"I met a son of Anak the other night at the Newhavens'," he said to Hester, "who claimed you as a cousin—a Mr. Richard Vernon. He broke the ice by informing me that I had confirmed him, and that perhaps I should like to know that he had turned out better than he expected."
"How like Dick!" said Hester.
"I remembered him at last. His father was the squire of Farlow, where I was rector before I came to Southminster. Dick was not a source of unmixed pleasure to his parents. As a boy of eight he sowed the parental billiard-table with mustard and cress in his father's absence, and raised a very good crop, and performed other excruciating experiments. I believe he beat all previous records of birch rods at Eton. I remember while he was there he won a bet from another boy who could not pay, and he foreclosed on the loser's cricketing trousers. His parents were distressed about it when he brought them home, and I tried to make him see that he ought not to have taken them. But Dick held firm. He said it was like tithe, and if he could not get his own in money, as I did, he must collect it in trousers. I must own he had me there. I noticed that he wore the garment daily as long as any question remained in his parents' minds as to whether they ought to be returned. After that I felt sure he would succeed in life."
"I believe he is succeeding in Australia."
"I advised his father to send him abroad. There really was not room for him in England, and, unfortunately for the army, the examiners jibbed at his strictly phonetic spelling. He tells me he has given up being an A.D.C. and has taken to vine-growing, because if people are up in the world they always drink freely, and if they are 'down on their luck' they drink all the more to drown care. The reasoning appeared to me sound."
"He and James used to quarrel frightfully in the holidays," said Hester. "It was always the same reason, about playing fair. Poor James did not know that games were matters of deadly importance, and that a rule was a sacred thing. I wonder why it is that clergymen so often have the same code of honor as women; quite a different code from that of the average man."
"I think," said the Bishop, "it is owing to that difference of code that women clash so hopelessly with men when they attempt to compete or work with them. Women have not to begin with the esprit de corps which the most ordinary men possess. With what difficulty can one squeeze out of a man any fact that is detrimental to his friend, or even to his acquaintance, however obviously necessary it may be that the information should be asked for and given. Yet I have known many good and earnest and affectionate women, who lead unselfish lives, who will 'give away' their best woman friend at the smallest provocation, or without any provocation at all; will inform you, à propos of nothing, that she was jilted years ago, or that her husband married her for her money. The causes of humiliation and disaster in a woman's life seem to have no sacredness for her women friends. Yet if that same friend whom she has run down is ill, the runner down will nurse her day and night with absolutely selfless devotion."
"I have often been puzzled by that," said Rachel. "I seem to be always making mistakes about women, and perhaps that is the reason. They show themselves capable of some deep affection or some great self-sacrifice, and I respect and admire them, and think they are like that all through. And the day comes when they are not quite straightforward, or are guilty of some petty meanness, which a man who is not fit to black their boots would never stoop to."
Hester's eyes fixed on her friend.
"Do you tell them? Do you show them up to themselves," she asked, "or do you leave them?"
"I do neither," said Rachel. "I treat them just the same as before."
"Then aren't you a hypocrite, too?"
Hester's small face was set like a flint.
"I think not," said Rachel, tranquilly, "any more than they are. The good is there for certain, and the evil is there for certain. Why should I take most notice of the evil, which is just the part which will be rubbed out of them presently, while the good will remain?"
"I think Rachel is right," said the Bishop.
"I don't think she is, at all," said Hester, her plumage ruffled, administering her contradiction right and left to her two best friends like a sharp peck from a wren. "I think we ought to believe the best of people until they prove themselves unworthy, and then—"
"Then what?" said the Bishop, settling himself in his chair.
"Then leave them in silence."
"I only know of a woman's silence by hearsay. I have never met it. Do you mean bitterly reproach the thistle for not bearing grapes?"
"I do not. It is my own fault if I idealize a thistle until the thistle and I both think it is a vine. But if people appear to love and honor certain truths which they know are everything to me, and claim kinship with me on that common ground, and then desert when the pinch comes, as it always does come, and act from worldly motives, then I know that they have never really cared for what they professed to love, that what I imagined to be a principle was only a subject of conversation—and—I withdraw."
"You withdraw!" echoed the Bishop. "This is terrible."
"Just as I should," continued Hester, "if I were in political life. If a man threw in his lot with me, and then, when some means of worldly advancement seemed probable from the other side, deserted to it, I should not in consequence think him incapable of being a good husband and father and landlord. But I should never again believe that he cared for what I had staked my all on. And when he began to talk as if he cared (as they always do, as if nothing had happened) I should not show him up to himself. I have tried that and it is no use. I should—"
"Denounce him as an apostate?" suggested the Bishop.
"No. He should be to me thenceforward as a heathen."
"Thrice miserable man!"
"You would not have me treat him as a brother after that?"
"Of course not, because he would probably dislike that still more."
