The Vicar of Wrexhill Part 55

CHAPTER VIII.

THE LETTER-BAG.

Among the many highly-valued comforts and privileges which Mr.

Cartwright's exclusive possession of the library afforded him, that of receiving in solitary state--and privacy, the family letter-bag, was not the one least valued.

It may, I believe, be laid down as a pretty general rule, that those persons who conceive, or profess it to be their duty, to dive into the hearts and consciences of their fellow-creatures, and to regulate the very thoughts and feelings of all the unfortunate people within their reach, are not very scrupulous as to the methods used to obtain that _inward_ knowledge. Mr. Cartwright, according to the usual custom of divines of his cla.s.s, had his village matron, ostensibly only a merchant of apples, gingerbread, and lollypops, but intrusted with as many secret missions of inquiry as the most jealous pontiff ever committed to a faithful and favoured nuncio on quitting the gates of Rome. She could tell, and was not ill paid for that precious knowledge, how often Betty Jackson went to buy baccy; and how many times in the day Sally Wright looked over her shoulder at the pa.s.sers-by while walking out with her master's children; and how many pots of porter were carried to one house, and how many times the ladies walked forth from another; besides innumerable other facts and anecdotes, which, though apparently not of sufficient importance to record, were nevertheless of great value to the vicar and to his curate, as themes to lecture upon in private, and preach upon in public.

Sources of information such as these had never been overlooked or neglected by Mr. Cartwright at any period of his ministry; but hitherto he had held them to be important rather to the general welfare of the Christian world than to his own family: no sooner, however, did he find himself placed in the responsible position of master of a large household, than, besides taking the butler into a sort of partners.h.i.+p for the discovery of petty offences, and having moreover an elected stable-boy, who made a daily report of all that he saw and heard, and a little more, he determined that all letters addressed to any member of the family should pa.s.s through his hand; and in like manner, that all those put into the letter-box in the hall, of which he kept the key himself, should be submitted to the same species of religious examination before they were deposited in the post-bag.

In the execution of this part of his duty Mr. Cartwright displayed, to himself at least, considerable mechanical skill--for the letters were excellently well re-sealed--and likewise great equanimity of temper; for, scanty as the family correspondence proved to be, he chanced to fall upon some few pa.s.sages which might have shaken the philosophy of a mind less admirably regulated.

In former times, if any Mowbray had wished to send a note from the Park to the village, a groom or a groom's helper would have taken it: but now, though the establishment was greatly increased, there was no such privilege allowed them; and in order to escape the ceremony of asking permission to employ a servant, they all resorted to the post-bag.

One of the letters thus sent and thus examined was from little Mary Richards to her friend f.a.n.n.y; and many more important doc.u.ments had pa.s.sed through his hands without exciting an equal degree of emotion. It ran thus:

"I cannot express to you, my dearest f.a.n.n.y, how anxious I feel to open my whole heart to you on a subject that has long occupied us both with, I believe, equal depth and sincerity of interest;--I mean, as I am sure you will instantly antic.i.p.ate, that inward call to especial grace and favour which Mr.

Cartwright taught us to expect would be the sure and certain consequence of unbounded faith in _himself_; for so only can we interpret the language he used to us. If I were to live a thousand years, dear f.a.n.n.y, I should never cease to regret the dreadful, but, I thank Heaven brief interval, during which I firmly believed that I had received this call. While this frightful and most presumptuous notion had possession of me, I looked upon my dear and excellent mother--ay, and, to my bitter sorrow, treated her too, as a being almost unworthy of communion with me! Is not this of itself enough to prove the unholy tendency of the doctrine? Now that the madness is pa.s.sed, I look back upon it with as much astonishment as sorrow; and can so clearly trace in it the workings of the most paltry vanity and egregious self-love, that while remembering how sincerely I believed myself _the better_ for all the hateful crimes of impious presumption and filial ingrat.i.tude of which I was guilty, I cannot but think that the most contemptible follies into which vanity and fine speeches ever plunged a girl in the ordinary routine of this world's nonsense must be considered as innocent and respectable, when compared to those committed (oh! fearful impiety!) in the name of Heaven.

