Mr. Harvey (the great Mr. Harvey) strode forward, and Rachel found her hand engulfed in a large soft hand, which seemed to have a poached egg in the palm.
"This is a pleasure to which I have long looked forward," murmured the great man, all cuff and solitaire, bending in what he would have termed a "chivalrous manner" over Rachel's hand; while Doll, standing near, wondered drearily "why these writing chaps were always such bounders."
Rachel passed on to greet Miss Barker, standing on the hearthrug, this time in magenta velveteen, but presumably still tired of the Bible, conversing with Rachel's former lover, whose eyes were on the floor and whose hand gripped the mantel-piece. He had seen her—recognized her.
"May I introduce Mr. Tristram?" said Sybell to Rachel.
"We have met before," said Rachel, gently, as he bowed without looking at her, and she put out her hand.
He was obliged to touch it, obliged to meet for one moment the clear, calm eyes that had once held boundless love for him, boundless trust in him; that had, as he well knew, wept themselves half blind for him.
Mr. Tristram was one of the many who judge their actions in the light of after-circumstances, and who towards middle-age discover that the world is a treacherous world. He had not been "in a position to marry" when he had fallen in love with Rachel. But he had been as much in love with her as was consistent with a permanent prudential passion for himself and his future—that future which the true artist must ever preserve untrammelled. "High hopes faint on a warm hearthstone," etc. He had felt keenly breaking with Rachel. Later on, when a tide of wealth flowed up to the fifth floor of Museum Buildings, he had recognized, for the first time, that he had made a great mistake in life. To the smart of baffled love had been added acute remorse, not so much for wealth missed as for having inflicted upon himself and upon her a frightful and unnecessary pain. But how could he have foreseen such a thing? How could he tell? he had asked himself, in mute stupefaction, when the news reached him. What a cheat life was! What a fickle jade was Fortune!
Since the memorable day when Rachel had found means to lay the ghost that haunted her he had made no sign.
"I hardly expected you would remember me," he said, catching at his self-possession.
"I have a good memory," she said, aware that Miss Barker was listening and that Hugh was bristling at her elbow. "And the little Spanish boy whom you were so kind to, and who lodged just below me in Museum Buildings, has not forgotten either. He still asks after the 'Cavalier.'"
"Mr. Tristram is positively blushing at being confronted with his good deeds," said Sybell, intervening on discovering that the attention of some of her guests had been distracted from herself. "Yes, darling"—to her husband—"you take in Lady Jane. Mr. Scarlett, will you take in Miss West?"
"I have been calling on your friend, Miss Gresley," said Hugh, after he had overcome his momentary irritation at finding Mr. Harvey was on Rachel's other side. "I did not know until her brother dined here last night that she lived so near."
"Did not Mrs. Loftus tell you?" said Rachel, with a remembrance of Sybell's remarks before dinner.
"She told me after I had mentioned my wish to go and see her. She even implored me so repeatedly to go that I—"
"Nearly did not go at all."
"Exactly. But in this case I persevered because I am, or hope I am, a friend of hers. But I was not rewarded."
"I thought you said you had seen her."
"Oh yes, I saw her, and I saw that she looked very ill. But I found it impossible to have any conversation with her in the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Gresley. Whenever I spoke to her Mr. Gresley answered, and sometimes Mrs. Gresley also. In fact, Mr. Gresley considered the call as paid to himself. Mrs. Loftus tells me he is much cleverer than his sister, but I did not gain that impression. And after I had given tongue to every platitude I could think of I had to take my leave."
"Hester ought to have come to the rescue."
"She did try. She offered to show me the short cut to Wilderleigh across the fields. But unluckily—"
"I can guess what you are going to say."
"I am sure you can. Mr. Gresley accompanied us, and Miss Gresley turned back at the first gate."
"You have my sympathy."
"I hope I have, for I have had a severe time of it. Mr. Gresley was most cordial," continued Hugh, ruefully, "and said what a pleasure it was to him to meet any one who was interested in intellectual subjects. I suppose he was referring to my platitudes. He said living in the country cut him off almost entirely from the society of his mental equals, so much so that at times he had thoughts of moving to London and making a little centre for intellectual society. According to him the whole neighborhood was sunk in a state of hopeless apathy, with the exception of Mrs. Loftus. He said she was the only really clever, cultivated person in Middleshire."
"Did he? How about the Bishop of Southminster?"
"He did not mention him. My acquaintance with Mrs. Loftus is of the slightest," added Hugh, interrogatively, looking at his graceful, animated hostess.
"I imagined you knew her fairly well, as you are staying here."
"No. She asked me rather late in the day. I fancy I was a 'fill up.' I accepted in the hope, rather a vague one, that I might meet you here."
To Rachel's surprise her heart actually paid Hugh the compliment of beating a shade faster than its wont. She looked straight in front of her, and her absent eyes fell on Mr. Tristram sitting opposite, talking somewhat sulkily to Miss Barker. Rachel looked steadily at him.
