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Page 27
"Dear Helen, you are weary; ill, perhaps," exclaimed her gentle
cousin. "You have entered too soon into gay society, and you suffer
for the public restraint in private."
Her cousin looked steadily in her face, and then smiled one of those
bitter disdainful smiles which it is always painful to see upon a
woman's lip.
"Sit down, Rose," she said; "sit down, and copy this letter. I
have been writing all night, and yet cannot get a sufficient number
finished in time, without your assistance."
Rose did as she was desired, and, to her astonishment, found that
the letters were to the inhabitants of a borough, which Mr. Ivers
had expressed his desire to represent. Rose wrote and wrote; but the
longest task must have a termination. About one, the gentleman himself
came into the room, and, as Rose thought, somewhat indifferently,
expressed his surprise, that what he came to commence, was already
finished. Still he chid his fair wife for an exertion which he feared
might injure her health, and evinced the strongest desire to succeed
in rescuing the people of L---- from the power of a party to which he
was opposed; hinting, at the same time, that the contest would drain
his purse and many of his resources.
"And let it," exclaimed Helen, when he left the room, "let it. I
care not for _that_, but I will overturn every thing that interposes
between me and the desire I have to humble the wife of the present
representative. Look, I would hold this hand in the fire, ay, and
suffer it to smoulder into ashes, to punish the woman who called me
a proud _parvenue_! She did so before I had been a week in London.
Her cold calm face has been a curse to me ever since. She has stood,
the destroying angel, at the gate of my paradise, poisoning every
enjoyment. Let me but humble _her_," she continued, rising proudly
from the sofa upon which she had been resting; "let me but humble
_her_, and I shall feel a triumphant woman! For that I have watched
and waited; _anxiety for that caused me the loss of my child_; but if
Ivers succeeds, I shall be repaid."
Rose shuddered. Was it really true, that having achieved the wealth,
the distinction she panted for, she was still anxious to mount higher?
Was it possible that wealth, station, general admiration, and the
devoted affection of a tender husband did not satisfy the humbly-born
beauty of an obscure English village? Again Helen spoke; she told how
she had at last succeeded in rousing her husband to exertion--how,
with an art worthy a better cause, she had persuaded him that his
country demanded his assistance--how he had been led almost to believe
that the safety of England was in the hands of the freeholders of
L----; and then she pictured her own triumph, as the wife of the
successful candidate, over the woman who had called her a _parvenue_.
"And, after all," murmured poor Rose, "and after all, dear Helen, you
are really unhappy."
"Miserable!" was the reply--"no creature was ever so perfectly
miserable as I am! The one drop of poison has poisoned the whole cup.
What to me was all this grandeur, when I felt that _that_ woman looked
down upon me, and induced others to do the same; that though I was
with them, I was not of them; and all through her means. Ivers could
not understand my feeling; and, besides, I dare not let him know
what had been said by one of his own clique, lest _he should become
inoculated by the same feeling_."
"Another fruit," thought Rose Dillon, "of the evil which attends
unequal marriages."
"But _my_ triumph will come!" she repeated; "Ivers must carry all
before him; and _who knows what may follow_?"
"Still unsatisfied!" thought Rose, as she wandered through the
splendid rooms and inhaled the perfume of the most expensive exotics,
and gazed upon beautiful pictures, and listened to the roll of
carriages, and heard the kind fond voice of Helen's devoted husband
urging the physician, who made his daily calls, to pay his wife the
greatest attention. "Still unsatisfied!" she repeated; and then she
thought of one of Edward's homely but wise proverbs--"All is not
gold that glitters;" and she thought how quite as beautiful, and
more varied by the rich variety of nature, was the prospect from
the parlour-window of the farm-house, that was to be her own. "And
woodbine, roses, and mignonette breathe as sweet odours as exotics,
and belong of right to the cottages of England. Ah!" continued the
right-minded girl, "better is a little and content therewith, than all
the riches of wealth and art without it. If her ambition had even a
_great_ object I could forgive her; but all this for the littleness
of society." This train of thought led her back to the days of
their girlhood, and she remembered how the same desire to outshine
manifested itself in Helen's childhood. If Mr. Stokes had been there
he could have told her of the pink gingham, with her grandmother's
injudicious remark thereupon--"Be content with the pink gingham _now_,
Helen--_the time will come when you shall have a better_;" instead
of--"Be always content, Helen, with what befits your sphere of life."
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