“To think that he should have formed so foolish and cruel and fatal an attachment,” the widow said, “which can but end in pain whatever be the issue.”
“The issue shan’t be marriage, my dear sister,” the Major said resolutely. “We’re not going to have a Pendennis, the head of the house, marry a strolling mountebank from a booth. No, no, we won’t marry into Greenwich Fair, ma’am.”
“If the match is broken suddenly off,” the widow interposed, “I don’t know what may be the consequence. I know Arthur’s ardent temper, the intensity of his affections, the agony of his pleasures and disappointments, and I tremble at this one if it must be. Indeed, indeed, it must not come on him too suddenly.”
“My dear madam,” the Major said, with an air of the deepest commiseration “I’ve no doubt Arthur will have to suffer confoundedly before he gets over the little disappointment. But is he, think you, the only person who has been so rendered miserable?”
“No, indeed,” said Helen, holding down her eyes. She was thinking of her own case, and was at that moment seventeen again—and most miserable.
“I, myself,” whispered her brother-in-law, “have undergone a disappointment in early life. A young woman with fifteen thousand pounds, niece to an Earl—most accomplished creature—a third of her money would have run up my promotion in no time, and I should have been a lieutenant—colonel at thirty: but it might not be. I was but a penniless lieutenant: her parents interfered: and I embarked for India, where I had the honour of being secretary to Lord Buckley, when commander-in-Chief—without her. What happened? We returned our letters, sent back our locks of hair (the Major here passed his fingers through his wig), we suffered—but we recovered. She is now a baronet’s wife with thirteen grown-up children; altered, it is true, in person; but her daughters remind me of what she was, and the third is to be presented early next week.”
Helen did not answer. She was still thinking of old times. I suppose if one lives to be a hundred: there are certain passages of one’s early life whereof the recollection will always carry us back to youth again, and that Helen was thinking of one of these.
“Look at my own brother, my dear creature,” the Major continued gallantly: “he himself, you know, had a little disappointment when he started in the—the medical profession—an eligible opportunity presented itself. Miss Balls, I remember the name, was daughter of an apoth—a practitioner in very large practice; my brother had very nearly succeeded in his suit.—But difficulties arose: disappointments supervened, and—and I am sure he had no reason to regret the disappointment, which gave him this hand,” said the Major, and he once more politely pressed Helen’s fingers.
“Those marriages between people of such different rank and age,” said Helen, “are sad things. I have known them produce a great deal of unhappiness.—Laura’s father, my cousin, who—who was brought up with me”—she added, in a low voice, “was an instance of that.”
“Most injudicious,” cut in the Major. “I don’t know anything more painful than for a man to marry his superior in age or his inferior in station. Fancy marrying a woman of low rank of life, and having your house filled with her confounded tag-rag-and-bobtail of relations! Fancy your wife attached to a mother who dropped her h’s, or called Maria Marire! How are you to introduce her into society? My dear Mrs. Pendennis, I will name no names, but in the very best circles of London society I have seen men suffering the most excruciating agony, I have known them to be cut, to be lost utterly, from the vulgarity of their wives’ connections. What did Lady Snapperton do last year at her dejeune dansant after the Bohemian Ball? She told Lord Brouncker that he might bring his daughters or send them with a proper chaperon, but that she would not receive Lady Brouncker who was a druggist’s daughter, or some such thing, and as Tom Wagg remarked of her, never wanted medicine certainly, for she never had an h in her life. Good Ged, what would have been the trifling pang of a separation in the first instance to the enduring infliction of a constant misalliance and intercourse with low people?”