The Semi-attached Couple/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
It is not worth while to give any of Helen's letters to her family. Some years ago it was the fashion of all newly-married people to write word to their friends that they were the happiest of human creatures. Heaven alone knows if it were true, but so they always said. Now this romantic state of bliss has been laughed at in society, and sneered at in novels, till nobody dares say a word about it. It may be wiser, but it is not quite satisfactory. The domestic novels of the day have described with such accuracy, and with so much satire, all the little fidgety amiabilities of life, that a wife who is inclined to praise her husband checks herself, for fear she should be reckoned like Mrs. Major Waddell. An active mother has a suspicion that she is laughed at as a Mrs. Fairbairn, and the kindly affections of the heart are now so carefully wrapped up and concealed, that it seems just possible that they may die altogether of suffocation.
Helen did not commit herself by any asseverations of extraordinary happiness, and made no mention of any fresh trait of perfection that every day must have revealed in Lord Teviot's character; but there was St. Mary's to describe, and the neighbourhood to explain, and all the various congratulatory letters she received were duly quoted, and her own regularly ended wdth "Teviot's love to all"; and Lady Eskdale was satisfied. Amelia read her sister's letters with greater distrust. She thought they were written in a constrained, guarded tone, and she remembered the week that preceded the wedding with pain and doubt. She hoped in another fortnight to see and judge for herself; but Mr. Trevor and she were summoned into Sussex by the sudden death of his father; and ten days after Helen's marriage Lord and Lady Eskdale sat down, for the first time during the last ten years, to a tête-à-tête dinner. Poor dear people, it fairly puzzled them. They were more attached to each other than many husbands and wives are after twenty-four years of married life; and they had been in the daily habit of taking a comfortable half-hour's talk in Lord Eskdale's library, uninterrupted by any of their children. But they had never contemplated the possibility of dining and passing the whole evening together, without a child to come in to dessert, or a daughter to look at and listen to. Then who was to make breakfast the next morning, and to answer notes, and to receive visitors? Lady Eskdale was quite posed. She actually ordered a riding-habit, and declared she would begin riding again with Lord Eskdale, who hated going out alone, and had always been accompanied by one of his children. Then she thought she could rub up music enough to play to him after dinner; but when the evening came she was fast asleep on the sofa, half dead with the fatigue of her morning ride, and she almost cried when a note was brought to her that required an answer—partly because, as she said and thought, she missed Helen so much, and partly because she was too indolent to sit up to write.
"I don't think I can ever exist in this way, Lord Eskdale," she said. "What is to be done? here is this note to be answered."
"Give it to me, Jane; I will be your secretary."
"Thank you, that is very good of you. It is a great relief for this once; but how am I to get on when you are out? To be sure, that poor dear Lord Walden might as well have put off dying just for a month, and then the Trevors could have stayed here. I am utterly lost without Amelia. There never was anything so unlucky. I wish Beaufort would marry. A daughter-in-law would be better than nothing; or if the Waldegraves would come back to England, Sophia might come here. It is really very hard to have no daughter at all, after all my trouble"; and Lady Eskdale's voice faltered.
"The schoolmistress, my lady," said the groom of the chambers, "is waiting for directions about the children's stuff books."
"There again, now! What am I to do? I have mislaid the patterns. Very well, tell her I will send to her. Now, Lord Eskdale, you know you cannot settle about the schoolchildren's frocks; that was poor Helen's business. Dear child! I do trust she is happy, but it is sad work marrying off one's daughters; it makes me very low at times. Lord Eskdale, do you think if I were to ask Mrs. Douglas to let me have Eliza here, that it would bore me very much?"
"You must be the best judge of that, my dear Jane; at all events, take care to ask the right daughter, not the one with the voice."
"No, no; I mean Eliza, who was Helen's bridesmaid. You know you thought her very pretty that day. She plays very well on the pianoforte, and I could take care that she should be always well dressed; and she would write my notes, and see the school-mistress, and help to entertain the company. She is a good-humoured, amiable girl, and I have always felt that I could be fond of her; and it would be such a thing for her, for the Douglases see so few people. I wish I could guess whether I should like this plan or not. I can ask her for a fortnight only at first, and if it does not do, then there would be an end of it."
"As you please, my love; it concerns you more than me."
"Yes, but I wish you would say what you think best; I am so little in the habit of making up my own mind. Helen always knew what I should like. I must say we have been unlucky in our daughters all marrying rich people. If any one of them had married a younger son without a shilling, they must have lived with us; but my girls had no time allowed them to look about them and choose for themselves; and so they have all married men with country-houses of their own, and I have lost them all."
And, roused by this overpowering calamity of wealthy sons-in-law, Lady Eskdale sat up to write her note to Mrs. Douglas.