At the word Champfort, Marriott’s mouth opened eagerly, and she began to answer with her usual volubility. Lady Delacour waited not for any reply to the various questions which, in the hurry of her mind, she had asked; but, passing swiftly by Marriott, she threw open the door of her dressing-room. At the sight of Belinda she stopped short; and, totally overpowered, she would have sunk upon the floor, had not Miss Portman caught her in her arms, and supported her to a sofa. When she came to herself, and heard the soothing tone of Belinda’s voice, she looked up timidly in her face for a few moments without being able to speak.
“And are you really here once more, my dear Belinda?” cried she at last; “and may I still call you my friend? — and do you forgive me? — Yes, I see you do — and from you I can endure the humiliation of being forgiven. Enjoy the noble sense of your own superiority.”
“My dear Lady Delacour,” said Belinda, “you see all this in too strong a light: you have done me no injury — I have nothing to forgive.”
“I cannot see it in too strong a light. — Nothing to forgive! — Yes, you have; that which it is the most difficult to forgive — injustice. Oh, how you must have despised me for the folly, the meanness of my suspicions! Of all tempers that which appears to me, and I am sure to you, the most despicable, the most intolerable, is a suspicious temper. Mine was once open, generous as your own — you see how the best dispositions may be depraved — what am I now? Fit only
‘To point a moral, or adorn a tale’ —
a mismatched, misplaced, miserable, perverted being.”
“And now you have abused yourself till you are breathless, I may have some chance,” said Belinda, “of being heard in your defence. I perfectly agree with you in thinking that a suspicious temper is despicable and intolerable; but there is a vast difference between an acute fit of jealousy, as our friend Dr. X —— would say, and a chronic habit of suspicion. The noblest natures may be worked up to suspicion by designing villany; and then a handkerchief, or a hammercloth, ‘trifles as light as air’—”
“Oh, my dear, you are too good. But my folly admits of no excuse, no palliation,” interrupted Lady Delacour; “mine was jealousy without love.”
“That indeed would admit of no excuse,” said Belinda; “therefore you will pardon me if I think it incredible — especially as I have detected you in feeling something like affection for your little daughter, after you had done your best, I mean your worst, to make me believe that you were a monster of a mother.”
“That was quite another affair, my dear. I did not know Helena was worth loving. I did not imagine my little daughter could love me. When I found my mistake, I changed my tone. But there is no hope of mistake with my poor husband. Your own sense must show you, that Lord Delacour is not a man to beloved.”
“That could not always have been your ladyship’s opinion,” said Belinda, with an arch smile.
“Lord! my dear,” said Lady Delacour, a little embarrassed, “in the highest paroxysm of my madness, I never suspected that you could love Lord Delacour; I surely only hinted that you were in love with his coronet. That was absurd enough in all conscience — don’t make me more absurd than I am.”
“Is it then the height of absurdity to love a husband?”
“Love! Nonsense! — Impossible! — Hush! here he comes, with his odious creaking shoes. What man can ever expect to be loved who wears creaking shoes?” pursued her ladyship, as Lord Delacour entered the room, his shoes creaking at every step; and assuming an air of levity, she welcomed him as a stranger to her dressing-room. “No speeches, my lord! no speeches, I beseech you,” cried she, as he was beginning to speak to Miss Portman. “Believe me, that explanations always make bad worse. Miss Portman is here, thank Heaven! and her; and Champfort is gone, thank you — or your boots. And now let us sit down to breakfast, and forget as soon as possible every thing that is disagreeable.”
When Lady Delacour had a mind to banish painful recollections, it was scarcely possible to resist the magical influence of her conversation and manners; yet her lord’s features never relaxed to a smile during this breakfast. He maintained an obstinate silence, and a profound solemnity — till at last, rising from table, he turned to Miss Portman, and said, “Of all the caprices of fine ladies, that which surprises me the most is the whim of keeping their beds without being sick. Now, Miss Portman, you would hardly suppose that my Lady Delacour, who has been so lively this morning, has kept her bed, as I am informed, a fortnight — is not this astonishing?”
