She put her hands together beseechingly. ‘Oh, go at once—don’t keep me in this suspense.’
‘My dear girl! you are frightening yourself in the most absurd way. After to-morrow, the very earliest minute that I can get away.’
Lady William did not lie down and rest when her brother left her, but she went upstairs and took refuge in her own room, very thankful that Mab had returned to her gardening. That Mab was an heiress and that ‘the family’ were seeking her acquaintance was the news Mr. Plowden longed to tell. But Mab’s mother was filled with another thought. If it could be that the search should fail! She believed more in failure than success with her experience. If it should fail, if there should fall upon Mab any cloud, any shadow of possible shame! She wrung her hands till they hurt her, but her heart was wrung more sorely still. It was a view she had not thought of before. Shame for herself would be bad enough. But for Mab! And even the possibility that Mab should turn astonished eyes upon her, should ask even with those eyes alone a question—should have such a thought suggested even for a moment, to her mind! Lady William had borne many miseries in her not yet very long life, but in that there would be the crown of all.
XXXIII
It will be recollected that Mr. Osborne, the curate, ended very suddenly, and with no small amount of heat and displeasure, that walk with Florence Plowden which had so nearly decided the whole colour of his life. He had fallen in love (as people say—and, indeed, it is as good a phrase as any, for it is often by no means a voluntary action) with the Rector’s daughter in spite of himself. It was so perfectly banal and commonplace a thing to do; the sort of thing looked for by everybody; so suitable, that bugbear of youth; so exactly what might—except by his own ambitious relations, who thought him worthy of a loftier fate—have been expected, that the young man had resisted almost fiercely the tide of being which led him to that commonplace conclusion. But yet, when there is fate in it, what is the use of struggling? Florence Plowden was, Mr. Osborne thought, the prettiest, the most delightful and attractive of all the girls in Watcham—more than that, of all the girls he had ever seen. I do not know that this idea was justified by universal consent. Many people gave the palm in respect to good looks to Emmy, and, indeed, neither of them was at all up to the level of many of the girls from London who came down during the boating season, or of Dora Wade, for example, who was the belle of the county. However, the fact that this opinion was by no means universal did not affect the certainty of the curate, who had a very high idea of his own judgment, and, in fact, was better pleased that it should not chime in with other people’s, which was the last thing in the world he wished to do. He was a young man who was very well connected, and to lift his eyes even to Dora Wade would scarcely have been beyond his pretensions. But the mere fact that she was the acknowledged beauty was enough to make that pursuit unlikely to Edward Osborne. The banalité of falling in love with his Rector’s daughter was bad enough, but it would have been nothing in comparison with the downright vulgarity of falling in love with the beauty who had, as it were, signposts put up all round her to indicate her position as the Queen of Hearts. Edward Osborne would have died rather than follow these indications. They convinced him instead that she was not fair at all, but a most matter-of-fact and commonplace Blowsibella, whose radiant complexion was of the mere dairymaid order, and meant nothing but high health and good digestion—good enough things in their way, but altogether devoid of romance, and of any attraction which could dominate a highly trained and fastidious spirit like himself. At first, when he came to Watcham, he would have also said that the attributes of a Rector’s daughter, the delightful good young woman of the parish, acquainted with all the poor people and their wants, and occupied with clothing clubs, penny banks, sewing classes, and mothers’ meetings, were also the very last things that would attract a young philanthropist of the higher order like himself, who proposed to get at the people in a loftier way, to convince them by reason and argument of their foolish ways of living, and to inaugurate some large movement among them which would have little to do with the petty methods of feminine supervision. Florence Plowden, by universal consent, was made to be a clergyman’s wife, which was almost as strong an argument against her as if she had been an acknowledged beauty. But, as a matter of fact, there is no rule which tells in those mysterious ways of mutual attraction which draw the most unlikely or, which is worse, the most likely people together. And it had grown a certainty with Mr. Osborne that he had never met any one like Florence before her attention had been directed to him at all, and before even it had occurred to himself as possible that he could ever get over the dreadful obstacle of all that there was in her favour, and think of her as in possible relationship to himself. He represented it to himself as a thing that could affect him in no possible way, but yet a certain thing—that Florence Plowden was as a swan among the ducklings about her, that there was no one at all equal to her far and near, and that it was one of the mysteries of humanity how such a creature could spring and blossom from such a root, and among such surroundings. But I will not attempt to follow the matter from that first germ—obstinately held against all the force of the general idea that Florence was a nice girl and a very good girl (praises both calculated to drive an idealist mad), but nothing very particular—just like other girls, in fact, and a little like her mother. ‘When she is Mrs. Plowden’s age, Florence, indeed, will, I think, be very much like her mother,’ the General had once said, without the slightest idea that the curate, who was an athletic young person, would have liked to knock him down for saying it. And why shouldn’t Florence Plowden resemble her mother? But it was blasphemy to Mr. Osborne’s ears.
I will not, I repeat, attempt to follow all that happened from that first impression to the moment when he had made up his mind that without the companionship of Florence life would be, if not unworthy living, yet so diminished in everything that was fair and sweet that all its glory and hope would be over. Many notions about life had been in this young man’s head. He had once thought that there was no institution in the world so great as that of a celibate clergy, and that it would be his highest duty to tread that austere and lofty path. I don’t know whether Florence could be justly chargeable with the destruction of that ideal. He had come to see at last that it could not be made a general rule of, or universally enforced, before he arrived at the sudden conviction that he was not himself adapted for that form of self-abnegation. I am obliged to confess that all the different steps in Mr. Osborne’s progress had been made suddenly, as with a bound, surprising himself as much as any one else. And perhaps he had no certain idea upon that morning when he found himself engaged in a discussion with his fast friend, Miss Grey, and opposed by the object of his affections—that these affections were to burst all the restraints with which he had bound them, and pour themselves forth in a burst of enthusiasm at Florry’s feet. And then, to think that when the flood could scarcely be restrained—when despite her opposition, despite all her naughty ways, he was about to tell her that there was nobody like her in the world (a statement which would have been as astounding and incredible to Florry as any miracle)—that she should have stopped him, by contradicting all his theories, by finding fault with what he felt to be, in its way, a small martyrdom, and by suggesting something quite different—she a girl, a nobody—to him, a priest and consecrated person set apart to instruct and lead mankind, as the better way!
