Scenes and Characters , livre ebook

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166 pages

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pubOne.info thank you for your continued support and wish to present you this new edition. Of those who are invited to pay a visit to Beechcroft, there are some who, honestly acknowledging that amusement is their object, will be content to feel with Lilias, conjecture with Jane, and get into scrapes with Phyllis, without troubling themselves to extract any moral from their proceedings; and to these the Mohun family would only apologise for having led a very humdrum life during the eighteen months spent in their company.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	23 octobre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819918141
Langue	English

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PREFACE
Of those who are invited to pay a visit toBeechcroft, there are some who, honestly acknowledging thatamusement is their object, will be content to feel with Lilias,conjecture with Jane, and get into scrapes with Phyllis, withouttroubling themselves to extract any moral from their proceedings;and to these the Mohun family would only apologise for having led avery humdrum life during the eighteen months spent in theircompany.
There may, however, be more unreasonable visitors,who, professing only to come as parents and guardians, expectentertainment for themselves, as well as instruction for those whohad rather it was out of sight, - look for antiques in carvedcherry-stones, - and require plot, incident, and catastrophe in achronicle of small beer.
To these the Mohuns beg respectfully to observe,that they hope their examples may not be altogether devoid ofindirect instruction; and lest it should be supposed that theylived without object, aim, or principle, they would observe thatthe maxim which has influenced the delineation of the differentScenes and Characters is, that feeling, unguided and unrestrained,soon becomes mere selfishness; while the simple endeavour to fulfileach immediate claim of duty may lead to the highest acts ofself-devotion.
NEW COURT, BEECHCROFT, 18th January.
PREFACE (1886)
Perhaps this book is an instance to be adduced insupport of the advice I have often given to young authors - not toprint before they themselves are old enough to do justice to theirfreshest ideas.
Not that I can lay claim to its being a productionof tender and interesting youth. It was my second actualpublication, and I believe I was of age before it appeared - but Isee now the failures that more experience might have enabled me toavoid; and I would not again have given it to the world if the samecharacters recurring in another story had not excited a certaindesire to see their first start.
In fact they have been more or less my life-longcompanions. An almost solitary child, with periodical visits to theElysium of a large family, it was natural to dream of otherchildren and their ways and sports till they became almostrealities. They took shape when my French master set me to writeletters for him. The letters gradually became conversation andnarrative, and the adventures of the family sweetened the toils ofFrench composition. In the exigencies of village school building inthose days gone by, before in every place
"It there behoved him to set up the standard of herGrace,"
the tale was actually printed for private sale, as alink between translations of short stories.
This process only stifled the family in myimagination for a time. They awoke once more with new names, butsubstantially the same, and were my companions in many a solitarywalk, the results of which were scribbled down in leisure momentsto be poured into my mother's ever patient and sympatheticears.
And then came the impulse to literature for youngpeople given by the example of that memorable book the Fairy Bower,and followed up by Amy Herbert. It was felt that elder childrenneeded something of a deeper tone than the Edgeworthian style, yetless directly religious than the Sherwood class of books; and onthat wave of opinion, my little craft floated out into the greatsea of the public.
Friends, whose kindness astonished me, and fills mewith gratitude when I look back on it, gave me seasonable criticismand pruning, and finally launched me. My heroes and heroines hadarranged themselves so as to work out a definite principle, andthis was enough for us all.
Children's books had not been supposed to require aplot. Miss Edgeworth's, which I still continue to think gems intheir own line, are made chronicles, or, more truly, illustrationsof various truths worked out upon the same personages. Moreover,the skill of a Jane Austen or a Mrs. Gaskell is required to producea perfect plot without doing violence to the ordinary events of anevery-day life. It is all a matter of arrangement. Mrs. Gaskell canmake a perfect little plot out of a sick lad and a canary bird; andanother can do nothing with half a dozen murders and an explosion;and of arranging my materials so as to build up a story, I wasquite incapable. It is still my great deficiency; but in those daysI did not even understand that the attempt was desirable. Criticismwas a more thorough thing in those times than it has since becomethrough the multiplicity of books to be hurried over, and it wasoften very useful, as when it taught that such arrangement ofincident was the means of developing the leading idea.
