Mansfield Park
My Fanny, indeed, at this very time, I have the satisfaction of
knowing, must have been happy in spite of everything. She must have
been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt, or thought she
felt, for the distress of those around her. She had sources of delight
that must force their way. She was returned to Mansfield Park, she was
useful, she was beloved; she was safe from Mr. Crawford; and when Sir
Thomas came back she had every proof that could be given in his then
melancholy state of spirits, of his perfect approbation and increased
regard; and happy as all this must make her, she would still have been
happy without any of it, for Edmund was no longer the dupe of Miss
Crawford.
It is true that Edmund was very far from happy himself. He was
suffering from disappointment and regret, grieving over what was, and
wishing for what could never be. She knew it was so, and was sorry; but
it was with a sorrow so founded on satisfaction, so tending to ease,
and so much in harmony with every dearest sensation, that there are few
who might not have been glad to exchange their greatest gaiety for it.
Sir Thomas, poor Sir Thomas, a parent, and conscious of errors in his
own conduct as a parent, was the longest to suffer. He felt that he
ought not to have allowed the marriage; that his daughter’s sentiments
had been sufficiently known to him to render him culpable in
authorising it; that in so doing he had sacrificed the right to the
expedient, and been governed by motives of selfishness and worldly
wisdom. These were reflections that required some time to soften; but
time will do almost everything; and though little comfort arose on Mrs.
Rushworth’s side for the misery she had occasioned, comfort was to be
found greater than he had supposed in his other children. Julia’s match
became a less desperate business than he had considered it at first.
She was humble, and wishing to be forgiven; and Mr. Yates, desirous of
being really received into the family, was disposed to look up to him
and be guided. He was not very solid; but there was a hope of his
becoming less trifling, of his being at least tolerably domestic and
quiet; and at any rate, there was comfort in finding his estate rather
more, and his debts much less, than he had feared, and in being
consulted and treated as the friend best worth attending to. There was
comfort also in Tom, who gradually regained his health, without
regaining the thoughtlessness and selfishness of his previous habits.
He was the better for ever for his illness. He had suffered, and he had
learned to think: two advantages that he had never known before; and
the self-reproach arising from the deplorable event in Wimpole Street,
to which he felt himself accessory by all the dangerous intimacy of his
unjustifiable theatre, made an impression on his mind which, at the age
of six-and-twenty, with no want of sense or good companions, was
durable in its happy effects. He became what he ought to be: useful to
his father, steady and quiet, and not living merely for himself.
Here was comfort indeed! and quite as soon as Sir Thomas could place
dependence on such sources of good, Edmund was contributing to his
father’s ease by improvement in the only point in which he had given
him pain before—improvement in his spirits. After wandering about and
sitting under trees with Fanny all the summer evenings, he had so well
talked his mind into submission as to be very tolerably cheerful again.
These were the circumstances and the hopes which gradually brought
their alleviation to Sir Thomas, deadening his sense of what was lost,
and in part reconciling him to himself; though the anguish arising from
the conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters was
never to be entirely done away.
Too late he became aware how unfavourable to the character of any young
people must be the totally opposite treatment which Maria and Julia had
been always experiencing at home, where the excessive indulgence and
flattery of their aunt had been continually contrasted with his own
severity. He saw how ill he had judged, in expecting to counteract what
was wrong in Mrs. Norris by its reverse in himself; clearly saw that he
had but increased the evil by teaching them to repress their spirits in
his presence so as to make their real disposition unknown to him, and
sending them for all their indulgences to a person who had been able to
attach them only by the blindness of her affection, and the excess of
her praise.
Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually
grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan
of education. Something must have been wanting _within_, or time would
have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active
principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught
to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which
can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their
religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be
distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object
of their youth, could have had no useful influence that way, no moral
effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had
been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition;
and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had
never heard from any lips that could profit them.
Bitterly did he deplore a deficiency which now he could scarcely
comprehend to have been possible. Wretchedly did he feel, that with all
the cost and care of an anxious and expensive education, he had brought
up his daughters without their understanding their first duties, or his
being acquainted with their character and temper.
The high spirit and strong passions of Mrs. Rushworth, especially, were
made known to him only in their sad result. She was not to be prevailed
on to leave Mr. Crawford. She hoped to marry him, and they continued
together till she was obliged to be convinced that such hope was vain,
and till the disappointment and wretchedness arising from the
conviction rendered her temper so bad, and her feelings for him so like
hatred, as to make them for a while each other’s punishment, and then
induce a voluntary separation.
