Dilemmas of Pride. Mrs. Loudon
and his being consequently heir to the Arden estates, which were strictly entailed in the male line. Nay, his very nursemaid's usual threat was, that if he cried when his face was being washed, he should never be Sir Geoffery. At school, all the boys at play hours had somehow or other acquired the habit of calling him Sir Geoffery; and at college his companions, particularly those who wished to flatter him into idle extravagance, constantly joked and complimented him about his great expectations. Thus had those expectations, unjustly founded as they were, grown with his growth and strengthened with his strength; till, when his uncle did marry, he could scarcely help thinking himself an injured, robbed, and very ill-treated person. Hope however revived a little, on the first three children chancing to be daughters, and his mother began again to say, he might have the Arden estates yet:—stranger things had happened. "And you might marry one of the girls, you know, Geoffery," she would continue—"it would be some compensation to poor Sir Alfred for having no son."
"Indeed I should do no such thing," he would reply. "I should just please myself. It's not to oblige me, I suppose, that my uncle has no son."
The birth of the twin brothers, immediately after this, put an end to all further speculations on the subject; except, indeed, that Mrs. Arden could not help observing that, "after all, the lives of two weakly infants, as twins of course must be, with the measles, hooping-cough, and all other infantile diseases before them, were not worth much."
Geoffery became sulky under his disappointment, and said very little; but silently he hated the twins for having been born. Of what use were they, he thought; for what purpose had they been brought into the world, except indeed to ruin his prospects.
Had they never been born, they would not have wanted the property, and he might have enjoyed it. Now he must go and drudge at a profession, the very idea of which, after his imagination had been so long dazzled by false hopes, he absolutely loathed.
He had been educated for the Bar, but had neglected his studies. He had been dissipated without gaiety of heart, and a gambler from avarice. His hopes had made him proud, while his fears had made him gloomy. In short, he had contrived to extract the evil from every thing, while he had avoided all that was good. As to his legal studies, he had never read any portion with interest or attention but the law of male entail.
He was a bachelor, and likely to remain such: for he could not afford to marry, unless he obtained a much larger fortune than he was entitled to expect.
There was nothing he could exactly dare to do to injure his cousins; but he hated them both, and kept an evil eye upon them. As for his female cousins, he did not take the trouble of actively hating them, he merely despised them as beings shut out from all possibility of inheriting the property. Beautiful and high born as they were, he would not have accepted the hand of any one of them had it been offered to him.
Sir Willoughby was goodnaturedly weak, and very vain;—his was a vanity however which, when it happened to be gratified, made him extremely happy, by keeping him in the highest good humour with himself. From him Geoffery won large sums at billiards, by flattering him on his play, 'till he induced him to give him, habitually, such odds as amounted, in point of fact, to giving him the game, or, in other words, the sum staked upon it.
Lady Arden often endeavoured to dissuade her son from acquiring so bad a habit as that of gambling, but in vain; for Willoughby, like all weak men, was obstinate to excess: he had besides a marvellous respect for the salique law, and that jealousy of being guided, which unhappily always forms a leading feature in the characters of those who stand most in need of guidance. Yet he was fondly attached to his mother; his greatest delight was to devise something for her pleasure or her accommodation; he was always ready to make her munificent presents; in short, he would do any thing to oblige her, with the exception of following her suggestions.
Not that he always ungraciously refused requests that contained in them nothing prohibitory; he had no particular objection sometimes to do a thing he was asked to do; but a thing he was asked not to do, he was always sure to do! And if it happened to be a thing which Geoffery Arden wished should be done, he could always decide the point, by artfully complimenting his cousin on the firmness of his character.
Of Alfred, Geoffery could make nothing. He was frank, kind, and open-hearted; yet clear-seeing and decided. With him his mother's slightest wish but guessed at was a law: his sisters, too, could always coax him out of any plan of pleasure of his own, and get him to go with them. Not so those for whom he had no particular affection; he had never yet been known, in any one instance, to sacrifice his opinion of what was right, respectable, or amiable, to the persuasions of idle companions; so that he was already respected as well as regarded by thinking and discerning men much older than himself; some of them too, men who had bought their experience dearly enough and who were surprised into involuntary admiration of so young a person, who seemed to have his intuitively.
His brother loved him in the most enthusiastic manner; more than he did his mother, or any one else in the world; yet, strange to say, such was Willoughby's dread of being governed, that even the brother whom he loved so much, had not the slightest influence over him; nay, Alfred was afraid to use persuasion of any kind, lest it should have a contrary effect; and yet, if he ever let it appear that he was in the slightest degree hurt or offended by this unmeaning and dogged obstinacy on the part of his brother, Willoughby's despair would sometimes, though but for a moment or two, manifest itself in a way perfectly terrifying; he would rush towards a window, or a river side, and threaten to fling himself out or in; so that Alfred, though he knew himself to be his brother's sole confidant, and the first object of his affections, was obliged, with great pain of course, to see him led away by designing people, especially his cousin Geoffery, into many practices far from prudent, yet not interfere; and even be thankful, when by refraining from so doing, he could avoid the recurrence of the distressing scenes alluded to. Willoughby had received a blow on the head when a child, which had not then exhibited any serious consequences; whether this circumstance had any connection with the occasional strangeness of his temper or not, it was impossible to say, but Alfred sometimes secretly feared it had. It was a thought, however, which he did not communicate even to his mother. Such was the family, which on the morning we have described, quitted Arden Park for London.
CHAPTER III.
While the Arden family are on their way to town, we shall take a peep at the High-street in Cheltenham. Strings of carriages were driving backward and forward, from turnpike to turnpike, while the open barouches, filled with bonnets of every colour in the rainbow, flaunting and waving to and fro, looked like so many moving beds of full blown tulips. Foot-passengers too of all classes thronged the flag-ways.
Among these was distinguishable a tall, large, and still handsome woman, apparently upwards of fifty. There was something aristocratic about both her countenance and carriage, although she was closely followed by a trollopy looking maid-servant, who carried a bandbox under each arm, a dressing-box in one hand, and a work-box in the other.
Mistress and maid entered the private door or genteel separate ingress, appropriated to lodgers, of a music-shop; and having the door at the further end of the passage opened, for the purpose of throwing light on the subject, stumbled up a still dark and very narrow staircase, at the top of which they turned abruptly into a small sunny drawing-room, furnished with chintz hangings, lined and draperied with faded pink calico. The carpet was a stamped cloth, of a showy pattern. It was a recent purchase, and therefore not yet faded; so that it secured to these lodgings, as being superiorly furnished, a great preference over their competitors. In the centre of the room stood a table covered with a very dingy green baize, and round the walls were ranged some half dozen small mock rosewood chairs, accommodated with little square inclined planes, covered with pink calico, and called cushions. Either for want of strings at the back, or in consequence of such strings being out of repair, these said inclined planes, whenever you attempted to help yourself or any one else to a chair, flew off, either into the middle of the floor, or if it was the fire you had wished to approach, perchance under the grate. Over the mantelpiece was placed what the landlady considered