Emma (62 page)

She rose early, and wrote her letter to Harriet, an employment which left her so very serious, so nearly sad, that Mr Knightley, in walking up to Hartfield to breakfast, did not arrive at all too soon, and half an hour stolen afterwards to go over the same ground again with him, literally and figuratively, was quite necessary to reinstate her in a proper share of the happiness of the evening before.

He had not left her long, by no means long enough for her to have the slightest inclination for thinking of anybody else, when a letter was brought her from Randalls—a very thick letter. She guessed what it must contain, and deprecated the necessity of reading it. She was now in perfect charity with Frank Churchill, she wanted no explanations, she wanted only to have her thoughts to herself—and as for understanding anything he wrote, she was sure she was incapable of it. It must be waded through, however. She opened the packet, it was too surely so, a note from Mrs Weston to herself, ushered in the letter from Frank to Mrs Weston.

I have the greatest pleasure, my dear Emma, in forwarding to you the enclosed. I know what thorough justice you will do it, and have scarcely a doubt of its happy effect. I think we shall never materially disagree about the writer again, but I will not delay you by a long preface. We are quite well. This letter has been the cure of all the little nervousness I have been feeling lately. I did not quite like your looks on Tuesday, but it was an ungenial morning, and though you will never own being affected by weather, I think everybody feels a north-east wind. I felt for your dear father very much in the storm of Tuesday afternoon and yesterday morning, but had the comfort of hearing last night, by Mr Perry, that it had not made him ill.

Yours ever,

A. W.

To Mrs Weston.

Windsor—July.

My dear madam,

If I made myself intelligible yesterday, this letter will be expected, but expected or not, I know it will be read with candour and indulgence. You are all goodness, and I believe there will be need of even all your goodness to allow for some parts of my past conduct. But I have been forgiven by one who had still more to resent. My courage rises while I write. It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble. I have already met with such success in two applications for pardon that I may be in danger of thinking myself too sure of yours, and of those among your friends who have had any ground of offence.

You must all endeavour to comprehend the exact nature of my situation when I first arrived at Randalls—you must consider me as having a secret which was to be kept at all hazards. This was the fact. My right to place myself in a situation requiring such concealment is another question. I shall not discuss it here. For my temptation to think it a right, I refer every caviller to a brick house, sashed windows below, and casements above, in Highbury. I dared not address her openly—my difficulties in the then state of Enscombe must be too well known to require definition, and I was fortunate enough to prevail before we parted at Weymouth, and to induce the most upright female mind in the creation to stoop in charity to a secret engagement. Had she refused, I should have gone mad.

But you will be ready to say, ‘what was your hope in doing this? What did you look forward to?’ To anything, everything—to time, chance, circumstance, slow effects, sudden bursts, perseverance and weariness, health and sickness. Every possibility of good was before me, and the first of blessings secured, in obtaining her promises of faith and correspondence.

If you need farther explanation, I have the honour, my dear madam, of being your husband’s son, and the advantage of inheriting a disposition to hope for good, which no inheritance of houses or lands can ever equal the value of. See me, then, under these circumstances, arriving on my first visit to Randalls, and here I am conscious of wrong, for that visit might have been sooner paid. You will look back and see that I did not come till Miss Fairfax was in Highbury, and as you were the person slighted, you will forgive me instantly, but I must work on my father’s compassion by reminding him that so long as I absented myself from his house, so long I lost the blessing of knowing you.

My behaviour during the very happy fortnight which I spent with you did not, I hope, lay me open to reprehension, excepting on one point. And now I come to the principal, the only important part of my conduct while belonging to you, which excites my own anxiety, or requires very solicitous explanation. With the greatest respect and the warmest friendship do I mention Miss Woodhouse—my father perhaps will think I ought to add, with the deepest humiliation. A few words which dropped from him yesterday spoke his opinion, and some censure I acknowledge myself liable to.

My behaviour to Miss Woodhouse indicated, I believe, more than it ought. In order to assist a concealment so essential to me, I was led on to make more than an allowable use of the sort of intimacy into which we were immediately thrown. I cannot deny that Miss Woodhouse was my ostensible object—but I am sure you will believe the declaration, that had I not been convinced of her indifference, I would not have been induced by any selfish views to go on.

Amiable and delightful as Miss Woodhouse is, she never gave me the idea of a young woman likely to be attached, and that she was perfectly free from any tendency to being attached to me was as much my conviction as my wish. She received my attentions with an easy, friendly, good-humoured playfulness which exactly suited me. We seemed to understand each other. From our relative situation, those attentions were her due, and were felt to be so. Whether Miss Woodhouse began really to understand me before the expiration of that fortnight, I cannot say—when I called to take leave of her, I remember that I was within a moment of confessing the truth, and I then fancied she was not without suspicion, but I have no doubt of her having since detected me, at least in some degree. She may not have surmised the whole, but her quickness must have penetrated a part. I cannot doubt it. You will find, whenever the subject becomes freed from its present restraints, that it did not take her wholly by surprise. She frequently gave me hints of it. I remember her telling me at the ball, that I owed Mrs Elton gratitude for her attentions to Miss Fairfax.

I hope this history of my conduct towards her will be admitted by you and my father as great extenuation of what you saw amiss. While you considered me as having sinned against Emma Woodhouse, I could deserve nothing from either. Acquit me here, and procure for me, when it is allowable, the acquittal and good wishes of that said Emma Woodhouse, whom I regard with so much brotherly affection as to long to have her as deeply and as happily in love as myself.

Whatever strange things I said or did during that fortnight, you have now a key to. My heart was in Highbury, and my business was to get my body thither as often as might be, and with the least suspicion. If you remember any queernesses, set them all to the right account. Of the pianoforte so much talked of, I feel it only necessary to say that its being ordered was absolutely unknown to Miss Fairfax, who would never have allowed me to send it had any choice been given her.

