The Semi-Detached House

THE

SEMI-DETACHED HOUSE

BY

EMILY EDEN

Xist Publishing

TUSTIN, CA

ISBN: 978-1-68195-066-2

This edition published in 2015 by Xist Publishing

PO Box 61593

Irvine, CA 92602

www.xist publishing.com

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the Special Sales Department at the address above.

The Semi-Detached House/ Emily Eden

ISBN 978-1-68195-066-2

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

THE SEMI-DETACHED HOUSE

CHAPTER I

THE only fault of the house is that it is semi-detached.

Oh, Aunt Sarah! you don't mean that you expect me to live in a semi-detached house?

Why not, my dear, if it suits you in other respects?

Why, because I should hate my semi-detachment, or whatever the occupants of the other half of the house may call themselves.

They call themselves Hopkinson, continued Aunt Sarah coolly.

I knew it, said Blanche triumphantly. I felt certain their name would be either Tomkinson or Hopkinson–I was not sure which–but I thought the chances were in favour of Hop rather than Tom.

Aunt Sarah did not smile, but drew the mesh out of her netting and began a fresh row.

Go on, Aunt Sarah, said Blanche demurely.

I am going on, thank you, my dear, very nicely; I expect to finish this net this week.

Blanche looked at her aunt to ascertain if she looked angry, or piqued, or affronted; but Aunt Sarah's countenance was totally incapable of any expression but that of imperturbable stolid sense and good-humour. She did not care for Blanche's little vivacities.

Do you know the Hopkinsons, Aunt Sarah?

No, my dear.

Nor their history, nor their number, nor their habits? Recollect, Aunt Sarah, they will be under the same roof with your own pet Blanche.

I have several pets, my dear–Tray, and Poll, and your sister, and–

Well, but she will be there, too, for I suppose the Lees will let Aileen come to me, now that I am to be deserted by Arthur, and Blanche's voice quivered, but she determined to brave it through. Did you see any of the Hopkinsons when you went to look at the house?

Yes, they went in at their door just as I went in at yours. The mother, as I suppose, and two daughters, and a little boy.

"Oh dear me! a little boy, who will always be throwing stones at the palings and making me jump; daughters who will always be playing Partant pour la Syrie; and the mother–"

Well, what will she do to offend your Highness?

She will be immensely fat, wear mittens–thick, heavy mittens–and contrive to know what I have for dinner every day.

There was a silence, another row of netting and a turn of the mesh, and then Aunt Sarah said in her most composed tone:

I often think, my dear, that it is a great pity you are so imaginative, and a still greater pity that you are so fastidious. You would be happier if you were as dull and as matter-of-fact as I am.

"Dear Aunt Sarah, don't say you are dull. There is nobody I like so much to talk to. You bring out such original remarks, such convincing truths, and in a quiet way, so that they do not make the black bruises which les vérités dures generally produce. But am I fastidious and imaginative?"

Yes, my dear, very painfully so. Now, just consider, Blanche; you began this week by throwing yourself into a fever because Arthur was to leave you, on a mission that may be of great future advantage to him. He is to be away only three months, and is as much grieved as you are at the separation it involves. You immediately assert that he is going for a year at least, that he is to forget you instantly, and fall in love with any and every other woman he sees.

No, only with that woman with the unpronounceable name that he used to dance with; a very dangerous woman, Aunt Sarah.

That he is to be smashed in the railroad to Folkestone, drowned off Antwerp, and finally die of a fever at Berlin; and that in the meanwhile you are to have a dead child immediately, twins soon after, a very bad confinement, besides dying of consumption, and various other maladies, pursued Aunt Sarah in her steadiest tone. Now, if those things are not vain imaginings, Blanche, I do not know what are.

They sound plausible, though; and, I assure you, Aunt, I did not imagine them; they suggested themselves, and they look very like the ordinary facts of life. However, I grant it is a bad habit to look forward to evils that may not occur; but then, you know, I am ill. I never had these grey thoughts when I was strong, and Arthur's going away has turned them all black. And now as to my fastidiousness.

You always were fastidious, my child, easily jarred by the slightest want of tact and refinement, and I am not much surprised, added Aunt Sarah, as she looked fondly at her niece. There was something startling in the mobility of Blanche's beautiful features; every thought that passed through her mind might be read in her kindling eyes and expressive lips; she looked too ethereal for contact with the vulgar ills of life.

