“I would have done what she did!” said Mabel.
“I daresay that you would,” answered Mrs. Aumerle, with a touch of sarcasm in her manner; “but I happen to know a good deal more of life than you do, and mind my word, Mabel, when a woman marries she takes her husband for better for worse; she has made her choice and she must abide by it; she only lowers herself by appealing to the world to arbitrate between her and the man whom she has vowed to obey.”
“How has Annabella appealed to the world?” asked Mabel, with but little of respect in her tone.
“By making herself the talk of the world. There’s not a house in Pelton, no, nor much farther round, in which the flight of the countess and its cause is not the subject of conversation. The gossips are feasting on the news, and doubtless by to-morrow morning we shall have the whole affair, with every kind of exaggeration, appearing in the county paper. I’ve really no patience with the girl! And to mix us up with her folly! I feel as if I were aiding and abetting a wife’s rebellion against her husband.”
“Unfeeling creature!” thought Mabel, whose partiality for her cousin, and high-flown spirit of romance, made her espouse the countess’s cause with the chivalric devotion of a knight errant towards some fair and persecuted damsel.
“I am sure I hope that she does not intend to prolong her stay here,” continued Mrs. Aumerle. “To say nothing, of the inconvenience of accommodating herself and her fine maid, I think it an evil to have in the house one who sets such an example of wilfulness and pride.”
“Papa could never but welcome to his home the orphan niece of my own beloved mother,” exclaimed Mabel, with flashing eyes, feeling as though she were doing a lofty and generous action in defending the cause of the oppressed.
“A child of fifteen is no judge of these matters, and would show her good sense best by her silence,” was the cold observation of Mrs. Aumerle.
Mabel’s proud spirit was thoroughly roused by this remark. Her present mood seemed strangely inconsistent with the softened humility which she had shown, when in the arbour a few days previously, she had leant her head on her sister’s bosom, feeling herself indeed to be a poor, helpless sinner! But is not this a species of inconsistency which, by experience, we know to be but too common in the heart? We prostrate ourselves before God, but stand erect before our fellow-creatures: we own our infirmities in the quiet hour when religion speaks to the soul, but start back with angry indignation, if those weaknesses be touched upon by another. Pride stands back when we, in solitude, or with one chosen friend, review our past conduct and mourn over our faults, but springs forward if a rebuke, however just, be not sweetened by flattery, or tempered by caution.