The kindly, shrewd old merchant’s advice was followed; and Ruth Creelock, although she did not feign passionate grief for the half-brother who had so injured all who ought to have been dear to him, yet spoke of him with a softened feeling, which must have been changed had she known of the deadly enmity which once existed between the dead man and her husband.
MISS MARRABLE’S ELOPEMENT.
IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER I.
Miss Martha Marrable, a spinster lady of five-and-fifty, is the last of her race. Her only brother, Mr Clement Marrable, never married, and died twenty years ago at Baden-Baden, whither he had gone to drink the waters; and her two sisters, Maria and Lætitia, although they did marry, did not live to become middle-aged women. The elder, Maria, after becoming the wife of Mr Langton Larkspur, of the firm of Scrip, Larkspur, and Company, bankers, of Threadneedle Street, gave birth to a single child, a daughter, who was named Lucy; and the younger, Lætitia, having been led to the altar by Mr Septimus Allerton, of the firm of Allerton, Bond, and Benedict, brokers, of Pancake Lane, presented her husband with twin girls, of whom one only—and she was called Amy—survived her extreme infancy. It is therefore not astonishing that Miss Martha Marrable, a well-to-do woman without family ties, is exceedingly fond of the daughters of her two dead sisters. She usually has them to stay with her at least twice a year—once in the early summer at her house in Grosvenor Street; and once in the autumn at the seaside, or in Italy, whither she goes occasionally, accompanied—to the great wonder of the foreigners—by a courier, a man-servant, two maids, eleven boxes, and a green parrot. And as she is very kind to her nieces, and denies them nothing, it is not surprising that they are fully as fond of her as she is of them. But Miss Martha Marrable is growing old; whereas Miss Lucy Larkspur and Miss Amy Allerton are both young, and intend to remain so for some years to come. It is not, therefore, to be expected that the three ladies should invariably think exactly alike on all subjects. And indeed, I am happy to say that there are not many women who do agree with Miss Marrable upon all questions; for although she is as good-hearted an old spinster as ever breathed, she is, unfortunately, a man-hater.
I have looked into the dictionary to see what the verb ‘to hate’ signifies, and I find that it means ‘to despise,’ or ‘to dislike intensely.’ Let it not, however, be supposed that the word ‘man-hater’ is a stronger one than ought to be applied to Miss Marrable; for I am really not quite certain that it is altogether strong enough. She regards men as inferior animals, and looks down upon them with lofty contempt. ‘Who,’ she once said to her niece Lucy, ‘has turned the world upside down, filled it with poverty and unhappiness, and deluged it with blood? It is Man, Lucy. If woman had always governed the earth, we should have had no Cæsar Borgias, no Judge Jefferieses, no Bonapartes, and no Nana Sahibs.’ And yet Miss Martha Marrable can never see a vagrant begging in the street without giving him alms. The truth is, that although she detests and despises man, she pities him; just as she pities the poor idiot whom she sometimes sees grinning and gibbering by the wayside in Italy.
These being her sentiments, Miss Marrable has not, of course, many male acquaintances. She is on good, but not affectionate terms with her widowed brothers-in-law, Mr Langton Larkspur and Mr Septimus Allerton. She once a year invites her man of business, Mr John Bones, of Cook’s Court, to dine with her and them in Grosvenor Street; and she is civil to the rector of her parish, and to the medical man whom she would call in to attend her in case of illness. Yet Mr Larkspur once told Mr Allerton that this feminine dragon had had a violent love-affair when she was nineteen; and Mr Allerton—whose connection with the Marrable family is of much more recent date than that of Lucy’s father—actually declared that he could well believe it. If, however, Miss Marrable did have a love-affair in her youth, I am not inclined at this time of day to cast it as a reproach in her teeth. Boys will be boys; and girls, I suppose, will be girls, though they may live to see the error of their ways, and be none the worse for their follies. One thing is certain, and that is, that at the present time, and for at least five-and-twenty years past, Miss Martha Marrable has ceased to dream of the tender passion. She still occasionally talks vaguely of going up the Nile, or of visiting the Yellowstone Region, ere she dies; but she never contemplates the possibility of getting married; and I believe that she would as soon think of allowing a man to believe that she regarded him with anything but polite aversion, as she would think of going into business as a steeple-jack, and learning to stand on one leg on the top of the cross at the summit of St Paul’s Cathedral.
And yet Miss Martha Marrable was last year the heroine of a terrible scandal; and many of her misanthropic female friends have never since been able to completely believe her professions of hatred of man. The affair gave rise to many whispers, and was even, I understand, guardedly alluded to, with just and virtuous deprecation, in the columns of the Woman’s Suffrage Journal, as a terrible but happily rare instance of womanly weakness and frivolity; and since the true story has never been told, I feel that it is only fair to tell it, and by telling it, to defend Miss Marrable from the dastardly charges that have been made against her established reputation for good sense and unflinching contempt of the rougher sex.
Towards the end of August, Miss Marrable and her two nieces left London for North Wales, and after a long and tiresome journey, reached Abermaw, in Merionethshire, and took rooms at the Cors-y-Gedol Hotel. They were accompanied, as usual, by the two maids and the green parrot; but the courier and the man-servant, being males, and their services not being imperatively required, they were left behind in London. Lucy had just celebrated her twenty-third birthday, and Amy was just about to celebrate her twenty-first; and—although I am sorry to have to record it—I am by no means astonished that they were both in love. Lucy, during the whole of the previous season, had been determinedly flirting with a designing young artist named Robert Rhodes; and Amy, younger and less experienced than her cousin, had been carrying on, even more sentimentally, with Mr Vivian Jellicoe, who, being heir to a baronetcy, found that position so arduous and fatiguing, that he was quite unfitted for any active occupation of a laborious character. Of course Miss Marrable knew nothing of these affairs. Had she suspected them, she would perhaps have not taken her nieces with her to Abermaw; for it happened that at that very watering-place, Sir Thomas Jellicoe and his son Vivian were staying when the three ladies, the two maids, and the green parrot arrived. But no foresight on Miss Marrable’s part could have prevented Mr Robert Rhodes from following Lucy to North Wales. That adventurous artist had made up his mind to spend the autumn in Miss Larkspur’s neighbourhood; and even if Miss Marrable had carried off her elder niece to Timbuctoo or the Society Islands, Mr Rhodes would have gone after the pair by the next train, steamboat, diligence, or caravan available.
Upon the morning, therefore, after Miss Marrable’s arrival at Abermaw, she and her nieces were comfortably installed at the Cors-y-Gedol Hotel; while at the Red Goat, close by, Sir Thomas Jellicoe and Vivian occupied rooms on the first floor, and Mr Rhodes had a bedroom on the third.
In the course of that afternoon, Miss Martha Marrable, accompanied by her nieces, and followed at a respectful distance by the two maids, walked in the sunshine upon the hard sands that stretch, for I do not know how many hundred yards at low water, between the rocky hills behind the little town and the margin of Cardigan Bay. The weather was hot and sultry, and the unrippled sea looked like molten lead in the glare. Much exercise was therefore out of the question; and ere long, the three ladies sat down on the seaward side of a rush-grown sandhill to read, leaving the two maids to stroll farther if they chose to do so, and to explore at their leisure the unaccustomed wonders of the seashore.