“Ladies’ Toilet Repository, Diana Street, Pimlico,
“Wednesday.
“MY DEAR LYDIA--To save the post, I write to you, after a long day’s
worry at my place of business, on the business letter-paper, having news
since we last met which it seems advisable to send you at the earliest
opportunity.
“To begin at the beginning. After carefully considering the thing, I
am quite sure you will do wisely with young Armadale if you hold your
tongue about Madeira and all that happened there. Your position was, no
doubt, a very strong one with his mother. You had privately helped
her in playing a trick on her own father; you had been ungratefully
dismissed, at a pitiably tender age, as soon as you had served her
purpose; and, when you came upon her suddenly, after a separation of
more than twenty years, you found her in failing health, with a grown-up
son, whom she had kept in total ignorance of the true story of her
marriage.
“Have you any such advantages as these with the young gentleman who has
survived her? If he is not a born idiot he will decline to believe your
shocking aspersions on the memory of his mother; and--seeing that you
have no proofs at this distance of time to meet him with--there is an
end of your money-grubbing in the golden Armadale diggings. Mind, I
don’t dispute that the old lady’s heavy debt of obligation, after what
you did for her in Madeira, is not paid yet; and that the son is the
next person to settle with you, now the mother has slipped through your
fingers. Only squeeze him the right way, my dear, that’s what I venture
to suggest--squeeze him the right way.
“And which is the right way? That question brings me to my news.
“Have you thought again of that other notion of yours of trying your
hand on this lucky young gentleman, with nothing but your own good
looks and your own quick wits to help you? The idea hung on my mind so
strangely after you were gone that it ended in my sending a little note
to my lawyer, to have the will under which young Armadale has got
his fortune examined at Doctor’s Commons. The result turns out to
be something infinitely more encouraging than either you or I could
possibly have hoped for. After the lawyer’s report to me, there cannot
be a moment’s doubt of what you ought to do. In two words, Lydia, take
the bull by the horns--and marry him!
“I am quite serious. He is much better worth the venture than you
suppose. Only persuade him to make you Mrs. Armadale, and you may set
all after-discoveries at flat defiance. As long as he lives, you can
make your own terms with him; and, if he dies, the will entitles you, in
spite of anything he can say or do--with children or without them--to
an income chargeable on his estate of _twelve hundred a year for life_.
There is no doubt about this; the lawyer himself has looked at the will.
Of course, Mr. Blanchard had his son and his son’s widow in his eye
when he made the provision. But, as it is not limited to any one heir by
name, and not revoked anywhere, it now holds as good with young Armadale
as it would have held under other circumstances with Mr. Blanchard’s
son. What a chance for you, after all the miseries and the dangers you
have gone through, to be mistress of Thorpe Ambrose, if he lives; to
have an income for life, if he dies! Hook him, my poor dear; hook him at
any sacrifice.
“I dare say you will make the same objection when you read this which
you made when we were talking about it the other day; I mean the
objection of your age.
“Now, my good creature, just listen to me. The question is--not whether
you were five-and-thirty last birthday; we will own the dreadful truth,
and say you were--but whether you do look, or don’t look, your real age.
My opinion on this matter ought to be, and is, one of the best opinions
in London. I have had twenty years experience among our charming sex in
making up battered old faces and wornout old figures to look like new,
and I say positively you don’t look a day over thirty, if as much.
If you will follow my advice about dressing, and use one or two of my
applications privately, I guarantee to put you back three years more.
I will forfeit all the money I shall have to advance for you in this
matter, if, when I have ground you young again in my wonderful mill,
you look more than seven-and-twenty in any man’s eyes living--except,
of course, when you wake anxious in the small hours of the morning; and
then, my dear, you will be old and ugly in the retirement of your own
room, and it won’t matter.
“‘But,’ you may say, ‘supposing all this, here I am, even with your
art to help me, looking a good six years older than he is; and that
is against me at starting.’ Is it? Just think again. Surely, your
own experience must have shown you that the commonest of all common
weaknesses, in young fellows of this Armadale’s age, is to fall in love
with women older than themselves. Who are the men who really appreciate
us in the bloom of our youth (I’m sure I have cause to speak well of the
bloom of youth; I made fifty guineas to-day by putting it on the spotted
shoulders of a woman old enough to be your mother)--who are the men, I
say, who are ready to worship us when we are mere babies of seventeen?
The gay young gentlemen in the bloom of their own youth? No! The cunning
old wretches who are on the wrong side of forty.
“And what is the moral of this, as the story-books say?
“The moral is that the chances, with such a head as you have got on
your shoulders, are all in your favor. If you feel your present forlorn
position, as I believe you do; if you know what a charming woman (in the
men’s eyes) you can still be when you please; and if all your resolution
has really come back, after that shocking outbreak of desperation on
board the steamer (natural enough, I own, under the dreadful provocation
laid on you), you will want no further persuasion from me to try this
experiment. Only to think of how things turn out! If the other young
booby had not jumped into the river after you, _this_ young booby would
never have had the estate. It really looks as if fate had determined
that you were to be Mrs. Armadale, of Thorpe Ambrose; and who can
control his fate, as the poet says?
“Send me one line to say Yes or No; and believe me your attached old
friend,
“MARIA OLDERSHAW.”