Mansfield Park Revisited

by Joan Aiken

  Later in the morning, however, a note arrived from the sister; a note brief, shaky as to orthography, suggesting all too clearly the infirmity of the writer, but warm and sincere in expressions of gratitude and a wish to meet the sister of her dear friend.

  Already the air of this place does me good! In a very few days, I am persuaded I shall be able to leave my chamber and come downstairs; then I shall look forward eagerly to hearing everything that you can tell me about your dear, dear sister and all her doings. My brother, who, alas, had to depart on business, asked to be remembered to you; he says that he recalls a very pleasant walk on the battlements of Southsea, many years ago, when you were no more than a charming child.

  Yours etc.

  Here was gratification! and in the intervals of assisting Lady Bertram to write a few replies to the notes of condolence that still came trickling in, as her elderly and distant acquaintance learned of the death of Sir Thomas, Susan was able to enjoy the idea that she had been remembered, and pleasantly, by a man who up till this day had been no more than a name to her, but was now an object of decided interest.—She was very often thinking of him. She could not put him out of her mind.

  The occupation of letter-writing was presently broken off by the arrival of Mr. Wadham, who had called to leave a pamphlet on Roman excavations for Tom Bertram, and, Tom being from home, was persuaded to stay and make his acquaintance with Lady Bertram. His quiet voice and gentle manners exerted an immediately favourable impression on that lady, and she listened very placidly to his conversation about the Mansfield parishioners and inquiries as to their families, sometimes, in her own way, sleepily responding.

  “Is he so?—did she do that?—I was not aware of it—I do not know one of those children from another—he is a very good sort of man I believe—I have not been there—very well—pray do as you think best, Mr. Wadham—I always leave those matters to Sir Thomas, or to my son Edmund.”

  Mr. Wadham probably quitted the house not much wiser than he had come, in regard to the villagers, but with a generous donation from Lady Bertram towards the Poor Basket, and with carte blanche to act as he chose in relief of the needy and chastisement of sinners, were any to be found in such a contented parish.

  At the conclusion of his visit Lady Bertram declared that she would take her rest early, as after so much exertion she found herself somewhat languid and heavy; Susan therefore accepted an invitation from Mr. Wadham to ride across the park with him in his barouche. He was going on, he said, to make the acquaintance of some outlying farmers but he knew that his sister would be happy to see Miss Price and he could drop her at the Parsonage. This exactly fell in with Susan’s wish to tell Mrs. Osborne about the invalid at the White House, and ask for her counsel and assistance in mitigating the newcomer’s lonely lot.

  —She found that as a newsbearer she had been anticipated by the butcher’s boy giving the information to the Parsonage cook that there was a sad sick lady at the White House who took nothing but beef tea and toast gruel. Mrs. Osborne had already been deliberating with herself whether she should not immediately call on the new arrival and offer her services; she listened with great interest to all Susan had to tell about Lady Ormiston or Miss Crawford.

  The name Crawford struck her at once, and she inquired, “Did you not say, my dear, that the lady had been brought here by her brother?”

  “Yes, ma’am, Mr. Henry Crawford. He escorted her here and has now left again.”

  “Henry Crawford. Gracious me!—Yes, of course it must be the same. How very curious. Henry Crawford—well, well—I fear he was a much-maligned man.”

  “Dear ma’am, what can you mean?”

  “In a way—” looking consideringly at Susan “the tale is hardly fit for your ears, young as you are. Yet, since you are in all probability to meet the sister—and since your own sister Fanny was in some way concerned—perhaps I had best tell you, if only to clear the poor gentleman’s reputation of an undeserved slur, which, so far as I know, he has borne unprotestingly.”

