It would be hardly doing justice to the good sense of Miss Betsy to state, that this rational and proper destination of her property had never been finally decided upon by her till the moment she answered her brother's question on the subject; and still less correctly true would it be to say, that the dying man's delirious fancy respecting the presence of their father was the reason that she answered that appeal in the manner she did; yet still there might be some slight mixture of truth in both. Miss Compton was constantly in the habit of telling herself that she had not decided to whom she would leave her property; but it is no less true, that the only person she ever thought of as within the possibility of becoming her heir, was Agnes. It is certain also, as I have stated above, that Miss Compton did not believe that departed spirits ever revisited the earth; nevertheless, the dying declaration of Josiah, that he saw the figure of his father, did produce a spasm at her heart, which found great relief by her pronouncing the words, "Agnes Willoughby."
And now that she was quietly alone, and perfectly restored to her sober senses, she began to reconsider all that she had spoken, and to pass judgment upon herself for the having yielded in some degree to the weakness of a visionary imagination.
The result, however, of this self-examination was not exactly what she herself expected. At first she was disposed to exclaim mentally, "I have been foolish—I have been weak;" ... but as she gazed abstractedly on her little fire, and thought—thought—thought of all the chain of events (each so little in itself, yet all so linked together as to produce an important whole,) by which she, the sickly, crooked, little Betsy Compton, had become the proprietor of the long preserved patrimony of her ancestors, ... and also, when she remembered the infinite chances which had existed against either of her portionless, uneducated nieces, forming such a marriage as might produce a child of gentle blood to be her successor,—when she thought of all this, and that, notwithstanding the lieutenant's poverty, the name of Willoughby could disgrace none to which it might be joined, she could not but feel that all things had been managed for her better than she could have managed them for herself.
"And if," thought she, "I was influenced, by hearing my poor father so accurately described, to bind myself at once by a promise to make little Agnes my heir, how do I know but that Providence intended it should be so?"
"Is my freedom of action then gone for ever?" she continued, carrying on her mental soliloquy. The idea was painful to her, and her head sunk upon her breast as she brooded upon it.
"Not so!" she muttered to herself, after some minutes' cogitation. "I am not pledged to this, nor shall it be so. If indeed some emanation from my father's mind has made itself felt by his children this night, it ought not to make a timid slave of me, but rather rouse my courage and my strength to do something more than mere justice to the race that seems so strangely intrusted to my care. And so I will!... if the girl be such a one as may repay the trouble; ... if not, I will shew that I have still some freedom left."
Miss Compton had never seen Agnes Willoughby from the time she first took her from Silverton. Deeply shocked at the profound ignorance in which she found the poor little girl when she visited Compton Basett, she had set herself very earnestly to discover where she could immediately place her, with the best chance of her recovering the time she had so negligently been permitted to lose, and by good luck heard of a clergyman's family in which young ladies were received for a stipend of fifty pounds a-year, and treated more like the children of affectionate parents than the pupils of mercenary teachers. The good spinster heard all this, and was well pleased by the description; yet would she not trust to it, but breaking through all her habits, she put herself into a post-chaise and drove to the rectory of Empton, a distance of at least twenty miles from the town of Silverton. Here she found everything she wished to find; a small, regular establishment, a lady-like and very intelligent woman, with an accomplished young person, (her only child,) fully capable of undertaking the education of a gentleman's daughter; while the venerable father of the family and of the parish, by his gentle manners and exemplary character, ensured exactly the sort of respectability in the home she sought for the little Agnes, which she considered as its most essential feature.
The preliminaries were speedily arranged, and as soon as a neat and sufficient wardrobe was ready for her use, her final separation from her improvident grandmother took place in the manner that has been related.
When Miss Compton left the little girl in the charge of Mrs. Wilmot, she had certainly no idea of her remaining there above three years without visiting or being seen by any of her family; but Mrs. Wilmot, in her subsequent letters, so strongly urged the advantage of not disturbing studies so late begun, and now proceeding so satisfactorily, that our reasonable aunt Betsy willingly submitted to her remaining quietly where she was; an arrangement rendered the more desirable by the death of her grandmother, and the breaking up of the establishment which had been her only home.