University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.

With no enviable feelings Henry Beckford glanced
after the carriage as it drove off. “By heaven,” he
muttered to himself, through his teeth, pulling at the
same moment his hat over his brows, “she has
brought me to this pass to laugh at and scorn me.
Now, when the whole town knows how long I have
been her servant, almost her slave—they will say
her very slave—she treats me in this manner. I
boasted to our set at our last supper of my success
with her, and now, damnation! I shall have their
taunts—I must bear all this—her scorn and their
laughter, as well as—as—yes, yes, I love her as well
as hate her. And, if my love brings nothing but this
wormwood, I'll make that wormwood a bitter drug
for her. I will, I must be revenged. Her conduct
is insufferable—`Master Henry,'—I'll master her
yet. She has, with the most cold-blooded malice,
coquetted me, and now this dashing southerner has
come, she spurns me as though I were a dog, whose
fawning molested her. Her devilish spirit and her
unbridled, unlicensed tongue unman me. The
miser's son, my virtuous cousin! she `would rather
have his friendship, than the love of any man in
Christendom,' and therefore I could see she `had no

idea of love or matrimony'—a most gentle hint that
I am flung. And that puritanical little Ruth, she
received my attentions all the while so demurely,
and was engaged to Mr. Ralph—how she deceived
her mother!—this pink of all the virtues!—I am
fooled, bamboozled, deceived at every point—and
nothing accursed ever happens to me, but the name
of this cousin of mine comes in like the evil word—
damn him.

“I'll see Helen Murray again, alone,—I'll see her
and know what she means. It may be that she is
provoked at my letter—`Master Henry!'—oh, that
I were her master!”

With these reflections presenting themselves to
his mind in a thousand different hues, Henry Beckford
betook himself to the house of a frail, fair, false
one, whom he flattered himself with the belief he had
himself betrayed—a belief which she was at no pains
to contradict—and over whom he was in the habit
of tyrannizing whenever he felt in an ill humour, and
dared not vent his spleen where it originated.

In a quarrel of considerable duration with this
Dulcinea, in which Henry was not sparing of the
most abusive epithets, on their being retorted on him,
he struck the poor girl—woman though she was—
repeatedly with his fist and rattan, and left her with
the express injunction that she should not attend the
theatre that night, and repaired to his lodgings to
arrange his toilet, resolving to visit Helen Murray,
and endeavour to see her alone.

Alone, a few hours after, he found Helen. She
had a book in her hand, from which she did not raise
her eye, until Henry had entered the room and
twice said:

“Good afternoon, Miss Murray.”

“Ah! Mr. Beckford! Good afternoon, sir;” and
she shut the book with her finger between the leaves
where she had been reading, placing the volume
edgewise on her lap, and resting her hands on it.
Henry, with an embarrassed air, took a seat at some
distance from her, while she calmly patted her
fingers against the book, and glanced over her dress
and at her guard-chain and watch, as if to see that
her habiliments were all properly adjusted.

“I hope you had a pleasant ride,” said Henry in
a slightly satirical tone.

“Delightful, most delightful, Mr. Beckford—I regretted
exceedingly that your strict adherence to the
truth of proverbs prevented you from accompanying
us.”

Henry bit his lip, and then said:

“You made me aware, Miss, that you had motives
for wishing me to break the proverb so plainly, that,
if you threw your bait at all as you rode out, Mr.
Davidson must have caught the idea—old birds—as
you love proverbs so, Miss Murray—are not to be
caught by chaff.”

Helen laughed. “That is very true, Master
Henry, it is proverbially true, but is there anything
in your experience, sir, that leads you to believe that

young ones may be caught by it? As for myself, I
have arrived at that age when I can tell the chaff
from the grain, but I am not old enough yet to do it
at a glance; however, when I do find it is chaff, I
never mistake it for grain again.”

“Miss Helen,” said Henry, after an internal
struggle, drawing his chair close to the lady's, “let
us away with this—I did not come here to battle
words with you—I wish to know explicitly—after
what has passed between us, I think I have a right
to know—what this means.”

“Means, sir! just what I have said, sir—that
though I do not put myself down on the list of the
aged, I have at least arrived at that age—the age
of discretion I take it to be—when I am not to
be caught by chaff. But away with this; Master
Henry, go you to the theatre to-night?”

“Master Henry! you have resumed that phrase,
Miss Murray, after having dropped it for a long
time. But there is no away with this. Have you
not, Miss Murray, given me encouragement?—did
you not mean to give me encouragement?”

“Encouragement! in what respect?”

“In my suit.”

“O! in your suit. Why, Mr. Beckford, I received
your attentions as those of a gallant young
gentleman who, having plenty of leisure upon his
hands, was kind enough to bestow some of it upon
me.”

“But, Miss Helen, what when you saw that I was

serious, and confessed my attachment to you, and
reiterated it?”

“O! sir, even then I thought you but practising
to keep your hand in, that you might make a dead
shot in some other quarter—up in Fourth street, for
instance!” alluding to the street in which Miss
Wraxall lived.

“But you are now convinced that I am serious?”
asked Henry.

