Mansfield Park
before; and it was not merely Tom, for the requisition was now backed
by Maria, and Mr. Crawford, and Mr. Yates, with an urgency which
differed from his but in being more gentle or more ceremonious, and
which altogether was quite overpowering to Fanny; and before she could
breathe after it, Mrs. Norris completed the whole by thus addressing
her in a whisper at once angry and audible—“What a piece of work here
is about nothing: I am quite ashamed of you, Fanny, to make such a
difficulty of obliging your cousins in a trifle of this sort—so kind as
they are to you! Take the part with a good grace, and let us hear no
more of the matter, I entreat.”
“Do not urge her, madam,” said Edmund. “It is not fair to urge her in
this manner. You see she does not like to act. Let her chuse for
herself, as well as the rest of us. Her judgment may be quite as safely
trusted. Do not urge her any more.”
“I am not going to urge her,” replied Mrs. Norris sharply; “but I shall
think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl, if she does not do what
her aunt and cousins wish her—very ungrateful, indeed, considering who
and what she is.”
Edmund was too angry to speak; but Miss Crawford, looking for a moment
with astonished eyes at Mrs. Norris, and then at Fanny, whose tears
were beginning to shew themselves, immediately said, with some
keenness, “I do not like my situation: this _place_ is too hot for me,”
and moved away her chair to the opposite side of the table, close to
Fanny, saying to her, in a kind, low whisper, as she placed herself,
“Never mind, my dear Miss Price, this is a cross evening: everybody is
cross and teasing, but do not let us mind them”; and with pointed
attention continued to talk to her and endeavour to raise her spirits,
in spite of being out of spirits herself. By a look at her brother she
prevented any farther entreaty from the theatrical board, and the
really good feelings by which she was almost purely governed were
rapidly restoring her to all the little she had lost in Edmund’s
favour.
Fanny did not love Miss Crawford; but she felt very much obliged to her
for her present kindness; and when, from taking notice of her work, and
wishing _she_ could work as well, and begging for the pattern, and
supposing Fanny was now preparing for her _appearance_, as of course
she would come out when her cousin was married, Miss Crawford proceeded
to inquire if she had heard lately from her brother at sea, and said
that she had quite a curiosity to see him, and imagined him a very fine
young man, and advised Fanny to get his picture drawn before he went to
sea again—she could not help admitting it to be very agreeable
flattery, or help listening, and answering with more animation than she
had intended.
The consultation upon the play still went on, and Miss Crawford’s
attention was first called from Fanny by Tom Bertram’s telling her,
with infinite regret, that he found it absolutely impossible for him to
undertake the part of Anhalt in addition to the Butler: he had been
most anxiously trying to make it out to be feasible, but it would not
do; he must give it up. “But there will not be the smallest difficulty
in filling it,” he added. “We have but to speak the word; we may pick
and chuse. I could name, at this moment, at least six young men within
six miles of us, who are wild to be admitted into our company, and
there are one or two that would not disgrace us: I should not be afraid
to trust either of the Olivers or Charles Maddox. Tom Oliver is a very
clever fellow, and Charles Maddox is as gentlemanlike a man as you will
see anywhere, so I will take my horse early to-morrow morning and ride
over to Stoke, and settle with one of them.”
While he spoke, Maria was looking apprehensively round at Edmund in
full expectation that he must oppose such an enlargement of the plan as
this: so contrary to all their first protestations; but Edmund said
nothing. After a moment’s thought, Miss Crawford calmly replied, “As
far as I am concerned, I can have no objection to anything that you all
think eligible. Have I ever seen either of the gentlemen? Yes, Mr.
Charles Maddox dined at my sister’s one day, did not he, Henry? A
quiet-looking young man. I remember him. Let _him_ be applied to, if
you please, for it will be less unpleasant to me than to have a perfect
stranger.”
Charles Maddox was to be the man. Tom repeated his resolution of going
to him early on the morrow; and though Julia, who had scarcely opened
her lips before, observed, in a sarcastic manner, and with a glance
first at Maria and then at Edmund, that “the Mansfield theatricals
would enliven the whole neighbourhood exceedingly,” Edmund still held
his peace, and shewed his feelings only by a determined gravity.
“I am not very sanguine as to our play,” said Miss Crawford, in an
undervoice to Fanny, after some consideration; “and I can tell Mr.
Maddox that I shall shorten some of _his_ speeches, and a great many of
_my_ _own_, before we rehearse together. It will be very disagreeable,
and by no means what I expected.”
