This is a very usual threat of selfish and ill-tempered people, particularly if they have loving and anxious hearts to deal with. To Mrs Crampton, to whom the girl was everything in the world, Jenny’s words seem full of bitter portent.
‘Oh! my darling! my darling!’ she exclaimed, in a voice of the deepest concern, ‘don’t say such terrible things, even in jest, for Heaven’s sake! You will break my heart, Jenny, and your poor father would go mad if he heard you speak in such an awful way. Why! we would cut off our right hands to save you a moment’s trouble.’
‘Yes! it looks like it, doesn’t it?’ said the young lady, sarcastically.
‘My dearest, don’t discuss the subject again. Wait a little and you will see it perhaps in a different light. My head aches so, Jenny, I am not fit to argue it with you, and you have been upset as well. Go for a nice drive, and the fresh air will make your head clearer. But be careful, my love, and don’t do anything rash! I’m half afraid of those cobs, Jenny, they’re so fresh and spirited.’
‘Oh! you’re afraid of everything,’ replied her daughter in a tone of contempt; ‘and as for Aunt Clem, she’s alarmed at her own shadow.’
‘I was never brought up to horses and dogs, as you have been, dear,’ said Miss Bostock, who was standing near.
‘No; nor to anything, I should think,’ replied her niece, as she prepared to get into her Ralli cart. ‘I often think you and mamma must have been born and reared on a desert island, you seem so utterly ignorant of the things most people do.’
With which Miss Crampton gently touched her steeds with the lash of her whip, and they went prancing down the drive as if they intended to bolt, whilst her mother and aunt held their breath with anxiety, lest the wilful driver should come to any harm.
Jenny drove at a smart pace through the principal ways of Hampstead, whilst the pedestrians whom she passed said to each other ‘There goes the beautiful Miss Crampton,’ and she overheard some of their remarks and flushed with pleasure at the notice she excited. For this young lady’s besetting sin was an inordinate vanity of her personal attractions, which she had cultivated to the exclusion of all the Christian graces. She was a specimen of that most odious of all modern innovations, the fast girl of the nineteenth century, and she was vulgar in consequence, for all fast women are vulgar, and obnoxious in the eyes of everybody but their male admirers. For when will men be ever sensible enough to separate the value of personal beauty and mental charm? Not while they have eyes to see. Once touch their senses, and, for the time their infatuation lasts, you cannot convince them but that the mind and soul of their goddess equal her body in charm. Frederick Walcheren was infatuated with the beauty of this girl, and he believed her disposition to be all that was good and lovable as well. It appeared so to him, for, whenever they met, Jenny was in her best temper, and ready to be pleased with everything. Had he even seen her, as she had been on the present occasion, rude and impertinent to her parents, cruelly sarcastic to her meek and unoffending aunt, and obstinately resolved upon having her own way, he would still have taken her part, declared her to be a suffering angel, and her father and mother most unjust and tyrannical towards her. Shakespeare never wrote a greater truism than when he made Rosalind declare that ‘Love is a madness,’ a madness that blinds our vision, distorts our judgment, and makes all things, not only apparently, but actually, different from what they are; when the rose-coloured spectacles have been torn by circumstance from our eyes, and we wonder we could ever have been such egregious fools as to think that they were otherwise.
Miss Crampton, then, with her heart on fire and her soul up in arms, stopped at the first pillar-box she passed, and bade Brunell post the letter which she gave him, the letter she had written in her bedroom and which she knew would reach town before Mr Walcheren left it to meet her at the house of their mutual friends, the Bouchers.