"Quite!" replies Bob, emphatically.
He is standing leaning against the chimneypiece, his colour heightened, and a sorely angered look on his open simple face.
"You need not wait for me, mother," he continues, seeing his parent look inquiringly towards him, as she moves with the slowness of age and portliness to the door; "I shall not come to prayers to-night. When one prays, one ought to be in charity with all the world, ought not one? And I am not."
CHAPTER XXV
The rough winds and the spiteful rains have wellnigh stripped all their red-and-yellow clothing off the trees: upon the oaks alone some leaves still hang persistent, though withered and crackly. The apples and pears are all gathered and stored for the winter; even the dark-blue Orleans plums, that require the crisping frost to ripen them, are eaten and gone.
The sale at Glan-yr-Afon is over; it is enrolled among that countless array of unrecallable events, great and little, that is past. The new tenant, an ordinary Welsh farmer, with an overfull quiver of sprouting Welshmen and Welshwomen, has entered into possession. No one has taken the trouble to "redd up" the garden for the winter; flowers do not help to pay the rent – they give back nothing but their beauty and perfume; and so, over Esther's trim flower-beds, sheep-dogs gallop, and children, boisterous with health and spirits, run races. The rustic seat under the old cherry-tree – the seat that Jack fashioned in the summer evenings – has been broken up for firewood; and in Jack's chair in the dining-room, the father of the family reposes his plethoric bulk of an evening, when he does not happen to be getting drunk at the "Punch Bowl," and snores euphoniously.
And Bob, pursued by blessings, prayers, lamentations, and strong wishes for his safe back-coming, is gone – gone away in a smoky steamer, over the mist-mantled grey sea. Not a few of the tears that fell for him came from Esther's eyes – not love-tears, shed privily, secretly, dashed away with hasty care at the sound of any approaching footsteps, but poured out openly, publicly, in the presence of his mother and sisters – mingled with theirs, indeed, as of no different quality. Not more openly, not more publicly, had she wept for old Luath, when, on the day before the sale, the old dog, who had ailed and moped ever since his master's (to him) unaccountable disappearance, crawled weakly to her feet, and, looking up dimly wistful into her face for the last time, died licking her tender hand. On the day before his departure, Brandon came to say "Good-bye" to her.
"I have told mother nothing," he says, with some embarrassment, in allusion to their late engagement – "nothing, except that I was sure that I could not make you happy. I have given her no reason, Esther – give her none either! She will not ask you point-blank, and it is always easy to evade indirect questions; there are some things that it is of no use being confidential about."
"I see," she answers, with a faint smile. "I understand, neatly as you have gilded the pill, you are afraid that she would turn me out-of-doors if she knew what a treacherous, black-hearted wretch I have been; that I should have to take refuge even sooner than I must otherwise do in the workhouse, to which I always look forward as my final destination.
"Then, bidding God bless her, he wrings her hand, strongly, and so takes his last farewell of her, nor ever sees her fair face and great gentle stag eyes again.
And now he is gone – gone with a difficult smile on his face, and very little money in his pocket. He never has much, but he has less than usual now; having spent his few last sovereigns on the erecting a plain white cross at the head of Jack's low grave, that, when this generation has passed, his place of sleeping may not be quite undistinguished from that of his neighbour dust. He has gone, with his heart's strongest longing balked, his prime hope death-smitten; but yet not despairing – not cursing his day, nor arraigning High God, saying, "Why do I, undeserving, thus suffer?" He carries away with him no heavy seething load of revenge, no man-slaying ardour of hatred against the woman that has wronged him, and the man for whose sake she did it. Life is full, interesting, complex – not all on one string, whatever morbid women and moody rhymers may say; not all sexual love – all of it, that is, that is not devoted to drinking, as Anacreon, Catullus, and Moore have dulcetly told us. And therefore, though poor, disappointed, and heart-wrung, Brandon is not all unhappy. He has been greatly sinned against, and has forgiven, thus exercising the function that raises us nearest to a level with the Godhead.