She had lived with him to be reproached as the ruin of all his
happiness in Fanny, and carried away no better consolation in leaving
him than that she _had_ divided them. What can exceed the misery of
such a mind in such a situation?
Mr. Rushworth had no difficulty in procuring a divorce; and so ended a
marriage contracted under such circumstances as to make any better end
the effect of good luck not to be reckoned on. She had despised him,
and loved another; and he had been very much aware that it was so. The
indignities of stupidity, and the disappointments of selfish passion,
can excite little pity. His punishment followed his conduct, as did a
deeper punishment the deeper guilt of his wife. _He_ was released from
the engagement to be mortified and unhappy, till some other pretty girl
could attract him into matrimony again, and he might set forward on a
second, and, it is to be hoped, more prosperous trial of the state: if
duped, to be duped at least with good humour and good luck; while she
must withdraw with infinitely stronger feelings to a retirement and
reproach which could allow no second spring of hope or character.
Where she could be placed became a subject of most melancholy and
momentous consultation. Mrs. Norris, whose attachment seemed to augment
with the demerits of her niece, would have had her received at home and
countenanced by them all. Sir Thomas would not hear of it; and Mrs.
Norris’s anger against Fanny was so much the greater, from considering
_her_ residence there as the motive. She persisted in placing his
scruples to _her_ account, though Sir Thomas very solemnly assured her
that, had there been no young woman in question, had there been no
young person of either sex belonging to him, to be endangered by the
society or hurt by the character of Mrs. Rushworth, he would never have
offered so great an insult to the neighbourhood as to expect it to
notice her. As a daughter, he hoped a penitent one, she should be
protected by him, and secured in every comfort, and supported by every
encouragement to do right, which their relative situations admitted;
but farther than _that_ he could not go. Maria had destroyed her own
character, and he would not, by a vain attempt to restore what never
could be restored, by affording his sanction to vice, or in seeking to
lessen its disgrace, be anywise accessory to introducing such misery in
another man’s family as he had known himself.
It ended in Mrs. Norris’s resolving to quit Mansfield and devote
herself to her unfortunate Maria, and in an establishment being formed
for them in another country, remote and private, where, shut up
together with little society, on one side no affection, on the other no
judgment, it may be reasonably supposed that their tempers became their
mutual punishment.
Mrs. Norris’s removal from Mansfield was the great supplementary
comfort of Sir Thomas’s life. His opinion of her had been sinking from
the day of his return from Antigua: in every transaction together from
that period, in their daily intercourse, in business, or in chat, she
had been regularly losing ground in his esteem, and convincing him that
either time had done her much disservice, or that he had considerably
over-rated her sense, and wonderfully borne with her manners before. He
had felt her as an hourly evil, which was so much the worse, as there
seemed no chance of its ceasing but with life; she seemed a part of
himself that must be borne for ever. To be relieved from her,
therefore, was so great a felicity that, had she not left bitter
remembrances behind her, there might have been danger of his learning
almost to approve the evil which produced such a good.
She was regretted by no one at Mansfield. She had never been able to
attach even those she loved best; and since Mrs. Rushworth’s elopement,
her temper had been in a state of such irritation as to make her
everywhere tormenting. Not even Fanny had tears for aunt Norris, not
even when she was gone for ever.
That Julia escaped better than Maria was owing, in some measure, to a
favourable difference of disposition and circumstance, but in a greater
to her having been less the darling of that very aunt, less flattered
and less spoilt. Her beauty and acquirements had held but a second
place. She had been always used to think herself a little inferior to
Maria. Her temper was naturally the easiest of the two; her feelings,
though quick, were more controllable, and education had not given her
so very hurtful a degree of self-consequence.
She had submitted the best to the disappointment in Henry Crawford.
After the first bitterness of the conviction of being slighted was
over, she had been tolerably soon in a fair way of not thinking of him
again; and when the acquaintance was renewed in town, and Mr.
Rushworth’s house became Crawford’s object, she had had the merit of
withdrawing herself from it, and of chusing that time to pay a visit to
her other friends, in order to secure herself from being again too much
attracted. This had been her motive in going to her cousin’s. Mr.
Yates’s convenience had had nothing to do with it. She had been
allowing his attentions some time, but with very little idea of ever
accepting him; and had not her sister’s conduct burst forth as it did,
and her increased dread of her father and of home, on that event,
imagining its certain consequence to herself would be greater severity
and restraint, made her hastily resolve on avoiding such immediate