He grows steadier as he grows
older, paints better, and makes friends worth making; much to the joy of
poor Bessie, who asks no greater privilege than to stand humbly by, gazing
fondly while he puts on his white cravat, and sallies forth radiant, with a
hot-house flower in his button-hole, to dine in the great world.
But this is only a glance into the future. The story ends in the orthodox
manner, to the sound of wedding bells--Miss Granger's--who swears to love,
honour, and obey Thomas Tillott, with a fixed intention to keep the upper
baud over the said Thomas in all things. Yet these men who are so slavish
as wooers are apt to prove of sterner mould as husbands, and life is all
before Mrs. Tillott, as she journeys in chariot and posters to Scarborough
for her unpretentious honeymoon, to return in a fortnight to a bran-new
gothic villa on the skirts of Arden, where one tall tree is struggling
vainly to look at home in a barren waste of new-made garden. And in the
servants' hall and housekeeper's room at Arden Court there is rejoicing,
as when the elder Miss Pecksniff went away from the little village near
Salisbury.
For some there are no marriage bells--for Lady Geraldine, for instance, who
is content to devote herself unostentatiously to the care of her sister's
neglected children--neglected in spite of French and German governesses,
Italian singing masters, Parisian waiting-maids, and half an acre or so
of nursery and schoolroom--and to wider charities: not all unhappy, and
thankful for having escaped that far deeper misery--the fate of an unloved
wife.
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