And meanwhile Esther, left behind in wintry Wales, takes his emptied place at triste Plas Berwyn. Despite all her resolves, despite her high talk that a morsel of Mrs. Brandon's bread would choke her – that it would be better to starve than to be under any obligation to the family of the man she has betrayed – she is now eating that suffocating bread, now lying under those annihilating obligations.
Want makes us swallow our dignity – makes us do many mean things. One must live; one must keep in that breath that perhaps is only spent in sighs: and Mr. James Greenwood has made us all out of love with the workhouse. So she sits down three times a day at Mrs. Brandon's table, the unwillingest guest that ever sat at any board, and eats the bread of charity, and the roast mutton and apple-tart of charity, when the conclusion of the long Puritan grace gives her permission to do so.
There is plenty of time for thinking at Plas Berwyn, for in that still household talk is not rife. When people never leave their own little one earth-nook, rarely see any one beyond their immediate family circle, and rarelier still read any reviews, papers, books, that treat of any subject but one, they have not much to talk about. There are few minds original enough, copious enough, to suffice to themselves – to be able to do without supplies derived from external objects. Our thoughts are generally our own, merely by right of immediate possession; mostly they are the thoughts of others, more or less digested, more or less amalgamated with thought-matter of our own.
They are not unkind to her, these chill faded women. Not loving her – for, as Bessy appositely quoted, "Can two walk together except they be agreed?" – and Esther and they are most surely in nothing agreed; mistrusting her, though not knowing, of having dealt falsely by their brother; sincerely, though bigotedly, looking upon her society as unprofitable – nay, almost contaminating; as being one of the unregenerate many – one standing in the cold, outside their little clique of elect, safe souls: despite all this, they are yet willing to give her food and shelter, to give them her for an indefinite number of years, to make her a part of their own dry sapless lives.
But she is not willing – oh, most unwilling! Let me not be mistaken, however: it is not with the dryness and saplessness of the offered life that she quarrels. Life must henceforth be to her, everywhere, dry and sapless; the duller it is, the less it contrasts with her own thoughts. It must be lived, somewhere: it can be lived pleasurably nowhere. Then, why not unpleasurably, greyly, negatively, at Plas Berwyn? Why not, supposing that she had been able to pay for her own cups of tea and slices of mutton, for her own iron bedstead and deal washhand-stand?
But, supposing that she was not able; supposing that she was so destitute as to be glad, even while weeping over his poor rough body, that her old dog had died because she was too poor to be able to keep him; supposing that this life entailed upon her the bitter pain of being daily, hourly grateful to people for whose society she had a strong repugnance, and upon whom, in the person of one of their nearest and dearest, she had inflicted a mortal injury? It is hard to live with people whose every idea runs counter to your own – whose whole tone of thought and conversation is diametrically opposed to what you have been used to all your life – and yet not be able to contradict, to argue with, or differ from them, because you are eating of their bread and drinking of their cup. The mere fact of feeling that you are too deeply indebted to people to be able, without flagrant ingratitude, to quarrel, makes you desire ardently to fall out with them.
"How much better to be a professed beggar at once!" thinks Esther, with a sort of grim humour. "How much better to whine and shuffle along the streets at people's elbows, swearing that you have a husband dying of consumption, and six children all under three years of age starving at home!"
It is only the very basest and the very noblest natures that can accept great favours and not be crushed by them. Esther's is neither. To her it is only the thought that her state of dependence is temporary that makes it supportable. She has lost no time in appealing to Mrs. Brandon for her aid in the search for work —work, that vague word, that conveys to her no distinct idea, that stands to her in the place of something to be done by her, in return for which she may be able to obtain food and drink, without saying "Thank you" to any one for them.