"Though we frequently meet, I have never yet been able fully and clearly to state to you how completely I have made a recantation of all my religious errors. It is singular how Mr.

Cartwright contrives, either by himself or his satellites, to be always hovering near us. For the three last Wednesdays I have set off for the Park with a firm determination to speak to you on this subject; but I have each time found it impossible.

I believe that my countenance or manner must have expressed some part of the anxiety I felt to converse with you, and that my eagerness to obtain my object defeated it. On one occasion, as I think you must remember, Mr. Cartwright himself, though constantly drawn here and there to perform his gracious hospitalities to the rest of the company, ceased not again and again to return with his soft "Well, dear children! what are you talking about?"--on another it was his curate and deputy who performed the office of interrupter; and last Wednesday, that very unaccountable person Mr. Jacob seemed determined that no one should speak to you but himself. I have therefore, dearest f.a.n.n.y, determined to write to you. I think it likely that I may soon leave this neighbourhood: Major Dalrymple, who has been greatly the means of bringing me back to happiness and common sense, will, I believe, undertake the charge of me for the rest of my life. This, I find, has long been my dear, dear mother's wish. Had I been quite sure of this a year ago, I think I should have been saved this wild interlude of fanatic raving. However, it is over; and greatly as I have been the worse, I hope and believe that for the future I shall be the humbler Christian and the better woman for it.

"Major Dalrymple is at present in Scotland, attending the sick--I believe the dying hours of his cousin Lord Hilton.

After his return, it is probable we shall leave Wrexhill; and I am therefore most anxious to make you acquainted with my present state of mind, for I cannot but suspect that we have run the farther into this lamentable folly because we ran together.

"You have already said enough to make me hope that you too are recovering from your delusion; but I cannot be easy without telling you explicitly, that I am again the same unpretending little Church-of-England Christian that I was in the days of our good Mr. Wallace; that I am once more a loving and dutiful daughter to the best of mothers, and ever and always your very

"Affectionate friend,

"MARY RICHARDS."

"P. S. Pray let me hear from you."

This letter was wormwood to Mr. Cartwright from one end to the other.

Had it rehea.r.s.ed the kissing story, he would liked it infinitely better.

He was quite aware of Mary Richards's "falling off," and attributed it, as well as that equally evident in f.a.n.n.y, to jealousy--woman's jealousy, and drew thence a species of gratification that almost atoned for their secession; the more so perhaps as the all-important business of the will rendered it absolutely necessary that, cost what converts it might, he should bestow his love-making wholly and solely upon his lady.

But to find that this pretty little girl really appeared to have forgotten the kiss altogether, and yet that she had escaped from his net--at the very moment too when, as it seemed she was on the very verge of becoming a viscountess, was a mortification so cutting, that he actually ground his fine teeth together with rage at it.

His first impulse was to destroy it. But he recollected that by suffering it to reach f.a.n.n.y, he should obtain a sight of her answer; and feeling considerable curiosity to discover how he should fare in the hands of the little melancholy poetess who had of late evidently avoided all tete-a-tete communication with him, he carefully re-sealed it, and sedulously pinching its folds into unsuspicious-looking flatness, put it aside to be delivered according to its address.

The event proved that he was quite right in believing that f.a.n.n.y Mowbray would answer this letter; but whether the perusal of her reply increased his satisfaction in being master of Cartwright Park, may be doubted.

f.a.n.n.y's reply was as follows:

"My very dear Mary,

"I am most thankful to have received your letter; for one source of the mental misery I have endured has arisen from believing that I first led you to fix your attention on Mr.

