Read the book: «Hopes and Fears or, scenes from the life of a spinster», page 35
‘Let me ask one question—why was this explanation never offered before to those who had more right to decide?’
‘My tenets have seldom been the subject of inquiry. When they have, I have concealed nothing; and twice have thus missed a situation. But these things are usually taken for granted; and I never imagined it my duty to volunteer my religious sentiments, since I never obtruded them. I gave no scandal by objecting to any form of worship, and concerned myself with the moral and intellectual, not the religious being.’
‘Could you reach the moral without the religious?’
‘I should tell you that I have seldom reared a pupil from childhood. Mine have been chiefly from fifteen to eighteen, whose parents required their instruction, not education, from me; and till I came here, I never fully beheld the growth and development of character. I found that whereas all I could do for Phœbe was to give her method and information, leaving alone the higher graces elsewhere derived, with Bertha, my efforts were inadequate to supply any motive for overcoming her natural defects; and I believe that association with a person of my sceptical habit has tended to prevent Phœbe’s religion from influencing her sister.’
‘This is the reason you tell me?’
‘Partly; and likewise because I esteem you very differently from my former employers, and know that your views for your sisters are not like those of the persons with whom I have been accustomed to deal.’
‘You know that I have no power. It rests entirely with my brother and Mr. Crabbe.’
‘I am perfectly aware of it; but I could not allow myself to be forced on your sisters by any family arrangement contrary to the wishes of that member of it who is most qualified to judge for them.’
‘Thank you, Miss Fennimore; I will treat you as openly as you have treated me. I have often felt indignant that my sisters should be exposed to any risk of having their faith shaken; and this morning I almost hoped to hear that you did not consent to Mervyn’s scheme. But what you have said convinces me that, whatever you may have been previously, you are more likely to strengthen and confirm them in all that is good than half the people they would meet. I know that it would be a heavy affliction to Phœbe to lose so kind a friend; it might drive her from the home to which she clings, and separate Bertha, at least, from her; and under the circumstances, I cannot wish you to leave the poor girls at present.’ He spoke rather confusedly, but there was more consent in manner than words.
‘Thank you,’ she replied, fervently. ‘I cannot tell you what it would cost me to part with Phœbe, my living lesson.’
‘Only let the lesson be still unconscious.’
‘I would not have it otherwise for worlds. The calm reliance that makes her a ministering spirit is far too lovely to be ruffled by a hint of the controversies that weary my brain. If it be effect of credulity, the effects are more beauteous than those of clear eyesight.’
‘You will not always think it credulity.’
‘There would be great rest in being able to accept all that you and she do,’ Miss Fennimore answered with a sigh; ‘in finding an unchanging answer to “What is truth?” Yet even your Gospel leaves that question unanswered.’
‘Unanswered to Pilate; but those who are true find the truth; I verily trust that your eyes will become cleared to find it. Miss Fennimore, you know that I am unready and weak in argument, and you have often left me no refuge but my positive conviction; but I can refer you to those who are strong. If I can help you by carrying your difficulties to others, or by pointing out books, I should rejoice—’
‘You cannot argue—you can only act,’ said Miss Fennimore, smiling, as a message called him away.
The schoolroom had been left undisturbed, for the sisters were otherwise occupied. By Mr. Fulmort’s will, the jewels, excepting certain Mervyn heirlooms, were to be divided between the daughters, and their two ladyships thought this the best time for their choice, though as yet they could not take possession. Phœbe would have given the world that the sets had been appropriated, so that Mervyn and Mr. Crabbe should not have had to make her miserable by fighting her battles, insisting on her choosing, and then overruling her choice as not of sufficiently valuable articles, while Bertha profited by the lesson in harpy-hood, and regarded all claimed by the others as so much taken from herself; and poor Maria clasped on every bracelet one by one, threaded every ring on her fingers, and caught the same lustre on every diamond, delighting in the grand exhibition, and in her own share, which by general consent included all that was clumsy and ill-set. No one had the heart to disturb her, but Phœbe felt that the poor thing was an eyesore to them all, and was hardly able to endure Augusta’s compliment, ‘After all, Phœbe, she is not so bad; you may make her tolerably presentable for the country.’
