Chapter XV

It was to a wife and daughters such as these that he was returning, with the benevolent wish of interesting them for the guilty Adeline.

'So, Dr Norberry, you are come back at last!' was his first salutation, 'and what does the creature say for herself?'

'The creature!--Your fellow-creature, my dear, says very little--grief is not wordy.'

'Grief!--So then she is unhappy, is she?' cries Miss Norberry; 'I am monstrous glad of it.'

The doctor started; and an oath nearly escaped his lips. He did say, 'Why, zounds, Jane!'--but then he added, in a softer tone, 'Why do you rejoice in a poor girl's affliction?'

'Because I think it is for the good of her soul.'

'Good girl!' replied the father:--'Jane, (seizing her hand,) may your soul never need such a medicine!'

'It never will,' said her mother proudly: 'she has been differently brought up.'

'She has been well brought up, you might have added,' observed the doctor, 'had modesty permitted it. Mrs Mowbray, poor woman, had good intentions; but she was too flighty. Had Adeline, my children, had such a mother as yours, she would have been like you.'

'But not half so handsome,' interrupted the mother in a low voice.

'But as our faults and our virtues, my dear, depend so much on the care and instruction of others, we should look with pity, as well as aversion on the faults of those less fortunate in instructors than we have been.'

'Certainly;--very true,' said Mrs Norberry, flattered and affected by this compliment from her husband: 'but you know, James Norberry,' laying her hand on his, 'I always told you you overrated Mrs Mowbray; and that she was but a dawdle after all.'

'You always did, my good woman,' replied he, raising her hand to his lips.

'But you men think yourselves much wiser than we are!'

'We do so,' replied the doctor.

The tone was equivocal--Mrs Norberry felt it to be so, and looked up in his face.--The doctor understood the look: it was one of doubt and inquiry; and, as it was his interest to sooth her in order to carry his point, he exclaimed, 'We men are, indeed, too apt to pride ourselves in our supposed superior wisdom: but I, you will own, my dear, have always done your sex justice; and you in particular.'

'You have been a good husband indeed, James Norberry,' replied his wife in a faltering voice; 'and I believe you to be, to every one, a just and honourable man.'

'And I dare say, dame, I do no more than justice to you, when I think you will approve and further a plan for Adeline Mowbray's good, which I am going to propose to you.'

Mrs Norberry withdrew her hand; but returning it again:--'To be sure, my dear,' she cried. 'Any thing you wish; that is, if I see right to--'

'I will explain myself,' continued the doctor gently.

'I have promised this poor girl to endeavour to bring about a reconciliation between her and her mother; but though Adeline wishes to receive her pardon on any terms, and even, if it be required, to renounce her lover, I fear Mrs Mowbray is too much incensed against her, to see or forgive her.'

'Hard-hearted woman!' cried Mrs Norberry.

'Cruel, indeed!' cried her daughters.

'But a mother ought to be severe, very severe, on such occasions, young ladies,' hastily added Mrs Norberry: 'but go on, my dear.'

'Now it is but too probable,' continued the doctor, 'that Glenmurray will not live long, and then this young creature will be left to struggle unprotected with the difficulties of her situation; and who knows but that she may, from poverty, and the want of a protector, be tempted to continue in the paths of vice?'

'Well, Dr Norberry, and what then?--Who or what is to prevent it?--You know we have three children to provide for; and I am a young woman as yet.'

'True, Hannah,' giving her a kiss, 'and a very pretty woman too.'

'Well, my dear love, anything we can do with prudence I am ready to do; I can say no more.'

'You have said enough,' cried the doctor exultingly; 'then hear my plan: Adeline shall, in the event of Glenmurray's death, which though not certain seems likely--to be sure, I did not inquire into the nature of his nocturnal perspirations, his expectoration, and so forth--'

'Dear papa, you are so professional!' affectedly exclaimed his youngest daughter.

'Well, child, I have done; and to return to my subject--if Glenmurray lives or dies, I think it advisable that Adeline should go into retirement to lie-in. And where can she be better than in my little cottage now empty, within a four-miles ride of our house? If she wants protection, I can protect her; and if she wants money before her mother forgives her, you can give it to her.'

'Indeed, papa,' cried both the girls, 'we shall not grudge it.'

The doctor started from his chair, and embraced his daughters with joy mixed with wonder; for he knew they had always disliked Adeline.--True; but then, she was prosperous, and their superior. Little minds love to bestow protection; and it was easy to be generous to the fallen Adeline Mowbray: had her happiness continued, so would their hatred.

