Book: Honor Edgeworth

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With the exception of a few newly-appointed civil servants who have
"made their calls" and run an account at the tailors, the other
gentlemen are mostly well-versed in the drawing-room slang and will
certainly not bore their fair partners by discussing anything outside of
Rideau Hall, or the other fashionable and interesting haunts of gay
winter festivities. These gallant knights are easily distinguished
looking around the ball room with half-closed eyes (they are mostly
short-sighted), or parading their audible element through the room with
such a lazy drawl--beautifully substituting the _r's_ with a perfectly
Italianized "aw."

Among these indispensables, were Jack Fairmay, Willie Airey and a great
many more of our "Sparks Street" elegants. How much better they look on
a freezing afternoon with their noses blue and their fur caps pulled
comfortably down over their ears, than in the painfully proper looking
long-tailed broad cloth and white kids, exactions of society's absolute
laws.

All the blondes and brunettes of Centre Town and Upper Town and Sandy
Hill, all the "tony" Post Office clerks, all the young, flourishing,
embryo and genuine lawyers, doctors, engineers, rich lumber merchants,
and civil servants, _ad infinitum_ were there.

What a gay picture! What an interesting sight! Who would not love Ottawa
for its self-made gouty papas and its fat, airy, comfortable mamas?
Think of the wonderful influence of these thoroughly Christian women on
the sphere in which they shine. Even in this one gathering can we not
realize how the improvements and customs of the day cast their benign
influence over a mighty world, through the rising generation. Those dear
pretty pink and white dimpled darlings done up in "illusion" and silks,
how happy it makes one feel only to look at them! This must be the
nature of the remarks, Guy and another male friend exchange in the bay
window. Let us draw nearer.

"You're wrong, Bob my dear," Guy is saying, "I agree with you they do
look like fish-hooks strung in a row, but I heard Miss Nellie Teazle
tell Mrs. John Prim, that that was the 'Montagu' style; so excuse me for
contradicting you."

"Oh! don't mention it, the name almost redeems the folly of the thing.
By the way Elersley, you have been 'going it' in rather a pronounced way
with Miss Mountainhead to-night. Is it too soon to be the first to
congratulate?"

"Oh Lord!" Guy smothers the exclamation under his heavy moustache. "You
might try the names of all the dear ones in succession on me. They're
just immensely jolly, you know, but I never heard of a young Ottawaite
in his sane sober senses, go choose his future wife in a ballroom."

Just here, Miss Dash comes up and throws a coquettish look at Guy
through the opening in the curtains. He nods a temporary good-bye to his
companion and goes off to claim the next waltz which Miss Dash has
promised him, and, oh Guy! naughty boy! if he is not saying over the
identical pretty nothings to Miss Bella, that are yet filling the heart
of Miss Mountainhead. with a delicious souvenir of him.

In another corner of the room Bob Apley is "spooning" most suggestively
with the same Miss MacArgent whose "fish-hooks" he has just been
ridiculing so mercilessly. This of course is pardonable according to the
world's wise indulgent maxims, especially when we consider that Miss
MacArgent's father's income, daily, is almost identical with the amount
of dollars and cents that find their way to the pockets of the
impecunious Bob in a whole year.

Besides Emily is rather a good-looking specimen of the "foreign" belles
that winter in Ottawa, and some one even said last winter that one of
the Governor-General's Aides-de Camp and she--oh! we all know how the
green-eyed monster tortured the hearts of the poor belles of countless
seasons, when they saw their indisputable rights usurped by a
comparative stranger. The two Misses Begg, for instance, who have been
twenty-five and twenty-six respectively for the last eight years,
waiting for the turn in their lives, that will never come, have cause
for bitter complaint. The same faces are here that are ever on
exhibition as the champion tennis player, the champion skater, another
an unrivalled waltzer, and some more distinguished vocalists and
instrumental performers. These grow wearisome once the novelty wears
off. There is nothing in them besides the foam that blows away after a
little and leaves no trace of its once august presence.

We will make our adieus gladly to the affected civil servants, the young
embryo professionals, the rich independent bachelors, the corpulent
papas and mamas, the famous tennis, skating, singing, dancing and
playing heroines, and go joyfully back to the snug little parlor of
Henry Rayne, where sits the only one sensible girl we have seen
to-night.

