A Marriage Proposal With Strings Attached

Malcolm Frazer was quite correct in his supposition that Miss Caldera was the cause of the sage advice Mina had been pleased to give him; and had his own reason not told him there was some sense in it, he would have valued it accordingly.

For it is a fact that Malcolm, so good-natured, and Miss Caldera, so prudent, could not, for some sufficient cause, contrive to “get on together;” and for every little disagreement which Mina and she were wont to have, he and she had fifty.

The truth was, Malcolm provoked her; she could have overlooked his extravagance, thoughtlessness, and rashness,—she had felt half inclined to pity him when she heard he was coming home in disgrace; but when he did actually swagger into the drawing-room with just the same careless, unabashed manner as formerly; when his laugh sounded as joyous as 243ever; when he and his mother sneered at business and called it low; when he never offered to settle down steadily at home, and become a useful member of society, and go each morning off to the place below the Tower where his uncle “turned over” no end of thousands of sovereigns in the year; and when he mysteriously hinted how, in a little time, he would “get round” Uncle John and coax him into doing a little more for him yet, the worthy lady’s patience became exhausted, and she confidentially told Mina she thought her brother was “a ridiculous idiot.”

They disagreed, whenever they met, on every conceivable point,—religion, politics, the news of the day, dress, education, music, books, amusements: these topics furnished them incessantly with occasions for what Malcolm styled, “little tiffs;” and he so enjoyed putting the worthy governess out of temper, that he frequently said precisely the opposite of what he thought, that Miss Caldera might be thus, innocently trapped into an argument, which furnished him with opportunities for laughing at her.

The theme matrimonial was, however, the grand battle-ground on which the two delighted to fling decided opinions at each other’s heads; for Miss Caldera, 244with all her sense, was one of those people who appear to imagine the feminine portion of the creation have been sent on the earth for no other purpose save to marry: and, to superficial observers, it really seemed as if she had remained a spinster solely from a philanthropic desire to have more time at her disposal to assist her fellow mortals to fulfil their destinies in this particular.

Original sense and later experiences were perpetually battling together in her mind, and she strove so hard to persuade herself and all whom it might concern that a “good settlement” was the great prize on which, from infancy, a female ought to fix her eyes, that she talked her theoretical set of opinions at every mortal who dared her to contradiction, with a pertinacity which ought, at least, to have convinced her own mind of the truth of her perpetual assertion, “That the only thing a woman can and ought to do to help herself, is to marry.”

But in vain: a few obstinate and primitive ideas, which she had collected amidst the roses of her mother’s flower-garden and the Latin books of her father’s library, that woman may think of something else during her progress through this world than “catching” a husband, would keep springing up in her rebellious heart; and, though she strove hard 245to root up these absurdities, all her endeavours were but of very little use, for the new views which intercourse with the world had taught her did not satisfy her as to the “rightness” of the match-making system, though they did as to its utility; and, when she got fairly bewildered, between feeling and what she was pleased to term reason, she settled the point by repeating, for the thousandth time, there was something wrong about women’s position, but as they were so situated, the best thing they could do, individually and collectively, was to marry, though she could not avoid confessing to herself that it was a great pity the eternal necessity should be always driving mothers and daughters along in an everlasting search after elder sons and wealthy partners.

Some specimens of the “fine old English gentleman” are still to be met with in rural districts, who assert that fox-hunting is the noblest pursuit which can employ the faculties of man; and really to have heard Miss Caldera converse, it might occasionally have been imagined she thought husband-hunting the grandest chase that could by possibility occupy the mind of woman, and her knowledge of the difficulties and troubles besetting every step of a female’s life had made her think it, as she said, “a very necessary chase,” though, to do her justice, she 246never could so far get over some of her original ideas as to feel that a marriage without affection is preferable to labouring solitarily for daily bread, or that any amount of hundreds or thousands per annum could have induced her, even though so weary of her situation, to take, for better, for worse, one whom she could not respect and love.

