Ada Cambridge - A Mere Chance - A Novel. Vol. 1

A few years ago there was a young débutante in Melbourne whose name was Rachel Fetherstonhaugh. She had risen upon the social horizon suddenly, like a new star – or, one might almost say, like a comet, so unusually bright was she, and so much talked about; and no one quite knew where she had come from. Mrs. Hardy had introduced her as her niece – everyone knew that – but there were sceptics who, having never heard of female relatives previously (except the three daughters, who had married so well), declared that she might be "anybody," picked up merely for matchmaking purposes – it being well understood that Mrs. Hardy had for an unknown period sustained life, figuratively speaking, upon the stimulus of matrimonial intrigues, and had now no more daughters to provide for.

That this pretty creature had been unseen and unsuspected until the last Miss Hardy, as Mrs. Buxton, was fairly away on her honeymoon, and almost immediately after had been introduced to society as Mrs. Buxton's successor, was a kind of circumstance that seemed, of course, bound to have a mystery at the bottom of it. But, as a matter of fact, there was no mystery. Rachel Fetherstonhaugh was a bona-fide niece, and her entrance into the Hardy family at a particular juncture could be quite easily accounted for.

Her father had been Mrs. Hardy's brother – a good-for-nothing, unlucky brother, whose clever brains could do anything but earn money, and whose pockets could no more hold it than a sieve could hold water – a brother whom, long ago, before she had become rich and fastidious, Mrs. Hardy had loved, and served, and worked for, but whom, of late years, she had – with some mild self-reproach for doing so – ignored as far as possible.

This man had married a girl without a penny, as such a man was certain to do; and his wife had left him a widower, with an only child, a few years afterwards. Since then, for fifteen years, he had rambled about from place to place, seeking his fortune in all kinds of visionary and impracticable schemes, whose collapse one after the other, never deterred him from fresh enterprises, until a sunstroke closed the list of his life's many failures at the early age of forty-five.

A formal little note was sent by his orphan daughter to Mrs. Hardy to announce this sad event; and for half an hour after receiving it the bereaved sister was inconsolable, tormenting herself with unavailing regrets for her neglect of "her own flesh and blood," and with harrowing reminiscences of loving early years.

At the end of that time, however, she had made many generous plans for her dead brother's child, which cheered and comforted her; and in time these gave place to the prudent, unemotional dictates of worldly wisdom. Mrs. Hardy dried her tears, bought herself a black bonnet, and stole out of town in a surreptitious fashion, to see what manner of niece had been thrown upon her hands.

She pictured to herself what the child's life had probably been – the motherless child of a vagabond speculator, who had lived very indifferently by his wits; and the most she hoped for was to find her a raw bush girl, rudimentally educated, and uncontaminated by the low society in which she had been brought up. For such a niece she had mapped out what seemed to be a suitable career – that of a nursery governess in some distant colony; and she had resolved to be a good friend to the girl, to set her up in clothes, and to see that she never came to want or misfortune if by any reasonable means it could be helped.

To her intense surprise her young relative turned out to be a remarkably pretty and refined young woman, obviously accustomed to the decorous and reticent poverty of people who had "seen better days" and appreciated the fact, and not raw in any sort of sense, though diffident and shy; the kind of young woman, indeed, who, it was evident at a glance, was capable under good management of bringing honour and glory upon the family.

The result was as above indicated. Rachel Fetherstonhaugh, instead of being sent into obscurity to earn her bread, was adopted in the sight of all men as a daughter of the house – that great white house at Toorak, which had achieved local fame for its profuse entertainments, its social diplomacies, and its three great marriages.

Her father's debts were paid; her wardrobe was supplemented with the very best style of new clothes – less expensive, but more becoming, than any that Mrs. Buxton and Mrs. Buxton's sisters had worn; and by and bye when, having got over the first shock and grief of her father's death, she made her appearance in public, and began to take an interest in her new life, she found herself, to her great astonishment, a personage – if not the personage – in the society around her.

It must be said, and not to her discredit, I hope, that Miss Fetherstonhaugh liked being a personage very much indeed. She had grown up a sensitive little gentlewoman, full of delicate thoughts and tastes, in the midst of dull, uncultured people of sordid cares and occupations, and of uncongenial surroundings of all sorts; and the mere physical enjoyment of her changed circumstances, in which everything was orderly, and dainty, and plenteous, and "nice," was something like the enjoyment that a flower must feel when the sun shines.

And the sudden discovery that certain shy conjectures about her personal appearance (which she had hardly had leisure or heart to attend to) were confirmed by the best authority – to know herself a pretty girl, and to see that society paid her homage accordingly – this was an experience that no woman born, being in possession of her faculties, could help delighting in. And having all the grateful consciousness of the value of life and its good things that nature gives to the young and healthy, unspoiled by artificial sentiment, her delight was unbounded, and consequently unconcealed.

Rachel Fetherstonhaugh was, as her uncle said, "A modest, good girl, with no nonsense about her." All the same, she was proud and glad of her fair, clear-cut features, and her pensive, large, sweet eyes that were full of tender suggestions, for which no authority existed when she lifted them meekly to an admirer's face; and that figure which with all its slenderness had the curves of beauty everywhere, and those waves of ruddy auburn hair.

"I am so glad I am not plain," she once said to her cousin, Mrs. Thornley (who strange to say did not repeat the remark to all her friends with disparaging comments, but responded confidentially with a sympathising kiss, and said she could quite understand it). "I have always thought that it must be the most charming thing in the world to be a really pretty woman. And now I know it."

On a grey afternoon in the beginning of May this young lady was enjoying the luxury of a slow drive up and down Collins Street, shopping with her aunt. She nestled in a soft corner of a well-appointed Victoria, with a great rug of native bearskins about her knees, showing her delicate fresh face, like a well-hung picture, to the crowd of passers-by on the pavement, and yet sitting just enough above them to see into the shop-windows over their heads; and she felt – though she did not formulate the sentiment – perfectly happy and satisfied.

If the truth must be told, she found the sight of more or less well-dressed men and women, streaming up and down the busy street, more interesting than the most lovely landscape she had ever seen. She took as much pleasure in the exquisite fit of her gloves as in the exquisite colour and fragrance of a Marshal Neil rose that she wore in her button-hole; and she had never seen a moonrise or a sunset that had fascinated her more than that sealskin jacket in Alston and Brown's window, which she observed was exactly the size for her. It is not, therefore, to be supposed that she is a heroine unworthy of the name.