Hopes and Fears or, scenes from the life of a spinster

‘Did you ever play at bagatelle?’

He stared in displeased surprise.

‘Did you never see the ball go joggling about before it could settle into its hole, and yet abiding there very steadily at last?  Look on quietly, and you will see the poor fellow as sober a parish priest as yourself.’

‘You are a very philosophical spectator of the process,’ Robert said, still displeased.

‘Just consider what a capacious swallow the poor boy had in his tender infancy, and how hard it was crammed with legends, hymns, and allegories, with so many scruples bound down on his poor little conscience, that no wonder, when the time of expansion came, the whole concern should give way with a jerk.’

‘I thought Miss Charlecote’s education had been most anxiously admirable.’

‘Precisely so!  Don’t you see?  Why, how dull you are for a man who has been to Oxford!’

‘I should seriously be glad to hear your view, for Owen’s course has always been inexplicable to me.’

‘To you, poor Robin, who lived gratefully on the crumbs of our advantages!  The point was that to you they were crumbs, while we had a surfeit.’

‘Owen never seemed overdone.  I used rather to hate him for his faultlessness, and his familiarity with what awed my ignorance.’

‘The worse for him!  He was too apt a scholar, and received all unresisting, unsifting—Anglo-Catholicism, slightly touched with sentiment, enthusiasm for the Crusades, passive obedience—acted faithfully up to it; imagined that to be “not a good Churchman,” as he told Charles, expressed the seven deadly sins, and that reasoning was the deadliest of all!’

‘As far as I understand you, you mean that there was not sufficient distinction between proven and non-proven—important and unimportant.’

‘You begin to perceive.  If Faith be overworked, Reason kicks; and, of course, when Owen found the Holt was not the world; that thinking was not the exclusive privilege of demons; that habits he considered as imperative duties were inconvenient, not to say impracticable; that his articles of faith included much of the apocryphal,—why, there was a general downfall!’

‘Poor Miss Charlecote,’ sighed Robert, ‘it is a disheartening effect of so much care.’

‘She should have let him alone, then, for Uncle Kit to make a sailor of.  Then he would have had something better to do than to think!’

‘Then you are distressed about him?’ said Robert, wistfully.

‘Thank you,’ said she, laughing; ‘but you see I am too wise ever to think or distress myself.  He’ll think himself straight in time, and begin a reconstruction from his scattered materials, I suppose, and meantime he is a very comfortable brother, as such things go; but it is one of the grudges I can’t help owing to Honora, that such a fine fellow as that is not an independent sailor or soldier, able to have some fun, and not looked on as a mere dangler after the Holt.’

‘I thought the reverse was clearly understood?’

‘She ought to have “acted as sich.”  How my relatives, and yours too, would laugh if you told them so!  Not that I think, like them, that it is Elizabethan dislike to naming a successor, nor to keep him on his good behaviour; she is far above that, but it is plain how it will he.  The only other relation she knows in the world is farther off than we are—not a bit more of a Charlecote, and twice her age; and when she has waited twenty or thirty years longer for the auburn-haired lady my father saw in a chapel at Toronto, she will bethink herself that Owen, or Owen’s eldest son, had better have it than the Queen.  That’s the sense of it; but I hate the hanger-on position it keeps him in.’

‘It is a misfortune,’ said Robert.  ‘People treat him as a man of expectations, and at his age it would not be easy to disown them, even to himself.  He has an eldest son air about him, which makes people impose on him the belief that he is one; and yet, who could have guarded against the notion more carefully than Miss Charlecote?’

‘I’m of Uncle Kit’s mind,’ said Lucilla, ‘that children should be left to their natural guardians.  What! is Lolly really moving before I have softened down the edge of my ingratitude?’

‘So!’ said Miss Charteris, as she brought up the rear of the procession of ladies on the stairs.

Lucilla faced about on the step above, with a face where interrogation was mingled with merry defiance.

‘So that is why the Calthorp could not get a word all the livelong dinner-time!’

‘Ah!  I used you ill; I promised you an opportunity of studying “Cock Robin,” but you see I could not help keeping him myself—I had not seen him for so long.’

‘You were very welcome!  It is the very creature that baffles me.  I can talk to any animal in the world except an incipient parson.’

‘Owen, for instance?’

