Christian's Mistake by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

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No; much as she pitied herself, and condoled with Aunt Maria every
hour in the day, Aunt Henrietta was a great deal better in every way
since she came to Avonside--less cross, less ill-natured; even her
perpetual mill-stream of talk flowed on without such violent outbreaks
of wrath against the whole as had embittered the atmosphere of the
Lodge. Now, though her answer was sharp, it was not so sharp as it
might have been--would certainly have been--a few weeks before.

"Maria, I don't think you ever do listen to me when I'm talking. I am
afraid all I say goes in at one ear and out at the other," which was not
impossible, perhaps not unfortunate otherwise, since Miss Gascoigne
talked pretty nearly all day long, Miss Grey's whole life might have
been spent in listening. She replied, with a meek smile, "Oh no, dear
Henrietta!"

"Then you surely would have made some observation on what I have
been telling you--this very extraordinary thing which Miss Smiles told
me last night at the Lodge, while Mrs. Grey was singing--as I
forewarned you, Mrs. Grey sings every where now--and her husband
lets her do it--likes it, too--he actually told me it was a pleasure to him
that his wife should make herself agreeable to other people. They mean
to give tea-parties once a week to the undergraduates at Saint Bede's,
because she says the master ought to be like a father over them, invite
them and make his house pleasant to them. Such a thing was never
heard of in our days."

"No; but I dare say dear Arnold knows best. And what about Miss
Smiles?"

"I've told you twenty times already, Maria, how Miss Smiles said that
Mrs. Brereton said--you know Mrs. Brereton, who has so many
children, and never can keep a governess long--that her new governess,
who happens to be Miss Susan Bennett, whom, you may remember, I
once got for Letitia--told her a long story about Mrs. Grey and Sir
Edwin Uniacke--how he was an old acquaintance of hers before she
was married."

"Of Christian's? She never said so. Oh no! it can't be, or she would
have said so."

"Don't be too sure of that," said Aunt Henrietta, mysteriously.

"Besides, she dislikes him. You know, Henrietta, that when he called
here last week, and she happened to be with us, she put on her bonnet
and went home immediately, without seeing him!"

"And a very rude thing, too, on her part. Any visitors whom I choose
to invite to my house--"

"But he invited himself."

"No matter, he came, and I certainly had no reason to turn him out. I
consider Dr. Grey's objections to him perfectly ridiculous. Why, one
meets the young man every where, in the very best society, and his
manners are charming. But that is not the question. The question is
just this: Was he, or was he not, an acquaintance of Mrs. Grey's before
her marriage? and if he were, why did she not say so?"

"Perhaps she did."

"Not to me; when he called at the Lodge and I introduced them, they
bowed as if they were just ordinary strangers. Now that was a rather
odd thing, and a very disrespectful thing to myself, not to tell me they
had met before, I certainly have a right to be displeased. Don't you feel
it so, Maria?"

Whether she did or not, Maria only answered with her usual
deprecatory smile.

"There is another curious circumstance, now I recall it. Sir Edwin
showed great surprise, which, indeed, I could scarcely wonder at, when
I told him--(I forget how it happened, but I know I was somehow
obliged to tell him)--who it was your brother had married--Miss
Oakley, the organist's daughter."

"Don't you think," said Aunt Maria, with a sudden sparkle of
intelligence, "it might have been her father he was acquainted with?
Sir Edwin is so very musical himself that it is not unlikely he should
seek the company of musicians. As for Christian "--simple as she was,
Aunt Maria had not lived fifty years in the world, and twenty with Miss
Gascoigne, without some small acuteness--"I can see, of course, how
very bad it would have been for poor Christian to have any
acquaintance among young gownsmen, and especially with a person
like Sir Edwin Uniacke."

"He is no worse than his neighbors, and I beg you will make no
remarks upon him," said Miss Gascoigne, with dignity. "As to Mrs.
Grey--"

"Perhaps," again suggested Aunt Maria, appealingly, "perhaps it isn't
true. People do say such untrue things. Mrs. Brereton may have
imagined it all."

"It was no imagination. Haven't I told you that Miss Bennett gave the
whole story, with full particulars, exactly as she had learned it lately
from the servant at the farm where Mr. Oakley and his daughter once
lodged and where Mr. Uniacke used to come regularly? Not one day
did he miss during a whole month. Now, Maria, I should be sorry to
think ill of her for your brother's sake but you must allow, when a
young person in her station receives constant visits from young
gentlemen--gentlemen so much above her as Sir Edwin is--it looks very
like--"

"Oh, Henrietta," cried Miss Grey, the womanly feeling within her
forcing its way, even through her placid non-resistance, "do stop! you
surely don't consider what you are saying?"

