Discovering "Evelina": An Old-fashioned Romance / A Companion Book to "The Jessamy Bride"

by Frank Frankfort Moore

CHAPTER XXX

The levity shown by Fanny Burney and the flippancy of her phrases did not wholly conceal from her sisters all that she was feeling on the subject of the proposal to which she had referred with such lightness. She knew that while her father and her stepmother would not treat her with any marked disfavour on account of her rejection of the worthy young man who was ready to offer her a home, still Mrs. Burney at least regarded with great disfavour the nature of the answer which she had to send to the Poultry, and Fanny was very well aware of the ease with which so conscientious a guardian as Mrs. Burney could make her feel every day of her life what was Mrs. Burney’s opinion of her rejection of an eligible young man.

Fanny recognized the great merits of her stepmother, and she could look from her standpoint at most of the incidents of their daily life. In that household one mouth less to feed was worth consideration—the number of mouths to feed was a constant source of thought with Mrs. Burney, as was also the question of a provision for the future of all of them.

Mrs. Burney would be fully justified in feeling cross with her, not being aware of the fact that another young man, compared with whom Thomas Barlowe was as the dust of the ground, was burning, with an ardour of which Thomas was incapable, to take her to himself and provide for her in a style undreamt of in the Poultry.

But the worst of the matter was that she could not let her stepmother into this secret. She could not say that she was engaged to marry Signor Rauzzini, and she might leave herself open to the gravest rebuke for having listened to his protestations of devotion without obtaining the consent of either of her parents.

And through all this tangle of reflections there ran the silken thread of consciousness that she was no longer the Fanny Burney who was regarded by her stepmother as the dunce, but Fanny Burney the writer of “Evelina,” to whom the most critical review had devoted a full column of adulation!

That was what made her position so anomalous; and it was because she took the happenings of the previous days to heart that she went to bed with a shocking headache, and after a sleepless night was found on the verge of a fever. She was suffering from suppressed secrets; but the doctor did not know this. He prescribed James’s Powders; and when these should have done all that they were meant to do—a small part of all that Dr. James and Mr. Newbery affirmed they would do—a change into the country.

But several weeks had passed before she was strong enough to start on the latter and most essential portion of the prescription, and found herself in her own room in Mr. Crisp’s isolated house at Chessington.

Meantime, of course, she had no further news of the book, and she remained unconfessed, so far as the secret of its publication was concerned. Her sisters did not so much as mention its name or the name of Thomas Barlowe, so cleverly had they diagnosed the nature of her malady and so tactfully did they try to hasten her recovery.

Her old friend Mr. Crisp had been her guide since her childhood. She always alluded to him as her second Daddy—so far as paternal influence was concerned she might have given him the foremost place. He it was who had led her on to embody in letters to him the daily incidents of her life, thus unconsciously setting the loom, as it were, in which “Evelina” was to be woven. He it was who became her teacher and her critic, and it was possibly because she feared his criticism of her work that she refrained from making a confidant of him from the first. She felt that she could face the public and the reviewers—it did not matter how they might receive the book, but she was too timid to submit it to the mature judgment of the man who had first put a pen in her hand. It was not on her own account that she refrained from giving him a chance of reading her book, but on his: she knew how hurt he would be if he found her book to be an indifferent one, and whether indifferent or not, how angry he would be if people did not buy it by the thousand.