“Prodigiously astonishing, that my Lord Delacour, like all the rest of the world, should be liable to be deceived by appearances,” cried her ladyship. “Honour me with your attention for a few minutes, my lord, and perhaps I may increase your astonishment.”
His lordship, struck by the sudden change of her voice from gaiety to gravity, fixed his eyes upon her and returned to his seat. She paused — then addressing herself to Belinda, “My incomparable friend,” said she, “I will now give you a convincing proof of the unlimited power you have over my mind. My lord, Miss Portman has persuaded me to the step which I am now going to take. She has prevailed upon me to make a decisive trial of your prudence and kindness. She has determined me to throw myself on your mercy.”
“Mercy!” repeated Lord Delacour; and a confused idea, that she was now about to make a confession of the justice of some of his former suspicions, took possession of his mind: he looked aghast.
“I am going, my lord, to confide to you a secret of the utmost importance — a secret which is known to but three people in the world — Miss Portman, Marriott, and a man whose name I cannot reveal to you.”
“Stop, Lady Delacour!” cried his lordship, with a degree of emotion and energy which he had never shown till now: “stop, I conjure, I command you, madam! I am not sufficiently master of myself — I once loved you too well to hear such a stroke. Trust me with no such secret — say no more — you have said enough — too much. I forgive you, that is all I can do: but we must part, Lady Delacour!” said he, breaking from her with agony expressed in his countenance.
“The man has a heart, a soul, I protest! You knew him better than I did, Miss Portman. Nay, you are not gone yet, my lord! You really love me, I find.”
“No, no, no,” cried he, vehemently: “weak as you take me to be, Lady Delacour, I am incapable of loving a woman who has disgraced me, disgraced herself, her family, her station, her high endowments, her—” His utterance failed.
“Oh, Lady Delacour!” cried Belinda, “how can you trifle in this manner?”
“I meant not,” said her ladyship, “to trifle: I am satisfied. My lord, it is time that you should be satisfied. I can give you the most irrefragable proof, that whatever may have been the apparent levity of my conduct, you have had no serious cause for jealousy. But the proof will shock — disgust you. Have you courage to know more? — Then follow me.”
He followed her. — Belinda heard the boudoir door unlocked. — In a few minutes they returned. — Grief, and horror, and pity, were painted in Lord Delacour’s countenance, as he passed hastily through the room.
“My dearest friend, I have taken your advice: would to Heaven I had taken it sooner!” said Lady Delacour to Miss Portman. “I have revealed to Lord Delacour my real situation. Poor man! he was shocked beyond expression. He behaved incomparably well. I am convinced that he would, as he said, let his hand be cut off to save my life. The moment his foolish jealousy was extinguished, his love for me revived in full force. Would you believe it? he has promised me to break with odious Mrs. Luttridge. Upon my charging him to keep my secret from her, he instantly, in the handsomest manner in the world, declared he would never see her more, rather than give me a moment’s uneasiness. How I reproach myself for having been for years the torment of this man’s life!”
“You may do better than reproach yourself, my dear Lady Delacour,” said Belinda; “you may yet live for years to be the blessing and pride of his life. I am persuaded that nothing
but your despair of obtaining domestic happiness has so long enslaved you to dissipation; and now that you find a friend in your husband, now that you know the affectionate temper of your little Helena, you will have fresh views and fresh hopes; you will have the courage to live for yourself, and not for what is called the world.”
“The world!” cried Lady Delacour, with a tone of disdain: “how long has that word enslaved a soul formed for higher purposes!” She paused, and looked up towards heaven with an expression of fervent devotion, which Belinda had once, and but once, before seen in her countenance. Then, as if forgetful even that Belinda was present, she threw herself upon a sofa, and fell, or seemed to fall, into a profound reverie. She was roused by the entrance of Marriott, who came into the room to ask whether she would now take her laudanum. “I thought I had taken it,” said she in a feeble voice; and as she raised her eyes and saw Belinda, she added, with a faint smile, “Miss Portman, I believe, has been laudanum to me this morning: but even that will not do long, you see; nothing will do for me now but this,” and she stretched out her hand for the laudanum. “Is not it shocking to think,” continued she, after she had swallowed it, “that in laudanum alone I find the means of supporting existence?”