Mr. Tristram had been handsome once, and four years had altered him but little in that respect. He had not yet grown stout, but it was evident that Nature had that injury in reserve for him. To grow stout is not necessarily to look common, but if there is an element of inherent commonness in man or woman, a very little additional surface will make it manifest, as an enlarged photograph magnifies its own defects. The "little more and how much it is" had come upon the unhappy Tristram, once the slimmest of the slim. Life had evidently not gone too well with him. Self-pity and the harassed look which comes of annoyance with trifles had set their mark upon him. His art had not taken possession of him. "High hopes faint on a warm hearthstone." But they sometimes faint also in bachelor lodgings. The whole effect of the man was second-rate, mentally, morally, socially. He seemed exactly on a par with the second-rate friends with whom Sybell loved to surround herself. Hugh and Dick were taking their revenge on the rival who blocked their way. Whatever their faults might be, they were gentlemen, and Mr. Tristram was only "a perfect gentleman." Rachel had not known the difference when she was young. She saw it now.
"I trust, Miss West," said the deep voice of Mr. Harvey, revolving himself and his solitaire slowly towards her, that I have your sympathy in the great cause to which I have dedicated myself, the emancipation of woman."
"I thought the new woman had effected her own emancipation," said Rachel.
Mr. Harvey paid no more attention to her remark than any one with a theory to propound which must be delivered to the world as a whole.
"I venture to think," he continued, his heavy, lustreless eyes coming to a stand-still upon her, "that though I accept in all reverence the position of woman as the equal of man, as promulgated in The Princess, by our lion-hearted Laureate, nevertheless I advance beyond him in that respect. I hold"—in a voice calculated to impress the whole table—"that woman is man's superior, and that she degrades herself when she endeavors to place herself on an equality with him."
There was a momentary silence, like that which travellers tell us succeeds the roar of the lion in his primeval forest, silencing even the twitter of the birds.
"How true that is!" said Sybell, awed by the lurid splendor of Mr. Harvey's genius. "Woman is man's superior, not his equal. I have felt that all my life, but I never quite saw how until this moment. Don't you think so, too, Miss Barker?"
"I have never lost an opportunity of asserting it," said the Apostle, her elbow on Mr. Tristram'
s bread, looking at Mr. Harvey with some asperity for poaching on her manor.
"All sensible women have been agreed for years on that point."
Chapter XXIII
*
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone,
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish 'twere done!
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built do we discern.
—MATTHEW ARNOLD.
It was Sunday morning. The night was sinking out of the sky to lean faint unto death upon the bosom of the earth. The great forms of the trees, felt rather than seen, were darkness made visible. Among the night of high elms round Warpington a single yellow light burned in an upper window. It had been burning all night. And now, as the night waned, the little light waned with it. At least, it was suddenly blown out.
Hester came to the window and looked out. There was light, but there was no dawn as yet. In the gray sky over the gray land the morning-star, alone and splendid, kept watch in the east.
She sat down and leaned her brow against the pane. She did not know that it was aching. She did not know that she was cold, exhausted; so exhausted that the morning-star in the outer heaven and the morning-star in her soul were to her the same. They stooped together, they merged into one great light, heralding a perfect day presently to be.
The night was over, and that other long night of travail and patience and faith, and strong rowing in darkness against the stream, was over, too, at last—at last. The book was finished.
The tears fell slowly from Hester's eyes on to her clasped hands, those blessed tears which no human hand shall ever intervene to wipe away.
To some of us Christ comes in the dawn of the spiritual life walking upon the troubled waves of art. And we recognize Him, and would fain go to meet Him. But our companions and our own fears dissuade us. They say it is only a spirit, and that Christ does not walk on water, that the land whither we are rowing is the place He has Himself appointed for us to meet Him. So our little faith keeps us in the boat, or fails us in the waves of that windswept sea.
It seemed to Hester as if once, long ago, shrinking and shivering, she had stood in despair upon the shore of a great sea, and had heard a voice from the other side say, "Come over." She had stopped her ears; she had tried not to go. She had shrunk back a hundred times from the cold touch of the water that each time she essayed let her trembling foot through it. And now, after an interminable interval, after she had trusted and doubted, had fallen and been sustained, had met the wind and the rain, after she had sunk in despair and risen again, she knew not how, now at length a great wave—the last—had cast her up half drowned upon the shore. A miracle had happened. She had reached the other side, and was lying in a great peace after the storm upon the solemn shore under a great white star.
Hester sat motionless. The star paled and paled before the coming of a greater than he. Across the pause which God has set 'twixt night and day came the first word of the robin. It reached Hester's ear as from another world—a world that had been left behind. The fragmentary notes floated up to her from an immeasurable distance, like scattered bubbles through deep water.
The day was coming. God's creatures of tree and field and hill took form. Man's creature, the little stout church in their midst, thrust once more its plebeian outline against God's sky. Dim shapes moved athwart the vacancy of the meadows. Voices called through the gray. Close against the eaves a secret was twittered, was passed from beak to beak. In the nursery below a little twitter of waking children broke the stillness of the house.
But Hester did not hear it. She had fallen into a deep sleep in the low window-seat, with her pale forehead against the pane; a sleep so deep that even the alarum of the baby did not rouse her, nor the entrance of Emma with the hot water.
