An Apple-Cast and a Letter.
“Better the blind faith of our youth
Than doubt, which all truth braves;
Better to die, God’s children dear,
Than live, the Devil’s slaves.”
Dinah Mulock.
“Good-morrow, Lady Lettice! I am come to ask a favour.”
“Ask it, I pray you, Mrs Rookwood.”
“Will you suffer Mrs Lettice to come to our apple-cast on Tuesday next? We shall have divers young folks of our neighbours—Mrs Abbott’s Mary, Dorcas, and Hester, Mrs Townsend’s Rebecca, my Lady Woodward’s Dulcibel and Grissel, and such like; and our Doll, I am in hopes, shall be back from Suffolk, and maybe her cousin Bessy with her. I have asked Mr Louvaine to come, and twain more of my Lord Oxford’s gentlemen; and Mr Manners, Mr Stone, and our Tom, shall be there. What say you?”
Lady Louvaine looked with a smile at her granddaughter, who sat in the window with a book. She was not altogether satisfied with the Rookwoods, yet less from anything they said or did than from what they omitted to say and do. They came regularly to church, they attended the Sacrament, they asked the Vicar to their dinner-parties, they were very affable and friendly to their neighbours. There was absolutely nothing on which it was possible to lay a reproving finger, and say, This is what I do not like. And yet, while she could no more give a reason for distrusting them than the schoolboy for objecting to the famous Dr Fell, she did instinctively distrust them. Still, Lettice was a good girl, on the whole a discreet girl; she had very few pleasures, especially such as took her outside her home, and gave her the companionship of girls of her own age. Lettice had been taught, as all Puritan maidens were, that “life is, to do the will of God,” and that pleasure was not to be sought at all, and scarcely to be accepted except in its simplest forms, and as coming naturally along with the duties of life. An admirable lesson—a lesson which girls sadly need to learn now, if only for the lowest reason—that pleasures thus taken are infinitely more pleasing than when sought, and the taste for them is keener and more enduring. To the moral taste, no less than the physical, plain fare with a good appetite is incomparably more enjoyable than the finest dainties with none: and the moral appetite can cloy and pall at least as soon as the physical. Lettice’s healthy moral nature had been content with the plain fare, and had never cried out for dainties. But, like all young folks, she liked a pleasant change, and her grandmother, who had thought her looking pale and somewhat languid with the summer heat in town, was glad that she should have the enjoyment. She knew she might trust her.
Not even to herself did Lady Louvaine confess her deepest reason for allowing Lettice to go to the apple-cast—an assembly resembling in its nature the American “bee,” and having an apple-gathering and storing for its object. It was derived from the fact that Aubrey had been invited. It occurred to her that something might transpire in Lettice’s free and innocent narrative of her enjoyment, which would be of service in the difficult business of dealing with Aubrey at this juncture.
Lettice, as beseemed a maiden of her years, was silent, though her eyes said, “Please!” in very distinct language.
“I thank you, Mrs Rookwood; Lettice may go.”
Lettice’s eyes lighted up.