She put her hand to her head, as if partly conscious of the confusion of her own ideas: and ashamed that Belinda should witness it, she desired Marriott to assist her to rise, and to support her to her bedchamber. She made a sign to Miss Portman not to follow her. “Do not take it unkindly, but I am quite exhausted, and wish to be alone; for I am grown fond of being alone some hours in the day, and perhaps I shall sleep.”
Marriott came out of her lady’s room about a quarter of an hour afterward, and said that her lady seemed disposed to sleep, but that she desired to have her hook left by her bedside. Marriott searched among several which lay upon the table, for one in which a mark was put. Belinda looked over them along with Marriott, and she was surprised to find that they had almost all methodistical titles. Lady Delacour’s mark was in the middle of Wesley’s Admonitions. Several pages in other books of the same description Miss Portman found marked in pencil, with reiterated lines, which she knew to be her ladyship’s customary mode of distinguishing passages that she particularly liked. Some were highly oratorical, but most of them were of a mystical cast, and appeared to Belinda scarcely intelligible. She had reason to be astonished at meeting with such books in the dressing-room of a woman of Lady Delacour’s character. During the solitude of her illness, her ladyship had first begun to think seriously on religious subjects, and the early impressions that had been made on her mind in her childhood, by a methodistical mother, recurred. Her understanding, weakened perhaps by disease, and never accustomed to reason, was incapable of distinguishing between truth and error; and her temper, naturally enthusiastic, hurried her from one extreme to the other — from thoughtless scepticism to visionary credulity. Her devotion was by no means steady or permanent; it came on by fits usually at the time when the effect of opium was exhausted, or before a fresh dose began to operate. In these intervals she was low-spirited — bitter reflections on the manner in which she had thrown away her talents and her life obtruded themselves; the idea of the untimely death of Colonel Lawless, of which she reproached herself as the cause, returned; and her mind, from being a prey to remorse, began to sink in these desponding moments under the most dreadful superstitious terrors — terrors the more powerful as they were secret. Whilst the stimulus of laudanum lasted, the train of her ideas always changed, and she was amazed at the weak fears and strange notions by which she had been disturbed; yet it was not in her power entirely to chase away these visions of the night, and they gained gradually a dominion over her, of which she was heartily ashamed. She resolved to conceal this weakness, as in her gayer moments she thought it, from Belinda, from whose superior strength of understanding she dreaded ridicule or contempt. Her experience of Miss Portman’s gentleness and friendship might reasonably have prevented or dispelled such apprehensions; but Lady Delacour was governed by pride, by sentiment, by whim, by enthusiasm, by passion — by any thing but reason.
When she began to revive after her fit of languor, and had been refreshed by opium and sleep, she rang for Marriott, and inquired for Belinda. She was much provoked when Marriott, by way of proving to her that Miss Portman could not have been tired of being left alone, told her that she had been in the dressing-room rummaging over the books.
“What books?” cried Lady Delacour. “I forgot that they were left there. Miss Portman is not reading them still, I suppose? Go for them, and let them be locked up in my own bookcase, and bring me the key.”
Her ladyship appeared in good spirits when she saw Belinda again. She rallied her upon the serious studies she had chosen for her morning’s amusements. “Those methodistical books, with their strange quaint titles,” said she, “are, however, diverting enough to those who, like myself, can find diversion in the height of human absurdity.”
Deceived by the levity of her manner, Belinda concluded that the marks of approbation in these books were ironical, and she thought no more of the matter; for Lady Delacour suddenly gave a new turn to the conversation by exclaiming, “Now we talk of the height of human absurdity, what are we to think of Clarence Hervey?”
“Why should we think of him at all?” said Belinda.
