The other was to Miss Leslie.
“My dear Letitia,
I am sure you will be glad to hear that dear Boy has gone to school. I have sent him to a very good establishment in Noirville, Brittany, where he will pick up French very quickly, and languages are so necessary to a boy nowadays. He left his love for you, and told me to say good-bye to you for him. I hope you are quite well, and that this rather damp weather is not affecting your spirits. I am of course rather lonely without my darling son, but to be a good mother one must always suffer something.
Sincerely yours,
Amelia D’Arcy-Muir.”
It was with a curious sense of self-congratulation that she posted these two letters, and thought of the result they would effect. The one to the French schoolmaster would subject Boy to a sort of espionage, which would, she decided, be “good for him,”—it was part of “a mother’s duty” to make a child feel that he was watched and suspected and mistrusted, and that every innocent letter he wrote was under “surveillance” as if he were a prisoner of war,—and the one to Miss Letty would cause that good and gentle creature such grief and consternation as made the worthy Amelia D’Arcy-Muir wriggle with pleasure to contemplate. She was one of those very common types of women who delight in making other women unhappy, and who approve of themselves for doing an unkindness as though it were a virtue. There was nothing she liked better than to meet some sour old beldame-gossip and talk with a sort of condescending pity of some beautiful or well-known person completely out of her sphere, as if the said person were an ancient hooded crow. To pick a reputation to pieces was one of her delights,—to make mischief in households, another,—and to create confusion and discord where, till her arrival, all had been peace, was an ecstacy whose deliciousness to her soul almost approached surfeit. She always said her disagreeable things in the softest accents, as though she were imparting a valuable secret,—and when an inextricably hopeless muddle of affairs among perfectly harmless people had come about through her interference, she put on a grand air of protesting innocence, and looked “like Niobe all tears.” But in secret she hugged herself with joy to think what trouble she had managed to work up out of nothing,—hence her mood was one of the smoothest, most suave satisfaction, as she pictured Miss Letty’s face of woe when she heard that Boy had gone away out of England! She ordered a dozen native oysters, and had a pint of champagne for supper, by way of outward expression for her inward comfort—and enjoyed these luxuries doubly because of the delighted consciousness she had that Miss Letty was unhappy.
And she was right enough. Poor Miss Leslie was indeed unhappy. When she received Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir’s letter, her astonishment and regret knew no bounds.
“Boy gone to school in France!” she exclaimed—“In France!”
And the tears sprang to her eyes. She read the news again and yet again.
“Oh, poor Boy!” she murmured,—“Why didn’t you write to me! And yet—— if his mother was obstinately resolved upon such a scheme I could have done nothing. But—to send him to France!”