‘What sort of scrape?’ asked Bertha, gathering from the smack of the hope that it was something exciting.
‘Oh, you are too much of a chit to know—but I say, Bertha,
write to me, and let me know whom Mervyn brings to the house.’
With somewhat the like injunction, only directed to a different quarter, Robert likewise left Beauchamp.
As he well knew would be the case, nothing in his own circumstances was changed by his mother’s death, save that he no longer could call her inheritance his home. She had made no will, and her entire estate passed to her eldest son, from whom Robert parted on terms of defiance, rather understood than expressed. He took leave of his birthplace as one never expecting to return thither, and going for his last hour at Hiltonbury to Miss Charlecote, poured out to her as many of his troubles as he could bear to utter. ‘And,’ said he, ‘I have given my approval to the two schemes that I most disapproved beforehand—to Mervyn’s giving my sisters a home, and to Miss Fennimore’s continuing their governess! What will come of it?’
‘Do not repent, Robert,’ was the answer. ‘Depend upon it, the great danger is in rashly meddling with existing arrangements, especially by a strain of influence. It is what the young are slow to learn, but experience brings it home.’
‘With you to watch them, I will fear the less.’
Miss Charlecote wondered whether any disappointment of his own added to his depression, and if he thought of Lucilla.
CHAPTER XVIII
My sister is not so defenceless left
As you imagine. She has a hidden strength
Which you remember not.—Comus