'Then it is a settled point, is it not dame?' asked the doctor, chucking his wife under the chin; when, to his great surprise and consternation, she threw his hand indignantly from her, and vociferated, 'She shall never live within a ride of our house, I can assure you, Dr Norberry.'

The doctor was petrified into silence, and the girls could only articulate 'La! mamma?' But what could produce this sudden and violent change? Nothing but a simple and natural operation of the human mind. Though a very kind husband, and an indulgent father, Dr Norberry was suspected, though unjustly, of being a very gallant man: and some of Mrs Norberry's good-natured friends had occasionally hinted to her their sorrow at hearing such and such reports; reports which were indeed destitute of foundation; but which served to excite suspicions in the mind of the tenacious Mrs Norberry. And what more likely to re-awaken them than the young and frail Adeline Mowbray living in a cottage of her husband's, protected, supported, and visited by him! The moment this idea occurred, its influence was unconquerable; and with a voice and manner of determined hostility she made known her resolves in consequence of it.

After a pause of dismay and astonishment, the doctor cried, 'Dame, what have you gotten in your head? What, all on a sudden, has had such an ugly effect on you?'

'Second thoughts are best, doctor; and I now feel that it would be highly improper for you, with daughters grown up, to receive with such marked kindness a single young woman at a cottage of yours, who is going to lie-in.'

'But, my dear, it is a different case, when I do it to keep her out of the way of further harm.'

'That is more than I know, Dr Norberry,' replied the wife bridling, and fanning herself.

'Whew!' whistled the doctor; and then addressing his daughters, 'Girls, you had better go to bed; it grows late.'

The young ladies obeyed; but first hung round their mother's neck, as they bade her good night, and hoped she would not be so cruel to the poor deluded Adeline.

Mrs Norberry angrily shook them off, with a peevish--'Get along, girls.' The doctor cordially kissed, and bade God bless them; while the door closed and left the loving couple alone.

What passed, it were tedious to repeat: suffice that after a long altercation, continued even after they were retired to rest, the doctor found his wife, on this subject, incapable of listening to reason, and that, as a finishing stroke, she exclaimed, 'It does not signify talking, Dr Norberry, while I have my senses, and can see into a mill-stone a little, the hussey shall never come near us.'

The doctor sighed deeply; turned himself round, not to sleep but to think, and rose the next morning to go in search of Mrs Mowbray, dreading the interview which he was afterwards to have with Adeline; for he did not expect to succeed in his application to her mother, and he could not now soften his intelligence with a 'but,' as he intended. 'True,' he meant to have said to her, 'your mother will not receive you; but if you ever want a home or a place of retirement, I have a cottage, and so forth.'

'Pshaw!' cried the doctor to himself, as these thoughts came across him on the road, and made him hastily let down the front window of the post-chaise for air.

'Did your honour speak?' cries the post-boy.

'Not I. But can't you drive faster and be hanged to you?'

The boy whipped his horses.--The doctor then found that it was up hill--down went the glass again:--'Hold, you brute, why do you not see it is up hill?' For find fault he must; and with his wife he could not, or dared not, even in fancy.

'Dear me! Why, your honour bade me put it on.'

'Devilishly obedient,' muttered the doctor: 'I wish every one was like you in that respect.'--And in a state of mind not the pleasantest possible the doctor drove into town, and to the hotel where Mrs Mowbray was to be found.

Dr Norberry was certainly now not in a humour to sooth any woman whom he thought in the wrong, except his wife; and, whether from carelessness or design, he did not, unfortunately for Adeline, manage the self-love of her unhappy mother.

He found Mrs Mowbray with her heart shut up, not softened by sorrow. The hands once stretched forth with kindness to welcome him, were now stiffly laid one upon the other; and 'How are you, sir?' coldly articulated, was followed by as cold a 'Pray sit down.'

'Why, how ill you look!' exclaimed the doctor.

'I attend more to my feelings than my looks,' with a deep sigh, answered Mrs Mowbray.

'Your feelings are as bad as your looks, I dare say.'

'They are worse, sir,' said Mrs Mowbray piqued.

'There was no need of that,' replied the doctor: 'but I am come to point out to you one way of getting rid of some of your unpleasant feelings:--see, and forgive your daughter.'

Mrs Mowbray started, changed colour, and exclaimed with quickness, 'Is she in England?' but added instantly, 'I have no daughter:--she, who was my child, is my most inveterate foe; she has involved me in disgrace and misery.'

'With a little of your own help she has,' replied the doctor. 'Come, come, my old friend, you have both of you something to forget and forgive; and the sooner you set about it the better. Now do write, and tell Adeline, who is by this time in London, that you forgive her.'

