Puff. “Now gentlemen, this scene goes entirely for what we call situation and stage effect, by which the greatest applause may be obtained without the assistance of ... sentiment or character. Pray mark.”

The Critic.

I returned to the Bank after seeing the ladies to Grove End, and going straight into my uncle’s private room, told him that Theresa and I were engaged.

“Engaged!” he cried, staring at me. “Are you in earnest?”

“Certainly I am.”

I never saw any man look so pleased.“It is almost time,” he said, “that I had something to give my spirits a turn. This delights me. But, good gracious! how sudden! how unexpected! I had no idea you were in love with her.”

“I came home from Thistlewood in love; but I never meant to ask her to be my wife yet awhile. My feelings overpowered me this morning and out came everything.”

“And does she love you, Charlie?”

“I don’t suppose she would accept me if she didn’t.”

“To be sure she wouldn’t. Of course she loves you. Well, well, this is cheering news after our late troubles. That old scheme of mine was quite pushed out of my mind by this elopement. I have been able to think of nothing else. Now at all events there will be one marriage after my heart. Has she written to Dick yet about it?”

“Why, you see, I only proposed to her this morning.”

“True, I forgot. You had better go to her. We can very well do without you just now—far better than she can. Upon my word,” he cried, grasping my hand, “your news is as good as a cordial. It throws quite a bright light on the future, and I can see my way now as I never saw it before. But I’ll not keep you. Get away to Grove End. We’ll talk the thing over this evening.”

I left him, but stopped a moment to ask Curling, who was at his desk, how he and Conny felt after the wedding.

“Very well thank you, Mr. Hargrave,” he replied: “but as I told your uncle, I shall go to my grave protesting that it was entirely superfluous.”

“No, no! come, you must confess that you feel more comfortable now that you have been married correctly.”

“Not a bit,” he said, “and whilst I live I shall always say it was superfluous.”

“By the way,” said I, halting as I was moving off, as though arrested by an afterthought: “you might tell Conny when you see her that I am engaged to be married.”

“Really!”

“Yes, my cousin Theresa has done me the honour to accept me. The news will interest your wife.”

“And delight her too,” said Curling, “for she still worries now and then over the trick we were unavoidably——”

“Tell her to forget everything as I have,” I interrupted quickly, for I never could stand any reference to that trick from him. “She has nothing to forget so far as I am concerned, as I hope my engagement proves.”

And I left the bank.

I found Theresa alone—my aunt having been seized with an auspicious fit of tenderness which had driven her (in her carriage) to her daughter’s lodgings.

“It seems that I was destined to make love to you,” said I; “for I am perpetually finding you by yourself all alone, as the song says, and opportunity creates the thief.”

“I can hardly believe we are engaged,” she answered. “We have, I fear, both been too hasty—you in proposing, I in accepting you.”

“If you mean to imitate Conny, I had better withdraw to my bed-room and cut my gorge. What! accept me, and then break into lamentations?”

“I can be true,” said she, firmly and proudly, “and do not speak of myself. But——”

There was only one way of silencing her buts, and that was by stopping her mouth. I leave you to guess how I did it. There was a vast deal of blushing, tender charges of sauciness, assumptions of indignation which the eyes vowed were terrible hypocrisies, and——

But, my Eugenio, even were love-making not an amusement in which no breathing creature can take the faintest interest, save those who are concerned in it, still ought I, and do I, politely but firmly decline to set down the particulars of that dear, delightful morning. The very respectable fear of growing sentimental is one check; but another and a more violent restraint is that profound sense of what d’ye call it? with which most men recur to the nonsense they are forced to emit when the fit is on them.

However, I ought not to conceal that our conversation brought out some little secrets of great value and moment to me; of which one was the assurance that she had fallen in love with me before I left Thistlewood.

“I never suspected it,” said I.

“I don’t think,” she whispered, “that I should have been so easily conquered had I not been resolved to atone for the cruel reception I gave you, and the wicked story I told O’Twist.”

“You tried to harden your heart,” said I; “but the process that ought to have made iron of it transformed it into wax.”

“I suppose so. I am a silly creature.”

“So much the better, dearest; for were you wise I might be miserable. A woman must love a man for something; and providing he gains her love, the means by which he wins her ought not to trouble either of them.”

That afternoon we each wrote to our respective fathers. What Theresa said I don’t know; but my letter was a very candid confession of happiness.

I was happy. I loved this cousin of mine dearly. It is true that I had had to undergo no ordeal for her. I had neither (to use a favourite order of description) been tried by the fire, nor proved in the furnace; “long years” had had nothing whatever to do with my love. I had been guilty of no “passionate yearnings,” nor “wild and wistful longings.” And I don’t think I had been “thrilled” once. In short, my passion was totally unlike those which are heard of at Mr. Mudie’s. And yet I am bold to say that no hero was ever fonder of the heroine whom he wooes in chapter the first, and loses in chapter the second, recovers in chapter the third, doubts in chapter the fourth, quarrels with in chapter the fifth, grows sardonic over in chapter the sixth, adores in chapter the seventh, flees in chapter the eighth, and finally marries in chapter the sixty-fourth, than I was of Theresa whom I had known only a few weeks, and whom, when I had first met her, I had execrated.

