MRS. SCHWELLENBERG’S OPINION OF MR. FAIRLY.
Dec. 12.—This day passed in much the same manner. Late in the evening, after Mr. Smelt was gone, Mrs. Schwellenberg began talking about Mr. Fairly, and giving free vent to all her strong innate aversion to him. She went back to the old history of the “newseepaper,” and gave to his naming it every unheard motive of spite, disloyalty, and calumny! three qualities which I believe equally and utterly unknown to him. He was also, she said, “very onfeeling, for she had heard him laugh prodigious with the Lady Waldegraves, Perticleer with lady Carlisle, what you call Lady Elizabeth her sister, and this in the king’s illness.” And, in fine, she could not bear him.
Such gross injustice I could not hear quietly. I began a warm defence, protesting I knew no one whose heart was more feelingly devoted to the royal family, except, perhaps, Mr. Smelt; and that as to his laughing, it must have been at something of passing and accidental amusement, since he was grave even to melancholy, except when he exerted his spirits for the relief or entertainment of others.
Equally amazed and provoked, she disdainfully asked me what I knew of him?
I made no answer. I was not quite prepared for the interrogatory, and feared she might next inquire when and where I had seen him?
My silence was regarded as self-conviction of error, and she added, “I know you can’t not know him; I know he had never seen you two year and half ago; when you came here he had not heard your name.”
“Two years and a half,” I answered coolly, “I did not regard as a short time for forming a judgment of any one’s character.”
“When you don’t not see them? You have never seen him, I am sure, but once, or what you call twice.”
I did not dare let this pass, it was so very wide from the truth; but calmly said I had seen him much oftener than once or twice. “And where? when have you seen him?”
“Many times; and at Cheltenham constantly; but never to observe in him anything but honour and goodness.”
“O ver well! you don’t not know him like me, you can’t not know him; he is not from your acquaintance—I know that ver well!”
She presently went on by herself. “You could not know such a person—he told me the same himself: he told me he had not never seen you when you first came. You might see him at Cheltenham, that is true; but nothing others, I am sure. At Windsor there was no tea, not once, so you can’t not have seen him, only at Cheltenham.”
I hardly knew whether to laugh or be frightened at this width of error; nor, indeed, whether it was not all some artifice to draw me out, from pique, into some recital: at all events I thought it best to say nothing, for she was too affronting to deserve to be set right.
She went on to the same purpose some time, more than insinuating that a person such as Mr. Fairly could never let him self down to be acquainted with me; till finding me too much offended to think her assertions worth answering, she started, at last, another subject. I then forced myself to talk much as usual. But how did I rejoice when the clock struck ten—how wish it had been twelve!