Alas! the amari aliquid of these old records is the unblushing chronicle of intentions, enough to have paved all Acheron with a durability unachieved by any highway board! The only comfort for diarists so imprudently candid as to record such aspirations, and so yet more imprudent as to read them half a century after the penning of them, is the consideration that au bout des comptes the question is, not what one has done, but what one has become. If one could flatter oneself that one has the mens sana in corpore sano at seventy-seven years, one might accept and condone the past without too much regret; and at all events it is something to have undeniably brought the latter to its seventy-eighth year.
CHAPTER XI.
I came down from Oxford to find my mother and my two sisters returned from America, and living in that Harrow Weald farm-house which my brother Anthony, in his Autobiography, has described, I think, too much en noir. It had once been a very good house, probably the residence of the owner of the small farm on which it was situated. It certainly was no longer a very good house, but it was not “tumble-down,” as Anthony calls it, and was indeed a much better house than it would have been if its original destination had been that of merely a farmhouse. But it and “all that it inherited” was assuredly shabby enough, and had been forlorn enough, as I had known it in my vacations, when inhabited only by my father, my brother Anthony and myself.
But my mother was one of those people who carry sunshine with them! The place did not seem the same! The old house, whatever else it may have been, was roomy; and a very short time elapsed before my mother had got round her one or two nice girl guests to help her in brightening it.
I may mention here a singular circumstance, which furnished me with means of estimating my mother’s character in a phase of her life which rarely comes within the purview of a son. Some years ago, not many years I think after my mother’s death, an anonymous stranger sent my brother Anthony a packet of old letters written by my mother to my father shortly before and shortly after their marriage. He never was able to ascertain who his benevolent correspondent was, nor how the papers in question came into his possession. There they are, carefully tied up in a neat packet, most of them undated by her, but carefully docketed with the date by my father’s hand. The handwriting, not spoiled as it afterwards became by writing over a hundred volumes, is a very elegant one.
There is a singularly old-world flavour about them. There is a staid moderation in their tone, which a reader of the present day, fresh from the perusal of similar literature, as supplied by Mr. Mudie, would probably call coldness. In the few letters which precede the marriage there are no warm assurances of affection. After marriage the language becomes more warm. I am tempted to transcribe a few passages that the girls of the period may see how their great-grandmothers did these things.
“It does not require three weeks’ consideration, Mr. Trollope”—thus begins the first letter, undated, but docketed by my father, “F. M. undated, received 2nd Nov., 1808”—“to enable me to tell you that the letter you left with me last night was most flattering and gratifying to me. I value your good opinion too highly not to feel that the generous proof you have given me of it must for ever, and in any event, be remembered by me with pride and gratitude. But I fear you are not sufficiently aware that your choice, so flattering to me, is for yourself a very imprudent one.” And then follows a business-like statement of possessions and prospects, which the writer fears fall much short of what her suitor might reasonably expect.
But none of my father’s faults tended in the slightest degree to lead him to marry a millionnaire, whom he cared less for, in preference to a girl without a sixpence, whom he loved better.
“In an affair of this kind,” the letter I have cited goes on to say, “I do not think it any disadvantage to either party that some time should elapse between the first contemplation and final decision of it. It gives each an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the other’s opinion on many important points, which could not be canvassed before it was thought of, and which it would be useless to discuss after it was settled.”
Could Mrs. Chapone have expressed herself better?