Yet, with all its faults, the children, who had beenreal to me, caught, chiefly by the youthful sense of fun andenjoyment, the attention of other children; and the curioussemi-belief one has in the phantoms of one's brain made me dwell ontheir after life and share my discoveries with my friends, not,however, writing them down till after the lapse of all these yearsthe tenderness inspired by associations of early days led to takingup once more the old characters in The Two Sides of the Shield; andthe kind welcome this has met with has led to the resuscitation ofthe crude and inexperienced tale which never pretended to be morethan a mere family chronicle.
C. M. YONGE. 6th October 1886.
CHAPTER I - THE ELDER SISTER
'Return, and in the daily round
Of duty and of love,
Thou best wilt find that patient faith
That lifts the soul above.'
Eleanor Mohun was the eldest child of a gentleman ofold family, and good property, who had married the sister of hisfriend and neighbour, the Marquis of Rotherwood. The first years ofher life were marked by few events. She was a quiet, steady, usefulgirl, finding her chief pleasure in nursing and teaching herbrothers and sisters, and her chief annoyance in her mamma'sattempts to make her a fine lady; but before she had reached hernineteenth year she had learnt to know real anxiety and sorrow. Hermother, after suffering much from grief at the loss of her twobrothers, fell into so alarming a state of health, that her husbandwas obliged immediately to hurry her away to Italy, leaving theyounger children under the care of a governess, and the elder boysat school, while Eleanor alone accompanied them.
Their absence lasted nearly three years, and duringthe last winter, an engagement commenced between Eleanor and Mr.Francis Hawkesworth, rather to the surprise of Lady Emily, whowondered that he had been able to discover the real worth veiledbeneath a formal and retiring manner, and to admire features which,though regular, had a want of light and animation, which diminishedtheir beauty even more than the thinness and compression of thelips, and the very pale gray of the eyes.
The family were about to return to England, wherethe marriage was to take place, when Lady Emily was attacked with asudden illness, which her weakened frame was unable to resist, andin a very few days she died, leaving the little Adeline, abouteight months old, to accompany her father and sister on theirmelancholy journey homewards. This loss made a great change in theviews of Eleanor, who, as she considered the cares and annoyanceswhich would fall on her father, when left to bear the whole burthenof the management of the children and household, felt it was herduty to give up her own prospects of happiness, and to remain athome. How could she leave the tender little ones to the care ofservants - trust her sisters to a governess, and make her brothers'home yet more dreary? She knew her father to be strong in sense andfirm in judgment, but indolent, indulgent, and inattentive todetails, and she could not bear to leave him to be harassed by thepetty cares of a numerous family, especially when broken in spiritsand weighed down with sorrow. She thought her duty was plain, and,accordingly, she wrote to Mr. Hawkesworth, to beg him to allow herto withdraw her promise.
Her brother Henry was the only person who knew whatshe had done, and he alone perceived something of tremulousnessabout her in the midst of the even cheerfulness with which she hadfrom the first supported her father's spirits. Mr. Mohun, however,did not long remain in ignorance, for Frank Hawkesworth himselfarrived at Beechcroft to plead his cause with Eleanor. He knew hervalue too well to give her up, and Mr. Mohun would not hear of hermaking such a sacrifice for his sake. But Eleanor was also firm,and after weeks of unhappiness and uncertainty, it was at lengtharranged that she should remain at home till Emily was old enoughto take her place, and that Frank should then return from India andclaim his bride.
Well did she discharge the duties which she hadundertaken; she kept her father's mind at ease, followed out hisviews, managed the boys with discretion and gentleness, and madeher sisters well-informed and accomplished girls; but, for want offully understanding the characters of her two next sisters, Emilyand Lilias, she made some mistakes with regard to them. The cloudsof sorrow, to her so dark and heavy, had been to them but morningmists, and the four years which had changed her from a happy girlinto a thoughtful, anxious woman, had brought them to an age which,if it is full of the follies of childhood, also partakes of theearnestness of youth; an age when deep foundations of enduringconfidence may be laid by one who can enter into and direct thedeeper flow of mind and feeling which lurks hid beneath the freaksand fancies of the early years of girlhood. But Eleanor had littlesympathy for freaks and fancies. She knew the realities of life toowell to build airy castles with younger and gayer spirits; hersisters' romance seemed to her dangerous folly, and their livelynonsense levity and frivolity. They were too childish to share inher confidence, and she was too busy and too much preoccupied tohave ear or mind for visionary trifles, though to trifles of reallife she paid no small degree of attention.
It might hav