The Semi-attached Couple/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
This was the grand day of the Douglas dinner. They arrived. Mr. Douglas prepared to dine and to talk, and to be thankful if the cookery and conversation were good; Mrs. Douglas, perfectly ready and able to detect what might be amiss, and to say what would be disagreeable; and the girls, charmed with the new gowns that had been manufactured in honour of the occasion, and full of mysterious curiosity about Lord Teviot, and of real affectionate interest in Lady Helen.
Lord and Lady Eskdale and most of the guests were assembled. Amelia, for a wonder, was ready in good time; she was anxious to see her sister and Lord Teviot meet, and had taken her station near the door on purpose. Helen appeared soon after the arrival of the Douglas family, and received the friendly greeting of Mr. Douglas, and the meaning pressure of his daughters' hands, with the kindest cordiality. She looked flushed and excited when first she entered, but after a glance round the room her agitation subsided, and it was evidently a relief to her to see that Lord Teviot was not there. Dinner was announced, and he had not appeared.
"Are we to wait for him, Helen?" said Lord Eskdale, with a smile.
"Oh no, papa. Mr. Douglas, you must take pity on me. Do you remember the first day I dined down, how you protected me in to dinner?"
The whole party marshalled themselves, and went on to the dining-room.
"How disappointing!" whispered Sarah to Eliza; "I wanted to see them together."
Helen always sat on one side of her father, whatever guests there might be; and Amelia observed with pain the earnestness with which she tried to induce Mr. Douglas to take the chair next to her on the other side; but he laughed and left her, telling her he preferred going of his own accord to being sent away. Lord Teviot came in just as the soup and fish were taken away. He took his accustomed place, but without looking at Helen, and not till the second course came did any conversation pass between them, and then it seemed to be short and constrained; but she talked to her father in apparently good spirits. Sarah and Eliza looked at each other, and wondered whether that would be the right manner to adopt under similar circumstances. The ladies rose to retire. Helen had dropped her bracelet. Lord Teviot stooped for it, but with an air of such unwillingness that Helen said, "Pray do not give yourself so much trouble, I will send for it presently."
"As you please," he answered coldly, and stepped back to let her pass.
"Stay, Nell," said Trevor, "I will find it; Amelia has brought me into excellent training. I am quite in the habit of groping about under the table for all the things she drops. I am much more pliable than Teviot."
"That you are," said Helen; "thank you, dear Alfred"; and without another look at Lord Teviot she passed on. Amelia did not at all like the aspect of affairs, but consoled herself with the hope that it was a mere lovers' quarrel, and would end in a burst of sentiment; and in the meantime she was glad to divert Mrs. Douglas's attention by showing her Helen's trousseau. It was indeed "showing her eyes to grieve her heart"; but if her saturnine dispositions could exhaust themselves on the senseless gowns and the poor dumb trinkets, it would be better than allowing her to make remarks on more sensitive victims. Sarah and Eliza were in good-natured rapture with the whole show—from the Brussels lace wedding-gown to the very last dozen of embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs, and they were quite sorry when a summons to coffee took them back to the drawing-room.
"Thirty morning gowns!" whispered Sarah, as they went down stairs. "The idea of a new gown every day for a month. Now I call that real happiness."
"Not such real, lasting happiness," answered Eliza, half laughing, as eighteen bracelets, and then those heaps of gloves and handkerchiefs. A quarter of them, Sarah, would free our miserable allowances from embarrassments for life."
"It must be very pleasant to be so rich———"
"And to be going to be married," said Eliza; and this sage conclusion brought them to the drawing-room door.