The perpetual warfare which went on in her mind, between feeling and desirability, produced many rather contradictory results; amongst others, the anomaly that she, a spinster governess, who was constantly urging on all with whom she came in contact to “fulfil their destinies,” had refused, since she came to London, what her cousin, the schoolmistress, had been pleased to term, a most “eligible offer,” from a rich, vulgar, dinner-loving parvenu (who wanted a wife as a housekeeper, and thought Miss Caldera would just suit), simply because she retained an old-fashioned prejudice (spite of her new-fashioned convictions) that she should not care to wed a person she disliked: and no doubt she was very foolish to reject a home for such a slight reason. And she thought so herself; but she could not overcome the prejudice, and so remained single to give capital advice to other people, which she did not approve sufficiently to follow herself.

247Then again, until any girl amongst her limited circle of acquaintances was “settled,” she gave her rest neither by day nor night till she tacked “Mrs.” to a new name; told her, if she chanced to be so self-willed and unworldly as to refuse an apparently eligible offer, that “she had thrown good fortune from her,” and “wished she might ever get such a proposal again;” and finally, after she had, in conjunction with friends and relatives, moved heaven and earth to get her to tie herself for life to some rich dunce or genteel spendthrift, she turned the tables, and commenced grumbling “how that misguided child had thrown herself away, and what a wretched lot she had thought proper to select for herself.”

Many reasons induced her to desire that Mina should marry Mr. Westwood: first, she liked him, and thought there was no cause to fear its proving an unhappy union; secondly, that gentleman had been at great pains to convince her that Mina’s chance of fortune from her uncle was by no means certain; that he might choose a wife for himself; that he might quarrel with Malcolm, who was a most provoking young fellow; that he might even fail; that a thousand reverses might arise to blast her prospects; that, in fact, her only hope of a tranquil 248existence was changing her Scotch name for his English one; and his hints to Miss Caldera had grown so alarmingly strong after Malcolm’s finishing exploit, that at length the worthy governess became a sight perfectly dreaded by Mina, who was half frightened by the pictures of poverty occasionally presented for her contemplation, but who was wholly determined to have her own way, spite of the combined efforts of the entire universe, always supposing she could manage to get it.

On the Sunday previous to the dialogue between Malcolm and his sister, it had chanced that Mr. Alfred Westwood, instead of walking peaceably home from church to his house in Belerma Square, turned his steps in an opposite direction, and proceeded to that tenanted by Miss Caldera and her cousin, both of whom he encountered on the pipeclayed steps.

“Could you favour me with five minutes’ private conversation,” he said, on the strength of which point blank hint, the strong minded schoolmistress, who had somehow come to the conclusion that the earth would be too happy if fine gentlemen and bold children were not permitted to spoil the face of it, stalked majestically off, setting down vanity, perfumes, rings, hair oil, and rudeness, as amongst the 249sins which did most easily beset Mr. Alfred Westwood, and had gained immense possession over him.

“Miss Caldera,” began that individual, who could speak perfectly straightforwardly when he chose to do so, “will you try to bring Mina to reason. I want to marry her, and settle the business without delay.”

“You ought to try yourself,” replied the lady, who was pretty nearly weary of her fruitless endeavours.

“I have, till I am tired,” he answered; “but I have now more pressing reasons than ever: if you will use your best influence, you shall never have cause to repent; if she marry me I will make her happy—on my soul I will; her uncle’s consent is certain, will you try to gain her’s?”

“She does not seem to care very much for you; that is the difficult part of the business,” said Miss Caldera.

“But it is her interest to care for me,” retorted Mr. Westwood, “and if you point that out to her, the rest is easy; no woman is insensible to that.”

The esprit de corps brought a flush into the lady’s pale cheek as she answered warmly,

“Interest is the last thing woman does look to in any relation of life, and no mortal ever thought less 250of worldly advancement than Mina Frazer; faults she has,—too many, perhaps, for her own happiness,—but a mercenary spirit is not one of them; I could not care for her as I do if she were sordid and calculating; neither could you.”