Lady Acton patronized Bertha, in opposition to Phœbe; and Sir Bevil was glad to have one sister to whom he could be good-natured without molestation. The young lady, heartily weary of the monotony of home, was much disappointed at the present arrangement; Phœbe had become the envied elder sister instead of the companion in misfortune, and Juliana was looked on as the sympathizing friend who would fain have opened the prison doors that Phœbe closed against her by making all that disturbance about Maria.
‘It is all humbug about Maria,’ said Juliana. ‘Much Phœbe will let her stand in her way when she wants to come to London for the season—but I’ll not take her out, I promise her.’
‘But you will take me,’ cried Bertha. ‘You’ll not leave me in this dismal hole always.’
‘Never fear, Bertha. This plan won’t last six months. Mervyn and Phœbe will get sick of one another, and Augusta will be ready to take her in—she is pining for an errand girl.’
‘I’ll not go there to read cookery books and meet old fogies. You will have me, Juliana, and we will have such fun together.’
‘When you are come out, perhaps—and you must cure that stammer.’
‘I shall die of dulness before then! If I could only go to school!’
‘I wouldn’t be you with Maria for your most lively companion.’
‘It is much worse than when we used to go down into the drawing-room. Now we never see any one but Miss Charlecote, and Phœbe is getting exactly like her!’
‘What, all her sanctimonious ways? I thought so.’
‘And to make it more aggravating, Miss Fennimore is going to get religious too. She made me read all Butler’s Analogy, and wants to put me into Paley, and she is always running after Robert.’
‘Middle-aged governesses always do run after young clergymen—especially the most outré’s.’
‘And now she snaps me up if I say anything the least comprehensive or speculative, or if I laugh at the conventionalities Phœbe learns at the Holt. Yesterday I said that the progress of common sense would soon make people cease to connect dulness with mortality, or to think a serious mistiness the sole evidence of respect, and I was caught up as if it were high treason.’
‘You must not get out of bounds in your talk, Bertha, or sound unfeeling.’
‘I can’t help being original,’ said Bertha. ‘I must evolve my ideas out of my individual consciousness, and assert my independence of thought.’
Juliana laughed, not quite following her sister’s metaphysical tone, but satisfied that it was anti-Phœbe, she answered by observing, ‘An intolerable fuss they do make about that girl!’
‘And she is not a bit clever,’ continued Bertha. ‘I can do a translation in half the time she takes, and have got far beyond her in all kinds of natural philosophy!’
‘She flatters Mervyn, that’s the thing; but she will soon have enough of that. I hope he won’t get her into some dreadful scrape, that’s all!’
‘What sort of scrape?’ asked Bertha, gathering from the smack of the hope that it was something exciting.
‘Oh, you are too much of a chit to know—but I say, Bertha, write to me, and let me know whom Mervyn brings to the house.’
With somewhat the like injunction, only directed to a different quarter, Robert likewise left Beauchamp.
As he well knew would be the case, nothing in his own circumstances was changed by his mother’s death, save that he no longer could call her inheritance his home. She had made no will, and her entire estate passed to her eldest son, from whom Robert parted on terms of defiance, rather understood than expressed. He took leave of his birthplace as one never expecting to return thither, and going for his last hour at Hiltonbury to Miss Charlecote, poured out to her as many of his troubles as he could bear to utter. ‘And,’ said he, ‘I have given my approval to the two schemes that I most disapproved beforehand—to Mervyn’s giving my sisters a home, and to Miss Fennimore’s continuing their governess! What will come of it?’
