The feud between Miss Stanbury and Mr Gibson raged violently in Exeter, and produced many complications which were very difficult indeed of management. Each belligerent party felt that a special injury had been inflicted upon it. Mr Gibson was quite sure that he had been grossly misused by Miss Stanbury the elder, and strongly suspected that Miss Stanbury the younger had had a hand in this misconduct. It had been positively asserted to him, at least so he thought, but in this was probably in error, that the lady would accept him if he proposed to her. All Exeter had been made aware of the intended compact. He, indeed, had denied its existence to Miss French, comforting himself, as best he might, with the reflection that all is fair in love and war; but when he counted over his injuries he did not think of this denial. All Exeter, so to say, had known of it. And yet, when he had come with his proposal, he had been refused without a moment’s consideration, first by the aunt, and then by the niece and, after that, had been violently abused, and at last turned out of the house! Surely, no gentleman had ever before been subjected to ill-usage so violent! But Miss Stanbury the elder was quite as assured that the injury had been done to her. As to the matter of the compact itself, she knew very well that she had been as true as steel. She had done everything in her power to bring about the marriage. She had been generous in her offers of money. She had used all her powers of persuasion on Dorothy, and she had given every opportunity to Mr Gibson. It was not her fault if he had not been able to avail himself of the good things which she had put in his way. He had first been, as she thought, ignorant and arrogant, fancying that the good things ought to be made his own without any trouble on his part, and then awkward, not knowing how to take the trouble when trouble was necessary. And as to that matter of abusive language and turning out of the house, Miss Stanbury was quite convinced that she was sinned against, and not herself the sinner. She declared to Martha, more than once, that Mr Gibson had used such language to her that, coming out of a clergyman’s mouth, it had quite dismayed her. Martha, who knew her mistress, probably felt that Mr Gibson had at least received as good as he gave; but she had made no attempt to set her mistress right on that point.
But the cause of Miss Stanbury’s sharpest anger was not to be found in Mr Gibson’s conduct either before Dorothy’s refusal of his offer, or on the occasion of his being turned out of the house. A base rumour was spread about the city that Dorothy Stanbury had been offered to Mr Gibson, that Mr Gibson had civilly declined the offer, and that hence had arisen the wrath of the Juno of the Close. Now this was not to be endured by Miss Stanbury. She had felt even in the moment of her original anger against Mr Gibson that she was bound in honour not to tell the story against him. She had brought him into the little difficulty, and she at least would hold her tongue. She was quite sure that Dorothy would never boast of her triumph. And Martha had been strictly cautioned as indeed, also, had Brooke Burgess. The man had behaved like an idiot, Miss Stanbury said; but he had been brought into a little dilemma, and nothing should be said about it from the house in the Close. But when the other rumour reached Miss Stanbury’s ears, when Mrs Crumbie condoled with her on her niece’s misfortune, when Mrs MacHugh asked whether Mr Gibson had not behaved rather badly to the young lady, then our Juno’s celestial mind was filled with a divine anger. But even then she did not declare the truth. She asked a question of Mrs Crumbie, and was enabled, as she thought, to trace the falsehood to the Frenches. She did not think that Mr Gibson could on a sudden have become so base a liar. ‘Mr Gibson fast and loose with my niece?’ she said to Mrs MacHugh. ‘You have not got the story quite right, my dear friend. Pray, believe me there has been nothing of that sort.’ ‘I dare say not,’ said Mrs MacHugh, ‘and I’m sure I don’t care. Mr Gibson has been going to marry one of the French girls for the last ten years, and I think he ought to make up his mind and do it at last.’
‘I can assure you he is quite welcome as far as Dorothy is concerned,’ said Miss Stanbury.
Without a doubt the opinion did prevail throughout Exeter that Mr Gibson, who had been regarded time out of mind as the property of the Miss Frenches, had been angled for by the ladies in the Close, that he had nearly been caught, but that he had slipped the hook out of his mouth, and was now about to subside quietly into the net which had been originally prepared for him. Arabella French had not spoken loudly on the subject, but Camilla had declared in more than one house that she had most direct authority for stating that the gentleman had never dreamed of offering to the young lady. ‘Why he should not do so if he pleases, I don’t know,’ said Camilla. ‘Only the fact is that he has not pleased. The rumour of course has reached him, and, as we happen to be very old friends we have authority for denying it altogether.’ All this came round to Miss Stanbury, and she was divine in her wrath.
‘If they drive me to it,’ she said to Dorothy, ‘I’ll have the whole truth told by the bellman through the city, or I’ll publish it in the County Gazette.’
‘Pray don’t say a word about it, Aunt Stanbury.’
‘It is those odious girls. He’s there now every day.’
‘Why shouldn’t he go there, Aunt Stanbury?’
‘If he’s fool enough, let him go. I don’t care where he goes. But I do care about these lies. They wouldn’t dare to say it only they think my mouth is closed. They’ve no honour themselves, but they screen themselves behind mine.’
‘I’m sure they won’t find themselves mistaken in what they trust to,’ said Dorothy, with a spirit that her aunt had not expected from her. Miss Stanbury at this time had told nobody that the offer to her niece had been made and repeated and finally rejected, but she found it very difficult to hold her tongue.
In the meantime Mr Gibson spent a good deal of his time at Heavitree. It should not perhaps be asserted broadly that he had made up his mind that marriage would be good for him; but he had made up his mind, at least, to this, that it was no longer to be postponed without a balance of disadvantage. The Charybdis in the Close drove him helpless into the whirlpool of the Heavitree Scylla. He had no longer an escape from the perils of the latter shore. He had been so mauled by the opposite waves, that he had neither spirit nor skill left to him to keep in the middle track. He was almost daily at Heavitree, and did not attempt to conceal from himself the approach of his doom.
