This is a delightful Victorian romance by Irish novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. The heroine of this novel, Joyce, finds herself to be in high demand, receiving the attentions of two eligible gentlemen. There is the steadfast Mr. Dysart, but can he outshine the charming but slightly sinister Mr. Beauclerk? Joyce needs to keep her head throughout this affair and come to the right decision in the end.
By : Mrs. Hungerford (1855 - 1897)
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"A letter from my father," says Mr. Monkton, flinging the letter in question across the breakfast-table to his wife.
"A letter from Sir George!" Her dark, pretty face flushes crimson.
"And such a letter after eight years of obstinate silence. There! read it," says her husband, contemptuously. The contempt is all for the writer of the letter.
Mrs. Monkton taking it up, with a most honest curiosity, that might almost be termed anxiety, reads it through, and in turn flings it from her as though it had been a scorpion.
"Never mind, Jack!" says she with a great assumption of indifference that does not hide from her husband the fact that her eyes are full of tears. "Butter that bit of toast for me before it is quite cold, and give Joyce some ham. Ham, darling? or an egg?" to Joyce, with a forced smile that makes her charming face quite sad.
"Have you two been married eight whole years?" asks Joyce laying her elbows on the table, and staring at her sister with an astonished gaze. "It seems like yesterday! What a swindler old Time is. To look at Barbara, one would not believe she could have been born eight years ago."
"Nonsense!" says Mrs. Monkton laughing, and looking as pleased as married women—even the happiest—always do, when they are told they look unmarried. "Why Tommy is seven years old."
"Oh! That's nothing!" says Joyce airily, turning her dark eyes, that are lovelier, if possible, than her sister's, upon the sturdy child who is sitting at his father's right hand. "Tommy, we all know, is much older than his mother. Much more advanced; more learned in the wisdom of this world; aren't you, Tommy?"
But Tommy, at this present moment, is deaf to the charms of conversation, his young mind being nobly bent on proving to his sister (a priceless treasure of six) that the salt-cellar planted between them belongs not to her, but to him! This sounds reasonable, but the difficulty lies in making Mabel believe it. There comes the pause eloquent at last, and then, I regret to say, the free fight!
It might perhaps have been even freer, but for the swift intervention of the paternal relative, who, swooping down upon the two belligerents with a promptitude worthy of all praise, seizes upon his daughter, and in spite of her kicks, which are noble, removes her to the seat on his left hand.
Thus separated hope springs within the breasts of the lookers-on that peace may soon be restored; and indeed, after a sob or two from Mabel, and a few passes of the most reprehensible sort from Tommy (entirely of the facial order), a great calm falls upon the breakfast-room.
"When I was your age, Tommy," says Mr. Monkton addressing his son, and striving to be all that the orthodox parent ought to be, "I should have been soundly whipped if I had behaved to my sister as you have just now behaved to yours!"
"You haven't a sister," says Tommy, after which the argument falls flat. It is true, Mr. Monkton is innocent of a sister, but how did the little demon remember that so apropos.
"Nevertheless," said Mr. Monkton, "if I had had a sister, I know I should not have been unkind to her."
"Then she'd have been unkind to you," says Tommy, who is evidently not afraid to enter upon a discussion of the rights and wrongs of mankind with his paternal relative. "Look at Mabel! And I don't care what she says," with a vindictive glance at the angelic featured Mabel, who glares back at him with infinite promise of a future settlement of all their disputes in her ethereal eyes. "'Twas my salt-cellar, not hers!"
"Ladies first—pleasure afterwards," says his father somewhat idly.
"Oh Freddy!" says his wife.
"Seditious language I call it," says Jocelyne with a laugh.
"Eh?" says Mr. Monkton. "Why what on earth have I been saying now. I quite believed I was doing the heavy father to perfection and teaching Tommy his duty."
"Nice duty," says Jocelyne, with a pretence of indignation, that makes her charming face a perfect picture. "Teaching him to regard us as second best! I like that."
"Good heavens! did I give that impression? I must have swooned," says Mr. Monkton penitently. "When last in my senses I thought I had been telling Tommy that he deserved a good whipping; and that if good old Time could so manage as to make me my own father, he would assuredly have got it."
"Oh! your father!" says Mrs. Monkton in a low tone; there is enough expression in it, however, to convey the idea to everyone present that in her opinion her husband's father would be guilty of any atrocity at a moment's notice.
"Well, 'twas my salt-cellar," says Tommy again stoutly, and as if totally undismayed by the vision of the grand-fatherly scourge held out to him. After all we none of us feel things much, unless they come personally home to us.
"Was it?" says Mr. Monkton mildly. "Do you know, I really quite fancied it was mine."
"What?" says Tommy, cocking his ear. He, like his sister, is in a certain sense a fraud. For Tommy has the face of a seraph with the heart of a hardy Norseman. There is nothing indeed that Tommy would not dare.
"Mine, you know," says his father, even more mildly still.
"No, it wasn't," says Tommy with decision, "it was at my side of the table. Yours is over there."
"Thomas!" says his father, with a rueful shake of the head that signifies his resignation of the argument; "it is indeed a pity that I am not like my father!"
"Like him! Oh no," says Mrs. Monkton emphatically, impulsively; the latent dislike to the family who had refused to recognize her on her marriage with their son taking fire at this speech.
Her voice sounds almost hard—the gentle voice, that in truth was only meant by Mother Nature to give expression to all things kind and loving.