‘Do not repent, Robert,’ was the answer. ‘Depend upon it, the great danger is in rashly meddling with existing arrangements, especially by a strain of influence. It is what the young are slow to learn, but experience brings it home.’
‘With you to watch them, I will fear the less.’
Miss Charlecote wondered whether any disappointment of his own added to his depression, and if he thought of Lucilla.
CHAPTER XVIII
My sister is not so defenceless left
As you imagine. She has a hidden strength
Which you remember not.
—Comus
Phœbe was left to the vacancy of the orphaned house, to a blank where her presence had been gladness, and to relief more sad than pain, in parting with her favourite brother, and seeing him out of danger of provoking or being provoked.
To have been the cause of strife and object of envy weighed like guilt on her heart, and the tempest that had tossed her when most needing peace and soothing, left her sore and suffering. She did not nurse her grief, and was content that her mother should be freed from the burthen of existence that had of late been so heavy; but the missing the cherished recipient of her care was inevitable, and she was not of a nature to shake off dejection readily, nor to throw sorrow aside in excitement.
Mervyn felt as though he had caught a lark, and found it droop instead of singing. He was very kind, almost oppressively so; he rode or drove with her to every ruin or view esteemed worth seeing, ordered books for her, and consulted her on improvements that pained her by the very fact of change. She gave her attention sweetly and gratefully, was always at his call, and amused his evenings with cards or music, but she felt herself dull and sad, and saw him disappointed in her.
Then she tried bringing in Bertha as entertainment for both, but it was a downright failure. Bertha was far too sharp and pert for an elder brother devoid both of wit and temper, and the only consequence was that she fathomed his shallow acquirements in literature and the natural sciences, and he pronounced her to be eaten up with conceit, and the most intolerable child he ever saw—an irremediable insult to a young woman of fifteen; nor could Bertha be brought forward without disappointing Maria, whose presence Mervyn would not endure, and thus Phœbe was forced to yield the point, and keep in the background the appendages only tolerated for her sake.
Greatly commiserating Bertha’s weariness of the schoolroom, she tried to gratify the governess and please her sisters by resuming her studies; but the motive of duty and obedience being gone, these were irksome to a mind naturally meditative and practical, and she found herself triumphed over by Bertha for forgetting whether Lucca were Guelf or Ghibelline, putting oolite below red sandstone, or confusing the definition of ozone. She liked Bertha to surpass her; but inattention she regarded as wrong in itself, as well as a bad example, and her apologies were so hearty as quite to affect Miss Fennimore.
Mervyn’s attentions wore off with the days of seclusion. By the third week he was dining out, by the fourth he was starting for Goodwood, half inviting Phœbe to come with him, and assuring her that it was just what she wanted to put her into spirits again. Poor Phœbe—when Mr. Henderson talking to Miss Fennimore, and Bertha at the same time insisting on Decandolle’s system to Miss Charlecote, had seemed to create a distressing whirl and confusion!
Miss Fennimore smiled, both with pleasure and amusement, as Phœbe asked her permission to walk to the Holt, and be fetched home by the carriage at night.
‘Don’t laugh at me,’ said Phœbe. ‘I am so glad to have some one’s leave to ask.’
‘I will not laugh, my dear, but I will not help you to reverse our positions. It is better we should both be accustomed to them.’
‘It seems selfish to take the carriage for myself,’ said Phœbe; ‘but I think I have rather neglected Miss Charlecote for Mervyn, and I believe she would like to have me alone.’
The solitude of the walk was a great boon, and there was healing in the power of silence—the repose of not being forced to be lively. Summer flowers had passed, but bryony mantled the bushes in luxuriant beauty, and kingly teazles raised their diademed heads, and exultingly stretched forth their sceptred arms. Purple heather mixed with fragrant thyme, blue harebells and pale bents of quiver-grass edged the path, and thistledown, drifting from the chalk uplands, lay like snow in the hollows, or danced like living things on the path before her. A brood of goldfinches, with merry twitter and flashing wings, flitted round a tall milk thistle with variegated leaves and a little farther on, just at the opening of a glade from the path, she beheld a huge dragon-fly, banded with green, black, and gold, poised on wings invisible in their rapid motion, and hawking for insects. She stood to watch, collecting materials to please Miss Charlecote, and make a story for Maria.
