An Old Man's Love. Anthony Trollope
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quite sure would not answer.
Two years ago had died his best beloved friend, Captain Patrick Lawrie. With him we have not anything to do, except to say that of all men he was the most impecunious. Late in life he had married a second wife—a woman who was hard, sharp, and possessed of an annuity. The future condition of his only daughter had been a terrible grief to him; but from Mr. Whittlestaff he had received assurances which had somewhat comforted him. "She shan't want. I can't say anything further." Such had been the comfort given by Mr. Whittlestaff. And since his friend's death Mr. Whittlestaff had been liberal with presents—which Mary had taken most unwillingly under her step-mother's guidance. Such had been the state of things when Mr. Whittlestaff received the letter. When he had been walking up and down the long walk for an extra hour, Mr. Whittlestaff expressed aloud the conclusion to which he had come. "I don't care one straw for Mrs. Baggett." It should be understood as having been uttered in direct opposition to the first assurance made by him, that "He'd be whipped if he'd have anything to do with her." In that hour he had resolved that Mary Lawrie should come to him, and be made, with all possible honours of ownership, with all its privileges and all its responsibilities, the mistress of his house. And he made up his mind also that such had ever been his determination. He was fifty and Mary Lawrie was twenty-five. "I can do just what I please with her," he said to himself, "as though she were my own girl." By this he meant to imply that he would not be expected to fall in love with her, and that it was quite out of the question that she should fall in love with him. "Go and tell Mrs. Baggett that I'll be much obliged to her if she'll put on her bonnet and come out to me here." This he said to a gardener's boy, and the order was not at all an unusual one. When he wanted to learn what Mrs. Baggett intended to give him for dinner, he would send for the old housekeeper and take a walk with her for twenty minutes. Habit had made Mrs. Baggett quite accustomed to the proceeding, which upon the whole she enjoyed. She now appeared with a bonnet, and a wadded cloak which her master had given her. "It's about that letter, sir," said Mrs. Baggett.
"How do you know?"
"Didn't I see the handwriting, and the black edges? Mrs. Lawrie ain't no more."
"Mrs. Lawrie has gone to her long account."
"I'm afeared, sir, she won't find it easy to settle the bill," said Mrs. Baggett, who had a sharp, cynical way of expressing her disapprobation.
"Mrs. Baggett, judge not, lest you be judged." Mrs. Baggett turned up her nose and snuffed the air. "The woman has gone, and nothing shall be said against her here. The girl remains. Now, I'll tell you what I mean to do."
"She isn't to come here, Mr. Whittlestaff?"
"Here she is to come, and here she is to remain, and here she is to have her part of everything as though she were my own daughter. And, as not the smallest portion of the good things that is to come to her, she is to have her share in your heart, Mrs. Baggett."
"I don't know nothing about my heart, Mr. Whittlestaff. Them as finds their way to my heart has to work their way there. Who's Miss Lawrie, that I'm to be knocked about for a new comer?"
"She is just Mary Lawrie."
"I'm that old that I don't feel like having a young missus put over me. And it ain't for your good, Mr. Whittlestaff. You ain't a young man—nor you ain't an old un; and she ain't no relations to you. That's the worst part of it. As sure as my name is Dorothy Baggett, you'll be falling in love with her." Then Mrs. Baggett, with the sense of the audacity of what she had said, looked him full in the face and violently shook her head.
"Now go in," he said, "and pack my things up for three nights. I'm going to Norwich, and I shan't want any dinner. Tell John I shall want the cart, and he must be ready to go with me to the station at 2.15."
"I ought to be ready to cut the tongue out of my head," said Mrs. Baggett as she returned to the house, "for I might have known it was the way to make him start at once."
