The poor curate was naturally very much dismayed at the contemplated departure of his pupil. When Arthur should go, Smirke's occupation and delight would go too. What pretext could he find for a daily visit to Fairoaks, and that kind word or glance from the lady there, which was as necessary to the curate as the frugal dinner which Madam Fribsby served him? Arthur gone, he would only be allowed to make visits like any other acquaintance: little Laura could not accommodate him by learning the catechism more than once a week: he had curled himself like ivy round Fairoaks: he pined at the thought that he must lose his hold of the place. Should he speak his mind and go down on his knees to the widow? He thought over any indications in her behavior which flattered his hopes. She had praised his sermon three weeks before; she had thanked him exceedingly for his present of a melon, for a small dinner party which Mrs. Pendennis gave: she said she should always be grateful to him for his kindness to Arthur, and when he declared that there were no bounds to his love and affection for that dear boy, she had certainly replied in a romantic manner, indicating her own strong gratitude and regard to all her son's friends. Should he speak out?—or should he delay? If he spoke and she refused him, it was awful to think that the gate of Fairoaks might be shut upon him forever—and within that door lay all the world for Mr. Smirke.
Thus, oh friendly readers, we see how every man in the world, has his own private griefs and business, by which he is more cast down or occupied than by the affairs or sorrows of any other person. While Mrs. Pendennis is disquieting herself about losing her son and that anxious hold she has had of him, as long as he has remained in the mother's nest, whence he is about to take flight into the great world beyond—while the major's great soul chafes and frets, inwardly vexed as he thinks what great parties are going on in London, and that he might be sunning himself in the glances of dukes and duchesses, but for those cursed affairs which keep him in a wretched little country hole—while Pen is tossing between his passion and a more agreeable sensation, unacknowledged yet, but swaying him considerably, namely, his longing to see the world—Mr. Smirke has a private care watching at his bed side, and sitting behind him on his pony; and is no more satisfied than the rest of us. How lonely we are in the world; how selfish and secret, every body! You and your wife have pressed the same pillow for forty years and fancy yourselves united.—Pshaw, does she cry out when you have the gout, or do you lie awake when she has the tooth-ache? Your artless daughter, seemingly all innocence, and devoted to her mamma and her piano lesson, is thinking of neither, but of the young lieutenant with whom she danced at the last ball—the honest frank boy just returned from school is secretly speculating upon the money you will give him, and the debts he owes the tart man. The old grandmother crooning in the corner and bound to another world within a few months, has some business or cares which are quite private and her own—very likely she is thinking of fifty years back, and that night when she made such an impression, and danced a cotillion with the captain, before your father proposed for her; or, what a silly little over-rated creature your wife is, and how absurdly you are infatuated about her—and, as for your wife—O philosophic reader, answer and say—Do you tell her all? Ah, sir—a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine—all things in nature are different to each—the woman we look at has not the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one and the other—you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us. Let us return, however, to the solitary Smirke.
Smirke had one confidante for his passion—that most injudicious woman, Madame Fribsby. How she became Madame Fribsby, nobody knows; she had left Clavering to go to a milliner's in London as Miss Fribsby—she pretended that she had got the rank in Paris during her residence in that city. But how could the French king, were he ever so much disposed, give her any such title? We shall not inquire into this mystery, however. Suffice to say, she went away from home a bouncing young lass; she returned a rather elderly character, with a Madonna front and a melancholy countenance—bought the late Mrs. Harbottle's business for a song—took her elderly mother to live with her; was very good to the poor, was constant at church, and had the best of characters. But there was no one in all Clavering, not Mrs. Portman herself, who read so many novels as Madame Fribsby. She had plenty of time for this amusement, for, in truth, very few people besides the folks at the Rectory and Fairoaks employed her; and by a perpetual perusal of such works (which were by no means so moral or edifying in the days of which we write, as they are at present), she had got to be so absurdly sentimental, that in her eyes life was nothing but an immense love-match; and she never could see two people together, but she fancied they were dying for one another.
On the day after Mrs. Pendennis's visit to the curate, which we have recorded many pages back, Madame Fribsby settled in her mind that Mr. Smirke must be in love with the widow, and did every thing in her power to encourage this passion on both sides. Mrs. Pendennis she very seldom saw, indeed, except in public, and in her pew at church. That lady had very little need of millinery, or made most of her own dresses and caps; but on the rare occasions when Madame Fribsby received visits from Mrs. Pendennis, or paid her respects at Fairoaks, she never failed to entertain the widow with praises of the curate, pointing out what an angelical man he was, how gentle, how studious, how lonely; and she would wonder that no lady would take pity upon him.
Helen laughed at these sentimental remarks, and wondered that madame herself did not compassionate her lodger, and console him. Madame Fribsby shook her Madonna front, "Mong cure a boco souffare," she said, laying her hand on the part she designated as her cure. "Il est more en Espang, Madame," she said with a sigh. She was proud of her intimacy with the French language, and spoke it with more volubility than correctness. Mrs. Pendennis did not care to penetrate the secrets of this wounded heart: except to her few intimates she was a reserved and it may be a very proud woman; she looked upon her son's tutor merely as an attendant on that young prince, to be treated with respect as a clergyman, certainly, but with proper dignity as a dependent on the house of Pendennis. Nor were madame's constant allusions to the curate particularly agreeable to her. It required a very ingenious sentimental turn indeed to find out that the widow had a secret regard for Mr. Smirke, to which pernicious error, however, Madame Fribsby persisted in holding.
Her lodger was very much more willing to talk on this subject with his soft-hearted landlady. Every time after that she praised the curate to Mrs. Pendennis, she came away from the latter with the notion that the widow herself had been praising him. "Etre soul au monde est bien ouneeyong," she would say, glancing up at a print of a French carbineer in a green coat and brass cuirass which decorated her apartment—"Depend upon it when Master Pendennis goes to college, his ma will find herself very lonely. She is quite young yet.—You wouldn't suppose her to be five-and-twenty. Monsieur le Cury, song cure est touchy—j'ong suis sure—Je conny cela biang—Ally, Monsieur Smirke."
He softly blushed; he sighed; he hoped; he feared; he doubted; he sometimes yielded to the delightful idea—his pleasure was to sit in Madame Fribsby's apartment, and talk upon the subject, where, as the greater part of the conversation was carried on in French by the milliner, and her old mother was deaf, that retired old individual (who had once been a housekeeper, wife and widow of a butler in the Clavering family), could understand scarce one syllable of their talk.
Thus it was, that when Major Pendennis announced to his nephew's tutor that the young fellow would go to college in October, and that Mr. Smirke's valuable services would no longer be needful to his pupil, for which services the major, who spoke as grandly as a lord, professed himself exceedingly grateful, and besought Mr. Smirke to command his interest in any way—thus it was, that the curate felt that the critical moment was come for him, and was racked and tortured by those severe pangs which the occasion warranted.