CHAPTER IX.
When a lady of such temperament as Lady Aimwell takes upon herself the trouble of going into a fit of the sullens, though she may in the first instance be speechless and even resolve not to open her lips upon the subject of her wrath, or to utter any expressions of anger against the object of her indignation, yet she finds at the last that there is no other mode of getting rid of the oppressive burden than by throwing it off in words. In like manner, also, when two gentlemen quarrel about any subject, whether it be geology, or theology, and they cannot convince one another, then they are angry and sulky, andthey treat one another with what they call silent contempt, and yet they make a mighty noise and a great trumpeting about the silence of their contempt. So again, when an author who has written the best possible book on any subject, and another author reviews that same book and proves by most ingenious argument that it is utterly worthless, the writer of the book runs about among the circle of his acquaintance foaming at the mouth to shew how cool he is, and dinning every one’s ears with the noise that he makes in proclaiming his silent contempt of the scrub who has criticized him. And what else can he do? Who is to know anything of the existence of silent contempt unless it be advertized? We have heard the phrase, “proclaiming silence;” it has its origin perhaps in this silence of contempt, which by the way seems to be rather a contempt of silence.
If the reader does not by this time understand the state of mind in which Lady Aimwell was, on the occasion referred to, he must be obtuse;if he does not pity Arabella Glossop, he must be inhuman and unfeeling.
On the morning which followed Colonel Crop’s last mentioned visit to Neverden Hall, Lady Aimwell took her seat in the drawing-room as usual, and spread before her eyes the accustomed Stackhouse. But her ladyship found it difficult to command her attention, and to find room in her mind for any other thoughts than those which related to Arabella Glossop. And the young lady as usual made her appearance. At her entering the apartment Lady Aimwell lifted her eyes and fixed them frowningly on the young lady.
It is not pleasant to be frowned at, even though it be but by an automaton. There is in the human mind, especially in the minds of the young, a love of cheerfulness, and this principle was exceedingly strong in Arabella Glossop.
Lady Aimwell had never been very courteous to this gay-spirited young woman, and yet her ladyship expected, or seemed to expect, thatMiss Glossop ought to be most especially courteous to her. Lady Aimwell made herself as repulsive as she possibly could to Miss Glossop, and then with a most diverting simplicity expressed her wonderment that the young lady should seem so readily to avoid her company. Lady Aimwell had certain obsolete notions of decorum, and divers crotchets about propriety which she had learned from her grandmother’s sampler, and curiously did she profess herself astonished that the hoydenish daughter of a successful attorney should not have the same starched notions and the same precise formality.
It has been said that Lady Aimwell looked frowningly upon Miss Glossop, as soon as the young lady entered the drawing-room. But Miss Glossop, with all her rudeness and vulgarity, was not so rude or vulgar as to return the frown. On the contrary, she very kindly asked her ladyship if she had recovered from her yesterday’s indisposition. The question was asked verycivilly, and with the most conciliating intonation of voice; but it was answered with great incivility and with a most sneering cadence.
“You care much about my health,” replied Lady Aimwell.
To this no reply was made; and Miss Glossop, seeing that her ladyship was in an ill-humour, thought it best to let that humour take its course. But as the young lady had no very great desire to undergo a dissertation on propriety, she was preparing to leave the room. Thereupon Lady Aimwell was roused to greater volubility; and, closing the great book with a great noise, she said, “It is very unaccountable, Miss Glossop, that you have so great a dislike to me that you take every opportunity to avoid me.”
At hearing this Miss Glossop returned, and would have made something of a reply, but Lady Aimwell prevented her by continuing the oration.
“I cannot imagine what I can have done orsaid to make you dislike me so much. I have never said anything to you but for your good. But young people now-a-days think themselves so prodigiously wise, that they will not condescend to be advised. I know that when I was a young woman, if any one had taken so much pains with me as I have with you, I should have been grateful for it, instead of turning my back upon my best friends.”
