THE next day Father Brousseau came to see us. We had been so hurried and flurried at the time of our landing the day before, that we had hardly exchanged a dozen words, and now he came to bid us farewell before going to his friends in the country.
They had sent some one to meet him—a gentleman-in-waiting of some kind, and a very solemn and dignified person indeed, who accompanied him to our house. He had furnished the good priest with a suit of raiment, such as is worn by ordinary English clergymen, not wishing, I suppose, to have him attract notice as a foreigner.
There were at the time considerable disturbances in the country. A French war was impending, and an apprehended rising of the Jacobites, or adherents to the house of Stuart, which really took place the next year, had awakened the "no popery" feeling, always prevailing more or less in the lower and middle classes. I must say he had not succeeded very well in disguising him, for Father Brousseau looked, if possible, more priestly than ever.
He was to leave town that very day, and it was easy to see that the serving-man was anxious to get him away. Indeed, he made his impatience so manifest, that our leave-taking was rather a hurried one. The father gave us some advice as to our conduct, enjoined it upon us to read no heretical books, and attend no heretical services, to say our prayers and keep at home, and to be guided by Mrs. Thorpe in all things not belonging to our religion. He gave us each a little picture, and his blessing, and bade us farewell. I did not see him for many a year afterward, when times were greatly changed for both of us.
It must be confessed that for a few days, we lived rather an idle and unprofitable life at Mrs. Thorpe's. The good woman herself was naturally very busy after her long absence, and she left us much to ourselves. We had never been used to the ordering of our own time any more since we were grown up, than when we were three years old.
In the convent every hour brought its own occupation, in the same regular routine, day after day, and year after year, and we never thought of anything else. We had never been trained to think or decide for ourselves in the smallest matter. "A good religious has no will of her own, and no more thinks of guiding herself than does the needle she sews with," was a favorite saying of Mother Superior's, and we had been brought up on the same principle. A man who has never learned to walk alone, will, if left to himself, stumble just as much at fifty as at three, and will probably hurt himself a good deal more. It is therefore no wonder that being, as it were, thus suddenly put on our own feet, and bade to go, we did not know very well how to set about it.
Mrs. Thorpe, as I have said, had provided us with a parlor of our own, but we liked better to sit in her room which opened from the shop, and watch the many customers—the fine ladies who came for essences, laces, and fans, and the hundred and one nothings in which Mrs. Thorpe dealt—to cheapen china jars and dragons, and go into ecstasies over tiny tea-cups and French painted fans—and the still finer gentlemen who came to see the fine ladies, look over the last novel—for Mrs. Thorpe added that of a circulating library to her other business—and discuss the latest bit of news and scandal.
Mrs. Thorpe usually found or made time to take a walk with us every day, and when she could not go herself, she sent Mrs. Crump, her housekeeper, a most respectable woman, whom we particularly liked, because she had come from Cornwall, and could tell about the place where our mothers had grown up.
In the house I am afraid, we dawdled sadly. We found ourselves for the first time among books. Mrs. Thorpe, as I have said, kept a circulating library, but she by no means made us free of its contents. However, she picked out for us Mr. Thomson's Poems and Dr. Young's, and the then new romance of "Sir Charles Grandison" in its seven closely-printed little volumes, (the good Richardson had made fourteen in the first place) and allowed us to amuse ourselves with these. *
* This is an anachronism. "Sir Charles Grandison" was published in 1751.