"To Aimée, Walking with a Little Child."
"To Aimée, Singing at her Work."
"To Aimée, Turning away from me while I told my Love."
"Aimée's Confession."
"Aimée in Despair."
"The Foreign Land in which my Aimée dwells."
"The Wedding Ring."
"The Wife."
When he came to this last sonnet he put down his bundle of papers
and began to think. "The wife." Yes, and a French wife; and a
Roman Catholic wife--and a wife who might be said to have been in
service! And his father's hatred of the French, both collectively
and individually--collectively, as tumultuous brutal ruffians,
who murdered their king, and committed all kinds of bloody
atrocities--individually, as represented by "Boney," and the various
caricatures of "Johnny Crapaud" that had been in full circulation
about five-and-twenty years before this time, when the Squire had
been young and capable of receiving impressions. As for the form of
religion in which Mrs. Osborne Hamley had been brought up, it is
enough to say that Catholic emancipation had begun to be talked about
by some politicians, and that the sullen roar of the majority of
Englishmen, at the bare idea of it, was surging in the distance with
ominous threatenings; the very mention of such a measure before the
Squire was, as Osborne well knew, like shaking a red flag before a
bull.
And then he considered that if Aimée had had the unspeakable, the
incomparable blessing of being born of English parents, in the very
heart of England--Warwickshire, for instance--and had never heard
of priests, or mass, or confession, or the Pope, or Guy Fawkes, but
had been born, baptized, and bred in the Church of England, without
having ever seen the outside of a dissenting meeting-house, or a
papist chapel--even with all these advantages, her having been a
(what was the equivalent for "bonne" in English? 'nursery-governess'
was a term hardly invented) nursery-maid, with wages paid down once a
quarter, liable to be dismissed at a month's warning, and having her
tea and sugar doled out to her, would be a shock to his father's old
ancestral pride that he would hardly ever get over.
"If he saw her!" thought Osborne. "If he could but see her!" But if
the Squire were to see Aimée, he would also hear her speak her pretty
broken English--precious to her husband, as it was in it that she
had confessed brokenly with her English tongue, that she loved him
soundly with her French heart--and Squire Hamley piqued himself on
being a good hater of the French. "She would make such a loving,
sweet, docile little daughter to my father--she would go as near as
any one could towards filling up the blank void in this house, if he
would but have her; but he won't; he never would; and he sha'n't have
the opportunity of scouting her. Yet if I called her 'Lucy' in these
sonnets; and if they made a great effect--were praised in _Blackwood_
and the _Quarterly_--and all the world was agog to find out the
author; and I told him my secret--I could if I were successful--I
think then he would ask who Lucy was, and I could tell him all then.
If--how I hate 'ifs.' 'If me no ifs.' My life has been based on
'whens;' and first they have turned to 'ifs,' and then they have
vanished away. It was 'when Osborne gets honours,' and then 'if
Osborne,' and then a failure altogether. I said to Aimée, 'when my
mother sees you,' and now it is 'if my father saw her,' with a very
faint prospect of its ever coming to pass." So he let the evening
hours flow on and disappear in reveries like these; winding up with
a sudden determination to try the fate of his poems with a publisher,
with the direct expectation of getting money for them, and an
ulterior fancy that, if successful, they might work wonders with his
father.