Dilemmas of Pride. Mrs. Loudon
union, behaved with neglect, and even contempt, towards his wife. Upon which the lady, partly out of revenge, and partly out of levity, gave a favourable reception to the addresses of a lover in no very exalted sphere of life.
Proceedings were immediately instituted to obtain legal redress; but before the divorce had passed the house, his lordship, who had previously been in a bad state of health, chanced to die.
Lady Flamborough, therefore, though of course banished from all tolerable society, still continued to be Lady Flamborough, and to enjoy a handsome jointure. On her total expulsion from the set among whom her marriage had, for a time, given her a place, she descended till she found her level among that, rationally speaking, only disreputable class, made up of those who have lost caste by their own wilful departures from principle, and those who are contemptible enough to be willing to associate with vice, for the love of the tarnished tinsel which once was rank; forgetful that titles and honours were first invented as badges of the virtuous or heroic deeds of those on whom they were bestowed; that only as such they have any meaning; and that, when borne by the vicious, they become, in a peculiar degree, objects for the finger of scorn to point at, and seem to claim, as their especial privilege, the contempt and derision of mankind.
"'Tis phrase absurd to call a villain great."
Titles are attainted for high treason, why should they not be so for every treason against good morals? Are not good morals as essential to the well-being of the community as good Government?
Nay, what is Government? Power to enforce moral order. Why then should not a sin against the end be visited as severely as a sin against the means?
Are men, whose vices invade the peace of the domestic hearth, and sunder the sacred ties of life—or men who court luxury in foreign climes, while evading the payment of their just debts at home; consigning the while industrious tradesmen and their helpless families to ruin;—are men, in short, who are no longer men of honour, to be still misnamed noble men? Is it not the natural tendency of such misnomers to bring nobility into contempt? And is not this an injustice to the truly noble?
Are the vicious to be allowed to sully honours till the honourable cannot wear them?
Nobility would indeed be beautiful were it a guarantee of virtue! titles would indeed be honours, if the men who bore them must be pure! And if the certainty that those titles for ages had existed in that family, were thus an assurance that morality for centuries had not been sinned against in that house, then indeed, would rank be nobility. Let us not be misunderstood: let us not be supposed to mean that men of rank are more likely to offend against the laws of morality than other men; on the contrary, education and circumstances ought to render them less so: we simply assert, that when they do so offend, such offence ought to degrade them from their rank as noble men.
How glorious would be that land that first enacted such a law! how worthy its monarch of that greatest of his titles, "Defender of the Faith!" For what is this faith? Religion! and the author of Religion has defined it thus:
"True religion and undefiled, before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and keep himself unspotted from the world."
CHAPTER IX.
Mrs. Dorothea had been so busy all day, changing her lodgings again, that she had hardly had time to ask Sarah a word about the Salters' dinner-party.
On this occasion, however, we must remark, that she had moved to a furnished house, not to a mere lodging; for she was determined to make an exertion, while the Ardens were in Cheltenham, live how she might the rest of the year, having a great horror of living like a poor relation.
Most people have a particular objection to seeming to be what they really are.
Indeed Lady Arden had written most kindly to Mrs. Dorothea, inviting her to spend the time they should be at Cheltenham with them. Had the expense of a house or lodging been no object to Aunt Dorothea, she would gladly have availed herself of this invitation for the pleasure of the thing; but the arrangement would have been so very convenient, that her pride took the alarm, and would not suffer her to accept the offer. In her father's life time, as a daughter of the then head of the family, she had acquired notions of her own consequence, which became a painful incumbrance from the moment her circumstances underwent that violent revolution to which those of the daughters of the proudest and most ancient families are peculiarly liable.
Pride in any situation is a moral disease, which it would be highly desirable to see for ever banished from the world! but pride, when complicated with poverty, is apt to render the unhappy sufferer not only always very uncomfortable, but often very ridiculous. Added to which, it must ever be impossible for the heart that harbours pride to know contentment.
At present, however, Mrs. Dorothea was quite delighted. The house she had taken for six months certain for Lady Arden, though designated by the rural title of Violet Bank, was a splendid mansion. The one she had taken for herself for the same period, was both pretty and agreeably situated; it was accommodated with a cook, or maid of all work, who was taken with it as a part of the furniture. Mrs. Dorothea had also hired a footman for the great occasion, and put him into livery; so that with Sarah, her own maid, she had now, for a single lady, quite a respectable little establishment, and could look forward to returning the evening entertainments, at least of her relations, on something of an independent footing. Dinners of course she could not give, nor need she accept them; she did not care what she eat. She certainly liked the best society, and that she should now have, without laying herself under obligations to any one. For, much as she liked Lady Arden, (one whom no one could help liking, she was so truly amiable,) she could not forget that her ladyship was a stranger in blood, from whom, consequently, an Arden could not receive even a courtesy without requital.
Mrs. Dorothea was so glad too, as she told Sarah, while she stood in the centre of her new drawing-room, looking round her, to get out of that horrid place where she had been for the last two months, sitting every evening on those tiresome little chairs, for, as Sarah had prophesied, her landlady had never given her the sofa, nor put the drops to the chimney-light, nor even got a key for the chiffonier. Then, the woman of the house could not or would not afford a decent servant, so that the cooking was shocking, and the attendance wretched; and then the oven of the bakehouse next door she found out at last was just on the other side of the one brick thin wall, against which her bed stood, so that she had been nearly baked to death, and had been losing her health without knowing why. To be sure the carpet looked respectable, but then the lodging had no other recommendation, as in addition to its many discomforts, it had proved one way or other very expensive; for mistaking the heat and restlessness she felt at nights for the consequences of the lassitude and want of appetite of which they were in fact the cause; she had got frightened about herself, and had called in doctor after doctor, and taken ever so much medicine in vain, till at last happening to go in next door to correct an error in her baker's bill, in which she had been charged with all the bread supplied to her landlady, she became acquainted with the geography of the premises, and so discovered the whole mystery. Then being without a key to the chiffonier too, made a great difference in the groceries, though having no proof of the fact, it would not do to say so. This might have brought down the lawyers upon her; then indeed would the cup of her afflictions have been full. Poor Aunt Dorothea felt almost restored to the days of her youth by the comparative comforts which now surrounded her. She moved into her regular dining-room when her dinner was ready, and was there decently and respectfully attended by her own footman in livery. There was a sideboard, and her few articles of plate were arranged upon it, and things looked orderly and comfortable; it was enough to give one an appetite, and made her boiled chicken and quarter of a hundred of asparagus seem a dinner for an emperor. Instead of dining in the comfortless scramble she used to do, in her haste to send the tray out of the drawing-room lest some one should come in, she now ate as slowly as possible to prolong the gratifying sense of dignity which accompanied the ceremony.
The very next day the Misses Salter