AGNES’S FORTUNE.
The morning, like a good fairy, came kindly to these good people,
increasing in the remembrance of the girls the impression of pleasure,
and lessening that of disappointment. They came, after all, to be very
well satisfied with their reception at Mrs Edgerley’s. And now her
second and most important invitation remained to be discussed--the
Willows--the pretty house at Richmond, with the river running sweetly
under the shadow of its trees; the company, which was sure to include,
as Mr Agar said, _some_ people worth knowing, and which that ancient
connoisseur himself did not refuse to join. Agnes and Marian looked with
eager eyes on the troubled brow of Mamma; a beautiful vision of the lawn
and the river, flowers and sunshine, the sweet silence of “the country,”
and the unfamiliar music of running water and rustling trees, possessed
the young imaginations for the time to the total disregard of all
sublunary considerations. _They_ did not think for a moment of Lord
Winterbourne’s daughter, and the strange chance which could make them
inmates of her house; for Lord Winterbourne himself was not a person of
any importance in the estimation of the girls. But more than that, they
did not even think of their wardrobe, important as that consideration
was; they did not recollect how entirely unprovided they were for such a
visit, nor how the family finances, strait and unelastic, could not
possibly stretch to so new and great an expenditure. But all these
things, which brought no cloud upon Agnes and Marian, conspired to
embarrass the brow of the family mother. She thought at the same moment
of Lord Winterbourne and of the brown merinos; of this strange
acquaintanceship, mysterious and full of fate as it seemed; and of the
little black silk cloaks which were out of fashion, and the bonnets with
the faded ribbons. It was hard to deny the girls so great a pleasure;
but how could it be done?
And for a day or two following the household remained in great
uncertainty upon this point, and held every evening, on the engrossing
subject of ways and means, a committee of the whole house. This,
however, we are grieved to say, was somewhat of an unprofitable
proceeding; for the best advice which Papa could give on so important a
subject was, that the girls must of course have everything proper if
they went. “If they went!--that is exactly the question,” said the
provoked and impatient ruler of all. “But are they to go? and how are we
to get everything proper for them?” To these difficult questions Mr
Atheling attempted no answer. He was a wise man, and knew his own
department, and prudently declined any interference in the legitimate
domain of the other head of the house.
Mrs Atheling was by no means addicted to disclosing the private matters
of her own family life, yet she carried this important question through
the faded wallflowers to crave the counsel of Miss Willsie. Miss Willsie
was not at all pleased to have such a matter submitted to her. _Her_
supreme satisfaction would have lain in criticising, finding fault, and
helping on. Now reduced to the painful alternative of giving an opinion,
the old lady pronounced a vague one in general terms, to the effect that
if there was one thing she hated, it was to see poor folk striving for
the company of them that were in a different rank in life; but whenever
this speech was made, and her conscience cleared, Miss Willsie began to
inquire zealously what “the silly things had,” and what they wanted, and
set about a mental turning over of her own wardrobe, where were a great
many things which she had worn in her own young days, and which were
“none the worse,” as she said--but they were not altogether adapted for
the locality of the Willows. Miss Willsie turned them over not only in
her own mind, but in her own parlour, where her next visitor found her
as busy with her needle and her shears as any cottar matron ever was,
and anxiously bent on the same endeavour to “make auld things look
amaist as weel’s the new.” It cost Miss Willsie an immense deal of
trouble, but it was not half so successful a business as the repairs of
that immortal Saturday Night.
But the natural course of events, which had cleared their path for them
many times before, came in once more to make matters easy. Mr
Burlington, of whom nothing had been heard since the day of that
eventful visit to his place--Mr Burlington, who since then had brought
out a second edition of _Hope Hazlewood_, announced himself ready to
“make a proposal” for the book. Now, there had been many and great
speculations in the house on this subject of “Agnes’s fortune.” They
were as good at the magnificent arithmetic of fancy as Major Pendennis
was, and we will not say that, like him, they had not leaped to their
thousands a-year. They had all, however, been rather prudent in
committing themselves to a sum--nobody would guess positively what it
was to be--but some indefinite and fabulous amount, a real fortune,
floated in the minds of all: to the father and mother a substantial
provision for Agnes, to the girls an inexhaustible fund of pleasure,
comfort, and charity. The proposal came--it was not a fabulous and
magnificent fortune, for the author of _Hope Hazlewood_ was only Agnes
Atheling, and not Arthur Pendennis. For the first moment, we are
compelled to confess, they looked at each other with blank faces,
entirely cast down and disappointed: it was not an inexhaustible fairy
treasure--it was only a hundred and fifty pounds.
Yes, most tender-hearted reader! these were not the golden days of Sir
Walter, nor was this young author a literary Joan of Arc. She got her
fortune in a homely fashion like other people--at first was grievously
disappointed about it--formed pugnacious resolutions, and listened to
all the evil stories of the publishing ghouls with satisfaction and
indignant faith. But by-and-by this angry mood softened down; by-and-by
the real glory of such an unrealisable heap of money began to break upon
the girls. A hundred and fifty pounds, and nothing to do with it--no
arrears to pay--nothing to make up--can any one suppose a position of
more perfect felicity? They came to see it bit by bit dawning upon them
in gradual splendour--content blossomed into satisfaction, satisfaction
unfolded into delight. And then to think of laying by such a small sum
would be foolish, as the girls reasoned; so its very insignificance
increased the pleasure. It was not a dull treasure, laid up in a bank,
or “invested,” as Papa had solemnly proposed to invest “Agnes’s
fortune;” it was a delightful little living stream of abundance, already
in imagination overflowing and brightening everything. It would buy
Mamma the most magnificent of brocades, and Bell and Beau such frocks as
never were seen before out of fairyland. It would take them all to the
Old Wood Lodge, or even to the seaside; it would light up with books and
pictures, and pretty things, the respectable family face of Number Ten,
Bellevue. There was no possibility of exhausting the capacities of this
marvellous sum of money, which, had it been three or four times as much,
as the girls discovered, could not have been half as good for present
purposes. The delight of spending money was altogether new to them: they
threw themselves into it with the most gleeful abandonment (in
imagination), and threw away their fortune royally, and with genuine
enjoyment in the process; and very few millionaires have ever found as
much pleasure in the calculation of their treasures as Agnes and Marian
Atheling, deciding over and over again how they were to spend it, found
in this hundred and fifty pounds.
In the mean time, however, Papa carried it off to the office, and locked
it up there for security--for they all felt that it would not be right
to trust to the commonplace defences of Bellevue with such a prodigious
sum of money in the house.