Confessions of a Young Lady: Her Doings and Misdoings

by Richard Marsh

"My dear aunt!"

"They will do for a wedding present for Clara Leach. Other people can marry, if you can't."

The Rev. Alan sighed. He had been having a bad quarter of an hour. He was a little, freckled, sandy-haired, short-sighted man: one of those short-sighted men whose spectacles require continually settling in their place on the bridge of the nose. Such as he was, he was the only hope of an ancient race--the only male hope, that is.

The Macleods of Pittenquhair predated the first of the Scottish kings. Fortunately for themselves they postdated them as well.

For a considerable portion of their history, the members of that time-honoured family had been compelled, in the Sidney-Smithian phrase, to cultivate their greatness on a little oatmeal--for want of cash to enable them to indulge in any other form of cultivation. But in these latter days they had grown rich, owing to a fortunate matrimonial speculation with a Chicago young lady whose father had something to do with hogs. The lady's name was Biggins--Cornelia P. Biggins--the P. stood for Pollie, which was her mother's name, the "front" name came from history. The particular Macleod who had married her had been christened David. He devoted a considerable portion of his wife's fortune to buying up the ancient lands of the Macleods, in the neighbourhood of Pittenquhair and thereabouts. In his person he resolved that the ancient family glories should reappear--and more. But in these cases it is notorious that man only proposes--his wife never bore him a child. To make matters worse, he only outlived Mrs Macleod six months, so that he never had a decent chance to try his luck again.

David had a brother. Being a childless man, and desirous to restore the ancestral grandeur, one would have thought that he would have left his wealth to his brother, who wanted it if ever a man did yet. But, unfortunately, Alan was not only an irredeemable scamp--which might have been forgiven him, for David was by no means spotless--but also the two brothers hated each other with a truly enduring brotherly hatred. Nor had Alan improved matters by making public and unpleasant allusions to hogs and swine, not only on the occasion of David's marriage, but on many occasions afterwards. So it came to pass that when David was gathered to his fathers, his brother's name was not even mentioned in his will. All his wealth was left to his sister Janet.

In course of time Alan died abroad--very much abroad, and in more senses than one. Then, for the first time, Janet appeared upon the scene. She paid for her brother's funeral, and took his only child, a boy, back with her to England. The child's mother, who was nothing and nobody, had died--charitable people said, murdered by her husband--soon after her infant's birth. So his aunt was the only relation the youngster had.

Janet was a spinster. She had ideas of her own, and plenty of them. Her dominant idea was that in her nephew the family sun should rise again in splendour. But alas for the perversity of fate! The boy passed from a public school to the university, and from the university--after a struggle, in which he showed himself, in a lymphatic sort of way, as obstinate as one of Mrs David's father's pigs--into the church. This was bad enough for a son of his father, and the heir to Pittenquhair and ten thousand pounds a year, but what followed was infinitely worse. He became a ritualist of the ritualists--more Roman than the Romans--and the motto which he nailed to the mast was "Celibacy of the clergy"!

Her nephew's conduct almost drove Miss Janet mad. Two wives she might have forgiven--but none! In season and out of season she preached to him the duty of marriage; but what she regarded as a duty he regarded as a crime. She spoke of an heir for Pittenquhair; his thoughts were of something very different indeed. To speak of disinheriting him was to pander to his tastes. The income from his curacy was seventy pounds a year--and he lived on it. The money sent him by his aunt he surrendered to the Church and to the poor. What availed it to preach of disinheritance to a man who behaved like that?

And yet, in his own peculiar way, he was a good nephew to his aunt. He was the meekest, ugliest, shyest, awkwardest of men. His curacy was at a place on the Suffolk coast called Swaffham-on-Sea. From these wilds he was perpetually being summoned by his aunt to attend on her in her house in town. Although--possibly because he was that kind of man--these visits were anything but occasions of pleasure, he generally obeyed the summons. On the present occasion it was the second day of his stay under his aunt's hospitable roof in Cadogan Place. From the moment of his arrival she had continually reviled him. She had suggested as wives some two-score eligible young women, from earls' daughters to confectioners' assistants. She had arrived at that state of mind in which, if he would only marry, she would have welcomed a cook. In his awkward, stammering way, he had vetoed them all. Then she had rated him for an hour and three-quarters by the clock. Finally, exhausted by her efforts, she had caught up the paper in a rage. The Rev. Alan watched her in silence as she read it, fingering a little book of prayers he had in his waistcoat pocket.