Honora was infinitely relieved at having bestowed this piece of advice, on which she had agreed with Robert as the only means of insuring Phœbe’s being sheltered from society that Mervyn might not esteem so bad for his sister as they did.
The quietness of Mervyn’s absence did much for the restoration of Phœbe’s spirits. The dame’s school was not delightful to her; she had not begun early enough in life for ease, but she did her tasks there as a duty, and was amply rewarded by the new enjoyment thus afforded to Maria. The importance of being surrounded by a ring of infants, teaching the alphabet, guiding them round the gooseberry bush, or leading their songs and hymns, was felicity indescribable to Maria. She learnt each name, and, with the reiteration that no one could endure save Phœbe and faithful Lieschen, rehearsed the individual alphabetical acquirements of every one; she painted pictures for them, hemmed pinafores, and was happier than she had ever been in her life, as well as less fretful and more manageable, and she even began to develop more sense and intelligence in this direction than she had seemed capable of under the dreary round of lessons past her comprehension.
It was a great stimulus to Phœbe, and spurred her to personal parish work, going beyond the soup and subscriptions that might have bounded her charities for want of knowing better. Of course the worst and most plausible people took her in, and Miss Charlecote sometimes scolded, sometimes laughed at her, but the beginning was made, and Robert was pleased.
Mervyn did bring home some shooting friends, but he made no difficulties as to the seclusion that Miss Charlecote had recommended for his sister; accepting it so easily that Phœbe thought he must have intended it from the first. From that time he was seldom at home without one or more guests—an arrangement that kept the young ladies chiefly to the west wing, and always, when in the garden, forced them to be on their guard against stumbling upon smoking gentlemen. It was a late-houred, noisy company, and the sounds that reached the sisters made the younger girls curious, and the governess anxious. Perhaps it was impossible that girls of seventeen and fifteen should not be excited by the vicinity of moustaches and beards whom they were bidden to avoid; and even the alternate French and German which Miss Fennimore enforced on Bertha more strongly than ever, merely produced the variety of her descanting on their knebelbarten, or on l’heure à guelle les voix de ces messieurs-là entonnaient sur le grand escalier, till Miss Fennimore declared that she would have Latin and Greek talked if there were no word for a gentleman in either! There were always stories to be told of Bertha’s narrow escapes of being overtaken by them in garden or corridor, till Maria, infected by the panic, used to flounder away as if from a beast of prey, and being as tall as, and considerably stouter than, Phœbe, with the shuffling gait of the imbecile, would produce a
volume of sound that her sister always feared might attract notice, and irritate Mervyn.
Honora Charlecote tried to give pleasure to the sisters by having them at the Holt, and would fain have treated Bertha as one of the inherited godchildren. But Bertha proved by reference to the brass tablet that she could not be godchild to a man who died three years before her birth, and it was then perceived that his sponsorship had been to an elder Bertha, who had died in infancy, of water on the head, and whom her parents, in their impatience of sorrow, had absolutely caused to be forgotten. Such a delusion in the exact Phœbe could only be accounted for by her tenderness to Mr. Charlecote, and it gave Bertha a subject of triumph of which she availed herself to the utmost. She had imbibed a sovereign contempt for Miss Charlecote’s capacity, and considered her as embodying the passive individual who is to be instructed or confuted in a scientific dialogue. So she lost no occasion of triumphantly denouncing all ‘cataclysms’ of the globe, past or future, of resolving all nature into gases, or arguing upon duality—a subject that fortunately usually brought on her hesitation of speech, a misfortune of which Miss Fennimore and Phœbe would unscrupulously avail themselves to change the conversation. The bad taste and impertinence were quite as apparent to the governess as to the sister, and though Bertha never admitted a doubt of having carried the day against the old world prejudices, yet Miss Fennimore perceived, not only that Miss Charlecote’s notions were not of the contracted and unreasonable order that had been ascribed to her, but that liberality in her pupil was more uncandid, narrow, and self-sufficient than was ‘credulity’ in Miss Charlecote. Honor was more amused than annoyed at these discussions; she was sorry for the silly, conceited girl, though not in the least offended nor disturbed, but Phœbe and Miss Fennimore considered them such an exposure that they were by no means willing to give Bertha the opportunity of launching herself at her senior.
The state of the household likewise perplexed Phœbe. She had been bred up to the sight of waste, ostentation, and extravagance, and they did not distress her; but her partial authority revealed to her glimpses of dishonesty; detected falsehoods destroyed her confidence in the housekeeper; her attempts at charities to the poor were intercepted; her visits to the hamlet disclosed to her some of the effects on the villagers of a vicious, disorderly establishment; and she understood why a careful mother would as soon have sent her daughter to service at the lowest public-house as at Beauchamp.
Mervyn had detected one of the footmen in a flagrant act of peculation, and had dismissed him, but Phœbe believed the evil to have extended far more widely than he supposed, and made up her mind to entreat him to investigate matters. In vain, however, she sought for a favourable moment, for he was never
alone. The intervals between other visitors were filled up by a Mr. Hastings, who seemed to have erected himself into so much of the domesticated friend that he had established a bowing and speaking acquaintance with Phœbe; Bertha no longer narrated her escapes of encounters with him; and, being the only one of the gentlemen who ever went to church, he often joined the young ladies as they walked back from thence. Phœbe heartily wished him gone, for he made her brother inaccessible; she only saw Mervyn when he wanted her to find something for him or to give her a message, and if she ventured to say that she wanted to speak to him, he promised—‘Some time or other’—which always proved sine die. He was looking very ill, his complexion very much flushed, and his hand heated and unsteady, and she heard through Lieschen of his having severe morning headaches, and fits of giddiness and depression, but these seemed to make him more unable to spare Mr. Hastings, as if life would not be endurable without the billiards that she sometimes heard knocking about half the night.
However, the anniversary of Mr. Fulmort’s death would bring his executor to clear off one branch of his business, and Mervyn’s friends fled before the coming of the grave old lawyer, all fixing the period of their departure before Christmas. Nor could Mervyn go with them; he must meet Mr. Crabbe, and Phœbe’s heart quite bounded at the hope of being able to walk about the house in comfort, and say part of what was on her mind to her brother.