but turned the handle and entered. She found Julia sitting up in bed, looking wildly at her, with cheeks flushed and wet. She sat on the bed and clasped her to her breast in silence: but more than one warm tear ran down upon Julia's bare neck; the girl felt them drop, and her own gushed in a shower.
“Oh, what have I done?” she sobbed. “Am I to make you wretched too?”
Mrs. Dodd did not immediately reply. She was there to console, and her admirable good sense told her that to do that she must be calmer than her patient; so even while she kissed and wept over Julia, she managed gradually to recover her composure. “Tell me, my child,” said she, “why do you act a part with me? Why brave it out under my eye, and spend the night secretly in tears? Are you still afraid to trust me?”
“Oh no, no; but I thought I was so strong, so proud: I undertook miracles. I soon found my pride was a molehill and my love a mountain. I could not hold out by day if I did not ease my breaking heart at night. How unfortunate! I kept my head under the bed-clothes, too; but you have such ears. I thought I would stifle my grief, or else perhaps you would be as wretched as I am: forgive me! pray forgive me!”
“On one condition,” said Mrs. Dodd, struggling with the emotion these simple words caused her.
“Anything to be forgiven,” cried Julia, impetuously. “I'll go to London. I'll go to Botany Bay. I deserve to be hanged.”
“Then, from this hour, no half-confidences between us. Dear me, you carry in your own bosom a much harsher judge, a much less indulgent friend, than I am. Come! trust me with your heart. Do you love him very much? Does your happiness depend on him?”
At this point-blank question Julia put her head over Mrs. Dodd's shoulder, not to be seen; and, clasping her tight, murmured scarce above a whisper, “I don't know how much I love him. When he came in at that party I felt his slave—his unfaithful adoring slave; if he had ordered me to sing Aileen Aroon, I should have obeyed; if he had commanded me to take his hand and leave the room, I think I should have obeyed. His face is always before me as plain as life; it used to come to me bright and loving; now it is pale, and stern, and sad. I was not so wretched till I saw he was pining for me, and thinks me inconstant—oh, mamma, so pale! so shrunk I so reckless! He was sorry for misbehaving that night: he changed clothes with a beggar to kiss my dress, poor thing! poor thing! Who ever loved as he does me! I am dying for him; I am dying.”
“There! there!” said Mrs. Dodd soothingly. “You have said enough. This must be love. I am on your Alfred's side from this hour.”
Julia opened her eyes, and was a good deal agitated as well as surprised. “Pray do not raise my hopes,” she gasped. “We are parted for ever. His father refuses. Even you seemed averse; or have I been dreaming?”
“Me, dearest? How can I be averse to anything lawful on which I find your heart is really set, and your happiness at stake? Of course I have stopped the actual intercourse, under existing circumstances; but these circumstances are not unalterable: your only obstacle is Mr. Richard Hardie.”
“But what an obstacle!” sighed Julia. “His father! a man of iron! so everybody says; for I have made inquiries—oh!” And she was abashed. She resumed hastily, “And that letter, so cold, so cruel! I feel it was written by one not open to gentle influences. He does not think me worthy of his son so accomplished, so distinguished at the very university where our poor Edward—has—you know——”
“Little simpleton!” said Mrs. Dodd, and kissed her tenderly; “your iron man is the commonest clay, sordid, pliable; and your stern heroic Brutus is a shopkeeper: he is open to the gentle influences which sway the kindred souls of the men you and I buy our shoes, our tea, our gloves, our fish-kettles of: and these influences I think I command, and am prepared to use them to the utmost.”
Julia lay silent, and wondering what she could mean.
But Mrs. Dodd hesitated now: it pained and revolted her to show her enthusiastic girl the world as it is. She said as much, and added—“I seem to be going to aid all these people to take the bloom from my own child's innocence. Heaven help me!”
“Oh, never mind that,” cried Julia in her ardent way; “give me Truth before Error, however pleasing.”
Mrs. Dodd replied only by a sigh: grand general sentiments like that never penetrated her mind: they glided off like water from a duck's back. “We will begin with this mercantile Brutus, then,” said she, with such a curl of the lip. Brutus had rejected her daughter.
“Mr. Richard Hardie was born and bred in a bank; one where no wild thyme blows, my poor enthusiast, nor cowslips nor the nodding violet grows; but gold and silver chink, and Things are discounted, and men grow rich, slowly but surely, by lawful use of other people's money. Breathed upon by these 'gentle influences,' he was, from his youth, a remarkable man—measured by Trade's standard. At five-and-twenty divine what he did! He saved the bank. You have read of bubbles: the Mississippi Bubble and the South Sea Bubble. Well, in the year 1825, it was not one bubble but a thousand; mines by the score, and in distant lands; companies by the hundred; loans to every nation or tribe; down to Guatemala, Patagonia, and Greece; two hundred new ships were laid on the stocks in one year, for your dear papa told me; in short, a fever of speculation, and the whole nation raging with it: my dear, Princes, Dukes, Duchesses, Bishops, Poets, Lawyers, Physicians, were seen struggling with their own footmen for a place in the Exchange: and, at last, good, steady, old Mr. Hardie, Alfred's grandfather, was drawn into the vortex. Now, to excuse him and appreciate the precocious Richard, you must try and realise that these bubbles, when they rise, are as alluring and reasonable as they are ridiculous and incredible when one looks back on them; even soap bubbles, you know, have rainbow hues till they burst: and, indeed, the blind avarice of men does but resemble the blind vanity of women: look at our grandmothers' hoops, and our mothers' short waists and monstrous heads! Yet in their day what woman did not glory in these insanities? Well then, Mr. Richard Hardie, at twenty-five, was the one to foresee the end of all these bubbles; he came down from London and brought his people to their senses by sober reason and 'sound commercial principles'—that means, I believe, 'get other people's money, but do not risk your own.' His superiority was so clear, that his father resigned the helm to him, and, thanks to his ability, the bank weathered the storm, while all the other ones in the town broke or suspended their trade. Now, you know, youth is naturally ardent and speculative; but Richard Hardie's was colder and wiser than other people's old age: and that is one trait. Some years later, in the height of his prosperity—I reveal this only for your comfort, and on your sacred promise as a person of delicacy, never to repeat it to a soul—Richard Hardie was a suitor for my hand.”
“Mamma!”
“Do not ejaculate, sweetest. It discomposes me. 'Nothing is extraordinary,' as that good creature Dr. Sampson says. He must have thought it would answer, in one way or another, to have a gentlewoman at the head of his table; and I was not penniless, bien entendu. Failing in this, he found a plain little Thing, with a gloomy temper, and no accomplishments nor graces; but her father could settle twenty thousand pounds. He married her directly: and that is a trait. He sold his father's and grandfather's house and place of business, in spite of all their associations, and obtained a lease of his present place from my uncle Fountain: it seemed a more money-making situation. A trait. He gives me no reason for rejecting my daughter. Why? because he is not proud of his reasons: this walking Avarice has intelligence: a trait. Now put all this together, and who more transparent than the profound Mr. Hardie? He has declined our alliance because he takes for granted we are poor. When I undeceive him on that head he will reopen negotiations in a letter—No. 2 of the correspondence; copied by one of his clerks—it will be calm, plausible, flattering: in short, it will be done like a gentleman: though he is nothing of the kind. And this brings me to what I ought to have begun with: your dear father and I have always lived within our income for our children's sake; he is bringing home the bulk of our savings this very voyage, and it amounts to fourteen thousand pounds.”
“Oh, what an enormous sum!”
“No, dearest, it is not a fortune in itself. But it is a considerable sum to possess,