All this was what is called too bad. It was villanously tedious and generally untrue. Lady Aimwell could very well imagine what it was rendered her company unacceptable to Miss Glossop; nor could her ladyship think it very likely that all which she had been pleased to say for the good of the young lady, should be considered by her as really pleasant and agreeable. And in good truth we really believe that, though what had been said by Lady Aimwell might, by a little ingenuity, be interpreted as being said for the young lady’s good, yet the principal motive which urged her ladyship tosay all this, was the gratification of her own ill humour and the indulgence of her own spleen. And when the wife of the exemplary magistrate of Neverden Hall said, that had any one in her younger days so administered the tediousness of snarling exhortation, she should have been grateful for it, we are of opinion that imagination had usurped the throne of memory, or that invention had taken the place of veracity. For, unless Lady Aimwell had greatly changed since the days of her youth, or unless we have grossly misapprehended the character of her mind, we are of opinion that she would not have borne so patiently, as Miss Glossop did, the tediousness of prosy exhortation.
To all that Lady Aimwell was pleased to remark as touching the ingratitude of Miss Glossop and the degeneracy of the present generation of juvenile spinsters, the belectured young lady only replied, and that most meekly, “I am sure, Lady Aimwell, I never had the slightest intention of treating you disrespectfully. As you wereunwell last night, and as I thought you did not seem quite recovered this morning, I could not do otherwise than enquire after your health.”
“Not quite recovered!” echoed Lady Aimwell, with great briskness of tone and peculiar sharpness of manner—“Not quite recovered! So, I suppose you mean to insinuate that I was out of humour? Yes, yes, I understand what you mean by not quite recovered.”
At this remark, Miss Glossop smiled inwardly, but she took especial care not to manifest any outward and visible signs of mirth, lest she might provoke her ladyship to exercise some inconvenient mode of retaliation. Nor, on the other hand, could the young lady so far attempt the mask of hypocrisy as expressly and explicitly to disavow all thought and suspicion of ill-humour on the part of Lady Aimwell. Being however somewhat indignant at the pertinacity with which her ladyship kept up the hostility, and thinking that a little semblance of opposition would be better than a placid and unyieldingacquiescence in the gratuitous accusations and assumptions of her ladyship, Miss Glossop, with some degree of her natural tartness, replied:
“I think, Lady Aimwell, that you are treating me very ill to put an unfavourable construction on everything I say or do; I am sure I have not the slightest wish to behave disrespectfully to you; but you will not give me leave to pay you ordinary civilities without misinterpreting them.”
Now her ladyship knew that there was truth in this, therefore, fearing that she might be worsted in a regular argument, she thought it advisable to change the mode of attack, and, instead of continuing the discussion in that line, Lady Aimwell replied, “You may talk as long as you please, Miss Glossop, but nobody can make me believe that your conduct towards Lord Spoonbill the other day was at all becoming, or even decent.”
This was a repetition of a former attack, and as in the first instance this attack had driven the young lady to passionate weeping, Lady Aimwellwas in expectation that a renewal of it would produce a renewal of the young lady’s sobs and tears. But in this calculation the baronet’s lady reckoned wrong. The conversation which Miss Glossop had had the preceding evening with Colonel Crop, and the bright prospects which lay before her, of rank and opulence and luxury and homage, rendered an allusion of this nature rather agreeable than otherwise. Instead therefore of yielding, as before, to the down-rushing tear and the passionate sobbing, the possible countess replied with spirit and vivacity, “Lord Spoonbill is as well qualified to judge of propriety as any one. And if I said or did anything disrespectful to his lordship, it is his concern.”
In this reply we by no means vindicate Miss Glossop; we rather think that she was much to blame; for young men are not such good judges of propriety as old ladies; and it is not to be supposed, that if a pretty-looking young woman, as Miss Glossop certainly was, should behave with impertinent forwardness towards so gay andgallant a young gentleman as Lord Spoonbill, that his lordship would reprove her, and administer a wholesome lesson on the subject of decorum.
Lady Aimwell was precisely of our opinion on this point, and answered accordingly, “Miss Glossop, are you a downright simpleton? Or what do you mean by such language? Nothing could be better amusement for Lord Spoonbill, than to see you make a fool of yourself.”
Here Lady Aimwell had clearly the advantage of Miss Glossop. It was indeed true, that Lord Spoonbill had been mightily amused with seeing the ridiculous and fantastic airs which the young lady shewed off at the castle. But though Lady Aimwell was right, the young lady thought she was wrong. And from what Miss Glossop had heard on the preceding evening from Colonel Crop, there was not in her mind the remotest suspicion that Lord Spoonbill had regarded her demeanour with any other feeling than that of approbation.
