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A Terrible Temptation

C >> Charles Reade >> A Terrible Temptation




With this view, she promised to plight her faith to Compton the moment
Lady Bassett should be restored to health; and so, with hopes and
smiles, and the novelty of a daughter's love, she fought with death for
Lady Bassett, and at last she won the desperate battle.

This did Richard Bassett's daughter for her father's late enemy.

The grateful husband wrote to Bassett, and now acknowledged _his_
obligation.

A civil, mock-modest reply from Richard Bassett.

From this things went on step by step, till at last Compton and
Ruperta, at eighteen years of age, were formally betrothed.

Thus the children's love wore out the father's hate.

That love, so troubled at the outset, left, by degrees, the region of
romance, and rippled smoothly through green, flowery meadows.

Ruperta showed her lover one more phase of girlhood; she, who had been
a precocious and forward child, and then a shy and silent girl, came
out now a bright and witty young woman, full of vivacity, modesty, and
sensibility. Time cured Compton of his one defect. Ruperta stopped
growing at fifteen, but Compton went slowly on; caught her at
seventeen, and at nineteen had passed her by a head. He won a
scholarship at Oxford, he rowed in college races, and at last in the
University race on the Thames.

Ruperta stood, in peerless beauty, dark blue from throat to feet, and
saw his boat astern of his rival, saw it come up with, and creep ahead,
amid the roars of the multitude. When she saw her lover, with bare
corded arms, as brown as a berry, and set teeth, filling his glorious
part in that manly struggle within eight yards of her, she confessed he
was not a boy now.

But Lady Bassett accepted no such evidence: being pestered to let them
marry at twenty years of age, she clogged her consent with one
condition--they must live three years at Huntercombe as man and wife.

"No boy of twenty," said she, "can understand a young woman of that
age. I must be in the house to prevent a single misunderstanding
between my beloved children."

The young people, who both adored her, voted the condition reasonable.
They were married, and a wing of the spacious building allotted to
them.

For their sakes let us hope that their wedded life, now happily
commenced, will furnish me no materials for another tale: the happiest
lives are uneventful.

The foreign gent recovered his wound, but acquired rheumatism and a
dislike for midnight expeditions.

Reginald galloped a year or two over seven hundred miles of colony,
sowing his wild oats as he flew, but is now a prosperous squatter, very
fond of sleeping in the open air. England was not big enough for the
bold Bohemian. He does very well where he is.

Old Meyrick died, and left his wife a little estate in the next county.
Drake asked her hand at the funeral. She married him in six months, and
migrated to the estate in question; for Sir Charles refused her a lease
of his farm, not choosing to have her near him.

Her new abode was in the next parish to her sister's.

La Marsh set herself to convert Mary, and often exhorted her to
penitence; she bore this pretty well for some time, being overawed by
old reminiscences of sisterly superiority: but at last her vanity
rebelled. "Repent! and Repent!" cried she. "Why you be like a cuckoo,
all in one song. One would think I had been and robbed a church. 'Tis
all very well for you to repent, as led a fastish life at starting:
_but I never done nothing as I'm ashamed on."_



Richard Bassett said one day to Wheeler, "Old fellow, there is not a
worse poison than Hate. It has made me old before my time. And what
does it all come to? We might just as well have kept quiet; for my
grandson will inherit Huntercombe and Bassett, after all--"

"Thanks to the girl you would not ring the bells for."



Sir Charles and Lady Bassett lead a peaceful life after all their
troubles, and renew their youth in their children, of whom Ruperta is
one, and as dear as any.

Yet there is a pensive and humble air about Lady Bassett, which shows
she still expiates her fault, though she knows it will always be
ignored by him for whose sake she sinned.

In summing her up, it may be as well to compare this with the unmixed
self-complacency of Mrs. Drake.

You men and women, who judge this Bella Bassett, be firm, and do not
let her amiable qualities or her good intentions blind you in a plain
matter of right and wrong: be charitable, and ask yourselves how often
in your lives you have seen yourselves, or any other human being,
resist a terrible temptation.

My experience is, that we resist other people's temptations nobly, and
succumb to our own.

So let me end with a line of England's gentlest satirist--

"Heaven be merciful to us all, sinners as we be."

THE END

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