Phoebe, Junior

Miss Phoebe Tozer, the only daughter of the chief deacon and leading member of the Dissenting connection in Carlingford, married, shortly after his appointment to the charge of Salem Chapel, in that town, the Reverend Mr. Beecham, one of the most rising young men in the denomination. The marriage was in many ways satisfactory to the young lady’s family, for Mr. Beecham was himself the son of respectable people in a good way of business, and not destitute of means; and the position was one which they had always felt most suitable for their daughter, and to which she had been almost, it may be said, brought up. It is, however, scarcely necessary to add that it was not quite so agreeable to the other leading members of the congregation. I should be very sorry to say that each family wished that preferment for its own favourite daughter; for indeed there can be no doubt, as Mrs. Pigeon asserted vigorously, that a substantial grocer, whose father before him had established an excellent business, and who had paid for his pew in Salem as long as anyone could recollect, and supported every charity, and paid up on all occasions when extra expense was necessary, was in every way a more desirable son-in-law than a poor minister who was always dependent on pleasing the chapel folks, and might have to turn out any day.

“My sons buy their wives by the hundredweight,” he would say jocularly at breakfast the day after; “thirteen stone if she is a pound, is Mrs. Joe. Expensive to keep up in velvet and satin, not to speak of mutton and beef. Your mother comes cheap,” he would add aside to Clarence, with a rolling laugh. Thus he did not in the least exempt his descendants from the universal ridicule which he poured on all the world; but when he sat down opposite his timid little delicate wife, and by his University man, who had very little on the whole to say for himself, Mr. Copperhead felt the increase in gentility as well as the failure in jollity. “You are a couple of ghosts after Joe and his belongings, you two. Speak louder, I say, young fellow. You don’t expect me to hear that penny-whistle of yours,” he would say, chuckling at them, with a mixture of pride and disdain. They amused him by their dullness and silence, and personal awe of him. He was quite out of his element between these two, and yet the very fact pleasantly excited his pride.

“I speak as gentlemen generally speak,” said Clarence, who was sometimes sullen when attacked, and who knew by experience that his father was rarely offended by such an argument.

“And I am sure, dear, your papa would never wish you to do otherwise,” said anxious Mrs. Copperhead, casting a furtive frightened glance at her husband. He rolled out a mighty laugh from the head of the table where he was sitting. He contemplated them with a leer that would have been insulting, had he not been the husband of one and the father of the other.

To nobody, however, was the question, what to wear, more interesting than to Phoebe, junior, who was a very well-instructed young woman, and even on the point of dress had theories of her own. Phoebe had, as her parents were happy to think, had every advantage in her education. She had possessed a German governess all to herself, by which means, even Mr. Beecham himself supposed, a certain amount of that philosophy which Germans communicate by their very touch must have got into her, besides her music and the language which was her primary study. And she had attended lectures at the ladies’ college close by, and heard a great many eminent men on a great many different subjects. She had read, too, a great deal. She was very well got up in the subject of education for women, and lamented often and pathetically the difficulty they lay under of acquiring the highest instruction; but at the same time she patronized Mr. Ruskin’s theory that dancing, drawing, and cooking were three of the higher arts which ought to be studied by girls. It is not necessary for me to account for the discrepancies between those two systems, in the first place because I cannot, and in the second place, because there is in the mind of the age some ineffable way of harmonizing them which makes their conjunction common. Phoebe was restrained from carrying out either to its full extent.

There was something, perhaps, in all the preparations for her departure which had thrown dust in Phoebe Beecham’s eyes. She had been too sharp-sighted not to see into her mother’s qualms and hesitations about her visit to Carlingford, and the repeated warnings of both parents as to the “difference from what she had been accustomed to;” and she thought she had fully prepared herself for what she was to encounter. But probably the elaborate outfit provided by her mother and the importance attached to her journey had to some degree obliterated this impression, for it is certain that when Phoebe saw an old man in a shabby coat, with a wisp of a large white neckcloth round his throat, watching anxiously for the arrival of the train as it came up, she sustained a shock which she had not anticipated. It was about five years since she had seen her grandfather, an interval due to hazard rather than purpose, though, on the whole, the elder Beechams had not been sorry to keep their parents and their children apart. Phoebe, however, knew her grandfather perfectly well as soon as she saw him, though he had not perceived her, and was wandering anxiously up and down in search of her. She held back in her corner for the moment, to overcome the shock. Yes, there could be no doubt about it; there he was, he whom she was going to visit, under whose auspices she was about to appear in Carlingford. He was not even like an old Dissenting minister, which had been her childish notion of him. He looked neither more nor less than what he was, an old shopkeeper, very decent and respectable, but a little shabby and greasy, like the men whose weekly bills she had been accustomed to pay for her mother.

“What is it now?” he said hurriedly. Everyone knew that when the door was closed like that it meant something like a declaration of war. But they had not much time to wait and wonder. Mr. May came in, pushing the door wide open before him, and admitting a gust of chill air of the January night. He looked at the peaceable domestic scene with a “humph” of dissatisfaction, because there was nothing to find fault with, which is as great a grievance as another when one is in the mood for grievances. He had come in cross and out of sorts, with a private cause for his ill-temper, which he did not choose to reveal, and it would have been a relief to him had he found them all chattering or wasting their time, instead of being occupied in this perfectly dutiful way⁠—even Johnnie at his lessons, repeating them over under his breath. What was the world coming to? Mr. May was disappointed. Instead of leading up to it gradually by a general battue of his children all round, he had to open upon his chief subject at once, which was not nearly so agreeable a way.

“What are you doing, Reginald?” he asked, roughly, pulling his chair to the other side of the fire, opposite the corner to which Johnnie had scuffled out of the way. “I have come in especially to speak to you. It is time this shilly-shallying was done with. Do you mean to accept the College chaplaincy or not? an answer must be given, and that at once. Are you so busy that you can’t attend to what I say?”