CHAPTER XVI
It was not in Miss Crawford’s power to talk Fanny into any real
forgetfulness of what had passed. When the evening was over, she went
to bed full of it, her nerves still agitated by the shock of such an
attack from her cousin Tom, so public and so persevered in, and her
spirits sinking under her aunt’s unkind reflection and reproach. To be
called into notice in such a manner, to hear that it was but the
prelude to something so infinitely worse, to be told that she must do
what was so impossible as to act; and then to have the charge of
obstinacy and ingratitude follow it, enforced with such a hint at the
dependence of her situation, had been too distressing at the time to
make the remembrance when she was alone much less so, especially with
the superadded dread of what the morrow might produce in continuation
of the subject. Miss Crawford had protected her only for the time; and
if she were applied to again among themselves with all the
authoritative urgency that Tom and Maria were capable of, and Edmund
perhaps away, what should she do? She fell asleep before she could
answer the question, and found it quite as puzzling when she awoke the
next morning. The little white attic, which had continued her
sleeping-room ever since her first entering the family, proving
incompetent to suggest any reply, she had recourse, as soon as she was
dressed, to another apartment more spacious and more meet for walking
about in and thinking, and of which she had now for some time been
almost equally mistress. It had been their school-room; so called till
the Miss Bertrams would not allow it to be called so any longer, and
inhabited as such to a later period. There Miss Lee had lived, and
there they had read and written, and talked and laughed, till within
the last three years, when she had quitted them. The room had then
become useless, and for some time was quite deserted, except by Fanny,
when she visited her plants, or wanted one of the books, which she was
still glad to keep there, from the deficiency of space and
accommodation in her little chamber above: but gradually, as her value
for the comforts of it increased, she had added to her possessions, and
spent more of her time there; and having nothing to oppose her, had so
naturally and so artlessly worked herself into it, that it was now
generally admitted to be hers. The East room, as it had been called
ever since Maria Bertram was sixteen, was now considered Fanny’s,
almost as decidedly as the white attic: the smallness of the one making
the use of the other so evidently reasonable that the Miss Bertrams,
with every superiority in their own apartments which their own sense of
superiority could demand, were entirely approving it; and Mrs. Norris,
having stipulated for there never being a fire in it on Fanny’s
account, was tolerably resigned to her having the use of what nobody
else wanted, though the terms in which she sometimes spoke of the
indulgence seemed to imply that it was the best room in the house.
The aspect was so favourable that even without a fire it was habitable
in many an early spring and late autumn morning to such a willing mind
as Fanny’s; and while there was a gleam of sunshine she hoped not to be
driven from it entirely, even when winter came. The comfort of it in
her hours of leisure was extreme. She could go there after anything
unpleasant below, and find immediate consolation in some pursuit, or
some train of thought at hand. Her plants, her books—of which she had
been a collector from the first hour of her commanding a shilling—her
writing-desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity, were all within
her reach; or if indisposed for employment, if nothing but musing would
do, she could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an
interesting remembrance connected with it. Everything was a friend, or
bore her thoughts to a friend; and though there had been sometimes much
of suffering to her; though her motives had often been misunderstood,
her feelings disregarded, and her comprehension undervalued; though she
had known the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect, yet almost
every recurrence of either had led to something consolatory: her aunt
Bertram had spoken for her, or Miss Lee had been encouraging, or, what
was yet more frequent or more dear, Edmund had been her champion and
her friend: he had supported her cause or explained her meaning, he had
told her not to cry, or had given her some proof of affection which
made her tears delightful; and the whole was now so blended together,
so harmonised by distance, that every former affliction had its charm.
The room was most dear to her, and she would not have changed its
furniture for the handsomest in the house, though what had been
originally plain had suffered all the ill-usage of children; and its
greatest elegancies and ornaments were a faded footstool of Julia’s
work, too ill done for the drawing-room, three transparencies, made in
a rage for transparencies, for the three lower panes of one window,
where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy and a
moonlight lake in Cumberland, a collection of family profiles, thought
unworthy of being anywhere else, over the mantelpiece, and by their
side, and pinned against the wall, a small sketch of a ship sent four
years ago from the Mediterranean by William, with H.M.S. Antwerp at the
bottom, in letters as tall as the mainmast.
To this nest of comforts Fanny now walked down to try its influence on
an agitated, doubting spirit, to see if by looking at Edmund’s profile
she could catch any of his counsel, or by giving air to her geraniums
she might inhale a breeze of mental strength herself. But she had more
than fears of her own perseverance to remove: she had begun to feel
undecided as to what she _ought_ _to_ _do_; and as she walked round the
room her doubts were increasing. Was she _right_ in refusing what was
so warmly asked, so strongly wished for—what might be so essential to a
scheme on which some of those to whom she owed the greatest
complaisance had set their hearts? Was it not ill-nature, selfishness,
and a fear of exposing herself? And would Edmund’s judgment, would his
persuasion of Sir Thomas’s disapprobation of the whole, be enough to
justify her in a determined denial in spite of all the rest? It would
be so horrible to her to act that she was inclined to suspect the truth
and purity of her own scruples; and as she looked around her, the
claims of her cousins to being obliged were strengthened by the sight
of present upon present that she had received from them. The table
between the windows was covered with work-boxes and netting-boxes which