LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2114, 2 December 1880, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE MYSTEEY «T LORD BRACKENBURT; A NOVEL. BY AMELIA B. EDWABDF, Author of “Barbara’s History,” ■‘Debenham’s Vow,” &c. IContinued . Chapter XII. THB WOOINO o’t. We all know how Eiohard of Gloster prevailed with the Lady Anne, and how Petrnchlo wooed Katherine the shrew ; but how Lord Brachenbnry made peace with Miss Langtrey of The Grange, wooing her as bis son’s ambassador for the hand of Winifred Ravage, fa a matter whereof the family {tapers contain no record. It is at all events certain that he broke the ice with as much skill as he might have used in manipulating a difficult and delicate international question. For, as Mr Brackenbury had said, Miss Langtrey was a good hater. In fact, she not only prided herself upon being a good hater, but she especially prided herself npon the excellence of her hatred towards the Brackenbnrys and all that was theirs. She shared her soul, so to- say, between her love for her brother and her enmity towards his opponents ; and when he died, she charged his death to their acconnt and carried it over to swell the balance against them. A narrow-minded, bitter-spoken woman ! —one of those who take their religion sadly, and are no lees hard to themselves than to those abont them.

Yet Lord Brackenbury prevailed with this formidable spinster. How he achieved his victory was a secret known only to himself. He nsed afterwards to liken his enterprise to certain British missions 'to Dahomey and other strange Courts, and declared that Miss langtrey received him seated on an ivory throne in the midst of a circle of skulls. Still he prevailed. Ho worked probably to some extent upon her ambition; for Miss Langtrey was not blind to the worldly advantages of the proffered alliance. Perhaps he worked also upon her love for her brother, and sho wed how the fancied wrongs of the late Squire would, in fact, be righted, if not only the coal mines, but the whole Brackenbury property came by-and-by to be inherited by a son born of this marriage. It may even be that he pleaded not only for the future but for the past —that far off, tenderly remembered past—when as yet there was neither strife nor thought of strife between their two houses ; and when, with the eyas of a lover, he beheld in Mabel Langtrey the sweetest and fairest of the daughters of men. And if Lord Brackenbury did venture upon this delicate ground, he ventured, one may be sure, with the conviction that he should not fail to evoke some faint response even In Miss Langtrey’s breast. He well knew that in every woman’s heart, however shrivelled and soured and solitary, there lurks a spark of romance, if one but knows where to strike for it. And here again his diplomatic crafts would stand i him In good stead. He would know where ■ to sound and how to strike ; no man better.

But this is conjecture; •whereas, that Lord Brackenbnry made his peace with Miss Lsngtrey, and that between them they agreed to arrange the marriage in question, is incontrovertible fact. Henc fjrth a systematic interchange of civilities was established between the high contracting parties ; and the neighborhood beheld with amazement how Lord Brackenbury walked down the church path on Sundays with Miss Langtrey and her niece, and how Cnthbert Brackenbury began ere long to ride over once a week—generally on Wednesday afternoons—to pay his respects to the ladies at the Grange. Not that Mr Brackenbury actually began his wooing at this early stage of the proceedings. The young lady proved, indeed, to be younger than JLord Brackenbury supposed, and was not fourteen when the reconciliation took place. Nor was the suitor in haste to begin writing sonnets to his mistress’ eyebrow. Enough that he came and went on the footing of an “habitue” at The Grange, and that the girl not only became accustomed to his weekly visit, but learned to look forward to it as to the one event of her monotonous life. By and by, as she grew older, there dawned upon her a vague conviction that she was destined, at some distant time, to become this young man’s wife; bat that prospect was so remote, and her notions of matrimony were so undefined, that it affected her no more than we are ourselves affected by the knowledge that our planet must, ages hence, cool down to the deathpoint of universal ice. Ha seemed to her dreadfully old—as old, almost, as his own fatheir; but then she would herself be dreadfully old in the course of time, so that It would not really matter. Ho brought her books, and ferns, and photographs of places abroad and of works of art in foreign

