Victorian Social Activists' Novels Vol 1 by Oliver Lovesey

Author:Oliver Lovesey [Lovesey, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social History, Literary Criticism, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Social Science, Research
ISBN: 9781000419078
Google: dxgoEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-04-13T16:03:24+00:00

CHAPTER IV.

WHY MRS. DONCASTER WAS A MATCH-MAKING MAMMA.

While ye may, go marry. – HERRICK.23

IT was one of Mrs. Doncaster’s cardinal maxims that it is the vocation of every woman to marry. She had no patience with old maids, and very little with old bachelors. The former she viewed with contempt, the latter with stern disapprobation, as persons who wilfully neglected an obvious duty. She had a sense of uneasiness in connection with Janet’s friendship with Margaret Chesney. A woman of nearly thirty, still unmarried, and apparently satisfied to remain unmarried, could not, she feared, be a very suitable companion to her daughter. She would occasionally ask Janet if there was any prospect of a husband appearing above Miss Chesney’s horizon. When Margaret came to spend the summer holidays at Norborough, Mrs. Doncaster asked her daughter if she did not think that Captain Macduff and Miss Chesney would make a very suitable pair. ‘Well, mamma, they would certainly be a kind of intellectual variety of Beauty and the Beast,’ Janet laughingly replied. To which Mrs. Doncaster had answered with great gravity -

‘Captain Macduff is a most holy man, Janet. I wish I could be as well assured that Miss Chesney had chosen the better part24 as I am that he has.’

Norborough rumour did say that Mrs. Doncaster might have been Mrs. Macduff if she had chosen. There was more probability in this than in most of the Norborough gossip, for it was remarkable that Mrs. Doncaster was much more lenient towards Captain Macduff than to any other bachelor. If he was unmarried, he had done what he could to enter a more blessed state, and it was also noticed that, although Mrs. Doncaster was no match-maker, she was always suggesting all kinds of alliances for him. To see a single woman was, with Mrs. Doncaster, to remark that she would make an excellent wife for Captain Macduff. Being in a manner responsible for his desolate condition, she had it on her mind that she ought to do her utmost to help him out of it.

As for herself, she considered that, being a widow, she had done all that could be required of her by God or man in the way of matrimony. ‘My beloved husband was taken from me by the visitation of God,’ she had said, possibly, to Captain Macduff; ‘I must bear the burden He has laid upon me, and not rebel against His will, which is that I should pass the remainder of my life alone.’

After Janet returneda from Dupuy, Mrs. Doncaster, dimly recognising the fact that if you want a girl to get married you must put her in the way of knowing some people whom it would be possible for her to marry, began to cultivate the acquaintance of the Greys and the Ralphs with more cordiality than she had ever shown before. The Ralphs and Greys were not conspicuously religious; but Mrs. Doncaster, though she would not have acknowledged so much, even to herself, was

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