She curtseyed and made to move on. I thought of this later when Miss Burney married M. D'Arblay, a Frenchman and Roman Catholic. I wondered then if she recalled this scene and her own strictures. She bridled with dignity.
"I can scarce imagine Dr Burney's daughter doing the like, Madam. My tastes are all English. But is it well to prolong this talk? Our ways of life are now so different--"
"Truly all is changed--and you with it. But I was ever a prophet, Fanny, and I venture to tell you that you have so overloaded your heart and your wits with caution and fear of the world's opinion that when you take pen in hand once more you 'll find it clogged and heavy. 'T will move on stilts instead of the light heels that danced 'Evelina,' and the ungrateful world will say, 'There goes a woman that if she had shut her eyes on forms and opened them on nature had been the glory of her age.' You are too fearful of the world, Fanny. I flew in its face and found its bark worse than its bite, and that if you kicked it, it crawled to kiss your feet. And so now good-bye."
They both curtseyed angrily, and Mrs Piozzi proceeded quickly down the drive, then suddenly turned and ran back, both hands outstretched:--
"Fanny, Fanny, I can't--" she panted. "It all so rose on me with the sight of you. My master at the table, and Johnson in his chair booming out his wisdoms, and Burke, and poor Goldie--Oh, the poor dead days--the sad dead days--and you a part of them all; and could I say a word to wound you, no matter what you did to me! You that were a part of it all--I felt as if I would kill it outright if I left you in anger. Can one kill ghosts?--they are but ghosts, and yet--Oh, Fanny!"
She held out her shaking hands. I knew this shockingly disordered Miss Burney's notions of propriety and that a lady out of favour with the great world should be seen by me thus familiar with her, and she at Court. She barely touched the hand.
"It was to the memory of those days your friends looked to keep you in a becoming path," said she. "Indeed I share your affection for them, but to remember them thus--"
"Do you so?" says the other a little wildly, and drawing back to dash the tears from her eyes. "Then remember them your way and I 'll remember them mine, and so our paths go east and west: (then turning to me,) I'm sure I ask your pardon, Ma'am, for what must appear so declamatory and high-flown. We Welsh folk, like all the other poor Celts, are allowed romantic flights sometimes to make sport for the sober English. Farewell, Miss Burney. My! best compliments and respects attend your father."
She ran off again very quick and tripping. We stood looking after her till Miss Burney spoke:--
"The tenderness I had and have for her is not to be expressed nor compared save with the love of David for Jonathan. How have I been wounded! Yourself, my dear Miss P., is a witness to her ungoverned passions. Your delicacy will not prefer to entail the misery of explanation on me."