The Venetians by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Vansittart spent five weeks at Merewood, hunting a good deal, dining with some of his neighbours once a week or so, and occasionally entertaining them at dinner or luncheon; tiring himself prodigiously with long rides to cover, or railway journeys before and after the chase, and falling asleep of an evening by the drawing-room fire, lulled by the monotonous click of his mother's knitting needles, or the flutter of the turning leaves as she read.

Those fireside evenings after the chase in January and February were delightful to Mrs. Vansittart. She rejoiced with an exceeding joy at having brought her son safe and sound out of the cave of the syren, having no suspicion of those serious thoughts of the syren which occupied his mind. There were half a dozen girls in the neighbourhood, two of them heiresses, any one of whom would be welcome to her as a daughter-in-law, for any one of whom she would have resigned her place in that household without a murmur, almost without a regret. But she shuddered at the idea of a girl brought up in a Bohemian fashion; a girl who had suffered all the disadvantages which poverty carries with it; the skimped education; the vulgarizing influence of petty household cares; a girl whose father never went to church. Such a girl would be unspeakably distasteful to her. If Eve Marchant were to reign at Merewood, Mrs. Vansittart's grey hairs must go down in sorrow to the grave.

She rejoiced in her son's company, and was even reconciled to the perils of the hunting field, since hunting occupied his days, and prevented his running after Eve Marchant. If he was unusually silent and thoughtful by the fireside, she ascribed silence and thoughtfulness to physical exhaustion. He was there, safe within her ken; and that was enough. She took infinite pains to bring the girls she liked about her, and in her son's way, which was not easy, since Vansittart was far afield nearly every day. She would invite one of her favourites to a friendly dinner, escorted by a young brother, perhaps -- a proceeding which bored her son infinitely, since instead of sleeping or brooding by the fire he must needs play billiards with the cub, or put himself out of the way to amuse the young lady.

He was very fond of music of a broad dramatic style -- loved grand opera, from Gluck to Meyerbeer and Verdi; but he had no passion for Grieg or Rubinstein, as expounded, neatly, elegantly, with lady-like inexpressiveness, by his mother's protégées; and it seemed to his ignorant ear that all his mother's protégées played exactly the same pieces in precisely the same manner.

If perchance he spent an afternoon at home, he invariably found one of those selected vestals in morning-room or drawing-room when he went to five o'clock tea, that meal being one which his mother loved to share with him, and at which dutiful affection constrained his presence whenever he was on the premises. All the charm of that unconstrained half-hour of chat between mother and son was scared away by the presence of a young lady, albeit the most admirable of her sex. His mother's favourites were very nice girls, every one of them, and only two out of the six were painfully religious. He liked them all well enough, in the beaten way of friendship; but the handsomest and most attractive of them left him cold as marble. He had gone beyond the season of easily kindled fires. He had passed the age at which a man falls in love once in six weeks. His heart was no longer touch-paper. A few months ago he had believed that he would spend his days as a bachelor, had calculated the manifold advantages of remaining single, with an estate which for a single man meant wealth, but which for a man with wife and family would only mean a modest competence.

He grew so weary at last of those social tea-drinkings and those eminently domestic evenings, that before the hunting season was over he suddenly announced his intention of going to London. It was an understood thing between his mother and himself that the house in Charles Street was always ready for him. The housekeeper left in charge had been his nurse, and administered to his comfort with unwearying devotion. She was an excellent cook, by force of native talent rather than by training and experience, and, with a housemaid under her, kept the house in exquisite order. These two women, with Vansittart's valet, an Italian, able to turn his hand to anything, made up an efficient bachelor establishment.

To Charles Street, therefore, Vansittart repaired, in the Lenten month of March. He had been at some trouble to resist the inclination which would have taken him to Redwold Towers, rather than to London. It would have been so easy to offer himself to his sister for a week; and at Redwold it would have been so easy to see Eve Marchant; so difficult, perhaps, to avoid seeing her, since Lady Hartley, who was, above all things, cordial and impulsive, had told him in one of her letters that she had taken a fancy to Miss Marchant, and had invited her and one of the sisters to Redwold very often.

"As a wife for you, she is impossible," wrote Maud Hartley. "Pray remember that, Jack. Mother and I are ambitious about your future. We want you to look high, to improve your position from that of a small country gentleman, to make your mark in the world. But, although quite impossible as your wife, as a human being Miss Marchant is charming, and I mean to do all I can in a neighbourly way to make things pleasanter for her. The father is shockingly neglectful, spends the greater part of his life in London; but that is perhaps an advantage for his daughters, for when he is at home Eve is a slave to him, has to worry about his dinners, and fetch and carry for him, and try to amuse the unamusable, as Madame de Maintenon said. I gather this not from any murmurings of Eve's, but from the young sisters, who are appallingly outspoken."