Did it ever occur to her that the peasant’s hovel, where, on the very threshold, the affections blossom, might be more congenial to her than all the beauties and comforts of Stowe Vale? How she came there she knew not; and she did not love her protector sufficiently to conform to his strange veto from affection for one so dreaded.
Humbled, rather than convinced, Mr. Day abandoned his attempt: and lo! Stowe Vale is deserted. The clear pond before it (now, we learn, filled up) no longer reflects Sabrina’s girlish image. No longer is she seen fleeing for her life into yon wood from the pistol’s aim. No longer vainly trying to compass a Latin declension, or to solve the pepperbox in Euclid. She is away to school—a common-place school in a common-place town, Sutton Coldfield, in Warwickshire—and is en train to become a useful, sensible, and even elegant young woman, upon the old-world principles of education. After remaining three years at school, she resided in various families, paying a board, for Day then allowed her fifty pounds a year. He corresponded with her, “paternally,” as Miss Seward expresses it, and resigned her when she had attained the age of twenty-five to a better protection than his own.
Mr. Bicknell, the barrister who, with Mr. Day, had become a surety to the governors of the Foundling Hospital at Shrewsbury for the young Sabrina, offered her his hand. She accepted it, without love. Though she did not exactly adopt Mrs. Malapert’s advice—“to begin with a little aversion”—she performed her part well. Mr. Day gave her a dot of five hundred pounds, with these ungracious words:—
“I do not refuse my consent to your marrying Mr. Bicknell; but remember, you have not asked my advice.”
She married, and was happy. After six years, however, Mr. Bicknell was carried off by a paralytic stroke, leaving Sabrina destitute, with two sons. Mr. Day then said he would allow her thirty pounds a year, to assist her in the efforts she would, he expected, make for her own maintenance. To this was added the sum of eight hundred pounds, raised among the profession to which Mr. Bicknell had belonged. Having done this, Mr. Day dismissed the child whom he had brought out of obscurity from his remembrance—just as a chemist throws away the dross of any substance in which he has made a fruitless experiment.
Sabrina, however, rose above fortune. She became the housekeeper, assistant, and friend of Dr. Charles Burney, whose large school at Greenwich formed so many youths for an honourable career. Her kindliness, her fresh though matronly beauty, her sympathy of character, endeared her to the boys, who loved her all the better that she was not at all Spartan. Her name did not appear in Mr. Day’s will, but she continued during her whole life to receive from his widow the annuity he had so sparingly allowed her.
The philosopher eventually married an infatuated young lady, named Mills. Young, elegant, handsome, rich, and well-born, Esther Mills accepted proposals to which were affixed the following conditions:—All that the world calls pleasure, luxury, ostentation, were to be given up once and for ever; even society was to be limited to a chosen few, and after the absolute wants of existence were satisfied, the rest of their ample fortunes was to be devoted to the poor. Esther gladly, we are told, complied, and Thomas Day found at last a wife shaped on his own plan. They retired into the country. Self-sacrifice began at the church door: no carriage, no lady’s-maid, no luxury, were allowed. The harpsichord—which Esther played excellently well—was to be silent: it was trivial to love music. Constant experiments were made on Esther’s temper. Her attachment was put to a severe test—she wept, but murmured not. Yet, as her fortune was wholly settled on herself, she had the power, as her husband reminded her, of withdrawing and living alone.
Ten years did this childless union subsist. It was dissolved, not in the Consistorial Court, as one might have expected, but by one of Mr. Day’s unfruitful experiments. Though hard upon women and children, he was indulgent to animals. He thought highly, for instance, of the native qualities of horses, and believed that, when they were absent, ill usage was the cause. He reared, he fed, he tamed a favourite foal. He attempted to accustom it to the bit himself; he rejected the aid of a horse-breaker, and attempted to break it himself. The animal, less patient than Sabrina, less devoted than Esther, threw him, and kicked him in the head. Death instantly ensued.
Peculiar, and mistaken, and hard as he was, Thomas Day had one heart at all events devoted to him. His friends, it is said, at once loved, and somewhat disapproved of, him. His wife refused after his death to see the light of day; during those hours when the sun gladdens our fair earth she remained in bed, no gleam allowed to penetrate through her curtains. At night she arose, and wandered through her gardens in the gloom in spectral sorrow. At length these unnatural and unwholesome regrets ended, as might be expected, in her death. She survived her husband only two years.
GLEANINGS FROM SPAIN.
PART III.
The journey to Madrid is accomplished by the very line of rail which “Ford” ridicules so unmercifully, speaking with contempt of the gullibility of the “Cit” which could believe in such a project. Part of the way lies through rich valleys, shut in by high-peaked mountains. The villages are bright and gay, and the whole aspect of the country is pleasant to the eye. But nearer Madrid are barren stony plains, parched and arid, broken occasionally by a patch of stunted stone pines, while here and there rises abruptly a conical hill, crowned with crumbling ruins, with a brown mud-built village at its base.
Madrid has no pretension to architectural beauty; save the glistening white palace, it has scarce a building worth inspection. It has an untidy, unfinished appearance, rendered all the worse by the fact, that half of every street is undergoing the process of demolition or reconstruction. The houses are stuccoed and painted