"I am not in the habit of speaking without consideration, and I am, I
assure you, perfectly aware of what I am saying. I say again, that such
conduct was not creditable to Miss Oakley. Of course, one could not
expect from a person like her the same decorum that was natural to you
and me in our girlhood. I do not believe you and William ever so much
as looked at one another before you were engaged."

A faint light, half tearful, half tender, gleamed in those poor, faded blue
eyes. "Never mind that now Henrietta. Consider Christian. It will be a
terrible thing if any ill-natured stories go about concerning poor dear
Christian."

"It will, and therefore I am determined, for your brother's sake, to sift
the story to the very bottom. In fact, I think--to end all doubt--I shall
put the direct question myself to Sir Edwin Uniacke."

Speak of the--But it would not be fair to quote the familiar proverb
against the young man who appeared that instant standing at the
wicket-gate.

"Well, I never knew such a coincidence," cried Miss Grey.

"Such a providence rather," cried Miss Gascoigne. And perhaps, in her
strange obliquity of vision, or, rather, in that sad preponderance of self
which darkened all her vision, like a moral cataract in the eye of her
soul, this woman did actually think Providence was leading her toward
a solemn duty in the investigating of the past history of the forlorn girl
whom Dr. Grey had taken as his wife.

"Speak of an angel and you see his wings," said she, with exceeding
politeness. "We were just talking about you, Sir Edwin."

"Thank you; and for your charming parody on the old proverb likewise,
I hope I am not the angel of darkness anyhow."

He did not look it--this graceful, handsome young man, gifted with that
peculiar sort of beauty which you see in Goethe's face, in Byron's,
indicating what may be called the Greek temperament--the nature of
the old Attic race--sensuous, not sensual; pleasure-loving, passionate,
and changeable; not intentionally vicious, but reveling in a sort of
glorious enjoyment, intellectual and corporeal, to which every thing
else is sacrificed--in short, the heathen as opposed to the Christian type
of manhood--a type, the fascination of which lasts as long as the body
lasts, and the intellect; when these both fail, and there is left to the
man only that something which we call the soul, the immortal essence, one
with Divinity, and satisfied with nothing less than the divine--alas for
him!

A keen observer, who had lived twenty years longer in the world than
he, might, regarding him in all his beauty and youth, feel a sentiment
not unlike compassion for Edwin Uniacke.

He sat down, making himself quite at home, though this was only his
second visit to Avonside Cottage. But Miss Gascoigne, if only from
love of opposition, had made it pretty clear to him that he was welcome
there, and that she liked him. He enjoyed being liked, and had the easy
confidence of one who is well used to it.

"Yes, I am ready to avouch, this is the prettiest little paradise within
miles of Avonsbridge. No wonder you should have plenty of visitors, I
met a tribe coming here--your sister-in-law (charming person is Mrs.
Grey!) your nephews and niece, and that gipsy-looking, rather
handsome nurse, who is a little like the head of Clytie, only for her
sullen, underlying mouth and projecting chin."

"How you notice faces, Sir Edwin!"

"Of course. I am a little bit of an artist."

"And a great piece of a musician, as I understand. Which reminds me,"
added Miss Gascoigne, eager to plunge into her mission, which, in her
strange delusion, she earnestly believed was a worthy and righteous
one, in which she had embarked for the family benefit--"I wanted to
ask whether you did not know Mrs. Grey's father, the organist? And
herself too, when she was Miss Oakley?"

"Every body knew Mr. Oakley," was the evasive answer. "He was a
remarkable man--quite a genius, with all the faults of a genius. He
drank, he ate opium, he--"

"Nay, he is dead," faintly said Aunt Maria.

"Which, you mean, is a good reason why I should speak no more about
him. I obey you, Miss Grey."

"But his daughter? Did you say you knew his daughter?" pursued Miss
Gascoigne.

"Oh yes, casually. A charming girl she was! very pretty, though
immature. Those large, fair women sometimes do not look their best
until near thirty. And she had a glorious voice. She and I used to sing
duets-together continually."

He might not have thought what he was doing--it is but charity to
suppose so; that he spoke only after his usual careless and somewhat
presumptuous style of speaking about all women, but he must have
been struck by the horrified expression of Miss Gascoigne's face.

