ETHEL CHURCHILL.
CHAPTER I.
THE SEASON.
And yet it is a wasted heart:
It is a wasted mind
That seeks not in the inner world
Its happiness to find;
For happiness is like the bird
That broods above its nest,
And finds beneath its folded wings,
Life's dearest, and its best.
A little space is all that hope
Or love can ever take;
The wider that the circle spreads,
The sooner it will break.
Another season had recently commenced its round of gayety; the present was outwardly as glad as if there had been no past; the sunshine played over the onward current of existence; and the bubbles, weeds and flowers, danced on the surface: few cared to look on the rock and the darkness below. Every one appeared to be doing precisely the same things that were doing at that very time the year before. The streets were filled with carriages, the Mall with a gay crowd; the talk was ot fêtes and visits; and eyes and diamonds seemed equally bright. The spring had come forth in all its beauty, and the flower was in the grass, and the green leaf on the bough. Change is slow and strange in the social and the natural world, it requires some great convulsion to alter the aspect of either; but, in the hidden and inward world,—there it is that change does its work; we marvel to find how ourselves are altered, while every thing seems to have remained the same around us; but decay always begins at the heart.
Mrs. Churchill being settled in London, Ethel had come out as a beauty and an heiress, and was brilliantly successful in both capacities. Sir Robert had remitted the fine; but flatteries, executed with whatever genius, were quite wasted on the quiet and pensive girl, who
Listened, and forgot them with a smile.
Youth has one delightful time, when hope walks, like an angel, at its side, and all things have their freshness and their charm. There appears so much to enjoy, that the only question is, what to enjoy first? But this period, brief enough with every one, had been unusually brief with Ethel Churchill. It now was like a dream to her that she had ever looked forward. "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof," is above all the motto of disappointment. At first she was reluctant to visit; she shrank, with morbid weakness, from the idea of meeting Mr. Courtenaye; but this she had hitherto escaped, he having been sent on a confidential mission to Paris. She went out, night after night, because it was less exertion to go out, than to refuse the kindness that forced on her the unwelcome amusement. When a day was over, she was glad, and yet there was nothing that she anticipated on the morrow. But Ethel's was a nature essentially unfitted to the cold and glittering life of society; gentle, timid, and dependent, her world was in the affections; those blighted and destroyed, existence was a blank, nothing remained wherewith to fill up the weary void.
The intercourse between her and Lady Marchmont was constant and affectionate, yet there was but little confidence. They were too different: Ethel had not Henrietta's information, nor her talents; and Henrietta scarcely comprehended the want of them. Lady Marchmont was now in the most brilliant hour of her life; her reputation for beauty, wit, and fashion, was firmly established. Her very caprices were pronounced charming; her slightest phrase was called a bon-mot; wherever she went, she was followed and flattered; and her whole existence seemed made up of praise and pleasure. With all this, there was that perpetual fever of the heart which broke out sometimes in petulance, sometimes in sarcasm; all admitted that her ladyship was very unequal, but very brilliant; and even her rudeness passed only for "pretty Fanny's way."
It is strange what society will endure from its idols. Henrietta had too much vanity not to like the homage that surrounded her; still she was too shrewd not to see through it, and she pined for something better. Between Lord Marchmont and herself the distance became greater every day; she despised him, and he disliked her; ay, disliked, for we hate the superiority which we only acknowledge secretly. Henrietta would have loved any man whom she could have admired; admiration is the divinest privilege of a high and generous nature like hers; it is the smaller and meaner kind who look down, but in her husband there was not one redeeming point:
"The head was vacant, and the heart was cold."
His lovely and neglected wife was in the most painful and the most dangerous situation for a woman. Only her vanity was cultivated: the mind had no employ, and the affections were left to waste.