CHAPTER XLIII.
AN EVIL EYE LOOKS ON THE VICAR.
There were influences of a wholly unsuspected kind already gatheringround the poor vicar, William Wylder; as worlds first begin in thinnestvapour, and whirl themselves in time into consistency and form, so dothese dark machinations, which at times gather round unsuspecting mortalsas points of revolution, begin nebulously and intangibly, and grow involume and in density, till a colossal system, with its inexorabletendencies and forces, crushes into eternal darkness the centre it hasenveloped.
Thou shalt not covet; thou shalt not cast an eye of desire; out of theheart proceed _murders_;--these dreadful realities shape themselves fromso filmy a medium as thought!
Ever since his conference with the vicar, good Mr. Larkin had been dimlythinking of a thing. The good attorney's weakness was money. It was aspeck at first; a metaphysical microscope of no conceivable power couldhave developed its exact shape and colour--a mere speck, floating, as itwere, in a transparent kyst, in his soul--a mere germ--by-and-by to be animpish embryo, and ripe for action. When lust hath conceived it bringethforth sin, and sin when it is finished bringeth forth death.
The vicar's troubles grew and gathered, as such troubles will; and theattorney gave him his advice; and the business of the Rev. William Wyldergradually came to occupy a good deal of his time. Here was a new reasonfor wishing to know really how Mark Wylder stood. William had undoubtedlythe reversion of the estate; but the attorney suspected sometimes--justfrom a faint phrase which had once escaped Stanley Lake--as the likeliestsolution, that Mark Wylder had made a left-handed marriage somehow andsomewhere, and that a subterranean wife and family would emerge at anunlucky moment, and squat upon that remainder, and defy the world todisturb them. This gave to his plans and dealings in relation to thevicar a character of irresolution and caprice foreign to his character,which was grim and decided enough when his data were clear, and hisobject in sight.
William Wylder, meanwhile, was troubled, and his mind clouded by moresorrows than one.
Poor William Wylder had those special troubles which haunt nervoustemperaments and speculative minds, when under the solemn influence ofreligion. What the great Luther called, without describing them, his'tribulations'--those dreadful doubts and apathies which at times menaceand darken the radiant fabric of faith, and fill the soul with namelesshorrors. The worst of these is, that unlike other troubles, they are notalways safely to be communicated to those who love us best. These terrorsand dubitations are infectious. Other spiritual troubles, too, there are;and I suppose our good vicar was not exempt from them any more than otherChristians.
The best man, the simplest man that ever lived, has his reserves. Theconscious frailty of mortality owes that sad reverence to itself, and tothe esteem of others. You can't be too frank and humble when you havewronged your neighbour; but keep your offences against God to yourself,and let your battle with your own heart be waged under the eye of Himalone. The frankness of the sentimental Jean Jacques Rousseau, and of mycoarse friend, Mark Wylder, is but a damnable form of vicious egotism. Amiserable sinner have I been, my friend, but details profit neither theenor me. The inner man had best be known only to himself and his Maker. Ilike that good and simple Welsh parson, of Beaumaris, near two hundredyears ago, who with a sad sort of humour, placed for motto under hisportrait, done in stained glass, _nunc primum transparui_.
But the spiritual tribulation which came and went was probably connectedwith the dreadful and incessant horrors of his money trouble. Thegigantic Brocken spectre projected from himself upon the wide horizon ofhis futurity.
The poor vicar! He felt his powers forsaking him. Hope, the life ofaction, was gone. Despair is fatalism, and can't help itself. Theinevitable mountain was always on his shoulders. He could not rise--hecould not stir. He could scarcely turn his head and look up beseechinglyfrom the corners of his eyes.
Why is that fellow so supine? Why is his work so ill done, when he oughtmost to exert himself? He disgusts the world with his hang-dog looks.Alas! with the need for action, the power of action is gone.Despair--distraction--the Furies sit with him. Stunned, stupid, andwild--always agitated--it is not easy to compose his sermons as finely asheretofore. He is always jotting down little sums in addition andsubtraction. The cares of the world--the miseries of what the world calls'difficulties' and a 'struggle'--these were for the poor vicar;--theworst torture, for aught we know, which an average soul out of hell canendure. Other sorrows bear healing on their wings;--this one is thePromethean vulture. It is a falling into the hands of men, not of God.The worst is, that its tendencies are so godless. It makes men bitter;its promptings are blasphemous. Wherefore, He who knew all things, indescribing the thorns which choke the word, places the _cares_ of thisworld _first_, and _after_ them the deceitfulness of riches and the lustsof other things. So if money is a root of evil, the want of it, withdebt, is root, and stem, and branches.
But all human pain has its intervals of relief. The pain is suspended,and the system recruits itself to endure the coming paroxysm. An hour ofillusion--an hour of sleep--an hour's respite of any sort, to six hoursof pain--and so the soul, in anguish, finds strength for its long labour,abridged by neither death nor madness.
The vicar, with his little boy, Fairy, by the hand, used twice, at least,in the week to make, sometimes an hour's, sometimes only half an hours,visit at Redman's Farm. Poor Rachel Lake made old Tamar sit at herworsteds in the window of the little drawing-room while theseconversations proceeded. The young lady was so intelligent that WilliamWylder was obliged to exert himself in controversy with her eloquentdespair; and this combat with the doubts and terrors of a mind of muchmore than ordinary vigour and resource, though altogether feminine,compelled him to bestir himself, and so, for the time, found him entireoccupation; and thus memory and forecast, and suspense, were superseded,for the moment, by absorbing mental action.
Rachel's position had not been altered by her brother's marriage. Dorcashad urged her earnestly to give up Redman's Farm, and take up her abodepermanently at Brandon. This kindness, however, she declined. She wasgrateful, but no, nothing could move her. The truth was, she recoiledfrom it with a species of horror.