She has ceased playing, and is now sitting by a low table with her
lovely head bent earnestly over a lap full of wool-work. The little
clock goes ticking on through the noiseless moments that come and go and
still her busy fingers ply hurriedly through the stitches. At last it is
ten o'clock and instinctively she rises, puts away her wools and needle,
and goes over to the chair which yet supports the sleeping figure of
Henry Rayne.

"Good night, Grandpapa," she says softly in his ear.

He hears the low sweet whisper. Her voice would penetrate the depth of
death itself for him, he fancies. She said "Grandpapa." She only calls
him that when she is sad, whenever a sense of bitter loneliness fills
her heart, making her miss a kind mother and her dear handsome father
most.

He opens his eyes instantly and raises his hand to draw the pretty bowed
head closer still to his.

"Good-night, my dear little child. How stupid of me to have dozed here
all night leaving you by yourself."

"Don't fret, Grandpa dear, I love your company, and all that, but
remember I am never less alone than when alone, and an evening by myself
is never lost to me."

"No, my pretty one, but you must grow tired some day thinking so
incessantly, I must try and distract you; it is dreadful of me to keep
you housed up, so secluded, when there is so much for your youth and
beauty to enjoy outside. May be I'm responsible for many a sigh you've
heaved lately, but it never struck me you see, my pretty darling, that
our sentiments and sympathies run so widely apart, it is not very
surprising if an old prosy bachelor should forget to ferret out the
pleasures of youth, to bestow them on a fair young beautiful thing like
you,"

"Oh-ho, now dear old Grandpa, you have been sleeping and dreaming of
somebody you are mistaking for me. Don't fret for not spoiling me more
than you do. I am pampered enough dear knows. Good-night, I am sleepy
too, and I think a night's rest would not be detrimental to either of
us, eh grandfather?" and kissing him tenderly on both cheeks, she
skipped out through the open doorway and ran up to her own little room.



CHAPTER VIII.


Grace was in all her steps
Heaven in her eye
In every gesture, dignity and love.
--_Milton._

There was no nonsense about Honor Edgeworth. Anyone should like her.
There may have been traits in her character that would elicit no
sympathy from some, but they either forget the extraordinary
circumstances that influenced her young life, or else they are
prejudiced against such individuals as she, whose eyes are widely opened
to all the existing follies and extravagances of her species.

Honor would have grown up and bloomed to ornament a far fairer land than
Canada, her too enthusiastic nature would have been infinitely better
developed in another world, but it is useless to sit down and mourn over
the "might have beens" that are always such a loss to us, because we see
them, devoid of all the disadvantages realization brings to bear on our
own sad experience.

Honor was not even one of those exceptionable women created, not out of
the slime of the earth, but conceived in the romantic mind of some
extravagant novelist, and brought into the world by his magic pen. No
indeed, she had certainly a beautiful face, almost a faultless face, but
how many have cursed the day when first they knew their own beauty! How
many look back over pages and pages of awful crimes and shameful deeds,
and the index page, the starting point, is their beautiful face. So do
not be too hasty in envying the physical perfection or loveliness of
others. Rejoice that you have it not; the want of it must be your
salvation. Know well that if it is not yours, it is because the
possession and consciousness thereof would lead you to evil, and it is
one of those things for which God has his own wise ends.

Perhaps if Honor had mixed with the feminine world more intimately she
would not be the standard of maidenly modesty and reserve that she was
in her nineteenth year; but in her there was an utter absence of that
self-sufficiency and loudness that is painfully prominent now-a-days in
the very city we inhabit. And yet in all her meekness and mildness if
you by look or word injured the extreme sense of delicacy that was the
under current of all her movements, then--she reared her aristocratic
chin high in the air and looked down upon you in such scorn and anger,
as wounded innocence alone can assume. One curl of that splendid lip,
one flash from that cold grey eye and you did not take long to feel how
basely you had lowered yourself, and that a pardon craved on your knees
could scarce half atone for the offence.

What a loss to the social world that women of her stamp are not more
plentiful! What on earth else can redress social evils if not the
redeeming influence of good Christian determined women? Why should they
not hold the key to the good impulses, the moral treasures of mankind as
well as they wind themselves into the evil nature by enticing the
susceptible, dealing out gratification to the willing, and dragging
souls blindfolded into an irremediable eternity?

