Country Lodgings | Page 2

beautiful girl of seventeen, the bridegroom a plain man of
seven-and-fifty. In this case, at least, the father was right. He lived long
enough to see that the young wife was unusually attached to her kind
and indulgent husband, and died, about a twelve-month after the
marriage, with the fullest confidence in her respectability and happiness.

Mr. Cameron did not long survive him. Before she was nineteen the
fair Helen Cameron was a widow and an orphan, with one beautiful
boy, to whom she was left sole personal guardian, an income being
secured to her ample for her rank in life, but clogged with the one
condition of her not marrying again.
Such was the tenant, who, wearied of her dull suburban home, a red
brick house in the middle of a row of red brick houses; tired of the
loneliness which never presses so much upon the spirits as when left
solitary in the environs of a great city; pining for country liberty, for
green trees, and fresh air; much caught by the picturesque-ness of
Upton, and its mixture of old-fashioned stateliness and village rusticity;
and, perhaps, a little swayed by a desire to be near an old friend and
correspondent of the mother, to whose memory she was so strongly
attached, came in the budding spring time, the showery, flowery month
of April, to spend the ensuing summer at the Court.
We, on our part, regarded her arrival with no common interest. To me it
seemed but yesterday since I had received an epistle of thanks for a
present of one of dear Mary Howitt's charming children's books,--an
epistle undoubtedly not indited by the writer,--in huge round text,
between double pencil lines, with certain small errors of orthography
corrected in as mailer hand above; followed in due time by postscripts
to her mother's letters, upon one single line, and the spelling much
amended; then by a short, very short note, in French; and at last, by a
despatch of unquestionable authenticity, all about doves and rabbits,--a
holiday scrawl, rambling, scrambling, and uneven, and free from
restraint as heart could desire. It appeared but yesterday since Helen
Graham was herself a child; and here she was, within two miles of us, a
widow and a mother!
Our correspondence had been broken off by the death of Mrs. Graham
when she was about ten years old, and although I had twice called upon
her in my casual visits to town during the lifetime of Mr. Cameron; and
although these visits had been most punctually returned, it had
happened, as those things do happen in dear, provoking London, where
one is sure to miss the people one wishes most to see, that neither party

had ever been at home; so that we had never met, and I was at full
liberty to indulge in my foolish propensity of sketching in my mind's
eye a fancy portrait of my unknown friend.
Il Penseroso is not more different from L'Allegro than was my
anticipation from the charming reality. Remembering well her mother's
delicate and fragile grace of figure and countenance, and coupling with
that recollection her own unprotected and solitary state, and somewhat
melancholy story, I had pictured to myself (as if contrast were not in
this world of ours much more frequent than congruity) a mild, pensive,
interesting, fair-haired beauty, tall, pale, and slender;--I found a Hebe,
an Euphrosyne,--a round, rosy, joyous creature, the very impersonation
of youth, health, sweetness, and gaiety, laughter flashing from her hazel
eyes, smiles dimpling round her coral lips, and the rich curls of her
chestnut hair,--for having been fourteen months a widow, she had, of
course, laid aside the peculiar dress,--the glossy ringlets of her "bonny
brown hair" literally bursting from the comb that attempted to confine
them.
We soon found that her mind was as charming as her person. Indeed,
her face, lovely as it was, derived the best part of its loveliness from her
sunny temper, her frank and ardent spirit, her affectionate and generous
heart. It was the ever-varying expression, an expression which could
not deceive, that lent such matchless charms to her glowing and
animated countenance, and to the round and musical voice sweet as the
spoken voice of Malibran, or the still fuller and more exquisite tones of
Mrs. Jordan, which, true to the feeling of the moment, vibrated alike to
the wildest gaiety and the deepest pathos. In a word, the chief beauty of
Helen Cameron was her sensibility. It was the perfume to the rose.
Her little boy, born just before his father's death, and upon whom she
doated, was a magnificent piece of still life. Calm, placid, dignified, an
infant Hercules for strength and fair proportions, grave as a judge, quiet
as a flower, he was, in point of age,