Helen would perhaps have given them a different opinion. She began to doubt much whether it were happiness, or anything like it, to be going to be married. She had accepted Lord Teviot on an acquaintance of very few weeks, and that carried on solely in a ball-room or at a breakfast. She knew that her sisters had married in the same way, and were very happy. No one, not even her mother, had seemed to doubt for a moment that Lord Teviot's proposal was to be accepted. And except some slight misgivings as to whether she liked him as much as Amelia had liked Mr. Trevor, she herself had had no distrust as to her future prospects till she came into the country. Then she found every day some fresh cause to doubt whether she were as happy, engaged to Lord Teviot, as she was before she had ever seen him. He was always quarrelling with her—at least, so she thought; but the real truth was, that he was desperately in love, and she was not; that he was a man of strong feelings and exacting habits, and with considerable knowledge of the world; and that she was timid and gentle, unused to any violence of manner or language, and unequal to cope with it. He alarmed her, first by the eagerness with which he poured out his affection, and then by the bitterness of his reproaches because, as he averred, it was not returned.
She tried to satisfy him; but when he had frightened away her playfulness, he had deprived her of her greatest charm, and she herself felt that her manner became daily colder and more repulsive. His prediction that she would be happier anywhere than with him seemed likely, by repetition, to insure its own fulfilment. Even their reconciliations—for what is the use of a quarrel but to bring on a reconciliation?—were unsatisfactory. She wished that he loved her less, or would say less about it; and he thought that the gentle willingness with which she met his excuses was only a fresh proof that his love or his anger were equally matters of indifference to her. No French actor with a broken voice, quivering hands, a stride, and a shrug, could have given half the emphasis to the sentiment, J'aimerais mieux être haï qu'aimé faiblement, than Lord Teviot did to the upbraidings with which he diversified the monotony of love-making. This very morning he had persuaded himself that Helen would have preferred riding with her brother. She found the sun hot, and proposed to return. This was a fresh offence, and he declared that it was only a desire to avoid him that made her wish to shorten their ride. Then he worked himself up by a repetition of his wrongs to a degree of violence that would have surprised himself at another moment. At first she laughed at his accusations, then she was shocked at his bitterness, and at last, gay and giddy as she was, her spirits gave way; and when he helped her to dismount from her horse, he saw that her cheeks were pale, and that big tears were rolling over them. To his entreaties that she would stay only five minutes more with him, she shook her head and said faintly, "No, I am too tired now, I can bear no more "; and as she left him the thought rushed into her mind, "Perhaps he is right. I do not love him as I ought; it is not yet too late."
It was in this mood that Amelia found her. One word of encouragement would have given her spirit to break off her marriage; but Amelia, who had been in love with Mr. Trevor from the first hour of their acquaintance down to the present speaking, could not realize her sister's feelings, and gave the only advice that she would herself have taken in Helen's position. Helen went down to dinner irresolute. Nothing in Lord Teviot's manner tended to reconcile her to him; and She thought that in the course of the evening she would bravely seek him to dissolve their engagement. But perhaps he saw something in her ease of manner that alarmed him: dinner, that useful counsellor, had smoothed his ruffled temper; perhaps the instinct that always leads a man to foresee when an impending explanation is not likely to end in his favour prompted him to divine that he should have the worse of this. And the result was, that when he came into the drawing-room, and saw Helen conversing gaily with Mrs. Douglas, he drew quietly towards her, and sat down, looking very penitent, on a wretched, hard, cane chair with a straight back, immediately behind her. Gradually he edged himself into the conversation, took an opportunity of throwing Helen's work on the floor, partly that he might stoop for it with all Trevor's pliability, and partly that in the course of that process he might contrive to touch with his lips Helen's hand, unperceived even by the sharp-eyed Mrs. Douglas; and that amends being made, he took his accustomed place on the sofa by her side, and was so gentle and so pleasant that her resentment faded gradually away, and all her magnanimous resolutions were forgotten. Her misgivings as to the degree of affection she felt for him remained; but she supposed Amelia was right: it would be shocking to break her promise. And, in short, she was too young to act for herself, and too much devoted to her parents to ask them to do for her what she knew would give them pain; and so the evening ended peacefully.