‘Stand still. He is upon you.’
She saw Miss Charlecote a few yards off, nearly on all-fours in the thymy grass.
‘Only a grasshopper. I’ve only once seen such a fellow. He makes portentous leaps. There! on your flounce!’
‘I have him! No! He went right over you!’
‘I’ve got him under my handkerchief. Put your hand in my pocket—take out a little wide-mouthed bottle. That’s it. Get in, sir, it is of no use to bite. There’s an air-hole in the cork. Isn’t he a beauty?’
‘O, the lovely green! What saws he wears on his thighs! See the delicate pink lining! What horns! and a quaint face, like a horse’s.’
‘“The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses.” Not that this is a locust, only a gryllus, happily for us.’
‘What is the difference?’
‘Long or short horns, since Bertha is not here to make me call them antennæ. I must take him home to draw, as soon as I have gathered some willow for my puss. You are coming home with me?’
‘I meant to drink tea with you, and be sent for in the evening.’
‘Good child. I was almost coming to you, but I was afraid of Mervyn. How has it been, my dear?’
Phœbe’s ‘he is very kind’ was allowed to stand for the present, and Honora led the way by a favourite path, which was new to Phœbe, making the circuit of the Holt; sometimes dipping into a hollow, over which the lesser scabious cast a tint like the gray of a cloud; sometimes rising on a knoll so as to look down on the rounded tops of the trees, following the undulations of the grounds; and beyond them the green valley, winding stream, and harvest fields, melting into the chalk downs on the horizon. To Phœbe, all had the freshness of novelty, with the charm of familiarity, and without the fatigue of admiration required by the show-places to which Mervyn had taken her. Presently Miss Charlecote opened the wicket leading to an oak coppice. There was hardly any brushwood. The ground was covered with soft grass and round elastic cushions of gray lichen. There were a few brackens, and here and there the crimson midsummer men, but the copsewood consisted of the redundant shoots of the old, gnarled, knotted stumps, covered with handsome foliage of the pale sea-green of later summer, and the leaves far exceeding in size those either of the sapling or the full-sized tree—vigorous playfulness of the poor old wounded stocks.
‘Ah!’ said Honor, pausing, ‘here I found my purple emperor, sunning himself, his glorious wings wide open, looking black at first, but turning out to be of purple-velvet, of the opaque mysterious beauty which seems nobler than mere lustre.’
‘Did you keep him? I thought that was against your principles.’
‘I only mocked him by trying to paint him. He was mine because he came to delight me with the pleasure of having seen him, and the remembrance of him that pervades the path. It was just where Humfrey always told me the creatures might be found.’
‘Was Mr. Charlecote fond of natural history?’ asked Phœbe, shyly.
‘Not as natural history, but he knew bird, beast, insect, and tree, with a friendly hearty intimacy, such as Cockney writers ascribe to peasants, but which they never have. While he used the homeliest names, a dish-washer for a wagtail, cuckoo’s bread-and-cheese for wood-sorrel (partly I believe to tease me), he knew them thoroughly, nests, haunts, and all.’
Phœbe could not help quoting the old lines, ‘He prayeth well that loveth well both man and bird and beast.’
‘Yes, and some persons have a curious affinity with the gentle and good in creation—who can watch and even handle a bird’s nest without making it be deserted, whom bees do not sting, and horses, dogs, and cats love so as to reveal their best instincts in a way that seems fabulous. In spite of the Lyra Innocentium, I think this is less often the case with children than with such grown people as—like your guardian, Phœbe—have kept something of the majesty and calmness of innocence.’