On the afternoon of the day of Bob's departure Esther has been sitting for an hour or more, in listless sadness, on the fender-stool before the fire, her eyes staring vacantly at the battered Michaelmas daisies and discoloured chrysanthemums in the wintry, darkening garden outside. Mrs. Brandon's steel knitting-pins click gently, as she knits round and round, round and round, in the monotonous eternity of a long-ribbed knickerbocker stocking. The fire-gleams flicker dully red on the sombre, large-patterned flock-paper, which makes the room look twice as small and twice as dark as it need otherwise do. Esther is roused from her reverie by the entrance of the servant with the moderator lamp.
"Mrs. Brandon!" she says, addressing her hostess.
"Yes, my dear!" The "my dear" is a concession to Bob's memory.
"Bob told me," says the young girl, with some diffidence, "that you were good enough to say that you would help me in looking for – for – something to do!"
The old lady looks scrutinizingly at her over the tops of her spectacles. "My dear son expressed such great, such surprising anxiety, considering that your connection with him is at an end, about your future, that I did promise."
"And you will?" asks the other, timidly.
"I always keep my promises, Esther, I hope" (with a slight expressive accent on the I and my).
"When will you begin? – soon? – at once? to-morrow?" cries the girl, eagerly.
Mrs. Brandon hesitates: "I must first know for what sort of employment you wish – for what sort you are best suited?"
"I am suited for nothing," she answers, despondently; "but that must not deter me. If nobody did any work but what they were fitted for, three quarters of the world would be idle."
"Would you be inclined to take a situation as governess, if one could be found for you in a respectable pious family?"
She shakes her head. "I don't know enough, and I have no accomplishments. I can read a few pages of 'Racine' or 'Télémaque' without applying very often to the dictionary; modern French, with its colloquialisms and slang, baffles me; and I can play a few 'Etudes' and 'Morceaux de Salon' in a slipshod, boarding-school fashion; but these extensive requirements would hardly be enough."
Mrs. Brandon pauses in consideration. "There are so few occupations open to ladies," she remarks, with an emphasis on the word. "Most professions are closed up by our sex, and all trades by our birth and breeding."
"When one is a pauper, one must endeavour to forget that one ever was a lady," answers Esther, rather grimly; "my gentility would not stand in the way of my being a shoeblack, if women ever were shoeblacks, and if they paid one tolerably for it."
"Would you like to try dressmaking?" inquires her companion, rather doubtfully.
Esther gives an involuntary gasp. It is not a pleasant sensation when the consciousness that one is about to descend from the station that one has been born and has grown up in is first brought stingingly home to one. Happiness, they say, is to be found equally in all ranks, but no one ever yet started the idea that it was sweet to go down. Quick as lightning there flashed before her mind the recollection of a slighting remark made by Miss Blessington, à propos of two very second-rate young ladies, who had come to call at Felton one day during her visit there, that "they looked like little milliners!" Was she going to be a "little milliner?"
"I'm afraid I don't sew well enough," she answers, gently, wondering meanwhile that the idea has never before struck her what a singularly inefficient, incapable member of society she is. "I cannot cut out: I can make a bonnet, and I can mend stockings in a boggling, amateur kind of way, and that is all!"
Recollecting whose stockings it was that she had been used to mend in the boggling way she speaks of, a knife passes through her quivering heart.
"The same objection would apply to your attempting a lady's-maid's place, I suppose?"
"Yes, of course" (bending down her long white neck in a despondent attitude); "but" (with regathered animation in eye and tone) – "but that objection would not apply to any other branch of domestic service – a housemaid, for instance; it cannot require much native genius, or a very long apprenticeship, to know how to empty baths, and make beds, and clean grates: I ought to be able to learn how in a week."
Mrs. Brandon's eyes travel involuntarily to the small, idle, white hands that lie on Esther's lap – the blue-veined, patrician hands that she is so calmly destining to spend their existence in trundling mops and scouring floors.
"My dear child," she says, with compelled compassion in her voice, "you talk very lightly of these things; but you can have no conception, till you make the experiment, of what the trial would be of being thrown on terms of equality among a class of persons so immensely your inferiors in education and refinement."
"I believe it is a well-authenticated fact," answers Esther, firmly, "that in some town in one of the midland counties a baronet's wife is, or was, earning her living by going out charing. What right have I to be more squeamish than she?"
