CHAPTER XXXII.
HONOR
Having now gained a partial insight into Letty's new position, Mary pondered what she could do to make life more of life to her. Not many knew better than she that the only true way to help a human heart is to lift it up; but she knew also that every kind of loving aid tends more or less to that uplifting; and that, if we can not do the great thing, we must be ready to do the small: if we do not help in little things, how shall we be judged fit to help in greater? We must help where we can, that we may help where we can not. The first and the only thing she could for a time think of, was, to secure for Letty, if possible, a share in her husband's pleasures.
Quietly, yet swiftly, a certain peaceful familiarity had established itself between Hesper and Mary, to which the perfect balance of the latter and her sense of the only true foundation of her position contributed far more than the undefined partiality of the former. The possibility of such a conversation as I am now going to set down was one of the results.
"Do you like Mr. Helmer, ma'am?" asked Mary one morning, as she was brushing her hair.
"Very well. How do you know anything of him?"
"Not many people within ten miles of Testbridge do not know Mr. Helmer," answered Mary.
"Yes, yes, I remember," said Hesper. "He used to ride about on a long-legged horse, and talked to anybody that would listen to him. But there was always something pleasing about him, and he is much improved. Do you know, he is considered really very clever?"
"I am not surprised," rejoined Mary. "He used to be rather foolish, and that is a sign of cleverness—at least, many clever people are foolish, I think."
"You can't have had much opportunity for making the observation, Mary!"
"Clever people think as much of themselves in the country as they do in London, and that is what makes them foolish," returned Mary. "But I used to think Mr. Helmer had very good points, and was worth doing something for—if one only knew what."
"He does not seem to want anything done for him," said Hesper.
"I know one thing you could do for him, and it would be no trouble," said Mary.
"I will do anything for anybody that is no trouble," answered Hesper. "I should like to know something that is no trouble."
"It is only, the next time you ask him, to ask his wife," said Mary.
"He is married, then?" returned Hesper with indifference. "Is the woman presentable? Some shopkeeper's daughter, I suppose!"
Mary laughed. "You don't imagine the son of a lawyer would be likely to marry a shopkeeper's daughter!" she said.
"Why not?" returned Hesper, with a look of non-intelligence.
"Because a professional man is so far above a tradesman."
"Oh!" said Hesper. "—But he should have told me if he wanted to bring his wife with him. I don't care who she is, so long as she dresses decently and holds her tongue. What are you laughing at, Mary?"
Hesper called it laughing, but Mary was only smiling.
"I can't help being amused," answered Mary, "that you should think it such an out-of-the-way thing to be a shopkeeper's daughter, and here am I all the time, feeling quite comfortable, and proud of the shopkeeper whose daughter I am."
"Oh! I beg your pardon," exclaimed Hesper, growing hot for, I almost believe, the first time in her life, and therein, I fear, showing a drop of bad blood from somewhere, probably her father's side of the creation; for not even the sense of having hurt the feelings of an inferior can make the thoroughbred woman of the world aware of the least discomfort; and here was Hesper, not only feeling like a woman of God's making, but actually showing it!—"How cruel of me!" she went on. "But, you see, I never think of you—when I am talking to you—as—as one of that class!"
Mary laughed outright this time: she was amused, and thought it better to show it, for that would show also she was not hurt. Hesper, however, put it down to insensibility.
"Surely, dear Mrs. Redmain," said Mary, "you can not think the class to which I belong in itself so objectionable that it is rude to refer to it in my hearing!"
"I am very sorry," repeated Hesper, but in a tone of some offense: it was one thing to confess a fault; another to be regarded as actually guilty of the fault. "Nothing was further from my intention than to offend you. I have not a doubt that shopkeepers are a most respectable class in their way—"
"Excuse me, dear Mrs. Redmain," said Mary again, "but you quite mistake me. I am not in the least offended. I don't care what you think of the class. There are a great many shopkeepers who are anything but respectable—as bad, indeed, as any of the nobility."
"I was not thinking of morals," answered Hesper. "In that, I dare say, all classes are pretty much alike. But, of course, there are differences."
"Perhaps one of them is, that, in our class, we make respectability more a question of the individual than you do in yours."
"That may be very true," returned Hesper. "So long as a man behaves himself, we ask no questions."
"Will you let me tell you how the thing looks to me?" said Mary.
"Certainly. You do not suppose I care for the opinions of the people about me! I, too, have my way of looking at things."