The delicacy of her mind throughout the whole engagement, my dear madam, is much beyond my power of doing justice to. You will soon, I earnestly hope, know her thoroughly yourself. No description can describe her. She must tell you herself what she is—yet not by word, for never was there a human creature who would so designedly suppress her own merit.

Since I began this letter, which will be longer than I foresaw, I have heard from her. She gives a good account of her own health, but as she never complains, I dare not depend. I want to have your opinion of her looks. I know you will soon call on her, she is living in dread of the visit. Perhaps it is paid already. Let me hear from you without delay, I am impatient for a thousand particulars. Remember how few minutes I was at Randalls, and in how bewildered, how mad a state, and I am not much better yet, still insane either from happiness or misery. When I think of the kindness and favour I have met with, of her excellence and patience, and my uncle’s generosity, I am mad with joy, but when I recollect all the uneasiness I occasioned her, and how little I deserve to be forgiven, I am mad with anger. If I could but see her again! But I must not propose it yet. My uncle has been too good for me to encroach.

I must still add to this long letter. You have not heard all that you ought to hear. I could not give any connected detail yesterday, but the suddenness, and in one light, the unseasonableness with which the affair burst out, needs explanation, for though the event of the twenty-sixth ult., as you will conclude, immediately opened to me the happiest prospects, I should not have presumed on such early measures, but from the very particular circumstances which left me not an hour to lose. I should myself have shrunk from anything so hasty, and she would have felt every scruple of mine with multiplied strength and refinement. But I had no choice. The hasty engagement she had entered into with that woman—

Here, my dear madam, I was obliged to leave off abruptly, to recollect and compose myself. I have been walking over the country, and am now, I hope, rational enough to make the rest of my letter what it ought to be. It is, in fact, a most mortifying retrospect for me. I behaved shamefully. And here I can admit, that my manners to Miss W, in being unpleasant to Miss F, were highly blameable. She disapproved them, which ought to have been enough. My plea of concealing the truth she did not think sufficient. She was displeased, I thought unreasonably so. I thought her, on a thousand occasions, unnecessarily scrupulous and cautious, I thought her even cold. But she was always right. If I had followed her judgement, and subdued my spirits to the level of what she deemed proper, I should have escaped the greatest unhappiness I have ever known.

We quarrelled. Do you remember the morning spent at Donwell? There every little dissatisfaction that had occurred before came to a crisis. I was late, I met her walking home by herself, and wanted to walk with her, but she would not suffer it. She absolutely refused to allow me, which I then thought most unreasonable. Now, however, I see nothing in it but a very natural and consistent degree of discretion. While I, to blind the world to our engagement, was behaving one hour with objectionable particularity to another woman, was she to be consenting the next to a proposal which might have made every previous caution useless? Had we been met walking together between Donwell and Highbury, the truth must have been suspected.

I was mad enough, however, to resent. I doubted her affection. I doubted it more the next day on Box Hill, when, provoked by such conduct on my side, such shameful, insolent neglect of her and such apparent devotion to Miss W as it would have been impossible for any woman of sense to endure, she spoke her resentment in a form of words perfectly intelligible to me. In short, my dear madam, it was a quarrel blameless on her side, abominable on mine, and I returned the same evening to Richmond, though I might have stayed with you till the next morning, merely because I would be as angry with her as possible. Even then, I was not such a fool as not to mean to be reconciled in time, but I was the injured person, injured by her coldness, and I went away determined that she should make the first advances.

I shall always congratulate myself that you were not of the Box Hill party. Had you witnessed my behaviour there, I can hardly suppose you would ever have thought well of me again. Its effect upon her appears in the immediate resolution it produced. As soon as she found I was really gone from Randalls, she closed with the offer of that officious Mrs Elton, the whole system of whose treatment of her, by the by, has ever filled me with indignation and hatred. I must not quarrel with a spirit of forbearance which has been so richly extended towards myself, but, otherwise, I should loudly protest against the share of it which that woman has known. ‘Jane’, indeed! You will observe that I have not yet indulged myself in calling her by that name, even to you. Think, then, what I must have endured in hearing it bandied between the Eltons with all the vulgarity of needless repetition, and all the insolence of imaginary superiority.

Have patience with me, I shall soon have done. She closed with this offer, resolving to break with me entirely, and wrote the next day to tell me that we never were to meet again. She felt the engagement to be a source of repentance and misery to each. She dissolved it.

This letter reached me on the very morning of my poor aunt’s death. I answered it within an hour, but from the confusion of my mind, and the multiplicity of business falling on me at once, my answer, instead of being sent with all the many other letters of that day, was locked up in my writing-desk, and I, trusting that I had written enough, though but a few lines, to satisfy her, remained without any uneasiness.

I was rather disappointed that I did not hear from her again speedily, but I made excuses for her, and was too busy, and—may I add?—too cheerful in my views to be captious. We removed to Windsor, and two days afterwards I received a parcel from her, my own letters all returned! And a few lines at the same time by the post, stating her extreme surprise at not having had the smallest reply to her last, and adding that as silence on such a point could not be misconstrued, and as it must be equally desirable to both to have every subordinate arrangement concluded as soon as possible, she now sent me, by a safe conveyance, all my letters, and requested that if I could not directly command hers so as to send them to Highbury within a week, I would forward them after that period to her at—. In short, the full direction to Mr Smallridge’s, near Bristol, stared me in the face.

I knew the name, the place, I knew all about it, and instantly saw what she had been doing. It was perfectly accordant with that resolution of character which I knew her to possess, and the secrecy she had maintained, as to any such design in her former letter, was equally descriptive of its anxious delicacy. For the world would not she have seemed to threaten me.