Free Mansfield Park Revisited by Joan Aiken

wholly, baldly informing her that he did not love her, had never loved her, that he loved another; in short, he turned her from his door.”
    â€œGood heavens, ma’am! Are you sure of this?”
    â€œAs sure as a person may be; for Mrs. Norris, in her eagerness to dissociate her niece from the slur of adultery, showed me letters—a letter from Maria to Crawford, still urging him, still beseeching him to relent; and his to her, even more adamant in refusal, enclosing her own note and requesting that he be spared the harassment of further correspondence.”
    â€œWhere was she then? Whither had she gone?”
    â€œShe was staying with her sister. Mrs. Norris gave me to understand that, at the same time as the elder sister had rashly quitted her husband’s roof, the younger one, who at that time was visiting friends in London, had eloped with the man whom she subsequently married.”
    â€œWhat?” cried Susan, to whom this came as utterly unheard-of and most startling news. That Julia Yates—now so high, at least in her own esteem, so well-conducted, such a pattern of worthy, frugal, impeccable respectability—could once have been so recklessly imprudent as to elope, was quite astonishing, hardly to be credited.
    â€œOh, I fancy it was all quickly hushed up and smoothed over; the young couple went to Gretna Green and married, and her father was then persuaded to receive them. Maria, apparently, had staid with them as far as Stamford, still in hopes that Crawford might be brought to change his mind. When he would not, in fury and bitterness of spirit, she determined that as her good name was irrevocably lost, she would take good care to blacken his, and would prevent him from marrying the woman he really loved. She therefore wrote her father that she was under Mr. Crawford’s protection, and let it be thought that he was to blame for the rupture of her marriage.”
    â€œPerhaps,” Susan said doubtingly, “he was at least partly to blame; at least, so I have always been given to understand by my sister. He was a sad flirt, Fanny told me.”
    â€œMore than probably there was blame on both sides; it is generally so in these cases where young people have behaved imprudently and allowed their feelings to run ahead of their judgment. I daresay the gentleman had encouraged hopes which he had no intention of fulfilling. But then she had committed the far worse sin of marrying a man whom she did not love; marrying him for the sake of money and position.”
    â€œSo—good heavens—poor thing, she was punished heavily enough for the mere commission of an imprudent marriage. If it is true that she did not go off with Mr. Crawford—if she quitted her husband alone—what occasion was there for her to live in such disgrace and seclusion? Why could she not return to her father’s house? It seems to me that she had damned herself, all to no purpose.”
    â€œPride, Miss Price: pride and anger made her adhere to her resolve, once she had told her tale, to stand by her course. She wished Crawford to suffer; and she could not bear it to be known that he had absolutely repulsed her. She told me once, furthermore, in a mood of reckless bitterness, that anything would be better than returning to Mansfield ‘to be lectured by Sir Thomas and preached at by Edmund and despised by the neighbours who had admired her before.’ Life with an aunt who doatd on her, even in remote and confined circumstances, was greatly to be preferred. ‘At least here I am independent and can do as I choose,’ she told me. It gives me pain to suggest that she was merely waiting for the demise of her aunt, but one could not help suspecting such to be the case. Maria is a person of high spirit and strong passions—not to be guided by the advice of others. It did not trouble her that, by pretending to be worse than she was, she had caused her father inexpressible pain.