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

CHAPTER XVII

Though she’s as like to this one as a crab is like to an apple,
I can tell what I can tell.

    —King Lear

Often a first grief, where sorrow was hitherto been a stranger, is but the foretaste to many another, like the first hailstorm, after long sunshine, preluding a succession of showers, the clouds returning after the rain, and obscuring the sky of life for many a day.

Those who daily saw Mrs. Fulmort scarcely knew whether to attribute her increasing invalidism to debility or want of spirits; and hopes were built on summer heat, till, when it came, it prostrated her strength, and at last, when some casual ailment had confined her to bed, there was no rally.  All took alarm; a physician was called in, and the truth was disclosed.  There was no formed disease; but her husband’s death, though apparently hardly comprehended, had taken away the spring of life, and she was withering like a branch severed from the stem.  Remedies did but disturb her torpor by feverish symptoms that hastened her decline, and Dr. Martyn privately told Miss Charlecote that the absent sons and daughters ought to be warned that the end must be very near.

Honor, as lovingly and gently as possible, spoke to Phœbe.  The girl’s eyes filled with tears, but it was in an almost well-pleased tone that she said, ‘Dear mamma, I always knew she felt it.’

‘Ah! little did we think how deeply went the stroke that showed no wound!’

‘Yes!  She felt that she was going to him.  We could never have made her happy here.’

‘You are content, my unselfish one?’

‘Don’t talk to me about myself, please!’ implored Phœbe.  ‘I have too much to do for that.  What did he say?  That the others should be written to?  I will take my case and write in mamma’s room.’

Immediate duty was her refuge from anticipation, gentle tendance from the sense of misery, and, though her mother’s restless feebleness needed constant waiting on, her four notes were completed before post-time.  Augusta was eating red mullet in Guernsey, Juliana was on a round of visits in Scotland, Mervyn was supposed to be in Paris, Robert alone was near at hand.

At night Phœbe sent Boodle to bed; but Miss Fennimore insisted on sharing her pupil’s watch.  At first there was nothing to do; the patient had fallen into a heavy slumber, and the daughter sat by the bed, the governess at the window, unoccupied save by their books.  Phœbe was reading Miss Maurice’s invaluable counsels to the nurses of the dying.  Miss Fennimore had the Bible.  It was not from a sense of appropriateness, as in pursuance of her system of re-examination.  Always admiring the Scripture in a patronizing temper, she had gloried in critical inquiry, and regarded plenary inspiration as a superstition, covering weak points by pretensions to infallibility.  But since her discussions with Robert, and her readings of Butler with Bertha, she had begun to weigh for herself the internal, intrinsic evidence of Divine origin, above all, in the Gospels, which, to her surprise, enchained her attention and investigation, as she would have thought beyond the power of such simple words.

Pilate’s question, ‘What is truth?’ was before her.  To her it was a link of evidence.  Without even granting that the writer was the fisherman he professed to be, what, short of Shakesperian intuition, could thus have depicted the Roman of the early Empire in equal dread of Cæsar and of the populace, at once unscrupulous and timid, contemning Jewish prejudice, yet, with lingering mythological superstition, trembling at the hint of a present Deity in human form; and, lost in the bewilderment of the later Greek philosophy, greeting the word truth with the startled inquiry, what it might be.  What is truth?  It had been the question of Miss Fennimore’s life, and she felt a blank and a disappointment as it stood unanswered.  A movement made her look up.  Phœbe was raising her mother, and Miss Fennimore was needed to support the pillows.

‘Phœbe, my dear, are you here?’

‘Yes, dear mamma, I always am.’

‘Phœbe, my dear, I think I am soon going.  You have been a good child, my dear; I wish I had done more for you all.’

‘Dear mamma, you have always been so kind.’

‘They didn’t teach me like Honora Charlecote,’ she faltered on; ‘but I always did as your poor papa told me.  Nobody ever told me how to be religious, and your poor papa would not have liked it.  Phœbe, you know more than I do.  You don’t think God will be hard with me, do you?  I am such a poor creature; but there is the Blood that takes away sin.’

‘Dear mother, that is the blessed trust.’

‘The Truth,’ flashed upon Miss Fennimore, as she watched their faces.

‘Will He give me His own goodness?’ said Mrs. Fulmort, wistfully.  ‘I never did know how to think about Him—I wish I had cared more.  What do you think, Phœbe?’

‘I cannot tell how to answer fully, dear mamma,’ said Phœbe; ‘but indeed it is safe to think of His great loving-kindness and mercy.  Robert will be here to-morrow.  He will tell you better.’

‘He will give me the Holy Sacrament,’ said Mrs. Fulmort, ‘and then I shall go—’

Presently she moved uneasily.  ‘Oh, Phœbe, I am so tired.  Nothing rests me.’

‘There remaineth a rest,’ gently whispered Phœbe—and Miss Fennimore thought the young face had something of the angel in it—‘no more weariness there.’

‘They won’t think what a poor dull thing I am there,’ added her mother.  ‘I wish I could take poor Maria with me.  They don’t like her here, and she will be teased and put about.’

‘No, mother, never while I can take care of her!’

‘I know you will, Phœbe, if you say so.  Phœbe, love, when I see God, I shall thank Him for having made you so good and dear, and letting me have some comfort in one of my children.’