Cartwright, and your faith on the hateful dogmas he taught. You are freed--you have escaped, you are restored to the mother you love, and _you_ will be happy! I thank Heaven, Mary, that my heart is not wholly perverted by all the unnatural struggles it has gone through; for I do rejoice, my dear friend, at your felicity with a pureness and freshness of joy that I have never felt at any thing since the death of my poor father came and blighted all our joys. Neither am I surprised at the end of your history. May you through life be as happy as I wish you, and you shall have no reason to complain.

"Of myself I know not how to speak; and yet I am sure that you will not be easy without knowing something of the present state of my mind.

"Yes, Mary, the mad fanaticism has pa.s.sed away; but it has left me weak as a child recovered from the delirium of a raging fever; and I feel very doubtful if I shall ever wholly recover it. I am thankful that you have suffered less than I have done; indeed the mischief wrought so differently with you, that I almost doubt my power of making you understand all I have suffered. I cannot explain even to myself what species of feeling it was which took possession of me when first I became acquainted with Mr. Cartwright. Of this, however, I am quite sure, that I believed with all the simplicity of truth and innocence, that all I felt proceeded from the immediate influence of the Deity working within me to secure my eternal salvation. I could not more firmly have believed that Mr.

Cartwright was Heaven's appointed agent on earth; and every thing he did and every thing he said appeared clothed in a sort of holiness in my eyes which would have rendered it impious to judge him as another would have been judged. During the first two or three months of our acquaintance, I was happy--oh! much more than happy; I lived in a sort of ecstasy. I believed myself the chosen of Heaven, and that all the agitating but delightful emotions which Mr. Cartwright's admiration and praises excited were only so many heavenly a.s.surances that I was indeed one of the elected few predestined to eternal and unspeakable happiness. He caressed me--very often he caressed me. But even now, Mary, that I see clearly much that was then concealed, I cannot comprehend the sort of effect this had upon me. I think that had he asked me to marry him, I should have been conscious of the disparity of his age; and I think, too, that I should have been startled and shocked at discovering that his love, always so fervently expressed, and often shown by tender endearments, was in anyway an earthly love. And yet, weak and inconsistent creatures that we are! when I discovered that the object of my mother's last sudden journey to town, in which I accompanied her--when I discovered that her purpose was to marry Mr. Cartwright, the sick faintness that seemed to seize upon my heart and creep over all my limbs convinced me for a moment that I loved him ... not as I fancied I did, dear Mary, as a lower angel might love one of higher order, but with a love of a weak sinful woman. The tortures I endured that night can never be obliterated from my mind; a terrified conscience and a wounded heart seemed struggling together, as if to try which could torment me most. But the struggle did not last long. My heart--at least all that was tender and womanly in it--appeared to turn to stone, and was tranquil enough as far as any feelings connected with love for Mr. Cartwright were concerned; but religious terrors, frightful, hideous, almost maddening, took possession of me. I believed that the crime I had committed in loving the man whom Heaven had ordained to be my spiritual teacher, was a deadly sin. I now felt certain--or, in the language of the sect, an inward a.s.surance, that I was pre-doomed to eternal perdition; and that the belief I had once entertained, exactly contrary to this, was of itself a sin never to be atoned, and only to be punished by eternal flames.

Is there another torture of the mind equal to this? I do not think it; for true and reasonable remorse for crimes really committed cannot approach it. Not all the sins that man ever laid upon his soul could equal in atrocity what my guilt seemed to me. I suppose I was mad, quite mad; for as I now recall the hours that pa.s.sed over me, and all the horrid images of the avenging fury of an angry G.o.d which entered and rested upon my spirit, I can call the state I was in nothing short of madness.

"This state lasted, with little variation in the amount of suffering, during the first week after my mother's marriage; and then its feverish violence gave place to sullen, heavy gloom. The cure however was near, very near me, for I found it in Mr. Cartwright himself.

"It was some trifling instance of contemptible artifice which first drew aside the veil from my mental vision, and caused me to see Mr. Cartwright, not as he is--oh no! that has been a work of steady study, and some length of time,--but as something of a very different species from that to which I had fancied he belonged.

