Читать книгу Memoirs of Emma Courtney - Mary Hays - Страница 15

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The small pittance bequeathed to me was insufficient to preserve me from dependence.—Dependence!—I repeated to myself, and I felt my heart die within me. I revolved in my mind various plans for my future establishment.—I might, perhaps, be allowed to officiate, as an assistant, in the school where I had been placed in my childhood, with the mistress of which I still kept up an occasional correspondence; but this was a species of servitude, and my mind panted for freedom, for social intercourse, for scenes in motion, where the active curiosity of my temper might find a scope wherein to range and speculate. What could the interest of my little fortune afford? It would neither enable me to live alone, nor even to board in a family of any respectability. My beloved aunt was no more; her children were about to be dispersed, and to form various connections.

Cruel prejudices!—I exclaimed—hapless woman! Why was I not educated for commerce, for a profession, for labour? Why have I been rendered feeble and delicate by bodily constraint, and fastidious by artificial refinement? Why are we bound, by the habits of society, as with an adamantine chain? Why do we suffer ourselves to be confined within a magic circle, without daring, by a magnanimous effort, to dissolve the barbarous spell?

A child in the drama of the world, I knew not which way to turn, nor on what to determine. I wrote to Mr Morton, to enquire on what terms I was to be received by his family. If merely as a visitor for a few weeks, till I had time to digest my plans, I should meet, with pleasure, a gentleman whose character I had been taught to respect; but I should not consider myself as subject to controul. I ought, perhaps, to have been satisfied with Mr Morton's answer to my interrogatories.

He wished to embrace the daughter of his brother, his family would be happy to render Morton Park agreeable to her, as long as she should think proper to favour them by making it her residence. The young ladies expected both pleasure and improvement from the society of their accomplished kinswoman, &c.

I believe I was unreasonable, the style of this letter was civil, nay kind, and yet it appeared, to me, to want the vivifying principle—what shall I say?—dictated merely by the head, it reached not the heart.

The trials of my mind, I foreboded, were about to commence, I shrunk from the world I had been so willing to enter, for the rude storms of which I had been little fitted by the fostering tenderness of my early guardians. Those ardent feelings and lively expectations, with all the glowing landscapes which my mind had sketched of the varied pleasures of society, while in a measure secluded from its enjoyments, gradually melted into one deep, undistinguished shade. That sanguine ardour of temper, which had hitherto appeared the predominant feature of my character, now gave place to despondency. I wept, I suffered my tears to flow unrestrained: the solemnity of the late events had seized my spirits, and the approaching change filled me with solicitude. I wandered over the scenes of my past pleasures, and recalled to my remembrance, with a sad and tender luxury, a thousand little incidents, that derived all their importance from the impossibility of their renewal. I gazed on every object, for the last time—What is there in these words that awakens our fanaticisms? I could have done homage to these inanimate, and, till now, uninteresting objects; merely because I should see them no more.

How fantastic and how capricious are these sentiments! Ought I, or ought I not, to blush while I acknowledge them? My young friends, also, from whom I was about to separate myself!—how various might be our destinies, and how unconscious were we of the future! Happy ignorance, that by bringing the evils of life in succession, gradually inures us to their endurance.

'Had I beheld the sum of ills, which one

By one, I have endured—my heart had broke.'