Belinda

Lady Delacour’s maid Marriott arrives in a panic at Oakly-park to tell Belinda that her mistress is finally convinced that the rumors about Belinda’s betrayal were just that; she now wants to beg Belinda for her forgiveness. Belinda without thinking twice sets aside their quarrel and returns to London. The reunion with Lady Delacour is touching. Believing she is dying, Lady Delacour, at Belinda’s urging, at last forgives her husband for a lifetime of transgressions and finally confesses the truth behind her sickness.

Far from being angry at being lied to for so long, Lord Delacour embraces his wife and promises to stay by her side through the cancer operation. Sensing Lady Delacour’s emotional vulnerability and her genuine terror over the approach of mortality, Belinda convinces her that now would be a good time to summon Helena, her estranged daughter, and make peace with her. When Helena arrives later that day, Lady Delacour collapses in tears and shares with her daughter the reality of her condition and her fears over her death. Certain she will die (she even has a dream foretelling her death), Lady Delacour heads to meet Doctor X. in Twickenham, west of London. The operation, however, discloses no cancer. The stubborn infection was from the errant bullet and is quickly cleaned out.

Back at the Delacour estate, Helena finds a wounded bullfinch in the gardens. She takes it in to nurse it and finds that it sings an actual melody as if it had been trained. When Marriott chances to see a notice in the local newspaper about a missing trained bullfinch, she takes the bird to the advertised address, a shop that sells cosmetics, toilet water, and perfumes. The clerk is desperate to know whether Marriott knows where he might find the bird’s owner. The clerk identifies the bird’s owner as none other than Virginia St. Pierre, the beautiful, mysterious woman who has long been under the care of Clarence Hervey.

Meanwhile, Hervey is in something of a moral dilemma, and the only way he can see his way out of it is honesty. He will admit to the Delacours the exact nature of his relationship with this mysterious Virginia St. Pierre in hope that he might still have a chance with Belinda. The story he shares is involved and complicated. In a lengthy packet he sends to Lady Delacour, Hervey reveals that he first met Virginia St. Pierre three years earlier when she was a young girl, no more than 15. Hervey chanced to see her riding a horse alone in the woods in New Forest in rural Southern England far from London. At the time he had no idea who she was, save that she was a singularly beautiful girl. He approached her and found out that her name was Rachel Hartley and that for as long as she could remember she had lived with her grandmother in New Forest. Hervey was immediately drawn to the girl’s purity and innocence. When he approached the grandmother, she told him, “I have bred Rachel up in innocence. I never sent her to a boarding school […] from the moment of her birth till now, I have kept her under my own eye; she has lived with me away from the world” (213).

Hervey was intrigued. It was then that he first got the idea to adopt the young girl, this “child of nature” (216), and to raise her within the protective hothouse environment of his household. He would care for her, educate her in the arts, develop her taste, teach her appropriate manners, and in essence shape her to be the ideal wife. When the grandmother died two years later, Hervey put his plan into motion, moving the young girl, now 17, to a well-appointed cottage in Windsor, a remote rural town just west of London. He installed Mrs. Ormond, a woman with minimum education but impeccable character, to be the girl’s live-in companion. The girl was grateful for Hervey’s kindness. Hervey noticed that the girl wore a locket around her neck with a miniature portrait of a young man. She never tells Mrs. Ormond who the man is nor does she ever take off the locket. For his part, Hervey never asks about the locket.

He began in earnest the work of creating the girl into his perfect wife. He first renamed her: Rachel became Virginia St. Pierre after a heroine in a sentimental French romance novel, Paul et Virginie by Jacques Henri St. Pierre. In the novel a young innocent country girl is ultimately destroyed by her disastrous introduction into Parisian society. The sentimental romance was all the rage in London. While living in Windsor, Virginia/Rachel became fond of a bullfinch she heard in the garden. She brought it into the house and raised it like a pet. It became for her a consolation in what was an otherwise lonely life. When it flew off, she was crushed. Otherwise, she spends her time in long hours of melancholic reverie or reading popular sentimental novels, grand and glittery fairy tales that fill her head with romantic notions about love. She is certain she is bound to love Hervey as her benefactor, confusing gratitude for affection. Indeed, Mrs. Ormond chastises her to abandon the “foolish dreams” (227) engendered by the frothy novels and to embrace the pragmatic opportunity to marry Hervey.

The point of Hervey’s long letter is to tell Lady Delacour that he no longer wants to marry Virginia. But without malicious intent, Mrs. Ormond already told the girl of Hervey’s plan to mold her into his wife. Now, Hervey admits to Lady Delacour, he feels obligated to go through with what he predicts will be a loveless marriage of convenience and duty. More to the point, he cannot simply release Virginia. Her residence under his care has long sparked rumors about her character, and the only way to save her reputation is to do the honorable thing and marry her.