The Hampstead Mystery: A Novel (Complete)
9781465679833
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
‘Once for all,’ exclaimed Mr Crampton, bringing down his broad fist heavily upon the table, ‘once for all, I tell you, I will not have it.’ At this terrible assertion, Mrs Crampton shivered as if she had been struck, and Aunt Clem silently dissolved into tears. Henry Hindes, of all the party, alone preserved his composure. He leaned back in his chair, carefully trimming his filbert nails with a penknife, as if the affair under discussion were not of the slightest moment. ‘Of course you will not have it,’ he said after a pause to Mr Crampton, ‘no man in his senses would. Mr Frederick Walcheren has money and good looks, but there his claims to admiration end. The first you do not require for your daughter, and the second would have no weight with anyone but a woman. To place against these supposed advantages, Mr Walcheren is a young man of dissolute habits, and lavish expenditure. You should hear what his cousin, Philip Walcheren, says of him.’ ‘I want no one’s opinion but my own,’ replied Mr Crampton vehemently. ‘Jenny will have all my money by-and-by, and she shall marry no man that will make ducks and drakes of it. Besides, he isn’t good enough for her in any way. He thinks, I suppose, because his family have been a set of idle scoundrels for centuries past, while my progenitors have been working to support their children, that his is the better of the two, but I don’t see it. Besides, if he were the heir to the Crown, he shouldn’t have my daughter. He’s a Roman, that’s more than enough for me. I’ll have no Papists in my family. I hate the whole crew, with their cunning, underhand ways. If Jenny won’t give this Walcheren fellow over, I’ll lock her up on bread and water till she comes to her senses again.’ As neither of the ladies made any answer to this threat, Mr Hindes interfered again. ‘Surely,’ he said with an incredulous smile, ‘Miss Crampton will not dream of opposing your wishes in this particular, when so much depends upon her obedience. What can she see in this young man to attract her, above others of his kind; she who has a crowd of admirers wherever she goes, and is the acknowledged beauty of Hampstead? I believe, Crampton, that you are alarming yourself without cause. Miss Crampton means nothing serious. She is merely amusing herself with the sight of young Walcheren’s infatuation for her.’ ‘It’s more than that,’ returned the older man; ‘I’ve forbidden the girl to dance with him when she meets him out, or to receive him here during my absence. And now, her mother tells me, she met them riding together yesterday afternoon, and has intercepted a letter from him to Jenny, in which he writes as though they were promised to each other. What am I to do? I can’t be always at my daughter’s elbow, and her mother can’t go galloping all over the country after her. It is disgraceful to think that a young lady of twenty can’t be trusted to behave herself properly as soon as she is out of her parents’ sight!’ ‘Don’t you think you are making rather a mountain out of a molehill?’ inquired Henry Hindes, in the same calm way. ‘Doubtless, Miss Crampton is young and thoughtless, and, if I may venture to say so—perhaps just a wee bit spoilt; but is that any reason that you should suspect her of impropriety? And, after all, is there anything wrong or unusual in a lovely girl being followed and persecuted by her admirers? Perhaps, if the truth were known, Miss Crampton might be as well pleased to get rid of Mr Walcheren as you would be.’