So said Hesper; yet it was just the opinions of the people about her that ruled all those of her actions that could be said to be ruled at all. No one boasts of freedom except the willing slave—the man so utterly a slave that he feels nothing irksome in his fetters. Yet, perhaps, but for the opinions of those about her, Hesper would have been worse than she was.
"Am I right, then, in thinking," began Mary, "that people of your class care only that a man should wear the look of a gentleman, and carry himself like one?—that, whether his appearance be a reality or a mask, you do not care, so long as no mask is removed in your company?—that he may be the lowest of men, but, so long as other people receive him, you will, too, counting him good enough?"
Hesper held her peace. She had by this time learned some facts concerning the man she had married which, beside Mary's question, were embarrassing.
"It is interesting," she said at length, "to know how the different classes in a country regard each other." But she spoke wearily: it was interesting in the abstract, not interesting to her.
"The way to try a man," said Mary, "would be to turn him the other way, as I saw the gentleman who is taking your portrait do yesterday trying a square—change his position quite, I mean, and mark how far he continued to look a true man. He would show something of his real self then, I think. Make a nobleman a shopkeeper, for instance, and see what kind of a shopkeeper he made. If he showed himself just as honorable when a shopkeeper as he had seemed when a nobleman, there would be good reason for counting him an honorable man."
"What odd fancies you have, Mary!" said Hesper, yawning.
"I know my father would have been as honorable as a nobleman as he was when a shopkeeper," persisted Mary.
"That I can well believe—he was your father," said Hesper, kindly, meaning what she said, too, so far as her poor understanding of the honorable reached.
"Would you mind telling me," asked Mary, "how you would define the difference between a nobleman and a shopkeeper?"
Hesper thought a little. The question to her was a stupid one. She had never had interest enough in humanity to care a straw what any shopkeeper ever thought or felt. Such people inhabited a region so far below her as to be practically out of her sight. They were not of her kind. It had never occurred to her that life must look to them much as it looked to her; that, like Shylock, they had feelings, and would bleed if cut with a knife. But, although she was not interested, she peered about sleepily for an answer. Her thoughts, in a lazy fashion, tumbled in her, like waves without wind—which, indeed, was all the sort of thinking she knew. At last, with the decision of conscious superiority, and the judicial air afforded by the precision of utterance belonging to her class—a precision so strangely conjoined with the lack of truth and logic both—she said, in a tone that gave to the merest puerility the consequence of a judgment between contending sages:
"The difference is, that the nobleman is born to ease and dignity and affluence, and the—shopkeeper to buy and sell for his living."
"Many a nobleman," suggested Mary, "buys and sells without the necessity of making a living."
"That is the difference," said Hesper.
"Then the nobleman buys and sells to make money, and the shopkeeper to make a living?"
"Yes," granted Hesper, lazily.
"Which is the nobler end—to live, or to make money?" But this question was too far beyond Hesper. She did not even choose to hear it.
"And," she said, resuming her definition instead, "the nobleman deals with great things, the shopkeeper with small."
"When things are finally settled," said Mary—"Gracious, Mary!" cried Hesper, "what do you mean? Are not things settled for good this many a century? I am afraid I have been harboring an awful radical!—a—what do they call it?—a communist!"
She would have turned the whole matter out of doors, for she was tired of it.
"Things hardly look as if they were going to remain just as they are at this precise moment," said Mary. "How could they, when, from the very making of the world, they have been going on changing and changing, hardly ever even seeming to standstill?"
"You frighten me, Mary! You will do something terrible in my house, and I shall get the blame of it!" said Hesper, laughing.
But she did in truth feel a little uncomfortable. The shadow of dismay, a formless apprehension overclouded her. Mary's words recalled sentiments which at home she had heard alluded to with horror; and, however little parents may be loved or respected by their children, their opinions will yet settle, and, until they are driven out by better or worse, will cling.
"When I tell you what I was really thinking of, you will not be alarmed at my opinions," said Mary, not laughing now, but smiling a deep, sweet smile; "I do not believe there ever will be any settlement of things but one; they can not and must not stop changing, until the kingdom of heaven is come. Into that they must change, and rest."
"You are leaving politics for religion now, Mary. That is the one fault I have to find with you—you won't keep things in their own places! You are always mixing them up—like that Mrs.—what's her name?—who will mix religion and love in her novels, though everybody tells her they have nothing to do with each other! It is so irreverent!"
"Is it irreverent to believe that God rules the world he made, and that he is bringing things to his own mind in it?"
