A Wife's Duty Part 7

"Yes: my child!" said she, as if thinking aloud, for I am sure she did not intend to grieve me, "Yes, go with your husband while you can, and have as few separate pleasures and divided hours as possible; for they lead to divided hearts. But if you have a large family you will not be able to leave home. Go therefore while you can, and while I am with you, and turn me to account while I am still here to serve you. That time I know will be short enough!"

It is not in the power of language to convey an adequate idea of the agony with which I listened to these words. Never before had my mother so pointedly alluded to her conviction that her health was decaying; and if the idea of separation from her by a happy marriage was so painful to my feelings, what must be the idea of that terrible and eternal separation?

Pendarves came in in the midst of my distress and almost fiercely demanded who had been so cruelly afflicting me, fearing, no doubt, that I had heard something concerning him, and naturally enough conceiving that no great grief could reach me, except through that or from him.

My mother gently replied, "She has been afflicting herself, foolish child! I said, unwillingly I allow, what might have prepared her for an unavoidable evil; but she chooses to fancy, poor thing! that I am not mortal: yet, see here, Seymour!" As she said this she turned up her long loose sleeves, and showed him her once fine arm fallen away comparatively to nothing!

I never saw my husband much more affected: he seized that faded arm, and, pressing it repeatedly to his lips, turned away and burst into tears--then folding us in one embrace he faltered out, "My poor Helen!

Well indeed might I find you thus!" But my mother solemnly promised that she would never so afflict me again.

In the midst of this scene a letter was brought to my mother. It was from Lord Charles, and was so like the man, that I shall transcribe it.

"Madam,

"I doubt not but you were amazed, and probably offended, at my quitting the house of your son-in-law without taking leave of you, as you are not a woman likely to think my silence at the moment of parting from you was to be attributed to the tender pa.s.sion which I had conceived for your beauty and accomplishments. But, madam, if my silence was not attributable to love, so neither was it caused by hate; and I beg leave, hat in hand, and on bended knee, to explain whence my conduct proceeded. In the first place, madam, you had given me a blow, a stunning blow; and after a man has been stunned, he does not soon recover himself sufficiently to know what he is about, and how he ought to behave. In the next place, I endeavoured to remember how the great Earl of Ess.e.x behaved when Queen Elizabeth gave him a blow, or in other words a box on the ear (for blow I need not tell a lady of your erudition is the _genus_, and box on the ear the _species_). Now that n.o.ble Earl did not return the blow (which I own I was very much inclined to do), but he departed in silence from her presence, I believe; and so _I_ in imitation of _him_ from yours. Methinks I hear you exclaim 'The little lord is mad! I gave him no blow.' Not with your hand, I own; but with your tongue, 'that unruly member,' as St. James so justly calls it; you gave me a tingling blow on the cheek of my mind, which it still feels, and for which perhaps it may be the better. It is this consideration, and the belief that your motives were kind, though your treatment was rough, and that you only meant, like the bear in the fable, to guard me from a slight evil, though you broke my head in doing it; it is this belief, I say, that now throws me thus a suppliant at your feet, and makes me beg of you to excuse all my rudeness, and all my faults, whether caused by imitation of Lord Ess.e.x, or my own sinful propensities, and to raise me up to receive not the kiss of peace, for to that I dare not aspire, but to grasp and carry to my heart the white hand tendered to me in token of forgiveness.

"I am, madam, with the liveliest esteem, and the deepest respect, your obliged, though stricken servant, "CHARLES FIREBRAND."

"Ridiculous person!" said my mother, when she had finished the letter, giving it to me at the same time.

When I had read it, I asked her to tell us what she had said to him.

"And why," said Pendarves, "does he sign himself Charles Firebrand?"

"Oh! thereby hangs a tale," said my mother blus.h.i.+ng, "which I, I a.s.sure you, shall not tell: therefore ask me no questions. If ever Lord Charles and I meet again, the white hand shall be tendered to him. Nay, perhaps I shall answer his letter."

And so she did; but we never saw what she wrote: however, I am convinced, that she had called him a firebrand, and reproved him for his evident desire of making mischief between my husband and me. Nor can I doubt but that the justice of her reproofs made them more stinging to the heart of the offender, and that he felt at the time a degree of unspeakable and unutterable resentment, on which his cooler judgment made him feel it impolitic to act; for he had, as my mother said, too much good sense not to value her acquaintance.

I must now return to Charlotte Jermyn. I forgot to say, that she wrote a very fawning letter of thanks to me after her return home, thanking me for my kindness to her, and hoping that I would send for her again whenever she could be of any service to me. I have reason to think that she also wrote more than once to my husband: but he never communicated what she wrote to me; and I had the mortification to find how vainly I had tried to give him those habits of openness and ingenuousness which can alone render the nearest and tenderest ties productive of confidence and happiness.

Now, after a silence of four months, she again wrote to me to inform me that she was married to a young ensign in a marching regiment quartered near her father's house; but as it was against her father's consent, she had been forced to go to Gretna Green, and that her father, Mr. Jermyn, continued inexorable.