"Sing duets together! a young man in your position, and a young
woman in hers! Without a mother, too!"

"Oh, her father was generally present, if you think of propriety. But I
do assure you, Miss Gascoigne, there was not the slightest want of
propriety. She was a very pretty girl, and I was a young fellow, rather
soft, perhaps, and so we had a--well, you might call it a trifling
flirtation. But nothing of any consequence--nothing. I do assure you."

"Of course it was of no consequence," said Aunt Maria, again breaking
in with a desperate courage. And still more desperate were the nods
and winks with which she at last aroused even Aunt Henrietta to a
sense of the position into which the conversation was bringing them
both, so that she, too, had the good feeling to add,

"Certainly it is not of the slightest consequence. Dr. Grey is probably
aware of it all?"

"Which may be the reason I am never invited to the Lodge," laughed
the young man, so pleasantly that one would hardly have paused to
consider what he laughed at or what it implied. "By-the-by, I hear they
had such a pleasant gathering there last night--a musical evening, where
every body sang a great deal, and Mrs. Grey only once, but then, of
course, divinely. I should like to hear her again. But look, there are
the children. Shall I take the liberty of unfastening for them the latch
of your garden gate?"

He sprang out of the low window, and came back heading the small
battalion of visitors--Phillis, Arthur, Letitia, and Oliver. But Mrs. Grey
was not there. She had come half way, and returned home alone.

"Well, I must say that is very odd, considering I invited her to spend the
day, and, I think, rather disrespectful of me--to us both, Maria."

"She might have been tired after the party last night," put in Aunt
Maria.

"No, she wasn't tired, for she never told me so." said Arthur. "She told
me to say--not you, Phillis, mother always trusts me with her messages--
that she had gone back on account of papa's wanting her, and that if he
came to fetch us, she would come here with him in the evening."

"Very devoted! 'An old man's darling and a young man's slave,' runs
the proverb; but Mrs. Grey seems to reverse it. She will soon never stir
out an inch without your brother, Maria."

"And I am sure my brother never looks so happy as when she is beside
him," said Aunt Maria. "We shall quite enjoy seeing them both
together to-night."

"And I only wish it had been my good fortune to join such a pleasant
family party," observed Sir Edwin Uniacke.

It was rather too broad a hint, presuming even upon Miss Gascoigne's
large courtesy. In dignified silence she passed it over, sending the
children and Phillis away to their early dinner, and after an interval of
that lively conversation, in which, under no circumstances, did Sir
Edwin ever fail, allowing him also to depart.

As he went down the garden, Miss Grey, with great dismay, watched
him stop at her beautiful jessamine bower, pull half a dozen of the
white stars, smell at them, and throw them away. He would have done
the same--perhaps had done it--with far diviner things than jessamine
flowers.

"Yes," said Miss Gascoigne, looking after him, and then sitting down
opposite Miss Grey, spreading out her wide silk skirts, and preparing
herself solemnly for a wordy war--that is, if it could be called a war
which was all on one side--"yes, I have come to the bottom of it all. I
knew I should. Nothing ever escapes me. And pray, Maria, what do
you think of her now."

"Think of whom?"

"You are so dull when you won't hear. Of your sister-in-law, Christian
Grey."

Poor Aunt Maria looked up with a helpless pretense of ignorance.
"What about her. Henrietta, dear?"

"Pshaw! You know as well as I do, only you are so obtuse, or so
meek," (A mercy she was, or she would never have lived a week, not to
say twenty years, with Henrietta Gascoigne.) "Once for all, tell me
what you propose doing?"

"Doing? I?"

"Yes, you. Can't you see, my dear Maria, that it is your business to
inform your brother what you have discovered concerning his wife?"

"Discovered?"

"Certainly; it is a discovery, since she has never told it--never told her
husband that before her marriage she had been in the habit of singing
duets (love-songs, no doubt, most improper for any young woman)
with a young gentleman of Sir Edwin's birth and position, who, of
course, never thought of marrying her--(your brother, I do believe, is
the only man in Avonsbridge who would have so committed himself)--
and who, by the light way he speaks of her, evidently shows how little
respect he had for her."

"Perhaps," mildly suggested Aunt Maria, "perhaps she really has told
dear Arnold."

