"What report, Lady Harrington?" said Mowbray, colouring like scarlet. "I have heard no report, excepting that which is indeed too sure and certain to be called a report;—namely, that she has become a violent Calvinistic Methodist."
"That's bad enough, my dear Charles,—bad enough of all conscience; and yet I have heard of what would be worse still: I have heard, Charles, that she is going to be weak and wicked enough to marry that odious hypocritical Tartuffe, the Vicar of Wrexhill."
Mowbray put his hand before his eyes, as if he had been blasted by lightning, and then replied, as steadily as he could, "I have never heard this, Lady Harrington."
"Then I trust—I trust it is not true, Charles. Helen, surely, and that bright-eyed creature Miss Torrington, who have both, I believe, (for, Heaven help me, I don't know!)—both, I believe, been staying all the time at Mowbray;—and surely—and surely, if this most atrocious deed were contemplated, they must have some knowledge of it."
"And that they certainly have not," returned Charles with recovered courage; "for I sat with them both for two or three hours last night, listening to their miserable account of this man's detestable influence over my mother and Fanny; and certainly they would not have concealed from me such a suspicion as this, had any such existed in the breast of either."
"Quite true, my dear boy, and I can hardly tell you how welcome this assurance is to me—not for your mother's sake, Charles; if you cannot bear the truth, you must not come to me,—and on this point the truth is, that I don't care one single straw about your mother. I never shall forgive her for not answering Sir Gilbert's note. I know what the writing it cost him—dear, proud, generous-hearted old fellow! And not to answer it! not to tell her children of it! No, I never shall forgive her, and I should not care the value of a rat's tail if she were to marry every tub preacher throughout England, and all their clerks in succession—that is, not for her own sake. I dare say she'll preach in a tub herself before she has done with it; but for your sakes, my dear souls, I do rejoice that it is not true."
"That would indeed complete our misery; and it is already quite bad enough, I assure you. The house, Helen says, is a perfect conventicle. The girls are ordered to sing nothing but psalms and hymns; some of the latter so offensively ludicrous, too, as to be perfectly indecent and profane. A long extempore sermon, or lecture as he calls it, is delivered to the whole family in the great drawing-room every night; missionary boxes are not only hung up beside every door, but actually carried round by the butler whenever any one calls; and a hundred and fifty other absurdities, at which we should laugh were we in a gayer mood: but this farce has produced the saddest tragedy I ever witnessed, in the effect it has had upon our poor Fanny. I have had some conversation with her this morning, and I do assure you that I greatly fear her reason is unsettled, or like to be so."
"Heaven forbid, Charles! Pretty innocent young thing! that would be too horrible to think of."
The old lady's eyes were full of tears, a circumstance very unusual with her, but the idea suggested struck her to the heart; and she had not yet removed the traces of this most unwonted proof of sensibility, when a heavy thump was heard at the door of the closet.
"Who's there?" said her ladyship in a voice rather raised than lowered by the emotion which dimmed her eyes.