Physiognomists tell us, if we can not observe it for ourselves, that
there exists not only that universal difference among things, which
makes genus, species, classes, etc., but that even among individuals
there is no perfect resemblance found. There are the general prominent
traits that serve to classify them, but perhaps there is more difference
among the individuals of a species, when examined minutely, than there
would be between individuals of a different genus.

This is so true of the human species, which is difficult to judge
individually on account of the incessant mysterious hidden workings of
that ever active faculty of the soul, which manifests itself so
differently to other eyes through actions and words of greater or less
import.

This is a digression, but, it came from contemplating the singular
beauty of one woman's soul, among the tarnished multitude of victims to
that social levity and those superficial virtues that society honors,
and with which our modern fashionable women persuade themselves they are
doing marvels in the world of good.

If I make a paragon of Honor Edgeworth, it is because I can defy any
broad-minded, unprejudiced critic to find a single grievous fault in her
character.

Besides the ordinary cultivation of her mind in all its faculties, Honor
had another and a nobler ambition. She had acquired all the requisite
knowledge to fit her for any station in life, from that of a nursery
governess to that of the highest lady in the land. Her learning was not
a smattering of this and that--a few words of German, a great deal too
many of her own tongue, a well-studied enthusiasm for Tennyson and
Longfellow, and may be now and then a word for the "Lake" school poets.
Who has not met in their long or short run of experience with the modern
graduate who "perfectly idolized" Tennyson or Byron, who "raved" about
Shelley's poetical mysticism, or who was "fairly enchanted" with
Goethe's deep romanticism. In some of her peculiar phases she even
reckons as items of her illimitable knowledge selections from her
"favorites" among the French romantics, or the realistic school may be
more to her taste. She rolls up her eyes for Mozart and Beethoven and
Gottschalk, but her heart thumps for Offenbach, Lamothe or Strauss. To
make herself "interesting" in society she has "burned the midnight oil"
over "David Copperfield," "Dombey and Son," "Jane Eyre," "East Lynne,"
"Endymion" and other popular volumes as they gain fame. She can sing
snatches from all the finest operas, in Italian, German or French. She
can dance the Boston and Rush Polka with unrivalled grace, she can flirt
and affect the most becoming airs, she never misses a _matinee_ or
evening performance at the Grand Opera House; she can do the
"grape-vine" exquisitely on her silver-plated skates, and can toss the
tennis ball with wonderful dexterity.

All this relates to the effects of the superficial cultivation that our
women are getting in this century. A mind polished so that the "rough"
cannot manifest itself, a little veneering of knowledge and showy
accomplishments, but a heart, alas!--ignored and neglected; the source
of all womanly perfection blocked up and destroyed--that is the
sacrifice that will alone appease the world in its most sensual phase of
to-day, the sacrifice complete and universal of women's hearts. Ah! how
soon they nourish the briers and thistles of cold indifference and
unchristian feeling. In opposition to this sad spectacle I come back to
Honor Edgeworth by her bedside, on her knees, at her evening prayer.
Here is a woman who has moulded her heart according to the law of
Christ. "Be ye perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect." Here is a
woman who is learned, wise and simple, gay, light-hearted and pious,
confiding and discreet, one who can redeem the loss of many because
temptation assailed her and left her the victor.

Long after Honor lay sleeping peacefully, her pink cheeks buried in the
soft pillows, Mr. Rayne sat thinking in the armchair below. It was
growing painfully evident to him that his darling _protegee_ was now
budding into all the fullness and maturity of womanhood, and had she
been his own daughter he would have introduced her formally into society
by now. This was what troubled him. He did not relish the idea of
sending this fair delicate morsel out among the chills and dangers of a
cold world. And yet, if influenced by this good intention, he deprived
her of the seeming advantages that active life in society affords, and
if in later years she would reproach him as the cause of some misfortune
or other, what would these probably groundless fears avail him in his
defence? She was old enough to know danger, and she had spoken to him
already of the world as though her experience of it was great and
sufficient. Perhaps all she needed for a final confirmation of her
opinions of the degradation of that same world was a trial of it. And
should he wrong her by depriving her of it through a false motive?