Mr. Westwood smiled as he replied,

“Perhaps not,” but it was not a pleasant smile; in truth, he had about as much opinion of women as of men, and that was none: but he had a strange sort of attachment for Mina; a dim unacknowledged idea that there was some kind of good in her, although at the same time he thought she refused him, not because she was blind to his fascinations—that being impossible—but because she expected to be a great heiress, and to marry, perhaps, in time, a pauper lord. He saw the pride and folly of both mother and son, and concluded that underneath Mina’s reserve, pride as great, and folly nearly as ridiculous, were resolutely lurking; therefore, he imagined if she thought herself likely to be poor, she would accept him, and that was all he wanted her to do; he would manage all the rest quietly and dexterously himself. In this endeavour, who so likely to aid him as Miss Caldera, his staunch friend and ally? wherefore he had come to her, and so, instead of treating her to his opinion of the entire 251feminine sex, he said, in answer to her rather angry speech, the two words previously recorded,

“Perhaps not.”

“I am sure not,” responded the governess earnestly.

Mr. Westwood laughed.

“I wish,” he said, “you would find some means to make her care for me; believe me she had better.”

There was a significance in the tone of the latter portion of the sentence that struck Miss Caldera so much as to cause her to inquire what he meant.

“That it will be well with mother, brother, and sister if she do; that it will be worse for all if she do not,” was the rejoinder.

“You do not wish me to understand that, even if Mina persist in her refusal, you would be so ungenerous as to endeavour to turn Mr. Merapie’s heart against them,” she said, hurriedly.

“Heaven forbid!” replied Mr. Westwood; “but in the one case I should use all my influence to advance their interests, and in the other I should merely let matters take their course, without interfering. I don’t pretend to Quixotism, Miss Caldera: if she marry me, I will do her and her’s good; 252if not, I would not stir ten paces out of my way to serve her; she had better consider fifty times before she says ‘no.’”

“But do you mean to imply that Mr. Merapie takes Malcolm’s breach of discipline in such an angry spirit that he will never forgive it,—that the silly boy has endangered, not merely his own prospects but those of his sister?” she inquired in surprise. “I think you must be mistaken. I can scarcely believe that he will ever forget to provide for Mina, at all events.”

“I neither imply nor ask you to believe anything,” said Mr. Westwood deliberately; “but I say what I know, that he is greatly grieved about his nephew, and perplexed and tormented about other matters; that Mina Frazer’s fortune won’t be the one half what I once thought it would be, and what she, I suppose, thinks it is certain to be; and, finally, I know she had better marry me, and I want you to try and persuade her to do it: if she does not have her fortune settled now, she may never have any.”

There was a something almost triumphant in the tone in which these words were spoken, and Miss Caldera felt a vague alarm steal over her as she asked,

“But why do you say so; why is she less likely 253to be wealthy a few years hence than now? Why are you in such haste to have matters arranged?”

“Because life is always uncertain, and business is even more so; because, in ten words, ‘it is well to strike while the iron is hot,’” was his brief reply.

Miss Caldera sat and looked at him as if she thought more knowledge might be gained from any feature in his face than from his mouth; but he returned her gaze with such an unmoved expression of countenance, that at last she withdrew her eyes with a vexed and puzzled air: then he, with a smile, arose to depart.

“I am not jesting,” he remarked, by way of a departing hint.

“I see you are not,” she answered.

“And I trust to your friendship and good sense,” he added.

“I suppose,” began Miss Caldera, “it would be useless to ask you any questions on the subject, for——”

“For, although it is impolite not to answer any questions a lady may propound, you think, in this instance, I should feel inclined to do so,” he interposed, resuming his usual manner, and laughing so as to display the whiteness of his regular teeth. “No, no, please not to place me in such a disagreeable 254position, because I cannot tell even you; and indeed I should not like to refuse. I have said, perhaps, even more than I ought, but I rely implicitly on your discretion.”

