Free Mansfield Park Revisited by Joan Aiken Page A

‘He thinks me abandoned to vice; let him continue to think so,’ she asserted. ‘I would have had Crawford if I could; my father is right enough there. If the sin were in resolution, not commission , I have sinned. And now I care nothing what is thought about me!’”
    Thunderstruck, aghast at these revelations of destructive passion and thwarted love, Susan could only sit silent, pondering over the story.
    â€œAnd so poor Mr. Crawford has suffered all these years un-deservedly—has borne the reputation of a seducer when he had done nothing? I wonder he would make no attempt to clear his name.”
    â€œPerhaps, like Maria, he did not care; having lost the woman he loved, he was not interested in mere vindication.”
    Again Susan sat silent, thinking of Mr. Crawford, who had never married, but lived ever since on his property in Norfolk, shooting his coverts and taking care of his tenants, remembering Fanny.
    â€œWell, my child,” said Mrs. Osborne cheerfully, “you look mighty grave, and so you should! It is a moral tale indeed! Do not marry for money, do not engage in flirtation with young men, do not attempt to revenge yourself by blackening another’s name.”
    â€œI am not like to do any of those things,” replied Susan smiling. “Fortunately for me, Mansfield contains none of the needful ingredients. There is nobody to flirt with, no rich suitor begging for my hand, and not a soul on whom I wish to be revenged at present.—I wonder,” she added musingly, almost to herself, “what my cousin Maria will do now? In London?”
    â€œOh—very likely she will meet with no worse fate than many another whose first essay into matrimony has been disastrous—she will set forward on a second attempt, and may next time, with more experience and more reasonable hopes, achieve greater success. My brother Frank would scold, to hear me talk thus, but so it is; many a second marriage, when the parties are of more rational age and peaceable temper, has a firmer basis and promises better than one scrambled together amid the ardours and fervours of hot-headed youth and blind first love.”
    â€œThen you yourself, ma’am—” ventured Susan, greatly daring, “would you think it desirable to embark on a second marriage?”
    Mrs. Osborne laughed heartily.
    â€œAh—” shaking her head “you have properly caught me there! No, my dear—never! Having been so fortunate as to achieve perfect felicity in one of those hot-headed young first marriages I have just been decrying—I forget whether it was a week or ten days between our first meeting and the marriage ceremony—I would never be so rash as to venture upon a second. But—good gracious—there is the church clock striking noon. We have gossiped away the entire morning.”
    ***
    Several of the ensuing days were fine enough to permit Lady Bertram to sit out on the terrace in the shade, languidly calling out a few directions to the gardeners, while Susan picked flowers for the drawing-room and little Mary set out her dolls on the flagstones and wrapped them in coverlids of leaves.
    All were thus peacefully employed one morning when Tom came riding back from Thornton Lacey, looking hot and out of humour; at the same moment Julia Yates’s chariot rolled to a halt in front of the house, and Julia alighted from it, accompanied by her children and her sister-in-law.
    Susan always experienced a slight sinking of the spirit at the advent of Miss Yates. That young lady had brought to a fine art the quelling of pretension—or what she held to be pretension—in persons from classes of society lower than her own; as an earl’s daughter, she naturally felt herself the equal of anybody in the kingdom, and higher than most. A Susan Price, coming from a shabby naval household in Portsmouth, her father no more than a lieutenant of Marines, her grandfather