The Rock Ahead (Vol. 1&2). Edmund Yates

CHAPTER IV.

      Settled.

       Table of Contents

      The Vale House, Hampstead, was admirably suited in point of size and situation for a boarding-school or "establishment" for young ladies. It stood in its own grounds, which, though not really extensive, had been made the most of, and contrived to look as if there were a great deal more of them than there really was; and it commanded an extensive prospect from the upper windows, well elevated above the jealous walls which guarded the youth and beauty committed to Mrs. Bloxam's charge from contact with the outer world. Occasionally, or at least in one instance, as will presently appear, the security had not been altogether so inviolable as might have been desired; but, on the whole, the "establishment" at Vale House maintained and deserved a high character. A heavy, square, roomy, red-brick mansion, with its windows cased in white stone, and a coat-of-arms sculptured in the same material, but now nearly undecipherable, inserted over the heavy mahogany hall-door,--the Vale House belonged to a period of architecture when contract-building was unknown, when the art of "running-up" houses was yet undiscovered, and a family mansion among the middle-classes meant a house in which fathers and sons and grandsons intended to live and die, unbeguiled by "splendid opportunities" into constant migrations and rapid changes in their style and manner of living.

      The Vale House had, however, suffered from the changes and innovations of the age; and the grandson of its last hereditary inhabitant now dwelt in splendour in a west-end "place," forming an "annexe" to a square of ultra-fashionable pretensions and performances, and looked and spoke as though he had never even heard the name of a locality more northern or more distant from the centre of civilisation than the Marble Arch. If the Townleys were oblivious of the Vale House, so was the Vale House of them. Except among such of the inhabitants of Hampstead as were careful and religious conservators of tradition, the origin and history of the Vale House had been forgotten; and a general notion prevailed that it had always been a school. The pupils--with the exception of such as were of a romantic turn of mind and given to the association of all old houses having plenty of room in them with the Orphan of the Forest and the Children of the Abbey--hated the place, and believed that it must always have witnessed the incarceration of unoffending girlhood. The ancient and much-effaced armorial bearings awakened no compassionate respect in the minds of these haughty young creatures, but rather a lively scorn. "Old Bloxam was only a sea-captain, and she was a governess in some old lord's family, and they set her up in the school, and she gives herself airs as if she was a lady," they would remark, under the influence of irritation, arising from causes gastronomic or otherwise; and the caricaturing of these armorial bearings was a favourite jeu d'esprit among the livelier and cleverer section of Mrs. Bloxam's pupils.

      The school at the Vale House had--been of late years a very prosperous undertaking. Mrs. Bloxam's connection was among the rich and respectable mercantile community, not the shop-keeping, be it known: she observed with the utmost strictness the distinction between wholesale and retail trades, and especially affected the learned professions. In Gertrude's time, two daughters of a Scotch baronet had effectively represented the real aristocracy; but they were "finished" long since, and had returned to the land of their birth, having learned to braid their sandy locks, and to tone down their hereditary freckles, and equally hereditary accents, to the admiration of all Glen Houlaghan. The real aristocracy was quite unrepresented at the Vale House, but the "British-merchant" element flourished there. Mrs. Bloxam had prospered of late years, and was now in circumstances which permitted her to contemplate retiring from the labours of school-keeping,--in which she had never pretended to herself to find a congenial occupation,--as a not impossible, indeed not even a very remote, contingency.

      Mrs. Bloxam was not at all like the conventional schoolmistress; she as little resembled the Pinkerton as the Monflathers type; and despite the contemptuous comments of her pupils was very ladylike indeed, both in appearance and manners. She was a tall slight woman, very fair of hair and complexion, with blue eyes, which were a little hard in expression, and a little shifty; with an inexpressive mouth, a graceful figure, and a good deal of character and decision in her voice, gestures, and movements. She had purchased the Vale House from its former proprietor, a distant relative of her own and, like herself, a schoolmistress, on highly advantageous terms, when she was a new-made widow, and a very young woman; and now she hoped, after a year or two, to dispose of it on terms by no means so advantageous to the purchaser. But this hope Mrs. Bloxam had not spoken of to anyone. She was of silent and secretive temperament, and liked to make up her mind completely, and in every detail, to any plan of action which she contemplated before making it known to any friend or acquaintance. Her man of business was Mrs. Bloxam's sole confidant, and even he knew no more of her affairs than was indispensable to their safe and profitable conduct.

      Mr. Dexter would have been as ignorant as any mere acquaintance of Mrs. Bloxam's--as any of the young girls asleep in the white beds, standing in long ranges in the "lofty and well-ventilated dormitories" which formed so important a feature in the prospectus that eloquently set forth the advantages of the Vale House "establishment"--of the nature of the contents of a bundle of letters which Mrs. Bloxam set herself to peruse, late on the same evening on which Gertrude Lloyd's letter reached her well-shaped hands. Only one individual in the world besides Mrs. Bloxam knew that the letters which she was now engaged in reading had ever been written; and their writer would probably have been surprised--as they did not contain any guarantees for the payment of money--had he known that they were still in existence.

      Gertrude's letter had reached Mrs. Bloxam just at the hour at which the concluding ceremonial of the school-day routine was about to be performed. She laid it aside until prayers and the formal leave-taking for the night insisted upon at the Vale House as essential to the due inculcation of good breeding had been gone through; and then, in the welcome retirement and solitude of her own sitting-room, seated before her own particular bureau, and with her own particular supper in tempting perspective, Mrs. Bloxam read, not without sympathy mingling with her astonishment, the letter of her quondam pupil.

      Mrs. Bloxam read the letter once and laid it down, and thought very profoundly for some minutes. Then she took it up and read it again, and once more fell into a fit of musing. The bureau before which she had seated herself had a number of small drawers at the side. One of these Mrs. Bloxam opened, and selected from among its neatly-arranged contents a packet, tied with green ribbon and docketed: "Lord S--, from 185- to 186-." The parcel contained twenty letters, and Mrs. Bloxam read them all through. The task did not occupy much time; the writing was large and clear, her sight was strong and quick. When she had read the letters, she replaced them in the order which she had temporarily disturbed, retied the packet, and locked it away in the drawer whence she had taken it. Then she arranged a sheet of paper on the blotting-pad before her, took up a pen, and began to write with a rapid hand what was evidently intended to be a long letter.

      But in the middle of the third page Mrs. Bloxam changed her mind. "Safer not, better not," she muttered to herself; "the written letter remains. Witness these;" and she inclined her pen-handle towards the drawer in which she had just replaced the packet of letters; "time will show whether she had better know, or not know."

      Then Mrs. Bloxam tore the sheet, the third page of which she had begun to write on, into fragments sufficiently minute to defy the curiosity and the ingenuity of the most prying and ingenious of housemaids, and replaced it by another, on which she wrote the following words:

      "The Vale House, Hampstead.

      "Tuesday night.

      "My