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

Phœbe explained.

‘From Mervyn and his spy one could expect no delicacy,’ said Bertha, ‘but in you it was treachery.’

‘No, Bertha,’ said Phœbe, ‘I was grieved to expose you, but it was my duty to clear the innocent by examining the letter, and Mervyn had a right to know what concerned you when you were under his charge.  It is our business to save you, and a letter sent in this way does not stand on the same ground as one coming openly under your own name.  But I did not read it to him, Bertha—not all.’

‘If you had,’ said Bertha, more piqued than obliged by this reserve, ‘he would have known it was in earnest and not childish nonsense.  You saw that it was earnest, Phœbe?’ and her defiant voice betrayed a semi-distrust.

‘I am afraid it looked very much so,’ said Phœbe; ‘but, Bertha, that would be saddest of all.  I am afraid he might be wicked enough to be trying to get your fortune, for indeed—don’t be very much vexed, dearest, I am only saying it for your good—you are not old enough, nor formed, nor pretty enough, really to please a man that has seen so much of the world.’

‘He never met so fresh, or original, or so highly cultivated a mind,’ said Bertha; ‘besides, as to features, there may be different opinions!’

‘But, Bertha, how could you ever see him or speak to him?’

‘Hearts can find more ways than you dream of,’ said Bertha, with a touch of sentiment; ‘we had only to meet for the magnetism of mind to be felt!’

Argument was heartless work.  Flattery and the glory of her conquest had entirely filled the child’s mind, and she despised Mervyn and Phœbe far too much for the representations of the one or the persuasions of the other to have the smallest weight with her.  Evidently, weariness of her studies, and impatience of discipline had led her to lend a willing ear to any distraction, and to give in to the intercourse that both gratified and amused herself and outwitted her governess, and thence the belief in the power of her own charms, and preference for their admirer, were steps easier than appeared credible to Phœbe.  From listening in helpless amaze to a miserable round of pertness and philosophy, Phœbe was called down-stairs to hear that Mervyn had been examining Jane Hart, and had elicited from her that after having once surprised Mr. Hastings and Miss Bertha in conversation, she had several times conveyed notes between them, and since he had left Beauchamp, she had posted two letters to him from the young lady, but this was the first answer received, directed to herself, to be left at the post-office to be called for.

‘Earnest enough on his part,’ said Mervyn; ‘a regular speculation to patch up his fortunes.  Well, I knew enough of him, as I told you, but I was fool enough to pity him!’

He became silent, and so did Phœbe.  She had been too much overset to look the subject fairly in the face, and his very calmness of voice and the absence of abusive epithets were a token that he was perfectly appalled at what he had brought on his sisters.  They both sat still some minutes, when she saw him lean back with his hand to his head, and his eyes closed.  ‘There’s a steeple chase!’ he said, as Phœbe laid her cool hand on his burning brow, and felt the throbbing of the swollen veins of his temples.  Both knew that this meant cupping, and they sent in haste for the Hiltonbury doctor, but he was out for the day, and would not return till evening.  Phœbe felt dull and stunned, as if her decision had caused all the mischief, and more and more were following on, and her spirit almost died within her at Mervyn’s interjection of rage and suffering.

‘Though they curse, yet bless thou,’ had of necessity been her rule while clinging to this brother; a mental ejaculation had become habitual, and this time it brought reaction from her forlorn despondency.  She could do something.  Twice she had assisted in cupping, and she believed she could perform the operation.  No failure could be as hurtful as delay, and she offered to make the attempt.  Mervyn growled at her folly, yawned, groaned, looked at his watch, counted the heavy hours, and supposed she must do as she chose.

Her heart rivalled his temples in palpitation, but happily without affecting eye, voice, or hand, and with Lieschen’s help the deed was successfully done, almost with equal benefit to the operator and the patient.

Success had put new life into her; the troubles had been forgotten for the moment, and recurred not as a shameful burthen, caused by her own imprudence, but as a possible turning-point, a subject for action, not for despair, and Phœbe was herself again.

‘What’s that you are writing?’ asked Mervyn, starting from a doze on the sofa.

‘A letter to Robert,’ she answered reluctantly.

‘I suppose you will put it in the Times.  No woman can keep a thing to herself.’

‘I would tell no one else, but I wanted his advice.’

‘Oh, I dare say.’

Phœbe saw that to persist in her letter would utterly destroy the repose that was essential in Mervyn’s state, and she laid aside her pen.

