Mistletoe
When Arabella Trefoil started from London for Mistletoe,
with no companion but her own maid, she had given
more serious consideration to her visit than she had
probably ever paid to any matter up to that time.
She had often been much in earnest but never so much
in earnest as now. Those other men had perhaps
been worthy, worthy as far as her ideas went of worth,
but none of them so worthy as this man. Everything
was there if she could only get it;—money,
rank, fashion, and an appetite for pleasure. And
he was handsome too, and good-humoured, though these
qualities told less with her than the others.
And now she was to meet him in the house of her great
relations,—in a position in which her rank
and her fashion would seem to be equal to his own.
And she would meet him with the remembrance fresh
in his mind as in her own of those passages of love
at Rufford. It would be impossible that he should
even seem to forget them. The most that she could
expect would be four or five days of his company,
and she knew that she must be upon her mettle.
She must do more now than she had ever attempted before.
She must scruple at nothing that might bind him.
She would be in the house of her uncle and that uncle
a duke, and she thought that those facts might help
to quell him. And she would be there without
her mother, who was so often a heavy incubus on her
shoulders. She thought of it all, and made her
plans carefully and even painfully. She would
be at any rate two days in the house before his arrival.
During that time she would curry favour with her uncle
by all her arts, and would if possible reconcile herself
to her aunt. She thought once of taking her aunt
into her full confidence and balanced the matter much
in her mind. The Duchess, she knew, was afraid
of her,—or rather afraid of the relationship,
and would of course be pleased to have all fears set
at rest by such an alliance. But her aunt was
a woman who had never suffered hardships, whose own
marriage had been easily arranged, and whose two daughters
had been pleasantly married before they were twenty
years old. She had had no experience of feminine
difficulties, and would have no mercy for such labours
as those to which her less fortunate niece was driven.
It would have been a great thing to have the cordial
co-operation of her aunt; but she could not venture
to ask for it.
She had stretched her means and her credit to the
utmost in regard to her wardrobe, and was aware that
she had never been so well equipped since those early
days of her career in which her father and mother
had thought that her beauty, assisted by a generous
expenditure, would serve to dispose of her without
delay. A generous expenditure may be incurred
once even by poor people, but cannot possibly be maintained
over a dozen years. Now she had taken the matter
into her own hands and had done that which would be
ruinous if not successful. She was venturing her
all upon the die,—with the prospect of
drowning herself on the way out to Patagonia should
the chances of the game go against her. She forgot
nothing. She could hardly hope for more than one
day’s hunting and yet that had been provided
for as though she were going to ride with the hounds
through all the remainder of the season.