Several times was Miss Glossop on the very brink of exultingly avowing to her ladyship what had been said by Colonel Crop concerning the approbation which that discriminating judge of propriety Lord Spoonbill had been pleased to express of herself. But as frequently she checked herself, since she thought that the mode in which Lord Spoonbill had conveyed to her his approbation and admiration were not quite according to the etiquette of Lady Aimwell’s grandmother’s sampler.
The inward consciousness however that Lord Spoonbill was graciously disposed towards her, gave her unusual calmness and composure, so that she could patiently bear much of the rebuke that was addressed to her by Lady Aimwell.
But at last came the grand, decisive, interrogatory, which referred to Colonel Crop’s negociation. Now we cannot approve Lady Aimwell’s conduct in leaving her young friend exposed to such negociation; for it was very obvious, that on the preceding evening her ladyshiphad retired early, because she was displeased with the visible symptoms of Colonel Crop’s extraordinary attention to the young lady. With an exulting and almost triumphing confidence did Lady Aimwell say, “Now, pray, Miss Glossop, may I take the liberty to ask, did your friend Colonel Crop deliver any message to you from your favorite Lord Spoonbill?”
There was a sneer in the phraseology of this question, there was also a still stronger expression of contempt in the tone and cadence of it. And thereat Miss Glossop coloured, not blushed merely with maiden diffidence and modesty, but coloured with mighty and puissant indignation at the question, at the language in which it was conveyed, and at the tone in which it was uttered. The consciousness that she was destined to a high rank in society, and that she was honored with the approbation of so great a man as Lord Spoonbill, gave her an additional confidence, and increased her natural pertness,and she replied, “If your ladyship must know, I can tell you that Colonel Crop did deliver a message to me from Lord Spoonbill. What that message was, your ladyship may know hereafter.”
At this reply Lady Aimwell was struck with tenfold astonishment. And we will here do her ladyship the justice to acknowledge, that whatever might be the spirit of her endeavours, they were certainly directed with a view to the young lady’s good. For Lady Aimwell, though not the brightest woman in the world, could easily see that a negociation of this kind was not very likely to terminate in making Miss Glossop a countess. Therefore, when this acknowledgment had been thus extorted from the young lady, her more sagacious relative replied with a very natural expression of astonishment, mingled also with an indication of pity and a slight tincture of contempt:
“Surely, Miss Glossop, you will not suffer yourself to be led away by such idle and foolishstories! Do you, can you for a moment, imagine that if Lord Spoonbill had any serious and honorable intentions, he would send messages to you by a third person. I must insist upon it that you will not give Colonel Crop any farther encouragement to talk such nonsense. What would your father say to us if he knew that such folly, such wickedness I may say, was encouraged under our roof?”
Lady Aimwell’s intention was good, but it was not duly appreciated by the young lady in whose behalf it was manifested. And, instead of gratefully acknowledging her ladyship’s kindness, and humbly promising to follow her ladyship’s good advice, Miss Glossop, with a most arrogant air, rejected the good counsel and said, “I think I know how to govern myself without your ladyship’s assistance. You make pretty pretensions enough to what you say is all for my good. The plain fact is, you are merely mortified at my good fortune.”
There was something so outrageously insultingin this last speech, that Lady Aimwell was absolutely unable to make an immediate reply, and the contending parties looked at each other for a few moments in perfect silence, and with flushed and angry countenances. Lady Aimwell after a while, as soon as she could recover from her overwhelming astonishment, replied, “Very pretty language, Miss Glossop; very grateful and respectful, indeed! However, I will take care that I shall not be so insulted again; and perhaps if I cannot persuade you, I may find some one who can.”
So saying Lady Aimwell left the apartment, and Miss Glossop remained alone to think over the meaning and interpretation of her ladyship’s threat. Not long did the young lady exercise her conjectures; for it was very clear to her that Lady Aimwell designed to write to Mr Glossop, of whom Miss Arabella stood more in awe than of any other human being. But as she knew that her father’s views for her were of the aspiring and ambitious cast, and as she had no otherthought concerning the negociation of Colonel Crop, than that her own sweet person and graceful manners and accomplishments had won the affection of Lord Spoonbill, she felt very much at ease even under Lady Aimwell’s threat, and had no fears that her father would throw any obstacle in the way of her marriage with a person of such high rank and consideration.