The Railway Man and His Children - Mrs. Oliphant

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      The news that Miss Ferrars was going to marry Mr. Rowland the engineer, ran through the station like wildfire, producing a commotion and excitement which had rarely been equalled since the time of the Mutiny. Miss Ferrars! and Mr. Rowland!—it was repeated in every tone of wonder and astonishment, with as many audible notes of admiration and interrogation as would fill a whole page. “Impossible!” people said, “I don’t believe it for a moment”—“You don’t mean to say——” But when Mrs. Stanhope, who was Miss Ferrars’ friend, with whom she had been living, answered calmly that this was indeed what she meant to say, and that she was not very sure whether she was most sorry or glad—most pleased to think that her friend was thus comfortably established in life, or sorry that she was perhaps stepping a little out of her sphere—there remained nothing for her visitors but a universal gape of amazement, a murmur of deprecation or regret—“Oh, poor Miss Ferrars!” the ladies cried. “A lady, of such a good family, and marrying a man who was certainly not a gentleman.” “But he is a very good fellow,” the gentlemen said; and one or two of the mothers who were conscious in their hearts, though they did not say anything of the fact, that had he proposed for Edie or Ethel, they would have pushed his claims as far as legitimate pressure could go, held their tongues or said little, with a feeling that they had themselves escaped the criticism which was now so freely poured forth. They were aware indeed that it would have come upon them more hotly, for it was they who would have been blamed in the case of Ethel or Edie, whereas Miss Femurs was responsible for herself. But the one of them who would have been most guilty, and who indeed had thought a good deal about Mr. Rowland, and considered the question very closely whether she ought not as a matter of duty to endeavour to interest him in her Ethel, whose name was Dorothy, took up the matter most hotly, and declared that she could not imagine how a lady could make up her mind to such a descent “Not a gentleman: why, he does not even pretend to be a gentleman,” said the lady, as if the pretention would have been something in his favour. “He is not a man even of any education. Oh I know he can read and write and do figures—all those surveyor men can. Yes, I call him a surveyor—I don’t call him an engineer. What was he to begin with? Why he came out in charge of some machinery or something! None of them have any right to call themselves engineers. I call them all surveyors—working men—that sort of thing! and to think that a woman who really is a lady—”

      “Oh come, Maria, come!” cried her husband, “you are glad enough of the P.W.D. when you have no bigger fish on hand.”

      “I don’t understand what you mean by bigger fish, Colonel Mitchell,” said the lady indignantly; but if she did not know, all the rest of the audience did. Matchmaking mothers are very common in fiction, but more rare in actual life, and when one exists she is speedily seen through, and her wiles are generally the amusement of her circle, though the woman remains unconscious of this. And indeed poor Mrs. Mitchell was not so bad as she was supposed to be. She was a great entertainer, getting up parties of all kinds, which was the natural impulse of a fussy but not unkindly personality, delighting to be in the midst of everything; and it is certain that picnics and even dinner parties, much less dances, cannot be managed unless you keep up your supply of young men. There were times when her eagerness to keep up that supply and to assure its regularity was put down quite wrongly to the score of her daughters, which is an injustice which every hospitable woman with daughters must submit to. A sort of half audible titter went round the little party when Colonel Mitchell, with that cruel satisfaction so often seen in men, gave over his wife to the criticism of society. A man never stands by the women of his family in such circumstances; he deserts them even when he does not, as in this instance, actually betray. There was one young man, however, one of the staff of dancers and picnic men, who was faithful to her—a poor young fellow who knew that he had no chance of being looked upon as a parti, and who made a diversion in pure gratitude, a quality greatly lacking among his kind.

      “Rowland,” he said, “is one of the best fellows in the world. He does not shine perhaps among ladies, but he’s good fun when he likes, and a capital companion.”

      “And Miss Ferrars, dear,” said one of the ladies soothingly, “is not like my Ethel or your Dorothy. Poor thing, it is just as well, for she has nobody to look after her: she is, to say the least, old enough to manage matters for herself.”

      “And to know that such a chance would never come again,” said one of the men with a laugh—which is a kind of speech that jars upon women, though they may perhaps say something very like it themselves. But to think of Miss Ferrars making a last clutch of desperation at James Rowland the engineer, as at a chance which might never occur again, was too much even for an afternoon company making a social meal upon a victim, and there was a feeling of compunction and something like guilt when some one whispered almost with awe, “Look! there they are.”

      The party in question were seated in a verandah in the cool of the day when the sun was out of sight. They had all been gasping in semi-darkness through the heat, and now had come to life again to enjoy a little gossip, before entering upon the real business of dining and the amusements of the evening. The ladies sat up in their chairs, and the men put themselves at least in a moral attitude of attention as the two figures went slowly across the square. One feels a little “caught” in spite of oneself by the sudden appearance of a person who has been under discussion at the moment he or she appears. There is a guilty sense that walls have ears, and that a bird of the air may carry the matter. It was a relief to everybody when the pair had passed and were seen no more. They went slowly, for the lady had a couple of little children clinging to her hands.

      Miss Ferrars was of an appearance not to be passed over, even though she was quite old enough, as her critic said, to manage matters for herself—so old as to have no prospect of another chance did she reject the one unexpectedly offered to her at present. She was a woman a little more than the ordinary height, and a little less than the ordinary breadth—a slim, tall woman, with a very pliant figure, which when she was young had lent itself to all kinds of poetical similes. But she was no longer young. She must have been forty at the least, and she was not without the disadvantages that belong to that age. She did not look younger than she was. Her complexion had faded, and her hair had been touched, not to that premature whiteness which softens and beautifies, but to an iron grey, which is apt to give a certain sternness to the face. That there was no sternness about her, it was only necessary to see her attitude with the children, who clung to her and swayed her about, now to one side now to the other, with the restless tyranny peculiar to their age, while still she endeavoured to give her attention and a smile to the middle-aged person by her side, who, truth to tell, was by no means so patient of the children’s presence as she was. It was the little boy, who was next to Mr. Rowland, and who kicked his legs and got in the way of his footsteps, that brought that colour of anger to his face, and many exclamations which had to be repressed to his lips. Those dreadful little Stanhopes! Miss Ferrars had been by way of paying a visit to the friend of her childhood, and it was very kind, everybody said, of Mrs. Stanhope to stretch such a point for a friend, and to keep her so long. But there were many who knew very well what Evelyn Ferrars had not said even to herself, that she was the most useful member of the Stanhope household, doing everything for the children, though not a word was said of any such duties as those which had insensibly been thrown upon her. Nobody breathed such a word as governess in respect to Mrs. Stanhope’s friend: but people have eyes, and uncommonly sharp ones sometimes at an Indian station, and everybody knew perfectly to what that long visit had come.

      Mr. Rowland was a man of another order altogether. He was not tall, and he was rather broad—a ruddy weatherbeaten man, much shone upon by the sun, and blown about by all the winds. It was not difficult to see at a glance the difference between the two, which the critics in Colonel Mitchell’s verandah had pointed out so fully. He was dressed as well as the gentlemen of the station, and had an air of prosperity and wealth which was not often to be seen in the lean countenances of the soldiers; but he was not like them. He was respectable beyond words, well off, a sensible, responsible man: but he was not what is called a gentleman in common parlance. You may say that he was much better, being a good and upright and honest man; but after all that is but a begging of the question, for he might have been all these things and yet a gentleman,

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