"It is unchristian," pursues Mrs. Brandon – unconvinced by Esther's anecdote, which indeed she treats as apocryphal – "to call anyone common or unclean, and God forbid that I should ever do so! But imagine a lady, born and bred like yourself, exposed to the coarse witticisms of the footman and the intimate friendship of the cook!"
Esther's little face seems to catch some of the deep fire-glow – her breast heaves up and down in angry, quick pants.
"Mrs. Brandon, do you suppose that they would be so impertinent– ?" she begins, fiercely; then breaks off, ashamed. "I forgot; it would be no impertinence then! Well!" (with a long low sigh) "I am tough: I have borne worse things! This is but a little thing, after all; I can bear this!"
"I think, Esther, that if, as I fear, you are leaning on your own strength, and not on an Unseen Arm, you are overrating your powers of endurance."
"Perhaps; I can but try."
"Impossible!" answers Mrs. Brandon, with cool, common sense. "Who would hire you? Ridiculous! – childish! No, Esther; we must try and find something more eligible for you, if you are still foolishly bent on declining the happy, and respectable, and (I humbly hope I may say) pious home that I am so willing – that we are all so willing – to offer you."
"Oh yes! yes! yes!" cries the child, passionately. "I am bent on it! It is less degrading even to be exposed, as you say, to the witticisms of the footman and the friendship of the cook, than to live upon people on whom you have no claim beyond that of having been already most ungrateful to them – than to impose on their generosity, to sponge upon them!"
"As you will, Esther," answers Mrs. Brandon, loving her too little, and respecting her independence of spirit too much, to reason further with her.
There is a pause – a pause broken presently by Esther, who speaks diffidently: "Mrs. Brandon, don't you think that if I could get into one of those large shops in London, or one of our great towns, I could try on cloaks, and measure yards of ribbon, without requiring any great amount of knowledge of any kind, theoretical or practical?"
Mrs. Brandon looks doubtful. "It is not so easy as you may imagine, my dear, to obtain admission into one of those shops: a friend of mine made great efforts to get a situation for a protégée of hers at Marshal & Snelgrove's, or Lewis & Allenby's, and after waiting a long time, was obliged to give it up as hopeless."
"Perhaps she was not tall?" suggests Esther, rather timidly.
"I really never inquired."
"They like them tall!" says the girl, involuntarily drawing up her slight élancé figure; "and I'm tall, am I not?"
"I should imagine that that qualification alone would hardly suffice," answers the old lady, drily; "and indeed," she continues, pursing up her mouth rather primly, "even if it would, I should hardly think a situation in a shop, or other place of public resort, desirable for a girl so young, and of so – so – so peculiar an appearance as you."
"Peculiar!" repeats Esther, rather resentfully, raising her great eyes in unfeigned, displeased surprise to her companion's face. "Am I so very odd-looking, Mrs. Brandon? I don't think I can be, for no one ever told me so before!"
"I did not say odd-looking, my dear," returns Mrs. Brandon, sharply; "please don't put words into my mouth."
"If people came to buy cloaks, they would surely be thinking of how they were looking, not how I looked," says Esther, not yet quite recovered from her annoyed astonishment; "my appearance, beyond the mere fact of my being tall, could not be of much consequence one way or another."
Mrs. Brandon takes off and lays down her spectacles the better to point the rebuke she is about to administer.
"Esther," she says, severely, "since you insist on my explaining myself more clearly, I must tell you that I think a girl should be steadier in conduct, and more decidedly imbued with religious principles than I have any reason for supposing you to be, before she is exposed to the temptations to which a young and handsome woman is liable in one of those sinks of iniquity, our great towns.
"Esther flings up her head with an angry gesture. "I really don't see what temptations a person even as unsteady and irreligious as I am," she says, contemptuously, "could be exposed to in a haberdasher's shop. Temptation, in a woman's mouth, always implies something about men; and in a place specially devoted to woman's dress, one would be less likely to see them than in any other spot on the face of the earth."