"You can't persuade me religion means turning things upside down."
"It means that a good deal more than people think. Did not our Lord say that many that are first shall be last, and the last first?"
"What has that to do with this nineteenth century?"
"Perhaps that the honorable shopkeeper and the mean nobleman will one day change places."
"Oh," thought Hesper, "that is why the lower classes take so to religion!" But what she said was: "Oh, yes, I dare say! But everything then will be so different that it won't signify. When we are all angels, nobody will care who is first, and who is last. I'm sure, for one, it won't be anything to me."
Hesper was a tolerable attendant at church—I will not say whether high or low church, because I should be supposed to care.
"In the kingdom of heaven," answered Mary, "things will always look what they are. My father used to say people will grow their own dresses there, as surely as a leopard his spots. He had to do with dresses, you know. There, not only will an honorable man look honorable, but a mean or less honorable man must look what he is."
"There will be nobody mean there."
"Then a good many won't be there who are called honorable here."
"I have no doubt there will be a good deal of allowance made for some people," said Hesper. "Society makes such demands!"
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE INVITATION
When Letty received Mrs. Redmain's card, inviting her with her husband to an evening party, it raised in her a bewildered flutter—of pleasure, of fear, of pride, of shyness, of dismay: how dared she show her face in such a grand assembly? She would not know a bit how to behave herself! But it was impossible, for she had no dress fit to go anywhere! What would Tom say if she looked a dowdy? He would be ashamed of her, and she dared not think what might come of it!
But close upon the postman came Mary, and a long talk followed. Letty was full of trembling delight, but Mary was not a little anxious with herself how Tom would take it.
The first matter, however, was Letty's dress. She had no money, and seemed afraid to ask for any. The distance between her and her husband had been widening.
Their council of ways and means lasted a good while, including many digressions. At last, though unwillingly, Letty accepted Mary's proposal that a certain dress, her best indeed, though she did not say so, which she had scarcely worn, and was not likely to miss, should be made to fit Letty. It was a lovely black silk, the best her father had been able to choose for her the last time he was in London. A little pang did shoot through her heart at the thought of parting with it, but she had too much of that father in her not to know that the greatest honor that can be shown any thing , is to make it serve a person ; that the dearest gift of love, withheld from human necessity, is handed over to the moth and the rust. But little idea had Letty, much as she appreciated her kindness, what a sacrifice Mary was making for her that she might look her own sweet self, and worthy of her renowned Tom!
When Tom came home that night, however, the look of the world and all that is in it changed speedily for Letty, and terribly. He arrived in great good humor—somebody had been praising his verses, and the joy of the praise overflowed on his wife. But when, pleased as any little girl with the prospect of a party and a new frock, she told him, with gleeful gratitude, of the invitation and the heavenly kindness which had rendered it possible for her to accept it, the countenance of the great man changed. He rejected the idea of her going with him to any gathering of his grand friends—objected most of all to her going to Mrs. Redmain's. Alas! he had begun to allow to himself that he had married in too great haste—and beneath him. Wherever he went, his wife could be no credit to him, and her presence would take from him all sense of liberty! Not choosing, however, to acknowledge either of these objections, and not willing, besides, to appear selfish in the eyes of the woman who had given herself to him, he was only too glad to put all upon another, to him equally genuine ground. Controlling his irritation for the moment, he set forth with lordly kindness the absolute impossibility of accepting such an offer as Mary's. Could she for a moment imagine, he said, that he would degrade himself by taking his wife out in a dress that was not her own?
Here Letty interrupted him.
"Mary has given me the dress," she sobbed, "—for my very own."
"A second-hand dress! A dress that has been worn!" cried Tom. "How could you dream of insulting me so? The thing is absolutely impossible. Why, Letty, just think!—There should I be, going about as if the house were my own, and there would be my wife in the next room, or perhaps at my elbow, dressed in the finery of the lady's-maid of the house! It won't bear thinking of! I declare it makes me so ashamed, as I lie here, that I feel my face quite hot in the dark! To have to reason about such a thing—with my own wife, too!"
"It's not finery," sobbed Letty, laying hold of the one fact within her reach; "it's a beautiful black silk."
"It matters not a straw what it is," persisted Tom, adding humbug to cruelty. "You would be nothing but a sham!—A live dishonesty! A jackdaw in peacock's feathers!—I am sorry, Letty, your own sense of truth and uprightness should not prevent even the passing desire to act such a lie. Your fine dress would be just a fine fib—yourself would be but a walking fib. I have been taking too much for granted with you: I must bring you no more novels. A volume or two of Carlyle is what you want."