And Mr. Westwood, who was evidently most anxious to get out of the house, shook hands quite vehemently with the governess and departed, leaving her, for the first time since she had seen his clever handsome face, a little dissatisfied with the possessor of it.

For a few minutes she actually wondered if Mina were not right, if a marriage between the shrewd, calculating, middle-aged man and the impetuous, generous, passionate, self-willed girl, were likely to produce happiness; and then Miss Caldera “pshawed” down the thought, and decided that, if there were the least risk of Mina ever being poor, she ought to wed Mr. Westwood at once, who was just as good as most men, and far better than many.

All that night Miss Caldera strove to convince herself Mr. Westwood had been merely threatening or scheming; but there was truth in the tone of his voice as it sounded again and again in her ears. She began to form a fixed idea that something was wrong, and, on the full strength of this conviction, she went over to Belerma Square the following 255afternoon, and had a long earnest talk with Mina, the result of which talk was, that her former charge got, as usual, into a passion, and, going a step further than was her wont, declared that “she would submit to this persecution no longer; that marry Mr. Westwood she would not; that she had no present intention of wedding any one; and that, finally, she was mistress of her own actions and intended to remain so, and that she wished Miss Caldera would not interfere with her again.”

Then the governess, who, though sensitive to a look from most people, knew Mina’s love for her so well as never to feel offended even at her angriest expressions, put her arms around the girl’s waist, and, even though Mina strove to push her away, besought her, for the sake of former times, to, listen to her. And then she told her old pupil all that Mina subsequently repeated to her brother, and a great deal more besides—which brought tears into the rebellious eyes and a swelling into the wilful heart—about how earnestly she desired her happiness, and of what an interest she had taken in her from the first day, and how she had loved the pale slight child at the beginning, solely because of the vehement love she had evinced for the land of her birth and the people who dwelt there.

256“You may be angry or not, Mina,” the faithful friend said at length, “but so long as I speak to you, I will say just what I think; for many reasons, I believe you are wrong to be so stiff towards Mr. Westwood, who is so fond of you. Mina, for my sake, will you reflect on all I have said?”

“Good gracious!” said the girl, squeezing back, after her determined fashion, a tear that almost trembled on her eyelashes, “good gracious! you have made me think about Mr. Westwood and ‘marrying and giving in marriage’ till I am sick of the theme, and the conclusion I long ago arrived at, Malcolm, you remember, put into words for me the other day. He said, men considered matrimony, when they reflected upon it at all, as a thing which might come, not as women did, as a thing which must come; that it is one incident in the drama of men’s lives, but forms the entire plot in the drama of ours; that, if you would let me think of it as of an event which, if it suited, was well, and if it did not, why well still,—it would be better and happier and more respectable altogether. He says, that’s the way he contemplates the step matrimonial, and that he does not see why, simply because I am his sister, I should not view it in the same light.”

“Malcolm can push his way in the world, if he 257will; he must never be a dependant amongst strangers: he is a man and may struggle; you could not.”

“I could,” retorted Mina, “but I need not, for my uncle will always provide for me.”

“Mina Frazer,” said Miss Caldera, laying an earnest hand on her shoulder and looking half sorrowfully into the flushed youthful face, “do not be too sure of that; life’s chances and changes are awful to contemplate. I once would have laughed, had any one told me I should ever have to work for my daily bread; but desolation came into my home. You have not the patience or the nature to bear, as it has been my lot imperfectly to do; you would not like to think you would ever be situated as I am; but remember, dear, when reverses come, that, though a woman tenderly trained and matured finds it hard to toil and work, yet that still she must live. I had a father to leave a competence to his only daughter, and yet you know a little of the burden I have borne.”

“I am as sure,” said Mina, gazing up sadly into the countenance of the weary woman, “I am as sure of Uncle John as I could be of my dear father if he were now alive.”