"If you are so much better informed on the subject than a person of treble your years and experience," says Mrs. Brandon, resuming her spectacles, and beginning to knit faster than ever, "I have, of course, no more to say."
An apposite retort rises prompt and saucy to Esther's lips, clamouring for egress through those sweet red gates; but the recollection of Mrs. Brandon's weak tea and legs of mutton, and the obligations thereto hanging, drives it back again. She leans her elbow on her knee, and elevates her straight dark brows.
"The question is," she says, gravely, "can you suggest anything better? When one has no money, and none of the acquirements that command money, one must take what one can get, and be thankful."
But Mrs. Brandon is silent, counting her stitches, buried in calculations as to whether her stocking-leg has attained the length and breadth suited to the dimensions of one of her son's large limbs.
The wind shakes the shutter as if, in its lonely coldness outside, it coveted the fire and lamp-light. The old grey cat sits on the fender-stool beside Esther, yawning prodigiously every now and then; her round fore-paws gathered trimly under her, and the sleepy benignity of her face half-contradicting the fierce stiffness of her whiskers, and the tigerish upward curve of her lips.
"What is done in haste is always ill-done, my dear!" says Mrs. Brandon, presently, having satisfactorily calculated that five more rows will conduct her to Bob's large heel – giving utterance to her little trite saw with a certain air of complacency. Original remarks come forth doubtfully, questioningly, feeling their way: it is only a well aired platitude that can strut and swagger forwards in the certainty of a good reception. "We will think over the subject seriously and prayerfully: we will take it with us to the Throne of Grace, and make it the subject of special intercession of worship this evening."
"Oh no, no! please not! —please not!" cries Esther, the lilies in her fair cheek turning quickly to deepest, angriest carnations. "I should not like it: I could not come to prayers if you did. Why cannot we talk it over now, this instant? There's no time like the present."
"I see no hurry, Esther," answers Mrs. Brandon, coldly.
"But there is a hurry! —every hurry!" exclaims the girl, passionately, throwing herself on the floor beside Mrs. Brandon, too much in earnest to be chilled by the frosty cold of her manner; her whole soul thrown, in bright entreaty, into the great clear pupils of her superb, up-looking eyes. "I don't think I ever knew what the words meant till now. I don't believe I ever could have been in a real hurry in my life before! Put yourself in my position, Mrs. Brandon," she says, laying her little eager hand on her companion's rusty-black-coburg knee; "imagine how you would like to be wholly dependent, not only for luxuries and comforts – one might well do without them – but for bare bread and water, on people that are neither kith nor kin to you, and that have taken you in out of Christian charity, and because they think it right – not in the least because they love you!"
"If I were exposed to such a trial, Esther," replied Mrs. Brandon, deliberately rubbing her spectacles gently with her pocket-handkerchief, "I hope that I should bear it meekly; that I should kiss the rod, knowing that it was an Allwise Hand that brandished it, and that I was so chastened in order to lower the pride of a too carnal heart."
"Then God forbid that my carnal heart may ever be so lowered!" cries the other, springing impetuously to her feet, and drawing up her head haughtily. "Why," she continues, beginning to walk up and down the little room with agitated steps and fingers hotly interlaced – "why did God implant such an instinct as self-respect in us, if supinely submitting to what destroys all self-respect is a passport to heaven? Who would bow beneath any rod if they could get from under it? It is a metaphor that always reminds me of a naughty child, or a broken-spirited cur."
Mrs. Brandon deposits her knitting on the table; rises slowly – old people's joints, like wooden dolls, decline to bend on short notice (it is a pity, is it not, that our machinery is not calculated to remain in a state of efficiency, even through our paltry seventy years?) – dismounts from the footstool, on which her feet have been perched, walks to the door, there stands, and, shaking her stiff, grey curls, speaks with trembling severity:
"Esther, until you can discuss this subject with less irreverent violence, I must beg to decline any further conversation upon it."