  Her curiosity naturally whetted to an extreme degree by these remarks, Susan could only gaze at Mrs. Osborne wide-eyed. That lady continued: “I heard the tale myself from Mrs. Norris, before her strength had completely declined, you know; she would be talking for ever about her niece, and the rights and wrongs of the business. Mrs. Norris, of course, thought nothing too good for her niece and felt that she had received a most undeserved rebuff. Well! Maria, it seemed, had a violent partiality for this Henry Crawford; nevertheless she committed the supreme folly of marrying another man, a man of far greater fortune who commanded neither her affection nor her respect. It seemed that Mr. Crawford had not reciprocated Maria’s feelings; yet she must have had hopes of him for when, wearied out by impatience and incompatibility, she finally left her husband, it was to Mr. Crawford that she turned. But he, according to Mrs. Norris, rejected her wholly, baldly informing her that he did not love her, had never loved her, that he loved another; in short, he turned her from his door.”

  “Good heavens, ma’am! Are you sure of this?”

  “As sure as a person may be; for Mrs. Norris, in her eagerness to dissociate her niece from the slur of adultery, showed me letters—a letter from Maria to Crawford, still urging him, still beseeching him to relent; and his to her, even more adamant in refusal, enclosing her own note and requesting that he be spared the harassment of further correspondence.”

  “Where was she then? Whither had she gone?”

  “She was staying with her sister. Mrs. Norris gave me to understand that, at the same time as the elder sister had rashly quitted her husband’s roof, the younger one, who at that time was visiting friends in London, had eloped with the man whom she subsequently married.”

  “What?” cried Susan, to whom this came as utterly unheard-of and most startling news. That Julia Yates—now so high, at least in her own esteem, so well-conducted, such a pattern of worthy, frugal, impeccable respectability—could once have been so recklessly imprudent as to elope, was quite astonishing, hardly to be credited.

  “Oh, I fancy it was all quickly hushed up and smoothed over; the young couple went to Gretna Green and married, and her father was then persuaded to receive them. Maria, apparently, had staid with them as far as Stamford, still in hopes that Crawford might be brought to change his mind. When he would not, in fury and bitterness of spirit, she determined that as her good name was irrevocably lost, she would take good care to blacken his, and would prevent him from marrying the woman he really loved. She therefore wrote her father that she was under Mr. Crawford’s protection, and let it be thought that he was to blame for the rupture of her marriage.”

  “Perhaps,” Susan said doubtingly, “he was at least partly to blame; at least, so I have always been given to understand by my sister. He was a sad flirt, Fanny told me.”

  “More than probably there was blame on both sides; it is generally so in these cases where young people have behaved imprudently and allowed their feelings to run ahead of their judgment. I daresay the gentleman had encouraged hopes which he had no intention of fulfilling. But then she had committed the far worse sin of marrying a man whom she did not love; marrying him for the sake of money and position.”

  “So—good heavens—poor thing, she was punished heavily enough for the mere commission of an imprudent marriage. If it is true that she did not go off with Mr. Crawford—if she quitted her husband alone—what occasion was there for her to live in such disgrace and seclusion? Why could she not return to her father’s house? It seems to me that she had damned herself, all to no purpose.”

  “Pride, Miss Price: pride and anger made her adhere to her resolve, once she had told her tale, to stand by her course. She wished Crawford to suffer; and she could not bear it to be known that he had absolutely repulsed her. She told me once, furthermore, in a mood of reckless bitterness, that anything would be better than returning to Mansfield ‘to be lec
tured by Sir Thomas and preached at by Edmund and despised by the neighbours who had admired her before.’ Life with an aunt who doatd on her, even in remote and confined circumstances, was greatly to be preferred. ‘At least here I am independent and can do as I choose,’ she told me. It gives me pain to suggest that she was merely waiting for the demise of her aunt, but one could not help suspecting such to be the case. Maria is a person of high spirit and strong passions—not to be guided by the advice of others. It did not trouble her that, by pretending to be worse than she was, she had caused her father inexpressible pain. ‘He thinks me abandoned to vice; let him continue to think so,’ she asserted. ‘I would have had Crawford if I could; my father is right enough there. If the sin were in resolution, not commission, I have sinned. And now I care nothing what is thought about me!’”

  Thunderstruck, aghast at these revelations of destructive passion and thwarted love, Susan could only sit silent, pondering over the story.

  “And so poor Mr. Crawford has suffered all these years un-deservedly—has borne the reputation of a seducer when he had done nothing? I wonder he would make no attempt to clear his name.”

