The Uninhabited House | Page 5

one
wants to keep the place vacant, and is succeeding admirably."
The question I next put seemed irrelevant, but really resulted from a
long train of thought. This was it:
"Is Miss Elmsdale very handsome, sir?"
"She is very beautiful," was the answer; "but not so beautiful as her
mother was."
Ah me! two old, old stories in a sentence. He had loved the mother, and
he did not love the daughter. He had seen the mother in his bright,
hopeful youth, and there was no light of morning left for him in which
he could behold the child.
To other eyes she might, in her bright spring-time, seem lovely as an
angel from heaven, but to him no more such visions were to be
vouchsafed.
If beauty really went on decaying, as the ancients say, by this time there
could be no beauty left. But oh! greybeard, the beauty remains, though
our eyes may be too dim to see it; the beauty, the grace, the rippling
laughter, and the saucy smiles, which once had power to stir to their

very depths our hearts, friend--our hearts, yours and mine, comrade,
feeble, and cold, and pulseless now.

2. THE CORONER'S INQUEST
The story was told to me afterwards, but I may as well weave it in with
mine at this juncture.
From the maternal ancestress, the Demoiselles Blake inherited a certain
amount of money. It was through no fault of the paternal
Blake--through no want of endeavours on his part to make ducks and
drakes of all fortune which came in his way, that their small inheritance
remained intact; but the fortune was so willed that neither the girls nor
he could divert the peaceful tenure of its half-yearly dividends.
The mother died first, and the father followed her ere long, and then the
young ladies found themselves orphans, and the possessors of a fixed
income of one hundred and thirty pounds a year.
A modest income, and yet, as I have been given to understand, they
might have married well for the money.
In those days, particularly in Ireland, men went very cheap, and the
Misses Blake, one and both, could, before they left off mourning, have
wedded, respectively, a curate, a doctor, a constabulary officer, and the
captain of a government schooner.
The Misses Blake looked higher, however, and came to England, where
rich husbands are presumably procurable. Came, but missed their
market. Miss Kathleen found only one lover, William Craven, whose
honest affection she flouted; and Miss Susannah found no lover at all.
Miss Kathleen wanted a duke, or an earl--a prince of the blood royal
being about that time unprocurable; and an attorney, to her Irish ideas,
seemed a very poor sort of substitute. For which reason she rejected the
attorney with scorn, and remained single, the while dukes and earls
were marrying and intermarrying with their peers or their inferiors.
Then suddenly there came a frightful day when Kathleen and Susannah
learned they were penniless, when they understood their trustee had
robbed them, as he had robbed others, and had been paying their
interest out of what was left of their principal.
They tried teaching, but they really had nothing to teach. They tried
letting lodgings. Even lodgers rebelled against their untidiness and
want of punctuality.

The eldest was very energetic and very determined, and the youngest
very pretty and very conciliatory. Nevertheless, business is business,
and lodgings are lodgings, and the Misses Blake were on the verge of
beggary, when Mr. Elmsdale proposed for Miss Kathleen and was
accepted.
Mr. Craven, by that time a family man, gave the bride away, and
secured Mr. Elmsdale's business.
Possibly, had Mrs. Elmsdale's marriage proved happy, Mr. Craven
might have soon lost sight of his former love. In matrimony, as in other
matters, we are rarely so sympathetic with fulfilment as with
disappointment. The pretty Miss Blake was a disappointed woman after
she had secured Mr. Elmsdale. She then understood that the best life
could offer her was something very different indeed from the ideal
duke her beauty should have won, and she did not take much trouble to
conceal her dissatisfaction with the arrangements of Providence.
Mr. Craven, seeing what Mr. Elmsdale was towards men, pitied her.
Perhaps, had he seen what Mrs. Elmsdale was towards her husband, he
might have pitied him; but, then, he did not see, for women are
wonderful dissemblers.
There was Elmsdale, bluff in manner, short in person, red in the face,
cumbersome in figure, addicted to naughty words, not nice about
driving fearfully hard bargains, a man whom men hated, not
undeservedly; and yet, nevertheless, a man capable of loving a woman
with all the veins of his heart, and who might, had any woman been
found to love him, have compassed