supplemented that statement with a true history of the case, he would have given him considerable credit for imagination, and pooh-poohed the whole thing.
Amy Somerton discovered to be Christopher Tallant’s daughter, and Miss Tallant no other than the bailiff’s daughter!—changed in infancy by the bailiff’s wife! Old Tallant dead, and made Amy his heiress, cut off his son, not even with a shilling. And Earl Verner going to marry the young lady that Lionel had flirted with, and whose likeness was hung outside those mosquito curtains! Of course he would not have believed a word of it. He would more readily have accepted the incidents in the novel he had been reading than these. Besides, who could be expected to believe that those two girls had been changed in their cradles? It was such an old story, that; all very well in a poem or a romance, but it could never occur in the Vale of Avonworth.
Perhaps, chers amis, you, too, may think in this wise. The idea is not a new one, we must confess; but if it is a fact, you will accept it as worthy of record, not for its own sake, but on account of the consequences arising out of Mrs. Somerton’s mistaken ambition. Remember, friends, there is no new thing under the sun. We have this upon the authority of the wisest of all men, and the preacher is verified in ten thousand ways. As far back as the thirteenth century one Friar Bacon, probably writing upon facts and traditions handed down from times long antecedent to his own day, anticipated in his works the railway, the steamship, the hydraulic engine, and the balloon. The Chinese were printers before the ancient Romans discovered Britain, and the Romans made gunpowder when there were naked savages living in the neighbourhood of Barton Hall. The Chinese had discovered gas long before we knew anything about it. Chloroform, photography, the telegraph, and a hundred other “new” inventions, were old things used and forgotten before we heard of them. Have not all the finest thoughts that can enter the brain of scholar or poet been thought before? and does not some classical writer anathematise the great men who had said all the good things before him? All that long race of thinkers and writers, and poets and orators, and tale-tellers and humourists, and playwrights,—what room have they left for a mere story-teller to interest and say something new?
“There is nothing new under the sun.” But there ought to be something new in a novel, nevertheless, most readers seem to think. Critical readers claim something new at the novelist’s hands, and rate him and he dare to walk in beaten tracks. Next to something new comes something true. This shall protect our neck from the sharp edge of the sword that hangs by that Damoclean thread which is so easily severed. We are telling a tale with Truth for its basis, and how can the mere historian help it if there is nothing new in one of the main incidents of his narrative? Human hopes and fears, and sorrows and troubles, and joys and pleasures, are a constant repetition of the same occurrences, and love of money forms the axis upon which this world of trouble revolves.