  “Perhaps, like Maria, he did not care; having lost the woman he loved, he was not interested in mere vindication.”

  Again Susan sat silent, thinking of Mr. Crawford, who had never married, but lived ever since on his property in Norfolk, shooting his coverts and taking care of his tenants, remembering Fanny.

  “Well, my child,” said Mrs. Osborne cheerfully, “you look mighty grave, and so you should! It is a moral tale indeed! Do not marry for money, do not engage in flirtation with young men, do not attempt to revenge yourself by blackening another’s name.”

  “I am not like to do any of those things,” replied Susan smiling. “Fortunately for me, Mansfield contains none of the needful ingredients. There is nobody to flirt with, no rich suitor begging for my hand, and not a soul on whom I wish to be revenged at present.—I wonder,” she added musingly, almost to herself, “what my cousin Maria will do now? In London?”

  “Oh—very likely she will meet with no worse fate than many another whose first essay into matrimony has been disastrous—she will set forward on a second attempt, and may next time, with more experience and more reasonable hopes, achieve greater success. My brother Frank would scold, to hear me talk thus, but so it is; many a second marriage, when the parties are of more rational age and peaceable temper, has a firmer basis and promises better than one scrambled together amid the ardours and fervours of hot-headed youth and blind first love.”

  “Then you yourself, ma’am—” ventured Susan, greatly daring, “would you think it desirable to embark on a second marriage?”

  Mrs. Osborne laughed heartily.

  “Ah—” shaking her head “you have properly caught me there! No, my dear—never! Having been so fortunate as to achieve perfect felicity in one of those hot-headed young first marriages I have just been decrying—I forget whether it was a week or ten days between our first meeting and the marriage ceremony—I would never be so rash as to venture upon a second. But—good gracious—there is the church clock striking noon. We have gossiped away the entire morning.”

  ***

  Several of the ensuing days were fine enough to permit Lady Bertram to sit out on the terrace in the shade, languidly calling out a few directions to the gardeners, while Susan picked flowers for the drawing-room and little Mary set out her dolls on the flagstones and wrapped them in coverlids of leaves.

  All were thus peacefully employed one morning when Tom came riding back from Thornton Lacey, looking hot and out of humour; at the same moment Julia Yates’s chariot rolled to a halt in front of the house, and Julia alighted from it, accompanied by her children and her sister-in-law.

  Susan always experienced a slight sinking of the spirit at the advent of Miss Yates. That young lady had brought to a fine art the quelling of pretension—or what she held to be pretension—in persons from classes of society lower than her own; as an earl’s daughter, she naturally felt herself the equal of anybody in the kingdom, and higher than most. A Susan Price, coming from a shabby naval household in Portsmouth, her father no more than a lieutenant of Marines, her grandfather heaven knows what, must naturally come quite beneath Miss Yates’s notice. Consequently if Susan happened to cross Charlotte’s line of vision she generally contrived to remove her gaze elsewhere; and if Miss Price should for any reason address her, she would give a slight start, as if her thoughts had to be summoned back from an unimaginable distance, and emit a kind of languid gasp of surprise. “Oh—did you say something, Miss Price? I did not quite catch—”

  Julia, when away from her sister-in-law, could be meddlesome, interfering, and captious enough, but was not wholly inaccessible to reason. When in the company of Miss Yates, however, Julia was accustomed to follow her style and turns of talk and to imitate her fashion of ignoring Susan, or—if Susan were to be noticed—treating her in a haughty and slighting manner, as though her very existence were a matter of question.

  Lady Bertram, of course, observed nothing of this, and liked Miss Yates very well, only complaining that she talked too quick and that her voice was so soft that none of her remarks could be heard.

  Susan bore with the bad manners of her cousin, and her cousin’s sister-in-law as good-naturedly and philosophically as she could, going about her usual occupations in their presence, answering when addressed, which was seldom, and, in general, speaking as little as possible and keeping herself in the background.

  On the present occasion, however, this policy proved impracticable.

  Tom, having handed over his horse to a groom, came striding round the corner of the house with no very amiable expression on his countenance, addressed a few perfunctory greetings to his sister and Miss Yates, saluted his mother, and then directly approached Susan.