This was too much. To lose her novels and her new dress together, and be threatened with nasty moral medicine—for she had never read a word of Carlyle beyond his translation of that dream of Richter's, and imagined him dry as a sand-pit—was bad enough, but to be so reproved by her husband was more than she could bear. If she was a silly and ignorant creature, she had the heart of a woman-child; and that precious thing in the sight of God, wounded and bruised by the husband in whom lay all her pride, went on beating laboriously for him only. She did not blame him. Anything was better than that. The dear, simple soul had a horror of rebuke. It would break hedges and climb stone walls to get out of the path of judgment—ten times more eagerly if her husband were the judge. She wept and wailed like a sick child, until at length the hard heart of selfish Tom was touched, and he sought, after the fashion of a foolish mother, to read the inconsolable a lesson of wisdom. But the truer a heart, the harder it is to console with the false. By and by, however, sleep, the truest of things, did for her what even the blandishments of her husband could not.
When she woke in the morning, he was gone: he had thought of an emendation in a poem that had been set up the day before, and made haste to the office, lest it should be printed without the precious betterment.
Mary came before noon, and found sadness where she had left joy. When she had heard as much as Letty thought proper to tell her, she was filled with indignation, and her first thought was to compass the tyrant's own exclusion from the paradise whose gates he closed against his wife. But second thoughts are sometimes best, and she saw the next moment not only that punishment did not belong to her, but that the weight of such would fall on Letty. The sole thing she could think of to comfort her was, to ask her to spend the same evening with her in her room. The proposal brightened Letty up at once: some time or other in the course of the evening she would, she fancied, see, or at least catch a glimpse of Tom in his glory!
The evening came, and with beating heart Letty went up the back stairs to Mary's room. She was dressing her mistress, but did not keep her waiting long. She had provided tea beforehand, and, when Mrs. Redmain had gone down, the two friends had a pleasant while together. Mary took Letty to Mrs. Redmain's room while she put away her things, and there showed her many splendors, which, moving no envy in her simple heart, yet made her sad, thinking of Tom. As she passed to the drawing-room, Sepia looked in, and saw them together.
But, as the company kept arriving, Letty grew very restless. She could not talk of anything for two minutes together, but kept creeping out of the room and half-way down the stair, to look over the banister-rail, and have a bird's-eye peep of a portion of the great landing, where indeed she caught many a glimpse of beauty and state, but never a glimpse of her Tom. Alas! she could not even imagine herself near him. What she saw made her feel as if her idol were miles away, and she could never draw nigh him again. How should the familiar associate of such splendid creatures care a pin's point for his humdrum wife?
Worn out at last, and thoroughly disappointed, she wanted to go home. It was then past midnight. Mary went with her, and saw her safe in bed before she left her.
As she went up to her room on her return, she saw, through the door by which the gardener entered the conservatory, Sepia standing there, and Tom, with flushed face, talking to her eagerly.
Letty cried herself to sleep, and dreamed that Tom had disowned her before a great company of grand ladies, who mocked her from their sight.
Tom came home while she slept, and in the morning was cross and miserable—in part, because he had been so abominably selfish to her. But the moment that, half frightened, half hopeful, she told him where she was the night before, he broke into the worst anger he had ever yet shown her. His shameful pride could not brook the idea that, where he was a guest, his wife was entertained by one of the domestics!
"How dare you be guilty of such a disgraceful thing!" he cried.
"Oh, don't, Tom—dear Tom!" pleaded Letty in terror. "It was you I wanted to see—not the great people, Tom! I don't care if I never see one of them again."
"Why should you ever see one of them again, I should like to know! What are they to you, or you to them?"
"But you know I was asked to go, Tom!"
"You're not such a fool as to fancy they cared about you! Everybody knows they are the most heartless set of people in the world!"
"Then why do you go, Tom?" said Letty, innocently.
"That's quite another thing! A man has to cultivate connections his wife need not know anything about. It is one of the necessities laid on my position."
Letty supposed it all truer than it was either intelligible or pleasant, and said no more, but let poor, self-abused, fine-fellow Tom scold and argue and reason away till he was tired. She was not sullen, but bewildered and worn out. He got up, and left her without a word.
