After the ladies had retired to their respective chambers kind Mrs Wiseman wrapped herself in a loose dressing-gown of heroic proportions, and wandered forth in search of gossip. She first tapped lightly at the door of the room occupied by Lavinia and Matilda. She heard a whispered colloquy going on inside, but there was no response to her knock. Then she turned the handle, with the idea of opening the door and thus saving her guests the trouble of getting up, in case they were already in bed. She found, however, that the key had been turned in the lock, so she stole thankfully away to Stella’s room. A faint “Come in,” uttered in a voice that strongly suggested tears, reached her through the panel, and she entered, to find the girl, whose previous manner had been as that of one without a single care, flung on the bed, with her face buried in the pillow, and sobbing as though her heart were breaking. The motherly sympathy of the women went out to the desolate girl, and she folded her to a breast where loving kindness and bulk were in proportions of like vastness.
The girl told all her troubles and fears. Her story was a sad one. An orphan, and educated at the expense of the Mission Society, she had chosen the alternative of coming to South Africa and marrying a man she had never seen or heard of in preference to undertaking teaching work, which she not alone hated, but was quite unfit for. She had suddenly made up her mind to this course, to supply the place of one of the Lavinia-Matilda sisterhood, who was to have come, but who was prevented from doing so by illness. Alone with her thoughts, amid the silence of the sea, Stella had come bitterly to regret the step she had unthinkingly taken. Lavinia and Matilda had disliked her from the first, and excluded her from their improving companionship. When she made friends with the young Scotsman, who made her his confidante in respect of an ardent mutual attachment between himself and a girl he had left behind him, they had made cruel remarks on the subject, which had the effect of making her practically drop their acquaintance. Kind Mrs Wiseman did her best to comfort this belated little sunbird, who had absorbed some of the sombreness of the plumage of the too highly domesticated fowls whose cage she had shared during the past three months, and then retired to her room, where she woke her husband up for the purpose of making him listen to Stella’s history.
Next morning she heard Lavinia—in a voice evidently meant to be overheard—congratulating Matilda upon the fact that they had locked their door before retiring to rest, and thus prevented the entrance of an intruder. “One can never feel quite safe, you know, in savage countries.”
As the week which had to elapse between the arrival of the nymphs and that of the swains drew to a close, Mrs Wiseman found herself more and more drawn towards Stella, but unable to approach nearer to anything like friendliness with the other two. Her relations with Stella no doubt formed a bar to anything of the kind. Consequently, these patterns of propriety of the very properest type continued to cultivate each other’s society to a point of exclusiveness that verged upon rudeness.
As her regard for Stella grew, Mrs Wiseman began to think more and more of the girl’s future. She was well acquainted with the three ministers, and having had experience of the working of the system under which these marriages were arranged, she had no difficulty in forecasting Stella’s connubial destiny. She was absolutely certain that the Reverend Peter Bloxam would see the finger of Providence clearly indicating Stella as his fore-ordained bride, and she sighed at the incongruous prospect. As to young Wardley, well, he and Stella would have suited each other excellently well; but she knew by experience that one might as well expect children to pass by a rosy-cheeked apple for the sake of a turnip as to think that the two seniors would prefer the unimpeachable but mature qualities of either Lavinia or Matilda to the beauty and sweetness of Stella. Mrs Wiseman herself had come out from England as a pretty, fresh young girl, and had been promptly and unhesitatingly recognised as his Providence-selected bride by a man who was almost old enough to be her father. On the same occasion a certain young minister (the youngest of the batch) and she had looked at each other with eyes full of mournful sympathy that was closely akin to love—she from the side of her old, grizzled bridegroom, and he from that of his antique bride, who had fallen to him as the youngest of the party by a process of elimination of the others by his seniors, under Providential direction. In her case, however, things had, in a measure come right; her husband and the other clergyman’s wife had, after four years, died within a few months of each other, and when, about a year subsequently, the widow and the widower met, they found that the mournful element in their looks had given place to one of hopeful anticipation, which was duly realised a few months afterwards in a happy marriage. The odds were, of course, very much against such a fortunate combination happening in the case of Stella and young Wardley. She sighed more and more as the time for the arrival of the three suitors drew nigh, and the gloom of her thoughts seemed to communicate itself to all the others, so much so that the Parsonage took on the air of a house from which funerals rather than weddings were expected.
It was the evening before the expected arrival of the bridegrooms. The brides had retired to their rooms, and Mrs Wiseman went upstairs to have her usual chat with Stella. They had hitherto by tacit consent avoided discussion of the approaching events except in the most general terms.
“My dear,” said Mrs Wiseman, after a pause in the conversation, “suppose you and I have a chat about those who are expected to arrive to-morrow; I know them all, so can tell you what each one is like. Do you realise that in two days you will be engaged, and that in three you will be married?”
“Yes,” replied Stella; “I am not likely to forget it. I shall be glad to hear what my future husband is like.”
“Well, if I must tell the truth, I think it is a great shame the way they manage these things—I mean their giving the oldest man first choice.”
“Are a—any of them very old?”