Phœbe was all in a glow with the pleasure of hearing him so called, but bashful under that very delight, she said, ‘Perhaps part of Solomon’s wisdom was in loving these things, since he knew the plants from the cedar to the hyssop.’
‘And spoke of Nature so beautifully in his Song, but I am afraid as he grew old he must have lost his healthful pleasure in them when he was lifted up.’
‘Or did he only make them learning and ornament, instead of a joy and devotion?’ said Phœbe, thinking of the difference between Bertha’s love and Miss Charlecote’s.
‘Nor does he say that he found vanity in them, though he did in his own gardens and pools of water. No, the longer I live, the more sure I am that these things are meant for our solace and minor help through the trials of life. I assure you, Phœbe, that the crimson leaf of a Herb-Robert in the hedge has broken a strain of fretful repining, and it is one great blessing in these pleasures that one never can exhaust them.’
Phœbe saw that Miss Charlecote was right in her own case, when on coming in, the grasshopper’s name and history were sought, and there followed an exhibition of the ‘puss’ for whom the willow had been gathered, namely a grass-green caterpillar, with a kitten’s face, a curious upright head and shoulders, and two purple tails, whence on irritation two pink filaments protruded,—lashes for the ichneumons, as Honora explained. The lonely woman’s interest in her quaint pet showed how thickly are strewn round us many a calm and innocent mode of solace and cheerfulness if we knew but how to avail ourselves of it.
Honora had allowed the conversation to be thus desultory and indifferent, thinking that it gave greater rest to Phœbe, and it was not till the evening was advancing, that she began to discharge herself of an urgent commission from Robert, by saying, ‘Phœbe, I want you to do something for me. There is that little dame’s school in your hamlet. It is too far off for me to look after, I wish you would.’
‘Robin has been writing to me about parish work,’ said Phœbe, sadly. ‘Perhaps I ought, but I don’t know how, and I can’t bear that any change in our ways should be observed;’ and the tears came more speedily than Honor had expected.
‘Dear child,’ she said, ‘there is no need for that feeling. Parish work, at least in a lay family, must depend on the amount of home duty. In the last years of my dear mother’s life I had to let everything go, and I know it is not easy to resume, still less to begin, but you will be glad to have done so, and will find it a great comfort.’
‘If it be my duty, I must try,’ said Phœbe, dejectedly, ‘and I suppose it is. Will you come and show me what to do? I never went into a cottage in my life.’
I have spoken too soon! thought Honor; yet Robert urged me, and besides the evil of neglecting the poor, the work will do her good; but it breaks one’s heart to see this meek, mournful obedience.
‘While we are alone,’ continued Phœbe, ‘I can fix times, and do as I please, but I cannot tell what Mervyn may want me to do when he is at home.’
‘Do you expect that he will wish you to go out with him?’ asked Honora.
‘Not this autumn,’ she answered; ‘but he finds it so dull at home, that I fully expect he will have his friends to stay with him.’
‘Phœbe, let me strongly advise you to keep aloof from your brother’s friends. When they are in the house, live entirely in the schoolroom. If you begin at once as a matter of course, he will see the propriety, and acquiesce. You are not vexed?’
‘Thank you, I believe it is all right. Robert will be the more at ease about us. I only do not like to act as if I distrusted Mervyn.’
‘It would not be discreet for any girl so young as you are to be entertaining her brother’s sporting friends. You could hardly do so without acquiring the same kind of reputation as my poor Lucy’s Rashe, which he would not wish.’
‘Thank you,’ said Phœbe more heartily. ‘You have shown me the way out of a difficulty. I need not go into company at all this winter, and after that, only with our old country neighbours.’
Honora was infinitely relieved at having bestowed this piece of advice, on which she had agreed with Robert as the only means of insuring Phœbe’s being sheltered from society that Mervyn might not esteem so bad for his sister as they did.