Whatever way he turned the argument it looked like a dilemma. He should
either send her "out" or not. If he pursued the former course, the
advantages were six, the disadvantages half-a-dozen. If the latter, the
advantages were twelve, the disadvantages a dozen, so that he found
himself almost unequal to the solution of the problem.

Bye-and-bye however, he resolved to come to some conclusion, and thus by
getting angry with himself, he narrowed the two inclinations into one,
and that assumed the shape of a final decision to give her the same
chances as Ottawa's other comfortable daughters.

Once his resolution was made, matters grew easy. He would write to a
widowed cousin who was living a seceded life in Western Ontario,
inducing her to share his home, and the responsibility that weighed upon
him of giving his adopted child her due.

This lady had mourned her departed husband in solitary seclusion for
nigh eight years, and it struck Mr. Rayne on this eventful evening that
may be she would find pleasure in a change.

Thus was Honor's destiny slowly deciding itself in the troubled mind of
her benefactor while she lay blissfully unconcious, fast asleep among a
heap of downy pillows, with one fair hand thrown carelessly over her
head and a little stray curl or two nestling on her warm flushed brow.

Satisfied with his final judgment, Mr. Rayne called for a light and
escorted himself to the downy arms of his comfortable bed, and when we
next take a peep--for of course we've not intruded for the few moments
he was saying his prayers--he is snoring the snore of the truly heavy
sleeper, and his big good-natured face scarcely discernible among
night-cap, pillows and sheets, easily convinces one of the indisputable
quiescence of the mind's consciousness in slumber.

Is it not almost equivalent to the acomplishment of the deed itself when
we have fallen asleep the night before with the resolution of performing
it on the morrow? Is not the wrong almost redressed when we have
promised our selves to right it at any cost on the morrow? Is not the
thought itself equal to the vow if we know that with the morning's sun
we shall rise to make it in reality? One feels all the satisfaction of a
deed accomplished in anticipation, and God be thanked for this, for how
many weary souls must have made their last night on earth endurable, by
the peace of mind that such resolutions infallibly bring.

This explains the comfort and utter heedlessness of Mr Rayne's slumber
after such a miserable time as he passed arguing against himself in his
drawing-room. He had vowed that he would broach the tender subject to
Honor the very next day, and thus free himself from any more hours of
self-reproach.



CHAPTER IX.


"They say the maxim is not new,
That good and evil mixed must be
In every thing this world can show."

--_Patty_

The next morning dawned a calm, mild day. The snow was knee-deep on the
ground and covered the housetops with a thick soft mantle. On how many
utterly different scenes the stray sunbeams rested that winter morning.
Nearly all the heroines of Miss Teazle's ball were sunk in heavy, tired
slumber, in rooms strewn with laces and flowers and other fragments of
last night's dissipation. The poor over-exerted mammas are neither able
to rise nor to sleep, and their pitiably puckered brows and sour looking
faces would excite the sympathy of the most cynical misanthrope.

And yet, perhaps if not reminded, some readers would be tasteless enough
to overlook the noble sacrifice these mothers were making of the comfort
of their lives in order to "chaperone" their stylish daughters to all
the haunts of pleasure. These poor fashionable women must indeed drain
life's cup of bitterness to the dregs, if we can judge from the worldly
girl's soliloquy.

Who rigs herself in satins light,
And goes to parties every night,
To chaperone her daughters bright?
My mother

Who eats late suppers to her grief,
Of jellied turkeys and roast beef,
And finds no dyspeptic relief
My mother

Who tries to talk with pompous air,
And saturates with dye her hair,
To gratify her daughters fair?
My mother

Who snubs our neighbor Mrs. Bell,
In poorer days we knew so well,
And tales of woe did often tell?
My mother

Who calls at Ridleau and all round,
Where rank and titles do abound,
And boasts of cousins newly found?
My mother

Who fears to bow to poorer kin,
For fear her daughters will begin
To growl and scold as though 'twere sin!
My mother.

I give the intelligent reader ten minutes to pause and moralize after
digestion.