I will allow you have some right to be fastidious, darling; and it is only because it interferes with your comfort that I object to it. But you say you cannot go and stay with Lord Chesterton, because he calls you 'Blanket,' and thinks it a good joke; nor with your sister-in-law, Lady Elinor, because Sir William is fond of money, and you foresee he will say that you cost him at least seventeen shillings and four-pence a day; nor with your Aunt Carey, because the doctor who would attend you wears creaking boots, and calls you my Lady; and now you object to a house that all your friends and your doctor recommend, because it is possible that your next-door neighbour may play on the piano-forte and wear black mittens. Dear Blanche, this is what I call over-fastidiousness; and now I have finished my ten rows, and said all the disagreeable things I could think of, so I will go, and leave you to think how officious and particular old Aunt Sarah is.

You know I shall think no such thing, said Blanche, half crying and half laughing, but you must own, Aunt Sarah, that when you string all my fancies together, they are rather amusing–wrong, if you please, but amusing. However, I will try to reform, and if Arthur likes Pleasance, which he is gone to see, and if Dr. Ayscough persists in driving me out of London, I will establish myself in my semi-detached villa, and try to get into the Hopkinson set.

It may be inferred from the above conversation that Blanche was slightly spoiled, but she was charming, nevertheless–sweet-tempered and playful, and with high spirits, now subdued by the approaching separation from her husband, to whom she had been married only six months. They were as foolishly in love as all young couples are or ought to be, and Lord Chester would willingly have declined the offer to join a special mission to Berlin, which had been made to him. Blanche could not conceive it possible that he should leave her in her very interesting state of health. Dr. Ayscough treated the notion of her being able to accompany her husband with the politest and most magnificent contempt; and it seemed likely that the great national interests of Great Britain and Prussia would actually lose all the light which Arthur might throw upon them in the capacity of Secretary to a special mission. But old fathers see these matters in a different point of view from young sons. Lord Chesterton came fussing up to town full of admiration for her Majesty's Government in general, and for the Foreign Office in particular; he must own he thought Clarendon very judicious in his diplomatic appointments, he might say very discriminative. And he was so profuse in his felicitations to Arthur on his appointment, and in his compliments to dear little Blanche, on her wisdom of letting her husband go without her–that neither of them had courage to say that they meant to decline the offer. And so it came to pass that Arthur was to go to Berlin, and Blanche to Pleasance. Dr. Ayscough wished her to leave London, but still to be within reach of his surveillance; and Blanche, who had been under his care from the day of her birth, and who was delicate at all times, never supposed for a moment that his advice was not to be followed implicitly.

He went down with Arthur to look at Pleasance, they both approved of it, and when, soon after Aunt Sarah's departure, Arthur bounded upstairs, and declared that he had actually taken the prettiest villa in the world for his little Blanche, she warmed up to the idea. She made one faint inquiry as to whether he had seen her next-door neighbours. At first he denied their existence, but finally owned that there was a small house at the back of hers. But that does not signify; yours is a good large house, and such drawing-rooms, and such a conservatory, and a splendid lawn down to the river; and there is a wall and a laurel hedge, and all sorts of conundrums to shut out these neighbours who seem to alarm you.

Their name is Hopkinson, Arthur.

And a very good name, too. Hopkinson was the name of the Captain of the 'Alert,' who took me out to the Cape, and an excellent fellow he was; perhaps you would have thought him vulgar, but he helped me through a bad fever, which made rare havoc on board; and Florence Nightingale herself could not have made a better nurse. I like the name of Hopkinson.

Oh, well! said Blanche, then it will all do very well, and I must write to Aunt Sarah, and tell her we have taken her Semi-Detached House. It is quite within reach of her daily drive.