*
"James," said Mrs. Gresley, an hour later; as she and her husband returned through the white mist from early celebration, "Hester was not there. I thought she had promised to come."
"She had."
There was a moment's silence.
"Perhaps she is not well," said Mr. Gresley, closing the church-yard gate into the garden.
Mrs. Gresley's heart swelled with a sense of injustice. She had often been unwell, often in feeble health before the birth of her children, but had she ever pleaded ill-health as an excuse for absenting herself from one of the many services which her husband held to be the main-spring of the religious life?
"I do not think she can be very unwell. She is standing by the magnolia now," she said, her lip quivering, and withdrawing her hand from her husband's arm. She almost hated the slight, graceful figure, which was not of her world, which was, as she thought, coming between her and her husband.
"I will speak seriously to her," said Mr. Gresley, dejectedly, who recollected that he had "spoken seriously" to Hester many times at his wife's instigation without visible result. And as he went alone to meet his sister he prayed earnestly that he might be given the right word to say to her.
A ray of sunlight, faint as an echo, stole through the lingering mist, parting it on either hand, and fell on Hester.
Hester, standing in a white gown under the veiled trees in a glade of silver and trembling opal, which surely mortal foot had never trod, seemed infinitely removed from him. Dimly he felt that she was at one with this mysterious morning world, and that he, the owner, was an alien and a trespasser in his own garden.
But a glimpse of his cucumber-frames in the background reassured him. He advanced with a firmer step, as one among allies.
Hester did not hear him.
She was gazing with an absorption that shut out all other sights and sounds at the solitary blossom on the magnolia-tree. Yesterday it had been a bud; but to-day the great almond-white petals which guarded it, overlapping each other so jealously, had opened wide, and the perfect flower, keeping nothing back, had laid bare all its pure white soul before its God.
As Mr. Gresley stopped beside her, Hester turned her little pinched, ravaged face towards him and smiled. Something of the passionate self-surrender of the flower was reflected in her eyes.
"Dear Hester," he said, seeing only the wan, drawn face. "Are you ill?"
"Yes—no. I don't think so," said Hester, tremulously, recalled suddenly to herself. She looked hastily about her. The world of dew and silver had deserted her, had broken like an iridescent bubble at a touch. The magnolia withdrew itself. Hester found herself suddenly transplanted into the prose of life, emphasized by a long clerical coat and a bed of Brussels sprouts.
"I missed you," said Mr. Gresley, with emphasis.
"Where? When?" Hester's eyes had lost their fixed look and stared vacantly at him.
Mr. Gresley tried to subdue his rising annoyance.
Hester was acting, pretending not to understand, and he saw through it.
"At God's altar," he said, gravely, the priest getting the upper hand of the man.
"Have you not found me there?" said Hester, below her breath, but so low that fortunately her brother did not catch the words, and was spared their profanity.
"I will appeal to her better feelings," he said to himself. "They must be there, if I can only touch them."
He did not know that in order to touch the better feelings of our fellow-creatures we must be able to reach up to them, or by reason of our low stature we may succeed only in appealing to the lowest in them, in spite of our tiptoe good intentions. Is that why such appeals too often meet with bitter sarcasm and indignation?
But fortunately a robust belief in the assiduities of the devil as the cause of all failures, and a conviction that who-so opposed Mr. Gresley opposed the Deity, supported and blindfolded the young Vicar in emergencies of this kind.
He spoke earnestly and at length to his sister. He waved aside her timid excuse that she had overslept herself after a sleepless night, and had finished dressing but the moment before he fo
und her in the garden. He entreated her to put aside such insincerity as unworthy of her. He reminded her of the long months she had spent at Warpington with its peculiar spiritual opportunities; that he should be to blame if he did not press upon her the first importance of the religious life, the ever-present love of God, and the means of approaching Him through the sacraments. He entreated her to join her prayers with his that she might be saved from the worship of her own talent, which had shut out the worship of God, from this dreadful indifference to holy things, and the impatience of all religious teaching which he grieved to see in her.
He spoke well, the earnest, blind, would-be leader endeavoring to guide her to the ditch from which he knew not how she had emerged, passionately distressed at the opposition he met with as he would have drawn her lovingly towards it.
The tears were in Hester's eyes, but the eyes themselves were as flint seen through water. She stifled many fierce and cruel impulses to speak as plainly as he did, to tell him that it was not religion that was abhorent to her, but the form in which he presented it to her, and that the sin against the Holy Ghost was disbelief, like his, in the religion of others. But when have such words availed anything? When have they been believed? Hester had a sharp tongue, and she was slowly learning to beware of it as her worst enemy. She laid down many weapons before she trusted herself to speak.
"It is good of you to care what becomes of me," she said, gently, but her voice was cold. "I am sorry you regard me as you do. But from your point of view you were right to speak—as—as you have done. I value the affection that prompted it."
"She can't meet me fairly," said Mr. Gresley to himself, with sudden anger at the meanness of such tactics. "They say she is so clever, and she can't refute a word I say. She appears to yield and then defies me. She always puts me off like that."
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