I anticipate the look of stupid wonder that must necessarily envelope
the face. If there is so much in individual influence in the lower
circle, what can one expect from the multitude that must submit to a
thousand other decrees coming imperatively from the infallible (?) lips
of society herself? How can we do otherwise than substitute for truth
and simplicity, deception and affectation? What else can we do but fail
to recognise one another in the characters we are forced to assume? Is
it surprising that good and wise men from their corners of seclusion
call the world degenerate, and wonder at the persistent wrong-doing of
those who are the work of such merciful hands? Strange to say, most of
us know, or pretend to know, that life is all deception; that the world
itself, and those who belong to it are essentially, almost necessarily,
selfish; that the goodness and charity which circulate at rare intervals
are only the superfluidities of comfort, proceeding from no generous
impulse whatever. It is not dealt out at the sacrifice of a crust of
bread. It is given so that it may not be left.

Oh, the weakness of humanity after nineteen centuries of fortification!
Oh, the despicable degradation of a race conceived in an Eternal Mind,
created by an Infinite Hand, redeemed by the voluntary sacrifice of a
God, and sanctified by the Spirit that pervades the universe!

Knowing this, realizing this, as most of us do, why do we not make a
move towards independence? Not the independence of the State, that
gratifies the paltry ambition of thousands, not that social independence
whose meaning has of late been so shamefully misapplied, not even the
individual independence that satisfies many. These are but names. I mean
that independence that leaves one unfettered by one's self, that makes
one victor over one's own evil tendencies and impulses--for man has no
enemy so cunning as himself. If he cannot conquer his own inclinations
to error, how is he going to subdue them in others?

If we are slaves, mentally and morally to our sensual selves--if we
raise the material element above the spiritual within us, we then lose
the right of opinion on good or evil, for a man that is passion's slave
is the mouth-piece of evil, and an active agent of the enemy of mankind!
If we open our volumes of literature, every page bears a reflection of
some kind on these things.

For instance, see what a great writer says, speaking of the deception in
life:

"I am weary
Of the bewildering masquerade of life--
Where strangers walk as friends and friends as strangers,
Where whispers overhead betray false hearts;
And through the mazes of the crowd we chase
Some form of loveliness that smiles and beckons.
And cheats us with fair words, to leave us
A mockery and a jest, maddened, confused--
Not knowing friend from foe."

Every one who chooses to think at all has a thought in common on the
question. In a biography of George Eliot, Hutton speaks of the manners
of good society as "a kind of social costume or disguise which is in
fact much more effective in concealing how much of depth ordinary
characters have, and in restraining the expression of universal human
instincts and feelings, than in hiding individualities the
distinguishing inclinations, talents, bias and tastes of those who
assume them. After all, what we care chiefly to know of men and women is
not so much their special bias or tastes as the general depths and mass
of the human nature that is in them--the breadth and power of their
life, its comprehensiveness of grasp, its tenacity of instinct, its
capacity for love and its need for trust."

I fear we will never find this among the leading men and women of our
day. Great minds, like George Eliot's, when they wish to spend their
genius in written books, will leave the lighted hall where refinement
and _bon-ton_ hold their nightly revels, and will descend to the huts of
laborers and mechanics that form one distinct phase of English life.
Like Charlotte Bronte, and some others, she seeks substance for her work
in a true, open character, and that is rarely found among the educated
classes, who learn from books to unlearn the lessons of nature.

We will now leave the "lollipop" darlings of material nature and pass on
out of their dishevelled untidy rooms, leaving their painted faces and
powdered heads to spin out the late morning among the blankets,--and
seek gratification elsewhere. It is breakfast-time in Henry Rayne's
house and the curling steam rises in graceful clouds from the hot tasty
dishes that Mrs. Potts concocts with so much art. Honor, Nanette and Mr.
Rayne are as usual the only participants of the wholesome things. Honor
has just come in, fresh and rosy, all smiles as she steps up to Mr.
Rayne's chair with a cheery good-morning. Then kneeling beside her
guardian, and looking into his kindly face, she says shyly:

"I have something to tell you all, a surprise, and don't begin breakfast
before you know it. If I were not a little orphan this morning, I would
let it pass likely, but having only you and Nanette I must tell you,
that you may not spare your kind wishes for me. To-day is my twentieth
birthday!"

Mr. Rayne rose instantly to his feet and his eyes looked suspiciously
moist as he kissed her tenderly on the brow. Then Honor turned to
Nanette, but the poor woman was weeping mournfully in her blue
handkerchief.

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