when, quite suddenly, she consented to be his wife, he could scarcely have told if his delight were greater than his surprise.
“I do not love you,” she said with gentle calmness, “but I esteem you, and am prepared to do my duty as a wife. I should have preferred not to marry; but my parents desire that I should, and, as I am their only child, I do not think it right to oppose their wishes.”
It was scarcely an explanation to satisfy even an accepted lover, and Mr. Vane could not help asking if there were any one whom she preferred to him.
The answer was not prompt in coming, and was given with great reserve, though the lady showed neither confusion nor unwillingness to give it. She thought gravely for a minute before speaking, her fair,
quiet face all the time open to his study. “I have never had a lover,” she said then, “and I have never wished to marry any one. I have nothing to confess nor to repent of in this regard.”
With this he had been obliged to content himself. What unacknowledged maiden preference, untouched by passion, her words might have concealed, if any such had been, he could not ask and he never knew; but gentle, faithful, prompt in every duty, and sincerely desirous to render him happy as she was, he always felt that there was an inner chamber in her heart where he had never penetrated, and which she had even closed to her own eyes. There was no appearance of concealment or conscious reserve, no hidden pain, but only a something wanting, as if some delicate spring in her soul had been broken. He had hoped to make her forget whatever shadow of regret her life might have known, and to restore her to an elastic joyousness more suited to her age; and, in the earlier months of their married life, finding his efforts vain, he had broken out in some slight reproaches now and then. But the blush of pain and alarm, the anxious inquiries, “In what have I failed?” “What have I done to displease you?” and the gayety she strove to assume for his pleasure, made him regret his impatience. Tacitly he allowed her to renounce an affectation which was the first she had ever stooped to, and, as time passed on, they settled into a friendly and undemonstrative intercourse. Isabel seemed to have drawn her disposition from this lively surface of her mother’s briefly-troubled life; but the younger showed something of that quiet melancholy which had succeeded. Mrs. Vane died when
Bianca was but six years old, and her husband had never manifested any disposition to marry again, seeming to be satisfied with the society of his children.
In religion the daughters followed their mother, who had been a Catholic. The father was still Protestant.
“Poor papa!” Isabel said when speaking to a friend on the subject, “he never will be persuaded to study theology. The only way to attract him to a religion would be by the excellence of its professors; and he protests that he sees no difference in people in general, that he has no doubt the Chinese have amiable qualities, and that, if he lived among the Turks, he should probably become very fond of them. What can one do with such a man? Bring out all your hard little arguments and lay them down before him, showing how perfectly they fit into the most beautiful mosaic for your side, and he listens with the greatest attention, then mixes them all up, and rearranges them into an entirely different pattern for the opposite side, and ends by declaring that both are true as far as they go. You see, he has spent his life with two excellent women, one Protestant and the other Catholic—his mother and our mamma—and that has spoiled him for conversion. I’ve often wished that dear grand-mamma had been the least bit of a vixen, or had even taken snuff in her old age; but she never did a thing to spoil the beautiful white halo about her, and died at last as she had lived. Mamma went as the moon goes, waning, growing dimmer every day, till you see it like a little silver cloud in the sky, and then it is gone. But grand-mamma seemed to look up suddenly,
and smile, and disappear, as if some one she thought the world of, and hadn’t seen for a long time, had come and called her out of the room for a minute.”