Peter and Jane; Or, The Missing Heir

by S. Macnaughtan

'I see nothing for it,' said Jane, 'but to postpone getting my trousseau until after I am married. If I succeed in getting a wedding dress and something to go away in by the twenty-sixth, I shall consider myself lucky!'

Miss Abingdon, to whose Early Victorian mind a wedding was still an occasion for tears, sighed over her niece's engagement because Jane never came to her room at night to water her couch with tears, nor had doubts or presentiments or misgivings.

'She seems to have so little sense of responsibility,' she sighed to Mrs. Wrottesley, whose visits at this trying time were a cause of nothing but comfort to her.

'I know,' said Mrs. Wrottesley—in the hesitating manner of the woman who might have been 'advanced' had she not married a clergyman—'I know it may seem to you irreverent to say so, but I sometimes think that marriage is not undertaken lightly and unadvisedly enough. It seems to me that nowadays the tendency is to consider the matter almost too seriously, and that a certain light-hearted impulse is really what is required before taking what is called the plunge.'

Miss Abingdon—not by any means for the first time—felt regret that Canon Wrottesley's influence upon his wife had not made her a more orthodox thinker. A woman who criticized the Prayer Book was surely not fitted to be the wife of a clergyman. Miss Abingdon liked to lean on a spiritual guide, and she thought that this was the graceful and becoming attitude for all women.

'I am afraid we must not tamper with the Prayer Book,' she said reprovingly; and Mrs. Wrottesley, who for twenty years had been silent under reproof, relapsed into silence again.

Jane, meanwhile, was saying good-bye to every tenant on Miss Abingdon's small estate. To her hunters she confided the good news that they were going with her when she married, and that they would hunt with her as before. And the stable cat, whom she took up in her arms and kissed affectionately, was told that he really must not mind saying good-bye, for that she, Jane, would only be two miles off, so that the stable cat needn't look quite so disconsolate. The proverbial old nurse in the village had to be visited, and the school-children asked to tea, and tenants and gardeners to dinner; and every one was in a highly nervous state of preparation, and in a still more delightful state of anticipation.

Miss Abingdon enjoyed the dear fussiness of the wedding preparations, and thought in her secret heart that Mrs. Ogilvie missed all the pleasure of the thing by giving a few brief, emphatic orders to her steward, instead of personally superintending every detail of the servants' ball and the tenants' dinner.

Mrs. Ogilvie's directions were probably made in less than an hour, and transmitted to Mr. Miller's capacious pocket-book when he came to her boudoir to receive instructions one autumn morning. When he had left, Mrs. Ogilvie quitted her writing-table, by which she had been sitting, and walked to the window of her room and stood idly by it, her graceful figure outlined against the pane. Before her stretched the great gardens in an aching formality of borders and devices. Viewed from a height, and with her near-sighted eyes, they presented an appearance of a piece of elaborate stitchwork on a green worsted ground. The fountains, with their punctual fall of spray, might have been a device in shells and beads in the centre of each design. Beyond the gardens there was a mass of woods, all dim greens and bright golds; but even the woods were touched with formality, and the foresters of the place had lopped away every unsightly branch from the beeches and oaks. Probably there may have been homely corners in the gardens and grounds which Peter had discovered as a child; but Mrs. Ogilvie, when she walked, kept to the prim paths of the terrace and the garden, where every pebble seemed to have its proper place, in full view of the windows of the house.

'It has always been a prison to me—always,' she murmured to herself, oblivious of the fact that no one more than she would have missed a luxurious environment and a stately setting to her own personality. Mrs. Ogilvie often imagined that she would have liked a small house; but there is no doubt that she would have quitted it in disgust the first time that the odour of dinner came up the back stairs. She believed that a large staff of servants was merely a burden; but she would have felt at a loss had she been obliged to wait on herself even for an hour. As she looked now at the gardens in front of her, and away to the woods beyond, and to the great stretches of greenhouses and conservatories to southward, she thought how irksome they were, how unnecessary, and how little pleasure they gave.