“Seriously, if I am, Mr. Beckford, I can make you
no other return than I have made you—my acknowledgment
of the honour you would do me,
with my regrets that I must decline it.”

“May I ask, Miss Helen, have I a rival who
has caused this determination on your part?”

“You question me closely, Mr. Beckford, and remember
I answer from courtesy, and not that I acknowledge
the right of any one to question me.
No, sir, my feelings are unengaged, if I know them;
but you know it is said we women never know our
own minds.”

“May I then not hope, Miss Helen, by a continued
perseverance, to merit a return for the long affection
I have borne you. Reflect, Miss Murray, before
you answer, do reflect. This attachment has
not been the impulse of a day with me, it has been
a part of my being now for many years.”

“We can scarcely be said to have been acquainted
so long, Mr. Beckford,” interrupted Miss Murray,
“one of us at least does not number many years. I

am sure, although I am the older, I should be angry
with any one who imputed many years even of existence
to me.”

“I discover, Miss Murray,” exclaimed Henry, in a
tone of anger which he could not suppress, “that
you are determined to make a jest of me.”

“Make a jest of you! No, sir—there is but one
step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and when
you attempted to date the affection of one so young
as yourself, by alleging that it included many years
—and I all the while its object—I felt that you had
taken the step.”

“Well, Madam, you have brothers,” exclaimed
Henry, with a threatening brow, unable any longer
to control his temper under the lady's taunts, “and
as you are a woman, and I must not revenge in you
the injuries I have received from you, what step do
you think I should take next?”

“Any step you please, sir—the way to my front
door, is as plain as any other—and you have stepped
it often—I hope it will hereafter be, Master Henry,
like the passage of the Styx, returnless.”

“Do you think, Madam—I ask you, do you think
I will bear this?” exclaimed Henry, starting up from
his chair in a furious passion.

“Certainly, Master Henry, I think you have a spirit
of endurance that can bear a much more taunting
tongue than mine, and without the least restiveness,
were it a man's. But away with all this rhodomontade,
and listen to me, sir. Did you dare for a

passing moment to entertain the thought that I would
dream of marrying you—you who make such a public
boast of evil habits—you whose passion for the
card table has already impaired your fortune—you
who are given to such company that no modest woman
can think of it without loathing—you who
make a boast of the betrayal of a poor wretch—a
woman, sir—whose greatest folly is that she loved
you, and whose greatest vice is that she trusted you.
Did you think that I, brought up in the strict discipline
of Quaker rule, knowing these things of you,
which I am informed you have been at some trouble
to make public—did you think—no, sir, you never
thought it. And did I not know, too, of your conduct
to the Lormans—that Mrs. Lorman died of a
quantity of laudanum, taken by her after a friendly
visit from you, in which you wantonly destroyed the
hope which you had been at some pains to raise—
the hope that your intentions were serious towards
Ruth, and that in marrying her you would lift them
in the world again. Not even to have saved her
family from that bitter poverty would Ruth have
married you—you who, when her stepmother's attentions
led you to believe that you had won Ruth, and
outrivalled Ralph, at once forsook them, and did
not even attend the funeral which you yourself had
caused. After what I have said, you need not be
assured, Mr. Beckford, that I never entertained the
remotest idea of marrying you—I met you, sir, in
fashionable society, which esteems you from appearance
highly, and I was willing, as a belle there, to
receive your attentions. I also was intimate with
your mother, and could not therefore reject the courtesies
of her son. I will be frank with you: the wit
and the superior mind which your conversation displayed,
made me often a pleased listener to you.
But as for marrying,” here Helen shook her head
gravely, and continued, “many a gentleman mistakes
for encouragement from a lady, what was
only meant as a slave to his feelings. Construe, I
pray you, Mr. Beckford, whatever in my conduct
may have seemed as such, by such motives. And,
sir, I hope we may still continue, as the world goes,
friends.”

“Friends, Miss Murray,” exclaimed Henry, in a
rage, “after such language as you have just used to
me—friends!”

“Then, foes, if it so please you, Master Henry,”
exclaimed Helen, rising with that proud dignity
which sat upon her so well, “it seems to be your
fate to war upon women—foes, if it so please you,
sir—suffer me to say, though, that my Quaker notions
are not so strict, as to let me entertain my
avowed enemy in my own house.”

Henry bowed, haughtily stopped, as if to say something,
and then, without speaking, left the house.

Helen threw herself upon the sofa. “That language,”
said she to herself, “was hardly justifiable.
But how many boasts he has made of having won
me at last! And in what language has he made

them? I wonder, will he pick a quarrel with my
brothers? No he has not the courage, for he knows
they have, and he cannot stand the consequences.
Now, if they were right down sober Quakers, how
valiant he would be! I startled him with Ruth's love
for Ralph. How the coxcomb's comb was cut!
Heigh-ho! This Mr. Davidson is certainly a marvellous
proper man. Alas! but he is aged. I wish I
could meet with some right down romantic fellow,
like Ralph Beckford, fall in love with him, and have
him at my feet. Vanity, saith the preacher, all is
vanity.”