Essential Novelists - Maria Edgeworth. Maria Edgeworth

I am very sorry that my indiscreet questions gave Miss Delacour any pain — my head was so full of the mammoth, that I blundered on without seeing what I was about till it was too late.”

      “Pray, sir,” said Mrs. Margaret Delacour, who now returned, and took her seat upon a sofa, with the solemnity of a person who was going to sit in judgment upon a criminal, “pray, sir, may I ask how long you have been acquainted with my Lady Delacour?”

      Clarence Hervey took up a book, and with great gravity kissed it, as if he had been upon his oath in a court of justice, and answered,

      “To the best of my recollection, madam, it is now four years since I had first the pleasure and honour of seeing Lady Delacour.”

      “And in that time, intimately as you have had the pleasure of being acquainted with her ladyship, you have never discovered that she had a daughter?”

      “Never,” said Mr. Hervey.

      “There, Lady Anne! — There!” cried Mrs. Delacour, “will you tell me after this, that Lady Delacour is not a monster?”

      “Every body says that she’s a prodigy,” said Lady Anne; “and prodigies and monsters are sometimes thought synonymous terms.”

      “Such a mother was never heard of,” continued Mrs. Delacour, “since the days of Savage and Lady Macclesfield. I am convinced that she hatesher daughter. Why she never speaks of her — she never sees her — she never thinks of her!”

      “Some mothers speak more than they think of their children, and others think more than they speak of them,” said Lady Anne.

      “I always thought,” said Mr. Hervey, “that Lady Delacour was a woman of great sensibility.”

      “Sensibility!” exclaimed the indignant old lady, “she has no sensibility, sir — none — none. She who lives in a constant round of dissipation, who performs no one duty, who exists only for herself; how does she show her sensibility? — Has she sensibility for her husband — for her daughter — for any one useful purpose upon earth? — Oh, how I hate the cambric handkerchief sensibility that is brought out only to weep at a tragedy! — Yes; Lady Delacour has sensibility enough, I grant ye, when sensibility is the fashion. I remember well her performing the part of a nurse with vast applause; and I remember, too, the sensibility she showed, when the child that she nursed fell a sacrifice to her dissipation. The second of her children, that she killed —”

      “Killed! — Oh! surely, my dear Mrs. Delacour, that is too strong a word,” said Lady Anne: “you would not make a Medea of Lady Delacour!”

      “It would have been better if I had,” cried Mrs. Delacour, “I can understand that there may be such a thing in nature as a jealous wife, but an unfeeling mother I cannot comprehend — that passes my powers of imagination.”

      “And mine, so much,” said Lady Anne, “that I cannot believe such a being to exist in the world — notwithstanding all the descriptions I have heard of it: as you say, my dear Mrs. Delacour, it passes my powers of imagination. Let us leave it in Mr. Hervey’s apocryphal chapter of animals, and he will excuse us if I never admit it into true history, at least without some better evidence than I have yet heard.”

      “Why, my dear, dear Lady Anne,” cried Mrs. Delacour —“I’ve made this coffee so sweet, there’s no drinking it — what evidence would you have?”

      “None,” said Lady Anne, smiling, “I would have none.” “That is to say, you will take none,” said Mrs. Delacour: “but can any thing be stronger evidence than her ladyship’s conduct to my poor Helen — to your Helen, I should say — for you have educated, you have protected her, you have been a mother to her. I am an infirm, weak, ignorant, passionate old woman — I could not have been what you have been to that child — God bless you! — God will bless you!”

      She rose as she spoke, to set down her coffee-cup on the table. Clarence Hervey took it from her with a look which said much, and which she was perfectly capable of understanding.

      “Young man,” said she, “it is very unfashionable to treat age and infirmity with politeness. I wish that your friend, Lady Delacour, may at my time of life meet with as much respect, as she has met with admiration and gallantry in her youth. Poor woman, her head has absolutely been turned with admiration — and if fame say true, Mr. Hervey has had his share in turning that head by his flattery.”

      “I am sure her ladyship has turned mine by her charms,” said Clarence; “and I certainly am not to be blamed for admiring what all the world admires.”

      “I wish,” said the old lady, “for her own sake, for the sake of her family, and for the sake of her reputation, that my Lady Delacour had fewer admirers, and more friends.”

      “Women who have met with so many admirers, seldom meet with many friends,” said Lady Anne.

      “No,” said Mrs. Delacour, “for they seldom are wise enough to know their value.”

      “We learn the value of all things, but especially of friends, by experience,” said Lady Anne; “and it is no wonder, therefore, that those who have little experience of the pleasures of friendship should not be wise enough to know their value.”

      “This is very good-natured sophistry; but Lady Delacour is too vain ever to have a friend,” said Mrs. Delacour. “My dear Lady Anne, you don’t know her as well as I do — she has more vanity than ever woman had.”

      “That is certainly saying a great deal,” said Lady Anne; “but then we must consider, that Lady Delacour, as an heiress, a beauty, and a wit, has a right to a triple share at least.”

      “Both her fortune and her beauty are gone; and if she had any wit left, it is time it should teach her how to conduct herself, I think,” said Mrs. Delacour: “but I give her up — I give her up.”

      “Oh, no,” said Lady Anne, “you must not give her up yet, I have been informed, and upon the best authority, that Lady Delacour was not always the unfeeling, dissipated fine lady that she now appears to be. This is only one of the transformations of fashion — the period of her enchantment will soon be at an end, and she will return to her natural character. I should not be at all surprised, if Lady Delacour were to appear at once la femme comme il y en a pen.”

      “Or la bonne mère?” said Mrs. Delacour, sarcastically, “after thus leaving her daughter ——”

      “Pour bonne bouche,” interrupted Lady Anne, “when she is tired of the insipid taste of other pleasures, she will have a higher relish for those of domestic life, which will be new and fresh to her.”

      “And so you really think, my dear Lady Anne, that my Lady Delacour will end by being a domestic woman. Well,” said Mrs. Margaret, after taking two pinches of snuff, “some people believe in the millennium; but I confess I am not one of them — are you, Mr. Hervey?”

      “If it were foretold to me by a good angel,” said Clarence, smiling, as his eye glanced at Lady Anne; “if it were foretold to me by a good angel, how could I doubt it?”

      Here the conversation was interrupted by the entrance of one of Lady Anne’s little boys, who came running eagerly up to his mother, to ask whether he might have “the sulphurs to show to Helena Delacour. I want to show her Vertumnus and Pomona, mamma,” said he. “Were not the cherries that the old gardener sent very good?”

      “What is this about the cherries and the old gardener, Charles?” said the young lady who sat beside Lady Anne: “come here and tell me the whole story.”

      “I will, but I should tell it you a great deal better another time,” said the boy, “because now Helena’s waiting for Vertumnus and Pomona.”

      “Go then to Helena,” said Lady Anne, “and I will tell the story for you.”

      Then turning to the young lady she began —“Once upon a time there lived an old