Marriott came out of her lady’s room about a quarter of an hour afterward, and said that her lady seemed disposed to sleep, but that she desired to have her hook left by her bedside. Marriott searched among several which lay upon the table, for one in which a mark was put. Belinda looked over them along with Marriott, and she was surprised to find that they had almost all methodistical titles. Lady Delacour’s mark was in the middle of Wesley’s Admonitions. Several pages in other books of the same description Miss Portman found marked in pencil, with reiterated lines, which she knew to be her ladyship’s customary mode of distinguishing passages that she particularly liked. Some were highly oratorical, but most of them were of a mystical cast, and appeared to Belinda scarcely intelligible. She had reason to be astonished at meeting with such books in the dressing-room of a woman of Lady Delacour’s character. During the solitude of her illness, her ladyship had first begun to think seriously on religious subjects, and the early impressions that had been made on her mind in her childhood, by a methodistical mother, recurred. Her understanding, weakened perhaps by disease, and never accustomed to reason, was incapable of distinguishing between truth and error; and her temper, naturally enthusiastic, hurried her from one extreme to the other—from thoughtless scepticism to visionary credulity. Her devotion was by no means steady or permanent; it came on by fits usually at the time when the effect of opium was exhausted, or before a fresh dose began to operate. In these intervals she was low-spirited—bitter reflections on the manner in which she had thrown away her talents and her life obtruded themselves; the idea of the untimely death of Colonel Lawless, of which she reproached herself as the cause, returned; and her mind, from being a prey to remorse, began to sink in these desponding moments under the most dreadful superstitious terrors—terrors the more powerful as they were secret. Whilst the stimulus of laudanum lasted, the train of her ideas always changed, and she was amazed at the weak fears and strange notions by which she had been disturbed; yet it was not in her power entirely to chase away these visions of the night, and they gained gradually a dominion over her, of which she was heartily ashamed. She resolved to conceal this weakness, as in her gayer moments she thought it, from Belinda, from whose superior strength of understanding she dreaded ridicule or contempt. Her experience of Miss Portman’s gentleness and friendship might reasonably have prevented or dispelled such apprehensions; but Lady Delacour was governed by pride, by sentiment, by whim, by enthusiasm, by passion—by any thing but reason.
When she began to revive after her fit of languor, and had been refreshed by opium and sleep, she rang for Marriott, and inquired for Belinda. She was much provoked when Marriott, by way of proving to her that Miss Portman could not have been tired of being left alone, told her that she had been in the dressing-room rummaging over the books.
“What books?” cried Lady Delacour. “I forgot that they were left there. Miss Portman is not reading them still, I suppose? Go for them, and let them be locked up in my own bookcase, and bring me the key.”
Her ladyship appeared in good spirits when she saw Belinda again. She rallied her upon the serious studies she had chosen for her morning’s amusements. “Those methodistical books, with their strange quaint titles,” said she, “are, however, diverting enough to those who, like myself, can find diversion in the height of human absurdity.”
Deceived by the levity of her manner, Belinda concluded that the marks of approbation in these books were ironical, and she thought no more of the matter; for Lady Delacour suddenly gave a new turn to the conversation by exclaiming, “Now we talk of the height of human absurdity, what are we to think of Clarence Hervey?”
“Why should we think of him at all?” said Belinda.
“For two excellent reasons, my dear: because we cannot help it, and because he deserves it. Yes, he deserves it, believe me, if it were only for having written these charming letters,” said Lady Delacour, opening a cabinet, and taking out a small packet of letters, which she put into Belinda’s hands. “Pray, read them; you will find them amazingly edifying, as well as entertaining. I protest I am only puzzled to know whether I shall bind them up with Sterne’s Sentimental Journey or Fordyce’s Sermons for Young Women. Here, my love, if you like description,” continued her ladyship, opening one of the letters, “here is a Radcliffean tour along the picturesque coasts of Dorset and Devonshire. Why he went this tour, unless for the pleasure and glory of describing it, Heaven knows! Clouds and darkness rest over the tourist’s private history: but this, of course, renders his letters more piquant and interesting. All who have a just taste either for literature or for gallantry, know how much we are indebted to the obscure for the sublime; and orators and lovers feel what felicity there is in the use of the fine figure of suspension.”
“Very good description, indeed!” said Belinda, without raising her eyes from the letter, or seeming to pay any attention to the latter part of Lady Delacour’s speech; “very good description, certainly!”
“Well, my dear; but here is something better than pure description—here is sense for you: and pray mark the politeness of addressing sense to a woman—to a woman of sense, I mean—and which of us is not? Then here is sentiment for you,” continued her ladyship, spreading another letter before Belinda; “a story of a Dorsetshire lady, who had the misfortune to be married to a man as unlike Mr. Percival, and as like Lord Delacour, as possible; and yet, oh, wonderful! they make as happy a couple as one’s heart could wish. Now, I am truly candid and good-natured to admire this letter; for every word of it is a lesson to me, and evidently was so intended. But I take it all in good part, because, to do Clarence justice, he describes the joys of domestic Paradise in such elegant language, that he does not make me sick. In short, my dear Belinda, to finish my panegyric, as it has been said of some other epistles, if ever there were letters calculated to make you fall in love with the writer of them, these are they.”
“Then,” said Miss Portman, folding up the letter which she was just going to read, “I will not run the hazard of reading them.”