“And still, dear Mina, his love was impotent to 258preserve you from beggary; strong it was, I doubt not, but it had not power to keep him alive to guide and love and struggle for you.”

There was a pause, and then Mina said in a subdued voice,

“I wish I could do any one thing to show how I love you, except marry that horrid man, indeed I would do it.”

“Will you be a little more polite to him then, Mina, and endeavour to get Malcolm to be so too?” implored Miss Caldera.

“I will, just to please you,” said the girl; “for you’re a dear, kind, steady, provoking old friend, whom I shall never quarrel with for more than an hour at a time so long as I live, never!” And as Mrs. Frazer entered the room at this moment, Mina left it a little sorrowfully and a great deal more thoughtfully than usual.

Indeed she reflected so much on the subject that she resolved to warn her brother at the very first opportunity, and, as we have seen, did warn him; but her words, instead of soothing that young gentleman, only moved his spirit unto irritation, all the greater, perhaps, because he felt them to be true; and he resolved, during the course of his walk, that, instead of speaking to his uncle, as he had intended, 259immediately on Mr. Merapie’s return from Holland, he would go to Scotland until, as he mentally expressed it, “the storm blew over,” and take Mina with him.

“Then,” he concluded, as he paced home through Arras Street, in the fading light of a January afternoon, “he will have forgotten all about my unlucky exploit, and I will promise to be his dutiful nephew, and turn out a pattern of obedience and grace and so forth, and he will buy me a commission; and, if Westwood be not ‘settled’ some way by that time, why of course, when I am more in favour, I can speak with a better chance of success than would be possible at present: that is just what I will do forthwith,—write to Craigmaver and tell Allan and the laird what I want.”

And, having sketched out this vague beautiful design, Malcolm Frazer raised his eyes from the slippery pavement and noticed casually, as people do notice such things in London, that a tall gentlemanly looking man was walking slowly and thoughtfully a few steps before him.

“Decidedly an aristocrat,” was the result of Malcolm’s brief survey, for he had imbibed from his mother, the city merchant’s daughter, an idea that fine figures and long pedigrees are inseparable; and 260having arrived at this conclusion, the young Scotchman, who had a love for Aristocrats, second perhaps only to his love for himself, continued to scrutinize the stranger with some interest.

That individual was so much engrossed with his own reflections, that he never noticed one of those slides which, spite of the police, mischievous boys will make for their amusement in quiet streets, and, walking unsuspectingly upon it, down he came; before he was aware he had slipped, he was lying full length on the pavement at Malcolm’s feet.

“Halloa!” cried out that young gentleman in true sailor fashion, and “Halloa!” echoed a cabman, who was slowly coming down the narrow street, and who pulled up and jumped off his box to the rescue.

“Knowed he was ill hurt,” said he to Malcolm, “by the way I saw his head coming against the ground.”

“A deuced ugly business,” remarked Malcolm; “his head is cut, and, it seems to me, his arm broken.”

“Is he a friend of your’s, sir?” inquired a person who now joined the group to render assistance, as the Londoners always do on such occasions with 261hearty good will; “the fall has completely stunned him: is he a friend of your’s?”

“Never saw him in my life before,” was the rejoinder.

“Better put him in the cab, then, and drive without delay to the nearest hospital,” suggested a clergyman, standing amidst a knot of passers by and idlers, who had by this time collected to enjoy the excitement.

“Better look in his pocket for an address and take him there,” growled out a policeman, coming forward, as if to aid in the search.

“No, no!” cried a doctor; “the hospital’s close at hand, drive him there.”

“Shall I, sir?” demanded the cabman of Malcolm, to whom he somehow looked for his fare.

