Oliphant In Trust, The Story of a Lady and her Lover

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-96865-948-0
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 129 Seiten

Excerpt: '‘My dear, the case is as plain as noonday; you must give this man up.’‘The case is not plain to me, father—at least, not in your sense.’‘Anne, you are very positive and self-opinionated, but you cannot—it is not possible—set up your judgment against mine on such a point. You, an inexperienced, prejudiced girl, a rustic with no knowledge of the world! What do you know about the man? Oh, I allow he is well enough to look at; he has had the usual amount of education, and so forth; but what do you know about him? that is what I ask.’‘Not much, father,’ said Anne, steadily; ‘but I know him.’‘Stuff! you, a girl not much over twenty, know a man! Does he tell you, do you suppose, all the adventures of his life? Does he confess his sins to you? A young fellow that has been trained at a public school, that has been at the university, that has knocked about the world—is he going to confide all that to you? He would be unworthy the name of gentleman if he did.’'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Oliphant

Oliphant, Mrs.

Leseproben

CHAPTER I.

FATHER AND DAUGHTER.
‘My dear, the case is as plain as noonday; you must give this man up.’ ‘The case is not plain to me, father—at least, not in your sense.’ ‘Anne, you are very positive and self-opinionated, but you cannot—it is not possible—set up your judgment against mine on such a point. You, an inexperienced, prejudiced girl, a rustic with no knowledge of the world! What do you know about the man? Oh, I allow he is well enough to look at; he has had the usual amount of education, and so forth; but what do you know about him? that is what I ask.’ ‘Not much, father,’ said Anne, steadily; ‘but I know him.’ ‘Stuff! you, a girl not much over twenty, know a man! Does he tell you, do you suppose, all the adventures of his life? Does he confess his sins to you? A young fellow that has been trained at a public school, that has been at the university, that has knocked about the world—is he going to confide all that to you? He would be unworthy the name of gentleman if he did.’ ‘Would he not be more unworthy the name of gentleman if he had done things which he could not confide to me?’ said Anne; then reddening suddenly, she added, ‘And even if it were so, father, if in those days he had done things unfit for my ears, let him be silent; I will not ask any questions: I know what he is now.’ ‘Oh, stuff, I tell you! stuff and nonsense, child! You know what he is now! Yes, what he is when his best coat is on, when he is going to church with his hymn-book in his pocket and you on his arm; that is a very edifying aspect of him; but if you think that is all, or nearly all——’ Anne was silent. It was not that she was convinced, but that her indignation took words from her. She could not make any reply to such calumnies; and this was troublesome to her father, who preferred an argument to a distinct and unsupported statement. He looked at her for a moment, baffled, feeling himself cut short in the full flow of utterance—then picked up the thread again, and resumed: ‘You would be a fool to trust in any man in that unguarded way: and above all in a lawyer. They are all rogues; it is in them. When did you ever hear a good word spoken for that class of men? I will not consent to any such nonsense: and if you act without my consent, you know the consequence. I will not give your mother’s money to maintain in luxury a man who is—who will be—never mind! You shall not have it. I will give it to Rose, as I have the power.’ ‘You would not be so unjust,’ said Anne. ‘Unjust! I will do it if you defy me in this way. Rose has always been a better child to me than you have been; and she shall have the money if you don’t mind.’ Whoever had looked at Anne Mountford then would not have given much for the chance of her submission. She said nothing, but her upper lip shut down upon the lower with an unrelenting, immovable determination. She would not even add a word to her protest against the possibility of the injustice with which she had been threatened. She was too proud to repeat herself; she stood still, unbending, betraying no impatience, ready to receive with calmness everything that might be said to her, but firm as the house upon its foundations, or the hills that are called everlasting. Her father knew something of the character of his eldest child; he knew very well that no small argument would move her, but perhaps he was not aware how far beyond his power she was. He looked at her, however, with a passionate annoyance very different from her calm, and with something vindictive and almost spiteful in his reddish-grey eyes. Most likely he had felt himself dashed against the wall of her strong will before now, and had been exasperated by the calm force of opposition which he could make no head against. ‘You hear what I say,’ he repeated roughly; ‘if you insist, I shall exercise the right your mother gave me; I shall alter my will: and the fortune which is no doubt your chief attraction in this man’s eyes—the fortune he has been calculating upon—I will give to Rose. You hear what I say?’ ‘Yes,’ said Anne. She bowed her head gravely; no doubt that she understood him, and equally no doubt that what he said had moved her as much as a shower of rain might have done, and that she was fully determined to take her own way. ‘On your own head be it then,’ he cried. She bowed again, and after waiting for a moment to see if he had anything further to say to her, went quietly out of the room. It was in the library of a country house that this interview had taken place—the commonplace business room of a country gentleman of no very great pretensions. The walls were lined with bookcases in which there was a tolerable collection of books, but yet they did not tell for much in the place. They were furniture like the curtains, which were rather shabby, and the old Turkey carpet—most respectable furniture, yet a little neglected, wanting renewal. Mr. Mountford’s writing-table was laden with papers; he had plenty of business to transact, though not of a strictly intellectual kind. He was an old man, still handsome in his age, with picturesque snow-white hair in masses, clearly-cut, fine features, and keen eyes of that reddish hazel which betokens temper. Those eyes constantly burned under the somewhat projecting eyebrows. They threw a sort of angry lurid light on his face. The name of the house was Mount; it had been in the Mountford family for many generations; but it was not a beautiful and dignified house any more than he was a fine old English gentleman. Both the place and the man had traditionary rights to popular respect, but neither man nor place had enforced this claim by any individual beauty or excellence. There was no doubt as to the right of the Mountfords to be ranked among the gentry of the district, as good as the best, in so far that the family had been settled there for centuries; but they were of that curiously commonplace strain which is prevalent enough among the smaller gentry, without any splendour of wealth to dazzle the beholder, and which rouses in the mind of the spectator a wonder as to what it is that makes the squire superior to his neighbours. The Mountfords from father to son had got on through the world without any particular harm or good, uninteresting, ordinary people, respectable enough, yet not even very respectable. They were not rich, they were not able; they had nothing in themselves to distinguish them from the rest of the world; yet wherever the name of Mountford appeared, throughout all the southern counties at least, the claims of its possessor to gentility were founded on his relationship to the Mountfords of Mount. Most curious of all the triumphs of the aristocratical principle! Or rather perhaps it is the more human principle of continuance which is the foundation of this prejudice to which we are all more or less subject. A family which has lasted, which has had obstinacy enough to cling to its bit of soil, to its old house, must have something in it worth respect. This principle, however, tells in favour of the respectable shopkeeper quite as much as the squire, but it does not tell in the same way. The Mountfords felt themselves of an entirely different order from the shopkeeper—why, heaven knows! but their estimate was accepted by all the world. Mount had the distinction of being entailed; it was not a large estate nor a valuable one, and it had been deeply mortgaged when the present Mr. Mountford, St. John by name, came of age. But he had married an heiress, who had liberated his acres and added greatly to his social importance. The first Mrs. Mountford had died early, leaving only one daughter, and at the same time her entire fortune in the hands of her husband, to do with it what he pleased. These were the days when public opinion was very unanimous as to the impropriety and unnecessariness of female rights of any kind, and everybody applauded Mrs. Mountford for resisting all conditions, and putting herself and her child unreservedly in her husband’s hands. He had re-married two years after her death, but unfortunately had succeeded in obtaining only another girl from unpropitious fate. His first wife’s daughter was Anne, universally considered as the natural heiress of the considerable fortune which, after clearing the estate, had remained of her mother’s money, and which her father had kept scrupulously ‘in a napkin,’ like the churl in the parable, neither increasing nor diminishing the store. The other daughter was Rose. Such was the household at Mount in the days when this history begins. The reigning Mrs. Mountford was a good sort of easy woman who did not count for much. She was one of the Codringtons of Carrisford—a ‘very good family’ of the same class as the Mountfords. Nothing could be better than the connections on both sides—or duller. But the girls were different. It is very hard to say why the girls should have been different—perhaps because the present new wave of life has distinctly affected the girls more than any other class of society. At all events, the point was indisputable. Anne perhaps might have taken after her mother, who was of an entirely new stock, not a kind which had ever before been ingrafted on the steady-going family tree. She had come out of a race partly mercantile, partly diplomatic; her grandfather had been Spanish; it was even suspected that one of her ancestors had been a Jew. All kinds of out-of-the-way sources had furnished the blood which had been destined to mix with the slow current in the Mountford veins; and probably Anne had inherited certain bizarre qualities from this jumble. But Rose had no...