The kind reception of Mrs. Arlbery, and all the animation of her
discourse, were thrown away upon Camilla. An absent smile, and a few
faint acknowledgments of her goodness were all she could return: Eugenia
abandoned when she might have been served, Edgar contemning when he
might have been approving ... these were the images of her mind, which
resisted entrance to all other.
Tired of fruitless attempts to amuse her, Mrs. Arlbery, upon their
arrival at the Grove, conducted her to an apartment prepared for her,
and made use of no persuasion that she would leave it before dinner.
Camilla then, too unhappy to fear any injunction, and resigned to
whatever she might receive, read the discourse of Mr. Tyrold.
_For Miss_ Camilla Tyrold.
It is not my intention to enumerate, my dear Camilla, the many
blessings of your situation; your heart is just and affectionate,
and will not forget them: I mean but to place before you your
immediate duties, satisfied that the review will ensure their
performance.
Unused to, because undeserving control, your days, to this period,
have been as gay as your spirits. It is now first that your
tranquillity is ruffled; it is now, therefore, that your fortitude
has its first debt to pay for its hitherto happy exemption.
Those who weigh the calamities of life only by the positive, the
substantial, or the irremediable mischiefs which they produce,
regard the first sorrows of early youth as too trifling for
compassion. They do not enough consider that it is the suffering,
not its abstract cause, which demands human commiseration. The man
who loses his whole fortune, yet possesses firmness, philosophy, a
disdain of ambition, and an accommodation to circumstances, is less
an object of contemplative pity, than the person who, without one
real deprivation, one actual evil, is first, or is suddenly forced
to recognise the fallacy of a cherished and darling hope.
That its foundation has always been shallow is no mitigation of
disappointment to him who had only viewed it in its
super-structure. Nor is its downfall less terrible to its
visionary elevator, because others had seen it from the beginning
as a folly or a chimæra; its dissolution should be estimated, not
by its romance in the unimpassioned examination of a rational
looker on, but by its believed promise of felicity to its credulous
projector.
Is my Camilla in this predicament? had she wove her own destiny in
the speculation of her wishes? Alas! to blame her, I must first
forget, that delusion, while in force, has all the semblance of
reality, and takes the same hold upon the faculties as truth. Nor
is it till the spell is broken, till the perversion of reason and
error of judgment become wilful, that Scorn ought to point 'its
finger' or Censure its severity.