‘That is not my concern,’ said Robert, too much in the tone of ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
‘You will at least tell your reasons for refusing.’
‘Yes, and much I shall be heeded! However, my own hands shall be pure from the wages of iniquity. I am thankful that all I have comes from the Mervyns.’
‘It is a comfort, at least, that you see your way.’
‘I suppose it is;’ but he sighed heavily, with a sense that it was almost profanation to have set such a profession in the balance against the sacred ministry.
‘I know she will like it best.’
Dear Phœbe! in spite of Miss Fennimore, faith must still have been much stronger than reason if she could detect the model parsoness in yonder firefly.
Poor child, she went to bed, pondering over her brother’s terrible discoveries, and feeling as though she had suddenly awakened to find herself implicated in a web of iniquity; her delightful parcel of purchases lost their charms, and oppressed her as she thought of them in connection with the rags of the squalid children the rector had described, and she felt as if there were no escape, and she could never be happy again under the knowledge of the price of her luxuries, and the dread of judgment. ‘Much good had their wealth done them,’ as Robert truly said. The house of Beauchamp had never been nearly so happy as if their means had been moderate. Always paying court to their own station, or they were disunited among themselves, and not yet amalgamated with the society to which they had attained, the younger ones passing their elders in cultivation, and every discomfort of change of position felt, though not acknowledged. Even the mother, lady as she was by birth,
had only belonged to the second-rate class of gentry, and while elevated by wealth, was lowered by connection, and not having either mind or strength enough to stand on her own ground, trod with an ill-assured foot on that to which she aspired.
Not that all this crossed Phœbe’s mind. There was merely a dreary sense of depression, and of living in the midst of a grievous mistake, from which Robert alone had the power of disentangling himself, and she fell asleep sadly enough; but, fortunately, sins, committed neither by ourselves, nor by those for whom we are responsible, have not a lasting power of paining; and she rose up in due time to her own calm sunshiny spirit of anticipation of the evening’s meeting between Robin and Lucy—to say nothing of her own first dinner-party.