“No,” said the latter angrily; “stand back,” he continued, addressing the crowd generally, and the policeman particularly: “I am a gentleman myself, and I won’t submit to see a gentleman’s pockets rummaged or himself dragged off to an hospital. I’ll take the charge of him on myself: help me to lift him into the cab, driver; so,—now walk your horse very slowly over to number 12, Belerma Square;” and, as he spoke, Malcolm Frazer, who, spite of his absurd speech, would have done the same good turn 262for the meanest gillie that ever crossed a Highland moor, and who was possessed of an honest manly heart, and any amount of sailor frankness, entered the vehicle and strove with tenderness and solicitude, such as a woman might have displayed, to prevent the jolting injuring the sufferer, who, at the moment, however, was insensible to everything.

“Now you just be off about your business,” said the policeman savagely to a lot of boys who remained looking after the cab with open mouths, “be off about your business, if you have any, and if you haven’t, you had best make it one to be moving, or I may make it mine to stir you,” which vague threat produced so speedily the desired effect, that in five minutes he found himself pacing along the street utterly alone in his glory.

Mina was standing at one of the drawing-room windows as the cab stopped before the door of number 12; and, when she beheld her brother assisting the driver to lift something wonderfully resembling a human being out of the vehicle, and up the half dozen stone steps, she, moved by that curiosity which her mother Eve had transmitted to her, and also by that pity which every woman feels for the suffering and the afflicted, hastily quitted her post of observation, and ran down into the hall to ascertain 263what this new arrival meant, and if anything dreadful had occurred.

“Malcolm, what is the matter?” she inquired.

“Don’t torment me, Mina,” rejoined Malcolm, who, on the strength of being desperately out of breath, and in a profuse perspiration from his late philanthropic labours, felt himself raised on a sort of moral eminence above his sister. “Don’t torment me, Mina, but open that door, and send one of the servants over for Dr. Richards, and don’t talk, but come and make yourself useful if you can.”

And thus fraternally exhorted, Mina—whilst her brother paid the cabman so liberally, as not merely to extort three touches of the hat and two “thank you, sirs” from that individual, but also to cause him to mutter, as he drove off, in confidence to his horse, that he was a gentleman and no mistake, though he lived in such a place—did make herself useful; and truly there was need that she should, since Mrs. Frazer could not bear the sight of a wound, and the housekeeper was, if possible, worse than her mistress, and her assistant was out in quest of a doctor, and Miss Caldera was giving a French lesson some two miles off: there was need that she should.

“Bad case,” said the doctor when he entered.

264“Not hopeless, though,” exclaimed Malcolm.

“Well, no; but he must not be moved again: pity you had not carried him upstairs at once.”

“There is no necessity,” interposed Mina; “a bed can be made up here.”

“Let it be done then,” said Dr. Richards, one of the briefest and gruffest of his profession; but as Mina left the room to obey his command, he added, nodding approvingly to Malcolm, “always knew she was none of the fainting sort.”

And Mina got matters arranged so speedily and satisfactorily, that even the acid man of medicine was moved unto complimenting her; and he turned every mortal out of the room save Malcolm and herself, and made her hold a candle for him whilst he bandaged, and set, and went so rapidly and (Mina thought) so roughly through all sorts of surgical processes, that the girl at last grew quite faint and sick, and would fain have abandoned her post; but the doctor and Malcolm both telling her, though in somewhat various modes, that as she had been sent on the earth she must make herself useful there, she remained at their bidding to do all she could for the sufferer, who, when he was at all restored to consciousness, first groaned in perfect agony, and then inquired,

265“Where am I?”

“My dear sir,” growled forth Dr. Richards, “will you keep yourself quiet, if you please, and not speak a single word;” an injunction the patient obeyed whilst the pain of his arm kept him mute; but during a moment of ease, he whispered to Mina, who was bathing his forehead with some mixture the doctor had given her,

“Do tell me what place this is?”

“My uncle’s,” said the girl, in a voice which convinced him, more than fifty assurances could have done, that he was amongst those who are to be found in all climes and countries and ranks and classes; amongst those who enhance the pleasure of life, and soften its bitterness; amongst those of whom we meet a few everywhere, and part from mournfully, and greet joyfully, and call with thankful trusting hearts—friends.