"One must have been under a delusion as complete as mine has been, to conceive the sensation produced by once more seeing things as they are. I can compare it only to walking out of a region peopled with phantoms and shadows into a world filled with sober, solid realities. It is the phantom world which produces the strongest effect on the imagination; and the first effect of the change was to make everything around me seem most earthly dull, stale, and unprofitable. I was still, however, a fanatic; I still deemed myself one of those foredoomed to eternal destruction. But one blessed day, some time after I had become convinced that Mr. Cartwright was a very pitiful scoundrel, I chanced to hear him in sweet and solemn accents expound his scheme of providence to one of our distant neighbours who came here to pa.s.s the morning, and who seemed well disposed to listen to him. I saw that every word he said, rendered soothing and attractive by the gentle kindness of his manner and the eloquent commentary of his eyes, was making its way to the poor lady's soul, just as a year before the selfsame words and looks had worked their way to mine.

"It was at that moment I felt the first doubts of the truth of the doctrine I had imbibed from him. For himself I had long felt the most profound contempt; but I had hitherto shrunk from the impiety of confounding the doctrine and the teacher.

Something artificial and forced in his manner recalled by the force of contrast the voice and look of our dear Mr. Wallace; and then came the bold but blessed thought that the awful dogmas by which he had kept my soul in thrall might be as false and worthless as himself. My recovery from my mental malady may be dated from that hour. Every day that has pa.s.sed since has led me back nearer and nearer, I hope, to the happy state (of religious feeling at least) in which Mr. Cartwright found me.

But the more fully I recover my senses, the more fully I become aware of the sad change he has wrought in every thing else. Not only do we all creep like permitted slaves through the house that we once felt to be our own, but he has stolen our mother from us. Poor, poor mamma! how dearly did she love us! how dearly did we love her! Where is the feeling gone? She has never quarrelled with us; with me, particularly, she has never expressed herself displeased in any way;--and yet her love seems blighted and dried up, as if some poisonous breath had blasted it;--and so it has--placid and fair as is the outward seeming of this hateful man, I question not but every hour brings forth some sorry trick to draw her farther from us.

Poor, poor mamma! I know this cannot last; and when she finds him out--how dreadful will her feelings be!

"Then, too, I have another sorrow, my dear Mary, which tarnishes, though it cannot destroy, the joy of my return to reason. While the fit lasted, I believed it a part of my dark duty to keep Helen and Rosalind, and our poor exiled Charles, as much at a distance from me as possible; and now I hardly dare to hope that this can ever be quite forgotten by them. I have not courage to enter with them into an explanation as full as this which I have now given you; yet, till I do this, I cannot hope that they will either understand or forgive me.

"If Charles were at home, I think the task would be easier; but Rosalind and Helen both seem to avoid me. I believe they are too miserable themselves to look much at me, or they might see that I no longer turned from them as I did some months ago. All this, however, may some day or other come right again. But what is to become of poor Charles? I feel convinced this hypocrite will never rest till he has robbed him of his inheritance; and I sometimes think that as the doing this must be the act of my mother, it would be right in me to put her on her guard against his machinations. But this can only be done by opening her eyes to his real character; and though I think I could do this, I tremble at the misery into which it would plunge her.--But this is going beyond your request, dear Mary. You cannot be ignorant that my unhappy mother's marriage has plunged us all in misery; and there is little kindness in impressing this truth upon you when your own bright prospects ought to occupy you with pleasant thoughts of future happiness. Forgive me! and believe me with every wish that this happiness may be as great and as lasting as the nature of human life can permit,

"Your ever affectionate friend,

"f.a.n.n.y MOWBRAY."

Some people might have found the perusal of these letters sufficient to damp the ardour of their curiosity in the pursuit of private information; but it had not this effect upon Mr. Cartwright. He even doubted whether he should not suffer this letter of f.a.n.n.y's to reach its destination for the same reason that he had permitted that of her friend to reach hers--namely, the procuring a reply. But upon a re-perusal,--for he gave himself the gratification of reading it twice,--he tore it into tiny atoms, and then lighted a bougie to set fire to the fragments.