galleries; was always courteous, always kind ; treated her, perhaps, too much like » child, and behaved himself too much like a. philosopher ; but made her life at all events in many ways pleasanter than it had ever been before. So it was not wonderful that she ended by thinking him the wisest of mankind. Thinking him the wisest of man* kind, she naturally regarded him with awe, and was on her best behaviour before him * which behaviour savoured considerably of the schoolroom. If, however, the Winifred Savage of Mr Brackenbnry’a was * sober, silent, and demure, almost to a fault there was another Winifred of whom he knew nothing—a Winifred not of the achoolroem, but of the poultry-yard and the stable, the woods and the field. A Winifred from whose eyes and lips the laughter and lightheartedness of youth were not wholly extinguished, despite the straightness of her bringing np ; a Winifred whom the old cob followed like a dog, and into whose pockets the cowsthmst their wet noses in search of the rock salt they were sura to find there; s Winifred about whose feet the turkeys gathered and gobbled, and upon whose head and shoulders the pigeons fearlessly settled ; a Winifred whom the lame pointer and the purblind retriever loved as only dogs, and perhaps soma few women, know how to love; a Winifred whom the old women servant adored, and the dairy-maid worshipped, and the cowboy would have died for ; who was never so happy as when rambling over the fields, feeding the chickens, poking abont the sheds and outhouses in search of hens' eggs, running in and ont of poor folks cottages, chatting with the old women and playing with, the children; a Winifred who could laugh as merrily as if she had never been taught that the mirth of a well-bred young woman mnst never exceed a smile, and who would cry in secret over a foolish old romance as bitterly as if Mias Langtrey had never preached that novels and plays, circulating libraries, and theatres, were among the choicest inventions of the devil. Of this nnmanner'y Winifred Miss Langtrey knew very little, and the Honorable Cuthbert Brackenbury nothing whatever. A young lady who is given to scampering about a farmyard without hat or gloves, indifferent to appearances and reckless of freckles, must inevitably be found out now and then ; and Miss Langtrey, who farmed her own few acres and looked narrowly after all the sources of her narrow income, could not fail sometimes to surprise her niece in. •flagrante delicto.’ But as Mr Brackenbury’s visits were paid with strict punctuality cu a certain day at a certain hour, Mies Savage was in no danger of being caught by him in the act of swinging on the stackyard gate, or feeding the old cob with carrots in the stable. He knew her only as a well-trained young lady who played oldfashioned music on an old-fashioned piano, said very little, was an excellent listener, and took an intelligent interest in the study of Dante. Meanwhile, although Lord Brackenbury and his son knew quite well that there was poverty at The Grange, they little guessed with what difficulty Miss Langtrey, farming sometimes less than seventy acres of land, contrived to keep the old roof over her niece’s head and her own. Those acres consisted for the most part of low-lying meadows bordering both sides of a little river known thereabout as the Hipping. These meadows fed Miss Lsngtrey’s cows ; and upon 'the produce of her dairy and her poultry ward, and the rent of her few poor cottages. Miss Langtrey lived. She kept a dairymaid, a cowherd, and one aged female servant, who had lived in the family since the late Squire was a baby. The old cob did what light work was needed, and took the ladies to church in an antique, hooded chaise on Sundays when It rained; and ah Midsummer, Mies Langtrey’s hay was carted for her by a neighboring farmer. How penuriously they lived ; how old garments were mended and turned, end old wardrobes ransacked; how, when one bad year followed another, and the hay failed, and some of the cows died. Miss Langtrey patted with, first one family treasure and then another; how the massive old silver, and the rare old wines, and the choice antique books, were successively packed up and aent to London and sold at no matter what loss, were facts known only to Winifred and herself. Mr Brackenbury never dreamed, when ho used to ride over on those Wednesday afternoons, that the drawing-room shutters were opened for that day only ; or that the furniture, and the china, and the picture frames, and all the faded splendours of the room, were dusted in hia honor by Miss Savage's own bauds. Neither did he guess that the biscuits were of her making, and the coffee of her grinding ; or that these things wereluxuries denied to themselves all the other six days of the week Still less, that except at Christmas, when Miss Langtrey gave a certain guautity of beef to her poor cottagers, the butcher never came to her door. But it mattered nothing to her and her niece how poorly they fared, or how often they turned and altered their threadbare dresses, so long as they but lived in the old home and sat in the old high-backed pew on Sundays, and kept the world at arm’s length and the secret of their poverty to themselves. Meanwhile Miss Savage, who had not done growing when Lord Brackenbury first made peace with her aunt, travelled by imperceptible stages from girlhood to early womanhood, and by the time she was seventeen had developed into a tall, slender damsel; tolerably well educated, considering that Miss Langtrey had been her only teacher, and so fair to look upon that Lord. Brackenbury, who was professedly difficult to please, lost no opportunity of trying to awaken his son to a due sense of his good fortune. * With such a wife as Winifred Savage, my dear fellow !’ he was wont to say, ‘aman should aim at social distinction. She carries her head like a queen. She moves, speaks, gets np, sits down, with an intuitive grace and dignity that no amount of drilling could possibly put into her. Then as for her eyes —Heavens and earth ! Cuthbert, if I were your age, and in your place, I should think myself the happiest man in England I And more than that, it would be my ambition to see my wife admired. I should want to see her shine at every Court in Europe By Jove 1 I should aspire to be Viceroy of ludia.” To all of which Mr Brackenbury generally replied that he was unfortunately quite destitute of ambition, and that he feared Miss Savage must hereafter be content to shine with such moderate splendor as would befit the wife of a commonplace country gentleman. Apart, however, from any bops, that he might yet cherish of Inducing his son to enter public life. Lord Brackenbury’s main object was to promote the marriage of these two young peonle to as early a date as possible. He would fain have had them tie the indissoluble knot as soon as. Miss Savage should attain her eighteenth birthday ; but on this question he found himself in a minority of one. Elderly soinsters invariably disapprove of early marriages; and Miss Langtrey was no exception to that rule. She had, moreover, taken it into head that under the peculiar circumstances cf the present engagement, her niece could not, either becomingly or with dignity, wed Mr Brackenbury before she came of age Miss Savage herself declared that she would not marry till she was quite, quite old —thirty at the very least; and that it either Lord Brackenbury or his son said a syllable to her on the subject she would gointo a Protestant sisterhood and never marry at all. As for the bridegroom elect, he protested that the ladies wore perfectly right; that hia father was wrong ; and that for his. own part he was willing to wait Miss Savage's pleasure. In the end, however, a compromise was effected, and it came to he understood—tacitly on the part of the two. most interested, and explicitly on the part of Lord Brackenbury and Miss Langtrey—that the wedding should take place when the young lady had completed her nineteenth year. And now things went on pretty much as before —Mr Brackenbury, as usual, cruising about the world in his yacht, writing oncea week to his lady-love when away, and calling at the Grange on the orthodox Wednesday afternoons when at home; Miss Savage busying herself more than ever in the homely farm-house duties, loving the simple life, and unconscious of its privations ; Lord Brackenbury, when Parliament was not sitting, calling frequently at The Grange, playing backgammon with Mies. Langtrey, courting the young lady for his son, teaching her to ride, giving her a horse and keeping it for her in hia own stables, paying unremitting attention to both aunt and niece, and as often as he dared do an sending presents of flowers, fruit, and game for their acceptance. (To ie continued,)