“For two excellent reasons, my dear: because we cannot help it, and because he deserves it. Yes, he deserves it, believe me, if it were only for having written these charming letters,” said Lady Delacour, opening a cabinet, and taking out a small packet of letters, which she put into Belinda’s hands. “Pray, read them; you will find them amazingly edifying, as well as entertaining. I protest I am only puzzled to know whether I shall bind them up with Sterne’s Sentimental Journey or Fordyce’s Sermons for Young Women. Here, my love, if you like description,” continued her ladyship, opening one of the letters, “here is a Radcliffean tour along the picturesque coasts of Dorset and Devonshire. Why he went this tour, unless for the pleasure and glory of describing it, Heaven knows! Clouds and darkness rest over the tourist’s private history: but this, of course, renders his letters more piquant and interesting. All who have a just taste either for literature or for gallantry, know how much we are indebted to the obscure for the sublime; and orators and lovers feel what felicity there is in the use of the fine figure of suspension.”
“Very good description, indeed!” said Belinda, without raising her eyes from the letter, or seeming to pay any attention to the latter part of Lady Delacour’s speech; “very good description, certainly!”
“Well, my dear; but here is something better than pure description — here is sense for you: and pray mark the politeness of addressing sense to a woman — to a woman of sense, I mean — and which of us is not? Then here is sentiment for you,” continued her ladyship, spreading another letter before Belinda; “a story of a Dorsetshire lady, who had the misfortune to be married to a man as unlike Mr. Percival, and as like Lord Delacour, as possible; and yet, oh, wonderful! they make as happy a couple as one’s heart could wish. Now, I am truly candid and good-natured to admire this letter; for every word of it is a lesson to me, and evidently was so intended. But I take it all in good part, because, to do Clarence justice, he describes the joys of domestic Paradise in such elegant language, that he does not make me sick. In short, my dear Belinda, to finish my panegyric, as it has been said of some other epistles, if ever there were letters calculated to make you fall in love with the writer of them, these are they.”
“Then,” said Miss Portman, folding up the letter which she was just going to read, “I will not run the hazard of reading them.”
“Why, my dear,” said Lady Delacour, with a look of mingled concern, reproach, and raillery, “have you actually given up my poor Clarence, merely on account of this mistress in the wood, this Virginia St. Pierre? Nonsense! Begging your pardon, my dear, the man loves you. Some entanglement, some punctilio, some doubt, some delicacy, some fo
lly, prevents him from being just at this moment, where, I confess, he ought to be — at your feet; and you, out of patience, which a young lady ought never to be if she can help it, will go and marry — I know you will — some stick of a rival, purely to provoke him.”
“If ever I marry,” said Belinda, with a look of proud humility, “I shall certainly marry to please myself, and not to provoke any body else; and, at all events, I hope I shall never marry a stick.”
“Pardon me that word,” said Lady Delacour. “I am convinced you never will — but one is apt to judge of others by one’s self. I am willing to believe that Mr. Vincent — —”
“Mr. Vincent! How did you know — —” exclaimed Belinda.
“How did I know? Why, my dear, do you think I am so little interested about you, that I have not found out some of your secrets? And do you think that Marriott could refrain from telling me, in her most triumphant tone, that ‘Miss Portman has not gone to Oakly-park for nothing; that she has made a conquest of a Mr. Vincent, a West Indian, a ward, or lately a ward, of Mr. Percival’s, the handsomest man that ever was seen, and the richest, &c. &c. &c.?’ Now simple I rejoiced at the news; for I took it for granted you would never seriously think of marrying the man.”
“Then why did your ladyship rejoice?”
“Why? Oh, you novice at Cupid’s chess-board! do not you see the next move? Check with your new knight, and the game is your own. Now, if your aunt Stanhope saw your look at this instant, she would give you up for ever — if she have not done that already. In plain, unmetaphorical prose, then, cannot you comprehend, my straight-forward Belinda, that if you make Clarence Hervey heartily jealous, let the impediments to your union be what they may, he will acknowledge himself to be heartily in love with you? I should make no scruple of frightening him within an inch of his life, for his good. Sir Philip Baddely was not the man to frighten him; but this Mr. Vincent, by all accounts, is just the thing.”
Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth Page 44