With true gratitude and joy her son embraced her; and this was the most delightful, perhaps the only really delightful, moment she had felt for years. She was sincere, and at ease. But this touch of nature, strong as it was, operated only for a moment: habit resumed her influence; art regained her pupil and her slave! Captain Lightbody and Miss Hunter came into the room; and with them came low thoughts of plots, and notes, and baronets, and equipages, and a reversionary title, and the Wigram estate. What different ideas of happiness! Her son, in the mean time, had started up, mounted his horse, and had galloped off to realize some of his ideas of felicity, by the immediate offer of his hand to the lady who possessed his whole heart. Cool as policy, just recovered from the danger of imprudent sensibility, could make her, Mrs. Beaumont was now all herself again.
“Have you found much amusement shooting this morning, Lightbody?” said she, carelessly.
“No, ma’am; done nothing—just nothing at all—for I met Sir John in the grounds, and could not leave him. Poor Sir John, ma’am; I tell him we must get him a crook; he is quite turned despairing shepherd. Never saw a man so changed. Upon my soul, he is—seriously now, Mrs. Beaumont, you need not laugh—I always told Sir John that his time of falling in love would come; and come it has, at last, with a vengeance.”
“Oh, nonsense! nonsense, Lightbody! This to me! and of Sir John Hunter!”
Though Mrs. Beaumont called it, and thought it nonsense, yet it flattered her; and though she appeared half offended by flattery so gross, as to seem almost an insult upon her understanding, yet her vanity was secretly gratified, even by feeling that she had dependents who were thus obliged to flatter; and though she despised Captain Lightbody for the meanness, yet he made his court to her successfully, by persisting in all the audacity of adulation. She knew Sir John Hunter too well to believe that he was liable to fall in love with any thing but a fair estate or a fine fortune; yet she was gratified by feeling that she possessed so great a share of those charms which age cannot wither; of that substantial power, to which men do not merely feign in poetical sport to submit, or to which they are slaves only for a honey-moon, but to which they do homage to the latest hour of life, with unabating, with increasing devotion. Besides this sense of pleasure arising from calculation, it may be presumed that, like all other female politicians, our heroine had something of the woman lurking at her heart; something of that feminine vanity, which inclines to believe in the potency of personal charms, even when they are in the wane. Captain Lightbody’s asseverations, and the notes Sir John Hunter wrote to his sister, were at last listened to by Mrs. Beaumont with patience, and even with smiles; and, after it had been sufficiently reiterated, that really it was using Sir John Hunter ill not to give him some more decisive answer, when he was so unhappy, so impatient, she at length exclaimed, “Well, Lightbody, tell your friend Sir John, then, since it must be so, I will consult my friends, and see what can be done for him.”
“When may I say? for I dare not see Sir John again—positively I dare not meet him—without having some hope to give, something decisive. He says the next time he comes here he must be allowed to make it known to the family that he is Mrs. Beaumont’s admirer. So, when may I say?”
“Oh, dearest Mrs. Beaumont,” cried Miss Hunter, “say to-morrow.”
“To-morrow! impossible!”
“But when?” said Miss Hunter: “only look at my brother’s note to me again; you see he is afraid of being cast off at last as he was before about Amelia, if Mr. Palmer should object; and he says this disappointment would be such a very different affair.”
“Indeed,” said Captain Lightbody, “I, who am in Sir John’s confidence, can vouch for that; for I have reason to believe, that—that the connexion was the charm, and that the daughter would not have been thought of. Stop, I was charged not to say this. But when Mrs. Beaumont, to return to my point—”