At this moment a hurricane seemed to pass through the little house, and the three children rushed into the drawing-room, accompanied by Boulou, in a frantic state of excitement. Boulou, like Hester, had no happy medium in his character. He was what Mrs. Gresley called "very Frenchy," and he now showed his Frenchyness by a foolish exhibition of himself in coursing round and round the room with his silly foreign tail crooked the wrong way.
"Mother got out at Mrs. Brown's," shrieked Regie, in his highest voice, "and I drove up."
"Oh, Regie!" expostulated Mary the virtuous, the invariable corrector of the statements of others. "You held the reins, but William walked beside."
Hester made the children shake hands with her guests, and then they clustered round her to show what they had bought.
Though the Bishop was fond of children, he became suddenly restive. He took out his watch, and was nervously surprised at the lapse of time. The carriage was sent for, and in a few minutes that dignified vehicle was bowling back to Southminster.
"I am not satisfied about Hester," said the Bishop. "She looks ill and irritable, and she has the tense expression of a person who is making a colossal effort to be patient, and whose patience, after successfully meeting twenty calls upon it in the course of the day, collapses entirely at the twenty-first. That is a humiliating experience."
"She spoke as if she were a trial to her brother and his wife."
"I think she is. I have a sort of sympathy with Gresley as regards his sister. He has been kind to her according to his lights, and if she could write little goody-goody books he would admire her immensely, and so would half the neighborhood. It would be felt to be suitable. But Hester jars against the preconceived ideas which depute that clergymen's sisters and daughters should, as a matter of course, offer up their youth and hair and teeth and eyesight on the altar of parochial work. She does and is nothing that long custom expects her to do and be. Originality is out of place in a clergyman's family, just because it is so urgently needed. It is a constant source of friction. But, on the other hand, the best thing that could happen to Hester is to be thrown for a time among people
who regard her as a nonentity, who have no sense of humor, and to whom she cannot speak of any of the subjects she has at heart. If Hester had remained in London after the success of her Idyll she would have met with so much sympathy and admiration that her next book would probably have suffered in consequence. She is so susceptible, so expansive, that repression is positively necessary to her to enable her, so to speak, to get up steam. There is no place for getting up steam like a country vicarage with an inner cordon of cows round it and an outer one of amiable country neighbors, mildly contemptuous of originality in any form. She cannot be in sympathy with them in her present stage. It is her loss, not theirs. At forty she will be in sympathy with them, and appreciate them as I do; but that is another story. She has been working at this new book all winter with a fervor and concentration which her isolation has helped to bring about. She owes a debt of gratitude to her surroundings, and some day I shall tell her so."
"She says her temper has become that of a fiend."
"She is passionate, there is no doubt. She nearly fell on us both this afternoon. She is too much swayed by every little incident. Everything makes a vivid impression on her and shakes her to pieces. It is rather absurd and disproportionate now, like the long legs of a foal, but it is a sign of growth. My experience is that people without that fire of enthusiasm on the one side and righteous indignation on the other never achieve anything except in domestic life. If Hester lives, she will outgrow her passionate nature, or at least she will grow up to it and become passive, contemplative. Then, instead of unbalanced anger and excitement, the same nature which is now continually upset by them will have learned to receive impressions calmly and, by reason of that receptiveness and insight, she will go far."
Chapter XIV
*
Only those who know the supremacy of the Intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.—GEORGE ELIOT.
Hester in the meanwhile was expressing wonder and astonishment at the purchases of the children, who, with the exception of Mary, had spent their little all on presents for Fräulein, whose birthday was on the morrow. After Mary's tiny white bone umbrella had been discovered to be a needle-case, and most of the needles had been recovered from the floor, Regie extracted from its paper a little china cow. But, alas! the cow's ears and horns remained in the bag, owing possibly to the incessant passage of the parcel from one pocket to another on the way home. Regie looked at the remnants in the bag, and his lip quivered, while Mary, her own umbrella safely warehoused, exclaimed, "Oh, Regie!" in tones of piercing reproach.
But Hester quickly suggested that she could put them on again quite easily, and Fräulein would like it just as much. Still, it was a blow. Regie leaned his head against Hester's shoulder.
Hester pressed her cheek against his little dark head. Sybell Loftus had often told Hester that she could have no idea of the happiness of a child's touch till she was a mother; that she herself had not an inkling till then. But perhaps some poor substitute for that exquisite feeling was vouchsafed to Hester.
"The tail is still on," she whispered, not too cheerfully, but as one who in darkness sees light beyond.
The cow's tail was painted in blue upon its side.
"When I bought it," said Regie, in a strangled voice, "and it was a great-deal-of-money cow, I did wish its tail had been out behind; but I think now it is safer like that."
"All the best cows have their tails on the side," said Hester. "And to-morrow morning, when you are dressed, run up to my room, and you will find it just like it was before." And she carefully put aside the bits with the injured animal.
"And now what has Stella got?"
Stella produced a bag of "bull's-eyes," which, in striking contrast with the cow, had, in the course of the drive home, cohered so tightly together that it was doubtful if they would ever be separated again.
"Fräulein never eats bull's-eyes," said Mary, who was what her parents called "a very truthful child."