Even at the risk of hurt to his dignity, of which there was no danger from the presence of his sweet, modest little wife in the best of company, it had been well for Tom to have allowed Letty the pleasure within her reach; for that night Sepia's artillery played on him ruthlessly. It may have been merely for her amusement—time, you see, moves so slowly with such as have no necessities they must themselves supply, and recognize no duties they must perform: without those two main pillars of life, necessity and duty, how shall the temple stand, when the huge, weary Samson comes tugging at it? The wonder is, there is not a great deal more wickedness in the world. For listlessness and boredness and nothing-to-do-ness are the best of soils for the breeding of the worms that never stop gnawing. Anyhow, Sepia had flashed on Tom, the tinder of Tom's heart had responded, and, any day when Sepia chose, she might blow up a wicked as well as foolish flame; nor, if it should suit her purpose, was Sepia one to hesitate in the use of the fire-fan. All the way home, her eyes haunted him, and it is a more dreadful thing than most are aware to be haunted by anything, good or bad, except the being who is our life. And those eyes, though not good, were beautiful. Evil, it is true, has neither part nor lot in beauty; it is absolutely hostile to it, and will at last destroy it utterly; but the process is a long one, so long that many imagine badness and beauty vitally associable. Tom yielded to the haunting, and it was in part the fault of those eyes that he used such hard words to his wife in the morning. Wives have not seldom to suffer sorely for discomforts and wrongs in their husbands of which they know nothing. But the thing will be set right one day, and in a better fashion than if all the woman's-rights' committees in the world had their will of the matter.
About this time, from the top, left-hand corner of the last page of "The Firefly," it appeared that Twilight had given place to Night; for the first of many verses began to show themselves, in which Twilight, or Hesper, or Vesper, or the Evening Star, was no more once mentioned, but only and al-ways Nox, or Hecate, or the dark Diana. Tenebrious was a great word with Tom about this time. He was very fond, also, of the word interlunar . I will not trouble my reader with any specimen of the outcome of Tom's new inspiration, partly for this reason, that the verses not unfrequently came so near being good, nay, sometimes were really so good, that I do not choose to set them down where they would be treated with a mockery they do not in themselves deserve. He did not direct his wife's attention to them, nor did he compose them at home or at the office. Mostly he wrote them between acts at the theatre, or in any public place where something in which he was not interested was going on.
Of all that read them, and here was a Nemesis awful in justice, there was not one less moved by them than she who had inspired them. She saw in them, it is true, a reflex of her own power—and that pleased, but it did not move her. She took the devotion and pocketed it, as a greedy boy might an orange or bull's-eye. The verses in which Tom delighted were but the merest noise in the ears of the lady to whom of all he would have had them acceptable. One momentary revelation as to how she regarded them would have been enough to release him from his foolish enthrallment. Indignation, chagrin, and mortification would have soon been the death of such poor love as Tom's.
Mary and Sepia were on terms of politeness—of readiness to help on the one side, and condescension upon the other. Sepia would have condescended to the Mother Mary. The pure human was an idea beyond her, as beyond most people. They have not enough religion toward God to know there is such a thing as religion toward their neighbor. But Sepia never made an enemy-if she could help it. She could not afford the luxury of hating—openly, at least. But I imagine she would have hated Mary heartily could she have seen the way she regarded her—the look of pitiful love, of compassionate and waiting helpfulness which her soul would now and then cast upon her. Of all things she would have resented pity; and she took Mary's readiness to help for servility—and naturally, seeing in herself willingness came from nothing else, though she called it prudence and necessity, and knew no shame because of it. Her children justify the heavenly wisdom, but the worldly wisdom justifies her children. Mary could not but feel how Sepia regarded her service, but service, to be true, must be divine, that is, to the just and the unjust, like the sun and the rain.
Between Sepia and Mr. Redmain continued a distance too great for either difference or misunderstanding. They met with a cold good morning, and parted without any good night. Their few words were polite, and their demeanor was civil. At the breakfast-table, Sepia would silently pass things to Mr. Redmain; Mr. Redmain would thank her, but never trouble himself to do as much for her. His attentions, indeed, were seldom wasted at home; but he was not often rude to anybody save his wife and his man, except when he was ill.
It was a long time before he began to feel any interest in Mary. He knew nothing of her save as a nice-looking maid his wife had got—rather a prim-looking puss, he would have said, had he had occasion to describe her. What Mary knew of him was merely the reflection of him in the mind of his wife; but, the first time she saw him, she felt she would rather not have to speak to him.