THE LIFE OE' AN OLD MAID.*
A LITTLE story of but mild interest, but very skilfully and pleasantly told, and far better worth reading than forty-nine of every fifty novels which pour out of the press for what publishers are pleased to call our amusement. The old maid whose "ups and downs" are here recorded is a comfortable old maid, an old maid not of the moralizing and sentimentalizing, but of the affectionate and cosy kind, whose youth was eager and spirited, and whose old age, though slightly feeble and memorial, is not without humour and dignity. Jemima Compton is a daughter of one of the old Parliamentary officials who steadily supported Mr. Pitt; she finds at her father's death that his marriage with her mother had not taken place till after her own birth, so that she is an illegitimate child, and left almost without property. An old Quaker friend and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Hartland, take her at first to their house to live with their daughters, but attached as she is to Charlotte and Olivia Burnand, she will not be dependent on any one, and her 'ups and downs' are chiefly experienced in the attempt to earn her own independence, first as a companion, and then as a governess. The merit of the book, which is very modest, entirely consists in the truth and simplicity of the pictures which are drawn in it, and the prim perspective in which the worthy old maid orders her memories of the past. The name is well chosen,— she is a true Jemima. Exceedingly lifelike is the picture of, what was in the last generation, the regular type of spinsterish primness, gradually settling down upon a girl of naturally high spirit and warm heart. Our modern unmarried ladies have somehow, for the most part, contrived to see the needlessness of that professional old- maidishness which was so marked a feature among our great-aunts, and it is only among old ladies of seventy or upwards that we can study the type presented to us in this volume. When, during her father's lifetime, poor Jemima drops her garter, and her chaperone, Lady Railton, allows her husband to play off a trick upon her by writing her a letter in the name of a somewhat aged admirer, assuring her that he wears it next his heart, and begging her to allow him to continue to do so, this very old-world practical joke causes a distress to Jemima who is then about twenty-five we imagine, which clearly foreshadows the kind of old maidishness which settles down upon her in later life.
• The Ups and Downs of an OW dlaids Life. By Jemima Compton. London: Bell and Daldy. 1869.
" I was a very modest girl," she says, " and I think I should have been deemed a prude by the young ladies of the present day ; thus what I am about to relate, and the trouble it caused me, will be scarcely credited, nevertheless, I assure you my anger and distress were not feigned." No doubt of it, and the same feeling which inspires such anger and distress at so very clumsy a practical joke, grows upon our poor Jemima, till we have an excellent scene between her, when she is a few years older, and a young gentleman, the brother of one of her pupils, and eight years younger
than herself, who makes very fierce love to her, which she rather likes than otherwise, but which she knows she must refuse, and thinks it only decorous to repulse with even some affectation of " disgust :"— "He began to speak to me very quietly when his mother left the room. Ho told me that he had considered my words well in the last seven days, and that he still adhered to his desire to make me his wife. He made me understand how much good I had done him, and that without my influence his career would be blighted, and that I should have to answer for a wasted life. I should bear of him going from bad to worse, and must over remember I might have saved him. That if I would try and love him he would go forward and win laurels to cast at my feet. He was determined to rise in his profession, and was sure of success if I were at his side to stimulate him forward : if I persistently refused his love, all would be dark and dreary. I answered him as calmly as he had spoken, thus :—' You cannot thank me now, Herbert, for saying that I never will be your wife; but the time will come when you will look back to this day and be grateful to me for saving you from marrying unwisely. You smart under my refusal now : when you are a few years older you will choose some one for your wife who is nearer your own ago, and who will enter into all your pursuits and grow old with you ; and one who will not be withered and worn, as I should be, while you are in your prime. Women ago much sooner than men, and they need to marry those whom they can look up to. I should never reverence your judgment, and we should awake from our dream and find that we wore miserably mated.' Herbert hardly allowed me to finish the last sentence ; his calmness was fast disappearing, and when he spoke he was all excitement. Ho vowed eternal, unalterable love to me, and said it was no passing feeling that actuated him. He urged me to make some promise for the future ; he entreated me not to part with him without giving him one word of hope, and really worked himself up into such a state of frenzy that I did not know how to quiet him. At length ho stopped from sheer exhaustion, and I rose to leave him, and hold out my hand. He refused it scornfully, and before I knew what would be his next move, or could make my escape from the room, I was in his arms, and receiving a volley of kisses on my lips which came in rapid succession. This conduct on his part roused all my spirit. 'Herbert, let me go,' I said, in loud tones. You are forfeiting my esteem by this behaviour. How dare you treat me thus ? Have I ever, by word or look, encouraged your folly ? I hoped to have had the remembrance of a friend in you, now I shall look back on this our last meeting with disgust.' My words brought my young lover to himself again, and he humbly begged my pardon, and looked and appeared so contrite, that I held out my hand once more to bid him adieu. Herbert, softened, was more formidable to me than when he let his passion loose. I felt it would be well to shorten the leave-taking, for I was afraid of myself. I know I have repeated these words several times over, but they express better than any others my state of mind. I rapidly shook hands with Herbert, wished him well, and was gone before he had time to answer me again."