Phœbe tried to make her think of Robert, but she was exhausted, dozed, and was never able to speak so much again.

Miss Fennimore thought instead of reading.  Was it the mere effect on her sympathies that bore in on her mind that Truth existed, and was grasped by the mother and daughter?  What was there in those faltering accents that impressed her with reality?  Why, of all her many instructors, had none touched her like poor, ignorant, feeble-minded Mrs. Fulmort?

Robert arrived the next day.  His mother knew him and was roused sufficiently to accept his offices as a clergyman.  Then, as if she thought it was expected of her, she asked for her younger daughters, but when they came, she looked distressed and perplexed.

‘Bless them, mother,’ said Robert, bending over her, and she evidently accepted this as what she wanted; but ‘How—what?’ she added; and taking the uncertain hand, he guided it to the head of each of his three sisters, and prompted the words of blessing from the failing tongue.  Then as Bertha rose, he sank on his knees in her place, ‘Bless me, bless me, too, mother; bless me, and pardon my many acts of self-will.’

‘You are good—you—you are a clergyman,’ she hesitated, bewildered.

‘The more reason, mamma; it will comfort him.’  And it was Phœbe who won for her brother the blessing needed as balm to a bleeding heart.

‘The others are away,’ said the dying woman; ‘maybe, if I had made them good when they were little, they would not have left me now.’

While striving to join in prayer for them, she slumbered, and in the course of the night she slept herself tranquilly away from the world where even prosperity had been but a troubled maze to her.

Augusta arrived, weeping profusely, but with all her wits about her, so as to assume the command, and to provide for her own, and her Admiral’s comfort.  Phœbe was left to the mournful repose of having no one to whom to attend, since Miss Fennimore provided for the younger ones; and in the lassitude of bodily fatigue and sorrow, she shrank from Maria’s babyish questions and Bertha’s levity and curiosity, spending her time chiefly alone.  Even Robert could not often be with her, since Mervyn’s absence and silence threw much on him and Mr. Crabbe, the executor and guardian; and the Bannermans were both exacting and self-important.  The Actons, having been pursued by their letters from place to place in the Highlands, at length arrived, and Mervyn last of all, only just in time for the funeral.

Phœbe did not see him till the evening after it, when, having spent the day nearly alone, she descended to the late dinner, and after the quietness in which she had lately lived, and with all the tenderness from fresh suffering, it seemed to her that she was entering on a distracting turmoil of voices.  Mervyn, however, came forward at once to meet her, threw his arm round her, and kissed her rather demonstratively, saying, ‘My little Phœbe, I wondered where you were;’ then putting her into a chair, and bending over her, ‘We are in for the funeral games.  Stand up for yourself!’

She did not know in the least what he could mean, but she was too sick at heart to ask; she only thought he looked unwell, jaded, and fagged, and with a heated complexion.

He handed Lady Acton into the dining-room; Augusta, following with Sir Bevil, was going to the head of the table, when he called out, ‘That’s Phœbe’s place!’

‘Not before my elders,’ Phœbe answered, trying to seat herself at the side.

‘The sister at home is mistress of the house,’ he sternly answered.  ‘Take your proper place, Phœbe.’

In much discomfort she obeyed, and tried to attend civilly to Sir Nicholas’s observations on the viands, hoping to intercept a few, as she perceived how they chafed her eldest brother.

At last, on Mervyn himself roundly abusing the flavour of the ice-pudding, Augusta not only defended it, but confessed to having herself directed Mrs. Brisbane to the concoction that morning.

‘Mrs. Brisbane shall take orders from no lady but Miss Fulmort, while she is in my house,’ thundered Mervyn.

Phœbe, in agony, began to say she knew not what to Sir Bevil, and he seconded her with equal vehemence and incoherency, till by the time they knew what they were talking of, they were with much interest discussing his little daughter, scarcely turning their heads from one another, till, in the midst of dessert, the voice of Juliana was heard,—‘Sir Bevil, Sir Bevil, if you can spare me any attention—What was the name of that person at Hampstead that your sister told me of?’

‘That person!  What, where poor Anne Acton was boarded?  Dr. Graham, he called himself, but I don’t believe he was a physician.  Horrid vulgar fellow!’

‘Excellent for the purpose, though,’ continued Lady Acton, addressing herself as before to Mr. Crabbe; ‘advertises for nervous or deficient ladies, and boards them on very fair terms: would take her quite off our hands.’

Phœbe turned a wild look of imploring interrogation on Sir Bevil, but a certain family telegraph had electrified him, and his eyes were on the grapes that he was eating with nervous haste.  Her blood boiling at what she apprehended, Phœbe could endure her present post no longer, and starting up, made the signal for leaving the dinner-table so suddenly that Augusta choked upon her glass of wine, and carried off her last macaroon in her hand.  Before she had recovered breath to rebuke her sister’s precipitation, Phœbe, with boldness and spirit quite new to the sisters, was confronting Juliana, and demanding what she had been saying about Hampstead.

‘Only,’ said Juliana, coolly, ‘that I have found a capital place there for Maria—a Dr. Graham, who boards and lodges such unfortunates.  Sir Bevil had an idiot cousin there who died.  I shall write to-morrow.’