'Never:--after having promised me not to hold converse with that villain without my consent? Had I no other cause of complaint against her;--had she not by her coquettish arts seduced the affections of the man I loved:--never, never would I forgive her having violated the sacred promise which she gave me.'

'A promise,' interrupted the doctor, 'which she would never have violated, had not you first violated that sacred compact which you entered into at her birth.'

'What mean you, sir?'

'I mean, that though a parent does not, at a child's birth, solemnly make a vow to do all in his or her power to promote the happiness of that child,--still, as he has given it birth, he has tacitly bound himself to make it happy. This tacit agreement you broke, when at the age of forty, you, regardless of your daughter's welfare, played the fool and married a pennyless profligate, merely because he had a fine person and a handsome leg.'

Mrs Mowbray was too angry and too agitated to interrupt him, and he went on:

'Well, what was the consequence? The young fellow very naturally preferred the daughter to the mother; and, as he could not have her by fair, was resolved to have her by foul means; and so he--'

'I beg, Dr Norberry,' interrupted Mrs Mowbray in a faint voice, 'that you would spare the disgusting recital.'

'Well, well, I will. Now do consider the dilemma your child was in: she must either elope, or by her presence keep alive a criminal passion in her father-in-law, which you sooner or later must discover; and be besides exposed to fresh insults.--Well, Glenmurray by chance happened to be on the spot just as she escaped from that villanous fellow's clutches, and--'

'He is dead, Dr Norberry,' interrupted Mrs Mowbray; 'and you know the old adage, "Do not speak ill of the dead."'

'And a very silly adage it is. I had rather speak ill of the dead than the living, for my part: but let me go on.--Well, love taking the name and habit of prudence and filial piety, (for she thought she consulted your happiness, and not her own,) bade her fly to and with her lover; and now there she is, owing to the pretty books which you let her read, living with him as his mistress, and glorying in it, as if it was a notable praiseworthy action.'

'And you would have me forgive her?'

'Certainly: a fault which both your precepts and conduct occasioned. Not but what the girl has been wrong, terribly wrong:--no one ought to do evil that good may come. You had forbidden her to have any intercourse with Glenmurray; and she therefore knew that disobeying you would make you unhappy--that was a certainty. That fellow's persevering in his attempts, after the fine rebuff which she had given him, was an uncertainty; and she ought to have run the risk of it, and not committed a positive fault to avoid a possible evil. But then hers was a fault which she could not have committed had not you married that--but I forbear. And as to her not being married to Glenmurray, that is no fault of his; and with your consent, he will marry your daughter to-morrow morning. That ever so good, cleanly-hearted a youth should have poked his nose into the filthy mess of eccentric philosophy!'

'Have you done, doctor?' cried Mrs Mowbray haughtily: 'have you said all that Miss Mowbray and you have invented to insult me?'

'Your child send me to insult you!--She!--Adeline!--Why, the poor soul came broken-hearted and post haste from France, when she heard of your misfortunes, to offer her services to console you.'

'She console me?--she, the first occasion of them?--But for her, I might still have indulged the charming delusion, even if it were delusion, that love of me, not of my wealth, induced the man I doted upon to commit a crime to gain possession of me.'

'Why!' hastily interrupted the doctor, 'everyone saw that he loved her long before he married you.'

The storm, long gathering, now burst forth; and rising, with the tears, high colour, and vehement voice of unbridled passion, Mrs Mowbray exclaimed, raising her arm and clenching her fist as she spoke, 'And it is being the object of that cruel preference, which I never, never will forgive her!'

The doctor, after ejaculating 'Whew!' as much as to say 'The murder is out,' instantly took his hat and departed, convinced his labour was vain. 'There,' muttered he as he went down stairs, 'two instances in one day! Ah, ah,--that jealousy is the devil.' He then slowly walked to the hotel, where he expected to find Adeline and Glenmurray.

They had arrived about two hours before; and Adeline in a frame of mind but ill fitted to bear the disappointment which awaited her. For, with the sanguine expectations natural to her age, she had been castle-building as usual; and their journey to London had been rendered a very short one, by the delightful plans, for the future, which she had been forming and imparting to Glenmurray.

'When I consider,' said she, 'the love which my mother has always shown for me, I cannot think it possible that she can persist in renouncing me; and however her respect for the prejudices of the world, a world which she intended to live in at the time of her unfortunate connexion, might make her angry at my acting in defiance of its laws,--now that she herself, from a sense of injury and disgrace, is about to retire from it, she will no longer have a motive to act contrary to the dictates of reason herself, or to wish me to do so.'