This letter I communicated to my husband, who was, I found, already acquainted with the circ.u.mstance, though he did not tell me by what means he knew it. He also told me that her father has since a.s.sured her of his forgiveness; but told her at the same time, that he could bestow on her nothing else, as he had ten children, and a small income; and that the young couple had nothing to live upon except the pay of an ensign of foot.

"I am sure _I_ can do nothing for her," Pendarves added; "for my own wants, or rather my expenses, are beyond my means."

"And were they not," answered I, "I do not feel that Charlotte Jermyn, or rather Mrs. Saunders, has any claims on you."

"Still, I would not let her starve, if I could help it; but I cannot."

I did not like to ask whether she had applied to him to lend her money; but I suspected that she had, and that he had refused: for soon after I saw him receive a letter, which he read with an angry and flushed countenance, and thrust into the fire, muttering as he did so,

"Confounded fool, insolent!"

I felt, however, that her visit to me, and the terms which we had been upon, made it indispensable for me to give her a wedding gift, and I sent her money instead of a present in consideration of her poverty, desiring her to buy what she wanted most in remembrance of me. My letter and its contents, much to the annoyance of us both, she answered in person, bringing her husband with her; and they came with so evident an intention of staying all night, spite of the coldness of their reception, that we were forced to offer them a bed.

The next day, however, even their a.s.surance was not proof against the repelling power of our cold civility, and they departed, neither of us prejudiced in favour of the husband, and leaving me disgusted by the wife's forward behaviour to Pendarves.

I now, according to my mother's advice, proposed to Pendarves a visit to London: but, to my great surprise, he seemed to have no relish for the scheme; and telling me we would talk further about it, he dropped the subject.

Most gladly should I have welcomed this unwillingness to go to London, if I could have attributed it to a preference for home and for the country; but I had no reason to do this, and I feared it proceeded only from inability to meet the expenses of a London establishment, even for a few weeks; and of this I was soon convinced.

I told you a few pages back, that I was so cruel as to rejoice in my aunt's being rendered unable to write, by a violent inflammation in the eyes; but as that did not deprive her of locomotion, most unexpectedly one day, Mr. and Mrs. Pendarves drove up to my mother's door, and soon after she accompanied them to our house. I was dressing when they arrived, and I saw myself change even to alarming paleness when my mother came up to announce them. I also saw she was as much disconcerted as I was.

"Oh! if my dear uncle had but come alone," said she, "the visit would have been delightful!" But, here we were interrupted by Pendarves, who came in with "So, Helen! I suppose you know who is come. Oh! that one could but transfer the disease from the eyes to the tongue, and bandage that up instead of the former! What shall we do? For, probably, as she can't use her eyes, she makes her tongue work double tide."

"Suppose," replied I, "we bribe our surgeon to a.s.sure her that entire silence is the only cure for inflamed eyes?"

"The best thing we can do," observed my mother, "is to bear with fort.i.tude this unavoidable evil; and also to try to remember her virtues more than her faults."

When I went down, I found my mother admiring her beaver hat and feathers.

"Yes," she replied, "I think my beaver very pretty. What is it the mad poet says about 'my beaver?' Oh! I have it--

'When glory like a plume of feathers stood Perched on my beaver in the briny flood.'"

"Do you then bathe in the sea with your beaver on?" said my mother.

"Well! there's a question for a sensible woman!" cried my aunt, not seeing the sarcasm: then turning to me, she welcomed me with a cordial kiss; but I was struck by the great coldness with which she greeted Seymour.

My uncle, however, received us both with the kindest manner possible.

But I forgave all her oddness, when she saw my child; for praise of her child always finds its way to a mother's heart; and she was in raptures with its beauty. She pitied me too for being forced to give her up to a nurse; but she added, "I hope she is not, to use the words of the bard, a

'Stern rugged nurse, with rigid lore, Our patience many a year to bore.'"

Then renewing her caresses and her praises, she banished from my remembrance for a while all but her affectionate heart.

At dinner, however, she restored to me my fears of her, and my dislike to her visit; for she called my husband Mr. Seymour Pendarves at every word, though my mother she called Julia, and me Helen;--wis.h.i.+ng, as I saw, to point out to every one that _he_ was not in her good graces. But why? Alas! I doubted not but I should hear too soon; and, feeling myself a coward, I carefully avoided being alone with her that evening.

What she had to tell I knew not, and whether it regarded Charlotte Jermyn or Lady Bell; but I summoned up resolution to ask Pendarves whether he had ever visited Lady Bell Singleton in company with Lord Charles; and without hesitation, though with great confusion, he owned that he had.

"What! more than once?"

"Yes."

"Why did you not tell me of it?"

"Because I thought, after what you had heard, it might make you uneasy."

"Should you ever do," I replied, forcing a smile, "what in our relative situation it would make me uneasy to be informed of?"

"Not if your uneasiness would be at all well founded."

"But concealment implies consciousness of something indiscreet, if not wrong; and had you told me yourself of your visits to Lady Bell, I could have set Mrs. Pendarves and her insinuations at defiance."

"And can you not now?"

"Perhaps so; but no thanks to your ingenuousness. However, I must own,"

said I, smiling affectionately, "that no one answers questions more readily."