Edward Osborne would not pause to refute, to reprove, to pour down the thunders of his wrath upon the girl whom in another moment he would have asked to be his wife. He did what was the only thing possible in the circumstances, turned and left her, flinging her image and her counsel behind him in the fury of his indignation. He walked from that spot to his lodgings, which was about a mile off, in three minutes or thereabouts, his long steps skimming over the soil, his mind in a turmoil scarcely to be described, boiling with anger, with indignation, with resentment against this interference with his superior rights of manhood and of priesthood, as well as with the strong revulsion of thoughts thrown back upon himself and disappointed feeling. It would scarcely be too much to say that for the moment he would have liked something dreadful to happen to Florence, and if there had been a thunderbolt handy, which happily is not a missile within ready reach, he would probably have blackened the face of the whole country in order to dumb and to frighten (for I don’t think he would have gone so far as to blind) the girl he loved. When he got home he shut himself into his sitting-room, giving a stern order that no one was to be admitted, and betook himself to the writing of a sermon, which seemed the best way to sfogarsi, as the Italians say, to blow off the pernicious excitement which made his veins throb and his heart beat. But he soon threw that aside, finding it quite inadequate to the occasion, and wrote a letter to the newspapers, which was so fierce that it frightened the editor to whom it was addressed. I need scarcely say that it was on the subject of temperance.
After the vehemence of the first shock was over, which, however, took some time, Mr. Osborne made a distinct but insufficient effort to cure himself altogether of Florence. He never entered the Rectory, contriving to settle any question he might have with the Rector either when they met in church or by letter. He refused all invitations lest perhaps she might be there—for where, indeed, could a man go in the parish, to dinner or tea or evening solemnity, without the chance of encountering the family of the Rector? Of course Mr. Osborne was unaware that for a somewhat similar reason Florence refused the same invitations at this crisis, and, indeed, awakened the curiosity of her mother and Emmy—to whom, even to Emmy, she had said nothing—by her disinclination to go ‘out.’ ‘I’d rather stay and keep Jim company,’ she was forced to say on several occasions—though, alas! with very little hope that the temptation of her company would have much effect in keeping Jim indoors. It did, however, once or twice, and that was both reward and justification.
But it is not to be supposed that this curious incident passed over the head of the Rev. Edward Osborne without a certain effect. His heart began to long after Florry long before the smart of the wound she had given him was healed. And what she had said rankled in his mind even before that. Was there any truth in what she had said? Was it, perhaps, a better way, to win a young man who was his equal—i.e., whom no missionary effort was likely to be brought to bear upon, a man quite beyond the blandishments of district visitors, Bible readers, temperance lecturers, or even, in a general way, of the curate—to the paths of virtue, than to persuade an old lady to relinquish her poor little glass of beer by the sacrifice of his own very moderate glass of wine? The latter sacrifice had been mentioned in one or two papers, and held up as an example to other men. He had been applauded, but with reproof which was another kind of praise, by his own people and others. ‘Remember,’ his mother had written, ‘that Timothy was bidden by St. Paul to take a little wine for his stomach’s sake: and I am sure you are not such a giant of strength that you can afford to do without the little you take: though I quite appreciate the sacrifices you think it your duty to make, my dear boy.’ Sacrifice! It was no sacrifice. Osborne did not care in the least for the beer, which he took as a matter of habit, or the wine which was served to him at other people’s tables when he dined out. He rather liked, if truth must be told, to gently, tacitly snub his hosts by taking nothing. And it seemed to him, on the whole, an achievement which partook of the nature of the sublime to get old Mrs. Lloyd to give up her beer—not that it did her a great deal of harm, poor soul! But if she took none herself she would be strengthened to refuse it to her husband, and it would be an example to her sons and to the rest of the world—that small, dingy unenlightened world which it was so difficult to teach, which had so little to brighten or cheer it, and which pays so dearly for its indulgences in that sordid, dreadful way.
But Jim Plowden! that was a very different thing from Mrs. Lloyd. I do not for a moment believe that Mr. Osborne would have hesitated to take the pledge for and with Jim: but that was not at all what Florence had suggested. She had suggested that he should admit him to his society, take him for a companion, induce him to share in his pursuits—that last above all. She did not know, of course, that among the drawbacks to herself, of all of which Mr. Osborne was so conscious, her brother and her family took the first place. He would need to be friendly, or even more than friendly, with all the Plowdens. Nothing but the fact that Florence was unique in the world, that there was none like her, none, could make up for that. And now she demanded of him that he should take her brother into his bosom, so to speak, not as a consequence of being accepted by her, but as a matter of duty in his capacity as a priest, as a better way than that of taking the pledge along with old Mrs. Lloyd. That lout! he repeated to himself: that fellow to whom had been given all the same advantages as other people, even as Mr. Edward Osborne, and who had thrown, or was throwing, them away: the brother, who frequented the ‘Blue Boar,’ who was the friend of the schoolmistress, who shunned all the ordinary assemblages of his kind; and yet it was suggested to him that to take up this rowdy undergraduate, sent down from Oxford, would be the better way!