Ayala's Angel
Anthony Trollope
When Egbert Dormer died he left his two daughters utterly penniless
upon the world, and it must be said of Egbert Dormer that nothing else
could have been expected of him. The two girls were both pretty, but
Lucy, who was twenty-one, was supposed to be simple and comparatively
unattractive, whereas Ayala was credited—as her somewhat
romantic name might show—with poetic charm and a taste for
romance. Ayala when her father died was nineteen.
We must begin yet a little earlier and say that there had
been—and had died many years before the death of Egbert
Dormer—a clerk in the Admiralty, by name Reginald Dosett, who,
and whose wife, had been conspicuous for personal beauty. Their charms
were gone, but the records of them had been left in various
grandchildren. There had been a son born to Mr Dosett, who was also a
Reginald and a clerk in the Admiralty, and who also, in his turn, had
been a handsome man. With him, in his decadence, the reader will
become acquainted. There were also two daughters, whose reputation
for perfect feminine beauty had never been contested. The elder had
married a city man of wealth—of wealth when he married her, but
who had become enormously wealthy by the time of our story. He had
when he married been simply Mister, but was now Sir Thomas Tringle,
Baronet, and was senior partner in the great firm of Travers and
Treason. Of Traverses and Treasons there were none left in these days,
and Mr Tringle was supposed to manipulate all the millions with which
the great firm in Lombard Street was concerned. He had married old Mr
Dosett's eldest daughter, Emmeline, who was now Lady Tringle, with a
house at the top of Queen's Gate, rented at œ1,500 a year, with a
palatial moor in Scotland, with a seat in Sussex, and as many
carriages and horses as would suit an archduchess. Lady Tringle had
everything in the world; a son, two daughters, and an open-handed
stout husband, who was said to have told her that money was a matter
of no consideration.
The second Miss Dosett, Adelaide Dosett, who had been considerably younger
than her sister, had insisted upon giving herself to Egbert Dormer the
artist, whose death we commemorated in our first line. But she had died before
her husband. They who remembered the two Miss Dosetts as girls were wont to
declare that, though Lady Tringle might, perhaps, have had the advantage in
perfection of feature and in unequalled symmetry, Adelaide had been the more
attractive from expression and brilliancy. To her Lord Sizes had offered his
hand and coronet, promising to abandon for her sake all the haunts of his
matured life. To her Mr Tringle had knelt before he had taken the elder
sister. For her Mr Progrum, the popular preacher of the day, for a time so
totally lost himself that he was nearly minded to go over to Rome. She was
said to have had offers from a widowed Lord Chancellor and from a Russian
prince. Her triumphs would have quite obliterated that of her sister had she
not insisted on marrying Egbert Dormer.
Then there had been, and still was, Reginald Dosett, the son of old
Dosett, and the eldest of the family. He too had married, and was now
living with his wife; but to them had no children been born, luckily,
as he was a poor man. Alas, to a beautiful son it is not often that
beauty can be a fortune as to a daughter. Young Reginald
Dosett—he is anything now but young—had done but little
for himself with his beauty, having simply married the estimable
daughter of a brother clerk. Now, at the age of fifty, he had his
œ900 a year from his office, and might have lived in fair comfort
had he not allowed a small millstone of debt to hang round his neck
from his earlier years. But still he lived creditably in a small but
very genteel house at Notting Hill, and would have undergone any want
rather than have declared himself to be a poor man to his rich
relations the Tringles.
Such were now the remaining two children of old Mr
Dosett—Lady Tringle, namely, and Reginald Dosett, the clerk in
the Admiralty. Adelaide, the beauty in chief of the family, was gone;
and now also her husband, the improvident artist, had followed his
wife. Dormer had been by no means a failing artist. He had achieved
great honour—had at an early age been accepted into the Royal
Academy—had sold pictures to illustrious princes and more
illustrious dealers, had been engraved and had lived to see his own
works resold at five times their original prices. Egbert Dormer might
also have been a rich man. But he had a taste for other beautiful
things besides a wife. The sweetest little phaeton that was to cost
nothing, the most perfect bijou of a little house at South
Kensington—he had boasted that it might have been packed without
trouble in his brother-in-law Tringle's dining-room—the simplest
little gem for his wife, just a blue set of china for his dinner
table, just a painted cornice for his studio, just satin hangings for
his drawing-room—and a few simple ornaments for his little
girls; these with a few rings for himself, and velvet suits of
clothing in which to do his painting; these, with a few little dinner
parties to show off his blue china, were the first and last of his
extravagances. But when he went, and when his pretty things were sold,
there was not enough to cover his debts. There was, however, a sweet
savour about his name. When he died it was said of him that his wife's
death had killed him. He had dropped his palette, refused to finish
the ordered portrait of a princess, and had simply turned himself
round and died.
Then there were the two daughters, Lucy and Ayala. It should be
explained that though a proper family intercourse had always been
maintained between the three families, the Tringles, the Dormers, and
the Dosetts, there had never been cordiality between the first and the
two latter. The wealth of the Tringles had seemed to convey with it a
fetid odour. Egbert Dormer, with every luxury around him which money
could purchase, had affected to despise the heavy magnificence of the
Tringles. It may be that he affected a fashion higher than that which
the Tringles really attained. Reginald Dosett, who was neither
brilliant nor fashionable, was in truth independent, and, perhaps, a
little thin-skinned. He would submit to no touch of arrogance from Sir
Thomas; and Sir Thomas seemed to carry arrogance in his brow and in
his paunch. It was there rather, perhaps, than in his heart; but there
are men to whom a knack of fumbling their money in their pockets and
of looking out from under penthouse brows over an expanse of
waistcoat, gives an air of overweening pride which their true
idiosyncracies may not justify. To Dosett had, perhaps, been spoken a
word or two which on some occasion he had inwardly resented, and from
thenceforward he had ever been ready to league with Dormer against the
&odq;bullionaire&cdq;, as they agreed to call Sir Thomas. Lady Tringle
had even said a word to her sister, Mrs Dormer, as to expenses, and
that had never been forgiven by the artist. So things were when Mrs
Dormer died first; and so they remained when her husband followed her.
Then there arose a sudden necessity for action, which, for a while,
brought Reginald Dosett into connexion with Sir Thomas and Lady
Tringle. Something must be done for the poor girls. That the something
should come out of the pocket of Sir Thomas would have seemed to be
natural. Money with him was no object—not at all. Another girl
or two would be nothing to him—as regarded simple expenditure.
But the care of a human being is an important matter, and so Sir
Thomas knew. Dosett had not a child at all, and would be the better
for such a windfall. Dosett he supposed to be—in his, Dosett's
way—fairly well off. So he made this proposition. He would take
one girl and let Dosett take the other. To this Lady Tringle added her
proviso, that she should have the choice. To her nerves affairs of
taste were of such paramount importance! To this Dosett yielded. The
matter was decided in Lady Tringle's back drawing-room. Mrs Dosett was
not even consulted in that matter of choice, having already
acknowledged the duty of mothering a motherless child. Dosett had
thought that the bullionaire should have ...
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