The Virginians by William Makepeace Thackeray (top books to read txt) 📕

“So are you hungry over and over again, my dear! Is that a reason why your papa and I should leave off giving you dinner?” cries mamma, with some emotion. “Will you stay and have ours, Harry? 'Tis just three o'clock!” Harry agreed to stay, after a few faint negations. “My husband dines abroad. We are but three women, so you will have a dull dinner,” remarks Mrs. Lambert.

“We shall have a gentleman to enliven us, mamma, I dare say!” says Madam Pert, and then looked in mamma's face with that admirable gaze of blank innocence which Madam Pert knows how to assume when she has been specially and successfully wicked.

When the dinner appeared. Miss Hetty came downstairs, and was exceedingly chatty, lively, and entertaining. Theo did not know that any little difference had occurred (such, alas, my Christian friends, will happen in the most charming families), did not know, I say, that anything had happened until Hetty's uncommon sprightliness and gaiety roused her suspicions. Hetty would start a dozen subjects of conversation—the King of Prussia, and the news from America; the last masquerade, and the highwayman shot near Barnet; and when her sister, admiring this volubility, inquired the reason of it, with her eyes,—

“Oh, my dear, you need not nod and wink at me!” cries Hetty. “Mamma asked Harry on purpose to enliven us, and I am talking until he begins, just like the fiddles at the playhouse, you know, Theo! First the fiddles. Then the play. Pray begin, Harry!”

“Hester!” cries mamma.

“I merely asked Harry to entertain us. You said yourself, mother, that we were only three women, and the dinner would be dull for a gentleman; unless, indeed, he chose to be very lively.”

“I'm not that on most days—and, Heaven knows, on this day less than most,” says poor Harry.

“Why on this day less than another? Tuesday is as good a day to be lively as Wednesday. The only day when we mustn't be lively is Sunday. Well, you know it is, ma'am! We mustn't sing, nor dance, nor do anything on Sunday.”

And in this naughty way the young woman went on for the rest of the evening, and was complimented by her mother and sister when poor Harry took his leave. He was not ready of wit, and could not fling back the taunts which Hetty cast against him. Nay, had he been able to retort, he would have been silent. He was too generous to engage in that small war, and chose to take all Hester's sarcasms without an attempt to parry or evade them. Very likely the young lady watched and admired that magnanimity, while she tried it so cruelly. And after one of her fits of ill-behaviour, her parents and friends had not the least need to scold her, as she candidly told them, because she suffered a great deal more than they would ever have had her, and her conscience punished her a great deal more severely than her kind elders would have thought of doing. I suppose she lies awake all that night, and tosses and tumbles in her bed. I suppose she wets her pillow with tears, and should not mind about her sobbing: unless it kept her sister awake; unless she was unwell the next day, and the doctor had to be fetched; unless the whole family is to be put to discomfort; mother to choke over her dinner in flurry and indignation; father to eat his roast-beef in silence and with bitter sauce; everybody to look at the door each time it opens, with a vague hope that Harry is coming in. If Harry does not come, why at least does not George come? thinks Miss Theo.

Some time in the course of the evening comes a billet from George Warrington, with a large nosegay of lilacs, per Mr. Gumbo. “'I send my best duty and regards to Mrs. Lambert and the ladies,'” George says, “'and humbly beg to present to Miss Theo this nosegay of lilacs, which she says she loves in the early spring. You must not thank me for them, please, but the gardener of Bedford House, with whom I have made great friends by presenting him with some dried specimens of a Virginian plant which some ladies don't think as fragrant as lilacs.

“'I have been in the garden almost all the day. It is alive with sunshine and spring; and I have been composing two scenes of you know what, and polishing the verses which the Page sings in the fourth act, under Sybilla's window, which she cannot hear, poor thing, because she has just had her head off.'”

“Provoking! I wish he would not always sneer and laugh! The verses are beautiful,” says Theo.

“You really think so, my dear? How very odd!” remarks papa.

Little Het looks up from her dismal corner with a faint smile of humour. Theo's secret is a secret for nobody in the house, it seems. Can any young people guess what it is? Our young lady continues to read:

“'Spencer has asked the famous Mr. Johnson to breakfast to-morrow, who condescends to hear the play, and who won't, I hope, be too angry because my heroine undergoes the fate of his in Irene. I have heard he came up to London himself as a young man with only his tragedy in his wallet. Shall I ever be able to get mine played? Can you fancy the catcall music beginning, and the pit hissing at that perilous part of the fourth act, where my executioner comes out from the closet with his great sword, at the awful moment when he is called upon to amputate? They say Mr. Fielding, when the pit hissed at a part of one of his pieces, about which Mr. Garrick had warned him, said, 'Hang them, they have found it out, have they?' and finished his punch in tranquillity. I suppose his wife was not in the boxes. There are some women to whom I would be very unwilling to give pain, and there are some to whom I would give the best I have.'”

“Whom can he mean? The letter is to you, my dear. I protest he is making love to your mother before my face!” cries papa to Hetty, who only gives a little sigh, puts her hand in her father's hand, and then withdraws it.

“'To whom I would give the best I have. To-day it is only a bunch of lilacs. To-morrow it may be what?—a branch of rue—a sprig of bays, perhaps—anything, so it be my best and my all.

“'I have had a fine long day, and all to myself. What do you think of Harry playing truant?'” (Here we may imagine, what they call in France, or what they used to call, when men dared to speak or citizens to hear, sensation dans l'auditoire.)

“'I suppose Carpezan wearied the poor fellow's existence out. Certain it is he has been miserable for weeks past; and a change of air and scene may do him good. This morning, quite early, he came to my room, and told me he had taken a seat in the Portsmouth machine, and proposed to go to the Isle of Wight, to the army there.'”

The army! Hetty looks very pale at this announcement, and her mother continues:

“'And a little portion of it, namely, the thirty-second regiment, is commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Richmond Webb—the nephew of the famous old General under whom my grandfather Esmond served in the great wars of Marlborough. Mr. Webb met us at our uncle's, accosting us very politely, and