The quietness of Mervyn’s absence did much for the restoration of Phœbe’s spirits. The dame’s school was not delightful to her; she had not begun early enough in life for ease, but she did her tasks there as a duty, and was amply rewarded by the new enjoyment thus afforded to Maria. The importance of being surrounded by a ring of infants, teaching the alphabet, guiding them round the gooseberry bush, or leading their songs and hymns, was felicity indescribable to Maria. She learnt each name, and, with the reiteration that no one could endure save Phœbe and faithful Lieschen, rehearsed the individual alphabetical acquirements of every one; she painted pictures for them, hemmed pinafores, and was happier than she had ever been in her life, as well as less fretful and more manageable, and she even began to develop more sense and intelligence in this direction than she had seemed capable of under the dreary round of lessons past her comprehension.
It was a great stimulus to Phœbe, and spurred her to personal parish work, going beyond the soup and subscriptions that might have bounded her charities for want of knowing better. Of course the worst and most plausible people took her in, and Miss Charlecote sometimes scolded, sometimes laughed at her, but the beginning was made, and Robert was pleased.
Mervyn did bring home some shooting friends, but he made no difficulties as to the seclusion that Miss Charlecote had recommended for his sister; accepting it so easily that Phœbe thought he must have intended it from the first. From that time he was seldom at home without one or more guests—an arrangement that kept the young ladies chiefly to the west wing, and always, when in the garden, forced them to be on their guard against stumbling upon smoking gentlemen. It was a late-houred, noisy company, and the sounds that reached the sisters made the younger girls curious, and the governess anxious. Perhaps it was impossible that girls of seventeen and fifteen should not be excited by the vicinity of moustaches and beards whom they were bidden to avoid; and even the alternate French and German which Miss Fennimore enforced on Bertha more strongly than ever, merely produced the variety of her descanting on their knebelbarten, or on l’heure à guelle les voix de ces messieurs-là entonnaient sur le grand escalier, till Miss Fennimore declared that she would have Latin and Greek talked if there were no word for a gentleman in either! There were always stories to be told of Bertha’s narrow escapes of being overtaken by them in garden or corridor, till Maria, infected by the panic, used to flounder away as if from a beast of prey, and being as tall as, and considerably stouter than, Phœbe, with the shuffling gait of the imbecile, would produce a volume of sound that her sister always feared might attract notice, and irritate Mervyn.
Honora Charlecote tried to give pleasure to the sisters by having them at the Holt, and would fain have treated Bertha as one of the inherited godchildren. But Bertha proved by reference to the brass tablet that she could not be godchild to a man who died three years before her birth, and it was then perceived that his sponsorship had been to an elder Bertha, who had died in infancy, of water on the head, and whom her parents, in their impatience of sorrow, had absolutely caused to be forgotten. Such a delusion in the exact Phœbe could only be accounted for by her tenderness to Mr. Charlecote, and it gave Bertha a subject of triumph of which she availed herself to the utmost. She had imbibed a sovereign contempt for Miss Charlecote’s capacity, and considered her as embodying the passive individual who is to be instructed or confuted in a scientific dialogue. So she lost no occasion of triumphantly denouncing all ‘cataclysms’ of the globe, past or future, of resolving all nature into gases, or arguing upon duality—a subject that fortunately usually brought on her hesitation of speech, a misfortune of which Miss Fennimore and Phœbe would unscrupulously avail themselves to change the conversation. The bad taste and impertinence were quite as apparent to the governess as to the sister, and though Bertha never admitted a doubt of having carried the day against the old world prejudices, yet Miss Fennimore perceived, not only that Miss Charlecote’s notions were not of the contracted and unreasonable order that had been ascribed to her, but that liberality in her pupil was more uncandid, narrow, and self-sufficient than was ‘credulity’ in Miss Charlecote. Honor was more amused than annoyed at these discussions; she was sorry for the silly, conceited girl, though not in the least offended nor disturbed, but Phœbe and Miss Fennimore considered them such an exposure that they were by no means willing to give Bertha the opportunity of launching herself at her senior.