But still there were two of them. He knew that he must become a prey, but was there any choice left to him as to which siren should have him? He had been quite aware in his more gallant days, before he had been knocked about on that Charybdis rock, that he might sip, and taste, and choose between the sweets. He had come to think lately that the younger young lady was the sweeter. Eight years ago indeed the passages between him and the elder had been tender; but Camilla had then been simply a romping girl, hardly more than a year or two beyond her teens. Now, with her matured charms, Camilla was certainly the more engaging, as far as outward form went. Arabella’s cheeks were thin and long, and her front teeth had come to show themselves. Her eyes were no doubt still bright, and what she had of hair was soft and dark. But it was very thin in front, and what there was of supplemental mass behind the bandbox by which Miss Stanbury was so much aggrieved was worn with an indifference to the lines of beauty, which Mr Gibson himself found to be very depressing. A man with a fair burden on his back is not a grievous sight; but when we see a small human being attached to a bale of goods which he can hardly manage to move, we feel that the poor fellow has been cruelly over-weighted. Mr Gibson certainly had that sensation about Arabella’s chignon. And as he regarded it in a nearer and a dearer light as a chignon that might possibly become his own, as a burden which in one sense he might himself be called upon to bear, as a domestic utensil of which he himself might be called upon to inspect, and, perhaps, to aid the shifting on and the shifting off, he did begin to think that that side of the Scylla gulf ought to be avoided if possible. And probably this propensity on his part, this feeling that he would like to reconsider the matter dispassionately before he gave himself up for good to his old love, may have been increased by Camilla’s apparent withdrawal of her claims. He felt mildly grateful to the Heavitree household in general for accepting him in this time of his affliction, but he could not admit to himself that they had a right to decide upon him in private conclave, and allot him either to the one or to the other nuptials without consultation with himself. To be swallowed up by Scylla he now recognised as his doom; but he thought he ought to be asked on which side of the gulf he would prefer to go down. The way in which Camilla spoke of him as a thing that wasn’t hers, but another’s; and the way in which Arabella looked at him, as though he were hers and could never be another’s, wounded his manly pride. He had always understood that he might have his choice, and he could not understand that the little mishap which had befallen him in the Close was to rob him of that privilege.
He used to drink tea at Heavitree in those days. On one evening on going in he found himself alone with Arabella. ‘Oh, Mr Gibson,’ she said, ‘we weren’t sure whether you’d come. And mamma and Camilla have gone out to Mrs Camadge’s.’ Mr Gibson muttered some word to the effect that he hoped he had kept nobody at home; and, as he did so, he remembered that he had distinctly said that he would come on this evening. ‘I don’t know that I should have gone,’ sad Arabella, ‘because I am not quite not quite myself at present. No, not ill; not at all. Don’t you know what it is, Mr Gibson, to be to be to be not quite yourself?’ Mr Gibson said that he had very often felt like that. ‘And one can’t get over it can one?’ continued Arabella. ‘There comes a presentiment that something is going to happen, and a kind of belief that something has happened, though you don’t know what; and the heart refuses to be light, and the spirit becomes abashed, and the mind, though it creates new thoughts, will not settle itself to its accustomed work. I suppose it’s what the novels have called Melancholy.’
‘I suppose it is,’ said Mr Gibson. ‘But there’s generally some cause for it. Debt for instance.’
‘It’s nothing of that kind with me. Its no debt, at least, that can be written down in the figures of ordinary arithmetic. Sit down, Mr Gibson, and we will have some tea.’ Then, as she stretched forward to ring the bell, he thought that he never in his life had seen anything so unshapely as that huge wen at the back of her head. ‘Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens!’ He could not help quoting the words to himself. She was dressed with some attempt at being smart, but her ribbons were soiled, and her lace was tawdry, and the fabric of her dress was old and dowdy. He was quite sure that he would feel no pride in calling her Mrs Gibson, no pleasure in having her all to himself at his own hearth. ‘I hope we shall escape the bitterness of Miss Stanbury’s tongue if we drink tea tete-a-tete,’ she said, with her sweetest smile.
‘I don’t suppose she’ll know anything about it.’
‘She knows about everything, Mr Gibson. It’s astonishing what she knows. She has eyes and ears everywhere. I shouldn’t care, if she didn’t see and hear so very incorrectly. I’m told now that she declares — but it doesn’t signify.’
‘Declares what?’ asked Mr Gibson.
‘Never mind. But wasn’t it odd how all Exeter believed that you were going to be married in that house, and to live there all the rest of your life, and be one of Miss Stanbury’s slaves. I never believed it, Mr Gibson.’ This she said with a sad smile, that ought to have brought him on his knees, in spite of the chignon.
‘One can’t help these things,’ said Mr Gibson.
‘I never could have believed it, not even if you had not given me an assurance so solemn, and so sweet, that there was nothing in it.’ The poor man had given the assurance, and could not deny the solemnity and the sweetness. ‘That was a happy moment for us, Mr Gibson; because, though we never believed it, when it was dinned into our ears so frequently, when it was made such a triumph in the Close, it was impossible not to fear that there might be something in it.’ He felt that he ought to make some reply, but he did not know what to say. He was thoroughly ashamed of the lie he had told, but he could not untell it. ‘Camilla reproached me afterwards for asking you,’ whispered Arabella, in her softest, tenderest voice.‘she said that it was unmaidenly. I hope you did not think it unmaidenly, Mr Gibson?’
‘Oh dear, no, not at all,’ said he.
............