She has leant a little forward and a swift flush is dyeing her cheek. She is of all women the youngest looking, for her years; as a matron indeed she seems absurd. The delicate bloom of girlhood seems never to have left her, but—as though in love of her beauty—has clung to her day by day. So that now, when she has known eight years of married life (and some of them deeply tinctured with care—the cruel care that want of money brings), she still looks as though the morning of womanhood was as yet but dawning for her.
And this is because love the beautifier went with her all the way! Hand in hand he has traveled with her on the stony paths that those who marry must undoubtedly pursue. Never once had he let go his hold, and so it is, that her lovely face has defied Time (though after all that obnoxious Ancient has not had yet much opportunity given him to spoil it), and at twenty-five she looks but a little older than her sister, who is just eighteen, and seven years younger than she is.
Her pretty soft grey Irish eyes, that are as nearly not black as it is possible for them to be, are still filled with the dews of youth. Her mouth is red and happy. Her hair—so distinctly chestnut as to be almost guilty of a shade of red in it here and there—covers her dainty head in rippling masses, that fall lightly forward, and rest upon a brow, snow-white, and low and broad as any Greek's might be.
She had spoken a little hurriedly, with some touch of anger. But quick as the anger was born, so quickly does it die.
"I shouldn't have said that, perhaps," says she, sending a little tremulous glance at her husband from behind the urn. "But I couldn't help it. I can't bear to hear you say you would like to be like him."
She smiles (a little, gentle, "don't-be-angry-with-me" smile, scarcely to be resisted by any man, and certainly not by her husband, who adores her). It is scarcely necessary to record this last fact, as all who run may read it for themselves, but it saves time to put it in black and white.
"But why not, my dear?" says Mr. Monkton, magisterially. "Surely, considering all things, you have reason to be deeply grateful to Sir George. Why, then, abuse him?"
"Grateful! To Sir George! To your father!" cries his wife, hotly and quick, and——
"Freddy!" from his sister-in-law brings him to a full stop for a moment.
"Do you mean to tell me," says he, thus brought to bay, "that you have nothing to thank Sir George for?" He is addressing his wife.
"Nothing, nothing!" declares she, vehemently, the remembrance of that last letter from her husband's father, that still lies within reach of her view, lending a suspicion of passion to her voice.
"Oh, my dear girl, consider!" says Mr. Monkton, lively reproach in his tone. "Has he not given you me, the best husband in Europe?"
"Ah, what it is to be modest," says Joyce, with her little quick brilliant laugh.
"Well, it's not true," says Mrs. Monkton, who has laughed also, in spite of herself and the soreness at her heart. "He did not give you to me. You made me that gift of your own free will. I have, as I said before, nothing to thank him for."
"I always think he must be a silly old man," says Joyce, which seems to put a fitting termination to the conversation.
The silence that ensues annoys Tommy, who dearly loves to hear the human voice divine. As expressed by himself first, but if that be impracticable, well, then by somebody else. Anything is better than dull silence.
"Is he that?" asks he, eagerly, of his aunt.
Though I speak of her as his aunt, I hope it will not be misunderstood for a moment that Tommy totally declines to regard her in any reverential light whatsoever. A playmate, a close friend, a confidante, a useful sort of person, if you will, but certainly not an aunt, in the general acceptation of that term. From the very first year that speech fell on them, both Mabel and he had refused to regard Miss Kavanagh as anything but a confederate in all their scrapes, a friend to rejoice with in all their triumphs; she had never been aunt, never, indeed, even so much as the milder "auntie" to them; she had been "Joyce," only, from the very commencement of their acquaintance. The united commands of both father and mother (feebly enforced) had been insufficient to compel them to address this most charming specimen of girlhood by any grown up title. To them their aunt was just such an one as themselves—only, perhaps, a little more so.
A lovely creature, at all events, and lovable as lovely. A little inconsequent, perhaps at times, but always amenable to reason, when put into a corner, and full of the glad, laughter of youth.
"Is he what?" says she, now returning Tommy's eager gaze.
"The best husband in Europe. He says he's that," with a doubtful stare at his father.
"Why, the very best, of course," says Joyce, nodding emphatically. "Always remember that, Tommy. It's a good thing to be, you know. You'll want to be that, won't you?"
But if she has hoped to make a successful appeal to Tommy's noble qualities (hitherto, it must be confessed, carefully kept hidden), she finds herself greatly mistaken.
"No, I won't," says that truculent person distinctly. "I want to be a big general with a cocked hat, and to kill people. I don't want to be a husband at all. What's the good of that?"
"To pursue the object would be to court defeat," says Mr. Monkton meekly. He rises from the table, and, seeing him move, his wife rises too.
"You are going to your study?" asks she, a little anxiously. He is about to say "no" to this, but a glance at her face checks him.
"Yes, come with me," says he instead, answering the lovely silent appeal in her eyes. That letter has no doubt distressed her. She will be happier when she has talked it over with him—they two alone. "As for you, Thomas," says his father, "I'm quite aware that you ought to be consigned to the Donjon keep after your late behavior, but as we don't keep one on the premises, I let you off this time. Meanwhile I haste to my study to pen, with the assistance of your enraged mother, a letter to our landlord that will induce him to add one on at once to this building. After which we shall be able to incarcerate you at our pleasure (but not at yours) on any and every hour of the day."
"Who's Don John?" asks Tommy, totally unimpressed, but filled with lively memories of those Spaniards and other foreign powers who have unkindly made more difficult his hateful lessons off and on.
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