“Food and roof? But it does not content me. How should it? I need more. Eighteen!— ’Twas my birthday a week since, and what happiness or good has one of the eighteen years brought me? That man feeds on us, lives on us, sponges on us, and would do worse. He will suck us dry as a China orange. No—I have my chance and tomorrow I go.”
“Good God, and where?”
She condescended then on explanations, and added that she knew a good old woman who would give her lodging and that the fine salary she expected would make all easy. The old woman in her head was Mrs. Scawen for she knew no other, and ’tis to be seen how wild and insubstantial were all her plans. Indeed her mother was not wrong in scenting much danger, and equally the girl was cruel enough, in her young rebellion, to these anxieties. But there it was, and if anything was needed to clinch her resolves it was when Mr. Fenton swaggered into the room in his spotted and blotched cloth coat, carrying his bloated face without shame and garnishing every sentence with a deep oath. The courtship had been short, or sure poor Mrs. Fenton had discovered what like he was in time to save her and her child.
The two women hushed their talk like birds before a storm when he flung himself into the creaking armchair and came out with a proposal that the girl should dance and sing at a roister to be held at the coffee house in a week’s time.
“There’s money in light toes and a pretty face, Lavinia,” says he, “and when I hear talk of these foreign beauties coming to twirl the money out of poor English pockets I think I know as pretty a girl at home and I’m much mistook unless she sits by me now.”
Mrs. Fenton made an exclamation of horror.—A dancer! then silenced herself because Diana sat rigid. Thus they endured until the horrid man took himself off to his bottle below, and then the poor lady flung herself weeping into her girl’s arms and owned she could see no hope of better things.
“But promise me, promise me, Di,” she cried, “that you won’t drag your father’s honoured name in the dirt of the stage. Sure you don’t forget his father was a landed gentleman in Sussex if he hadn’t diced his all away. Promise me this.”
Diana promised, with a glitter in her eyes. “You have my word, Mamma. I’ll take a name that no dirt can soil because it’s so black already. Fenton. I’ll be Mrs. Fenton. And for Christian name—O, my mamma, lend me yours that I may have one thing at least clean about me where I go. Let me be Lavinia because ’tis your name. Lavinia Fenton! And if I make my fortune you’ll come to me, and we’ll have rooms where that horror can’t pursue us, and some happy day to come, you’ll bless your Lavinia Fenton!”
So her heart softened when she saw her mother’s grief, and it well became her.
The two passed the evening together talking and weeping, clasping each other’s hand, and trembling each in her own way at the coming dawn and its events. They slept in each other’s arms also, if sleep it could be called, with Diana huddling against her mother like a young bird that quakes to leave the nest maternal, yet knows her wings are fledged. And such indeed was her pitiful case.