'But your ideas of reason and hers may be so different--'

'No. Our practice may be different, but our theory is the same, and I have no doubt but that my mother will now forgive and receive us; and that, living in a romantic solitude, being the whole world to each other, our days will glide away in uninterrupted felicity.'

'And how shall we employ ourselves?' said Glenmurray smiling.

'You shall continue to write for the instruction of your fellow-creatures; while my mother and I shall be employed in endeavouring to improve the situation of the poor around us, and perhaps in educating our children.'

Adeline, when animated by any prospect of happiness, was irresistible: she was really Hope herself, as described by Collins--

'But thou, oh Hope, with eyes so fair,
What was thy delighted measure!'

and Glenmurray, as he listened to her, forgot his illness; forgot every thing, but what Adeline chose to imagine. The place of their retreat was fixed upon. It was to be a little village near Falmouth, the scene of their first happiness. The garden was laid out; Mrs Mowbray's library planned; and so completely were they lost in their charming prospects for the future, that every turnpike-man had to wait a longer time than he was accustomed to for his money; and the postillion had driven into London in the way to the hotel, before Adeline recollected that she was, for the first time, in a city which she had long wished most ardently to see.

They had scarcely taken up their abode at the hotel recommended to them by Dr Norberry, when he knocked at the door. Adeline from the window had seen him coming; and sure as she thought herself to be of her mother's forgiveness, she turned sick and faint when the decisive moment was at hand; and, hurrying out of the room, she begged Glenmurray to receive the doctor, and apologize for her absence.

Glenmurray awaited him with a beating heart. He listened to his step on the stairs: it was slow and heavy; unlike that of a benevolent man coming to communicate good news. Glenmurray began immediately to tremble for the peace of Adeline; and, hastily pouring out a glass of wine, was on the point of drinking it when Dr Norberry entered.

'Give me a glass,' cried he: 'I want one, I am sure, to recruit my spirits.' Glenmurray in silence complied with his desire. 'Come, I'll give you a toast,' cried the doctor: 'Here is--'

At this moment Adeline entered. She had heard the doctor's last words, and she thought he was going to drink to the reconciliation of her mother and herself; and hastily opening the door she came to receive the good news which awaited her. But, at sight of her, the toast died unfinished on her old friend's lips; he swallowed down the wine in silence, and then taking her hand led her to the sofa.

Adeline's heart began to die within her; and before the doctor, after having taken a pinch of snuff and blowed his nose full three times, was prepared to speak, she was convinced that she had nothing but unwelcome intelligence to receive; and she awaited in trembling expectation an answer to a 'Well, sir,' from Glenmurray, spoken in a tone of fearful emotion.

'No, it is not well, sir,' replied the doctor.

'You have seen my mother?' said Adeline, catching hold of the arm of the sofa for support: and in an instant Glenmurray was by her side.

'I have seen Mrs Mowbray, but not your mother: for I have seen a woman dead to every graceful impulse of maternal affection, and alive only to a selfish sense of rivalship and hatred. My poor child! God forgive the deluded woman! But I declare she detests you!'

'Detests me?' exclaimed Adeline.

'Yes; she swears that she can never forgive the preference which that vile fellow gave you, and I am convinced that she will keep her word;' and here the doctor, turning round, saw Adeline lying immoveable in Glenmurray's arms. But she did not long remain so, and with a frantic scream kept repeating the words 'She detests me!' till unable to contend any longer with the acuteness of her feelings, she sunk, sobbing convulsively, exhausted on the bed to which they carried her.

'My good friend, my only friend,' cried Glenmurray, 'what is to be done? Will she scream again, think you, in that most dreadful and unheard-of manner? For, if she does, I must run out of the house.'

'What, then, she never treated you in this pretty way before, heh?'

'Never, never. Her self-command has always been exemplary.'

'Indeed?--Lucky fellow! My wife and daughters often scream just as loud, on very trifling occasions: but that scream went to my heart; for I well know how to distinguish between the shriek of agony and that of passion.'

When Adeline recovered, she ardently conjured Dr Norberry to procure her an interview with her mother; contending that it was absolutely impossible to suppose, that the sight of a child so long and tenderly loved should not renew a little of her now dormant affection.

'But you were her rival, as well as her child; remember that. However, you look so ill, that now, if ever, she will forgive you, I think: therefore I will go back to Mrs Mowbray; and while I am there do you come, ask for me, and follow the servant into the room.'

'I will,' replied Adeline: and leaning on the arm of her lover, she slowly followed the doctor to her mother's hotel.