"Then why did he not tell us--tell me? Why did he place me in the very
awkward position of not knowing of this previous acquaintance of his
wife's? Why, in that very unpleasant conversation we had one day at
the Lodge, was I the only person to be kept in ignorance of his reasons--
and very good reasons I now see they were--for forbidding Sir Edwin's
visits? Singing duets together! Who knows but that they may meet
and sing them still? That new piano! and we turned out of the house
directly afterward--literally turned out! But perhaps that was the very
reason she did it--that she might meet him the more freely. Oh, Maria!
your poor deluded brother!"

It is strange the way some women have--men too, but especially
women--of rolling and rolling their small snowball of wrath until it
grows to an actual mountain, which has had dragged into it all sorts of
heterogeneous wrongs, and has grown harder and blacker day by day,
till no sun of loving-kindness will ever thaw it more. In vain did poor
Maria ejaculate her pathetic "Oh, Henrietta!" and try, in her feeble way,
to put in a kindly word or two; nothing availed. Miss Gascoigne had
lashed herself up into believing firmly every thing she had imagined
and it was with an honest expression of real grief and pain that she
repeated over and over again, "What ought we to do? Your poor, dear
brother!"

For, with all her faults, Miss Gascoigne was a conscientious woman;
one who, so far as she saw her duty, tried to fulfill it, and as strongly,
perhaps a little more so, insisted on other people's fulfilling theirs.
She stood aghast at the picture, her own self-painted picture, of the kind
brother-in-law, of whom in her heart she was really fond, married to a
false, wicked woman, more than twenty years his junior, who mocked
at his age and peculiarities, and flirted behind his back with any body
and every body. To do Aunt Henrietta justice, however, of more than
flirtation she did not suspect--no person with common sense and
ordinary observation could suspect--Christian Grey.

"I must speak to her myself, poor thing! I must open her eyes to the
danger she is running. Only consider, Maria, if that story did go about
Avonsbridge, she would never be thought well of in society again. I
must speak to her. If she will only confide in me implicitly, so that I
can take her part, and assure every body I meet that, however bad
appearances may be as regards this unlucky story, there is really no-
thing in it--nothing at all--don't you see, Maria?"

Alas! Maria had been so long accustomed to look at every thing
through the vision of dear Henrietta, that she had no clear sight of her
own whatever. She only found courage to say, in a feeble way,

"Take care, oh, do take care! I know you are much cleverer than I am,
and can manage things far better; but oh please take care?"

And when, some hours after, Dr. and Mrs. Grey not appearing, she was
called into Miss Gascoigne's room, where that lady stood tying her
bonnet-strings with a determined air, and expressing her intention of
going at once to the Lodge, however inconvenient, still, all that Aunt
Maria ventured to plead was that melancholy warning, generally
unheeded by those who delight in playing with hot coals and edged
tools, as Aunt Henrietta had done all her life, "Take care!"

In her walk to the Lodge, through the still, sweet autumn evening, with
a fairy-like wreath of mist rising up above the low-lying meadows of
the Avon, and climbing slowly up to the college towers, and the far-off
sunset clouds, whose beauty she never noticed, Miss Gascoigne
condescended to some passing conversation with Phillis, and elicited
from her, without betraying any thing, as she thought, a good deal--
namely, that Sir Edwin Uniacke was often seen walking up and down
the avenue facing the Lodge, and that once or twice he had met and
spoken to the children.

"But Mrs. Grey doesn't like it, I think she wants to drop his
acquaintance," said the sharp Phillis, who was gaining quite as much
information as she bestowed.

"Why, did they ever--did she ever"--and then some lingering spark of
womanly feeling, womanly prudence, made Miss Gascoigne hesitate,
and add with dignity. "Yes, very likely Mrs. Grey may not choose his
acquaintance. He is not approved of by every body."

"I know that." said Phillis, meaningly.

The two women, the lady and the servant, exchanged looks. Both were
acute persons, and the judgment either passed on the other was keen
and accurate. Probably neither judged herself, or recognized the true
root of her judgment upon the third person, unfortunate Christian. "She
has interfered with my management, and stolen the hearts of my
children;" "she has annoyed me and resisted my authority?" would
never have been given by either nurse or aunt as a reason for either
their feelings or their actions; yet so it was.

Nevertheless, when in the hall of the Lodge they came suddenly face to
face with Mrs. Grey, entering, hat in hand, from the door of the private
garden, the only place where she ever walked alone now, they both
started as if they had been detected in something wrong. She looked so
quiet and gentle, grave and sweet, modest as a girl and dignified as a
young matron--so perfectly unconscious of all that was being said or
planned against her, that if these two malicious women had a
conscience--and they had, both of them--they must have felt it smite
them now.

