‘That was a tremendous mistake. I assure you that for actual ready money I have been worse off since I have been Mr. Piper’s wife than I was as his governess. There are so many demands upon my purse. But if I can do anything next Christmas——’
‘Thank you, dear. We must get on somehow, I suppose. We always have struggled through our difficulties, and I suppose we always shall, thanks to Providence; but it’s a wearing life.’
The young Pipers came home for their holidays, and ran riot amidst the splendours and luxuries that Bella had introduced into the sober old house. These young people liked Bella better as a stepmother than they had liked her as a governess. She was very indulgent, so long as they did not spoil the furniture, or annoy her with too much of their society. She gave the girls fine dresses, and allowed them to share all her gaieties. She let the boys ride her ponies, when she did not want to use them. In a word she was a model stepmother, and everybody praised her, except Miss Coyle, who never praised anybody, and Mr. Chumney, who generally reserved his opinion as something too valuable to be parted with except under strongest pressure.
So the briefly glorious summer hurried by, and Bella lived only for pleasure, and to be flattered and followed by Captain Standish. She went to a great many parties among the Wigzell, Timperley, and Porkman section of society, and to a few among the professional classes and landed gentry, which latter were not so splendid as the mercantile entertainments, in the matter of eating and drinking, and were not much more lively; for whereas the Porkmans and Timperleys talked of nothing but money-making, the landed gentry had a language of their own which Bella, clever as she was, had yet to learn. Captain Standish was teaching her a great deal. Under his tuition she had learned to look down upon her fellow-creatures as an inferior set of beings, ‘mostly fools,’ to regard mental culture as a process only valuable to schoolmasters, college dons, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and that altogether subordinate race which has to earn its bread by the sweat of its brains, to think of money as a stepping-stone to social importance, the pleasure of the present moment as the one vital consideration, the future as an unknown quantity, not worth serious thought.
This was the code of ethics which Bella learned from Captain Standish, but before all and above all he taught her to despise her husband, her husband’s children, and her husband’s surroundings, from the lordly Timperley, swelling with the importance of the biggest mills in the district, to the unpretending Chumney, living in modest retirement upon an annuity of ninety pounds, the result of his laborious existence.
Of this gradual corruption of his wife’s mind honest Ebenezer Piper had no suspicion. Her manner and conduct to him of late had been unexceptionable. The deeper and stronger that feeling of contemptuous aversion grew in the secret depths of her heart, the more carefully did she regulate her outward seeming. She had never appeared sweeter, fairer, or more guileless in her husband’s eyes than when she was most inclined to betray him. Vivien herself, that supreme type of falsehood in woman, employed no finer art against the enchanter Merlin than Bella used to guard herself from the hazard of discovery.
She knew herself false to the core, not quite a subject for the divorce court, but a creature whose good angel had long left her, shuddering and abhorrent.
Mr. Piper had not forgotten Mrs. Dulcimer’s ideas about Captain Standish and Clementina, and when he saw the captain and sister-in-law together he was inclined to believe that there might be some foundation for that inveterate matchmaker’s fancy. The captain had a knack of being particularly attentive to Tina under Mr. Piper’s eye.
And now autumn was approaching, the russet corn was cut in the wide shadowless fields, the ploughman’s white horses were seen moving slowly along the upland ridges, against a cool gray sky.
Captain Standish went up into the wildest part of the moors for a fortnight’s grouse-shooting, and to everybody’s surprise came back to Great Yafford in three days.