Wenderholme: A Story of Lancashire and Yorkshire

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

CHAPTER XXV.

WENDERHOLME IN FESTIVITY.

At length the eve of the great day arrived on which the Twentieth Royal Lancashire was to possess its colors—those colors which (according to the phrase so long established by the usage of speech-making subalterns) it was prepared to dye with all its blood—yes, to the very last drop thereof.

Lady Helena had had a terribly busy time during the whole week. Arrangements for this ceremony had been the subject of anxious planning for months before; and during her last stay in London her ladyship had been very active in seeing tradesmen accustomed to create those temporary splendors and accommodations which are necessary when great numbers of people are to be entertained. Mr. Benjamin Edgington had sent down so many tents and marquees that the park of Wenderholme presented the appearance of a rather extensive camp. The house itself contained even more than the amount of accommodation commonly found in houses of its class, but every chamber had its destined occupant. A great luncheon was to be given in the largest of the marquees, and the whole regiment was to be entertained for a night and a day.

The weather, fortunately, was most propitious, the only objection to it being the heat, and the consequent dust on the roads. Once fairly out of Sootythorn, the Colonel gave permission to march at ease, and the men opened their jackets and took their stiff collars off, and began to sing and talk very merrily. They halted, too, occasionally, by the banks of clear streams, and scattered themselves on the grass, drinking a great deal of water, there being fortunately nothing stronger within reach. At the half-way house, however, the Colonel gave every man a pint of ale, and drank one himself, as he sat on horseback.

It was after sunset when they reached Wenderholme, and the men marched into the park—not at ease, as they had marched along the road, but in fairly good military order. Lady Helena and a group of visitors stood by the side of the avenue, at the point where they turned off towards the camp. A quarter of an hour afterwards the whole regiment was at supper in the tents, except the officers, who dined at the Hall, with the Colonel's other guests, in full uniform. The dining-room presented a more splendid and animated appearance than it had ever presented since the days of John Stanburne's grandfather, who kept a pack of hounds, and received his scarlet-coated companions at his table. And even the merry fox-hunters of yore glittered not as glittered all these majors and captains and lieutenants. Their full uniforms were still as fresh as when they came from the tailor's. They had not been soiled in the dust of reviews, for the regiment had never been reviewed. The silver of the epaulettes was as brilliant as the brilliant old plate that covered the Colonel's hospitable board, and the scarlet was as intense as that of the freshest flower with which the table was decorated. It was more than a dinner—it was a stately and magnificent banquet. The Stanburnes, like many old families in England, had for generations been buyers of silver plate, and there was enough of the solid metal in the house to set up a hundred showy houses with electro. Rarely did it come forth from the strong safes where it reposed, eating up in its unprofitable idleness the interest of a fortune. But now it glittered once again under the innumerable lights, a heterogeneous, a somewhat barbarous, medley of magnificence.

Lady Helena, without being personally self-indulgent—without caring particularly about eating delicately or being softly clad—had a natural taste for splendor, which may often be independent both of vanity and the love of ease. Human pomp suited her as the pomp of nature suits the mind of the artist and the poet; instead of paralyzing or oppressing her, it only made her feel the more perfectly at home. John Stanburne had known beforehand that his clever wife would order the festivities well, and he had felt no anxiety about her management in any way, but he had not quite counted upon this charming gayety and ease. There are ladies who, upon occasions of this kind, show that they feel the weight of their responsibility, and bring a trouble-clouded visage to the feast. They cannot really converse, because they cannot really listen. They hear your words, perhaps, but do not receive their meaning, being distracted by importunate cares. Nothing kills conversation like an absent and preoccupied hostess; nothing animates it like her genial and intelligent participation. Surely, John Stanburne, you may be proud of Helena to-night! What would your festival have been without her?

He recognizes her superiorities, and admires them; but he would like to be delivered from the little inconveniences which attend them. That clear-headed little woman has rather too much of the habit and the faculty of criticism, and John Stanburne would rather be believed in than criticised. Like many other husbands, he would piously uphold that antique religion of the household which sets up the husband as the deity thereof—a king who can do no wrong. If these had been his views from the beginning—if he had wanted simple unreasoning submission to his judgment, and unquestioning acceptance of his actions—what a mistake he made in choosing a woman like Lady Helena! He who marries a woman of keen sight cannot himself expect to be screened from its keenness. And this woman was so fearless—shall we say so proud?—that she disdained the artifices of what might have been a pardonable hypocrisy. She made John Stanburne feel that he was living in a glass case,—nay, more, that she saw through his clothes—through his skin—into his viscera—into his brain. You must love a woman very much indeed to bear this perpetual scrutiny, or she must love you very much to make it not altogether intolerable. The Colonel had a reasonable grievance in this, that in the presence of his wife he found no moral rest. But her criticisms were invariably just. For example, in that last cause of irritation between them—that about the horses—Lady Helena had been clearly in the right. It was, to say the least, a want of good management on the Colonel's part to have all the carriage-horses at Sootythorn on the day of her arrival. And so it always was. She never made any observation on his conduct except when such an observation was perfectly justified—perfectly called for, if you will; but then, on the other hand, she never omitted to make an observation when it was called for. It would have been more graceful—it would certainly have been more prudent—to let things pass sometimes without taking them up in that way. She might have let John Stanburne rest more quietly in his own house, I think; she might have forgiven his little faults more readily, more freely, more generously than she did. The reader perhaps wonders whether she loved him. Yes, she was greatly attached to him. She loved him a great deal better than some women love their husbands who give them perfect peace, and yet she contrived to make him feel an irksomeness in the tie that bound him. Perhaps, with all her perspicacity, she did not quite thoroughly comprehend—did not quite adequately appreciate—his simple, and frank, and honorable nature, his manly kindness of heart, his willingness to do all that could fairly be required of him, and the sincerity with which he would have regretted all his little failures in conjugal etiquette, if only he might have been left to find them out for himself, and repent of them alone.