Such a time as it has been since I have written – and with a bad pen as well – but that much has happened! For to say the truth, the family has been at sixes and sevens ever since Miss Lydia eloped with that deplorable Wickham, who turned out to be as wicked as wicked can be.
Aye, you read that aright. Miss Lydia eloped, the giddy young creature, while she was staying with Colonel Forster and his wife down at Brighton. Not only that but Miss Lizzy had actually dared to warn the master that she might – and he had only laughed at her! As Mr Spencer said, and rightly, ‘An easy temper is a blessing in a master but a disaster in a father.’
‘Well, I cannot understand that Wickham,’ was Bessy’s view. ‘What fool would have wed Miss Lydia when half Meryton would have had him? Why, even Miss Lizzy –’
‘Wed her?’ said Mr Spencer, quite sharpish. ‘Who says that he will wed her? ’Tis a longish way to Scotland. And, if he fails to wed her, why, the whole family comes to grief!’
Bessy said, ‘Aye, I should certainly think twice, if I were he, for Miss Lydie is so troublesome! In fact, were I Mr Wickham, I should leave the silly girl and her trunk by the side of the London Road and drive on to Scotland without her!’
And James holding his sides with laughing – even though the mistress is dying. Or so she says.
‘I shall die of this, Hill,’ she cries, ‘for there never was a better girl, nor a kinder and sweeter one, than my dearest Lydia! But men are deceivers ever!’
‘Quite, ma’am,’ says I, thinking that it was Miss Lydia, and not myself, she should have been lecturing to about men, for then her lecture might have been of rather more use.
‘The best girl in the world! And me lying here, dying!’
‘But with respect, ma’am, it could have been still worse, for a great many families have survived an elopement – and the nobility as well, as Mr Spencer himself says.’
‘Dying! Dying!’
I longed to ask if some camomile tea might set her to rights, but it did not seem respectful, what with her dying – though, to be sure, she was not.