‘Oh! if people choose to put a force on nature, there can be no general rules.  But, Cilly, you know I’ve always said you should marry whoever you liked; but I require another assurance—on your word and honour—that you are not irrevocably Jenny Wren as yet!’

‘Did you not see the currant wine?’ said Cilly, pulling leaves off a myrtle in a tub on the stairs, and scattering them over her cousin.

‘Seriously, Cilly!  Ah, I see now—your exclusive attention to him entirely reassures me.  You would never have served him so, if you had meant it.’

‘It was commonplace in me,’ said Lucilla, gravely, ‘but I could not help it; he made me feel so good—or so bad—that I believe I shall—’

‘Not give up the salmon,’ cried Horatia.  ‘Cilly, you will drive me to commit matrimony on the spot.’

‘Do,’ said Lucilla, running lightly up, and dancing into the drawing-room, where the ladies were so much at their ease, on low couches and ottomans, that Phœbe stood transfixed by the novelty of a drawing-room treated with such freedom as was seldom permitted in even the schoolroom at Beauchamp, when Miss Fennimore was in presence.

‘Phœbe, bright Phœbe!’ cried Lucilla, pouncing on both her hands, and drawing her towards the other room, ‘it is ten ages since I saw you, and you must bring your taste to aid my choice of the fly costume.  Did you hear, Rashe?  I’ve a bet with Lord William that I appear at the ball all in flies.  Isn’t it fun?’

‘Oh, jolly!’ cried Horatia.  ‘Make yourself a pike-fly.’

‘No, no; not a guy for any one.  Only wear a trimming of salmon-flies, which will be lovely.’

‘You do not really mean it?’ said Phœbe.

‘Mean it?  With all my heart, in spite of the tremendous sacrifice of good flies.  Where honour is concerned—’

‘There, I knew you would not shirk.’

‘Did I ever say so?’—in a whisper, not unheard by Phœbe, and affording her so much satisfaction that she only said, in a grave, puzzled voice, ‘The hooks?’

‘Hooks and all,’ was the answer.  ‘I do nothing by halves.’

‘What a state of mind the fishermen will be in! proceeded Horatia.  ‘You’ll have every one of them at your feet.’

‘I shall tell them that two of a trade never agree.  Come, and let us choose.’  And opening a drawer, Lucilla took out her long parchment book, and was soon eloquent on the merits of the doctor, the butcher, the duchess, and all her other radiant fabrications of gold pheasants’ feathers, parrot plumes, jays’ wings, and the like.  Phœbe could not help admiring their beauty, though she was perplexed all the while, uncomfortable on Robert’s account, and yet not enough assured of the usages of the London world to be certain whether this were unsuitable.  The Charteris family, though not of the most élite circles of all, were in one to which the Fulmorts had barely the entrée, and the ease and dash of the young ladies, Lucilla’s superior age, and caressing patronage, all made Phœbe in her own eyes too young and ignorant to pass an opinion.  She would have known more about the properties of a rectangle or the dangers of a paper currency.

Longing to know what Miss Charlecote thought, she stood, answering as little as possible, until Rashe had been summoned to the party in the outer room, and Cilly said, laughing, ‘Well, does she astonish your infant mind?’

‘I do not quite enter into her,’ said Phœbe, doubtfully.

‘The best-natured and most unappreciated girl in the world.  Up to anything, and only a victim to prejudice.  You, who have a strong-minded governess, ought to be superior to the delusion that it is interesting to be stupid and helpless.’

‘I never thought so,’ said Phœbe, feeling for a moment in the wrong, as Lucilla always managed to make her antagonists do.

‘Yes, you do, or why look at me in that pleading, perplexed fashion, save that you have become possessed with the general prejudice.  Weigh it, by the light of Whately’s logic, and own candidly wherefore Rashe and I should be more liable to come to grief, travelling alone, than two men of the same ages.’

‘I have not grounds enough to judge,’ said Phœbe, beginning as though Miss Fennimore were giving an exercise to her reasoning powers; then, continuing with her girlish eagerness of entreaty, ‘I only know that it cannot be right, since it grieves Robin and Miss Charlecote so much.’

‘And all that grieves Robin and Miss Charlecote must be shocking, eh?  Oh, Phœbe, what very women all the Miss Fennimores in the world leave us, and how lucky it is!’