Of course she meets Herbert again in later life, when he has a pretty young wife and girls of his own, and then the old-maidish element in her is admirably shown, for she cannot let bygones be bygones, but thinks it necessary to remind him most uncom- fortably of his former folly, and must, indeed, have given him a most uncomfortable moral sensation, which a lady whom we know calls "the Kicks" (we suppose from the attendant impulse to that sort of hysteric self-disgust which seems as if it would be best relieved by a violent tattoo with the heels on the floor) by saying :—" Old friend, was I not right in my decision some years ago ? I am worn and plain, while you and your wife are in the prime of life." This was a terrible revenge ;—first, to refer to the old scene at all, and next, to call him "old friend" in doing so, which was both a sheepishness in itself and a cause of sheepishness to him. Only an old maid would have attempted to knit so awkwardly as this an utterly expired feeling with the totally different friendliness which she desired to substitute for it. The last blossom of this side of the good Jemima's nature is admirably told in a later page :—
" I had come to the conclusion, after mature consideration, that women ought to be employed in every capacity which they could com- petently fill, and also that it was very indelicate for a lady to go into a draper's shop, and be served by a man, especially if she needed any article of dress pertaining to her special toilette. I determined to make a stand, and only be served by one of my own sex I did not tell Olivia beforehand that I would only be waited on by a woman, and thus astonished her as much as the young men in the shop by my question, Is there any young woman who can serve me with the articles I require. I think young men have no business to monopolize all employment, and act in a capacity that would be far better filled by one of my own sex.' The shopmen began to titter, and Olivia laughed audibly, and she could not trust herself to speak, or to remonstrate with me. The foreman stepped up to my side, and said politely, Madam, we have no woman who can serve you, all our hands are men ; I am very sorry ; will you allow me to fetch the articles that you require ? ' ---,No, young man,' I replied, it is against my principles."
This is very good, and the gradual ripening of this primness in Jetnima,—who is a hearty sort of soul, without any natural starch, after all,—is one of the best artistic features of the tale. Of the external sketches it contains, none is so good as that of Sir George Dalrymple, the starched, tyrannical old man, who engages Jemima partly to be companion to, still more to be spy upon, his wife ; but partly also to read aloud to himself, and who, when he finds that she will not be the spy he wishes, makes the reading aloud a pro- cess of torture by the savage little digs and pricks which he inter- sperses, by way of commentary, in the readings. This man, and also the man who marries Charlotte Burnand, and who is a man of the same genus, but a different and nobler species, are admirably drawn,—much better, indeed, and with more originality than any of the women in the little book. Still, the whole is better than the parts. It reads really like what it professes to be, "the ups and downs of an old maid's life," written down by the good old lady in her old age when the past was more to her than the present, and when she almost wonders at herself and admires herself for the spirits she could once boast, and the pride she had once displayed.
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