Lady Tyrrell held out her hand to her. "I will acknowledge, my dear Mrs. Effingham," she said, "that I must have sadly misconstrued some of my husband's expressions in regard to you, and I thank you for all your candour and your confidence. Depend upon it, I will return it with pleasure and with comfort to myself."
"I thought so from what I saw of you last night," said Mrs. Effingham; "but I had determined, nevertheless, whatever might be your character, to explain to you frankly and straightforwardly why I came without your invitation. I must now, however, come to another part of the subject, more difficult, and, perhaps, more disagreeable to treat of."
"Indeed!" said Lady Tyrrell, with some alarm. "Pray what may that be?"
"It is in regard to your son and my daughter," said Mrs. Effingham.
Lady Tyrrell smiled; but she was as much wrong in her present conclusions as she had been in her former ones.
"I have been entirely mistaken," continued Mis. Effingham, "in regard to your son's age; I had thought, I do not well know why, that he was not more than fifteen or sixteen, and I cannot let Lucy be here even for the short time that we are to stay, nor be so intimate in the house after we have removed to the manor, as I hope we shall be, without being straightforward and candid on that subject also. I mentioned that there were two motives which induced me to wish to leave Northumberland."
"Good God!" exclaimed Lady Tyrrell, raising herself in bed. "Your daughter is in love with somebody there." And she felt strangely at that moment what a perverse thing is human nature. Not two days before, all her feelings would have been different on hearing that Lucy Effingham was either engaged to, or in love with, somebody in Northumberland; but now, although she would not admit even to herself that she absolutely wished her to marry Charles Tyrrell, yet she was disappointed to think that such a thing was out of the question.
Mrs. Effingham, however, after a moment's pause, replied, "Not exactly, my dear Lady Tyrrell; I do not mean to say that Lucy is absolutely in love with anybody; but there is a young gentleman in that neighbourhood who is certainly desperately in love with her. What are Lucy's feelings on the subject I have never inquired; because both her father and myself were resolved, from the first, to set our face against such a marriage; and, having determined to reject it without any appeal to her, judged it would be unkind and unjust to enter upon the subject with her at all, as nothing that she could have said, or any one else could have said, could by any chance have shaken our resolution."
"Some person, I suppose," said Lady Tyrrell, "inferior to herself in circumstances and station?"
"Not exactly," replied Mrs. Effingham; "at least, not so inferior as to have proved an objection in her father's eyes or mine, had it not been for other circumstances. His father, Colonel Hargrave, is a man of small fortune, and, I believe, not very high connexions; but he is a gentleman, and a good though a weak man. His eldest son, who is married, is a clergyman; but his second son, who is in the navy, is in every respect objectionable; rash, wild, licentious, unprincipled. He was early sent to sea, from his ungovernableness at home; but the experiment only made bad worse. However, he was absent from our part of the country, and we did not hear of many of his proceedings till his return. Before we were aware of all the facts, he had seen Lucy frequently, both at his mother's house, at ours, and at other houses in the neighbourhood. But his reputation speedily followed him into Northumberland. We found that he had been in no place without leaving a bad character behind him; and that not alone of a wild and heedless young man of strong passions, but of a heartless, unfeeling debauchee; who was, besides, without any principle in affairs where money was concerned. He could not be exactly called a swindler, but approached as near that character as possible without bringing himself under the arm of the law, and he had very nearly ruined his father to free him from the consequences of his own extravagances and misconduct."