The marriage had been, after all, as great a surprise to Rachel as to anyof the Gylingden gossips. Dorcas, knowing how Rachel thought upon it, hadgrown reserved and impenetrable upon the subject; indeed, at one time, Ithink, she had half made up her mind to fight the old battle over againand resolutely exercise this fatal passion. She had certainly mystifiedRachel, perhaps was mystifying herself.
Rachel grew more sad and strange than ever after this marriage. I thinkthat Stanley was right, and that living in that solitary and darksomedell helped to make her hypochondriac.
One evening Stanley Lake stood at her door.
'I was just thinking, dear Radie,' he said in his sweet low tones, whichto her ear always bore a suspicion of mockery in them, 'how pretty youcontrive to make this bright little garden at all times of the year--youhave such lots of those evergreens, and ivy, and those odd flowers.'
'They call them _immortelles_ in France,' said Rachel, in a cold strangetone, 'and make chaplets of them to lay upon the coffin-lids and thegraves.'
'Ah, yes, to be sure, I have seen them there and in Pere la Chaise--sothey do; they have them in all the cemeteries--I forgot that. Howcheerful; how very sensible. Don't you think it would be a good plan tostick up a death's-head and cross-bones here and there, and to split upold coffin-lids for your setting-sticks, and get old Mowlders, thesexton, to bury your roots, and cover them in with a "dust to dust," andso forth, and plant a yew tree in the middle, and stick those bits ofpainted board, that look so woefully like gravestones, all round it, andthen let old Tamar prowl about for a ghost? I assure you, Radie, I thinkyou, all to nothing, the perversest fool I ever encountered or heard ofin the course of my life.'
'Well, Stanley, suppose you do, I'll not dispute it. Perhaps you areright,' said Rachel, still standing at the door
of her little porch.
'Perhaps,' he repeated with a sneer; 'I venture to say, _mostpositively_, I can't conceive any sane reason for your refusing Dorcas'sentreaty to live with us at Brandon, and leave this triste, andunwholesome, and everyway objectionable place.'
'She was very kind, but I can't do it.'
'Yes, you can't do it, simply because it would be precisely the mostsensible, prudent, and comfortable arrangement you could possibly make;you _won't_ do it--but you can and will practise all the airs andfooleries of a bad melodrama. You have succeeded already in fillingDorcas's mind with surmise and speculation, and do you think theGylingden people are either blind or dumb? You are taking, I've told youagain and again, the very way to excite attention and gossip. What goodcan it possibly do you? You'll not believe until it happens, and when itdoes, you'd give your eyes you could undo it. It is so like you.'
'I have said how very kind I thought it of Dorcas to propose it. I can'texplain to her all my reasons for declining; and to you I need not. But Icannot overcome my repugnance--and I won't try.'
'I wonder,' said Stanley, with a sly look of enquiry, 'that you who readthe Bible--and a very good book it is no doubt--and believe in all sortsof things--'
'That will do, Stanley. I'm not so weak as you suppose.'
'You know, Radie, I'm a Sadducee and that sort of thing does not troubleme the least in the world. It is a little cold here. May we go into thedrawing-room? You can't think how I hate this--house. We are alwaysunpleasant in it.'
This auspicious remark he made taking off his hat, and placing it and hiscane on her work-table.
But this was not a tempestuous conference by any means. I don't knowprecisely what they talked about. I think it was probably the pros andcons of that migration to Brandon, against which Rachel had pronounced sofirmly.
'I can't do it, Stanley. My motives are unintelligible to you, I know,and you think me obstinate and stupid; but, be I what I may, myobjections are insurmountable. And does it not strike you that my stayinghere, on the contrary, would--would tend to prevent the kind ofconversation you speak of?'
'Not the least, dear Radie--that is, I mean, it could have no possibleeffect, unless the circumstances were first supposed, and then it couldbe of no appreciable use. And your way of life and your looks--for bothare changed--are likely, in a little prating village, where every humanbeing is watched and discussed incessantly, to excite conjecture; that isall, and that is _every thing_.'
It had grown dark while Stanley sat in the little drawing-room, andRachel stood on her doorstep, and saw his figure glide away slowly intothe thin mist and shadow, and turn upward to return to Brandon, by thatnarrow ravine where they had held rendezvous with Mark Wylder, on thatill-omened night when trouble began for all.
To Rachel's eyes, that disappearing form looked like the moping spirit ofguilt and regret, haunting the scene of the irrevocable.
When Stanley took his leave after one of these visits--stolen visits,somehow, they always seemed to her--the solitary mistress of Redman'sFarm invariably experienced the nervous reaction which follows theartificial calm of suppressed excitement. Something of panic or horror,relieved sometimes by a gush of tears--sometimes more slowly andpainfully subsiding without that hysterical escape.
She went in and shut the door, and called Tamar. But Tamar was out of theway. She hated that little drawing-room in her present mood--itsassociations were odious and even ghastly; so she sat herself down by thekitchen fire, and placed her pretty feet--cold now--upon the high steelfender, and extended her cold hands towards the embers, leaning back inher rude chair.
And so she got the girl to light candles, and asked her a great manyquestions, and obliged her, in fact, to speak constantly though sheseemed to listen but little. And when at last the girl herself, growinginterested in her own narrative about a kidnapper, grew voluble andanimated, and looked round upon the young lady at the crisis of the tale,she was surprised to remark, on a sudden, that she was gazing vacantlyinto the bars; and when Margery, struck by her fixed and melancholycountenance, stopped in the midst of a sentence, the young lady turnedand gazed on her wistfully, with large eyes and pale face, and sighedheavily.
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