Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/298

290 bring back at his will her youth, her dead children's voices, her gay spirit?

Never in her best days had her spirits been gayer than on one memorable evening in the winter of 1779-80, at Dr. Burney's house in St. Martin's ^Street, where a number of people had been invited to meet the Thrales and Dr. Johnson. In the company were Mrs. Greville and Mrs. Crewe, the one a "wit" of some celebrity and authoress of an "Ode to Indifference," the other the most admired court beauty of her day. All of them had come to talk and to hear Dr. Johnson talk, and it is probable, too, that Mrs. Greville and Mrs. Thrale were looking forward to a friendly tilt to themselves in the course of the evening. But among the guests was a new singer from Paris, a Signor Piozzi, and Dr. Burney must, forsooth, exhibit his new lion before the old ones were allowed to roar. Now, Dr. Johnson did not know a fugue of Bach from a street cry, nor were some others present much wiser. When, therefore, Piozzi took his place at the piano and sung them one scena after another, it was for most of them simply a monopoly of noise on his part, and for them, a condemnation to silence. Mrs. Thrale alone was at her ease. She feared nobody; not Dr. Johnson, sitting abstractedly with his back to the piano; not the plaintive Greville, who was perhaps conning her own "Ode;" nor the beautiful Crewe, with her shepherdess airs and court smiles. A sudden sense of the ridiculous position they are in lifts her spirits altogether beyond her own control; and, while the rest of the guests are sitting round the room in frigid silence, she glides on tiptoe behind the singer, and begins imitating his gestures, squaring her little elbows, shrugging her shoulders, casting up her eyes—doing all of the aria parlante, in short, except its music. Dr. Johnson does not see the dumb show, but the ladies open their eyes wider, and Dr. Burney is shocked. With an air of dignified censure, the historian of music conducts the culprit back to her chair, whispering remonstrance; and Mrs. Thrale, with admirable good temper, accepts his rebuke and sits down like a pretty little miss, for the rest of a humdrum party: in her own heart, however—need we doubt it?—thinking Dr. Burney "a blockhead," to have wasted such a chance of a brilliant evening.

 

Though Anne Hatton's first attention had been turned to the wiping-out of the affront which she believed her father's sister had put upon her father and his daughters, by their repudiating the brief authority which Mrs. Wyndham had exercised over them, Anne had not been without the consideration of plans for herself and Pleasance; she had been full of them, working at them incessantly with a restless, excited brain.

Pleasance was cherishing a diversity of schemes, and fitful, airy projects. Now it was that Anne and she should manufacture an immense number of little pin-cushions, penwipers, etc. The girls at the Hayes had lightened their heavier labours by contriving and constructing such for birthday and Christmas presents and charity bazaars in which friends of some of the pupils were interested. They could be disposed of to a "repository," whatever that might be, or wherever it might be found, and live on the proceeds—as Pleasance had read of distressed ladies supporting themselves, in those good old-fashioned novels which Miss Cayley had not forbidden to her pupils.

Next, it was a new idea, culled from a modern American novel, that Anne and she should set up a little shop—only not in Saxford, where people stared and wrangled so, and girls were so saucy—and sell things, tea, or worsted, or, better, books; or try to get a little farm, which Mrs. Balls would tell them how to take care of, and have horses and donkeys, and cows and hens, all of their own, and sell corn and hay, butter and milk, and eggs and cheese, like Mrs. Balls's master.

In these occupations Pleasance recognized a new life and many delights, with some cares, of course, but no degradation—how could there be? Anne and she would still be Anne and Pleasance, retaining all that was worth having of their individual selves, with their gifts or g-aces, v and they would be doing what was honest and right under the circumstances. No more harm could come to them than came to Rosalind and Celia when they withdrew from the usurping duke's court, and lived as shepherd and shepherdess in the forest of Ardennes, or to Imogen, when she 