CHAPTER II

HERE is poor Willis coming to see us, said Mrs. Hopkinson, from her commanding position in the window, to her two girls who were drawing and reading at the secluded end of the room. The girls looked at each other with a slight expression of dismay. Willis was not a favourite; he had married their step-sister, and it was thought a great thing for the Hopkinsons, when Mr. Willis of Columbia House, which boasted of a lodge and an entrance drive, a shrubbery and a paddock, and a two-stalled stable, and every sort of suburban magnificence, married pretty Mary Smith, who lived merely at No. 2, without a shilling of her own, and dependent on her step-father for a home. So when she became Mrs. Willis of Columbia House, and of Fenchurch Street, where Mr. Willis duly transacted some mysterious business that appeared to produce a large return of profit, the Hopkinsons thought her a very fortunate young woman, and so she thought herself, till she found out that she had married a man who was by profession a grumbler. He had a passion for being a victim; when he was single, he grumbled for a wife, and when he had found a wife, he grumbled for the comforts of a bachelor. He grumbled for an heir to Columbia Lodge, and when the heir was born he grumbled because the child was frail and sickly. In short, he fairly grumbled poor gentle Mrs. Willis out of the world, and then grumbled at her for dying. But still her death was a gain to him. He took up the high bereaved line, was at all hours and in all societies the disconsolate mourner, wore a permanent crape round his hat, a rusty black coat in the city, and a shining one when he dined out. He professed himself serious, and proved it by snubbing his friends when they were prosperous, and steadily declining to take the slightest interest in their adversities.

What were their trials compared to his? A lonely man–ah! poor Mary! don't talk to him of losses indeed! Certainly, though he might be the very good man he said he was, he was not an agreeable companion. His sisters-in-law were strong in that opinion. Mrs. Hopkinson took him at his own valuation, always called him poor Willis from respect to Mary's memory, and relieved him of the care of his sick child, which enabled him to sigh over the sacrifice he had made of his lost angel's legacy to her bereaved mother.

I wonder what poor Willis will say, girls, when he hears that Pleasance is let?

Something very unpleasant, mamma, answered Janet.

Oh, my dears, you are hard upon poor Willis! I am sure when I think of my dear Mary (what a wife she was to be sure!) I quite respect her dear husband's melancholy face and heavy sighs.

But, mamma, don't you remember just after Mary had accepted him, and he came to ask for your consent, you said that he looked so gloomy, and sighed so deeply, that it was more like consenting to a funeral than a wedding?

Did I? said Mrs. Hopkinson, trying not to laugh. Well, he never was much in the cheerful line; but don't talk of it, for here he is. Well, Willis, Charlie is a little better to-day; and only think, Pleasance is let!

Of course it is, answered a sepulchral voice.

Well, it is a sweet place! one can't wonder at anybody taking it; but it has stood empty a long time.

"That I don't care about, that is Randall's loss; but as I liked to smoke my cigar there in peace, and to take my lonely stroll by the river side, and as it suited my child to play in the garden–in short, as it was a sort of consolation to me –of course somebody else went and took it, that's all!"

Janet and Rose tried to catch their mother's eye, but she was looking compassionately at Willis, the exile of Pleasance.

It is a Lord Something who has taken it. Mercy me, what a head I have, I remember nothing! What was his name? It was one of our great towns, Lord Leeds, Lord York, Lord Birmingham–could it be either of those?

As there are no such people I should think not. I do wish, Mrs. H., I could persuade you to read the 'Peerage' a little more, these blunders annoy me.

Law, Willis, you'll be a conjuror if you persuade me to read it at all. You might as well ask me to read a list of Red Morocco Chiefs, (Mrs. Hopkinson somehow fancied that the Morocco population was bright scarlet). I am just as likely to see them as all those peers you are always studying.

My studies are of a far more serious class, he said tartly; the 'Peerage' is not of much use to a broken heart. But I see nothing to be proud of in ignorance on any subject!

Mrs. Hopkinson was in a reverie. Chester! she said at last, with a start that immediately threw Mr. Willis into an attitude indicative of a nervous headache, Lord Chester, that was the name!

Viscount Chester, son of the Earl of Chesterton, married last year to Blanche, daughter of the Honourable W. Grenville. I met them this spring at the Lord Mayor's dinner. More frivolous specimens of fashion you could hardly see, all jewels, and laughter, and levity. Oh vanity of vanities!

Oh fun of fun! exclaimed Rose. A nice gay young couple. How glad I am! I dare say they will give parties and breakfasts, and there will be carriages continually down the lane, perhaps a band sometimes on the lawn. It will put you quite in spirits, Charles, she added, with a demure look.

He leant his head on his hands with a look of acute suffering.

Got the headache, Charles?

"One ache more or