Hugh Crichton's Romance. Coleridge Christabel Rose
from London – next to the county town in dignity, and before it in size and enterprise. It could boast no architecture and no antiquities, save a handsome church – neither very old nor very new – and some tumble-down, red-tiled, dirty streets, sloping down from the back of the town to the canal – unless, indeed, like some of its townsmen, you counted the Corinthian façade of the railway station, the Gothic gables of the new Town-Hall, or the sober eighteenth-century squareness of the Oxley Bank. These two latter public buildings opened on to a broad, sunny market-place; from which started a clean, white, sunny road, which led past villas, nursery gardens, meadows, and bits of furzy, heathery waste, all the way to Redhurst, and was the old coach-road from the county town to London.
Along this road were the prettiest residences, the gayest little conservatories, the most flowery lilacs, laburnums, and acacias of suburban Oxley. Here was the “best neighbourhood,” and here, on the clean, gravelled footway, the nursery-maids and children went to walk on fine mornings; ladies and little dogs paid calls of an afternoon; and groups of slim, long-haired girls came out to attend classes at Oxley Manor, the famous Young Ladies’ School. The Manor House lay back from the road behind high, substantial, red-brick walls, with mossy crevices, and bushy ivy peeping over the top; showing beyond, garden trees, walnuts, acacias, and horse-chestnuts, surrounding the big, substantial house, where, from the small-paned windows, peeped now and then a girl’s face.
There was no better school in the country than the Miss Vennings’ at Oxley Manor; and it was considered a great privilege for the girls of Oxley that certain classes there were opened to them; and a still greater that Miss Spencer and Miss Crofton were allowed to attend regularly as day scholars. But these young ladies did not come from Redhurst by the road. There was a pretty, quiet path through the meadows – half-way between the public road and the towing-path by the canal – that led here through a bit of copsewood famous for primroses, there across a sunny, open meadow; now over a low, wooden stile, then between high hedges, full of brambles, honey-suckles, and roses; till the hedges grew neater and closer, and terminated in the high red wall of the Manor kitchen-garden, from which opened a little green gate. On the other side of the road was a paddock, with a shallow pond where ducks flourished, and where, on the opposite bank, an old pollard willow threw its slender branches across the muddy water.
On that sunny afternoon a sunnier spot could hardly have been found than the narrow path under the wall; and yet here lingered two figures: a girl, who had poised herself on the end of a great garden-roller, and a young man who leaned against the white railing of the pond beside her. She was a graceful little lady, small and soft-faced; with brown hair, shining and neat, round rosy lips, and clear, steady eyes of a hazel tint. Her white dress was elaborately trimmed with handsome embroidery, and all her blue ribbons were fresh and smart, as if they had no need to see sunny days enough to dim their brightness. There was a bag of books at her feet, and her pretty eyes were cast down towards them; and her pink cheeks were flushed with considerable, yet not excessive, embarrassment.
“But, Arthur,” she said, with a clear, distinct, and yet soft utterance, “but, Arthur, I think we ought to consider about it a great deal.”
“I have never considered it at all,” said Arthur Spencer.
He was a tall young man, slight and graceful; with – spite of his second class and his cultivated expression – a sort of happy-go-lucky air, that seemed hardly to have outgrown the right to his old appellation of a “very pretty boy,” earned by his bright colour, dark hair, with a picturesque wave in it, and black-lashed eyes, of that distinct shade of grey which cannot be mistaken for blue or hazel. He was an elegant, rather handsome young man at three-and-twenty, with a light-hearted, self-reliant manner that might have been careless and even conceited had a less earnest and genuine affection looked out from his bright eyes at the pretty creature beside him. Arthur thought himself clever, good-looking, rather a fine fellow in his way; but what did he not think of Mysie Crofton?
“There’s nothing new in it; is there, Mysie?” he continued, as he took her prettily-gloved hand, with the freedom of old intercourse, just touched with something sweeter. “Nothing new. We were always the friends of the family, and it must have come to this soon.”
“Yes,” said Mysie, simply; “but I thought – I thought – those things never did come to anything.”
“You thought? Ah, Mysie, I have my answer now: You thought, you little worldly-minded thing, that first love was all humbug, eh? Well, we’ll be an instance to the contrary.”
Mysie blushed.
“I’m sure,” she said, “you were always telling me about young ladies.”
“But I always told you about them, Mysie! And now I could not go on any longer without having it out. I knew it; and you knew it – oh, yes, you did; and Aunt Lily was beginning to find out.”
“But there’s Hugh?”
“Ah, Hugh. I daresay he won’t quite like it; those things are not in his line. But he is too good to make foolish objections. To be sure, there is one he may fairly make.”
“What’s that?” said Mysie, frightened.
“Your fortune, Mysie; and when I think of it, it half frightens me.”
“I don’t think it is so very much,” said Mysie.
“It is enough to give you a right to all this,” said Arthur, touching her pretty dress; “and if I thought I could not give it you, I would be silent. But, Mysie, I have not much of my own; but I think I have earned the right to say I have a good chance of success in any career I might choose; and there is always the Bank. I know I cannot marry you now, Mysie, my darling,” he continued, with a sort of frank, eager deference; “and if anyone you like better comes by I will never hold you to your promise. But in the meantime are we the worse for acknowledging that which has existed so long – so long? Oh, Mysie, I don’t know how to make love to you. I think it’s all made, but you are part of myself. I could have no life without you. I cannot imagine myself not loving you, not looking to have you one day for my own.”
If Mysie was a little slow to answer, it was not because she could imagine her life without Arthur. All this was only the right name for that which had always been. They were Arthur and Mysie; and they would be Arthur and Mysie to the end of the chapter.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s quite true. It just is. But I’ll try and be a great deal better to you than ever I have been. It ought to be like ‘John Anderson.’”
Mysie had ideas, and was not afraid to express them. She used nice, pretty language, and when a thought struck her she would say it out in a way sometimes formal, but always genuine and sweet.
“John Anderson?” said Arthur – not that he did not know.
And Mysie repeated the sweetest of all sweet love-songs, the one fulfilment in the midst of so much longing desire.
As Arthur heard her gentle, fearless voice, and saw her clear eyes raised to his own, as she repeated, without fear or falter:
“And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo,”
a great awe came over him.
“Oh, Mysie, my love, my darling, may God grant it! For nothing in life could ever come between us.”
And with this hope, that in its intensity was almost fear, he drew her towards him, and gave her his first lover’s kiss. She was silent; and then, recovering herself, said, in a different tone:
“And I don’t think it will be inconvenient to have a little money!”
The revulsion of ideas made Arthur laugh.
“Worldly wisdom!” he exclaimed; then suddenly sprang up from the other end of the roller as a tall handsome lady, in a garden hat, came out of the green gate.
“Miss Crofton!”
“I – I was only taking Mysie to school, Miss Venning,” said Arthur; while Mysie, pink and fluttered, picked up her books and hurried off up the path.
Miss