Uncle Dick arrived at Grove End next day in high spirits. I remember that after making me all manner of handsome compliments, he whispered, “Nobody shall be miserable when my daughter is happy;” and unknown to any of us left the house and after an hour’s absence returned—with Curling and Conny.

“Here they are!” he cried, in great glee, joining us on the lawn. “I was just in time. Conny had fetched her beloved at the bank and was on the point of starting for a walk. They were very reluctant to come: but I told them we couldn’t be happy without them.”

Conny turned a little pale when she met me, but soon recovered her composure and whispered her congratulations with her deep blue eyes fully upturned to mine. I gazed calmly into their depths.

“May you be very happy!” said she, and kissed me.

Eheu! when I wanted her kisses she wouldn’t give them.

Thanks to uncle Dick, our dinner-party that day was a very much livelier one than the last at which the young couple had been present. Without embarrassing Curling, he contrived to make a very great deal of him, engaged him in a conversation on topics on which the young man was well qualified to talk, and developed so many really good social points in him, that not only was I never more favourably impressed, but I actually caught my aunt regarding her son-in-law with a face absolutely promising with a propitiatory expression.Her Theodore’s success delighted poor little Conny, who, long before the dinner was over, was chatting; and laughing as playfully as ever she had done in the days when she was the darling of the house, and life lay round her like a landscape of flowers and sunshine. She sat next to her mother, and I assure you that I would rather have forfeited the pleasure of having Theresa by my side at the table than missed the satisfaction of seeing Conny slip her hand into her mother’s, and leave it there to be nursed and petted.

That evening my uncles and myself had a long conversation on a great variety of topics, all which were of prodigious interest to me, since they all concerned me very closely. Besides a handsome settlement on his daughter, Dick promised to make us a present of a large sum of money, which was to procure me a partnership in uncle Tom’s, bank. But though that sum was considerable, the income uncle Tom promised me, not the most rapacious money-lender could have made it yield.

“Taking the capital Dick gives you at five per cent.,” said he, “your income would be £0,000; the difference, then, between that income and the sum you will draw, you will consider my present.”

I was overpowered by so much generosity; and, utterly wanting words, had to content myself with silently shaking their hands. It was a real relief to me when they began to talk of Curling.

“I had always proposed,” said uncle Tom, “to make the man my daughter married a partner in the bank; but of course I never anticipated that she would marry a man like Curling. However, waiving the consideration of his poverty, a fitter man than Curling to take in with us I don’t think I could choose.”

“I don’t think you could,” said uncle Dick.

“He is extraordinarily active,” continued uncle Tom, “and were he to be given an interest in the bank, would by his efforts and business habits extend its influence to a degree that would abundantly compensate for his want of capital.”

“Take him in by all means,” said uncle Dick.

“I won’t be in too great a hurry. There is plenty of time. He has behaved ill, though I am willing to forgive him for my girl’s sake; but there would be a want of moral propriety in my heaping benefits upon him too suddenly.”

“Perhaps so,” said uncle Dick. “But Charlie grows uneasy and pines for his sweetheart.”

“Quite true,” I answered, and without ceremony left the room.

Theresa received a letter next morning from my father, and a very gorgeous epistle it was—a series of dignified and embroidered congratulations and loftily-expressed good wishes. She was to let him know the date of her marriage and he would join us two or three days before at the house we should be married from. This letter was read aloud and caused an argument. Which house should we be married from? It was soon shown that Thistlewood was out of the question. It was impossible for uncle Tom to absent himself from Updown, owing to his presence being necessary at the bank, and the same objection held good with respect to Curling, whose presence and Conny’s at the breakfast was regarded by us all as essential to the celebration.

“For,” said my uncle Dick, “the breakfast must be given as much in their honour as in that of Charlie’s and Theresa’s; their healths have never yet been properly drunk, and until that solemnity has been gone through, they cannot, in spite of the double ceremony they have endured, be considered correctly married yet.”

Both my uncles were impatient that the marriage should not be delayed, and therefore not without a good deal of persuasion, I succeeded in getting Theresa to fix the day for——which gave us exactly six weeks to make our preparations. With less time we could hardly do. There were not only two houses to be sought and furnished (Dick being resolved that Theresa and Conny should both begin the duties of housekeeping at the same time) but there were two trousseaux to be got ready, for as one of us very properly observed, “It isn’t because a girl makes a runaway marriage that she doesn’t want the same outfit that would be given her had she been married correctly.”

A busy month that was! Theresa went to Thistlewood, but returned after an absence of a fortnight; her father declaring that no nonsensical fastidiousness should permit her to mope alone in a big house, which would be all the more dull, not only because it was the home she was to leave for ever, but because she would contrast it with the cheerfulness of the house at Grove End.

One individual welcomed her back, trust me.

That, I say, was a busy month. Two houses had been found, exactly “suited to the requirements of young married people,” as the landlords pointed out: one house in Updown, which was for Conny; and one a mile away, not very far from Grove End, which was for Theresa. These had to be furnished; and as my uncle Tom had no time to devote to the work, I was “told off” to assist uncle Dick.