The next letter of any importance which fell into his hands by the same means must also be given to the reader, as it contains some important information which, as it immediately shared the same fate as that of f.a.n.n.y's, remained for a considerable time unknown to the person it most concerned, as well as to all others.

This letter was addressed to Helen from one whom beyond all others in the wide world it would best have pleased her to receive any token of remembrance or attention. It came from Colonel Harrington, and contained the following lines:

"Were Miss Mowbray placed in other circ.u.mstances--were not all proper access to her barred by the hateful influence of an alien and a stranger to her and to her blood, I should not thus venture to address her. All application to your mother and natural guardian would be, we know but too well, in vain: nay, there is every reason to believe that any application to yourself through her would never be permitted to reach you.

But, rascal as this Cartwright has proved himself, I presume he does not tamper with the post; and it is therefore by this vulgar and ordinary medium that I determine to make known to you what it is great misery to conceal. Yet, after all, in saying, '_Helen, I love you_,' I think I say nothing that you do not know already. But, nevertheless, it is delightful to say it; and were I, sweet Helen, once more within reach of being heard by you, I might perchance weary you with the repet.i.tion of it.

"But this is not all I have to say, though it is only in the supposition of your listening to this without anger that I dare proceed. I believe, Helen, I ought to say something--a great deal perhaps about my presumption--and my fears, and I know not what beside,--but the simple truth is, that being quite conscious I loved you, and not feeling the least reason or wish to conceal it, my manner and words, too, I believe, must have let you into the secret the last time we met; and those dear eyes, with their long eyelashes, so constantly as they are before me, would long ago have looked me into despair if the memory of one soft glance at parting had not permitted me to hope. My father and mother, Helen, know that I love you, and that all my future happiness hangs on your consenting to become my wife, _even without your mother's consent_. Why should I conceal from you that I know it will be refused?--Why should I not frankly and fairly tell you at once, my beloved Helen, that something very like an elopement must be resorted to before you can be mine?--But what an elopement! It will only be to the house of your G.o.dmother, who already loves you as her child; and who not only sanctions my addressing you, but has commissioned me to say that she shall never know any thing approaching happiness till she can take you in her arms and call you her real daughter and her William's wife. For my father,--you know his oddities,--he declares that if you will come to Oakley and frankly consent to be his daughter, it will be the happiest moment of his life when he puts your hand in mine, and calls you so. But he swears l.u.s.tily, Helen, that no application to your mother shall ever be made with his consent.

This is rough wooing, sweet one! But do I overrate the generosity of your temper when I express my belief that you will not suffer what is inevitable, to destroy hopes that smile so sweetly on us?

"Address your answer to Oakley, Helen: write it, if you will, to my mother. Dear and precious as one little line of kindness would be to me, I will not ask it if your proud heart would find it easier to open itself to her than to me. But keep me not long in suspense; before I shall have sealed my letter, I shall feel sick because the answer to it is not come. My regiment is not going abroad. This change in its destination was only known to us on Friday last.--Farewell! How wholly does my fate hang upon your answer!

"Ever, ever yours,

"WILLIAM HARRINGTON."

The destruction of this letter was attended with a feeling of pleasure greatly superior both in quality and extent to that which he received from watching spark after spark die away from the fading embers of poor f.a.n.n.y's long epistle. That was merely a matter of mawkish sentiment; this was an affair of business. "But Miss Helen shall have a lover, nevertheless." It was thus he ended his cogitation. "My cousin Stephen will not fail me. This evening he will be here with what will make the young lady's hand worth just as much as I please, and no more: and if my worthy cousin likes her, he shall have her." And as he thought these words, a smile curled his lips, and he playfully blackened the paper, and singed it, and finally set it in a blaze, uttering aloud as the flame expired, "A lieutenant-colonel of dragoons _versus_ the Vicar of Wrexhill."