"I eats them," said Stella, reversing her small cauliflower-like person on the sofa till only a circle of white rims with a nucleus of coventry frilling, with two pink legs kicking gently upward, were visible.
Stella always turned upsidedown if the conversation took a personal turn. In later and more conventional years we find a poor equivalent for marking our disapproval by changing the subject.
Hester had hardly set Stella right side upward when the door opened once more and Mrs. Gresley entered, hot and exhausted.
"Run up-stairs, my pets," she said. "Hester, you should not keep them down here now. It is past their tea-time."
"We came ourselves, mother," said Regie. "Fruälein said we might, to show Auntie Hester our secrets."
"Well, never mind; run away now," said the poor mother, sitting down heavily in a low chair, "and take Boulou."
"You are tired out," said Hester, slipping on to her knees and unlacing her sister-in-law's brown boots.
Mrs. Gresley looked with a shade of compunction at the fragile kneeling figure, with its face crimsoned by the act of stooping and by the obduracy of the dust-ingrained boot-laces. But as she looked she noticed the flushed cheeks, and, being a diviner of spirits, wondered what Hester was ashamed of now.
As Hester rose her sister-in-law held out, with momentary hesitation, a thin paper bag, in which an oval form allowed its moist presence to be discerned by partial adhesion to its envelope.
"I saw you ate no luncheon, Hester, so I have brought you a little sole for supper."
Some of us poor Marthas spend all our existence, so to speak, in the kitchens of life. We never get so far as the drawing-room. Our conquests, our self-denials, are achieved through the medium of suet and lard and necks of mutton. We wrestle with the dripping, and rise on stepping-stones—not of our dead selves, but of sheep and oxen—to higher things.
The sole was a direct answer to prayer. Mrs. Gresley had been enabled to stifle her irritation against this delicate, whimsical, fine lady of a sister-in-law—laced in, too, we must not forget that—who, in Mrs. Gresley's ideas, knew none of the real difficulties of life, its butcher's bills, its monthly nurses, its constant watchfulness over delicate children, its long, long strain at two ends which won't meet. We must know but little of our fellow-creatures if the damp sole in the bag appears to us other than the outward and homely sign of an inward and spiritual conquest.
As such Hester saw it, and she kissed Mrs. Gresley and thanked her, and then ran, herself, to the kitchen with the peace offering, and came back with her sister-in-law's down-at-heel in-door shoes.
Mr. Gresley was stabling his bicycle in the hall as she crossed it. He was generally excessively jocose with his bicycle. He frequently said, "Whoa, Emma!" to it. But to-day he, too, was tired, and put Emma away in silence.
When Hester returned to the drawing-room Mrs. Gresley had recovered sufficiently to notice her surroundings. She was sitting with her tan-stockinged feet firmly planted on the carpet instead of listlessly outstretched, her eyes ominously fixed on the tea-table and seed-cake.
Hester's silly heart nudged her side like an accomplice.
"Who has been here to tea?" said Mrs. Gresley. "I met the Pratts and the Thursbys in Westhope."
Hester was frightened. We need to be in the presence of those who judge others by themselves.
"The Bishop was here and Rachel West," she said, coloring. "They left a few minutes ago."
"Well, of all unlucky things, that James and I should have been out. James, do you hear that? The Bishop's been while we were away. And I do declare, Hester," looking again at the table, "you never so much as asked for the silver teapot."
"I never thought of it," said Hester, ruefully. It was almost impossible to her to alter the habit of a lifetime, and to remember to dash out and hurriedly change the daily routine if visitors were present. Lady Susan had always
used her battered old silver teapot every day, and for the life of her Hester could not understand why there should be one kind one day and one kind another. She glanced resentfully at the little brown earthen-ware vessel which she had wielded so carefully half an hour ago. Why did she never remember the Gresleys' wishes?
"Hester," said Mrs. Gresley, suddenly, taking new note of Hester's immaculate brown holland gown, which contrasted painfully with her own dilapidated pink shirt with hard collars and cuffs and imitation tie, tied for life in the shop where it was born. "You are so smart; I do believe you knew they were coming."
If there was one thing more than another which offended Hester, it was being told that she was smart.
"I trust I am never smart," she replied, not with any touch of the haughtiness that some ignorant persons believe to be the grand manner, but with a subtle change of tone and carriage which seemed instantly to remove her to an enormous distance from the other woman with her insinuation and tan stockings. Mrs. Gresley unconsciously drew in her feet. "I did not know when I dressed this morning that the Bishop was coming to-day."
"Then you did know later that he was coming?"
"Yes, Rachel West wrote to tell me so this morning, but I did not open her letter at breakfast, and I was so vexed at being late for luncheon that I forgot to mention it then. I remembered as soon as James had started, and ran after him, but he was too far off to hear me call to him."
It cost Hester a good deal to give this explanation, as she was aware that the Bishop's visit had been to her and to her alone.
"Come, come," said Mr. Gresley, judicially, with the natural masculine abhorrence of a feminine skirmish.
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