THE kind reception of Mrs. Arlbery, and all the animation of her discourse, were thrown away upon Camilla. An absent smile, and a few faint acknowledgments of her goodness were all she could return: Eugenia abandoned when she might have been served, Edgar contemning when he might have been approving... these were the images of her mind, which resisted entrance to all other.
Tired of fruitless attempts to amuse her, Mrs. Arlbery, upon their arrival at the Grove, conducted her to an apartment prepared for her, and made use of no persuasion that she would leave it before dinner.
Camilla then, too unhappy to fear any injunction, and resigned to whatever she might receive, read the discourse of Mr. Tyrold.
For Miss Camilla Tyrold.
IT is not my intention to enumerate, my dear Camilla, the many blessings of your situation; your heart is just and affectionate, and will not forget them: I mean but to place before you your immediate duties, satisfied that the review will ensure their performance.
Unused to, because undeserving control, your days, to this period, have been as gay as your spirits. It is now first that your tranquillity is ruffled; it is now, therefore, that your fortitude has its first debt to pay for its hitherto happy exemption.
Those who weigh the calamities of life only by the positive, the substantial, or the irremediable mischiefs which they produce, regard the first sorrows of early youth as too trifling for compassion. They do not enough consider that it is the suffering, not its abstract cause, which demands human commiseration. The man who loses his whole fortune, yet possesses firmness, philosophy, a disdain of ambition, and an accommodation to circumstances, is less an object of contemplative pity, than the person who, without one real deprivation, one actual evil, is first, or is suddenly forced to recognise the fallacy of a cherished and darling hope.
That its foundation has always been shallow is no mitigation of disappointment to him who had only viewed it in its super-structure. Nor is its downfall less terrible to its visionary elevator, because others had seen it from the beginning as a folly or a chimera; its dissolution should be estimated, not by its romance in the unimpassioned examination of a rational looker on, but by its believed promise of felicity to its credulous projector.
Is my Camilla in this predicament? had she wove her own destiny in the speculation of her wishes? Alas! to blame her, I must first forget, that delusion, while in force, has all the semblance of reality, and takes the same hold upon the faculties as truth. Nor is it till the spell is broken, till the perversion of reason and error of judgment become wilful, that Scorn ought to point ‘its finger’ or Censure its severity.
But of this I have no fear. The love of right is implanted indelibly in your nature, and your own peace is as dependant as mine and as your mother’s upon its constant culture.
Your conduct hitherto has been committed to yourself. Satisfied with establishing your principles upon the adamantine pillars of religion and conscience, we have not feared leaving you the entire possession of general liberty. Nor do I mean to withdraw it, though the present state of your affairs, and what for some time past I have painfully observed of your precipitance, oblige me to add partial counsel to standing precept, and exhortation to advice. I shall give them, however, with diffidence, fairly acknowledging and blending my own perplexities with yours.
The temporal destiny of woman is enwrapt in still more impenetrable obscurity than that of man. She begins her career by being involved in all the worldly accidents of a parent; she continues it by being associated in all that may environ a husband: and the difficulties arising from this doubly appendant state, are augmented by the next to impossibility, that the first dependance should pave the way for the ultimate. What parent yet has been gifted with the foresight to say, ‘I will educate my daughter for the station to which she shall belong?’ Let us even suppose that station to be fixed by himself, rarely as the chances of life authorise such a presumption; his daughter all duty, and the partner of his own selection solicitous of the alliance: is he at all more secure he has provided even for her external welfare? What, in this sublunary existence, is the state from which she shall neither rise nor fall? Who shall say that in a few years, a few months, perhaps less, the situation in which the prosperity of his own views has placed her, may not change for one more humble than he has fitted her for enduring, or more exalted than he has accomplished her for sustaining? The conscience, indeed, of the father is not responsible for events, but the infelicity of the daughter is not less a subject of pity.
Again, if none of these outward and obvious vicissitudes occur, the proper education of a female, either for use or for happiness, is still to seek, still a problem beyond human solution; since its refinement, or its negligence, can only prove to her a good or an evil, according to the humour of the husband into whose hands she may fall. If fashioned to shine in the great world, he may deem the metropolis all turbulence; if endowed with every resource for retirement, he may think the country distasteful. And though her talents, her acquirements, may in either of these cases be set aside, with an only silent regret of wasted youth and application; the turn of mind which they have induced, the appreciation which they have taught of time, of pleasure, or of utility, will have nurtured inclinations and opinions not so ductile to new sentiments and employments, and either submission becomes a hardship, or resistance generates dissention.
If such are the parental embarrassments, against which neither wisdom nor experience can guard, who should view the filial without sympathy and tenderness?
You have been brought up, my dear child, without any specific expectation. Your mother and myself, mutually deliberating upon the uncertainty of the female fate, determined to educate our girls with as much simplicity as is compatible with instruction, as much docility for various life as may accord with invariable principles, and as much accommodation with the world at large, as may combine with a just distinction of selected society. We hoped, thus, should your lots be elevated, to secure you from either exulting arrogance, or bashful insignificance; or should they, as is more probable, be lowly, to instil into your understandings and characters such a portion of intellectual vigour as should make you enter into an humbler scene without debasement, helplessness, or repining.
It is now, Camilla, we must demand your exertions in return. Let not these cares, to fit you for the world as you may find it, be utterly annihilated from doing you good, by the uncombated sway of an unavailing, however well-placed attachment.
We will not here canvass the equity of that freedom by which women as well as men should be allowed to dispose of their own affections. There cannot, in nature, in theory, nor even in common sense, be a doubt of their equal right: but disquisitions on this point will remain rather curious than important, till the speculatist can superinduce to the abstract truth of the position some proof of its practicability.
Meanwhile, it is enough for every modest and reasonable young woman to consider, that where there are two parties, choice can belong only to one of them: and then let her call upon all her feelings of delicacy, all her notions of propriety, to decide: Since Man must choose Woman, or Woman Man, which should come forward to make the choice? Which should retire to be chosen?
A prepossession directed towards a virtuous and deserving object wears, in its first approach, the appearance of a mere tribute of justice to merit. It seems, therefore, too natural, perhaps too generous, to be considered either as a folly or a crime. It is only its encouragement where it is not reciprocal, that can make it incur the first epithet, or where it ought not to be reciprocal that can brand it with the second. With respect to this last, I know of nothing to apprehend:-with regard to the first–I grieve to wound my dearest Camilla, yet where there has been no subject for complaint, there can have been none for expectation.
Struggle then against yourself as you would struggle against an enemy. Refuse to listen to a wish, to dwell even upon a possibility, that opens to your present idea of happiness. All that in future may be realised probably hangs upon this conflict. I mean not to propose to you in the course of a few days to reinstate yourself in the perfect security of a disengaged mind. I know too much of the human heart to be ignorant that the acceleration, or delay, must depend upon circumstance: I can only require from you what depends upon yourself, a steady and courageous warfare against the two dangerous underminers of your peace and of your fame, imprudence and impatience. You have champions with which............