‘Going to do it out of sight?’ he petulantly said.

‘No; but at any rate I will wait till Miss Fennimore has talked to Bertha.  She will be more willing to listen to her.’

‘Because this is the result of her emancipating education.  Ha!’

‘No; but Bertha will attend to her, and cannot say her notions are servile and contracted.’

‘If you say any more, I shall get up and flog them both.’

‘Miss Fennimore is very wise,’ said Phœbe.

‘Why, what has she taught you but the ologies and the Rights of Women?’

‘The chief thing she teaches,’ said Phœbe, ‘is to attend to what we are doing.’

Mervyn laughed, but did not perceive how those words were the key of Phœbe’s character.

‘Sir John and Lady Raymond and Miss Raymond in the drawing-room.’

Unappreciating the benefit of changing the current of thought, Phœbe lamented their admission, and moved reluctantly to the great rooms, where the guests looked as if they belonged to a more easy and friendly region than to that world of mirrors, damask, and gilding.

Sir John shook hands like an old friend, but his wife was one of those homely ladies who never appear to advantage in strange houses, and Phœbe had not learnt the art of ‘lady of the house’ talk, besides feeling a certain chilliness towards Mervyn’s detractors, which rendered her stiff and formal.  To her amaze, however, the languishing talk was interrupted by his entrance; he who regarded Sir John as the cause of his disappointment; he who had last met Susan Raymond at the time of his rejection; he whom she had left prostrate among the sofa cushions; he had absolutely exerted himself to brush his hair and put on coat and boots, yet how horribly ill and nervous he looked, totally devoid of his usual cool assurance, uncertain whether to shake hands with the two ladies, and showing a strange restless eagerness as though entirely shaken off his balance.

Matters were mended by his entrance.  Phœbe liked Lady Raymond from the moment she detected a sign to the vehement Sir John not to keep his host standing during the discussion of the robbery, and she ventured on expressing her gratitude for his escort on the day of the hunt.  Then arose an entreaty to view the scene of the midnight adventure, and the guests were conducted to the gallery, shown where each party had stood, the gas-pipe, the mark of the pistol-shot, and the door was opened to display the cabinet, and the window of the escape.  To the intense surprise of her brother and sister, Bertha was examining her emeralds.

She came forward quite at her ease, and if she had been ten years a woman could not more naturally have assumed the entertainment of Lady Raymond, talking so readily that Phœbe would have believed the morning’s transactions a delusion, but for Mervyn’s telegraph of astonishment.

The visitors had been at the Holt, and obtained a promise from Miss Charlecote to spend the ensuing Saturday week at Moorcroft.  They begged the sisters to accompany her.  Phœbe drew back, though Mervyn hurried out declarations of his not wanting her, and the others never going out, till she hardly knew how it had been decided; but as the guests departed she heard Mervyn severely observing to Bertha—‘no, certainly I should not send you to keep company with any well-behaved young ladies.’

‘Thank you, I have no desire to associate with commonplace girls,’ said Bertha, marching off to the west wing.

‘You will go, Phœbe,’ said Mervyn.

‘Indeed, if I did it would be partly for the sake of giving change to Bertha, and letting her see what nice people really are.’

‘Are you crazy, Phœbe?  I would not have Bertha with her impudence and her pedantry go among the Raymonds—no, not for the Bank of England.’

Those words darted into Phœbe’s mind the perception why Mervyn was, in his strange way, promoting her intercourse with Moorcroft, not only as stamping her conduct with approval of people of their worth and weight, but as affording him some slight glimmering of hope.  She could not but recollect that the extra recklessness of language which had pained her, ever since his rejection had diminished ever since her report of Sir John’s notice of her at the justice room.  Sister-like, she pitied and hoped; but the more immediate care extinguished all the rest, and she was longing for Miss Fennimore’s sympathy, though grieving at the pain the disclosure must inflict.  It could not be made till the girls were gone to bed, and at half-past nine, Phœbe sought the schoolroom, and told her tale.  There was no answer, but an almost convulsive shudder; her hand was seized, and her finger guided to the line which Miss Fennimore had been reading in the Greek Testament—‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’