And now at Grove End Conny was to be found every day, helping her mother to prepare for Theresa’s marriage, to get together her own trousseau, to sympathise with her cousin’s maidenly anxieties. She and I were often together now; but so little did the memory of the past affect our relations—in short, so dead was all sentiment between us, that, though Theresa watched us narrowly (which she afterwards declared was not true), not a glance, not a sigh was exchanged upon which the most imaginative jealousy could have fastened as an excuse for a quarrel.

My father arrived at Grove End a week before the marriage. Both my uncles went to meet him with the phaeton. As I beheld his stately figure I felt that I had never sufficiently admired him. He certainly did look most imposing, dressed to perfection, his magnificent whiskers taking a purple tint from the sun. He grasped both my hands, and I led him at once to Theresa. Good heavens! with what inimitable grace did he take and kiss her hand; with which chivalrous greeting, however, she was by no means satisfied, for she insisted upon offering her cheek, which he touched with the imperial air of a potentate saluting a queen. And a queen she looked! and I noticed with happy pride the admiration that kindled in his face as he regarded her. Indeed, I had very good reason to be proud of both of them; for such a father and such a bride, I will venture to say, it has been the lot of very few men to possess at the same time.

My aunt, who had not seen the major for many years, was quite overpowered by the reception he gave her; whilst honest Tom was so vain of having his military brother under his roof, that for very conceit he couldn’t sit down, but strode about the room, putting all manner of questions about France, the Emperor, prospects of war with that country, and so forth, positively as if my father were a returned ambassador, whose intimacy with French affairs qualified him to raise or depress the Funds with a shrug or a nod.

One thing I could predict: the presence of the major would entirely nullify every lingering feeling of humiliation with which Tom and his wife might still regard Conny’s marriage. So gorgeous a relation could not but absorb out of the family circle the remnants of degradation Conny’s elopement had left behind it; and uncle Tom might well defy the neighbours to sneer after having set eyes on the military representative of the Hargraves, with his magnificent whiskers and aquiline nose, when he should sit by his sister-in-law in the carriage, resembling a monarch on a tour d’inspection, or when he worshipped with lofty solemnity in the family pew.

The following extract is from the Updown Mercury of ——, 185—. I subjoin it because the particulars it gives are expressed in language which, whether we consider the beauty of its epithets, the elegance of its construction, the ease of its periods, or the harmony of its sentences, is equally provocative of lasting admiration, and is so superior to anything I could write, that it would be injurious to the reputation of this book to omit it.

“Fashionable Marriage,—On Thursday last our delightfully-situated town was thrown into a state of unusual excitement by the solemnisation of the marriage of Charles Hargrave, Esq., son of Major Hargrave, and nephew of our respected fellow-townsman, Thomas Hargrave, Esq., to Theresa, only child of Richard Hargrave, Esq., of Thistlewood. The whole of the population turned out to celebrate the joyous occasion. The noble and ancient gateway in High Street was elegantly draped with flags, and a triumphal arch of great beauty was erected at the bottom of Grove End Lane. The church was densely packed, and an immense concourse of people assembled around the doors to witness the bridal party leave the sacred edifice. The bride wore a magnificent robe of white satin, and looked, to quote the words of a celebrated bard,

‘Beautiful exceedingly.’

The dresses of the bridesmaids were beyond praise, and elicited murmurs of admiration. The service was read impressively by the rector, assisted by the Reverend John Cattle, M.A.: Mr. Abrahams presided at the organ. The bridal party left the church and were driven to Grove End, where a recherchÉ breakfast awaited the happy guests. The usual toasts were eloquently proposed and eloquently responded to. We must not forget to say that the breakfast involved a double celebration; the other happy pair being Theodore Curling, Esq., of London, and Constance, the only child of Thomas Hargrave, Esq. Much amusement was created by the very droll speech delivered by Mr. Richard Hargrave in proposing the health of Mr. and Mrs. Curling; and hearty and cordial was the applause that greeted the few but graceful words with which Mr. Curling acknowledged the honour that was done him and his fair bride.

“Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hargrave left Grove End for the railway station at Updown at one o’clock, en route for the south of France, where we believe it is their intention to pass the honeymoon. Our best wishes follow them into their blissful though temporary retirement; nor can we close this inadequate notice of the auspicious event, without tendering our respectful congratulations to the parents of the young people whom the marriage cements with new and indissoluble domestic ties.”

Here I lay down my pen, having brought as much of the story of my life as I meant to relate, to an end.

Though I want you to accept the book as a work of fiction, who knows whether there may not be a great deal of truth in it? But whether there is or not, one thing is certain—there is no moral in the story: and if this is not a literary excellence of a very high order, perhaps somebody will tell me what is.

A little more, perhaps, might be said about Curling and his wife, if I were not sure that you had long ago settled in your mind that Curling would one day become good friends with his mother-in-law. If I add that at this time of writing, he has been a partner for seven years in the banking firm of Hargrave and Co., the sequel of his matrimonial adventure will be as fully related as if a volume were devoted to that purpose.

THE END.

CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.