"Miss Gascoigne, how kind of you to walk home with the children!
Papa and I would have come, but he was obliged to dine in Hall. He
will soon be free now, and will walk back with you. Pray come in and
rest; you look tired."

Mrs. Grey's words and manner, so perfectly guileless and natural, for
the moment quite confounded her enemy--her enemy, and yet an honest
enemy. Of the number of cruel things that are done in this world, how
many are done absolutely for conscience sake by people who deceive
themselves that they are acting from the noblest, purest motives--
carrying out all the Christian virtues, in short, only they do so, not in
themselves, but against other people. And from their list of
commandments they obliterate one--"Judge not, that ye be not judged
condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned."

But, for the time being, Miss Gascoigne was puzzled. Her stern
reproof, her patronizing pity, were alike disarmed. Her mountain
seemed crumbling to its original mole-hill. The heap of accusing
evidence which she had accumulated dwindled into the most ordinary
and commonplace facts at sight of Christian's innocent face and placid
mien. Nothing could be more unlike a woman who had ever
contemplated the ordinary "flirting" of society. As for any thing worse,
the idea was impossible to be entertained for a moment. It was simply
ridiculous.

Aunt Henrietta sat a good while talking, quite mildly for her, of
ordinary topics, before she attempted to broach the real object of her
visit. It was only as the hour neared for Dr. Grey's coming in that she
nerved herself to her mission. She had an uneasy sense that it would be
carried out better in his absence than in his presence.

Without glancing often at Christian, who sat so peaceful, looking out
into the fading twilight, she launched her thunderbolt at once.

"We had a visit today from Sir Edwin Uniacke."

"So I supposed, since I and the children met him on the way to
Avonside."

In this world, so full of shams, bow utterly bewildering sometimes is
the direct innocent truth! At this answer of Christian's Miss Gascoigne
looked more amazed than if she had been told a dozen lies.

"Was that the reason you turned back and went home?"

"Partly; I really had forgotten something which Dr. Grey wanted, but I
also wished to avoid meeting your visitor."

"Why so?"

"Surely you must guess. How can I voluntarily meet any one who is
not a friend of my husband's?"

"Not though he may have been a friend of your own? For, as I
understand, you once had a very close acquaintance with Sir Edwin
Uniacke."

The thrust was so unexpected, unmistakable in its meaning, that
Christian, in her startled surprise, said the very worst thing she could
have said to the malicious ears which were held open to every thing and
eager to misconstrue every thing, "Who told you that?"

"Told me! Why all Avonsbridge is talking about it, and about you."

This was a lie--a little white lie; one of those small exaggerations of
which people make no account; but Christian believed it, and it seemed
to wrap her round as with a cold mist of fear. All Avonsbridge talking
of her--her, Dr. Grey's wife, who had his honor as well as her own in
her keeping--talking about herself and Sir Edwin Uniacke! What? how
much? how had the tale come about? how could it be met?

With a sudden instinct of self-preservation, she forcibly summoned
back her composure. She knew with whom she had to deal. She must
guard every look, every word.

"Will you tell me. Miss Gascoigne, exactly who is talking about me,
and what they say? I am sure I have never given occasion for it."

"Never? Are you quite certain of that?"

"Quite certain. Who said I had 'a very close acquaintance'--were not
these your words--with Sir Edwin Uniacke?"

"Himself."

"Himself!"

Then Christian recognized the whole amount of her difficulty--nay, her
danger; for she was in the power, not of a gentleman, but of a villain.
Any man must have been such who, under the circumstances, could
have boasted of their former acquaintance, or even referred to it at all.

"Kiss and tell?" runs the disdainful proverb. And even the worldliest of
men, in their low code of honor, count the thing base and ignoble.
Alas! all women do not.

In the strangely mistaken code of feminine "honorable-ness," it is
deemed no disgrace for a woman to chatter and boast of a man's love,
but the utmost disgrace for her to own or feel on her side any love at
all. But Christian was unlike her sex in some things. To her, with her
creed of love, it would have appeared far less mean, less cowardly, less
dishonorable, openly to confess, "I loved this man," than to betray
"This man loved me." And it was with almost contemptuous
indignation that she repeated, "What! he told it himself?"

"He did. I first heard it through Miss Bennett, your _protégée,_ who
has come back, and is now a governess at Mrs. Brereton's. But when I
questioned Sir Edwin himself, he did not deny it."

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