Rallying before Phœbe could trace what was passing in her mind, she shut the book, turned her chair to the fire, invited Phœbe to another, and was at once the clear-headed, metaphysical governess, ready to discuss this grievous marvel.  She was too generous by nature not to have treated her pupils with implicit trust, and this trust had been abused.  Looking back, she and Phœbe could recollect moments when Bertha had been unaccounted for, and must have held interviews with Mr. Hastings.  She had professed a turn for twilight walks in the garden, and remained out of doors when the autumn evenings had sent the others in, and on the Sunday afternoons, when Phœbe and Maria had been at church, Miss Fennimore reproached herself exceedingly with having been too much absorbed in her own readings to concern herself about the proceedings of a pupil, whose time on that day was at her own disposal.  She also thought that there had been communications by look and sign across the pew at church; and she had remarked, though Phœbe had been too much occupied with her brother to perceive the restlessness that had settled on Bertha from the time of the departure of Mervyn’s guests, and had once reproved her for lingering, as she thought, to gossip with Jane Hart in her bedroom.  ‘And now,’ said Miss Fennimore, ‘she should have a thorough change.  Send her to school, calling it punishment, if you please, but chiefly for the sake of placing her among laughing girlish girls of the same age, and, above all, under a thoroughly religious mistress of wide intelligence, and who has never doubted.’

‘But we were all to keep together, dear Miss Fennimore—you—’

‘One whose mind has always been balancing between aspects of truth may instruct, but cannot educate.  Few minds can embrace the moral virtues unless they are based on an undoubted foundation, connected with present devotional warmth, and future hopes and fears.  I see this now; I once thought excellence would approve itself, for its own sake, to others, as it did to myself.  I regarded Bertha as a fair subject for a full experiment of my system, with good disposition, good abilities, and few counter influences.  I meant to cultivate self-relying, unprejudiced, effective good sense, and see—with prejudices have been rooted up restraints!’

‘Education seems to me to have little to do with what people turn out,’ said Phœbe.  ‘Look at poor Miss Charlecote and the Sandbrooks.’

‘Depend upon it, Phœbe, that whatever harm may have ensued from her errors in detail, those young people will yet bless her for the principle she worked on.  You can none of you bless me, for having guided the hands of the watch, and having left the mainspring untouched.’

Miss Fennimore had been, like Helvetius and the better class of encyclopædists, enamoured of the moral virtues, but unable to perceive that they could not be separated from the Christian faith, and she learnt like them that, when doctrine ceased to be prominent, practice went after it.  Bertha was her Jacobin—and seemed doubly so the next morning, when an interview took place, in which the young lady gave her to understand that she, like Phœbe, was devoid of the experience that would enable them to comprehend the sacred mutual duty of souls that once had spoken.  Woman was no longer the captive of the seraglio, nor the chronicler of small beer.  Intellectual training conferred rights of choice superior to conventional ties; and, as to the infallible discernment of that fifteen year old judgment, had not she the sole premises to go upon, she who alone had been admitted to the innermost of that manly existence?

‘I always knew Jack to be a clever dog,’ said Mervyn, when this was reported to him, ‘but his soft sawder to a priggish metaphysical baby must have been the best fun in the world?’

Mervyn’s great desire was to keep Bertha’s folly as great a secret as possible; and, by his decision, she was told that grace should be granted her till Mr. Crabbe’s arrival, when, unless she had renounced what he called her silly child’s fancy, stringent measures would be taken, and she would be exposed to the family censure.

‘So,’ said Bertha, ‘you expect to destroy the attraction of souls by physical force!’

And Phœbe wrote to Robert a sorrowful letter, chiefly consisting of the utmost pleadings for Mervyn and Bertha that her loving heart could frame.  She was happier when she had poured out her troubles, but grieved when no answer came by the next post.  Robert’s displeasure must be great—and indeed but too justly so—since all this mischief was the consequence of the disregard of his wishes.  Yet justice was hard between brothers and sisters, especially when Mervyn was in such a suffering state, threatened constantly by attacks of his complaint, which were only warded off by severe and weakening treatment.  Phœbe was so necessary to his comfort in waiting on him, and trying to while away his tedious hours of inaction and oppression, that she had little time to bestow upon Bertha, nor, indeed, was talking of any use, as it only gave the young lady an occasion for pouring forth magniloquent sentiments, utterly heedless of the answers.  Sad, lonely, and helpless were Phœbe’s feelings, but she was patient, and still went on step by step through the strange tangle, attending to Mervyn hour by hour, always with a gentle cheerful word and smile, and never trusting herself, even when alone, to think of the turmoil and break up that must ensue on her guardian’s arrival.