FATHER, CHILD, AND NURSE.
It would be but stirring a muddy pool to inquire—not
what motives induced, but what forces compelled sir
Wilton Lestrange to marry a woman nobody knew.
It is enough to say that these forces were mainly ignoble,
as manifested by their intermittent character and final
cessation. The mesalliance occasioned
not a little surprise, and quite as much annoyance,
among the county families,—failing, however,
to remind any that certain of their own grandmothers
had been no better known to the small world than lady
Lestrange. It caused yet more surprise, though
less annoyance, in the clubs to which sir Wilton had
hitherto been indebted for help to forget his duties:
they set him down as a greater idiot than his friends
had hitherto imagined him. For had he not been
dragged to the altar by a woman whose manners and
breeding were hardly on the level of a villa in St.
John’s Wood? Did any one know whence she
sprang, or even the name which sir Wilton had displaced
with his own? But sir Wilton himself was not
proud of his lady; and if the thing had been any business
of theirs, it would have made no difference to him;
he would none the less have let them pine in their
ignorance. Did not his mother, a lady less dignified
than eccentric, out of pure curiosity beg enlightenment
concerning her origin, and receive for answer from
the high-minded baronet, “Madam, the woman is
my wife!”—after which the prudent
dowager asked no more questions, but treated her daughter-in-law
with neither better nor worse than civility.
Sir Wilton, in fact, soon came to owe his wife a grudge
that he had married her, and none the less that at
the time he felt himself of a generosity more than
human in bestowing upon her his name. Creation
itself, had he ever thought of it, would have seemed
to him a small thing beside such a gift!
That Robina Armour, after experience of his first
advances, should have at last consented to marry sir
Wilton Lestrange, was in no sense in her favour, although
after a fashion she was in love with him—in
love, that is, with the gentleman of her own imagining
whom she saw in the baronet; while the baronet, on
his part, was what he called in love with what he
called the woman. As he was overcome by
her beauty, so was she by his rank—an idol
at whose clay feet is cast many a spiritual birthright—and
as mean a deity as any of man’s device.
But the blacksmith’s daughter was in many respects,
notwithstanding, a woman of good sense, with much real
refinement, and a genuine regard for rectitude.
Although sir Wilton had never loved her with what
was best in him, it was not in spite of what was best
in him that he fell in love with her. Had his
better nature been awake, it would have justified
the bond, and been strengthened by it.