  “Susan! How in the world does it come about that those disreputable people, the Crawfords, the ones who brought all the trouble, are established in the White House, and that you are in communication with them? What can you be thinking of? Are you gone quite mad?”

  His remark brought a chorus of exclamation from the females on the terrace.

  “The Crawfords? Why, Tom, you cannot mean those odious people—?” from Julia.

  “Dear me! The Crawfords! How singular!” from Miss Yates; and even Lady Bertram, who had been dozing, opened her eyes and murmured plaintively, “Pray, what is the matter, Tom? What is it that has happened?”

  Susan remained silent for a moment, from a wish to collect her thoughts, while all eyes were turned upon her. Then she said,

  “As to how the arrangement came to be made in the first place, Tom, your own agent must know that better than I. It was Claypole, your attorney, who managed the business and chose the tenants—”

  “Yes; and I shall soon say something pretty sharp to that gentleman, if he can take care of my business no better than to be installing such people—the very last one would wish to have about the place. But how comes it, Susan, that you have positively been engaging in correspondence with them—going behind all our backs in this secret, independent, self-regarding manner? Your position here is hardly such as to justify such liberties!” With even greater indignation he went on, “I was riding through the village just now when up comes Mrs. Osborne to me, she having just stept out of the White House. ‘Ah, Sir Thomas,’ says she to me—as if I were Jackson the carpenter, or anybody—‘Ah, Sir Thomas, as I see you are on the way home, perhaps you would be good enough to convey a message to your cousin, Miss Price?’ What could I do but comply, though with no very good grace—being employed as a common messenger, in such a way, by such a person, is not just in my style—on such a hot day, too, and when I was in haste to get home. ‘Pray command me, ma’am,’ I said however, ‘what is it that you wished to ask Miss Price?’ ‘Oh it is not for myself,’ she said then, as calmly as if it was noth
ing out of the ordinary, ‘but I have just been visiting Lady Ormiston, Miss Crawford as she used to be, in the White House, and she asks me to send her compliments to Miss Price and say that she finds herself still very much pulled down by the effects of her journey, unable as yet to leave her bed; but nonetheless she will be very happy if Miss Price will do her the favour of calling in a few days, perhaps on Saturday!’”

  “What?” cried Julia.

  And Miss Yates remarked coolly, looking down her aquiline nose, “How very curious, to be sure! Decidedly encroaching!”

  “The White House?’’ from Lady Bertram with a sigh. “Ah, how many years it seems since poor dear Mrs. Norris lived there.—Who are these people, Tom, that you do not seem quite pleased with?”

  “Why, ma’am, the Crawfords, you must remember the Crawfords. Do not you recall that summer when they stayed at the Parsonage—when we were all acting a play, ‘Lovers’ Vows’—and my father was so displeased with us. And very rightly so, as it turned out, for resulting from the affair my brother Edmund was in a fair way to have his head turned by that Miss Crawford—if at the last moment his hopes had not been overset by—by the consequences of the brother Henry Crawford’s behaviour towards my sister Maria—”

  He stopt, frowning, as if what he had to say further were too bad to be communicated out in the open like this, even in the presence of none but family connections.—It may also have occurred to him that his sister Julia’s marriage to Mr. Yates had been another consequence of the amateur theatricals, and the less said on that subject the better.

  Susan felt an almost overmastering impatience to divulge what she had been told by Mrs. Osborne in Crawford’s vindication and to Maria’s detriment, but, with an effort, restrained herself. Firstly she could not feel that she had a right to make public what had been told her in semi-confidence—or not at least without first applying to the teller; and in the second place she felt tolerably certain that no one would believe her. Blood is thicker than water, and Maria was still the sister of Tom and Julia, though a disgraced and disowned one; why should they chuse to believe her more vindictive, revengeful, proud, stubborn, than they knew her to be already? Moreover the news that she had been spurned by the man whom everybody assumed to be her lover would be reducing her status as grand heroine of a melodrama to something infinitely less heroic; instead of being condemned, she must be despised, or pitied; and if a family is to have a black sheep, the scandal must naturally be preferred on a grand scale.