Brownlows: A Novel

by Mrs. Oliphant

“How was I to know, Pamela?” said Mrs. Preston. “It appears you did not know yourselves. And then, when you told me what Mr. Brownlow said, I thought I might find you a friend. I think yet, if I could but see him; but when I spoke last night of seeing Mr. Brownlow, he would not hear of it. It is very hard to know what to do.”

Then there ensued another pause—a long pause, during which the mother, engaged with many thoughts, did not look at her child. Pamela, too, was thinking; she had taken her mother’s long thin hand into her own, and was smoothing it softly with her soft fingers; her head was bent over it, her eyes cast down; now and then a sudden heaving, as of a sob about to come, moved her pretty shoulders. And her voice was very tuneless and rigid when she spoke. “Mamma,” she said, “speak to me honestly, once for all. Ought I to give it all up? I don’t mean to say it would be easy. I never knew a—a—any one before—never any body was like that to me. You don’t know—oh, you don’t know how he can talk, mamma. And then it was not like any thing new—it felt natural, as if we had always belonged to each other. I know it’s no use talking. Tell me, mamma, once for all, would it really be better for him and—every body, if I were to give him quite up?”

Pamela held herself upright and rigid as she asked the question. She held her mother’s hand fast, and kept stroking it in an intermittent way. When she had finished she gave her an appealing look—a look which did not ask advice. It was not advice she wanted, poor child: she wanted to be told to do what she longed to do—to be assured that that was the best; therefore she looked not like a creature wavering between two opinions, but like a culprit at the bar, awaiting her sentence. As for Mrs. Preston, she only shook her head.

“It would not do any good,” she said. “You might give him up over and over, but you would never get him to give you up, Pamela. He is that sort of a young man; he would not have taken a refusal from me. It would be of no use, my dear.”

“Are you sure?—are you quite sure?” cried Pamela, throwing her arms round her mother’s neck, and giving her a shower of kisses. “Oh you dear, dear mamma. Are you sure, you are quite sure?”

“You are kissing me for his sake,” said Mrs. Preston, with a little pang; and then she smiled at herself. “I never was jealous before,” she said. “I don’t mean to be jealous. No, he will never give in, Pamela; we shall have to make the best of it; and perhaps,” she continued, after a pause, “perhaps this was the friend I was always praying for to take care of my child before I die.”

“Oh, mamma,” said Pamela, “how can you talk of dying at such a time as this? when, perhaps, we’re going to have—every thing we want in the world; when, perhaps, we are going to be—as happy as the day is long!” she said, once more kissing the worn old face which lay turned toward her, in a kind of sweet enthusiasm. The one looked so young and the other so old; the one so sure of life and happiness, the other so nearly done with both. Mrs. Preston took the kiss and the clasp, and smiled at her radiant child; and then she closed her eyes, and retreated into her headache. She was not going to have every thing she wanted in the world, or to be as happy as the day was long; so she retreated and took to her handy domestic little malady. The child could not conceive that there were still a thousand things to be thought over, and difficulties without number to be overcome.

As for Pamela, she sprang to her feet lightly, and went off to make the precious cup of tea which is good for every feminine trouble. As she went she fell into song, not knowing it. She was as near dancing as decorum would permit. She went into the kitchen where Mr. Swayne was, and cheered him up more effectually than if he had been well for a week. She made him laugh, though he was in low spirits. She promised him that he should be quite well in three months. “Ready to dance if there was any thing to dance at,” was what Pamela said.

“At your wedding, Miss Pamela,” said poor Swayne, with his shrill little chuckle. And Pamela too laughed with a laugh that was like a song. She stood by the fire while the kettle boiled, with the fire-light glimmering in her pretty eyes, and reddening her white forehead under the rings of her hair. Should she have to boil the kettle, to spread the homely table for him? or would he take her to Brownlows, or some other such house, and make her a great little lady like Sara? On the whole Pamela thought she would like the first best. She made the tea before the bright fire in such perfection as it never was made at Brownlows, and poured it out hot and fragrant, like one who knew what she was about. But the tea was not so great a cordial as the sight of her own face. She had come clear out of all her perplexities. There was no longer even a call upon that anxious faculty for self-sacrifice which belongs to youth. In short, self-sacrifice would do no good—the idol would simply decline to receive the costly offering. It was in his hands, and nothing that she could do would make any difference. Perhaps, if Pamela had been a self-asserting young woman, her pride would have suffered from this thought; but she was only a little girl of seventeen, and it made her as light as a bird. No dreadful responsibility rested on her soft shoulders—no awful question of what was best remained for her to consider. What use could there be in giving up when he would not be given up? What end would it serve to refuse a man who would not take a refusal? She had made her tragic little effort in all sincerity, and it had come to the sweetest and most complete failure. And now her part had been done, and no farther perplexity could overwhelm her. So she thought, flitting out and in upon a hundred errands, and thinking tenderly in her heart that her mother’s headache and serious looks and grave way of looking at every thing was not so much because there was any thing serious in the emergency, as because the dear mother was old—a fault of nature, not of circumstances, to be mended by love and smiles, and all manner of tender services on the part of the happy creature who was young.

When Mrs. Swayne left the parlor in the manner which we have already related, she rushed out, partly to be relieved of her wrath, partly to pour her prophecies of evil into the ears of the other Cassandra on the other side of the road, old Betty of the Gates. The old woman was sitting before her fire when her neighbor went in upon her. To be sure it was summer, but Betty’s fire was eternal, and burned without intermission on the sacred hearth. She was mending one of her gowns, and had a whole bundle of bits of colored print—“patches,” for which some of the little girls in Miss Brownlow’s school would have given their ears—spread out upon the table before her. Bits of all Betty’s old gowns were there. It was a parti-colored historical record of her life, from the gay calicoes of her youth down to the sober browns and olives of declining years. With such a gay centre the little room looked very bright. There was a geranium in the window, ruby and emerald. There were all manner of pretty confused cross-lights from the open door and the latticed window in the other corner and the bright fire; and the little old face in its white cap was as brown and as red as a winter apple. Mrs. Swayne was a different sort of person. She came in, filling the room with shadows, and put herself away in a big elbow-chair, with blue and white cushions, which was Betty’s winter throne, but now stood pushed into a corner out of reach of the fire. She uttered a sigh which blew away some of the patches on the table, and swayed the ruby blossoms of the big geranium. “Well,” she said, “I’ve done my best—I can say I’ve done my best. If the worst comes to the worst, there’s none as can blame me.”