The state of the household likewise perplexed Phœbe. She had been bred up to the sight of waste, ostentation, and extravagance, and they did not distress her; but her partial authority revealed to her glimpses of dishonesty; detected falsehoods destroyed her confidence in the housekeeper; her attempts at charities to the poor were intercepted; her visits to the hamlet disclosed to her some of the effects on the villagers of a vicious, disorderly establishment; and she understood why a careful mother would as soon have sent her daughter to service at the lowest public-house as at Beauchamp.
Mervyn had detected one of the footmen in a flagrant act of peculation, and had dismissed him, but Phœbe believed the evil to have extended far more widely than he supposed, and made up her mind to entreat him to investigate matters. In vain, however, she sought for a favourable moment, for he was never alone. The intervals between other visitors were filled up by a Mr. Hastings, who seemed to have erected himself into so much of the domesticated friend that he had established a bowing and speaking acquaintance with Phœbe; Bertha no longer narrated her escapes of encounters with him; and, being the only one of the gentlemen who ever went to church, he often joined the young ladies as they walked back from thence. Phœbe heartily wished him gone, for he made her brother inaccessible; she only saw Mervyn when he wanted her to find something for him or to give her a message, and if she ventured to say that she wanted to speak to him, he promised—‘Some time or other’—which always proved sine die. He was looking very ill, his complexion very much flushed, and his hand heated and unsteady, and she heard through Lieschen of his having severe morning headaches, and fits of giddiness and depression, but these seemed to make him more unable to spare Mr. Hastings, as if life would not be endurable without the billiards that she sometimes heard knocking about half the night.
However, the anniversary of Mr. Fulmort’s death would bring his executor to clear off one branch of his business, and Mervyn’s friends fled before the coming of the grave old lawyer, all fixing the period of their departure before Christmas. Nor could Mervyn go with them; he must meet Mr. Crabbe, and Phœbe’s heart quite bounded at the hope of being able to walk about the house in comfort, and say part of what was on her mind to her brother.
‘Whose writing is this?’ said Phœbe to herself, as the letters were given to her, two days before the clearance of the house. ‘I ought to know it—It is! No! Yes, indeed it is—poor Lucy. Where can she be? What can she have to say?’
The letter was dateless, and Phœbe’s amaze grew as she read.
‘Dear Phœbe,
‘You know it is my nature to do odd things, so never mind that, but attend to me, as one who knows too well what it is to be motherless and undirected. Gossip is long-tongued enough to reach me here, in full venom as I know and trust, but it makes my blood boil, till I can’t help writing a warning that may at least save you pain. I know you are the snowdrop poor Owen used to call you, and I know you have Honor Charlecote for philosopher, and friend, but she is nearly as unsophisticated as yourself, and if report say true, your brother is getting you into a scrape. If it is a fact that he has Jack Hastings dangling about Beauchamp, he deserves the lot of my unlucky Charteris cousins! Mind what you are about, Phœbe, if the man is there. He is plausible, clever, has no end of amusing resources, and keeps his head above water; but I know that in no place where there are womankind has he been received without there having been cause to repent it! I hope you may be able to laugh—if not, it may be a wholesome cure to hear that his friends believe him to have secured one of the heiresses at Beauchamp. There, Phœbe, I have said my say, and I fear it is cutting and wounding, but it came out of the love of a heart that has not got rid of some of its old feelings, and that could not bear to think of sorrow or evil tongues busy about you. That I write for your sake, not for my own, you may see by my making it impossible to answer.
‘Lucilla Sandbrook.
‘If you hold council with Honor over this—as, if you are wise, you will—you may tell her that I am learning gratitude to her. I would ask her pardon if I could without servility.’
