“But when will he ask you?” My dearest Eleanor, that is more than I can say. To tell you the truth, there is something about Linden which I cannot thoroughly understand. They say he is nephew and heir to the Mr. Talbot whom you may have heard Papa talk of; but if so, why the hints, the insinuations, of not being what he seems, which Clarence perpetually throws out, and which only excite my interest without gratifying my curiosity? ‘It is not,’ he has said, more than once, ‘as an obscure adventurer that I will claim your love;’ and if I venture, which is very seldom (for I am a little afraid of him), to question his meaning, he either sinks into utter silence, for which, if I had loved according to book, and not so naturally, I should be very angry with him, or twists his words into another signification, such as that he would not claim me till he had become something higher and nobler than he is now. Alas, my dear Eleanor, it takes a long time to make an ambassador out of an attache.
See now if you reproached me justly with scanty correspondences. If I write a line more, I must begin a new sheet, and that will be beyond the power of a frank,—a thing which would, I know, break the heart of your dear, good, generous, but a little too prudent aunt, and irrevocably ruin me in her esteem. So God bless you, dearest Eleanor, and believe me most affectionately yours, FLORA ARDENNE.
LETTER II. FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
Pray, dearest Eleanor, does that good aunt of yours—now don’t frown, I am not going to speak disrespectfully of her—ever take a liking to young gentlemen whom you detest, and insist upon the fallacy of your opinion and the unerring rectitude of hers? If so, you can pity and comprehend my grief. Mamma has formed quite an attachment to a very disagreeable person! He is Lord Borodaile, the eldest, and I believe, the only son of Lord Ulswater. Perhaps you may have met him abroad, for he has been a great traveller: his family is among the most ancient in England, and his father’s estate covers half a county. All this Mamma tells me, with the most earnest air in the world, whenever I declaim upon his impertinence or disagreeability (is there such a word? there ought to be). “Well,” said I to-day, “what’s that to me?” “It may be a great deal to you,” replied Mamma, significantly, and the blood rushed from my face to my heart. She could not, Eleanor, she could not mean, after all her kindness to Clarence, and in spite of all her penetration into my heart,—oh, no, no,—she could not. How terribly suspicious this love makes one!
But if I disliked Lord Borodaile at first, I have hated him of late; for, somehow or other, he is always in the way. If I see Clarence hastening through the crowd to ask me to dance, at that very instant up steps Lord Borodaile with his cold, changeless face, and his haughty old-fashioned bow, and his abominable dark complexion; and Mamma smiles; and he hopes he finds me disengaged; and I am hurried off; and poor Clarence looks so disappointed and so wretched! You have no idea how ill-tempered this makes me. I could not help asking Lord Borodaile yesterday if he was never going abroad again, and the hateful creature played with his cravat, and answered “Never!” I was in hopes that my sullenness would drive his lordship away: tout au contraire; “Nothing,” said he to me the other day, when he was in full pout, “nothing is so plebeian as good-humour!”
I wish, then, Eleanor, that he could see your governess: she must be majesty itself in his eyes!
Ah, dearest, how we belie ourselves! At this moment, when you might think, from the idle, rattling, silly flow of my letter, that my heart was as light and free as it was when we used to play on the green lawn, and under the sunny trees, in the merry days of our childhood, the tears are running down my cheeks; see where they have fallen on the page, and my head throbs as if my thoughts were too full and heavy for it to contain. It is past one! I am alone, and in my own room. Mamma is gone to a rout at H—— House, but I knew I should not meet Clarence there, and so said I was ill, and remained at home. I have done so often of late, whenever I have learned from him that he was not going to the same place as Mamma. Indeed, I love much better to sit alone and think over his words and looks; and I have drawn, after repeated attempts, a profile likeness of him; and oh, Eleanor, I cannot tell you how dear it is to me; and yet there is not a line, not a look of his countenance which I have not learned by heart, without such useless aids to my memory. But I am ashamed of telling you all this, and my eyes ache so, that I can write no more.
Ever, as ever, dearest Eleanor, your affectionate friend.
F. A. LETTER III. FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
Eleanor, I am undone! My mother—my mother has been so cruel; but she cannot, she cannot intend it, or she knows very little of my heart. With some ties may be as easily broken as formed; with others they are twined around life itself.