Not in three days, but before the end of the week, Mr. Whittlestaff returned home, bringing with him a dark-featured tall girl, clothed, of course, in deepest mourning from head to foot. To Mrs. Baggett she was an object of intense interest; because, although she had by no means assented to her master's proposal, made on behalf of the young lady, and did tell herself again and again during Mr. Whittlestaff's absence that she was quite sure that Mary Lawrie was a baggage, yet in her heart she knew it to be impossible that she could go on living in the house without loving one whom her master loved. With regard to most of those concerned in the household, she had her own way. Unless she would favour the groom, and the gardener, and the boy, and the girls who served below her, Mr. Whittlestaff would hardly be contented with those subordinates. He was the easiest master under whom a servant could live. But his favour had to be won through Mrs. Baggett's smiles. During the last two years, however, there had been enough of discussion about Mary Lawrie to convince Mrs. Baggett that, in regard to this "interloper," as Mrs. Baggett had once called her, Mr. Whittlestaff intended to have his own way. Such being the case, Mrs. Baggett was most anxious to know whether the young lady was such as she could love.
Strangely enough, when the young lady had come, Mrs. Baggett, for twelve months, could not quite make up her mind. The young lady was very different from what she had expected. Of interference in the house there was almost literally none. Mary had evidently heard much of Mrs. Baggett's virtues—and infirmities—and seemed to understand that she also had in many things to place herself under Mrs. Baggett's orders. "Lord love you, Miss Mary," she was heard to say; "as if we did not all understand that you was to be missus of everything at Croker's Hall,"—for such was the name of Mr. Whittlestaff's house. But those who heard it knew that the words were spoken in supreme good humour, and judged from that, that Mrs. Baggett's heart had been won. But Mrs. Baggett still had her fears; and was not yet resolved but that it might be her duty to turn against Mary Lawrie with all the violence in her power. For the first month or two after the young lady's arrival, she had almost made up her mind that Mary Lawrie would never consent to become Mrs. Whittlestaff. An old gentleman will seldom fall in love without some encouragement; or at any rate, will not tell his love. Mary Lawrie was as cold to him as though he had been seventy-five instead of fifty. And she was also as dutiful—by which she showed Mrs. Baggett more strongly even than by her coldness, that any idea of marriage was on her part out of the question.
This, strange to say, Mrs. Baggett resented. For though she certainly felt, as would do any ordinary Mrs. Baggett in her position, that a wife would be altogether detrimental to her interest in life, yet she could not endure to think that "a little stuck-up minx, taken in from charity," should run counter to any of her master's wishes. On one or two occasions she had spoken to Mr. Whittlestaff respecting the young lady and had been cruelly snubbed. This certainly did not create good humour on her part, and she began to fancy herself angry in that the young lady was so ceremonious with her master. But as months ran by she felt that Mary was thawing, and that Mr. Whittlestaff was becoming more affectionate. Of course there were periods in which her mind veered round. But at the end of the year Mrs. Baggett certainly did wish that the young lady should marry her old master. "I can go down to Portsmouth," she said to the baker, who was a most respectable old man, and was nearer to Mrs. Baggett's confidence than any one else except her master, "and weary out the rest on 'em there." When she spoke of "wearying out the rest on 'em," her friend perfectly understood that she alluded to what years she might still have to live, and to the abject misery of her latter days, which would be the consequence of her resigning her present mode of life. Mrs. Baggett was supposed to have been born at Portsmouth, and, therefore, to allude to that one place which she knew in the world over and beyond the residences in which her master and her master's family had resided.
Before I go on to describe the characters of Mr. Whittlestaff and Miss Lawrie, I must devote a few words to the early life of Mrs. Baggett. Dorothy Tedcaster had been born in the house of Admiral Whittlestaff, the officer in command at the Portsmouth dockyard. There her father or her mother had family connections, to visit whom Dorothy, when a young woman, had returned from the then abode of her loving mistress, Mrs. Whittlestaff. With Mrs. Whittlestaff she had lived absolutely from the hour of her birth, and of Mrs. Whittlestaff her mind was so full, that she did conceive her to be superior, if not absolutely in rank, at any rate in all the graces and favours of life, to her